Toward a Genealogy of Culture

Using psychoanalytic theory, this paper attempts to trace the natural history of the phenomenon designated as Culture. It postulates that psychoanalysis, a product of the Hegelian philosophical revolution, is still one of the best instruments to understand Culture. It traces the origins of culture as postulated by Freud and the pioneer anthropologists and its course from early and evolved religion through humanism, science, and finally postmodernism. It emphasizes the dialectical concepts in psychoanalysis and reviews summarily those psychoanalysts that, according to the author, have had a major impact on the study of culture: Freud, Horney, and Lacan.     

Correction to: Introduction: The Varieties of Enactivism

Topoi - The original article was published with incomplete acknowledgement. The complete acknowledgement section is given in this correction.     

应对全球化挑战的开明之举

当前,人类正面临着一长串可怕的全球化挑战——不可再生资源的枯竭,日益严重的收入不均,沉重的国家债务,暴力的全面升级,军国主义,新的帝国主义,广告驱动的消费主义,福利国家的危机,宗教盲信的复兴,种族间不相容的日益加剧,政治的商业化,对传统自由主义和社会主义的中伤,科学和工程学科的学生数量的减少,后现代主义的盛行以及被大众商业文化所取代的高雅艺术。那么,该如何应对这些全球化的挑战呢?对于上述种种现代文明的危机,人们可能持两种观点:一种是蒙昧的,另一种是开明的。蒙昧主义者乐意采纳回溯过去,并企图用堕胎、安乐死和同性婚姻等…     

Hemispatial neglect and serial order in verbal working memory

Working memory refers to our ability to actively maintain and process a limited amount of information during a brief period of time. Often, not only the information itself but also its serial order is crucial for good task performance. It was recently proposed that serial order is grounded in spatial cognition. Here, we compared performance of a group of right hemisphere-damaged patients with hemispatial neglect to healthy controls in verbal working memory tasks. Participants memorized sequences of consonants at span level and had to judge whether a target consonant belonged to the memorized sequence (item task) or whether a pair of consonants were presented in the same order as in the memorized sequence (order task). In line with this idea that serial order is grounded in spatial cognition, we found that neglect patients made significantly more errors in the order task than in the item task compared to healthy controls. Furthermore, this deficit seemed functionally related to neglect severity and was more frequently observed following right posterior brain damage. Interestingly, this specific impairment for serial order in verbal working memory was not lateralized. We advance the hypotheses of a potential contribution to the deficit of serial order in neglect patients of either or both (1) reduced spatial working memory capacity that enables to keep track of the spatial codes that provide memorized items with a positional context, (2) a spatial compression of these codes in the intact representational space.     

Brief psychological treatments for emotional disorders in Primary and Specialized Care: A randomized controlled trial

Background/Objective Brief transdiagnostic psychotherapies are a possible treatment for emotional disorders. We aimed to determine their efficacy on mild/moderate emotional disorders compared with treatment as usual (TAU) based on pharmacological interventions. Method: This study was a single-blinded randomized controlled trial with parallel design of three groups. Patients (N = 102) were assigned to brief individual psychotherapy (n = 34), brief group psychotherapy (n = 34) or TAU (n = 34). Participants were assessed before and after the interventions with the following measures: PHQ-15, PHQ-9, PHQ-PD, GAD-7, STAI, BDI-II, BSI-18, and SCID. We conducted per protocol and intention-to-treat analyses. Results: Brief psychotherapies were more effective than TAU for the reduction of emotional disorders symptoms and diagnoses with moderate/high effect sizes. TAU was only effective in reducing depressive symptoms. Conclusions: Brief transdiagnostic psychotherapies might be the treatment of choice for mild/moderate emotional disorders and they seem suitable to be implemented within health care systems.