Soul Man Meets the Blind Watchmaker: C. G. Jung and Neo-Darwinism

2003 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petteri Pietikainen
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Jungian Psychology ◽  
Crucial Point ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Scientific Psychology ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Universal Structure ◽  
Blank Slate ◽  
The Mind

C. G. Jung's name has recently been connected with neo-Darwinian theories. One major reason for this connection is that Jungian psychology is based on the suggestion that there exists a universal structure of the mind that has its own evolutionary history. On this crucial point, Jungians and neo-Darwinian evolutionary psychologists agree. However, it will be argued in this paper that, although Jungian psychology opposes the tabula rasa doctrine (mind as a blank slate), Jung cannot be regarded as the founding father of evolutionary psychology. From the scientific perspective, Jung's biological assumptions are simply untenable and have been for many decades. In his attempt to fuse biology, spirit, and the unconscious, Jung ended in speculative flights of imagination that bear no resemblance to modern neo-Darwinian theories. The premise of the paper is that, when Jungian psychology is presented to us as a scientific psychology that has implications for the development of neo-Darwinian psychology, we should be on guard and examine the evidence.

scholarly journals The rhetorical use of B. F. Skinner in evolutionary psychology

2021 ◽  
pp. 095935432110303
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Racine
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Cultural Adaptation ◽  
Evolutionary Explanation ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Evolutionary Theories ◽  
Academic Paper ◽  
Blank Slate ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Model View

This article examines Skinner’s often neglected ideas about evolution, which he returns to in his final academic paper. I attempt to square Skinner’s advocacy for evolutionary explanation, including his efforts to reconcile biological, individual, and cultural adaptation, with how he is framed and critiqued by a school of evolutionary psychologists who attribute to Skinner a blank slate, or so-called standard social science model, view of the mind. I argue that characterizing Skinner in this manner is inconsistent with his evolutionary writings and ignores Skinner’s explicit disavowals of such interpretations. I then discuss Skinner’s evolutionary views in light of contemporary evolutionary theories of human psychology. I also compare the reception to evolutionary psychology and Skinner within the field more generally and conclude by discussing the proposal that evolutionary psychology should be considered a new paradigm for psychology, a claim that seems to follow from evolutionary psychologists’ caricature of Skinner.

Beérkezett könyvek

2005 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-427
Author(s):  
Csaba Pléh
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Well Being ◽  
General Intelligence ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
Number Of Genes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Origin Of Mind ◽  
The Mind

Ádám György: A rejtozködo elme. Egy fiziológus széljegyzetei Carpendale, J. I. M. és Müller, U. (eds): Social interaction and the development of knowledge Cloninger, R. C.: Feeling good. The science of well being Dunbar, Robin, Barrett, Louise, Lycett, John: Evolutionary psychology Dunbar, Robin: The human story. A new history of makind's evolution Geary, D. C.: The origin of mind. Evolution of brain, cognition and general intelligence Gedeon Péter, Pál Eszter, Sárkány Mihály, Somlai Péter: Az evolúció elméletei és metaforái a társadalomtudományokban Harré, Rom: Cognitive science: A philosophical introduction Horváth György: Pedagógiai pszichológia Marcus, G.: The birth of the mind. How a tiny number of genes creates the complexities of human thought Solso, R. D.: The psychology of art and the evolution of the conscious brain Wray, A. (ed.): The transition to language

Mind Cure

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wakoh Shannon Hickey
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Psychology ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
First Americans ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Political Economic

Mindfulness is widely claimed to improve health and performance, and historians typically say that efforts to promote meditation and yoga therapeutically began in the 1970s. In fact, they began much earlier, and that early history offers important lessons for the present and future. This book traces the history of mind-body medicine from eighteenth-century Mesmerism to the current Mindfulness boom and reveals how religion, race, and gender have shaped events. Many of the first Americans to advocate meditation for healing were women leaders of the Mind Cure movement, which emerged in the late nineteenth century. They believed that by transforming their consciousness, they could also transform oppressive circumstances in which they lived, and some were activists for social reform. Trained by Buddhist and Hindu missionaries, these women promoted meditation through personal networks, religious communities, and publications. Some influenced important African American religious movements, as well. For women and black men, Mind Cure meant not just happiness but liberation in concrete political, economic, and legal terms. The Mind Cure movement exerted enormous pressure on mainstream American religion and medicine, and in response, white, male doctors and clergy with elite academic credentials appropriated some of its methods and channeled them into scientific psychology and medicine. As mental therapeutics became medicalized, individualized, and then commodified, the religious roots of meditation, like the social justice agendas of early Mind Curers, fell away. After tracing how we got from Mind Cure to Mindfulness, this book reveals what got lost in the process.

Language and the subconscious

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan M Cyna ◽  
Suyin GM Tan
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
External Environment ◽  
Conscious State ◽  
Routine Activities ◽  
Logical Thinking ◽  
Verbal Cues ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Extreme Stress ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind

Many of the communications commonly encountered in anaesthetic practice elicit subconscious responses, and, because this is so, they frequently go unrecognized. This form of communication involves verbal and non-verbal cues also known as suggestions that can elicit automatic changes in perception or behaviour. Much of this chapter is based on language structures that are thought to make subconscious changes in perception, mood or behaviour more likely, both with patients and anaesthetists themselves. Recognizing subconscious responses will facilitate communication. As is discussed later, anaesthetists can communicate with patients and colleagues in ways that utilize subconscious functioning. To all intents and purposes this looks like intuitive communication, when in reality it has structure and therefore can be learned and taught. The conscious and unconscious states are familiar to all anaesthetists. However, it is frequently unappreciated that all patients, whether in an unconscious or conscious state, will also be functioning subconsciously. In the unconscious patient it is well recognized that subconscious activities still occur—for example, in implicit awareness. Most people would appreciate that there are times during consciousness when they switch off the ‘logical brain’ and enter ‘daydream’-type thinking or they ‘tune out’. People including anaesthetists tend to function subconsciously most of the time—for example, during routine activities such as driving home on ‘autopilot’ and arriving home without realizing it consciously. The ability we all have to function automatically—that is, subconsciously—frees up the conscious part of the mind to focus on other things such as planning tomorrow’s ‘neuro’ case. The teleological basis for this ability lies in being able to filter the massive amount of information continuously presented to the individual. This allows the conscious mind to focus on what it perceives to be important—facilitating learning, logical thinking and problem solving. During activities where logical thinking is not a requirement, the subconscious comes to the fore. This is characterized by dissociation from the external environment—being ‘in your own world’. Paradoxically, at times of extreme stress, the subconscious tends to take over when the conscious part of the mind becomes so overwhelmed by external inputs it ceases to function logically.

May Sinclair

2021 ◽  
pp. 87-125
Author(s):  
Charlotte Jones
Keyword(s):  
Figurative Language ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
Power Of Language ◽  
May Sinclair ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Material Evidence

Chapter 2 extends the previous chapter’s inquiry into the relationship between realist aesthetics and figurative language as it might be oriented towards an unimaginable term—an unknowable, noumenal category—by considering its collision with what May Sinclair posits as its psychological equivalent, the unconscious. Sinclair combined a career as a novelist with philosophical research, mounting a vindication of neo-Hegelian idealist philosophy. For Sinclair, idealism’s impetus for thinking about immaterial and unseen realities led to the intangible and unseen realms of the mind, and a metaphysical absolute becomes the conduit for her early realist novels to begin to imagine a form for the uncertain boundaries and contours of consciousness. Both lack a verifiable content and are therefore apparently beyond the power of language to define or accommodate. This chapter suggests that the models of subjectivity presented in her fiction seek to integrate a revelatory encounter with an idealist absolute with the incontrovertible material evidence of alternative forms of consciousness being presented by the ‘new psychology’.

Steven Pinker: The Polymath Sublime

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan G. Gross
Keyword(s):  
Academic Career ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Massachusetts Institute Of Technology ◽  
Cognitive Scientist ◽  
Institute Of Technology ◽  
Blank Slate ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Blue Eyes ◽  
School Of Athens

Already famous at 40, Josef Haydn was searching for new means of expression. The result was his six Opus 20 string quartets, a dazzling set whose new directions put their stamp on every composer who has since attempted the form. For those accustomed to previous quartets, including Haydn’s own, every minor turn was a major surprise, each new direction conveying a sense of the composer’s joy as he reveled in his mastery of his medium. At 40, already a well-respected cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Steven Pinker came suddenly to the world’s attention with his first book of popular science, the bestselling Language Instinct, an embodiment of the linguistic sublime. Emboldened by instant fame, he followed this achievement by following Francis Bacon, making all knowledge his province, telling us how the mind works, why it isn’t a blank slate, and why violence has declined. Not many professors are interviewed by Stephen Colbert; not many can be described as a brilliant lecturer who looks like a rock star: “His curly shoulder-length mane and Cuban heels give him the air of a prog rocker on his third comeback tour. He has a superbly defined jaw, glittering blue eyes and a kilowatt smile which he beams at his class as he switches on the microphone.” Not many professors find themselves on a poster that updates Raphael’s famous painting The School of Athens, a gathering of ancient worthies. Figure 10.1 is a depiction easily identified by the caricature’s flowing locks. Raised by middle-class Jewish parents in Montreal, Pinker first distinguished himself as the graduate student of the prominent Harvard psychologist Steven Kosslyn, who said of him: “He was officially my student, but almost from the start we were colleagues.” After studying with Kosslyn, Pinker went on to carve out a successful academic career as an experimental psychologist, first at MIT, then at Harvard, specializing in language acquisition in children. But he was not satisfied as a mere academic star, much sought-after, much honored, destined to shine brightly but not to dazzle.

Rethinking Cultural Evolutionary Psychology

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 477-492
Author(s):  
Ryan Nichols ◽  
Henrike Moll ◽  
Jacob L. Mackey
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Learning ◽  
Cultural Evolutionary ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Alternative Theories

AbstractThis essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Heyes’ point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes articulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language, mental technologies, are “tuned” and “assembled” through social interaction and cultural learning. After recapitulating her explanations for the cultural and psychological origins of these gadgets, we turn to criticisms. Among those, we find Heyes’ use of evolutionary theory confusing on several points of importance; alternative theories of cultural evolution, especially those of the Tomasello group and of Boyd, Richerson and Henrich, are misrepresented; the book neglects joint attention and other forms of intersubjectivity in its explanation of the origins of cognitive gadgets; and, whereas Heyes accuses other theories of being “mindblind,” we find her theory ironically other-blind and autistic in character.

scholarly journals Charcot, Janet, and French Models of Psychopathology

2020 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-340
Author(s):  
Olivier Walusinski ◽  
Julien Bogousslavsky
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Psychology ◽  
Mental Content ◽  
Scientific Psychology ◽  
Personal Power ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Human Psychology ◽  
Psychic Automatism ◽  
Jean Martin Charcot

Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), thanks to his insight as a clinician can be said to be one of the precursors of scientific psychology. Charcot’s 30 years of activity at La Salpêtrière hospital display an intellectual trajectory that decisively changed the idea of human psychology by favouring the emergence of two concepts: the subconscious and the unconscious. It was his collaboration with Pierre Janet (1859–1947), a philosopher turned physician, that led to this evolution, relying on the search for hysteria’s aetiology, using hypnosis as a method of exploration. Focusing on clinical psychology that was experimental and observational, Janet built a theory of psychic automatism, “the involuntary exercise of memory and intelligence” leading to “independence of the faculties, freed from personal power.” From all that came the idea of the subconscious, a functioning as a passive mental mechanism, resulting from a more or less temporary dissociation of previously associated mental content.

scholarly journals Internalization: A metaphor we can live without

2001 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 618-625 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Kubovy ◽  
William Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Apparent Motion ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Motion Path ◽  
The World ◽  
Kinematic Geometry ◽  
Innate Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Internal Knowledge

Shepard has supposed that the mind is stocked with innate knowledge of the world and that this knowledge figures prominently in the way we see the world. According to him, this internal knowledge is the legacy of a process of internalization; a process of natural selection over the evolutionary history of the species. Shepard has developed his proposal most fully in his analysis of the relation between kinematic geometry and the shape of the motion path in apparent motion displays. We argue that Shepard has made a case for applying the principles of kinematic geometry to the perception of motion, but that he has not made the case for injecting these principles into the mind of the percipient. We offer a more modest interpretation of his important findings: that kinematic geometry may be a model of apparent motion. Inasmuch as our recommended interpretation does not lodge geometry in the mind of the percipient, the motivation of positing internalization, a process that moves kinematic geometry into the mind, is obviated. In our conclusion, we suggest that cognitive psychologists, in their embrace of internal mental universals and internalization may have been seduced by the siren call of metaphor.

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