Delving into psychoanalytic texts: the notion of the reading third

In this article I introduce the notion of the reading third, which evolves during the reading process. The idea came to my mind while studying Wolfgang Iser’s theory of the reading process, and already knowing about Thomas Ogden’s concept of the analytic third: What is experienced, shaped and understood while reading a text? The notion of the reading third is based on psychoanalytic theory and method like just Ogden’s concept, and on the aesthetic response theory of Iser. Elaborating the reading third, I combine two modes of reading: one understanding and interpreting, and one floating and experiencing mode. To these modes I add two different understandings of truth. The first mode is connected to a traditional, objective and visible truth. The latter mode relies on Wilfred Bion’s concept of O, a special kind of evasive, ephemeral truth. The reading third takes and loses form as one reads, accentuating reading as a highly creative activity, where each reading elicits different understandings, experiences and truths. I give examples of such a way of reading psychoanalytic texts like those of Bion and a work of fiction, Henry James’ short novel The Turn of the Screw.     

Language as potential space for relational positioning: Exploring language use as a manifestation of leadership anxiety dynamics

This exploratory study considered language use as a manifestation of anxiety in work and everyday settings. Respondents were seven psychology practitioners from across the discipline (following a psychodynamic approach), who reflected on the dynamics of language use associated with their social and occupational roles. Hermeneutic phenomenological analysis revealed the way in which participants characterised their language use in managing the language of titles and defining potential space for relational, regressive and defensive purposes.     

音乐的神经美学：从审美反应到神经基础

近年来, 随着音乐的神经科学与神经美学的发展, 逐渐形成一个新的研究领域, 即音乐的神经美学。这一研究领域关注音乐审美的心理过程和神经机制, 将注意力集中于音乐审美活动中的感知、认知和情感解释。音乐审美加工引起了相应的审美反应, 其中有三种音乐审美反应得到研究者更多的关注, 即音乐审美情绪、判断与偏好。研究者围绕这三种反应, 对音乐审美反应的知觉、认知、情绪加工和影响因素以及其神经机制展开研究。这些研究为我们理解音乐和美学的行为与神经机制提供了经验性证据。     

The art of the tincture: analytical supervision

Using the alchemical metaphor, effective supervision can be seen as an excellent example of the tincture: a little goes a long way. This paper offers a model of the dynamics in analytical supervision: a mirroring of the professional-self of the supervisee, the opportunity to learn through empirical factual knowledge, and, most importantly, experiential, interactive and dynamic learning. The container of supervision will be amplified using an image of the triple vessel of alchemy. The materia of supervision is discussed as 'amalgams' of complex related material. The supervisory field is seen in a triadic intersubjective and interimaginal manner. Jung's diagram of all the possible conscious and unconscious connections between patient and therapist is expanded to include the supervisory situation. Moving beyond projective identification as explanatory process, the concept of the mundus imaginalis is used as the medium for this triadic structure. The 'analytic third' expands to include the 'supervisory fourth' while incorporating the supervisor's imaginings of the patient as the quintessential experience of the imaginal other. The supervisor's attitude and state of mind are seen through the paradigm of active imagination. This state of mind is called supervisory reverie.     

The second me: Seeing the real body during humanoid robot embodiment produces an illusion of bi-location

Whole-body embodiment studies have shown that synchronized multi-sensory cues can trick a healthy human mind to perceive self-location outside the bodily borders, producing an illusion that resembles an out-of-body experience (OBE). But can a healthy mind also perceive the sense of self in more than one body at the same time? To answer this question, we created a novel artificial reduplication of one’s body using a humanoid robot embodiment system. We first enabled individuals to embody the humanoid robot by providing them with audio-visual feedback and control of the robot head movements and walk, and then explored the self-location and self-identification perceived by them when they observed themselves through the embodied robot. Our results reveal that, when individuals are exposed to the humanoid body reduplication, they experience an illusion that strongly resembles heautoscopy, suggesting that a healthy human mind is able to bi-locate in two different bodies simultaneously.     

The animating body: psychoid substance as a mutual experience of psychosomatic disorder

Starting from Jung's hypothesis of 'the psychoid', the author suggests that the concept can be extended and understood as a dynamic, relational and interpersonal experience-especially in regressed analytic relations. The author then defines his use of the term 'animating body' as having to do with primitive animal imagery and with psychosomatic symptoms stemming from disturbed pre-verbal and pre-whole-object stages of development. A case of a borderline patient is presented, whose projective identifications into the analyst infected him with her psychosomatic disorder, with her internalized Oedipal confusion and necessarily induced a mutually similar animal dream symbolism. If these embodied countertransference experiences (of desperate merging and sickening identification) can be lived through (tolerated and survived), thought through and interpreted, then they can actually become enlivening and lead to a therapeutic psychosomatic co-ordination.     

The Corporeal Order of Things: The <Emphasis Type="Italic">Spiel</Emphasis> of Usability

Things make sense to us. The identity of a thing is a meaningful style that expresses the usability of the thing. The usability is a dynamic order of the praxis in which the thing is embedded and in which we are ourselves de-centered. According to Merleau-Ponty, this sociocultural and psychosocial order is a formation of practical understanding and interpretation that rests upon and resumes the elementary, perceptual-expressive structuring of being. The Spiel is one of the three dimensions of corporeal intentionality, in which this entire organization of meaning and experience unfolds. So, the Spiel of usability is a corporeal and practical intentionality that reaches from an aesthetic-ontological structuring of meaning to the order of the things in modern everyday praxes.     

Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez on Religious Authority and Cause for Justified War: The Centrality of Religious War in the Christian Just War Tradition

Contrary to the received understanding that Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez ruled out religious war by grounding just cause in natural law, they supported a robust view of papal authority for war when necessary for the defense of the church against heretics, schismatics, and pagans as well as for the spread of Christianity and Christendom throughout the world. They believed that religious wars were in accord with natural law as a means to its fulfillment in Christianity, as a justification for the defense of the church as the one true faith, and as a moral obligation to provide all of humanity with the opportunity to receive Christian truth and grace. The neo‐Thomists' vigorous support for religious war was in the mainstream of the Christian just war tradition from the time of the wars against pagans in the early middle ages through their own time. This finding and the continuation into the modern era of sanctified patriotism stemming from the mixing of church and state especially during war that began in early Middle Ages, along with the historic roots of the recently prominent presumption against war, argue for a more complex understanding of the normative Christian just war tradition than that found among supporters of the classic interpretation of that tradition.     

The song of the siren: Some thoughts on idealization and creativity in Martinů's Julietta

The authors draw on ideas posited by Segal in her seminal paper 'A psychoanalytic approach to aesthetics' to explore idealization and the creative endeavour as it is imaginatively portrayed in the Poutney/Lazaridis production of Martin3's Julietta, performed by Opera North (2003). The opera is set in a dreamlike world in which confusion proliferates, and Julietta is portrayed as a modern-day siren, luring Mischa, the main character, on to the rocks of psychic withdrawal. It depicts an inner drama where music, narrative and spectacle work together to evoke the main character's struggle which touches on universal themes–the ongoing nature of infantile longings, the pain of loneliness and separation and the fear of madness. Through careful reading of the opera and consideration of Martin3's life, the authors refl ect on the factors that may have shaped Martin3's relationship to this work, including his feelings towards his homeland, his mid-life crisis and the social and political turmoil of Europe at the time. The authors conclude by refl ecting on the aesthetic experience of the opera and the way in which the music transforms the drama and seeks to extend our understanding of psychic truth.     

Experience as site of contested meaning and value: The attributional dog and its special tail

Religious Experience Reconsidered was premised on the idea that experience is a site of contested meaning and value for subjects (and scholars). Although the concept of specialness has drawn considerable attention, my goal in writing the book was to update efforts to use attribution theory to bridge between religious studies and the psychology of religion. I intended the focus on micro-social processes to complement analysis at the macro-social level. The need for a broader, more generic second order term, such as specialness, emerged in the context of working out an attributional approach and can and should be extended more broadly. While anything can be set apart as special and an analysis of the politics of deeming is essential, we can still ask if there is empirical evidence to suggest that humans are more likely to set some things apart than others within or across cultures. When we take experience as a site for study, we do not have to limit ourselves to describing the range of views held by our subjects, but can also legitimately seek to explain experience in terms that make sense to us as researchers. The breaking of taboos against explaining experience in naturalistic terms will only have apocalyptic consequences if we assume a special/ordinary binary; viewed on a continuum, we can still find special meaning and value in experiences that are not protected by taboos.     

Dionysian Spirit as “The Social Self”: Alfred Schutz’s Insightful (Mis)use of Nietzsche

ABSTRACT

Recent publications on Alfred Schutz suggest the importance of his musical thought for understanding his general viewpoint on intersubjectivity. Developing this proposition further, my article focuses on one aspect of Schutz’s writings on music: his attempts to amalgamate the aesthetic oppositions of the Dionysian/Apollonian by Friedrich Nietzsche and inner duration/spatialized time by Henri Bergson. Despite the seeming distortion of the initial meaning of the Dionysian impulse, I suggest that Schutz’s employment remains faithful to the aesthetic and cognitive theory of early Nietzsche. To substantiate this, I draw a link between Nietzsche’s early theory of aesthetic cognition and the neurophysiology of the mid-nineteenth century. Furthermore, the way Schutz applied the Dionysian/Apollonian opposition to the problem of musical communication made his musical thought prefigure some neuro-scientifically inspired discussions of the present-day, like the one on joint attention. Schutz tackled the key paradox: why the experience of music can be shared but not directly communicated.