Pseudomentalization as a Challenge for Therapists of Group Psychotherapy With Drug Addicted Patients

One of the main challenges in group therapy with drug-addicted patients is collective pseudomentalization, i.e., a group discourse consisting of words and clichés that are decoupled from any inner emotional life and are poorly related to external reality. In this study, we aimed to explore the phenomenology of pseudomentalization and how it was addressed by the therapist in an outpatient group for drug-addicted patients. The group was composed of seven members, and the transcripts of eight audio-recorded sessions (one per month) were rated and studied. The interventions of the therapist were measured with the mentalization-based group therapy (MBT-G) adherence and quality scale by independent raters. Two sessions, one with the highest and one with the lowest adherence, were selected, and the clinical sequences of pseudomentalization were analyzed in a comparative way. The findings revealed that pseudomentalization does occur as a collective phenomenon, akin to “basic assumptions” of Wilfred Bion, which we reconceptualized in this study. Any pseudomentalization seemed to be reinforced by the therapist when she was presenting frequent and long interventions, when abstaining from the management of group boundaries, when providing questions focused more on content than on the mental states of the group members, and when not focusing on emotions. However, the ultimate source of collective pseudomentalization seemed to be the fear of the group members of being overwhelmed by painful emotions, mental confusion, and a loss of identity. The findings also indicated that the principles of MBT-G may be a good antidote to pseudomentalization.

Being Carried Away. Fink and Winnicott on the Locus of Playing

The article investigates the question of the experiential location of the area of play, comparing the accounts of Eugen Fink and Donald Winnicott. It argues that while Fink builds on the phenomenological distinction between subjective phantasy and external perception, and accordingly introduces the area of play as a hybrid realm, a peculiar combination of the two, Winnicott considers the area of play as something that underlies and developmentally precedes the experiential differentiation between phantasy and external reality. While from Fink’s viewpoint Winnicott’s model neglects a central phenomenological distinction, from Winnicott’s viewpoint Fink’s account, in turn, appears adultomorphic. Elaborating on these viewpoints in detail, the article ends up considering the conditions on which the seemingly contradictory accounts of playing could be reconciled. This at once opens a new way to assess the compatibility between phenomenology and psychoanalysis.

Gender in Rhetorical Theory

The phrase gender in rhetorical theory refers to how gendered identities and dynamics have shaped the conceptualizing of rhetorical performances and interactions. Scholars have attended to this dimension of rhetoric by examining problems relating to gendered norms and representations as contexts, conditions, and functions for rhetoric. Despite the different aims and times of these inquiries, they share central concerns about the gendered productions and exclusions of discourses and rhetorical practices. Scholars also contribute to work in both rhetorical scholarship and gender studies by bringing diverse projects into contact to create new insights. Scholarly attention to gender in rhetorical studies has often critiqued conventional theories of rhetoric for importing simplistic accounts of gender or for failing to address its importance at all. Many crucial contributions to rhetorical studies have worked to correct this problem by drawing on interdisciplinary literature—particularly from feminist theory, intersectional analysis, queer theory, trans theory, and masculinity studies—enriching understandings of how rhetoric functions. Such research has enabled rhetorical theory to begin to account for distinct embodied encounters, material conditions, and performative agencies. Scholars have drawn on interdisciplinary literature to advance a more nuanced account of gendered experiences and representations in rhetorical theory. This research has often related sexism and misogyny to a host of other forms of bias and bigotry that are evident in some of the scholarly assumptions and abstractions guiding the discipline of rhetorical studies. These include universal and neutral standards of rhetorical efficacy, individualistic accounts of the rhetorical agent, and definitions of rhetoric as a representation of (or response to) an external reality that appeals to a preexisting audience. Rhetorical theorists have also contributed to broader conversations engaging complexities of gender by highlighting the role of discourse in the production of biological essentialisms; gender binaries; interlocking oppressions; and multiple vectors of marginalization, discrimination, erasure, exclusion, and violence.

“Natural” in the philosophical and moralistic literature of the XVII century

In philosophy, “natural” is viewed as an ontological characteristic of the objects of internal and external reality along with the concept of “artificial”. However, in the XVII century, the philosophical and moralistic literature undergoes aestheticization. Numerous appeals of the writers, moralists and philosopher, as well as dialogues and arguments on the topic of “natural” indicate that this was of crucial importance for the aesthetic thought of the XVII century. The answer to the question ‘what natural is’ has become the cornerstone of the new gallant aesthetics, and in behavior was associated with fluency and aristocratic inattention, which are opposed to pomposity and affectation. In art, “natural” was perceived as a desire to purge from the Baroque ostentation. In literature, it is the result of hard work on the language that allows achieving lightness and fluency. Ultimately, in the philosophical thought, “natural” is perceived as the correspondence with truth. Until the present, the question of aestheticization of the “natural” did not draw the attention of Russian researchers. This is partly explained by the historical tradition. Russia enters the European philosophical thought only in the Era of Enlightenment in the XVIII century; thus, the XVII century seems somewhat archaic on the background of the topical issues. However, the XVII century is the advent of the history of modern philosophical and aesthetic thought, and creates the foundation of modern European mentality. This period marks the formation of the new aesthetic ideal, new aesthetic norms, and the system for assessing the work of art, which assign an important role to the “natural”.

Creative illusion in couples: thoughts about the value of transitional experience for couple relationships

This article explores the importance of transitional experience—the intermediate area between internal and external reality, and a necessary and vitalising arena throughout life—in couple relationships. It considers the relationship between containment, transitional experience, and creativity, and how these ideas might add an element to Morgan's "creative couple" concept. Enlisting the thinking of Winnicott, Bion, and more current thinkers such as Goldman, Ogden, Peltz, and others, technical implications such as the importance of flexibility in emphasis between prioritising interpretation of projective processes and in non-verbal avenues of containment are explored.

The Implantation Argument: Simulation Theory is Proof that God Exists

I introduce the implantation argument, a new argument for the existence of God. Spatiotemporal extensions believed to exist outside of the mind, composing an external physical reality, cannot be composed of either atomlessness (infinite divisibility, atomless gunk), or of Democritean atoms (extended simples), and therefore the inner experience of an external reality containing spatiotemporal extensions believed to exist outside of the mind does not represent the external reality (inner mind does not represent external, mind-independent, reality), the mind is a mere cinematic-like mindscreen (a mindscreen simulation), implanted into the mind by a creator-God. It will be shown that only a creator-God can be the implanting creator of the mindscreen simulation (the creator of reality), and other simulation theories, such as Bostrom’s famous account, that do not involve a creator-God as the mindscreen simulation creator, involve a reification fallacy.

On the Veiling and Unveiling of Experience: A Comparison Between the Micro-Phenomenological Method and the Practice of Meditation

Both Buddhist meditation and micro-phenomenology start from the observation that our experience escapes us, we don’t see it as it is. Both offer devices that allow us to become aware of it. But, surprisingly, the two approaches offer few precise descriptions of the processes which veil experience, and of those which make it possible to dissipate these veils. This article is an attempt to put in parentheses declarative writings on the veiling and unveiling processes and their epistemological background and to collect procedural descriptions of this veiling and unveiling processes. From written and oral meditation teachings on the one hand, micro-phenomenological interviews applied to meditative experience and to themselves on the other hand, we identified four types of veiling processes which contribute to screen what is there, and ultimately to generate the naïve belief in the existence of an external reality independent of the mind: attentional, emotional, intentional and cognitive veils. The first part of the article describes these veiling processes and the processes through which they dissipate. It leads to the identification of several “gestures” conducive to this unveiling. The second part describes the devices used by meditation and by micro-phenomenology to elicit these gestures.

First genocide, now ecocide: an anti-life force in organisations?

Most contributions to OSD have assumed that organisations are beset by various anxieties—some inherent to their work, some to the social context in which they operate—which threaten to blow them off course. If not managed effectively these anxieties generate various defences—splitting, denial, dissociation, etc.—which undermine the capacity to engage creatively with the organisation's internal and external reality. Many of the organisations studied, in healthcare, education, etc., ostensibly have a public purpose, but what of those organisations whose purpose is antisocial, where their business is primarily to destroy rather than create? The group relations tradition emerged from the aftermath of the Holocaust and genocide. Today the genocidal impulse has become conjoined with an ecocidal one; as a result we stand on the brink of disaster. This article explores the "structures of feeling" in organisations as our existential fears reach acute levels, and asks whether we need to extend our frame of analysis beyond the anxieties and defences provoked by our destructiveness in order to better understand humanity's apparent embrace of destructiveness.

The Socio-Cultural and Confessional Dimension of Delusional Ideas Content in the Spectrum of Non-Organic Psychotic Disorders

In the last decade, population clinical trials support the disabling nature of most globally diagnosed psychotic disorders. As a defining integral part of this pathology, the delusional idea considered to be the result of the inaccurate and abnormal interpretation of an external reality is individualized, despite the contrary evidence. This ideation’s clinical expression variability is influenced by a heterogeneous spectrum of biological and psychosocial factors, predisposing and/or favouring. This review’s main objective is to identify a series of relational patterns of the content of delusional ideation with socio-familial and cultural/confessional parameters to obtain a holistic approach to patients. Careful decipherment of these conditions can be the basis for developing new interventions that are much more effective in establishing a long-term diagnostic and therapeutic strategy.

Descriptive and analytical psychology of Wilhelm Dilthey as theoretical source of phenomenological psychology of Edmund Husserl

The article contains the critical reconstruction of descriptive and analytical psychology of Wilhelm Dilthey and its influence on the phenomenological psychology of Edmund Husserl. Dilthey describes three fundamental features of intrinsic psychic life, which make it different from external physical world: 1. Immediacy — psychic life is directly perceived as intrinsic process; physical world is indirectly perceived as external reality. 2. Connection — psychic life is organic connection of interrelated experiences, physical world is conglomeration of the separate facts. 3. Value — psychic experiences use to have the value to us, physical facts can be irrelevant to us. According to Dilthey descriptive and analytic psychology is possible since the psychic life is directly given as organic connection of experiences, which have a special value. The main method of psychology should be description of the psychic experience. Dilthey sketches out three main direction of this description: 1. Description of the main types of the psychic processes. 2. Description of the main connections of the human experiences. 3. Description of the special parts of the human experiences. On one hand, the phenomenological psychology of Edmund Husserl is grounded on the descriptive and analytic psychology of Wilhelm Dilthey. On another hand, Husserl criticizes some crucial points of Dilthey’s conception. First of all the founder of phenomenology and phenomenological psychology points out the connection of the notions “understanding” and “induction” in the psychological conception of Wilhelm Dilthey. On the contrary, according to Husserl the method of understanding should be based on the concept of intuition, which plays an important role in his phenomenological project.