Author: Robert Samuels
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000880184
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 84
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Book Description
The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Consciousness, Free Will, Language, and Reason examines the ways in which we can use psychoanalysis in order to better understand humanity and explores the question of what makes us human. For thousands of years, thinkers have been trying to define what makes us human. Some of the main questions they have asked is: What is consciousness? Do we have free will? Do animals use language? And what does reason mean? Samuels argues that we need to better understand the psychoanalytic approach to human nature in order to answer these questions, as well as using it to provide a new way of understanding issues such as addiction, political conflict, ideology, and destructive personal relationship. This book will be of vital interest to psychotherapists, as well as students and researchers across the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and psychology.
Author: Antonio A. Semi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429906110
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 145
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Book Description
How do we psychoanalysts, first and foremost concerned with the Unconscious, go about thinking about consciousness? And why should we be interested in the first place? The author's answer is simply this: because there is no talk regarding the unconscious if not from the standpoint of consciousness. In answering this, we are already, on the one hand, linking consciousness with language and speech, and the author elegantly shows how the figures of discourse teach us a lot about the interface between consciousness and the unconscious.
Author: Ahmed Fayek
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442242523
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 125
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Book Description
In the last few decades consciousness has become a major topic of interest for neurologists, psychologists, and a host of other professionals in various disciplines. Their concerted efforts to define consciousness led them mostly to the same impasse: the leap from the body to the mind, or to the particular link that makes the mind an attribute of consciousness. In 1895 Freud put together a project for a Psychology for the Neurologists. It comprised the elements of a theory of consciousness as a manifestation of the continuous homeostatic pursuit of stability; an aconscious condition. Although he made a distinction between the aconscious and the unconscious in many of his important works, he did not clearly define the ways in which the two could co-exist in a unified theory. In Consciousness and the Aconscious in Psychoanalytic Theory, Ahmed Fayek summarizes current arguments and debates stemming from neurological and phenomenological perspectives. He presents the notion that consciousness needs to be considered a human phenomenon and not simply a manifestation of brain activity, which is an occurrence shared by all organisms. Using Freud’s theories as they relate to consciousness, Fayek places his own theory of the aconscious within the context of Freudian thought.
Author: Léon Chertok
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804719506
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 364
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Book Description
This original and provocative work begins by examining the shift of scientific paradigms that took place in the late eighteenth century, a shift illustrated by the report of a French Royal Commission appointed in 1784 to investigate Mesmerism. The reactions to Mesmerism among the Commission members--in particular the chemist Lavoisier and the botanist Jussieu--crystallized conflicts about the notion of reason and its role as a scientific ideal, about how science ought to be done. The Commission's denunciation of Mesmerism as the work of the "imagination" then serves as the starting point for the authors' reconsideration of the history of psychoanalysis, notably its suppression and repression of phenomena associated with hypnosis--imagination, suggestion, and empathy--in its search to establish itself as a science in accord with the new ideal of scientific reason. Examining the new and often troubled relationship in psychoanalysis between therapeutic effectiveness and advances in theory, the authors highlight the challenge to Freudian ideals in the 1920's by Otto Rank and Sandor Ferenczi. The discrediting of Ferenczi--engineered to a large extent by Ernest Jones and Freud himself--was an attempt to "purify" psychoanalysis of the effects of suggestion. The authors discuss Freud's own therapeutic nihilism occasioned by his recognition that suggestion, by means of the transference relationship, played an uncontrollable role in psychoanalytic therapy. In assessing Freud's legacy, the authors examine evolving notions of psychoanalysis, especially the role played by the effects of suggestion in recent theoretical representations of the development of the subject. Asserting that hypnosis and the challenge it poses to our understanding of human motivation, reason, and the mind/body relationship constitutes the fourth narcissistic wound to the human ego (after those introduced by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud), the authors analyze Lacan's rejection of hypnosis and explain current resistance to hypnosis through its challenge to the modern scientific notion of reason.
Author: Roy Schafer
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300027617
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
Should be of considerable interest to a wider public, since it proposes a radical reformulation of psychoanalytical theory which, if accepted, would render outmoded almost all the analytical jargon that has crept into the language of progressive, enlightened post-Freudian people.-Charles Rycroft, The New York Review of Books Schafer's arguments have considerable cogency. The tendency to over-theorize so that the translation of abstractions into the language of ordinary discourse between analyst and patient has become increasingly difficult is a fault; Schafer goes a long way towards redressing it, and his efforts to include meaning and the person in the form of his language is an achievement.-Michael Fordham, The Times Higher Education Supplement
Author: Barnaby B. Barratt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317382218
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
How do we know our mental life, and how is our mental life altered by our efforts to know it better? Originally published in 1984, this title attempts an epistemological and ontological discourse concerning the understanding of human mental processes, and it aims toward a definitive thesis on the dialectics of knowing and being in this work of psychological understanding. What this work reconfronts are questions pertaining to all psychology and to all human sciences. Yet much of its focus is on the understanding of unconscious mental contents, on the question of knowing and being in Freud’s psychology.
Author: Robert Samuels
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000457249
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 102
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Book Description
Inspired by Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, this book examines the unconscious processes shaping contemporary political ideologies. Addressing ten fundamental questions, Robert Samuels identifies four basic political ideologies: liberal, conservative, Left, and Right, which are often placed in the structure of a logical square, determined by two binary oppositions, with a fifth structure of centrism complicating the square. He turns to psychoanalysis to explain the unconscious defense mechanisms that structure these political ideologies. Each chapter uses a recent, influential title as a gateway to the analysis of the ideologies and structures identified. Through this analysis, Samuels argues that belief in ideological structures is tied to triumvirates of institutions and ideals; conservatives being tied to premodern institutions of religion, feudalism, and monarchy, while modern liberals are tied to ideals of universality, objectivity, and empiricism. He concludes that this investment in universality shapes the ethics of modern globalization and democratic liberalism. Unlike other books, conclusions are reinforced through examples drawn from current events with an integrated model of different psychopathologies. The Psychopathology of Political Ideologies moves beyond providing an understanding of what drives different political investments, to offer a more rational and conscious comprehension of subjectivity and social organization. This book will be a great resource for those interested in politics, political science psychology, social psychology, globalization, and ideology.
Author: Laurence A. Rickels
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791401569
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
This book, like the post-Heideggerian reception of Nietzsche, rides out the splits and frays of the text offering an up-to-date look at international Nietzsche scholarship. Included are topics such as the collaboration of German thought with the rise of National Socialism and the alliance between Nietzschean genealogy and Freudian culture criticism in regard to technology and the unconscious, the status of moral imperatives from Kant to Heidegger, and Heidegger's alleged rediscovery of Nietzsche as the "last metaphysician." Looking After Nietzsche is nonexclusionary in the risks it takes; every thread of "Nietzsche" is pursued throughout its labyrinthine entanglements.
Author: Anton O. Kris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780881632538
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 122
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Book Description
In this expanded edition of a classic text, Anton Kris reexamines the method of free association, one of the foundational components of psychoanalysis. Tracing the history of the concept from its original pride of place among early analysts through its more recent downgrading, Kris reformulates the multifaceted illumination that free association provides, thereby assigning it a central place in contemporary thinking about psychoanalytic technique.
Author: Michael Robbins (M.D.)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781351039598
Category : Bilingualism
Languages : en
Pages : 166
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Book Description
Consciousness, Language, and Self proposes that the human self is innately bilingual. Conscious mind includes two qualitatively distinct mental processes, each of which uses the same formal elements of language differently. The "mother tongue," the language of primordial consciousness, begins in utero and our second language, reflective symbolic thought, begins in infancy. Michael Robbins describes the respective roles the two conscious mental processes and their particular use of language play in the course of normal and pathological development, as well as the role the language of primordial consciousness plays in adult life in such phenomena as dreaming, infant-caregiver attachment, creativity, belief systems and their effects on social and political life, cultural differences, and psychosis. Examples include creative persons, extreme political figures and psychotic individuals. Five original essays, written by the author's current and former patients, describe what they learned about their aberrant uses of language and their origins. This book sheds new light on several controversies that have been limited by the incorrect assumption that reflective representational thought and its language is the only conscious mental state. These include the debate within linguistics about whether language is the expression of a hardwired instinct whose identifying feature is recursion; within psychoanalysis about the nature of conscious and unconscious mental processes, and within cognitive philosophy about whether language and thought are isomorphic. Consciousness, Language, and Self will be of great value to psychoanalysts, as well as students and scholars of linguistics, cognitive philosophy and cultural anthropology.
