<em>DreamSenseMemory</em> - a Gestalt-based dream-work approach embracing all our senses

Gestalt therapists believe that their task is to help their clients to experience repressed, ambivalent, and unpleasant things in order to accept and implement them in their whole self. To implement those ‘things’, those elements of the self, they need to be uncovered first, which is a process that often is achieved by dream work, as messages from the unconscious that are stuck in our dreams can be revealed by certain Gestalt-therapy methods. The method in focus is the newly developed DreamSenseMemory technique which is based on neurological findings on how the senses at play influence memory processing. Dream work with the DreamSenseMemory method has the advantage that by using this method on a regular basis, dream content will not only be remembered more often but also in more detail. Thus, effectively supporting dream work and its process of understanding the message of the unconscious, accepting the elements withing and implementing them in the self.

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The Will Not to Know

Philosophical Literary Journal Logos ◽

10.22394/0869-5377-2021-2-63-76 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 31 (1) ◽

pp. 63-78

Keyword(s):

Focal Point ◽

Real Life ◽

Dream Content ◽

Dream Work ◽

The Unconscious ◽

Health Crisis ◽

The Social ◽

The Will ◽

Second Wave ◽

Social Causes

COVID-19 has been gradually fading from the headlines since summer’s end, and other news has moved into the lead. However, the pandemic has not gone away, nor have expectations of a second wave. Famous philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek refers to this tendency as “the will not to know” in opposition to the title of Michel Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know. Behind this phenomenon Žižek sees a tripartite structure at work along the lines of Freudian dream-work: there is “triangulation” between latent dream-thought, manifest dream-content, and the unconscious wish. The coronavirus itself corresponds to the “manifest dream text,” the focal point of our media, and is what we all talk (and dream) about. It is not merely an actual phenomenon, but also the object of fantasized connections, of dreams and fears. For that reason Žižek regards the switch to other news as fake, while the pandemic remains the true Master-Signifier. This Master-Signifier is overdetermined by a whole series of interconnected real-life facts and processes that form its dream-content, consisting not only of the reality of the health crisis, but also of ecological troubles and more. The hypothesis Žižek defends is that this interplay between the COVID-19 pandemic and the social causes that overdetermine it is not the whole story. There is a third level at work here (which corresponds to the true trauma, the unconscious wish of a dream), and this is the ontological catastrophe triggered by the pandemic, the undermining of the coordinates of our basic access to reality, which reaches far beyond a usual “mental crisis.”

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Kierkegaard as Physician of the Soul: On Self-forgiveness and Despair

Journal of Psychology and Theology ◽

10.1177/009164710903700303 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 37 (3) ◽

pp. 174-185 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Simon D. Podmore

Keyword(s):

The Self ◽

Psychological Perspective ◽

The Unconscious ◽

Pastoral Identity ◽

Self Forgiveness ◽

Self Knowledge ◽

Divine Forgiveness

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.

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The self-face captures attention without consciousness: evidence from the N2pc ERP component analysis

10.1101/2020.01.22.915595 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Michał Bola ◽

Marta Paź ◽

Łucja Doradzińska ◽

Anna Nowicka

Keyword(s):

Face Image ◽

The Self ◽

The Unconscious ◽

Face Analysis ◽

Unconscious Processing ◽

Familiar Face ◽

Probe Experiment ◽

Early Processing ◽

Own Name ◽

Key Questions

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.

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Working on dreams, from neuroscience to psychotherapy

Research in Psychotherapy Psychopathology Process and Outcome ◽

10.4081/ripppo.2021.540 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 24 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Giorgio Caviglia

Keyword(s):

Clinical Practice ◽

Recent Literature ◽

Clinical Work ◽

The Self ◽

Current Clinical Practice ◽

The Unconscious ◽

Psychoanalytic Approach ◽

The Relationship ◽

Aggressive Drive ◽

Cultural Openness

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.

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Symphonic pastorals redux

Extending Ecocriticism ◽

10.7228/manchester/9781784994396.003.0011 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Aaron S. Allen

Keyword(s):

The Self ◽

Critical History ◽

History Of ◽

The Senses

Our experience of the environment relies on all the senses. In this chapter, Aaron Allen introduces non-musicologists to the relatively new field of ecomusicology. He argues that for musicology, the genre/idea of the symphony is laden with prestige; for ecocriticism, the pastoral has similar stature and is a genre/mode central to the discipline. In the concise juxtaposition of these two terms, Allen illustrates ecomusicology, which connects ecocritical and musicological scholarship, and further outlines a brief critical history of selected symphonies in relation to the pastoral. He makes the case that symphonies – ostensibly a textless genre of music conceived as abstract – can relate ideas about nature. Such connections between disciplines, approaches, and materials contribute to the larger effort in the environmental (post)humanities to break down humans’ problematic and the self-destructive nature-culture binary.

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The Passions

The Concealed Influence of Custom ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190933401.003.0003 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 49-70

Author(s):

Jay L. Garfield

Keyword(s):

Social Construction ◽

The Self ◽

The Social ◽

The Senses

This chapter begins the exploration of Book II of the Treatise. It explores and explains the distinctions between calm and violent passions and between direct and indirect passions, as they are drawn in Book II, and connects Hume’s accounts to those of Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, demonstrating both the senses in which he follows their respective accounts, and those in which he differs. It also discusses the nature of the self as the object of the passions, and explains how Hume takes the passions to be involved in the social construction of the person, showing that Hume does believe that persons are real, and are constructed socially.

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Reimaging ‘the Self’ in Criminology: Transcendence, Unconscious States and the Limits of Narrative Criminology

Theoretical Criminology ◽

10.1177/1362480620919102 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 136248062091910

Author(s):

Ben Laws

Keyword(s):

The Self ◽

The Unconscious ◽

Unconscious Processes ◽

Critical Engagement ◽

Causal Mechanisms ◽

Future Action ◽

The Moment ◽

Desistance From Crime

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.

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The Eolian Harp: Coleridge’s Middle Voice?

Literature and Theology ◽

10.1093/litthe/frz041 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 34 (1) ◽

pp. 101-119

Author(s):

Blake Allen

Keyword(s):

Significant Relationship ◽

Human Agency ◽

The Self ◽

Middle Voice ◽

Divine Inspiration ◽

The Senses

Abstract Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s conversation poem, The Eolian Harp, configures a complex and highly significant relationship between activity and passivity. A merely passive poet, under the influence of natural or divine inspiration, would in Coleridge’s view be reduced to a mere automaton. Yet the poem is often thought to represent just such a poet. Similarly, it is thought to represent Sara, the speaker’s interlocutor, as a surrogate self. I shall argue, instead, that the poem presents the self in a ‘middle voice’, at once active and passive, such that inspiration does not efface human agency. I shall also consider the senses in which Sara evinces a middle voice and thus a distinct and substantial subjectivity. The implications of this argument for Coleridge’s broader corpus, and for some recent critiques of his aesthetics, will be suggested.

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