The Vitality of Viennese Art Nouveau

The article develops the problem of vitality in art on the basis of the so-called Viennese Art Nouveau, in particular on the basis of the works of Arthur Schnitzler, Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser and critical works of Hermann Bahr. The concept of vitality is seen as the foundation of that artistic anthropology, which united all types of art within the framework of Viennese Art Nouveau, giving them a single intention. The heightened interest in Man as a psychophysiological phenomenon, in the instinctive nature of man and the chaos of his inner — mental — life, in the borderline states of human existence in the space of the eternal antinomy of Eros and Thanatos — all this led to the unprecedented originality of the art of Vienna at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries.

The Unifying Glue

Chapter 3 zeroes in on the trait of openness exclusively, including its structural and motivational elements. The author discusses how openness, like the rest of the Big Five traits, affects every aspect of mental life, but notes that traits are abstract potentials. Their existence is inferred from what people say and do, how they behave. Of more interest in this book are the habits of mind they give rise to. These involve ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. The author describes how, depending on how high a person is in O, certain challenges may (or may not) materialize. Three artists are profiled in the chapter: John Coltrane, John Lennon, and Francesca Woodman.

ABOUT THE APPLICATION OF THE ANALYTICAL AMPLIFICATION METHOD IN THE THERAPY OF A PATIENT WITH BORDERLINE MENTAL DISORDER BASED ON THE FAIRY TALE «GO THERE — I DON'T KNOW WHERE, BRING THAT — I DON'T KNOW WHAT»

В данной статье описан фрагмент психотерапевтической работы в парадигме юнгианского анализа с использованием метода амплификации с пациентом, имеющим пограничное расстройство психики. Амплификация — инструмент аналитической работы, введенный в практику К.Г. Юнгом, позволяющий исследовать и интерпретировать явные и скрытые психодинамические процессы через символический язык. По сути процесс амплификации — осмысление индивидуальной психической жизни индивида посредством использования коллективного опыта знаний: мифов, легенд, сказок и т.п. Современная психология, считал Юнг, так или иначе, имеет дело с продуктами бессознательной фантазии - мифологическими и сказочными мотивами, наиболее объективно отражающими динамику психической жизни. «Пользуясь методом мифологической амплификации, мы выбираем те или иные аналогии потому, что их смысловое ядро идентично содержанию исследуемых процессов или в каком-то отношении походит на него. Принимая в качестве данности, что все, когда-либо выраженное человеком в словесной или образной форме, обладает абсолютной психической реальностью, мы можем утверждать, что любая аналогия помогает уточнить, объяснить и подтвердить наше толкование мотивов бессознательных процессов» [4]. В случае с данным пациентом универсально подошла русская народная сказка «Пойди туда — не знаю куда, принеси то — не знаю что» [22]. Опираясь на исследования признанных авторов психоанализа и аналитической психологии, амплификацию этой сказки можно рассматривать как абрис мужского пути индивидуации, «синтетического процесса», описанного К.Г.Юнгом [12]. «Возможной целью, здоровым предназначением ассимилирующих процессов является путь индивидуации, подразумевающий самоосуществление, становление человека самим собой. Индивидуация от лат. in-dividuus означает «неделимый», «неразделенный», «неразведенный», «нерасщепленный» [19]. Индивидуация предполагает достижение психически нового интегрированного состояния, установление устойчивой связи между эго (осознаваемый идентифицированный образ «Я») и архетипом Самости (сложный центр психической жизни, соединяющий бессознательные и сознательные знания человека о себе самом и трансформирующий личность,). Амплификация данной сказки позволяет исследовать внутрипсихическое взаимодействие архетипической пары — маскулинного начала в сознательном поле мужчины и женского в его бессознательном — на разных этапах развития. Подобное взаимодействие отражает реальные отношения с противоположным полом, отзеркаливая внутреннюю/внешнюю мужскую/женскую часть личности. Также данная амплификация дает возможность предположить, что является основным фактором, «запускающим» процесс индивидуации у мужчин. This article describes a fragment of psychotherapeutic work in the paradigm of Jungian analysis using the amplification method with a patient with borderline mental disorder. Amplification is a tool of analytical work introduced into practice by C.G. Jung, which allows to investigate and interpret explicit and hidden psychodynamic processes through symbolic language. In essence, the amplification process is the comprehension of an individual's individual mental life through the use of collective experience of knowledge: myths, legends, fairy tales, etc. «In myths and fairy tales, as in dreams, the soul tells its own story, and the interaction of archetypes is revealed in its natural frame: "creation, re-creation, eternal spirit eternal entertainment»[13]. In the case of this patient, the Russian folk tale «Go there — I don't know where, bring that — I don't know what» was universally suitable [22]. Based on the research of recognized authors of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, the amplification of this fairy tale can be considered as an outline of the male path of individuation, a «synthetic process» described by C.G. Jung[12]. «A possible goal, a healthy purpose of assimilating processes is the path of individuation, implying self-fulfillment, becoming a person himself. Individuation from Lat. in-dividuus means «indivisible», «undivided» [19]. Individuation presupposes the achievement of a psychically new integrated state, the establishment of a stable connection between the ego (a conscious identified image of the «I») and the archetype of the Self (a complex center of mental life that connects the unconscious and conscious knowledge of a person about himself and transforms the personality). The amplification of this fairy tale allows us to explore the intrapsychic interaction of the archetypal pair — the masculine principle in the conscious field of a man and the female in his unconscious — at different stages of development. Such interaction reflects a real relationship with the opposite sex, mirroring the inner/outer male/female part of the personality. Also, this amplification makes it possible to assume that it is the main factor «triggering» the process of individuation in men.

Meditation Apps and the Promise of Attention by Design

This article demonstrates how meditation apps, such as Headspace and Calm, are imbricated within public discourse about technology addiction, exploring the consequences of this discourse on contemporary mental life. Based on ethnographic research with designers and users of meditation apps, I identify a promise put forth by meditation app companies that I call attention by design: a discursive strategy that frames attention as an antidote to technology addiction, which is ostensibly made possible when design is done right. I argue that attention by design is a promise unfulfilled. Meditation app companies construct attention as socially valuable by endlessly pointing out its purported opposite, technology addiction. Attention by design is promissory in that it keeps promising even when it doesn’t deliver what it promises, compelling the user to return to a practice that represents socially desirable traits that can never be fully acquired—and that often recede further from reach as the person becomes distracted by other obligations and communication mediated through the smartphone. Despite this broken promise, users believe they are becoming more attentive. The promissory attention designed into meditation apps reflects a new form of governmentality, in which users receive a mental nudge to reinterpret similarly designed experiences as different.

The Metropolis and the “Bloodless Characters”: A Comparative Study of James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” and Yusuf Idrīs’s “Qāʿ al-Madīna” [“The Bottom of the City”]

The current paper has been developed to examine the complexities of metropolitan subjects’ blasé attitude and bloodless life as portrayed in James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” and Yusuf Idrīs’s “Qāʿ al-Madīna” [“The Bottom of the City”] short stories. The paper aims at analyzing the impact of metropolis on its bloodless characters’ mental health and perception of self through the unpacking of the blasé attitude which emerges in Georg Simmel’s famous study “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Using Simmel’s study as a tool to analyze the two short stories, the paper will comment on and compare the manner in which the Irish and the Egyptian urban texts decipher the code of their modern metropoles to interpret in what ways Simmel’s insights illuminate our understanding of the dilemma of the metropolitan subject. In this paper the urban and literary theory will complement each other in shedding light on the emergence of new forms of socialization. The paper reaches the conclusion that the overall image of the metropolis portrayed in the two short stories was constructed through the mutilated sensibilities of the metropolitan subjects that have become dispirited by the routine of their daily lives. The two protagonists – Mr. Duffy and Mr. Abdallah - end up living like strangers who maintain minimal comunication with others due the cold and unfeeling rationality they adopt to protect themselves against the overstimulation of their dehumanizing metropoles.

Individual and Social in L.I. Petrazhitsky's Philosophy of Law

Along with competing legal concepts of positivism and gnoseologism in the second half of the 19th century, a direction of legal psychology was formed, within which the psychological theory of law by the Russian and Polish lawyer L.I. Petrazhitsky takes a prominent place. L.I. Petrazhitsky's legal theory interprets the law as a mental phenomenon in a person's mind. The mental life forms the internal and external legal behavior. Studying the law becomes possible only by analyzing the subject's particular kind of emotional life - legal experience. Our focus on the individual's emotional world gives us reason to think of the theory as individualistic, i.e., close to the subject's mental life. At the same time, the Russian lawyer's psychological doctrine also gains explanatory potential for scrutinizing social life. It contains ideas that reveal such mechanisms of social functioning as the affirmation of the ideal of love as the ultimate goal of law-making, the priority of unofficial law in the life of society, and a specific interpretation of public and private law. The system of legal emotions is carried out on the social niveau and establishes such values as love and social order. The article reconstructs the main provisions of Petrazhitsky's psychological theory of law from the point of view of the interaction of its individual and social sides. The social potential of the Russian lawyer's theory appears capable of supplementing and explaining the ideas of socialism and sobornost discussed widely at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Petrazhitsky's individualistic doctrine appears as a flexible concept, capable of fitting organically into various philosophical and sociological contexts.

Introduction

The introduction raises the main question the book investigates, namely how some of the greatest metaphysicians of antiquity discovered, reified in their ontologies, and explained what structure is. Structure is to be found in the natural world, in our mental life, in any work of craftsmanship and art: a plant, an intention, an engine are all instances of structured entities. Anaxagoras treats structures as primitive entities in his ontology; Plato pioneers a conception of structure as a property, which leads to many metaphysical innovations in his system. The book’s introduction sketches its overall argument, starting with an investigation of structure in Anaxagoras’s ontology, which will serve as a foil for understanding the development of Plato’s views concerning structure and their fundamental impact on those of Aristotle.

Propositionalism and Questions that do not have Correct Answers

As the label suggests, according to propositionalism, each intentional mental state, attitude or event is or involves a relation to a proposition. In this paper, I will discuss a case that seems prima facie not to be accountable for by propositionalism. After having presented the case, I will show why it is different from others that have been discussed in the literature as able to show that propositionalism cannot be correct. I will then consider what the propositionalist can say to fix the problem and I will show that no strategy that is genuinely propositionalist seems promising. I will not conclude that propositionalism is doomed. But I will show that if propositionalism can account for our case at all, it can only do so by losing its main appeal, i.e. its elegance and simplicity. But then propositionalism seems to have lost its advantage with respect to its obvious alternative, i.e. a pluralist account according to which mental states, attitudes and events are not all homogeneously relations to propositions, but rather our mental life should be accounted for in terms of a plurality of kinds of relata.

The Moral Status of Conscious Subjects

Any account of moral status faces three difficulties simultaneously. The first is the grounding difficulty—how to account for the grounds of moral status. The second is the mapping difficulty—how to map the grounds to the moral reasons for action associated with the possession of (some level of) moral status. The third is the cases difficulty—how to navigate the grounds and mapping difficulties without running afoul of strong intuitions about a wide range of problem cases. One cannot navigate these difficulties perfectly. But this chapter argues that a coherent and relatively compelling view can be had by grounding moral status in aspects of a subject’s conscious mental life, by mapping the grounds to moral reasons in terms of respect for conscious subjects, and by taking the problem cases one by one.