scholarly journals Goodnight Desdemona(Good Morning Juliet): A Critical Study on Constance's Search for the Self, the Author, and the Fool through the Journey of the Unconscious

2009 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-447
Author(s):  
HwangKyuCheol
2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 174-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon D. Podmore

Despair (sickness of the spirit) and divine forgiveness are decisive psychological and theological themes essential to both Søren Kierkegaard's relational vision of ‘the self before God’ and his own personal struggles with guilt and the consciousness of sin. Reading Kierkegaard as both a physician and a patient of this struggle, therefore, this article examines The Sickness unto Death (1849) as an attempt to resolve the sinful ‘self’ by integrating a psychological perspective on despair with a theology of the forgiveness of sins. It is suggested that by presenting this integrative notion of self-knowledge through the ‘higher’ Christian pseudonym of Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard is indicting his own resistances to accepting divine forgiveness and thereby operating—via a ‘higher’ pastoral identity—as a physician to his own soul. By diagnosing the unconscious psychological and theological relationships between sin/forgiveness, offense, and human impossibility/divine possibility, Kierkegaard finally reveals faith—as a self-surrendering recognition of acceptance before the Holy Other—to be the key to unlocking the enigma of the self in despair.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michał Bola ◽  
Marta Paź ◽  
Łucja Doradzińska ◽  
Anna Nowicka

AbstractIt is well established that stimuli representing or associated with ourselves, like our own name or an image of our own face, benefit from preferential processing. However, two key questions concerning the self-prioritization mechanism remain to be addressed. First, does it operate in an automatic manner during the early processing, or rather in a more controlled fashion at later processing stages? Second, is it specific to the self-related stimuli, or can it be activated also by other stimuli that are familiar or salient? We conducted a dot-probe experiment to investigate the mechanism behind attentional prioritization of the selfface image and to tackle both questions. The former, by employing a backwards masking procedure to isolate the early and preconscious processing stages. The latter, by investigating whether a face that becomes visually familiar due to repeated presentations is able to capture attention in a similar manner as the self-face. Analysis of the N2pc ERP component revealed that the self-face image automatically captures attention, both when processed consciously and unconsciously. In contrast, the visually familiar face did not attract attention, neither in the conscious, nor in the unconscious condition. We conclude that the selfprioritization mechanism is early and automatic, and is not triggered by a mere visual familiarity. More generally, our results provide further evidence for efficient unconscious processing of faces, and for a dissociation between attention and consciousness.


Author(s):  
Giorgio Caviglia

Within the current clinical practice, the debate on the use of dream is still very topical. In this article, the author suggests to address this question with a notable scientific and cultural openness that embraces either the psychoanalytic approach (classical, modern and intersubjective), and the neurophysiological assumptions and both clinical research and cognitive hypotheses. The utility of dream - in the clinical work with patients - is supported by the author with extensive bibliographic references and personal clinical insights, drawn from his experience as a psychotherapist. Results: From an analysis of recent literature on this topic, the dream assumes a very different function and position in the clinical practice: from ‘via regia to the unconscious’ of Freudian theories - an expression of repressed infantile wishes of libidinal or aggressive drive nature - it becomes the very fulcrum of the analysis, a fundamental capacity to be developed, a necessary and decisive element for the patient’s transformation. The dream can also be use with the function of thinking and mentalization, of problem solving, of adaptation, as well as an indicator of the relationship with the therapist in the analytic dialogue or of dissociated aspects of the self. Finally, the author proposes a challenging reading of the clinical relevance of dream: through listening to the dream, the clinician can help the patient to stand in the spaces of his own self in a more open and fluid way and therefore to know himself better, to regulate his affects, to think and to integrate oneself.


Author(s):  
Christopher S. Schreiner

The sociopolitical controversies on campus that have resulted in “safe spaces” have pressured traditional structures based on proxemics, such as the mentorship, to reinvent themselves or disappear. In the chapter, “proximity” itself is defined not in terms of spatial contiguity but as an attentional structure by which the mentee achieves an intimate understanding at a distance of the objective achievements in teaching and writing that distinguish her mentor and other role models and that provoke acts of creative mimesis and exegesis by the mentee. Inspired by the ancient Stoic practice of the “care of the self” as explicated by Michel Foucault, the crux of the redefined mentored relation is not inculcating knowledge but guiding the growth of the mentee's critical consciousness in preparation for a career and a life well-lived, befitting a noble spirit. Since the focus of the redefined mentored relation privileges distance and objective spirit (via the critical study of works) over personal interaction, the scholarly autonomy of the mentee is a noteworthy learning outcome.


2020 ◽  
pp. 136248062091910
Author(s):  
Ben Laws

Notions of ‘the self’ in criminology are rarely explored or defined, which is surprising given how pervasively the term is used. According to narrative criminology, the self is generated and moulded by the stories we tell; our identity emerges through narrative scripts and these stories motivate future action. But this understanding of selfhood is quite narrow. This article attempts to widen it by separating selfhood into three categories: ‘the reflexive self’ (the person we think we are); ‘the unconscious self’ (things we do not know that shape us); and ‘the experiencing self’ (the in-the-moment, living and breathing feeling of being alive). The article begins with a critical engagement with the field of narrative criminology which tends to address ‘the reflexive self’ somewhat in isolation. Then a number of findings in criminology, psychology and theology are presented which reveal alternative notions of selfhood. This includes engaging with theological accounts that can be described as transcendent or transpersonal. Second, psychoanalytic research notes how our behaviour is often motivated by unconscious processes that are hard to reconcile with traditional notions of selfhood. There is a call to bring these different ‘selves’ into dialogue and to draw cleaner distinctions between them. Increasing our understanding of selfhood helps us to think more clearly about key criminological debates, such as the causal mechanisms undergirding adaptation and desistance from crime.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 431-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xymena Kurowska

Abstract This paper develops what I call “the ethics of opaqueness” as a response to conceptual impasses concerning the uninterpretability of intersubjective knowledge production in narrative practice. The ethics of opaqueness sees the other as inscrutable and radically heterogenous, and confronts interpretations of the other by the self as suspicious projections. Thus, such an ethics addresses the self, not the other, as the object of the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” In order to conceptualize the ethics of opaqueness, I look to relational psychoanalysis, which understands the unconscious as being inherently intersubjective. This results in a reformulation of the process of recognition, and deeper acknowledgment of countertransference—that is, the partly unconscious conflicts activated in the researcher through the research encounter, which may lead to imposing meaning on the other. The apparatus of relational psychoanalysis concretizes the limits of knowing either the other or the self and supplies a vocabulary to crystallize the double quality of “uninterpretable moments” in narrative practice. They may trigger an imposition of a frame and therefore an interpretive closure; however, they also supply a potentially transformative space for the contentious co-construction of meaning, often in the form of metaphors, which subverts any claim to interpretive mastery.


Slavic Review ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuri Corrigan

By tracing a pattern through Fedor Dostoevskii's early stories–especially The Double, “The Landlady,” andNetochka Nezvanova–in which characters are bound to each other as interacting aspects of a larger personality, Yuri Corrigan explores the problem of individual identity. Entering into debate with classical studies of the self in Dostoevskii from Mikhail Bakhtin to Nikolai Berdiaev, Corrigan explores how the active suppression of memory and interiority in Dostoevskii's early characters gives rise to the mechanism of intersecting selves, in which the inner architecture of one personality is extended throughout numerous consciousnesses. Through an analysis of these relationships, Corrigan examines how Dostoevskii synthesizes two traditions of doubling in his early writing–the “cognitive” dualism of self-consciousness and the “psychic” dualism of the unconscious–to form a tripartite model of personality that will be important for his later novels.


1990 ◽  
Vol 147 (6) ◽  
pp. 804-805
Author(s):  
HENRY J. FRIEDMAN
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  

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