In Loving Memory of Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz

This article by the late Nora Mindell was first published in The Fountain of the Love of Wisdom: An Homage to Marie-Louise von Franz (2006). Nora Mindell recounts her first meeting with Marie-Louise von Franz who, over the years, became her mentor and dear friend. She shares personal communications with von Franz, focusing on a mysterious handwritten note on number by C. G. Jung. This note sums up Jung’s insights on the archetypal dimension of numbers and inspired von Franz’s pioneering works Number and Time and Psyche and Matter.     

Jung’s Axioms: An Introduction to Jung’s “Note on Number”

This article is an introduction to C. G. Jung’s handwritten note on natural numbers (in this issue), which became the basis of Marie-Louise von Franz’s book Number and Time. I present the historical background of Jung’s note and discuss part of its content using mostly Jung’s own words.     

An Introduction to Marie-Louise von Franz’s Number and Time

Number and Time: Reflections Leading toward the Unification of Depth Psychology and Physics, by Marie-Louise von Franz (1974 von Franz, M.-L. (1974). Number and time: Reflections leading toward the unification of depth psychology and physics (A. Dykes, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Google Scholar]), explores parallels between the understanding of psychological healing in Jungian psychology and the theory of subatomic particles in quantum physics. Von Franz compares number symbolism in dreams with the mathematical structure of matter to link these two realms of life. The parallel role of numbers in the psyche and in matter is described to explain the interrelationship of our inner images and the outer world, as well to represent fundamental processes of personal development.     

Conditioning,learning and psychopathology

The total of all conditioning and learning may be summed up as part of the adaptive patterns for survival. Adaptive learning is the person's way of discovering how to live successfully. He is not just sick or well. In one fashion or another, he learnshow to be sick orhow to be well within a certain milieu. Personality function signifies the integrant of this learning as the individual tries to realize his potentials, live effectively, and achieve gratification. Should his learning be deficient or distorted in any area proportionate difficulties in his total function will afflict him. Such areas of insufficiency or distress expose the psychopathologic process.

The ever-changing patterns of conditioning and adaptive learning continually modify mental function and create a feedback; the learning is used adaptively and adaptation, doubling back, adds to the learning. As the person adapts according to what he is and what he has learned, his ensuing patterns, still in the process of being conditioned, further change him and make him what he will be.

     

An Overdue Reunion

The announcement of his high school class’ fiftieth year reunion prompted the author to read a short story and an essay he had written in high school. He discovered considerable continuity between the themes with which the boy was preoccupied (especially hope but also wisdom and love) and his adult vocational interests and writings. Invoking John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1956) the author concludes that the high school boy who lives inside of him has been his faithful companion throughout the years. He also observes that the short story has proven prophetic because it tells about an old man in search of a young boy who appears to have found what both are searching for.     

Heidegger on Existentiality,Constancy, and the Self

In Being and Time, Heidegger develops an account of the self in terms of his existential ontology. He contrasts his view to Cartesian and Kantian accounts, and seems to reject features that we take to be fundamental for a self, such as diachronic unity and being the subject of one's experiences. His positive account is obscured by the difficult vocabulary of authenticity and temporality. This paper traces Heidegger's argument, outlines his existential conception of the self, and shows how it fits the basic criteria for a self.     

The Moses

In this essay, the author engages the Moses, a sculpture by Michelangelo, as a transformational object. He does so in light of psychoanalytic interpretations of the statue, including Sigmund Freud’s (who referred to his essay on the Moses as “a joke”), as well as three psychoanalytic interpretations after Freud. While drawing on and combining features of all of these psychoanalytic interpretations, the author makes particular use of Moshe Halevi Spero’s interpretation to affirm a reading of the Moses as representing a paternal figure who not only gives up his anger (and power to castrate) but also actively nourishes his children like a nursing mother. The author also understands Freud’s essay on the Moses to be a form of teasing, which, in part, is why it has been a transformational object for him.

     

Looking High and Low: Modem Art's Search and Seizure of Push-up Bras,Cadillac Fins and Blow-up Bunnies

Marie-Louise von Franz's classical volume on Number and Time was a pioneering effort to explore the deep archetypal structure of the way we organize our understanding of ourselves and the world. She used dreams, myths, and ancient cultural images to illustrate how numbers provide us with important insights into the co-creative dynamics of the psyche. In this column I seek to extend von Franz's work by illustrating a new mathematical model of how psychological dynamics are manifest in a series of dreams. These are the dreams of a young woman, whom I call “Davina,” going through critical life transitions (presented in greater detail in Rossi, 1999).     

A Constructivist Pedagogue's Personal Narrative of Integrating Faith with Learning: Epistemological and Pedagogical Challenges

This article offers a personal narrative about integrating the Christian faith into the process of teaching and learning. The author begins by describing his understanding of pedagogy that framed his beliefs about teaching in higher-education environments. Understanding the author's beliefs provides a context for his experiences in integrating faith with learning. Specifically, the author offers three tensions of faith integration and describes how pedagogy helped him overcome these tensions.     

Diary of a Telepathic Solipsist

A thorough telepath in an otherwise mindless world would have an observational basis for solipsism. He would perceive an absence of other minds. How would things appear to the lone telepath? Given sufficient scepticism about introspection, exactly as they now seem to you . This perceptual solipsist would exclude other minds on the basis of evidence rather than the absence of evidence. He would be open‐minded, ready to revise his opinion as rapidly as any perceiver. Any intransigence would be a side‐effect of his theory about the senses. Temperamentally, he need not be a loner. The solipsist's ethics could be altruistic, his politics democratic, and his social preferences gregarious. At the same time, his solipsism would inform his hopes for immortality, his career choice and his means of communication. 1 1 The author is not ready to come out as a solipsist. For the sake of plausible deniability, he asks that his diary be published under the name of someone willing to characterize him as a fiction.
     

Resistance in treatment as a means of avoiding inner conflict

It is not commonly known that, in his eighties, Michael Fordham sought the help of Donald Meltzer in what Dr Meltzer described as ‘more a weekly supervision of dreams than an analysis’. Dr Fordham is said to have commented that it was ‘a weekly supervision of my inner world - and you can't get closer to psychoanalysis than that’ He was greatly helped by these ‘supervisions’ and at the end of their work together, Meltzer suggested that Fordham wrote his memoirs. This resulted in The Making of an Analyst: Michael Fordham, published in 1993.

This fascinating account of Fordham's life and work contains much of interest about his personal development. He talks with candour about his confusions and passions in what is at times a surprisingly revealing manner. In particular Fordham talks openly about his closest relationships and how they affected him. The book was published, as he wanted it to be, after careful discussion with James Astor and Karl Figlio.

We are pleased to be able to publish the following contribution from Dr Meltzer about the book which he prompted. It is a mixture of personal responses on reading the book and memories of the man.     

The asymptotic distribution for the two-absorbing-barrier beta model

For the two-absorbing-barrier specialization of Luce's beta learning model, the asymptotic distribution of the response probability has all its density atp = 0 andp = 1. The functional equation for the amount of the density atp = 1 is investigated in this paper.Abstracted from a portion of the author's doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, June 1960. The author is indebted to Prof. B. Epstein and to Prof. Robert R. Bush, his dissertation supervisor, for the valuable help and encouragement received from them.The author is grateful to the Moore School for the support extended to him during his doctoral studies. He also wishes to thank D. Parkhill and N. Finkelstein of General Dynamics for their encouragement of his work.     

Heidegger?s Thought and Nazism

This article rejects the idea that Heidegger's Nazism derives from his philosophical thought. No connection has convincingly been shown to hold between the ontological apparatus of Being and Timeand any political orientation. The elaboration of the concept of being in the later work needs to be understood as Heidegger's own reaction to the activism of his earlier thought which in the absence of any principle of respect for other human beings could provide no moral basis for resistance to Nazi ideology. The tensions between the circumstances of Heidegger's early life - rural, conservative, and Catholic - and the Nietzschean modernism of his philosophical thought are explored. It is suggested that there were analogous tensions between tradition and the modern world in Nazism and that it was Heidegger's hatred of that world that led him to respond favorably to some (but not all) of the themes of Nazi thought.     

Authenticity in Heidegger: A response to Dreyfus

In his book, Being‐in‐the‐World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I, Hubert Dreyfus argues that Heidegger's concept of authenticity is incomprehensible. He maintains that there are two conflicting accounts of inauthenticity in Being and Time. He elucidates what he calls the ‘structural account’ of inauthenticity and being‐in‐the‐world in the main body of his work, and then criticizes what he calls the ‘motivational account’ in an Appendix. Because he overlooks certain textual evidence and underemphasizes fleeing and the role of choice, his interpretation is neither complete nor compelling. I offer an alternative interpretation of authenticity. While Heidegger's notion of authenticity may still be weakened by other flaws, it is not incomprehensible in the sense that Dreyfus contends.     

'Between the Brutely Given, and the Brutally, Banally Free': Von Balthasar's Theology of Drama in Dialogue with Hegel

Von Balthasar's theological dramatic theory is deeply indebted to Hegel, especially to Hegel's distinction between epic, lyric and dramatic genres. He criticizes the Hegelian identification of divine with human freedom and argues that analogy alone can express the fact that God's freedom is 'ever greater'. But his Hegelian tendencies corrupt his use of analogy and incline him to generalize and impose resolution on patterns of divine-human relation (especially in his Marian theology of the Church). His readings of Shakespeare and Scripture reflect the same tendencies. Thus von Balthasar fails adequately to respect what is existential and open-ended. This is confirmed in his treatment of the Eucharist. It indicates a deficiency in his theodramatics, and the need to develop his project using a different and less Hegelian dramatic theory.     

The Violence in Our Schools: What Can a Psychoanalytically Informed Approach Contribute?

In the first part of the overview the author draws on the papers in this issue to support the argument that school violence is but one form of social violence with which modern life confronts us. Without modeling from the top down, it is hard to imagine how viable programs for violence prevention in schools can be developed and implemented. Coercion is the rule within most social systems, with the exception of families where secure attachments dominate. In secure organizations social influence is exercised in a framework dominated by an awareness of the mental states, concerns, thoughts, and feelings of individuals within the system—that is, a capacity for mentalization. The creation of a peaceful learning environment requires enhancement of the child's consciousness of his or her own awareness of others' awareness of him/her. In the second part of the overview the author questions whether all violence is understandable in these ways or in any way at all. He suggests for reconsideration the classical psychoanalytic notion of threat as a manifestation of a destructive drive. He speculates that violence may occur in two ways and for two reasons which are often conflated and confused. A psychoanalytic theory of this second type of violence is briefly outlined.     

Heidegger on presence: A reply

Taylor Carman has argued that the passages I submitted to him as proof that Heidegger identifies being with presence are really just his characterizations of a metaphysical conception of being that he repudiates. I show that he has misread these passages and has misunderstood the nature of the continuity that Heidegger himself recognizes between the views of Kant which are under discussion in the texts from which these passages are drawn and his own (Heidegger's) position which finds expression in them. I then cite other passages from another work by Heidegger that make the same point about being and presence just as emphatically and quite independently of any account of any other philosopher's views. Finally, I explain the difference between the ways Heidegger uses the word Anwesenheit ‐ his word for presence. One of these is as a translation of the Greek ousia which he interprets as a concept of being as presence sans temporality; the other is the radicalized concept of being as presence toward which Heidegger was working in Being and Time.     

荣格的《易经》心理学思想探微

荣格作为心理学家在研读《易经》的过程中获得了诸多启示,他对《易经》中关于人类心理的潜意识呈现做了较为详细的论述,并从《易经》的感应观中获得启示,成为他大胆质疑因果率的唯一性,并最终提出"同时性"原则的关键.但是荣格对于《易经》的心理学思想并没有任意夸大,而是极为客观的做出评价.他指出《易经》的精神对某些人,可能明亮如白昼,对另外一个人,则熹微如晨光;对于第三者而言,也许就黝黯如黑夜.     

Was Heidegger an Externalist?

To address the question posed in the title, I focus on Heidegger's conception of linguistic communication developed in the sections on Rede and Gerede of Being and Time. On the basis of a detailed analysis of these sections I argue that Heidegger was a social externalist but semantic internalist. To make this claim, however, I first need to clarify some key points that have led critics to assume Heidegger's commitment to social externalism automatically commits him to semantic externalism regarding concept use. I begin by explaining the independence of those positions, arguing that social externalism answers the question of whose concepts in a linguistic community are properly individuated, whereas semantic externalism makes a claim about what it takes for concepts to be properly individuated. Once these issues are distinguished, it is possible to see that Heidegger's intersubjectivist conception of language commits him to social externalism, while his conception of the ontological difference commits him to semantic internalism.     

Let my people go! Sayyid Qutb and the vocation of Moses

Moses is a great figure of moral and social liberation. His role in the Muslim tradition has been as multifaceted as in Judaism and Christianity. This essay attempts to explore his importance in the ideology of radical Islam by exploring Sayyid Qutb's responses to a number of the Moses scenes of the Qur'an in his work Fi zilal al‐qur'an. Qutb's treatment reveals aspects of the ideological structure that informs his writing, his love of Egypt and his spirituality. It shows, also, how he had a vision of Islam that went far beyond the boundaries of a nation state and regarded Nasser as a betrayer of this vision. He saw the Egyptians suffering under him as they had suffered under Pharoah.