Freedom,emotion, and self‐subsistence

A set of basic static predicates, ‘in itself, ‘existing through itself, ‘free’, and others are taken to be (at least) extensionally equivalent, and some consequences are drawn in Parts A and ? of the paper. Part C introduces adequate causation and adequate conceiving as extensionally equivalent. The dynamism or activism of Spinoza is reflected in the reconstruction by equating action with causing, passion (passive emotion) with being caused. The relation between conceiving (understanding) and causing is narrowed down by introducing grasping (λαμβ?νω) as a basic epistemological term. Part D, ‘The road to freedom through active emotion’, introduces a system of grading with respect to the distinctions introduced in the foregoing, including ‘being in itself, ‘freedom’, etc. Active emotions are seen to represent transitions to a higher degree of freedom, the stronger and more active ones being the more conducive to rapid increase in degree of freedom. Elementary parts of the calculus of predicates are used in order to facilitate the survey of conceptual relations and to prove some theorems.     

Enduring self‐health

Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer, by Jacky Stacey, London/ New York: Routledge, 1997, 304 pp., £45.00 cloth, £13.99 pb     

The ideal‐self inventory: A new measure of self‐esteem

This article reports on some research in progress developing a new measure of self‐esteem which we have called the Ideal‐Self Inventory (ISI). The inventory is based on a constructivist approach and simply asks participants to list ten characteristics to describe their ideal self together with the ten opposite characteristics to describe their not ideal self. The ISI has been tested on over 100 student volunteers and correlates significantly with the adult version of the Coopersmith Self‐Esteem Inventory. The applications of this new measure are discussed with particular reference to counselling and psychotherapy.     

Hegel and self‐actualization

Abstract

Hegel says that mind develops through three phases, which he calls soul, consciousness, and mind. By referring to these three phases as the Primary level, the Social level and the Realizing level, it makes it clearer that they link up with thoroughly familiar phenomena in the field of psychotherapy and with contemporary life generally. In fact, they give a new angle on the whole process of self‐actualization, which throws light on many topics in humanistic psychology.     

Creativity,chaos, and self‐renewal in human systems

The research findings from the psychology of creativity are shown to be of considerable relevance to the study of self‐organization and self‐renewal in human systems. The characteristics of the creative person, and the nature of the creative process, particularly as they have been elaborated by Barron, are shown to be remarkably congruent with recent findings and theoretical elaborations by Abraham, Jantsch, Laszlo, Prigogine, and others in the fields of evolutionary and chaos theory. The broader social implications of chaos and evolutionary theories are fleshed out through an understanding of their characteristics in creative human systems.     

II. Eisenberg and self‐obligations

Terms for the pitch of tones, such as ‘high‐low’ do not describe pitch and can interfere with our apprehending such data for what they are in their sensuous uniqueness. Very different alternatives such as ‘narrow‐broad’ or French aigu‐grave serve equally well. In listening to music the first requisite is the apprehension of ‘uncategorized’ tones, the words for them serving only as a way of marking the fact of their differences. This must lead us to reaffirm what was said by Gorgias about what language can and cannot do in respect of such data.     

The creative thinking,environmental frustration,and self‐concept of left‐ and right‐handers

Abstract:

Left‐ (n = 12) and right‐handed (n = 12) college students were compared on creative thinking, environmental frustration, and self‐concept. It was hypothesized that because left‐handers regularly encounter equipment designed for right hand use, these individuals must use creative thinking to successfully interact with the environment. Results indicated that on the Environmental Frustration Questionnaire, left‐handers indicated significantly greater frustration with two of the six categories of objects, namely household tools (p < .005) and classroom desks (p < .005). On the Verbal and Figural Forms of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, lefthanders scored significantly higher on the figural elaboration measure (p < .05). Finally, the hypothesis that handedness plays a larger role in the self‐concept of left‐handers than right‐handers was confirmed. Left‐handers were significantly more likely than right‐handers to mention their handedness when asked to describe themselves (p < .05).     

British,Asian and Hindu: identity,self‐narration and the ethnographic interview

This article, based on a longitudinal study of young British Hindus’ perceptions of their religious tradition, explores their understandings of themselves as ‘British’, ‘Asian’ and Hindu’ [1] [1] The Longitudinal Study of Young British Hindus’ Perceptions of their Religious Tradition was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and directed by Professor Robert Jackson in the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit, University of Warwick 1995‐97. Earlier ethnographic study of these young people is reported in Jackson and Nesbitt (1993). View all notes. A theoretical framework is provided by psychologists’ and philosophers’ acknowledgement of the processual, interactive, integrative nature of identity and the conceptualisation of it as both narrative and interpretative. The young people's narratives of identity are contextualised by the ‘between two cultures’ debate, and by Jacobson's (1997) recent analysis of the factors in young British Pakistanis’ increasing preference for an Islamic rather than Asian or Pakistani identity. It is suggested that a binary model is over simple and that ‘Hindu’ emerges as a transgenerational, core identity, but with significant differences from the young South Asian Muslims’ preferred Islamic identity.

     

Multisensory self‐motion encoding in parietal cortex

Navigation through the environment requires the brain to process a number of incoming sensory signals, such as visual optical flow on the retina and motion information originating from the vestibular organs. In addition, tactile as well as auditory signals can help to disambiguate the continuous stream of incoming information and determining the signals resulting from one's own set of motion. In this review I will focus on the cortical processing of motion information in one subregion of the posterior parietal cortex, i.e., the ventral intraparietal area (VIP). I will review (1) electrophysiological data from single cell recordings in the awake macaque showing how self‐motion signals across different sensory modalities are represented within this area and (2) data from fMRI recordings in normal human subjects providing evidence for the existence of a functionally equivalent area of macaque area VIP in the human cortex.     

On motor creativity,age, and self‐concept in young learning disabled boys

In the beginning of the 21st century, creativity has been highly esteemed not only in the arts and sciences, but also in economy, politics, and individual welfare. Most theories and practical applications stem from individual sciences and frequently conclude with generalizations that cannot be derived from the specific scientific paradigm. It seems necessary to mark the limitations of individual scientific approaches and to detect where interdisciplinary perspectives are indispensable. This article is an attempt to investigate the interdependence and complementarity of neurobiological, psychological, and socio-cultural, as well as practical, aspects of creativity. It is shown that creativity is often a dialectical process apparent in psychological, cultural, and even neurobiological research. The dialectic of order and chaos seems to be a general concept that is conceived differently by the individual sciences and transports different meaning. However, it is shown that different scientific concepts also contain corresponding and complementary knowledge which amplifies scientific perspectives through interdisciplinary interpretation. The dialectics between coherence–incoherence, stabilization–destabilization, construction–deconstruction of cognitions, emotions, and actions are shown to be corresponding and complementary principles. The interdisciplinary interpretation of the findings of individual sciences leads to practical implications.     

A motivational hierarchy within: Primacy of the individual self,relational self,or collective self?

The individual self, relational self, and collective self are important and meaningful aspects of identity. However, they plausibly differ in their relative importance such that one self lies closer to the motivational core of the self-concept, better represent the “home base” of selfhood, or, simply stated, is motivationally primary. Four multi-method studies tested the relative motivational-primacy of the selves. Despite their disparate methods, the studies yielded consistent evidence of a three-tiered hierarchy with the individual self at the top, followed by the relational self, and trailed at the bottom by the collective self. The same hierarchy emerged in the Eastern culture of China and the Western cultures of the US and UK. Such pancultural consistency suggests that the motivational hierarchy is a fundamental pattern of the human self.     

The breadth and boundaries of a self‐psychological immersion in shame a one‐and‐a‐half‐person perspective

Shame colors other feelings and perceptions about the self. From reflections about his own personal experiences and observations regarding a particular manic‐depressive patient, the author discusses the evolution of his current clinical and theoretical understanding of shame. The framework of analytic self psychology is offered as a particularly useful perspective from which to consider shame, with its emphasis on the concept of selfobject to account both for shame's development (through selfobject misattunement and unresponsive‐ness) and for its amelioration (through empathic mirroring, idealization, and twinning). A developmental sequence for shame is advanced reflecting limitations in selfobject responsiveness, and problems are noted in the ability of current self psychology theory to fully account for the alleviation of shame. The self plays its part in the construction of those selfobjects needed to ease shame, representing the “one‐and‐a‐half‐person psychology”; of the paper's subtitle. Finally, the important role of countertransference shame is considered through a clinical example of therapist disclosure of his own shame to his patient, utilized in order to repair an interrupted kinship selfobject transference.     

Negative self‐imagery in social anxiety contaminates social interactions

Patients with social phobia report experiencing negative images of themselves performing poorly when in feared social situations. The present study investigates whether such negative self‐imagery (based on memory of past social situations) contaminates social interactions. High socially anxious volunteers participated in two conversations with another volunteer (conversational partner). During one conversation, the socially anxious volunteers held in mind a negative self‐image, and during the other they held in mind a less negative (control) self‐image. As predicted, when holding the negative image the socially anxious volunteers felt more anxious, reported using more safety behaviours, believed that they performed more poorly, and showed greater overestimation of how poorly they came across (relative to ratings by the conversational partner). Conversational partners rated the socially anxious volunteers' performance as poorer in the negative image condition. Furthermore, the conversation was contaminated since both groups of participants rated its quality as poorer in the negative image condition.     

Where does the self‐refutation objection take us?

Eliminative materialism is the position that common‐sense psychology is false and that beliefs and desires, like witches and demons, do not exist. One of the most popular criticisms of this view is that it is self‐refuting or, in some sense, incoherent. Hence, it is often claimed that eliminativism is not only implausible, but necessarily false. Below, I assess the merits of this objection and find it seriously wanting. I argue that the self‐refutation objection is (at best) a misleading reformulation of much more mundane objections to eliminativism and that, contrary to its advocates’ endorsements, it adds nothing of genuine interest to the debate over the existence of prepositional attitudes.     

Settling on what we are: The central place of the sense‐of‐self in education,and the implication of the concepts of the teleon and telentropy for the development of the sense‐of‐self

The purpose of this article is to illustrate the centrality of the development of a person's sense‐of‐self in his or her personal growth, and so to justify why educators should deliberately focus the attention of learners on the development of their own senses‐of‐self.

We describe the sense‐of‐self as a person's working hypothesis of what he or she is, as a functioning being. (This is in contrast to the notion of self‐concept, which is composed of the beliefs and evaluations that one has about oneself as a person in a social context.)

To illustrate the centrality of the sense‐of‐self we introduce two associated concepts—the teleon and telentropy. Teleons are “purposeful action patterns,” which may be regarded as the defining characteristic of any living system, including human beings.

Telentropy is similar to entropy (encountered in physics and chemistry), but instead of dealing with the level of disorder in externally described systems, it represents the level of informational confusion existing within an organism regarding its own true nature.

We discuss the implications of the concepts “teleon” and “telentropy” for a person's educability, using examples from daily life and educational institutions.

We provide a number of suggestions for the revising of educational practice to foster the development of the sense‐of‐self in learners. This we demonstrate to have potentially beneficial effects of the general stress levels of society.     

Creativity and the subliminal manipulation of projected self‐images

Abstract:

This is a report of two experiments on the relationship between creativity and the effects of manipulations of self‐image. Creativity was estimated with the Creative Functioning Test (CFT), an assessment of the tendency to bar the use of subjective interpretations when the support for a “correct” interpretation is being gradually eroded. Self‐image was manipulated in the Identification Test (IT). This involves a backwards masking design in which an ambiguous picture of a face is presented briefly on a viewing screen, preceded by either of two subliminal verbal messages. These were I SUPERIOR and I INFERIOR in a pilot study (n = 25) and I GOOD and I BAD in the main study (n = 33). In the latter, there was also an interview which served to further cross‐validate the CFT. In both studies, creative subjects alternated between reporting young faces and adult ones significantly more often than uncreative subjects. Their identity was not, then, fixedly adult. Creative and uncreative subjects also defended their projected self‐image in different ways against the subliminal manipulations. High and stable self‐confidence was typical of both highly creative and uncreative subjects, but not of subjects in the middle range. Still, the self‐confidence in the two extreme groups was only superficially similar.     

Some thoughts on self‐disclosure and the danger‐safety balance in the therapeutic relationship

This paper examines the assumptions and recommendations of Irwin Hoffman on self‐disclosure and Jay Greenberg on the danger—safety balance in the therapeutic relationship. On the basis of this examination, alternatives to the ideas of Hoffman and Greenberg are offered for consideration.     

The growth hypothesis and self‐actualization: An existential alternative

Abstract

Examining the process of becoming from an existential perspective, we describe the existence of the self in non‐biological terms as a product of its own intentionality. In this context, there is no need to postulate a growth hypothesis in order to (1) to describe a person as a process of becoming, and (2) to explain self‐actualization. While the process of becoming is a static process, self‐actualization is a dynamic process. In the first case, the self deterministically and naively merely becomes. In the second, case, the process results from becoming the object of personal choices, whereby we become authentic. While the self is “a being in the process of mere becoming,” self‐actualization is “a being in the process of authentic becoming.” In this view, humanistic psychotherapy aims at making the self's mere becoming an authentic process. Existential crisis, in particular confrontation with death, is often the transformational medium.     

The growth hypothesis and self‐actualization: An existential alternative

Abstract

Examining the process of becoming from an existential perspective, we describe the existence of the self in non‐biological terms as a product of its own intentionality. In this context, there is no need to postulate a growth hypothesis in order to (1) to describe a person as a process of becoming, and (2) to explain self‐actualization. While the process of becoming is a static process, self‐actualization is a dynamic process. In the first case, the self deterministically and naively merely becomes. In the second, case, the process results from becoming the object of personal choices, whereby we become authentic. While the self is “a being in the process of mere becoming,” self‐actualization is “a being in the process of authentic becoming.” In this view, humanistic psychotherapy aims at making the self's mere becoming an authentic process. Existential crisis, in particular confrontation with death, is often the transformational medium.