Religious, ethical and existential categories in the unconscious area of psychic reality of modern Russian youth: an attempt of comparative analysis

This article presents the results of a preliminary multidisciplinary research of the specificities of youth’s response to various descriptors. Using the semiotic, in-depth psychological, theological and mathematical analysis of the collected associative chains, the author compares the responses of youth representatives to religious and ethical terms with colloquial lexemes, as well as determines sensitivity to these terms and proclivity for their logical and sensory-emotional perception. Particularly, method of semantic multiplication allows identifying strong and weak descriptors of semiosis under consideration. The author determines the trends that outline a number of structural and psychodynamic characteristics of psychic reality of modern Russian youth. The following conclusions were made in the course of this research: 1. Sensitivity (and corresponding awareness) to religious descriptors was demonstrated by less than half of the respondents, and a fifth of the entire sample of terms appeared to be unfamiliar to the respondents; 2. The analysis of ethical associative chains at the level of interpretation, indicated the existence of such a phenomenon as “indeterminate religiosity”, which implies a certain spiritual pursuit, which at the moment does not comply with the familiar to a respondent religions traditions; 3. The acquired data, on the one hand, correspond to the classic “Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs”, while on the other hand, spiritual pursuit of respondents and simultaneously scarce character of “existential” associations may testify in favor of the dominance of “ethical-spiritual” paradigm in psychic reality of respondents (which also complies with the Maslow’s research of later period in the area of “existential needs” and “peak experiences”; 4. All of the aforementioned means that the key to interaction with modern youth (including didactical and educational) is the paradigm of ethical values, which can also be connected with a latent spiritual pursuit.

Conclusion

The conclusion to the book pulls together the many conceptual threads that emerged from the ethnographic material presented in the previous chapters. It argues for a human “shared psychic reality” that can only be expressed and operationalized through the meanings given to it by the cultural world in which each individual is immersed and lives. Thus, while psychic mechanisms have to be “primed” by the individual’s cultural and social environment in order to function meaningfully, so also cultural material, in order to be understood, has to be approached by investigating the subjectivities and psychological dynamics of those who utilize it and produce it. This is particularly true in the realm of conflict, in all its connotations, which is a constant presence in the pages of the book. Indeed, power is here considered to be constitutive of all relations of interdependence between individuals, and not simply as something that someone has and others have not, whether when producing harmony or conflict.

Personal Truth in the Shadow of Religious Truth

In this article I have chosen to approach the topic of personal truth, always subjected to repression, therefore being unconscious. This truth governs the choices in our lives, the attitudes and desires. Repression shows that this truth is unacceptable, unutterable – it must not be exposed, presented, or even consciously represented. When we discover it and manage its integration within the ensemble of our personality, we achieve the capacity to truly love and live, in an authentic manner. The process towards uncovering this truth is difficult and involves many reorganisations on the level of psychic reality, of self-image, of relationships with others as well as with one’s self. The reaction when faced with this discovery is fear, and the reaction towards psychoanalysis, which facilitates the discovery of this truth, is hatred. When personal truth is repressed and its attempts at breaching the conscious are obstructed by perversely imposing a religious truth which excludes it and confers absolute power onto the superego before the ego, the analytic endeavour must lead to a reinvestment of the patient’s ego, so that, later on, the analyst can become the partner of this ego in the pursuit of personal truth.

The Ancient Unconscious

Commonly understood as a modern conceptual invention rather than the discovery of a psychic reality, the notion of the unconscious is often criticized by traditional classicists as an anachronistic lens, one that ineluctably subjects ancient experience to modern patterns of thought. The book challenges this ambivalent theoretical disposition toward the psychoanalytic concept by offering an interpretation of the unconscious, explaining why this concept is in fact inseparable from, and crucial for, the study of the ancient text and more generally for the methodology of classical philology. The book thus examines the complicated, often conflicted, relationship between classical studies and psychoanalytic theory. The Ancient Unconscious considers the debate over whether the ancients had an unconscious as an invitation to rethink the relationship between antiquity and modernity. While antiquity does not provide organic provenance for modernity, it is nevertheless the case that despite the cultural and historical distance, the two epochs are firmly connected. The book investigates the meaning of the textual ties created by arbitrary, spontaneous, and unintentional contacts between the past and its future. Understanding the meaning of textuality through contact between times, historical moments that have no priority under the law of chronology, goes hand in hand with the book’s interpretation of the unconscious. Associations and connections between the past and its future—including the present—belong to the sphere of the unconscious. This latter is primarily employed here in order to study the inherent, often hidden links that bind modernity to classical antiquity, modern to ancient experiences.

The Gothic at the Heart of Film and Film Theory

The main elements of the Freudian uncanny - re-animation of the dead, doubles, repetition compulsion, omnipotence of thought - can also be seen as a catalogue of the key techniques of cinema, the magical thinking on which the affective effect of cinema is predicated. So as explore the Gothic at the heart of cinema's theorization of its own epistemological, psychological and aesthetic concerns, this chapter begins with the flashback scenes in the TV series Mad Men. Montage (and especially superimpositions) perform the spectral haunting at issue, notably how the past overshadows and encroaches upon the present and how the distinction between material and psychic reality, body and mind comes to blur. Given that, like much current cinema, Mathew Weiner's show is a genre mix, the chapter finally moves back into cinema history to explore the Gothic at the heart of film in Alfred Hitchcock's unique splice between film noir and melodrama.

Archaisms and their discovery in archetypal symbolism

The article presents the problem of archaisms, their energy influence on the human behavior in the integration unity with the ontological aspects of human development. The paper integrates the latest ideas of «non-classical psychology» (L. Vygotsky, A. Asmolov, D. El’konin, etc.), which determines the dynamics of the psychology development from statics to the psychodynamic approach to the study of the human psyche. The archaic heritage, as argued here, can not be studied independently from the personalized-individual human psyche. The article emphasizes the energу «doubling» (amplification and direction) of the psyche’s motivational potential due to its phylogenetic nature. The greatest achievement of the archaic heritage of mankind is the archetype as an instinct, which provides the ability to transcode the ideal psychic reality into the materialized and objectified one with the preservation of information equivalents. Therefore, it is impossible to perceive archaisms beyond the archetypal symbolism. The above mentioned explains the archaic origins of the successful use of the artistic works reproductions in the deep perception of the psyche. The article focuses on the archaism of guilt, which derives from the Oedipal complex and is also of an archaic origin. The category of guilt and the feeling of guilt respectively correlate with the conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche. The effectiveness of «Super-Ego» is revealed in the guilt emergence. The article is completed within the psychodynamic paradigm and is based on the empirical material of the deep knowledge of the subject's psyche.