Thinking about the body as subject

The notion of immunity to error through misidentification (IEM) has played a central role in discussions of first-person thought. It seems like a way of making precise the idea of thinking about oneself ‘as subject’. Asking whether bodily first-person judgments (e.g. ‘My legs are crossed’) can be IEM is a way of asking whether one can think about oneself simultaneously as a subject and as a bodily thing. The majority view is that one cannot. I rebut that view, arguing that on all the notions of IEM that have so far been successfully defined, bodily first-person judgments can be IEM.     

Imagined spatial transformation of one's body

This study examined two related phenomena: (a) the judgment of whether a human body part belongs to the left or right half of the body and (b) the imagined spatial transformation of one's body. In three experiments, observers made left-right judgments of a part of a body whose orientation differed from their own by a rotation about one of 13 axes. To do so, they imagined themselves passing to the orientation of the stimulus. Time for (a) left-right judgments and (b) accompanying imagined spatial transformations depended on the extent of the orientation difference (OD) between the observer and stimulus. More important, time for phenomena (a) and (b) depended strongly, and in the same way, on the direction of OD. Further results showed that the rate of imagined spatial transformations can vary strongly for different axes and directions of rotation about an axis. These and other results (e.g., Parsons, 1987a) suggest that temporal and kinematic properties of imagined spatial transformations are more object-specific than could be previously assumed.     

From object to subject: pastoral supervision as an intersubjective activity

The author sketches the development of psychoanalysis in terms of its trends from notions of objectivity to intersubjectivity and how this movement can inform contemporary pastoral supervision. The article argues that these same trends may be noted in the development of contemporary educational and theological theories.     

Changing one's prejudiced ways: Awareness,affect, and self-regulation

In this chapter, we review and integrate efforts related to the internal conflict people experience over their often automatic prejudiced tendencies. We first describe the Should-Would Discrepancy questionnaire, which assesses people's awareness of responding with greater prejudice than their standards prescribe. Results from numerous studies showing awareness of prejudice-related discrepancies and examining validity issues are summarised. Studies examining the affective consequences of discrepant responses are then reviewed. The development and testing of a model concerning the self-regulation of prejudiced responses are described. The model explains how people establish cues for control, which facilitate the inhibition of prejudiced responses. Finally, acknowledging that people sometimes fail to self-regulate their prejudiced responses, we review recent investigations concerning the effects of confrontation by others on the subsequent control of prejudiced responses.     

My body as an object: self-distance and social experience

In phenomenology the body is often referred to as the lived body which makes the world familiar to me. In this paper, however, I discuss bodily self-consciousness in terms of self-distance. Self-distance is the suggestion that bodily self-consciousness consist in a reflective stance where you conceive of your body as a physical thing, an object in the world as well as the subject of bodily experiences. I argue that we are bodily self-conscious because we experience our own body in more than one way and that these ways are not derivative of one another or hierarchically ordered. This latter claim conflicts with certain phenomenological readings of how the body is experienced, one of which I will refer to and discuss as the Familiarity Objection to my idea of self-distance. I end the paper with a discussion of why we need the conception of experienced objectification that is entailed in the notion of self-distance to account for both pathological and non-pathological bodily self-experiences. The notion of self-distance improves our understanding of how the body plays a central role in psychosis for the experience of distorted inter-subjective relations.     

Autoscopic phenomena and one's own body representation in dreams

Autoscopic phenomena (AP) are complex experiences that include the visual illusory reduplication of one’s own body. From a phenomenological point of view, we can distinguish three conditions: autoscopic hallucinations, heautoscopy, and out-of-body experiences. The dysfunctional pattern involves multisensory disintegration of personal and extrapersonal space perception. The etiology, generally either neurological or psychiatric, is different. Also, the hallucination of Self and own body image is present during dreams and differs according to sleep stage. Specifically, the representation of the Self in REM dreams is frequently similar to the perception of Self in wakefulness, whereas in NREM dreams, a greater polymorphism of Self and own body representation is observed. The parallels between autoscopic phenomena in pathological cases and the Self-hallucination in dreams will be discussed to further the understanding of the particular states of self awareness, especially the complex integration of different memory sources in Self and body representation.     

道教咒术中的主客体思想

咒术作为一种普遍的文化现象 ,很早就已经出现 ,如《尚书·无逸》中便有 :“民否则厥心违怨 ,否则厥口诅祝”的记载。咒术的出现源于主客体的分化及其矛盾的发展。道教咒术的产生 ,一方面也是利用咒语这种特殊的语言来解决现实生活中的主客体矛盾 ;另一方面 ,道教重“道” ,追求与道同体。在道教看来 ,人是从“道”分化而来。《太上老君内观经》云 :“天地媾精 ,阴阳布化 ,万物以生 ,承其宿业 ,分灵道一 ,父母和合 ,人受其生。”① 道是绝对的存在 ,没有主客体之分。人若与道同体 ,也没有主客体矛盾 ,但人得生而不能 :“尊其气、贵其形、宝…     

Disowning one's seen real body during an out-of-body illusion

Under normal circumstances, we experience that our center of awareness is located behind our eyes and inside our own body. To learn more about the perceptual processes that underlie this tight coupling between the spatial dimensions of our consciously perceived self and our physical body, we conducted a series of experiments using an 'out-of-body illusion'. In this illusion, the conscious sense of self is displaced in the testing room by experimental manipulation of the congruency of visual and tactile information and a change in the visual perspective. We demonstrate that when healthy individuals experience that they are located in a different place from their real body, they disown this body and no longer perceive it as part of themselves. Our findings are important because they reveal a relationship between the representation of self-location in the local environment and the multisensory representation of one's own body.     

Managing one's body using self-management techniques: practicing autonomy

This paper discusses some of the anthropological andphilosophical features of the use of self-managementplans by patients with a chronic disease, focusing onpatients with asthma. Characteristics of thistechnologically mediated form of self-care arecontrasted with the work of Mauss and Foucault on bodytechniques and techniques of self. The similaritiesand differences between self-management of asthma andFoucault's technologies of self highlight some of theways in which self-management contributes tomodifications in the definitions of patients andphysicians. Patients, in measuring their lungfunction, first come to rely on measurements more thanon felt disturbances, but next, felt disturbancesbecome modified by previous measurements. Physicians,on the other hand, see their role changed from expertto being a participant in a joint treatment. It isargued that the concept of agency is more appropriatefor describing the advantage of self-management forpatients than autonomy.     

Agrammatic aphasic subjects' comprehension of subject and object extracted Wh questions

This study attempted to replicate the unusual wh question comprehension pattern of Hickok and Avrutin's (1996) subjects who showed an expected subject/object extraction asymmetry for which NP questions, but not for who questions. We also examined comprehension of what and which one questions, which are similar to who and which NP questions, respectively, and we examined passivized wh questions in order to test predictions of Grodzinsky's (1995) restrictive theory of trace deletion, the Trace-Based Account (TBA). Results, using both a figurine manipulation task and a picture pointing task, showed that only one of four agrammatic (Broca's) aphasic subjects showed the pattern reported by Hickok and Avrutin and that this pattern extended to comprehension of what and which one questions. One of the subjects showed subject/object asymmetry for all wh questions tested, as would be predicted by the original trace deletion hypothesis (Grodzinsky, 1984), and two subjects showed neither pattern. None of our subjects demonstrated ability to comprehend passivized wh questions as predicted by the TBA. We discuss our findings in terms of the lack of homogeneity of wh question comprehension among individuals with agrammatic aphasia and we explore alternatives to the syntactic explanation for differences between who and which NP question comprehension advanced by Hickok and Avrutin.     

The body as a source of self-esteem: the effect of mortality salience on identification with one's body, interest in sex, and appearance monitoring

The present research investigated the role of the physical body as a source of self-esteem and tested the hypothesis derived from terror management theory that reminding people of their mortality increases self-esteem striving in the form of identification with one's body, interest in sex, and appearance monitoring. The results revealed that individuals high in body esteem responded to mortality salience manipulations with increased identification with their physical bodies in Study 1 and with increased interest in sex in Study 2. Study 3 showed that reminders of death led to decreased appearance monitoring among appearance-oriented participants who were low in body esteem. These findings provide insight into why people often go to extreme lengths to meet cultural standards for the body and its appearance.     

An investigation of body part as object (BPO) responses in normal and brain-damaged adults

A test of simple pantomime was administered to three groups of adults and comparisons were made across groups of the incidence of subjects who exhibited body part as object (BPO) responses and of the mean frequency of occurrence of BPO in each group. The three groups were left-hemisphere-damaged aphasics (N = 28), right-hemisphere-damaged (N = 24), and normal controls (N = 28). The results indicated no significant differences among groups on the BPO measures. Also, to test the strength of association between the frequency of occurrence of BPO and measures of limb apraxia and severity of aphasia for the left-hemisphere-damaged aphasic group, correlation coefficients were obtained. The correlations were low and nonsignificant. The results of this investigation do not support the common clinical assumption that the occurrence of BPO during the performance of simple pantomimes is pathognomic for left-hemisphere pathology or associated with limb apraxia.     

A constraint-based lexicalist account of the subject/object attachment preference

When a noun phrase could either be the object of the preceding verb or the subject of a new clause or a sentence complement, readers and listeners show a strong preference to parse the noun phrase as the object of the verb. This can result in clear garden paths for sentences such asThe student read the book was stolen andWhile the student read the book was stolen. Even when the verb does not permit a noun phrase complement, soem processing difficulty is still found. This has led some theorists to propose models in which initial attachments are lexically blind, with lexical information subsequently used as a filter to evaluate and revise initial analyses. In contrast, we show that these results emerge naturally from constraint-based lexicalist models. We present a modeling experiment with a simple recurrent network that was trained to predict upcoming complements for a sample of verbs taken from the Penn Treebank corpus. The model exhibits an boject bias and it aloo shows effects of verb frequency which are similar to those found in the psycholinguistic literature.     

Medication as object

People experience and treat medication as though it were a person: in other words, as an object. Among the many symbolic meanings attributed to medication, this sort of personification, or object representation, is a meaning that medication is uniquely positioned to contain and convey: imbued with intentionality and influence, medication moves beyond the sphere of static, iconic representation and enters the changeable, dynamic object world of action, aim, and agency. Unlike more generic or stereotypic meanings, object representations attributed to medication may reflect the patient's specific dynamics and object relations. These representations are many and mutable, and take on shifting and overlapping forms that evolve with the analytic process. Medication may represent a third person within the framework of an analytic treatment, expanding the analytic dyad into a triad and offering new transference paradigms to explore. The defensive displacement of transferential qualities and attitudes, or split-off parts thereof, from the analyst onto medication can serve as a powerful resistance to the awareness of the transference to the analyst. Clinical examples illustrate the utility and importance of the analysis of medication as object, for both patient and analyst, with particular attention to the transference.     

Drawing the boundary between subject and object: Comments on the mind-brain problem

Physics says that it cannot deal with the mind-brain problem, because it does not deal in subjectivities, and mind is subjective. However, biologists (among others) still claim to seek a material basis for subjective mental processes, which would thereby render them objective. Something is clearly wrong here. I claim that what is wrong is the adoption of too narrow a view of what constitutes ‘objectivity’, especially in identifying it with what a ‘machine’ can do. I approach the problem in the light of two cognate circumstances: (a) the ‘measurement problem’ in quantum physics, and (b) the objectivity of standard mathematics, even though most of it is beyond the reach of ‘machines’. I argue that the only resolution to such problems is in the recognition that closed loops of causation are ‘objective’; i.e. legitimate objects of scientific scrutiny. These are explicitly forbidden in any machine or mechanism. A material system which contains such loops is called ‘complex’. Such complex systems thus must possess nonsimulable models; i.e. models which contain impredicativities or ‘self-references’ which cannot be removed, or faithfully mapped into a single coherent syntactic time-frame. I consider a few of the consequences of the above, in the context of thus redrawing the boundary between subject and object.