Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Ratcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Substantial Proportion ◽  
Intentional State ◽  
Thought Insertion ◽  
Modal Structure ◽  
Auditory Verbal Hallucinations ◽  
The Social

This chapter outlines the overall argument of the book, emphasizing its two principal theses. First of all, it sketches the position that thought insertion, and also a substantial proportion of auditory verbal hallucinations, consist of disturbances in the sense of being in one or another kind of intentional state, in the modal structure of intentionality (meaning our grasp of the various modalities of intentionality, such as believing, perceiving, remembering, and imagining, as distinct from one another). Second, it introduces the view that the integrity of human experience, including what we might term the most basic experience of self, depends on ways of relating to other people and to the social world as a whole. The chapter concludes with summaries of the seven chapters that follow.

Real Hallucinations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Ratcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Social World ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Philosophical Study ◽  
Intentional State ◽  
Thought Insertion ◽  
Auditory Verbal Hallucinations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
Do So

Real Hallucinations is a philosophical study of the structure of human experience, its vulnerability to disruption, and how its integrity depends on interpersonal relations. It focuses on the beguilingly simple question of how we manage to routinely distinguish between our experiences of perceiving, remembering, imagining, and thinking. This question is addressed via a detailed philosophical study of auditory verbal hallucinations (usually defined as hearing a voice in the absence of a speaker) and thought insertion (somehow experiencing one’s own thoughts as someone else’s). The book shows how thought insertion, and also a substantial proportion of auditory verbal hallucinations, consist of disturbances in the structure of experience and –more specifically - in our sense of the various types of intentional state, such as believing, perceiving, remembering, and imagining, as distinct from one another. It is further argued that episodic and seemingly localized experiential disturbances such as these usually occur against a backdrop of less pronounced but much wider-ranging alterations in the structure of intentionality. To do so, the book addresses types of experience associated with trauma, schizophrenia, and profound grief. The outcome of this is a more generally applicable account of how the integrity of human experience, including the most basic sense of self, is inseparable from how we relate to other people and to the social world as a whole.

The Horizons of Experience

2012 ◽  
pp. 252-272
Author(s):  
Tony Hines
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Social Study ◽  
Social World ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Life World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rational Thought

Social researchers consciously and intentionally set out to understand the life-world (Lebenswelt). It is different than knowing the inanimate world of objects. Social study is systematic and as rigorous as natural science but focuses on human experience. The social world we inhabit cradles all human experience. It is the context for meaning, for all being and becoming. Life is a temporal stream of experience that, if we are to understand it, needs to be kept at bay (bracketing it). In doing so, it is as Husserl said at the ‘horizon of experience,’ pre-theoretical. It is only through critical reflection that we understand our lived experience in relation to others, present and past. This chapter reflects on Husserl’s notion of ‘horizon of experience’ to intentionally understand the limits of rational thought on irrational objects. It offers insights through these reflections and possibilities for researching information systems applying phenomenology.

Voices of Anxiety

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Ratcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Social Anxiety ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Inner Speech ◽  
Auditory Verbal Hallucinations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Inner Dialogue

This chapter develops a detailed account of what auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) consist of and how they arise. It focuses, to begin with, on those that involve a quasi-perceptual experience of ‘inner speech’ or ‘inner dialogue’. Such experiences are often preceded by heightened social anxiety, and it is argued that anxious anticipation of one’s own thought contents as they arise can constitute an experience of thought content as ‘alien’. This approach is then broadened to accommodate not only inner dialogue but also imagination and memory. The chapter further proposes that other kinds of AVH, which are experienced as external in origin and more akin to veridical auditory experiences, can likewise be accounted for in terms of anxious anticipation, but that they come about in a different way. It is also made clear how AVHs can fall somewhere in between the ‘internal, non-auditory’ and ‘external, auditory poles’, rather than fitting neatly into one or the other category. The chapter concludes by noting that AVHs tend to be associated with wider-ranging disturbances in a person’s relationship with the social world, which are often preceded by unpleasant interpersonal circumstances.

scholarly journals Thought Insertion Clarified

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Ratcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Substantial Proportion ◽  
Intentional State ◽  
Thought Insertion ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Auditory Verbal Hallucination ◽  
Anomalous Experience

This chapter begins by considering the possibility that a number of factors contribute to the sense of being in an intentional state, and that these can come into conflict. The remainder of the chapter argues that thought insertion (TI) and certain kinds of auditory verbal hallucination (AVH) are to be understood in this way. There is a difference between experiencing a process of thinking as alien and experiencing thought content as alien. It is argued that TI involves the latter. Hence it could just as well be described as experiencing one’s own thought contents in a strange, perception-like way. To further support this interpretation, the chapter considers AVHs and shows that a substantial proportion of experiences that are described in AVH terms can equally be conveyed in terms of TI. What we have is an anomalous experience that lies somewhere between thinking and perceiving. The content of the experience continues to resemble that of a thought. Even so, a sense of perceiving predominates. The chapter concludes by arguing that it is unhelpful to conceive of AVH / TI in terms of a distinction between agency and subjectivity or ownership.

The Contribution of Enrique Pichon-Rivière: Comparisons with His European Contemporaries and with Modern Theory

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Scharff
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
George Herbert Mead ◽  
Analytic Thinking ◽  
Family Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Original Family ◽  
Kurt Lewin ◽  
Social Applications

Enrique Pichon-Rivière, a pioneer of psychoanalysis, worked and wrote in Argentina in the mid-twentieth century, but his work has not so far been translated into English. From the beginning, Pichon-Rivière understood the social applications of analytic thinking, centring his ideas on "el vinculo", which is generally translated as "the link", but could equally be translated as "the bond". The concept that each individual is born into human social links, is shaped by them, and simultaneously contributes to them inextricably ties people's inner worlds to the social world of family and society in which they live. Pichon-Rivière believed, therefore, that family analysis and group and institutional applications of analysis were as important as individual psychoanalysis. Many of the original family and couple therapists from whom our field learned trained with him. Because his work was centred in the analytic writings of Fairbairn and Klein, as well as those of the anthropologist George Herbert Mead and the field theory of Kurt Lewin, his original ideas have important things to teach us today. This article summarises some of his central ideas such as the link, spiral process, the single determinate illness, and the process of therapy.

Our Most Troubling Madness

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Defeat ◽  
Social World ◽  
Epidemiological Evidence ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Brain Alteration ◽  
Benign Course ◽  
Cultural Features ◽  
The Way

This book examines the way schizophrenia is shaped by its social context: how life is lived with this madness in different settings, and what it is about those settings that alters the course of the illness, its outcome, and even the structure of its symptoms. Until recently, schizophrenia was perhaps our best example—our poster child—for the “bio-bio-bio” model of psychiatric illness: genetic cause, brain alteration, pharmacologic treatment. We now have direct epidemiological evidence that people are more likely to fall ill with schizophrenia in some social settings than in others, and more likely to recover in some social settings than in others. Something about the social world gets under the skin. This book presents twelve case studies written by psychiatric anthropologists that help to illustrate some of the variability in the social experience of schizophrenia and that illustrate the main hypotheses about the different experience of schizophrenia in the west and outside the west--and in particular, why schizophrenia seems to have a more benign course and outcome in India. We argue that above all it is the experience of “social defeat” that increases the risk and burden of schizophrenia, and that opportunities for social defeat are more abundant in the modern west. There is a new role for anthropology in the science of schizophrenia. Psychiatric science has learned—epidemiologically, empirically, quantitatively—that our social world makes a difference. But the highly structured, specific-variable analytic methods of standard psychiatric science cannot tell us what it is about culture that has that impact. The careful observation enabled by rich ethnography allows us to see in more detail what kinds of social and cultural features may make a difference to a life lived with schizophrenia. And if we understand culture’s impact more deeply, we believe that we may improve the way we reach out to help those who struggle with our most troubling madness.

Experience of Ethnographic Fieldwork in an English Benedictine Monastery

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Irvine
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Fieldwork Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Peripheral Participation

What is the role of imitation in ethnographic fieldwork, and what are its limits? This article explores what it means to participate in a particular fieldsite; a Catholic English Benedictine monastery. A discussion of the importance of hospitality in the life of the monastery shows how the guest becomes a point of contact between the community and the wider society within which that community exists. The peripheral participation of the ethnographer as monastic guest is not about becoming incorporated, but about creating a space within which knowledge can be communicated. By focusing on the process of re-learning in the monastery – in particular, relearning how to experience silence and work – I discuss some of the ways in which the fieldwork experience helped me to reassess the social world to which I would return.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document