Talking to the Dead in the Classroom: How a Supposedly Psychic Event Impacts Beliefs and Feelings

Paranormal beliefs (PBs) are common in adults. There are numerous psychological correlates of PBs and associated theories, yet, we do not know whether such correlates reinforce or result from PBs. To understand causality, we developed an experimental design in which participants experience supposedly paranormal events. Thus, we can test an event’s impact on PBs and PB-associated correlates. Here, 419 naïve students saw a performer making contact with a confederate’s deceased kin. We tested participants’ opinions and feelings about this performance, and whether these predicted how participants explain the performance. We assessed participants’ PBs and repetition avoidance (PB related cognitive correlate) before and after the performance. Afterwards, participants rated explanations of the event and described their opinions and feelings (open-ended question). Overall, 65% of participants reported having witnessed a genuine paranormal event. The open-ended question revealed distinct opinion and affect groups, with reactions commonly characterized by doubt and mixed feelings. Importantly, paranormal explanations were more likely when participants reported their feelings than when not reported. Beyond these results, we replicated that 1) higher pre-existing PBs were associated with more psychic explanations (confirmation bias), and 2) PBs and repetition avoidance did not change from before to after the performance. Yet, PBs reminiscent of the actual performance (spiritualism) increased. Results showed that young adults easily endorse PBs and paranormal explanations for events, and that their affective reactions matter. Future studies should use participants’ subjective experiences to target PBs in causal designs (e.g., adding control conditions).

The Problem of Trauma

This chapter brings to light the ways in which the concept of the psychic event, understood as a traumatic event, in the Freudian metapsychology blurs the distinction between interiority and exteriority in the form and functioning of psychical life. It demonstrates that Freud’s thinking of the compulsion to repeat traumatic scenarios distinguishes between the binding of repetition and the process of representing the drives. This difference shows that the character of compulsion is not purely determinist and the psychic elaboration of trauma is the formation of a materially real event. Unlike current trends in trauma studies, this chapter exposes how the relation between binding and repetition in trauma leads to the possibility of transforming the ontological meaning of destruction.

The Future Life of Trauma

The Future Life of Trauma elaborates a transformation in the concepts of trauma and event by situating a ground-breaking encounter between psychoanalytic and postcolonial discourses. It unfolds a new materialism that asserts the coincidence between the symbolic and empirical domains of life. Proceeding from the formation of psychical life as it is presented in the Freudian metapsychology, Future Life thinks anew the relation between temporality and the traumatized subjectivity, demonstrating how the psychic event, understood as a traumatic event, is a material reality that alters the determining character of the structure of repetition. It comprises two major sections. The first elucidates how the case of the psychoanalytic concept of trauma discloses the self-transformative tendency of life as the movement immanent to the real. Through a focus on the role of borders in the history of the 1947 Partition of British India and the politics of memorialization in post-genocide Rwanda, the second brings to light the implications of trauma as a material event in pressing contemporary issues of nation-formation, sovereignty, and geopolitical violence. In showing how the form of the psyche changes in the encounter, Future Life presents a challenge to the category of difference in the condition of identity. The epilogue pushes toward a new approach to ethical and political responsibility that breaks the deconstructive loops perpetuated by the idea of promise. The result is the formation of a form of life that elaborates a new relation to destruction and finitude by asserting its innate power to transform itself.

The Eventality of Trauma

The relation between chance and necessity in the psychic event introduced in the previous chapter is brought to the fore through a sustained confrontation with the Freudian and Lacanian notions of destruction, challenging the idea of trauma as that which always already happens. The development a new psychoanalytic conception of time in the chapter exposes the vulnerability inherent within the structure of destruction, conceived in both Freud and Lacan as the repetition of a more originary trauma and thus as a fundamental law of psychical life. Concentrating on the status of contingency in the dream and the Lacanian formulation of trauma as a missed encounter, this chapter presents the eventality of trauma as a material reality that reveals transformation as the dynamic movement immanent to the real.

SUBLIMATION AS A PARADIGM OF THE PSYCHE CONSTITUTION: METAPSYCHOLOGY AND THEORETICAL-CLINICAL DEVELOPMENTS

ABSTRACT: The present study aims at understanding sublimation as a psychic event inextricably linked to the advent of the subject, being then characterized as a singular and paradigmatic subjectivation process in what regards the psychic constitution. We begin with a brief theoretical- conceptual review with respect to Freud's process of sublimation, as well as the return and deepening carried out by Lacan, and considering contemporary articulations on the subject, we relate its importance, long neglected, with regard to the aspects and theoretical-clinical developments, as well as its fundamental importance with respect to understanding the psychic constitution within the psychoanalytic framework.

Jaspers on explaining and understanding in psychiatry

This chapter offers an interpretation of Jaspers’ distinction between explaining and understanding, which relates this distinction to that between general and singular causal claims. Put briefly, I suggest that when Jaspers talks about (mere) explanation, what he has in mind are general causal claims linking types of events. Understanding, by contrast, is concerned with singular causation in the psychological domain. Furthermore, I also suggest that Jaspers thinks that only understanding makes manifest what causation between one element of a person’s mental life and another ultimately consists in – that is, the particular way in which one psychic event can emerge from or arise out of another. I contrast the resulting view both with a view on causation in psychiatry recently put forward by John Campbell, and also with another view that is the target of Campbell’s attack, which is due to Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett.