Nymphea: from psychic breakdown to the emergence of subjectivity

In the first part of the paper the author presents an account of the analysis of a woman who is psychically extremely disturbed. This clinical presentation focuses on the unfolding of the transference process, and on the countertransference difficulties encountered during the course of the treatment which lasted more than ten years. In the second part of the paper the author proposes a theoretical approach to the breakdown experienced by the patient, and puts forward the hypothesis that there was insufficient differentiation between her internal objects and the archetypes, and that this prevented the development of symbolization. The author proposes the idea of a collapse between internal and external objects, which destroys the space necessary for representation and symbolization that normally arise between the two poles of the object. The account of this transference process between the analyst and the patient is thus seen as the account of the (re)construction of true internal objects, and of the resumption of a symbolic process to make possible the development of subjectivity.     

Exposing the conjuring trick: Wittgenstein on subjectivity

Since the publication of the Philosophical Investigations in 1953, Wittgenstein's later philosophy of mind has been the subject of numerous books and articles. Although most commentators agree that Wittgenstein was neither a behaviorist nor a Cartesian dualist, many continue to ascribe to him a position that strongly resembles one of the alternatives. In contrast, this paper argues that Wittgenstein was strongly opposed to behaviorism and Cartesianism, and that he was concerned to show that these positions implicitly share a problematic assumption. This assumption is a seemingly innocent idea that subjectivity, or mind, is some kind of object or thing. The paper provides a detailed survey of Wittgenstein's critique of Cartesianism and behaviorism, as well as an outline of Wittgenstein's alternative account of subjectivity.     

Reflexive research and the grounding of analysis: Social psychology and the psy-complex

This paper is concerned with reflexivity in research, and the way research is grounded in the operations of the psy-complex in social psychology. A central argument is that qualitative research in general, and a focus on reflexivity in particular, requires theoretical grounding. Distinctions are drawn between ‘uncomplicated subjectivity’, ‘blank subjectivity’ and ‘complex subjectivity’; and the analytic device of the ‘discursive complex’ is described. It is argued that such theoretical grounding can usefully draw on developments in discourse analytic, deconstructionist, and psychoanalytic social research. The opposition between objectivity and subjectivity is deconstructed, and psychoanalytic conceptual reference points for an understanding of the discursive construction of complex subjectivity in the context of institutions are explored with particular reference to the location of the researcher in the psy-complex. The paper discusses the reflexive engagement of the researcher with data, and the construction of the identity of the researcher with reference to professional bodies. An analysis of a document produced by the British Psychological Society is presented to illustrate conceptual issues addressed in the first sections. This illustrative analysis is designed to show how the material is structured by a series of six discursive complexes, and that the institutional structure facilitates, and inhibits, certain forms of action and reflection.     

Towards the feeling of emergence

Emergence is a multi-dimensional notion; the meanings it has acquired span the mythopoetic to the scientific, especially as found in complex systems. Examples of emergence in Navaho and Egyptian imagery underscore its diverse cultural origins and applications as well as suggesting an underlying archetypal quality to the core concept. A brief overview of the use of this term in science starting in the 17th century helps to locate the roots of modern emergent views in the philosophy of Leibniz. Jung's own use of early systems approaches was a part of his formulations of a 'third' position associated with the transcendent function. As this paper was delivered at the 50th anniversary conference of the Journal of Analytical Psychology, aspects of the emergence of the Journal within the contents of the first issue are explored. Attention is drawn to several articles, especially a case of brief child therapy done by Robert Moody. His approach to working his case is strikingly modern and vividly demonstrates principles of emergence within the clinical setting. Following this there is a discussion of some neuroscientific research on neural body maps, pointing to the experience of feelings as an emergent process. It is suggested that feelings derive from phase transitions in the brain's body mapping states. A reconsideration of a seeming impasse in the case described by Moody leads instead to a view of the initial phase of treatment as a pre-critical period. Research findings on mirror neurons are presented in terms of the feeling of empathy. Subjective feelings are then shown to be associated with moments of emergence, especially surprise and curiosity, exemplified by a case from the author's practice.     

Embodying sexual subjectivity after cancer: A qualitative study of people with cancer and intimate partners

Research has increasingly recognised the profound impact that cancer can have upon embodied subjectivity. However, there has been little acknowledgement of the centrality of sexuality to subjectivity, and marginalisation of the experiences of intimate partners of people with cancer. This Australian qualitative study explores the post-cancer experiences of embodied sexual subjectivity for 44 people with cancer (23 women and 21 men) and 35 partners of people with cancer (18 women and 17 men) across a range of cancer types and stages. Semi-structured interviews were analysed with theoretical thematic analysis, guided by a post-structuralist approach to sexual subjectivity as a dynamic process of becoming that can change over time, and by Williams’ [(1996). The vicissitudes of embodiment across the chronic illness trajectory. Body and Society, 2, 23–47] framework on post-illness embodiment. Participants took up the following post-cancer subject positions: ‘dys-embodied sexual subjectivity’ – characterised by bodily betrayal, sexual loss, lack of acceptance, depression, and anxiety; ‘re-embodied sexual subjectivity’ – characterised by greater sexual confidence, acceptance, the exploration of non-coital sexual practices and increased relational closeness; and ‘oscillating sexual subjectivity’ – involving a shift between states of sexual dys-embodiment and sexual re-embodiment. The findings point to the importance of focusing on the sexual health of people with cancer and partners across the cancer trajectory.     

The physics of evolution: From chaos to evolution and deep ecology

This paper summarizes the various physical science elements of the evolutionary story. The “nonlinear” revolution includes chaos, self‐organization theory, the thermodynamics of evolution, and biological evolution. The key result of the revolution is a physical understanding of how order emerges and change is driven. This paper brings the lessons of each branch of the revolution together into a single easily understood thread. The unexpected result of this revolution is an understanding of evolution as a single inexorable physical process that has given rise to everything from molecules to humankind. Here evolution is driven by energy flow and involves increasing efficiency, the growth of complexity, and the acceleration of change. This paper ties the resulting physical insights to an evolving ecological world view, looks at its ties to spirituality and applies the rules that govern the growth of complexity to business and its current crisis. The net result of the nonlinear revolution is a radical change in our everyday understanding of how the world works, a shift away from classical science's machine world to the vision of an evolving deeply ecologically intertwined world.     

Attachment-dissociation network: some thoughts about a modern complex theory

The paper revises the complex theory in the light of modern infant research, neurosciences and object relation theory. The author takes up Jean Knox's idea to understand complexes as analogies to the internal working models of attachment theory. The author proposes to understand complexes as dissociated sub-networks out of the network structure of the psyche; these sub-networks contain the internal working models, the characteristic affects and unconscious expectation phantasies. With this network model one can try to understand severe defensive organizations in some patients as a pathological organization of different complexes. This is illustrated by a clinical example.     

Adding pieces to the puzzle: a commentary

In Jensen's theme paper she did an excellent job of outlining and explaining ways in which motor developmentalists can use the tools of biomechanics and engineering to address research questions. We extend her thorough efforts in two ways. First, we highlight the communication value provided by the precision of biomechanics terminology, and second, we reinforce the need to embed motion (the kinematics and kinetics) in context and function in order to understand the complexity of behaviour. We illustrate how one biomechanical tool, mechanical models, can facilitate this and provide insight to the development of control. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Confucian Order at the Edge of Chaos: The Science of Complexity and Ancient Wisdom

Many academics extol chaos theory and the science of complexity as significant scientific advances with application in such diverse fields as biology, anthropology, economics, and history. In this paper we focus our attention on structure-within-chaos and the dynamic self-organization of complex systems in the context of social philosophy. Although the modern formulation of the science of complexity has developed out of late-twentieth-century physics and computational mathematics, its roots may extend much deeper into classical thinking. We argue here that the essential ideas and predictions of the science of complexity are found within the social ordering principle of li (the rites) in Confucius's Analects .     

Social comparison: The end of a theory and the emergence of a field

The past and current states of research on social comparison are reviewed with regard to a series of major theoretical developments that have occurred in the past 5 decades. These are, in chronological order: (1) classic social comparison theory, (2) fear-affiliation theory, (3) downward comparison theory, (4) social comparison as social cognition, and (5) individual differences in social comparison. In addition, we discuss a number of expansions of research on social comparison as they are currently occurring, and we outline what we see as likely and desirable future directions, including an expansion of areas, methods, and conceptualizations, as well as a stronger focus on cognitive, neuroscientific, and evolutionary aspects of social comparison.     

Children's spirituality with particular reference to a Norwegian context: some hermeneutical reflections

Spirituality has become an issue in many domains of the Norwegian society, but this is not reflected in public education. This paper discusses why this is so, and suggests some hermeneutical approaches to understanding spirituality that can include pre‐school children's spirituality, with particular reference to a Norwegian context. Central to this discussion is a case study of children in ‘sacred space’, and an understanding of spirituality as cultural learning. Education in schools as well as in kindergartens is dominated by a secular outlook on life as ‘default’, or a cultural and collective forgetfulness. Children's spirituality challenges adults to explore and rearticulate what is forgotten, in terms of nurturing what it is to be human, of caring for what is really important, and of cultivating hope – in Norway as well as in other countries.     

From nature in love: The problem of subjectivity in Adorno and Freudian psychoanalysis

This paper investigates the potential of the concept of sublimation for thinking subjectivity at the intersection of psychoanalysis and critical theory. I first rehearse a recent argument by Whitebook that Freud’s notion of sublimation presents a nonviolent integration and expansion of the ego, which can mediate the modern dichotomy between the rational subject and nonrational impulse and desire. On this view, sublimation turns subjectivity into a site of possibility in the context of modern, rationalized thought and society. I then argue that the concept of sublimation offered to critical theory in this form is insufficiently developed. Both Freud and Adorno analyze a deep-seated destructiveness of the modern subject, which turns up right at the heart of attempts to mediate the dichotomies of rationalized modernity. What is needed to counter this problem is a theory of love in which love is not separated from, but, rather, correlated with drive and desire, and can thereby get on a level with the unconscious or unacknowledged, impulsive nature of death-bearing subjectivity in enlightened modernity. A central conception in Kristeva’s development of Freudian psychoanalysis, the idea of transference love, delivers such a theory and thereby develops the concept of sublimation in the way that is needed at the intersection of psychoanalysis and critical theory.

An epistemological history of time: From technology to representations

Abstract

This paper attempts to link the social history of the mechanization of time with the history of the psychological notion of time. Historical processes such as the mechanization of tower clocks from the Middle Ages onwards, the reform of the Gregorian calendar and the quarrel of the Christian and Chinese calendars characterized the modern representation of time on three points: isochrony, desacralization and abstraction. While Western societies learned to domesticate the practical aspects of time, the scholars of the Enlightenment naturalized time. They considered it a concept only related to man and used quantified time for scientific purposes. Empiricists saw time as a product of the succession of thought while idealists considered it a form necessary for the human experience to occur. Both trends agreed in removing time from nature and accepted isochrony, desaralization and abstraction as the necessary foundation for the modern notion of time.     

The play of transference: some reflections on enactment in the psychoanalytic situation

The incessant play of nonverbal activity between patient and analyst actualizes and amplifies the primary verbal data of the psychoanalytic dialogue. Both parties must inevitably register this kinesic level of communication, and react with capacities acquired in and elaborated from earliest childhood. The analyst's apperceptive (unfocused) looking, as part of his freely hovering attentiveness, utilizes these capabilities gradually to perceive and organize patterns combining the verbal and nonverbal data. It is through the recognizing and eventual understanding of these gestalts that the analyst builds up his knowledge of his patients. In these patterns can be identified: (a) conspicuous behaviors, idiosyncratic for the individual, which often yield to psychoanalytic inquiry to reveal their dynamic-historical antecedents; and (b) inconspicuous background kinesics, habitual to the individual, which ordinarily are opaque to analytic exploration, yet hold rich meaning. Observing these small behaviors in relation to verbal content provides evidence of their linkage to, and enactment of, pregenital- and genital-level conflicts over diadic and triadic object relations, even in highly structured personalities. These enactments combine elements of play, miming, and drama to constitute an experiential dimension that actualizes and externalizes the patients' inner life of conflict and relation to objects.     

Jung's evolving views of Nazi Germany: From 1936 to the end of World War II

This article first shows Jung's evolving views of Nazi Germany from 1936 to the beginning of World War II. In a lecture at the Tavistock Clinic, London, in October 1936, he made his strongest and most negative statements to that date about Nazi Germany. While in Berlin in September 1937 for lectures to the Jung Gesellschaft, his observations of Hitler at a military parade led him to conclude that should the catastrophe of war come it would be far more and bloodier than he had previously supposed. After the Sudetenland Crisis in Fall 1938, Jung in interviews made stronger comments on Hitler and Nazi Germany. The article shows how strongly anti‐Nazi Jung's views were in relation to events during World War II such as Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, the fall of France, the bombings of Britain, the U.S. entry into the War, and Allied troops advancing into Germany. Schoenl and Peck, ‘An Answer to the Question: Was Jung, for a Time, a “Nazi Sympathizer” or Not?’ (2012) demonstrated how his views of Nazi Germany changed from 1933 to March 1936. The present article shows how his views evolved from 1936 to the War's end in 1945.     

Reaction time to the start and end of weak signals in noise

Summary A theoretical extension of Zwislocki's theory of temporal summation in hearing predicts that the growth of auditory sensation is faster than its decay. Hence the reaction time to the start of a tone ought to be faster than that to its end. Two experiments which investigated this hypothesis are described. Both experiments measured the reaction times of subjects to the start and end of an imperfectly detectable 1000-Hz tone embedded in continuous noise. All three subjects in Experiment I and three of four subjects in Experiment II revealed reaction-time differences in the expected direction; that is to say, the reaction time to the start of the tone was faster than that to its end. One subject in Experiment II did not show this difference, however, and this subject's anomalous behaviour is seen as a qualification to the general nature of the theory.This research was supported by a grant to R.J. Irwin from the Golden Kiwi Scientific Research Distribution Committee and from the University of Auckland     

Bridging the reductive and the synthetic: some reflections on the clinical implications of synchronicity

When Jung introduced the concepts of synchronicity and the psychoid unconscious, he expanded analytical psychology into decidedly uncanny territory. Despite the early interest shown by Freud, anomalous phenomena such as telepathy have become a taboo subject in psychoanalysis. Today, however, there is an increasing interest in thought transference and synchronicity, thus opening the way for a fruitful exchange between different psychoanalytical schools on their clinical implications. I propose to examine some of the ambiguities of Jung's thinking, to clarify how we define synchronicity, the relationship between synchronicities and parapsychological events, and their clinical significance. At the present moment, we are still unsure if such events should be considered as normal and a way of facilitating individuation, or as an indication of psychopathology in the patient or in the analyst, just as we are uncertain about the particular characteristics of the intersubjective field that can lead to synchronicities. Making use of the typology of mind‐matter correlations presented by Atmanspacher and Fach, and the distinction they draw between acategorial and non‐categorial states of mind, I will use two clinical vignettes to illustrate the different states of mind in analyst and analysand that can lead to synchronicities. In particular I will focus on the relationship between analytical reverie and synchronicity.