离别人间事 何关道者情——小议禅与送别诗

江淹《别赋》中说:“黯然销魂者,唯别而已矣。”别离,是中国文学中经久不衰的创作题材。早在《诗经》里就有“之子一,远送于野。瞻望弗及,润涕如雨。”〔1〕“于嗟阔兮。不我活兮。于嗟洵兮。不我信兮。”〔2〕这样的句子,堪称是中国送别诗的源头。到汉乐府、汉魏古诗中,送别诗日趋发展,《文选》已有送别一类。对于封建社会的知识分子而言,一生中辞亲远游、科举应试,甚至迁客贬谪等等常有发生。所谓“离群托诗以怨”,古人述别离之情的诗已成经典,李白“桃花潭水深千尺”〔3〕、王维“渭城朝雨轻尘”〔4〕、杜牧“蜡烛有心还惜别”〔5〕等,早…     

Other Things Being Equal

Philosophical Studies -     

Seeing Things Unseen: Fantasy Beliefs and False Reports

Whereas past research has demonstrated that children's beliefs about the real world can influence their memory for events, the role of fantasy beliefs in children's recall remains largely unexplored. We examine this topic in 5- and 6-year-olds by focusing on how belief in a familiar fantasy figure, namely the Tooth Fairy, is related to children's memory for their most recent primary tooth loss. Although children who fully believed in the reality of the Tooth Fairy provided more voluminous and complex accounts than those with less strong beliefs, they also provided the most fictitious reports, frequently characterized by claims of hearing or seeing the Tooth Fairy. Belief in the Tooth Fairy did not affect the accuracy of children's reports of the mundane elements of their tooth loss, and many fantastic claims were linked to real events. Exposure to seemingly tangible evidence of the Tooth Fairy's existence was associated with the provision of fantastic claims.     

Seeing and Being Seen: Courage and the Therapist in Cross-Racial Treatment

ABSTRACT

Correction of the patient's distortion is often the focus of therapeutic treatment. However, the therapist's distortions, based upon pre-existing fears, which themselves are often rooted in greater societal issues and energized by the work with the patient (especially as they relate to issues of racial difference between the therapist and patient), can lead to clinical impasse. Just as an effective treatment relies upon the patient's opening up to correcting distortions, so too the therapist must be able to use transference response and become vulnerable to knowing and moving beyond his own fears and distortions.     

Thinking Differently Principles of Process in Living Systems and the Specificity of Being Known

As a way of integrating emerging knowledge of biological systems, developmental process, and therapeutic process, we identify principles in the process of exchange between organism and its context of life support that are present at all levels of complexity in living systems, from the cellular to the organization of consciousness. These principles range from specificity, rhythmicity, recurrence, and pattern to coherence, wholeness, and a relative unity in the organization of component parts. By proposing that these principles are also governing the exchange between mother and infant as they negotiate a sequence of essential tasks of adaptation, or “fitting-together” between them over the first years of life, the author suggests that the biological level becomes integrated with the developmental. A sequence of adaptive tasks extends from specificity of recognition in the newborn state, to recognition of inner awareness, purpose, and intention—shaping conscious organization. The bridge to the therapeutic level is constructed as therapist and patient build increasingly inclusive and coherent moments of recognition between themselves at the level of conscious organization, which act as corrective experiences, bringing the patient's own senses of “true self” and of “agency-to-initiate” to new levels of validity and competence.     

Being Happy and Seeing 'Happy' ': Emotional State Mediates Visual Word Recognition

Lexical decision and word-naming experiments were conducted to examine influences of emotions in visual word recognition. Emotional states of happiness and sadness were induced with classical music. In the first two experiments, happy and sad participants (and neutral-emotion participants in Experiment 2) made lexical decisions about letter-strings, some of which were words with meanings strongly associated with the emotions happiness, love, sadness, and anger. Emotional state of the perceiver was associated with facilitation of response to words categorically related to that emotion (i.e. happy and sad words). However, such facilitation was not observed for words that were related by valence, but not category, to the induced emotions (i.e. love and anger words). Evidence for categorical influences of emotional state in word recognition was also observed in a third experiment that employed a word-naming task. Together the results support a categorical emotions model of the influences of emotion in information processing (Niedenthal, Setterlund, & Jones, 1994). Moreover, the result of the wordnaming experiment suggests that the effects of emotion are evident at very early stages in cognitive processing.     

Seeing the World Differently: An Analysis of Descriptions of Visual Experiences Provided by Visual Artists and Nonartists

ABSTRACT: This project examined nonartists', hobby artists', student artists', and professional artists' responses to questions about the visual games and visual analyses they engaged in as adults and their recollections of these experiences from childhood. Findings indicate that in comparison to nonartists, (a) more artists reported these visual perceptual experiences, (b) artists reported having these experiences more often (particularly as adults), and (c) artists provided better examples of these perceptual experiences that were also more vivid and detailed (particularly as adults). These findings suggest an important connection between artists' reports of past and current visual experiences and actual performance on attention and object perception tasks. Our long-term goal is to understand the importance of visual perceptual abilities to the development of artistic talent.     

《齐物论》与竹林玄学

《庄子》作为“三玄”之一,在魏晋玄学中大行其道。阮籍和嵇康是两位在任自然的旗帜下发挥庄子思想的名士。分析发现,阮籍对庄子的理解,大致来自《齐物论》。然《齐物论》对他的意义是双重的：既排遣其对现实的不满,又给因对现实的无能为力而游戏人生的生活态度提供掩饰。嵇康学理上的表现在于,其“声无哀乐”的见解,以乐论的形式,对《齐物论》中齐是非的观点作独特的补充,同时,却又在讨论人格的公（诚）私（伪）之分时,把它同是非问题联系起来,从而显露自己无法掩饰的价值立场。阮、嵇无论是言还是行的矛盾,都与庄子齐是非的悖论有关。     

Commonsense Morality and Not Being Required to Maximize the Overall Good

Philosophical Studies -     

Seeing Me,Being Me,Becoming the Me I Want to Be

This article summarizes pertinent research on women's adult development and Dream formation, then examines the Dreams of six female psychotherapists in their thirties. Evidence of how these women's Dreams guided their adult professional and personal development is discussed and compared. Finally, recommendations are made for educational and counseling institutions in order that they may more effectively facilitate the articulation and constructive use of women's adult Dreams in their professional and personal lives.