Splitting the mind within the individual,nation and economy: Reflections on the struggle for integration in post‐war Germany

With respect to theorisations of psychical splitting, this paper explores the psychical mechanisms that underlie different forms of social splitting. The paper first outlines Freud's and Kleins different theorisations of the psychical mechanisms of splitting, where the good is split from the bad, the inside split from the outside, and the painful disavowed. I then consider the psychical mechanisms of splitting that underlie ideological supports of certain social systems, specifically that of National Socialist Germany, East Germany during the Cold War period, and neoliberal capitalism. Here, I consider ideological splits between good and evil, the relation between external and internal splits, the relation between geographical, social and internal splitting, as well as splitting as disavowal of the other.     

The Embodied Attunement of Therapists and a Couple within Dialogical Psychotherapy: An Introduction to the Relational Mind Research Project

In dialogical practice, therapists seek to respond to the utterances of clients by including in their own response what the client said. No research so far exists on how, in dialogs, therapists and clients attune themselves to each other with their entire bodies. The research program The Relational Mind is the first to look at dialog in terms of both the outer and the inner dialogs of participants (clients and therapists), observed in parallel with autonomic nervous system (ANS) measurements. In the ANS, the response occurs immediately, even before conscious thought, making it possible to follow how participants in a multiactor dialog synchronize their reactions and attune themselves to each other. The couple therapy case presented in this article demonstrates how attunement is often not a simple “all at the same time” phenomenon, but rather a complex, dyadic or triadic phenomenon which changes over time. In the case presented, there was strong synchrony between one therapist and one client in terms of their arousal level throughout the therapy session. It was also observed that high stress could occur when someone else was talking about something related to the participant, or if that person mirrored the participant's words. Overall, it seems that in evaluating the rhythmic attunement between therapists and clients it is not enough to look at single variables; instead, integrated information from several channels is needed when one is seeking to make sense of the embodiment.     

The Activities of The Scandinavian Societies

Freud's concept of the death instinct has given rise to many different interpretations which have often been contradictory. It is in fact already possible to discern two diametrically opposite meanings of this concept in Freud's work from 1920—Beyond the Pleasure Principle—in which he first introduced the concept of the death instinct. In this paper, it is argued that both these meanings are relevant in describing psychical life, although only one of these meanings actually qualifies for the concept “death instinct”. Beyond the Pleasure Principle was written in order to try to understand some everyday, as well as clinical phenomena which could not be explained by the so-called pleasure principle. Freud postulated something beyond the pleasure principle, which initially seemed to have to do with binding energy. I will preserve this idea and attempt to develop it within the context of a phenomenological analysis of time. The temporalization of the subject involves a very basic affirmation of existence, in that the subject experiences something constant, something that can be said to possess the quality of a gestalt. I propose that that which is beyond the pleasure principle—this binding of energy—should be understood as the opposite of the idea of a primordial death instinct striving towards death. In this case, that which is beyond the pleasure principle reflects an original affirmation of existence, which could be said to correspond to Freud's first meaning of the death instinct. The second meaning—for which the name “death instinct” seems to be applicable—concerns the discharge of energy, which from a temporal point of view shows itself as a tendency to dissolution. The concept of the death instinct in its various meanings is discussed in connection with phenomenological reflections on time, which is a different approach from Freud's attempt to ground the death instinct in biology.     

Affordances and the Nature of Perceptual Content

Abstract

According to John McDowell, representational perceptual content is conceptual through and through. This paper criticizes this view by claiming that there is a certain kind of representational and non‐conceptual perceptual content that is sensitive to bodily skills. After a brief introduction to McDowell’s position, Merleau‐Ponty’s notion of body schema and Gibson’s notion of affordance are presented. It is argued that affordances are constitutive of representational perceptual content, and that at least some affordances, the so‐called ‘conditional affordances’, are essentially related to the body schema. This means that the perceptual content depends upon the nature of the body schema. Since the body schema does not pertain to the domain that our conceptual faculties operate upon, it is argued that this kind of perceptual content cannot be conceptual. At least some of that content is representational, yet it cannot feature as non‐demonstrative conceptual content. It is argued that if it features as demonstrative conceptual content, it has to be captured by private concepts. Since McDowell’s theory does not allow for the existence of a private language, it is concluded that at least some representational perceptual content is non‐conceptual.     

Frustration of Life Goals Mediates the Negative Effect of Unemployment on Subjective Well-Being

The present study investigated whether unemployment influences the importance and the realization of life goals and whether a reduced realization of life goals mediates the negative effect of unemployment on subjective well-being. A sample of 256 employed and unemployed German adults was studied with scales measuring six different life goal domains (power, achievement, variety, altruism, intimacy, affiliation). Only weak differences between unemployed and employed people were found for importance ratings of life goals. However, current realization of life goals, particularly of agency goals such as power, achievement and variety, was significantly lower among unemployed persons than among employed persons. Thus, unemployment did not change the goals people wanted to achieve in their lifetime, but it inhibited the success of these strivings. Furthermore, current realization of life goals was found to be a mediator of the detrimental effect of unemployment on life satisfaction and positive/negative affect.     

A ratio principle for a red/green and a yellow/blue channel?

There is strong empirical evidence that, under adaptation to another achromatic color stimulus, the lightness of an achromatic color stimulus depends on the ratio of the luminances of the two stimuli. In the present study, the suitability of this ratio principle is tested for two chromatic postreceptoral opponent channels. A Hering red/green channel and a non-Hering yellow/blue channel are specified as chromatic channels. The yellow/blue channel is defined by extrapolating the plane corresponding to unique green-white linearly to the reddish part of color space, using the plane’s surface as the channel’s equilibria. The experiment was run on an isoluminant plane, measured individually for each observer. Moving along an observer’s measured opponent axes, eight adaptation stimuli were selected for each channel and spanned the whole range of the channel’s coordinates. Red/green equilibria or yellow/blue equilibria were measured as excursions along the adaptation axes. For both presumed channels, the ratios of the equilibrium coordinates of test and adaptation stimuli were essentially constant. This supports the principle’s suitability. However, small asymmetries were found with respect to each channel’s opponent hues. The status of the proposed yellow/blue channel is discussed, as are conditions that might have favored the present findings.     

Thought Experiments,Formalization, and Disagreement

Topoi - In the last decade, philosophers have offered a number of proposals concerning the logical form of hypothetical cases, or thought experiments, as these are used for purposes of testing...     

Good weather for Schwarz and Clore

This article is a tribute to the "mood as information" paradigm in general and the seminal weather study (Schwarz & Clore, 1983) in particular. Schwarz and Clore used a natural variation in weather to induce different mood states and to further show that participants reported higher life satisfaction on sunny days than on rainy days, presumably because they misattributed their mood to their life satisfaction. Based on the mood-as-information heuristic the present study tested the reverse relationship between mood and weather. The results fully support the predictions of Schwarz and Clore. Participants in a good mood judged the weather more positively than did participants in a sad mood. Moreover, the effect diminished when participants were made aware of their mood, as predicted by Schwarz and Clore.     

Cross-modal personality attributions in synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes

Those variants of synaesthesia that trigger colour are well studied, although comparatively less is known about variants that involve cognitive constructs such as personality types. Here we investigate sequence-personality synaesthesia (also known as ordinal linguistic personification, OLP) in which sequenced units (e.g., letters) become associated to personalities or genders. We present the first group study of this variant, showing similarities and differences between synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes. In Experiment 1, we show that synaesthetes differ from the general population in the phenomenology of their reports, the depth of their personality associations, and the consistency of those associations over time. In Experiment 2, we show that synaesthetes are similar to the general population in the underlying rules that link their personalities to letters. Specifically, we show that these mappings are not random, but are based on a shared rule system linking linguistic qualities of letters with quantitative dimensions of personality (based on Goldberg's Big Five personality traits; Goldberg, 1990, 1992). Synaesthetes tend to associate high-frequency letters with high agreeable and low neurotic personalities, and non-synaesthetes share these tendencies at an implicit level. Together, these data show that synaesthetes differ from the general population in phenomenological ways, but that their underlying mechanisms may be common to all people.     

A strong parietal hub in the small-world network of coloured-hearing synaesthetes during resting state EEG

We investigated whether functional brain networks are different in coloured-hearing synaesthetes compared with non-synaesthetes. Based on resting state electroencephalographic (EEG) activity, graph-theoretical analysis was applied to functional connectivity data obtained from different frequency bands (theta, alpha1, alpha2, and beta) of 12 coloured-hearing synaesthetes and 13 non-synaesthetes. The analysis of functional connectivity was based on estimated intra-cerebral sources of brain activation using standardized low-resolution electrical tomography. These intra-cerebral sources of brain activity were subjected to graph-theoretical analysis yielding measures representing small-world network characteristics (cluster coefficients and path length). In addition, brain regions with strong interconnections were identified (so-called hubs), and the interconnectedness of these hubs were quantified using degree as a measure of connectedness. Our analysis was guided by the two-stage model proposed by Hubbard and Ramachandran (2005). In this model, the parietal lobe is thought to play a pivotal role in binding together the synaesthetic perceptions (hyperbinding). In addition, we hypothesized that the auditory cortex and the fusiform gyrus would qualify as strong hubs in synaesthetes. Although synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes demonstrated a similar small-world network topology, the parietal lobe turned out to be a stronger hub in synaesthetes than in non-synaesthetes supporting the two-stage model. The auditory cortex was also identified as a strong hub in these coloured-hearing synaesthetes (for the alpha2 band). Thus, our a priori hypotheses receive strong support. Several additional hubs (for which no a priori hypothesis has been formulated) were found to be different in terms of the degree measure in synaesthetes, with synaesthetes demonstrating stronger degree measures indicating stronger interconnectedness. These hubs were found in brain areas known to be involved in controlling memory processes (alpha1: hippocampus and retrosplenial area), executive functions (alpha1 and alpha2: ventrolateral prefrontal cortex; theta: inferior frontal cortex), and the generation of perceptions (theta: extrastriate cortex; beta: subcentral area). Taken together this graph-theoretical analysis of the resting state EEG supports the two-stage model in demonstrating that the left-sided parietal lobe is a strong hub region, which is stronger functionally interconnected in synaesthetes than in non-synaesthetes. The right-sided auditory cortex is also a strong hub supporting the idea that coloured-hearing synaesthetes demonstrate a specific auditory cortex. A further important point is that these hub regions are even differently operating at rest supporting the idea that these hub characteristics are predetermining factors of coloured-hearing synaesthesia.