Introduction: Fragmentation of the Unus Mundus

This panel is a series of presentations by a father and his three sons. The first is a critique of the concept of the Unus Mundus, an idea that goes back at least as far as Plato's Cave in western intellectual history. A longing for unchanging foundational ideas lies at the core of much of our culture, psychology, and theology. The subsequent presentations describe various unforeseen, destructive results stemming from the perspective of the Unus Mundus. The first example is of persons with Alzheimer's disease, whose singular subjectivity is often ignored because they are seen as a category. They are 'Alzheimer-ed', subtly enabling those around them to avoid an anxiety-producing encounter with their enigmatic otherness. Another important perspective is the modernist re-construction of city spaces that has resulted in the loss of an organic sense of containment. The lengthy horizon of the grand boulevards seemed like openings upon infinity, often provoking panic and agoraphobia, as seen in the work of Edvard Munch. Lastly, the genocidal tendencies of modern times epitomize the dangers of totalizing, Utopian ideas. Violent elimination may be visited upon groups or peoples who are deemed 'impure', as besmirching idealized social visions. Such examples illustrate some of the ethical dangers of conceptualizations related to the Unus Mundus.     

A Place to Stand: Intersubjectivity and the Desire to Dominate

Research indicates that upwards of 80% of our students experience the devastation of bullying during their school years. To date, research on bullying has mainly employed empirical methodologies, including quantitative and qualitative approaches. This research has largely concluded that bullying is situated in a lack of skill, understanding, or self-control and involves intentional action directed toward status dominance. Based upon these assumptions current anti-bullying strategies focus on training students toward more appropriate avenues of status acquisition and social interaction. Against the backdrop of an actual bullying encounter this paper employs a psychoanalytic philosophical lens to offer a fresh perspective on this enduring educational issue. Employing the philosophical work of Adam Phillips, Jessica Benjamin, and Emmanuel Ghent I ask the question: What is the desire to bully a desire for? Here I consider what is sought and what is at stake in the typical bullying encounter. Through careful analysis I argue that the domination represented in bullying is not simply situated in a lack of social skills or in disregulated aggression––skill deficiencies that require training. Instead, or perhaps in addition to these possibilities, I contend that bullying is foundationally a move toward establishing identity, a self. On this view bullying becomes an activity of self construction through attempted omnipotence. I argue that the status dominance inherent in bullying should be seen not as an end (a tool to secure resources or privilege), but as a means to something more foundational. I conclude that status dominance becomes a means toward the end of providing a secure place for the self to stand. Hence, instead of advocating that we train students to get along better this paper outlines the futility, as well as the insatiability of bullying, opening up new territory focused upon a re-construction of the bully through the relational bonding and differentiation available in the concrete Other.     

Spiritual Need Two: Continued Learning for Older Adults and Older Adult Organizations

SUMMARY

Age provides opportunity not only for a person to grow spiritually, but also for people to enlarge their understandings of the world about them, including God, and connect them to previous learnings and life-experiences. In older age, learning is not merely an affirmation of what has been, but a re-creation of the self in relation to everything that surrounds the person. The theories of James Fowler, Malcom Knowles, Peter Senge, and Erik Erikson provide insight as to the purpose of older adult education. The goal is for churchs to encourage and assist in each person's re-construction of their lives as they view life from the perspective of length of years. Concrete examples of re-constructive learning are provided.     

Re-construction of action awareness depends on an internal model of action-outcome timing

The subjective time of an instrumental action is shifted towards its outcome. This temporal binding effect is partially retrospective, i.e., occurs upon outcome perception. Retrospective binding is thought to reflect post-hoc inference on agency based on sensory evidence of the action – outcome association. However, many previous binding paradigms cannot exclude the possibility that retrospective binding results from bottom-up interference of sensory outcome processing with action awareness and is functionally unrelated to the processing of the action – outcome association. Here, we keep bottom-up interference constant and use a contextual manipulation instead. We demonstrate a shift of subjective action time by its outcome in a context of variable outcome timing. Crucially, this shift is absent when there is no such variability. Thus, retrospective action binding reflects a context-dependent, model-based phenomenon. Such top-down re-construction of action awareness seems to bias agency attribution when outcome predictability is low.     

Reminiscence,Ritual, and Beyond Working Through: Commentary on Papers by Joyce Slochower and by Laura Impert and Margaret Rubin

The author examines, contextualizes, and elaborates upon Slochower's psychoanalytic exploration of commemorative rituals and, more specifically, the Jewish tradition of Yitzor as well as upon Impert and Rubin's understanding of embodied nostalgic reminiscences, considering them within a therapeutic context for the mourner entering into the clinical situation. Slochower's experience with commemorative rituals as facilitating environments for the restoration or support of potential space and memorial activity suggests that they can aid in the re-construction and re-shaping of emotional memory, going beyond a notion of “working through.” Impert and Rubin suggest that generative nostalgic reminisces, a soma-sensory based form of memory that holds the potential for activating arrested mourning, may be clinically usefully in awakening dormant or dissociated grief so that patients can access mourning. Extending upon these contributions, the author further considers the possibility that mourning might be more usefully conceived as processes of transformational work for which a fixed resolution or outcome is neither proscribed nor prescribed. This transformational work may be seen, in part, as ongoing cycles of self-surrender to the mourner's swirling constructions of attachments lost, re-found, re-remembered, and re-conceived.     

中国古代关于"家"的哲学论纲

Unlike traditional Western philosophy, which places no special emphasis on the importance of family structure, traditional Chinese philosophy represented by Confucianism is a set of theories that give family a primary position. With family as the foundation, a complete framework of “human body → two genders → family and clan” is formed. Therefore, family in Chinese philosophy is existent, gender-interactive and diachronic. It should also be noted that family also plays a fundamental role in Chinese theories on cosmology, religion, and many other subjects. In other words, Chinese culture as a whole is imprinted with reflections on family. Nowadays, as the value of family becomes less prominent, re-examining ancient Chinese philosophy will undoubtedly bear theoretical significance. Meanwhile, traditional Chinese philosophy can also offer an ideological framework for the re-construction of family values in the contemporary world. __________ Translated by Zhang Shaoqian from Zhexue yanjiu 哲学研究 (Philosophical Researches), 2008, (1): 56–63     

Contextual Interference: A Response Planning Account

In two of the three experiments that are reported subjects were trained in either a blocked or a random practice schedule and allowed to self-select the amount of time they used to plan an upcoming movement. According to the reconstruction hypothesis (Lee & Magill, 1985) random practice participants engage greater movement planning processes (i.e. action plan re-construction) during acquisition than do their blocked practice counterparts. It was predicted that such reconstructive activity would be manifest as greater study time being used by random practice subjects as they readied themselves for an imminent response. Data from Experiments 1 and 2 supported this study time prediction while also revealing the typical retention benefit associated with random practice. Interestingly, the acquisition benefit often apparent with blocked practice was not evident when the random practice participants were given sufficient time to plan the upcoming response. These conclusions were supported by data from Experiment 3 that involved a direct manipulation of the amount of study time afforded random and blocked practice participants. Taken together, these data are consistent with the suggestion from the reconstruction hypothesis that more time is necessary for intratrial planning processes during random practice formats. Furthermore, acquisition differences that are commonly observed between high and low contextual interference practice conditions may, at least in part, be associated with the completion of the extra planning processes entertained by random practice participants as the movement is being executed.     

Self-Discovery and the Role of the Counselor

The major thesis of this philosophic treatise is that unless the counselor realizes in his own life the full import of the search for meaning and self-understanding, he will be unable to empathize adequately with the struggles of another human being who likewise seeks to realize his highest potential. Hindering our self-discovery are the problems of meaninglessness, alienation, and the loss of our freedom. The path toward breaking out of our insulated selves is: (a) to accept fully, on a personal level, a sense of responsibility for what we are, and (b) to realize that self-fulfillment occurs within a social context. The former involves a sense of personal integrity and the latter gives a contextual frame of reference to our search for meaning. The path to self-understanding is difficult and threatening, but as the counselee perceives—on both the intuitive and operational levels—the counselor's sincerity in his own quest for fulfillment, the goals we seek to achieve in the counseling relationship will be facilitated.     

The body of the other: intercorporeality and the phenomenology of agoraphobia

How is our experience of the world affected by our experience of others? Such is the question I will be exploring in this paper. I will do so via the agoraphobic condition. In agoraphobia, we are rewarded with an enriched glimpse into the intersubjective formation of the world, and in particular to our embodied experience of that social space. I will be making two key claims. First, intersubjectivity is essentially an issue of intercorporeality, a point I shall explore with recourse to Merleau-Ponty’s account of the prepersonal body. The implication of this claim is that evading or withdrawing from the other remains structurally impossible so long as we remain bodily subjects. Second, the necessary relation with others defines our thematic and affective experience of the world. Far from a formal connection with others, the corporeal basis of intersubjectivity means that our lived experience of the world is mediated via our bodily relations with others. In this way, intercorporeality reveals the body as being dynamically receptive to social interactions with others. Each of these claims is demonstrated via a phenomenological analysis of the agoraphobe’s interaction with others. From this analysis, I conclude that our experience of the world is affected by our experience of others precisely because we are in a bodily relation with others. Such a relation is not causally linked, as though first there were a body, then a world, and then a subject that provided a thematic and affective context to that experience. Instead, body, other, and world are each intertwined in a single unity and cannot be considered apart.     

Knowing,interconnecting, and fulfilling the four faces and the source of our being

This essay is part of a work in progress concerned with trying to discover, explain and evaluate the most crucial choices of our life and how to free ourselves to make fundamentally better choices. Our theoretical analysis focuses on the practice of the core drama of life, the archetypal drama of transformation. Why is that our core drama? Because by moving through its three Acts again and again, we free our capacity to participate with the deepest source of our being and with our neighbors in creating fundamentally new and better solutions to concrete problems. The living underlying pattern of this drama is always the same; its concrete experience, always different. It is also the core drama of life because we have only four fundamentally different choices for organizing a way of life in the service of which we live the stories of our lives, a way of life which provides us with ultimate meaning and purpose in life. And three of these four ways of life are only fragments of the core drama of transformation.     

Kantian constructivism and the authority of others

I argue that Christine Korsgaard's Kantian constructivism cannot accommodate our obligations to others. Because she holds that all of our obligations are grounded in our obligating ourselves, she is committed to the view that our obligations to others are grounded in corresponding obligations to ourselves. Yet this conclusion is objectionable on substantive moral grounds. The problem is that she embraces an egocentric conception of authority, on which we originally have the authority to obligate ourselves whereas others only have the authority to obligate us because we grant it to them. The solution is to adopt a more thoroughly social conception of authority and autonomy.     

Multiple Realizability Intuitions and the Functionalist Conception of the Mind

A popular argument supporting functionalism has been what is commonly called the “multiple realizability” argument. One version of this argument uses thought experiments designed to show that minds could be composed of different types of material. This article offers a metaphilosophical analysis of this argument and shows that it fails to provide a strong case for functionalism. The multiple realizability argument is best understood as an inference‐to‐the‐best‐explanation argument, whereby a functionalist account of our mental concepts serves to explain our multiple realizability intuitions. I show that the argument is inadequate because alternative accounts of our mental concepts exist that provide equally plausible explanations for these intuitions. Moreover, in the case of our qualia concepts, a nonfunctionalist account explains several other intuitions that functionalism cannot explain. Thus, despite its popularity, the intuition‐based version of the multiple realizability argument is a poor reason for accepting functionalism.     

Finding the space between east and west: the emotional impact of teaching in St Petersburg

The paper describes our experience of teaching analytical psychology to a group of graduates of the East European Institute of Psychoanalysis in St Petersburg, our developing partnership as we struggled to teach and learn, each with our own assumptions, preconceptions and projections about the other, and the emotional impact of our radically different social, intellectual and political histories. We had to be affected to become effective. It draws on contemporary Jungian ideas to unpack the interpersonal dynamics involved when there are culturally different styles of learning, which created a complicated transference/countertransference matrix. We believe we have by now witnessed a process of individuation among our students and at the same time they too have witnessed some change and growth in us.     

Psychoanalysis, the Anxiety of Influence, and the Sadomasochism of Everyday Life

After reviewing recent upheavals within psychoanalytic institutions and our diminished status in the worlds of academia, psychiatry, and the media, this essay turns to the historical trends that led to the current state of siege in which psychoanalysis finds itself—trends most clearly manifested on the East Coast institutes of the United States. I hypothesize that a legacy of arrogant entitlement on the part of the founding fathers made for an abiding institutional authoritarianism. This hierarchicalism fostered a loss of self-determination and individuation, negative Oedipal submission, identifications with the aggressor within psychoanalytic organizations, and a pseudospeciation with regard to potential critics in the outside world. Promising in many respects, nonetheless many of the current changes in psychoanalytic education and theory inevitably represent a positive Oedipal rebellion against the generation that had oppressed the one now in ascendancy and, more insidiously, a means of containing the candidates now in our charge. Finally, I argue that our future depends on our ability to embrace unwanted and disavowed truths about the history of our field and thereby to reclaim both our idealism and our credibility.     

The guise of the good and the problem of partiality

According to the guise of the good thesis, we desire things under the ‘guise of the good.’ Here I sympathetically articulate a generic formulation of the guise of the good thesis, and address a problem for the view, which I call the problem of partiality. The problem is, roughly, that our partial pro-attitudes –for example, our special concern for ourselves –do not correspond to what is absolutely good. I criticize three solutions to the problem, and propose an alternative strategy, on which partial pro-attitudes constitute a species of illusion.     

Ideology in work and organizational psychology: the responsibility of the researcher

This is a rejoinder to the commentaries on our paper on neoliberalism in work and organizational psychology. In this rejoinder, we provide a summarized response to the commentaries, thereby highlighting three main points: (1) when, where and how does neoliberalism manifest in society and our work as Work and Organizational Psychologists, (2) what is our duty as work and organizational psychologists towards society and our own work, and (3) what do we recommend on the basis of the exchange with the commentators on our paper?     

Foresight and the Seven Dimensions of Experience

How we understand and treat time says a great deal about our worldview. The major global crises we are enmeshed in are largely the result of dominant worldviews that do not correspond sufficiently with the realities of how the cosmos works. Although what humanity has learned through science has some areas of correspondence it does not have the requisite variety to correlate with the complexities unleashed in the Anthropocene. This is clear from the feedback that the world system is giving us in areas of, for example, climate change, species extinction, mental stress, and endemic violence. In this article it is proposed that the resulting deficiency of foresight occurs because our current notions of time and our resulting way of organizing and interpreting our world that follows from that seriously restricts our understanding where it is most needed. This article introduces an alternative view of time as only one of seven dimensions of our lived experience and opens more scope for practical as well as theoretical understanding.     

The co-evolution of tools and minds: cognition and material culture in the hominin lineage

The structuring of our environment to provide cues and reminders for ourselves is common: We leave notes on the fridge, we have a particular place for our keys where we deposit them, making them easy to find. We alter our world to streamline our cognitive tasks. But how did hominins gain this capacity? What pushed our ancestors to structure their physical environment in ways that buffered thinking and began the process of using the world cognitively? I argue that the capacity to engage in these behaviours is a by-product of increased tool investment and tool curation, which in turn was necessary because of increasingly heterogeneous environments. The minute tools are carried and cared for, they begin to undergo selection for added functions, becoming available as cognitive primers and as signals. I explore the trajectory of this co-evolutionary feedback loop of hominins and their tools, and demonstrate the role tools have in shaping our thinking.     

Streams and consciousness: visual awareness and the brain

Vision is our most powerful sense and, arguably, it gives us our most vivid sensory and imaginal experiences. It is also one of the best understood systems in contemporary neuroscience. Yet, contrary to both traditional assumptions and our phenomenological intuition, recent research has shown that vision is not a monolithic system that creates a single general-purpose representation in the brain. For example, selective brain damage can compromise visuomotor control while leaving perception intact, and damage elsewhere can compromise visual perception while leaving visuomotor control intact. Thus, it is becoming apparent that we have two (largely) separate visual systems. One of them is dedicated to the rapid and accurate guidance of our movements: it is a complex and powerful system, and yet it lies outside the realm of our conscious visual awareness. The other seems to provide our perceptual phenomenology, although its primary purpose is probably to provide suitably coded visual inputs for storage in and retrieval from memory. According to this conceptualization, both systems can be seen as serving our behaviour, but each does so on a different time scale. Recent studies suggest that neuropsychological research in humans can play a central role in bridging the gap between neurobiological studies of the monkey's visual system and the search to narrow down the brain mechanisms that mediate our visual awareness.