On Seeing What Is Not Said: The Concrete Mode of Psychic Functioning and the Development of Symbolization

This paper examines the difficulties that arise with patients who experience a compromised capacity in working on a symbolic level when ensnared in specific transference/countertransference entanglements. In these kinds of situations, patients often operate in what is referred to as the concrete mode of psychic functioning in which there is an inability to think psychologically about their own mind, as well as the minds of others. Similarly, the analyst often has trouble thinking with the patient in processing the actions between them, unable to recruit the patient’s mind in becoming a thinking couple together. Having exhausted conventional technique and interventions in trying to observe the enactment with the patient, the author argues that the analyst’s ability to grab hold of fleeting associations and memories that have not been fully processed not only expands his own mind but also facilitates symbolic functioning in the patient’s mind. By using the imagistic and sensorial substrates of these remembrances to further symbolize personal experiences, the analyst may gain entrée into the patient’s mental life.     

Care for one's own future experiences

We care for our own future experiences. Most of us, trivially, would rather have them pleasurable than painful. When we care for our own future experiences we do so in a way that is different from the way we care for those of others (which is not to say that we necessarily care more about our own experience). Prereflectively, one would think this is because these experiences will be ours and no one else's. But then, of course, we need to explain what it means to say that a future experience will be mine and how knowledge of this fact renders it rational for me to care for this experience in a special way. Indeed most philosophers take this route. But in doing so, they quickly stumble on insuperable problems. I shall argue that the problem of egocentric care, as it is sometimes called, can be solved by turning things upside down: it is much more fruitful to think that the special kind of care we feel for some future experiences (and not others) is part of what makes them ours should they occur. This requires an explanation of egocentric care for future experiences that does not draw in a theory of personal identity, but rather contributes to one. I will attempt to provide this explanation by making use of the idea of a diachronic mental holism.     

Perceiving expressions of emotion: What evidence could bear on questions about perceptual experience of mental states?

What evidence could bear on questions about whether humans ever perceptually experience any of another’s mental states, and how might those questions be made precise enough to test experimentally? This paper focusses on emotions and their expression. It is proposed that research on perceptual experiences of physical properties provides one model for thinking about what evidence concerning expressions of emotion might reveal about perceptual experiences of others’ mental states. This proposal motivates consideration of the hypothesis that categorical perception of expressions of emotion occurs, can be facilitated by information about agents’ emotions, and gives rise to phenomenal expectations. It is argued that the truth of this hypothesis would support a modest version of the claim that humans sometimes perceptually experience some of another’s mental states. Much available evidence is consistent with, but insufficient to establish, the truth of the hypothesis. We are probably not yet in a position to know whether humans ever perceptually experience others’ mental states.     

BUDDHISM,COMPARATIVE NEUROPHILOSOPHY,AND HUMAN FLOURISHING

Owen Flanagan's The Bodhisattva's Brain represents an ambitious foray into cross‐cultural neurophilosophy, making a compelling, though not entirely unproblematic, case for naturalizing Buddhist philosophy. While the naturalist account of mental causation challenges certain Buddhist views about the mind, the Buddhist analysis of mind and mental phenomena is far more complex than the book suggests. Flanagan is right to criticize the Buddhist claim that there could be mental states that are not reducible to their neural correlates; however, when the mental states in question reflect the embodied patterns of moral conduct that characterize the Buddhist way of being‐in‐the‐world, an account of their intentional and normative status becomes indispensable. It is precisely this synthesis of normativity and causal explanation that makes Buddhism special, and opens new avenues for enhancing, refining, and expanding the range of arguments and possibilities that comparative neurophilosophy can entertain.     

Mental states inside out: Switching costs for emotional and nonemotional sentences that differ in internal and external focus

Mental states—such as thinking, remembering, or feeling angry, happy, or dizzy—have a clear internal component. We feel a certain way when we are in these states. These internal experiences may be simulated when people understand conceptual references to mental states. However, mental states can also be described from an “external” perspective, for example when referring to “smiling.” In those cases, simulation of visible outside features may be more relevant for understanding. In a switching costs paradigm, we presented semantically unrelated sentences describing emotional and nonemotional mental states while manipulating their internal or external focus. The results show that switching costs occur when participants shift between sentences with an internal and an external focus. This suggests that different forms of simulation underlie understanding these sentences. In addition, these effects occurred for emotional and nonemotional mental states, suggesting that they are grounded in a similar way—through the process of simulation.     

The time machine in our mind

This article provides the first comprehensive conceptual account for the imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time--for the time machine in our mind. It is argued that language reveals this imagistic machine and how we use it. Findings from a range of cognitive fields are theoretically unified and a recent proposal about spatialized mental time travel is elaborated on. The following novel distinctions are offered: external versus internal viewing of time; 'watching" time versus projective 'travel" through time; optional versus obligatory mental time travel; mental time travel into anteriority or posteriority versus mental time travel into the past or future; single mental time travel versus nested dual mental time travel; mental time travel in episodic memory versus mental time travel in semantic memory; and 'seeing" versus 'sensing" mental imagery. Theoretical, empirical, and applied implications are discussed.     

Working Passions: Emotions and Creative Engagement with Value

It is now a commonplace that emotions are not mere sensations but, rather, conceptually contentful states. In trying to expand on this insight, however, most theoretical approaches to emotions neglect central intuitions about what emotions are like. We therefore need a methodological shift in our thinking about emotions away from the standard accounts' attempts to reduce them to other mental states and toward an exploration of the distinctive work emotions do. I show that emotions' distinctive function is to engage us with both objective and personal values. Attention to emotions' work reveals that it is precisely their “unruliness” that allows them to play meaningful roles in our lives.     

In my ‘Mind’s Eye’: introspectionism,detectivism, and the basis of authoritative self-knowledge

It is widely accepted that knowledge of certain of one’s own mental states is authoritative in being epistemically more secure than knowledge of the mental states of others, and theories of self-knowledge have largely appealed to one or the other of two sources to explain this special epistemic status. The first, ‘detectivist’, position, appeals to an inner perception-like basis, whereas the second, ‘constitutivist’, one, appeals to the view that the special security awarded to certain self-knowledge is a conceptual matter. I argue that there is a fundamental class of cases of authoritative self-knowledge, ones in which subjects are consciously thinking about their current, conscious intentional states, that is best accounted for in terms of a theory that is, broadly speaking, introspectionist and detectivist. The position developed has an intuitive plausibility that has inspired many who work in the Cartesian tradition, and the potential to yield a single treatment of the basis of authoritative self-knowledge for both intentional states and sensation states.     

Much ado about nothing? Why going non-semantic is not merely semantics

This paper argues that deciding on whether the cognitive sciences need a Representational Theory of Mind matters. Far from being merely semantic or inconsequential, the answer we give to the RTM-question makes a difference to how we conceive of minds. How we answer determines which theoretical framework the sciences of mind ought to embrace. The structure of this paper is as follows. Section 1 outlines Rowlands’s (2017) argument that the RTM-question is a bad question and that attempts to answer it, one way or another, have neither practical nor theoretical import. Rowlands concludes this because, on his analysis, there is no non-arbitrary fact of the matter about which properties something must possess in order to qualify as a mental representation. By way of reply, we admit that Rowlands’s analysis succeeds in revealing why attempts to answer the RTM-question simpliciter are pointless. Nevertheless, we show that if specific formulations of the RTM-question are stipulated, then it is possible, conduct substantive RTM debates that do not collapse into merely verbal disagreements. Combined, Sections 2 and 3 demonstrate how, by employing specifying stipulations, we can get around Rowlands’s arbitrariness challenge. Section 2 reveals why RTM, as canonically construed in terms of mental states exhibiting intensional (with-an-s) properties, has been deemed a valuable explanatory hypothesis in the cognitive sciences. Targeting the canonical notion of mental representations, Section 3 articulates a rival nonrepresentational hypothesis that, we propose, can do all the relevant explanatory work at much lower theoretical cost. Taken together, Sections 2 and 3 show what can be at stake in the RTM debate when it is framed by appeal to the canonical notion of mental representation and why engaging in it matters. Section 4 extends the argument for thinking that RTM debates matter. It provides reasons for thinking that, far from making no practical or theoretical difference to the sciences of the mind, deciding to abandon RTM would constitute a revolutionary conceptual shift in those sciences.     

What Exactly is the Explanatory Gap?

It is widely agreed among contemporary philosophers of mind that science leaves us with an ‘explanatory gap’—that even after we know everything that science can tell us about the conscious mind and the brain, their relationship still remains mysterious. I argue that this agreed view is quite mistaken. The feeling of a ‘explanatory gap’ arises only because we cannot stop ourselves thinking about the mind–brain relation in a dualist way.     

The containing object—a prerequisite for developing the symbolic function

The paper aims at investigating the prerequisites for the process of symbolisation to develop and to be used by the personality. The starting point for this exploration is the psychoanalysis with a little boy of four and a half who started analysis because of an encopresis that was an expression of an overwhelming and concrete annihilation anxiety. It is argued that the sym- bolisation process has its basis in the relation to a real, reliable object and that this relation is a prerequisite for the child to start trying to transmit his experiences. The clinical material shows the boy's efforts to find an object capable of containing his anxiety and giving words to his unbearable affects, and the way this is worked through in the transference. This process contributed to his growing capacity to use symbols as an expression of his emotional experiences and it offered him a way of thinking about them instead of acting them out concretely.     

The theory of thinking and the capacity to mentalize: a comparison of Fonagy's and Bion's models

This paper presents a comparison of two psychoanalytic models of how human beings learn to use their mental capacities to know meaningfully about the world. The first, Fonagy's model of mentalization, is concerned with the development of a self capable of reflecting upon its own and others' mental states, based on feelings, thoughts, intentions, and desires. The other, Bion's model of thinking, is about the way thoughts are dealt with by babies, facilitating the construction of a thinking apparatus within a framework of primitive ways of communication between mother and baby. The theories are compared along three axes: (a) an axis of the theoretical and philosophical backgrounds of the models; (b) an axis of the kind of evidence that supports them; and (c) the third axis of the technical implications of the ideas of each model. It is concluded that, although the models belong to different theoretical and epistemological traditions and are supported by different sorts of evidence, they may be located along the same developmental line using an intersubjective framework that maintains tension between the intersubjective and the intrapsychic domains of the mind.     

Children's conceptions of mental illness: A naïve theory approach

This paper reports two studies that investigated children's conceptions of mental illness using a naïve theory approach, drawing upon a conceptual framework for analysing illness representations which distinguishes between the identity, causes, consequences, curability, and timeline of an illness. The studies utilized semi‐structured interviewing and card selection tasks to assess 6‐ to 11‐year‐old children's conceptions of the causes and consequences (Study 1) and the curability and timeline (Study 2) of different mental and physical illnesses/ailments. The studies revealed that, at all ages, the children held coherent causal–explanatory ideas about the causes, consequences, curability, and timeline of both mental and physical illnesses/ailments. However, while younger children tended to rely on their knowledge of common physical illnesses when thinking about mental illnesses, providing contagion and contamination explanations of cause, older children demonstrated differences in their thinking about mental and physical illnesses. No substantial gender differences were found in the children's thinking. It is argued that children hold coherent conceptions of mental illness at all ages, but that mental illness only emerges as an ontologically distinct conceptual domain by the end of middle childhood.     

Consciousness as sensory quality and as implicit self-awareness

When a mental state is conscious – in the sense that there is something it is like for the subject to have it – it instantiates a certain property F in virtue of which it is a conscious state. It is customary to suppose that F is the property of having sensory quality. The paper argues that this supposition is false. The first part of the paper discusses reasons for thinking that unconscious mental states can have a sensory quality, for example in cases of absent-minded perception. If unconscious mental states can have a sensory quality, then sensory quality is an insufficient condition for consciousness. The second part of the paper argues that there are even better reasons to think that sensory quality is an unnecessary condition for consciousness. The idea is that mental states can be conscious even when they lack sensory quality, for example, in the case of certain conscious propositional attitudes. In the third part of the paper, an alternative to the rejected supposition, drawn from the phenomenological tradition, is offered: that consciousness is a matter of implicit self-awareness, rather than of sensory quality. According to this alternative, a mental state is conscious when, and only when, it involves implicit self-awareness.     

The inclosure scheme and the solution to the paradoxes of self-reference

Proponents of the explanatory gap claim that consciousness is a mystery. No one has ever given an account of how a physical thing could be identical to a phenomenal one. We fully understand the identity between water and H₂O but the identity between pain and the firing of C-fibers is inconceivable. Mark Johnston [Journal of philosophy (1997), 564–583] suggests that if water is constituted by H₂O, not identical to it, then the explanatory gap becomes a pseudo-problem. This is because all “manifest kinds”—those identified in experience—are on a par in not being identical to their physical bases, so that the special problem of the inconceivability of ‘pain = the firing of C-fibers’ vanishes. Moreover, the substitute relation, constitution, raises no explanatory difficulties: pain can be constituted by its physical base, as can water. The thesis of this paper is that the EG does not disappear when we substitute constitution for identity. I examine four arguments for the EG, and show that none of them is undermined by the move from constitution to identity.     

Religion and the morality of mentality

Christian doctrine considers mental states important in judging a person's moral status, whereas Jewish doctrine considers them less important. The authors provide evidence from 4 studies that American Jews and Protestants differ in the moral import they attribute to mental states (honoring one's parents, thinking about having a sexual affair, and thinking about harming an animal). Although Protestants and Jews rated the moral status of the actions equally. Protestants rated a target person with inappropriate mental states more negatively than did Jews. These differences in moral judgment were partially mediated by Protestants' beliefs that mental states are controllable and likely to lead to action and were strongly related to agreement with general statements claiming that thoughts are morally relevant. These religious differences were not related to differences in collectivistic (interdependent) and individualistic (independent) tendencies.     

A Model of Infant Mood States and Sandarian Affective Waves

There has been little or no research on the establishment of infant moods or the mechanisms underlying them. One reason may be our difficulty in entertaining the idea that there are affective processes in infants that have long-lasting organizing continuous effects. It is this possibility that is considered in this paper. I attempt to address the questions of how moods are created and what some of their functions are. My model of moods is that infants have long-lasting (e.g., hours, days, and even longer) mood states. Mood states are dynamically changing yet distinct assemblages of affective behaviors. Mood control processes are modified by affective input from others. Thus moods are cocreated by the interplay of active, self-organized, biorhythmic affective control processes in the infant and the effect of the emotions expressed by others on mood control processes. In recognition of the importance of Sander's thinking to this work, I have named one of these processes the Sanderian Affective Wave. Mood states organize behavior and experience over time. Critically, moods serve an anticipatory representational function by providing directionality to an infant's behavior as he “moves” into the future. Thus they provide continuity to infants' experiential life. Furthermore, moods fulfill the Janus principle of bringing the past into the future for the infant, but as a noncognitive/symbolic/linguistic process—that is, as a purely affective–memorial process. Moreover, I believe that consideration of the development of moods opens the way for thinking about dynamic conflictual emotional processes in infants. Lastly, thinking about moods has important implications for understanding the development of pathology and for therapy.     

Can anybody hear me? Reacting to pressures from psychotic states of mind

In this paper material is presented from supervision groups run for nurses and other mental health professionals. The patients presented to the group all came from different mental health settings and suffered from psychotic states of mind. In this paper I will argue that the psychodynamic model can help nurses and other front‐line mental health professionals in their understanding of psychotic process. Nursing staff, in particular, are with their patients over long periods of time and see them in different settings. The psychodynamic model can be helpful in giving mental health professionals a language for describing their experiences of, and interaction with, their patients. The psychodynamic model can also provide a dynamic picture of the patient's problems over time. This type of assessment and thinking, which includes an understanding of the dynamic process involved in psychosis, can then stand alongside the medical model.     

Towards a cognitive theory of existential meaning

The capacity to attribute meaning to personal experiences may rest on a specialized cognitive system enabling this form of causal reasoning. Close examination of these attributional tendencies suggests that this system may be distinct from those underlying other forms of causal reasoning such as a “theory of mind” system in the behavioral domain, a folk physics system in the physical domain, and a folk biology system in the biological domain. A fourth, existential domain, an abstract ontological frame within which the subjective, narrative self is envisioned to be contained, may have driven the construction of an intuitive capacity in humans that encourages them to search for the underlying purpose or reason for having had certain life experiences. This system likely has specific, definable operational rules that are responsible for activating such explanatory searches. In addition, it appears anchored to a general intentionality system that promotes the attribution of teleological purpose and higher-order mental states to an abstract agency that is envisioned to cause events and personal experiences. Identifying the component parts of this specialized cognitive system through empirical investigations can help researchers to reconstruct both its evolutionary phylogeny and to track its developmental emergence.