Humility

This paper offers a nuanced discourse on the otherwise ignored topic of humility. It brings together scattered comments within psychoanalysis, secular lay-literature, sociocultural studies, and religious thought on humility. The paper also describes pathological variants of humility (excessive, deficient, false, and compartmentalized) and delineates five areas of clinical practice where humility plays an important role: (i) humility in selecting patients to treat, (ii) humility in daily conduct with patients, (iii) humility in the attitude of listening to clinical material, (iv) humility in the manner of intervening, and (v) humility in deciding upon the longevity of our professional careers.     

Somatic Countertransference as Evidence of Adhesive Identification in a Severely Traumatized Woman

This paper discusses the use of somatic countertransference as a means of learning about the patient, about projective and adhesive identification and about the object relating nature of the most traumatized and withdrawn part of the personality. It assumes an elemental knowledge of British Object Relations and uses clinical material to illustrate the hypotheses that somatic countertransference is an indicator of a very elemental communication occurring from the aspect of the psyche that is united in a body mind or mind body. The paper assumes that this body mind was object seeking at birth and perhaps before. Because these early aspects of the personality are non verbal and non conceptual, the analyst must rely not only on the verbal material in a session but on the emotional and sensual experiences within the transference and the countertransference. Such reliance requires a faith in one’s own intuition without a certainty that one is “right.” Because speaking of such early experience is difficult, often writers and analysts appear more certain than they are. This is a hazard of this type of analytic work. What I am writing about is conjecture or imagination or dream, but I am suggesting that such dream work is a valuable tool for analysis.     

Binocular Vision in the Total Situation

This paper investigates the concept of “total situation” which, even though introduced into psychoanalytic thinking via sister disciplines, such as sociology, the neurosciences, etc., has gradually acquired a relatively prominent position in current therapeutic practice. It is used as a metaphor for the envelopment of the unfolding transferential and related events in the analytic process. Irrespective of whether one focuses on the individual analytic condition or the group-analytic one, contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives include both the bi-personal unconscious interactions and the various levels of the total situation in their conceptualizations of the nature of the process. Such a complex approach in conceptualization can only be achieved through the so-called binocular vision of the analyst.     

Losing the Lost Island

Gaunilo’s Lost Island Objection to Anselm’s Ontological Argument aims to show that if Anselm’s argument can establish the existence of a greatest conceivable being then a very similar argument can establish the existence of a greatest conceivable island. The challenge for the defender of Anselm is to identify the relevant disanalogy between Anselm’s argument and Gaunilo’s, in order to explain why Anselm’s can succeed while Gaunilo’s fails. In this essay I take up this challenge. Reflection on the differences between the nature of islands and the nature of being yields the relevant disanalogy.     

Everlasting check or philosophical fiasco: a response to Alexander George’s interpretation of Hume’s ‘Of Miracles’

In his The Everlasting Check: Hume on Miracles, Alexander George claims to provide readers with a single unified interpretation of Hume’s ‘Of Miracles’ that demonstrates Hume’s actual argument is philosophically rich and far more robust than is generally thought. This response argues that George is unsuccessful, ignoring crucial passages and misinterpreting others.     

Tracing and heavenly freedom

A new version of the ontological argument for the existence of God is outlined and examined. After giving a brief account of some traditional ontological arguments for the existence of God, where their defects are identified, it is explained how this new argument is built upon their foundations and surmounts their defects. In particular, this version uses the resources of impossible worlds to plug the common escape route from standard modal versions of the ontological argument. After outlining the nature of impossible worlds, and motivating the need for positing them, the new argument is delineated and its premises justified. It is taken for granted that the argument cannot be sound, since it would prove too much. However, its premises are all plausible, and their denial promises to have significant ramifications. Several intuitive lines of objections are then explored in order to illuminate their shortcomings. The puzzle that the argument poses is therefore not whether the argument is sound, for it clearly cannot be. Rather, it is to place pressure on its plausible premises, so some plausible account of how the argument fails can be identified, and that the devising of such an account promises to be insightful. In the process, we should gain an improved understanding of how such ontological arguments work.     

The threat of logical inversion and our need for philosophical attention: from thought-expression to discourse and discussion

Thought-expressions are not simply good; instead, they become good for us when they make sense, empower action, and support health. From time to time, we may need to (re)consider the difference between thought-expression and discourse, or thought-expression that really makes sense, and the difference between discourse and discussion, or a discourse-situation that makes genuine agreement or disagreement possible for us. In this essay, I explore a problem that D. Z. Phillips and Randy Ramal have termed “logical inversion,” and I argue that wherever logical inversions have gained a foothold in our thought-expressions, they threaten to render us incapable of authentic discourse and discussion by ensuring that we misunderstand the understandings of others such that we deceive ourselves and others by picturing the knowledge and truth of our perspective against an unreal background of conceivable falsehoods which we have falsely attributed to the perspectives of others. Where this has taken place, practices of philosophical attention and conceptual clarification are needed to help us move from a situation of endless thought expression toward authentic discourse and discussion.     

On the doing-allowing distinction and the problem of evil: a reply to Daniel Lim

In his article ‘Doing, allowing, and the problem of evil’ recently published in this journal, Daniel Lim attempts to undermine the following claims with respect to God: (1) the doing-allowing distinction exists and (2) the doing-allowing distinction is morally significant. I argue that Lim’s attempt is unsuccessful, and that his understanding of divine providence has the unacceptable consequence of implying that God is the originator of evil.     

Wittgenstein: “I can’t believe…or rather can’t believe it yet”

This paper presents a characterization of the ontological dependence relation between an existent and its sustaining cause, which allows to straightforwardly deduce that the being of any dependent existent is grounded on an independent one. Furthermore, an argument is given to the conclusion that there is a unique independent existent, which is therefore the ultimate ground of being.