Love as Exclusion

Inscribed into our psychic system are affective imprinting processes. These processes are the original source of differential investment and quick binding toward certain things over others. It always takes place in favor of a selected few. Inversely, and by extension, it is also the source of our dislikes and potential for dehumanizing of unfamiliar people. We draw strict, categorical lines in our valuation of people, from sacred to trash. If we love our children and immediate family, it is by exclusion. The fact is that love, by definition, is selective. It is always to the detriment of others outside of the particular sphere of infatuation. The simple rule is that things in our mind can only exist via a process of exclusion and the enhancement of contrast in relation to all others. Exclusion is the seed of why we think the world in black and white. Alliance exists because of rejection in the same way that love exists inversely because of hate—no contrast, no existence.

Unzuverlässigkeit bei heterodiegetischen Erzählern: Konturierung eines Konzepts an Beispielen von Thomas Mann und Goethe

Heterodiegetic narrators are not present in the story they tell. That is how Gérard Genette has defined heterodiegesis. But this definition of heterodiegesis leaves open what ›absence‹ of the narrator really means: If a friend of the protagonist tells the story but does not appear in it, is he therefore heterodiegetic? Or if a narrator tells something that happened before his lifetime, is he therefore heterodiegetic? These open questions reveal the vagueness of Genette’s definition. However, Simone Elisabeth Lang has recently made a clearer proposal to define heterodiegesis. She argues that narrators should be called heterodiegetic only if they are fundamentally distinguished from the ontological status of the fictional characters: Heterodiegetic narrators are not part of the story for logical reasons, because they are presented as inventors of the story. This is, for example, the case in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities (1809): In the beginning of this novel the narrator presents himself as inventor of the character’s names (»Edward – so we shall call a wealthy nobleman in the prime of life – had been spending several hours of a fine April morning in his nursery-garden«). Based on that recent definition of heterodiegesis my article deals with the question whether such heterodiegetic narrators can be unreliable. My question is: How could you indicate that the inventor of a fictitious story tells something which is not correct or incomplete? In answering this question, I refer to some proposals of Janina Jacke’s article in this journal. Jacke shows that the distinction between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrators should not be confused with the distinction between personal and non-personal narrators or with the distinction between restricted and all-knowing narrators. If you make such differentiations, then of course heterodiegetic narrators can be unreliable: They can omit some essential information or interpret the story inappropriately. Heterodiegetic narrators of an invented story can even lie to the reader or deceive themselves about some elements of the invention. That means: A heterodiegetic narration cannot only be value-related unreliable (›discordant narration‹), but also fact-related unreliable. My article delves especially into this type of unreliability and shows that heterodiegetic narrators of a fictitious story can be fact-related unreliable, if they tell something which was not invented by themselves. In that case, the narrator himself sometimes does not really know whether he tells a true or a fictitious story. Such narrators are unreliable if they assert that the story is true, although they are suggesting at the same time that it is not. I call this type of unreliable narrator a ›fabulating chronicler‹ (›fabulierender Chronist‹): On the one hand, such narrators present themselves as chroniclers of historical facts but, on the other hand, they seem to be fabulists who tell a fairy tale. This type of unreliability occurs especially if a narrator tells a legend or a story from the Bible. My article demonstrates this case in detail with two examples, namely two novels by Thomas Mann: The Holy Sinner (1951) and Joseph and His Brothers (1933–1943). My article also discusses some cases where it is not appropriate or counter-intuitive to call a heterodiegetic narrator ›unreliable‹: i. e. the narrator of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924) and the narrator of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795/1796). On the one hand, these narrators show some characteristics of unreliability, because they omit essential pieces of information. On the other hand, these narrators are barely shaped as characters, they are nearly non-personal. However, in order to describe a narrator as unreliable, it is – in my opinion – indispensable to refer to some traces of a narrative personality: Figural traits of a narrator provoke the reader to identify all depicting, describing and commenting sentences of a narration as utterances of one and the same ›psychic system‹ (Niklas Luhmann). Only narrators who can be interpreted as such a ›psychic system‹, provoke the reader to assume the role of an analyst or ›detective‹, who perhaps identifies the narrator’s discordance or unreliability. In my article the unreliability of a narration is understood as part of the composition and meaning of a literary work. I argue that a narrator cannot be described as unreliable without designating a semantic motivation for this composition by an act of interpretation. Therefore, my suggestion is that a narration should be merely called unreliable if it encourages the reader not only to imagine the told story, but also to imagine a discordant or unreliable storyteller.

Formation of the Affective-Cognitive Representation of Body in the Context of Psychosomatic Development

The article describes the phenomenology of health groups, substantiates the possibility of determining the psychosomatic ontogenesis as the formation of affective and cognitive representations of parts of the body in an integrated, systematic intra-psychic system from the perspective of cultural-historical approach and psychoanalytic theory to the study of the specificity of the reflection body experience. The paper presents analysis of the stages’ the forming a representation of the body, the main elements of its affective and cognitive components. Discusses the theoretical and methodological problems of the dynamics of affective and cognitive representation of the body in children and adolescents with various health groups. The problem of psychosomatic dysontogenesis viewed from the perspective of deconstruction and imbalance affective-cognitive components of body representation, as well as factors of child-parent relationships and its role in the formation of a detainee psychosomatic development.

Formas de destrucción Sufrimiento cerebral, sufrimiento psíquico y plasticidad. / Forms of destruction Cerebral suffering, psychic suffering, plasticity.

Durante el siglo XX, el concepto de plasticidad se desplazó desde la estética y la filosofía hacia el psicoanálisis y la neurología con el fin de caracterizar al sistema psíquico. Dicho desplazamiento se llevó a cabo de una manera simultáneamente muy cercana y muy diferente de aquellos conceptos previos. ¿Qué significa una ‘libido plástica’ o una ‘plasticidad cerebral’? ¿Puede ser esta una plasticidad destructiva? En el presente artículo se exploran las significaciones psicoanalíticas y neurológicas de la plasticidad, y se examina la posibilidad de pensar una plasticidad destructiva del cerebro y del psiquismo, teniendo en consideración el cambio de personalidad que se observa en ciertos sujetos con lesiones cerebrales. During the XXth Century, the concept of plasticity was moved from aesthetics and philosophy to psychoanalysis and neurology, in order to characterize the psychic system. Such displacement was performed at the same time in a very close and a very different way from those previous concepts. What does it means a ‘plastic libido’ or a ‘brain plasticity’? Could this be a destructive plasticity? This paper explores the psychoanalytical and neurological meanings of plasticity, and examines a chance to think a destructive plasticity of brain and psyche, taking into account the change of personality that is observed at certain brain damaged patients.

Opening Channels of Communication

Psychosis, as described through a psychodynamic perspective, is conceptualized as an attempt to deny the enveloping reality to avoid contact with the other. Music therapy is a way to break this barrier of non-communication raised by the patients. The music therapy process is configured as a trinomial – action (making music)/ relationship (action with the other)/communication (musical or verbal voluntary expression of feelings and conflicts), which, although intrinsically connected, is perceived in a sequential process. Aulagnier asserts that psychic activity represents the conjunction of three modes of functioning: the original process, the primary process and the secondary process. The perception of sound passes through three phases, corresponding to each manner of functioning of the psychic system – the pleasure of hearing, the desire to listen (to the other) and the imperative of meaning. The music therapy process offers a significant similarity with the theory proposed by Aulagnier. We propose the hypothesis that in music therapy, there is an opportunity to (re)experience very archaic phases in the constitution of the ego, but in a new manner, so helping to open communication channels. This theoretical hypothesis is illustrated by real examples of patients.

The Psychology of Self: An Update

The psychology of self is gaining increasing influence, particularly in the treatment of personality disorder. Kohut's work has revived interest in an intellectual tradition that was made peripheral during the positivist-behaviourist era. Kohut's concepts, the most important of which is the selfobject, are the core of an evolving body of theory that is open to findings in such fields as child development and neurophysiology. Kohut saw severe personality disorder as the manifestation of a disruption in the development of self. Recent contributions to the theory include: (i) attempts to make an adequate definition of self, which Kohut was unable to do, using the work of William James; (ii) an approach to the development of self which follows this definition; and (iii) the use of current memory research in understanding the traumata which have impeded this development and which leave their imprint on the psychic system.