Fear of breakdown and the unlived life

Winnicott's Fear of breakdown is an unfinished work that requires that the reader be not only a reader, but also a writer of this work which often gestures toward meaning as opposed to presenting fully developed ideas. The author's understanding of the often confusing, sometimes opaque, argument of Winnicott's paper is as follows. In infancy there occurs a breakdown in the mother–infant tie that forces the infant to take on, by himself, emotional events that he is unable to manage. He short‐circuits his experience of primitive agony by generating defense organizations that are psychotic in nature, i.e. they substitute self‐created inner reality for external reality, thus foreclosing his actually experiencing critical life events. By not experiencing the breakdown of the mother–infant tie when it occurred in infancy, the individual creates a psychological state in which he lives in fear of a breakdown that has already happened, but which he did not experience. The author extends Winnicott's thinking by suggesting that the driving force of the patient's need to find the source of his fear is his feeling that parts of himself are missing and that he must find them if he is to become whole. What remains of his life feels to him like a life that is mostly an unlived life.     

Internally represented forces may be cognitively penetrable: comment on Freyd, Pantzer, and Cheng (1988)

Freyd, Pantzer, and Cheng (1988) provided considerable evidence for the proposition that people can represent underlying forces within static scenes. However, they explicitly assumed that their observed memory shifts were the result of perceptually modular information processing. For several reasons, I suggest herein that this assumption of cognitive impenetrability is a dubious one. The assumption is challenged by recent empirical findings, some theoretical considerations, and calculations that show that the observed effects are minute when compared with those expected by means of physical forces. Three explanations for the evidence are proposed, including the alternative hypothesis that although people do represent static physical forces, these representations can be almost completely overridden by the conscious intention to remember an object's precise location.     

Hearing voices: the fate of the analyst's identifications.

Using detailed clinical examples, the author illustrates the function of conscious and unconscious identifications with former training analysts, supervisors, teachers, and theorists in the mind of the working analyst. As compromise formations, analytic identifications are the product of loving and aggressive wishes, defenses against those wishes, and self-punitive trends that accompany the analyst in the work. The analyst's stance at any given moment has an identificatory history that may become conscious at certain times with certain patients. While the analyst's identifications modify over time, following a predictable developmental path, they are never fully given up, but consciously and unconsciously remain an active part of the analyst's inner life. During the clinical hour they are responsive to both the analyst's and the patient's conflicts, and they coexist in a dynamic reciprocal relationship with the patient's inner life.     

Dreams,psychoanalysis and virtuality: the ancient mind in the modern world

The modern psyche is being shaped by the technological revolution involving the development of a virtual electronic environment in replacement of the natural world. Through the lens of the dream, as it has been valued and devalued in various cultures (including psychoanalysis), we can explore changes in the status of inner life. Psychoanalysis at first celebrated, now ignores dreams. This development runs parallel to the high value of dreams in pre‐industrial cultures and their demotion in contemporary post‐industrial Western culture. Despite official disregard for dreams, dreams as the original virtual experience, serve as the basic model from nature for the electronic virtual world displayed on the external screen. Also, dreams reappear in a technological transformation as film, video, TV and computer imagery. The ancient importance of dreams has been transferred to the powerful influence of life on the external screen. But dreams as dreams are like “the canary in the mind,” warning of a continuing demotion of inner life in modern “post‐human” culture. A rebellious re‐engagement with dreams, in clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis, is advocated.     

Teresa of Avila: The will and the weaving

For more than forty-five years as a Carmelite nun in the sixteenth century, Teresa of Avila suffered from great physical pain. We see in her life how disciplined prayer can become a healing experience that moves from minimal psychic representation to full symbolic representation. After a brief examination of Teresa's life, two theoretical perspectives on somatic manifestation will be reviewed: the theory of conversion hysteria of the classical Freudian school, and the differentiation Joyce McDougall draws between hysterical and psychosomatic phenomena. For the psychosomatic, as the mystic, the void of wordless space has significance. Following after McDougall on the suffering body, a third perspective will be offered: the concept of conscious body suffering as a means to inner change.     

THE DIVINE CONJECTURES: A CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNT OF HUMAN ORIGINS AND DESTINY

Six “divine conjectures” frame the place of Theóne (The One to Whom we pray) in the creation of our universe and for its continuing development in five subsequent stages into a loving universe. The first stage, the cosmological universe, establishes the laws of nature, understood by scientists as the “standard model”. The second stage introduces life and death into the universe by a process we are only now beginning to understand. Stage 3 requires certain life forms to become conscious with a subset of those life‐forms acquiring language that results in that subset becoming self‐conscious. The next stage, Conjecture 4, identifies certain persons who become addicted to learning in their unrelenting effort to learn as much of what can be known as possible. The fifth conjecture requires individual persons to act as agents of Theóne in achieving Conjecture 6—a universe that is both loving and lawful. During the course of the exposition subsidiary discussions of the concepts of conjecture and hypothesis explicate the function of each in the advancement of knowledge and understanding. There are brief discussions of prayer and purpose in relation to the Divine.     

Consciousness or the Physical Universe – Which Came First?

Historically, many have seen the intelligibility of the physical universe as showing that it is somehow ultimately dependent upon conscious intelligent pre‐existing being – ‘God’. Today, however, many believe that modern advances in our scientific understanding of the origins and nature of the universe, and of the conscious intelligent beings it contains, render God, as Laplace said, an ‘unnecessary hypothesis’. This article considers whether the findings of modern science do indeed diminish the plausibility of belief in a creator God. Or, on the contrary, whether there are features of current scientific understanding which may reasonably be thought to support the belief that conscious intelligent being pre‐existed the physical universe and caused it to be. In short: can science reasonably be thought to support the view that consciousness created the physical universe rather than that the physical universe created consciousness?     

朱子心性论的结构及其内在张力

本文试图对朱子关于心、性的结构及其关系的学说提出一些新的见解。按照传统理解,朱子属于理学,阳明属于心学;在理学中心、性是分离的,而在心学中心即是性。这种见解大体不误,能够揭示两派的特点。可是,也有一些当代学者称朱子哲学为心学,如中国的钱穆先生、美国的狄百瑞     

Well‐Being Blindness

Why are we still studying well‐being? We have a vested interest in understanding the good life, and the relevant data seem to be accessible to us all. The challenge is to explain why well‐being is one lasting philosophical topic among others in spite of our special epistemic relationship to it. This article argues that human nature renders us well‐being blind. On one side this is due to the heterogeneous nature of our interests. Some are directly mediated by conscious thought, others are not. Some are individualistically realized, others relationally. On the other side we suffer from cognitive biases that lead us to undervalue, indeed, to miss entirely, the important aspects of human life that do not depend on conscious attention. Consequently, there is reason to think that we shall never be satisfied with a theory of well‐being.     

The preconscious and potential space.

Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) have suggested that the drive/structure model and the relational/structure model are mutually exclusive models of psychic life. We regard their contribution as an invaluable one, which makes explicit the fundamental divergences in psychoanalytic theory. We have examined a derivative tendency in the field, for drive and relational theorists alike, to present psychic life as a dichotomy between inner experience and outer experience. We see a tendency to equate the drive model with unconscious motivation, and to the primacy of internal experience. There seems to be an equivalent tendency to equate the relational model with conscious perception and motivation, and to the primacy of external experience. We are advocating, for drive and relational theorists alike, greater focus on the process of intermediation between internal and external experience in the psychic life of the individual. Within the context of the drive model, precedent for such a focus is found in Freud's conception of the preconscious, an essential third dimension whose function was to mediate between the conscious and the unconscious. Within the context of the relational model, Winnicott's notion of potential space serves as a bridge between interior experience and external reality in the life of the individual. Finally, we have argued that by constructing three-part models of psychic life, these theorists have laid the groundwork for a synthetic theory. Though for Freud the drive state is primary, and for Winnicott the relationship between the infant and its environment (mother) is primary, each theorist posits an intermediating zone that fulfills a similar function in the psychic life of the individual. Whether we choose to call that zone the preconscious or potential space, its function is to translate bidirectionally between the infinitely dimensioned realm of interior, or unconscious, experience and the time-and space-bound realm of external, or conscious, experience. By highlighting the parallel constructs, we are not claiming to have created a synthesis between the theories. Our claim is that the eventual road to synthesis appears to reside in the direction of a movement away from the dichotomy between the primacy of inner or outer experience, and toward the common meeting ground of the primacy of an intermediating function.     

The Divine Child

The divine child of this article is not a concrete person, but rather a part of one’s inner self, a part that is with us from birth, but often unknown to us until some later critical moment in life brings it into our awareness, often as an image in a vivid dream or fantasy. This figure can reveal, and bring with it, an amazing energy, and make felt desires never before known to us, which are now pressing for our awareness—and along with this awareness, a need to live an expanded, more conscious life.     

EVOLUTION AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

Abstract. The last century has witnessed a succession of revolutionary transformations in the discipline of biology. However, the rapid expansion of our understanding of life and its nature has had curiously little impact on the way that questions about life and its significance have been discussed by philosophers. This paper explores the answers that biology provides to central questions about our existence, and it examines why the substitution of causal explanations for teleological ones appears natural and satisfying in the case of physical theory but meets widespread resistance in the case of biology.     

Some thoughts on empathy and countertransference

Two aspects of countertransference-namely, the countertransference reaction and empathic understanding-must be distinguished. The term countertransference should be reserved exclusively for the conscious reactions of the analyst emerging from the preconscious by virtue of the patient's current transferences; the term empathy should be used to denote a perspective whereby the analyst employs current countertransference reactions for an understanding of the patient's inner life.     

The Linguistic Determination of Conscious Thought Contents

In this paper we address the question of what determines the content of our conscious episodes of thinking, considering recent claims that phenomenal character individuates thought contents. We present one prominent way for defenders of phenomenal intentionality to develop that view and then examine ‘sensory inner speech views’, which provide an alternative way of accounting for thought‐content determinacy. We argue that such views fare well with inner speech thinking but have problems accounting for unsymbolized thinking. Within this dialectic, we present an account of the nature of unsymbolized thinking that accords with and can be seen as a continuation of the activity of inner speech, while offering a way of explaining thought‐content determinacy in terms of linguistic structures and representations.     

SCIENCE'S CONCEPTION OF HUMAN BEINGS AS A BASIS FOR MORAL THEORY

Abstract. Niels Bohr stated, and Werner Heisenberg reiterated, that “in the great drama of existence we ourselves are both actors and spectators.” Their emphasis stems from the fact that the entry of human beings into physics as actors constitutes the most fundamental philosophical departure of twentieth‐century basic physics from its eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century forerunners. Those earlier theories claimed that our human conscious thoughts are mere witnesses to, or by‐products of, essentially mechanically determined brain processes. In stark contrast, certain conscious decisions that are made by human beings, but that are not determined by any known law, statistical or otherwise, enter irreducibly into orthodox contemporary physical theory. These actions are required to counteract effects of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which ordains that the physically described process of nature, acting alone, produces not a physical world of the kind we experience but rather a continuous smear of potential possible worlds of the kind we know. This contradiction between theory and experience is resolved in orthodox contemporary physical theory by bringing certain effects of our conscious human choices into the dynamics in essentially the way that we intuitively feel that our conscious intentions affect the physical world, namely, via the effects of our intentional efforts on our physically described bodies. The moral implications of this profound change in physics are discussed.     

QUANTUM INTERACTIVE DUALISM: AN ALTERNATIVE TO MATERIALISM

Abstract. René Descartes proposed an interactive dualism that posits an interaction between the mind of a human being and some of the matter in his or her brain. However, the classical physical theories that reigned during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are based exclusively on the material/physical part of Descartes' ontology, and they purport to give, in principle, a completely deterministic account of the physically described properties of nature, expressed exclusively in terms of these physically described properties themselves. Orthodox contemporary physical theory violates this condition in two separate ways. First, it injects random elements into the dynamics. Second, it requires psychophysical events, called Process 1 interventions by John von Neumann. Neither the content nor the timing of these events is determined, even statistically, by any known law. Orthodox quantum mechanics considers these events to be instigated by choices made by conscious agents. This quantum conception of the mind‐brain connection allows many psychological and neuropsychological findings associated with the apparent physical effectiveness of our conscious volitional efforts to be explained in a causal and practically useful way. According to this quantum approach, conscious human beings are invested with degrees of freedom denied to the mechanistic automatons to which classical physics reduced us.     

奏响长者的“生命质量”凯歌

“健康老龄化”的探索中, 指标的定义至关重要。“生命质量”综合了生理、心理、社会、环境等多维度指标, 优于“预期寿命”、“健康预期寿命”等传统概念, 其定义在发展中被广为接受, 强调个体自评的主观性、可塑性和多维度。促进积极心理因素的干预是改善老年生命质量的有效路径。老龄化过程虽必然伴随生理系统衰退, 但心理系统积极参与, 仍能为年长者奏响生命质量的凯歌。     

A Quantum Biomechanical Basis for Near-Death Life Reviews

Near-death life reviews pose a challenge to current memory research in terms of the sheer amount of instantaneous and empathetic information recall. Advances in quantum physics, biomechanics, holographic information theory, and consciousness studies support for the first time a fully realizable quantum biomechanical basis for near-death life reviews. We introduce the unifying paradigm of the quantum hologram as a non-local carrier of information. We further investigate the interrelated phenomena of non-local communications, and the electromagnetic zero-point field. Recent confirmation of the zero-point field lends credibility to vast memory storage capabilities outside the physical body. Microtubules are considered to be key components in non-local, quantum processes critical to human consciousness. Discovery of the liquid crystalline nature of the human body provides further support for our model. Microtubules, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), and the entire brain are described as communicating non-locally with virtually unlimited memory storage capacity.