Opicinus de Canistris: some notes from Jung's unpublished Eranos Seminar on the medieval Codex Palatinus Latinus 1993

Abstract: Jung held an informal seminar for a limited number of students after the end of the Eranos Conference in August, 1943. All traces of this seminar were lost until the notes taken on it by one of the students, Alwine von Keller, were found in 2006. Jung's talk consisted of a psychological commentary on a series of images in the medieval Codex Palatinus Latinus 1993, attributed to Opicinus de Canistris (1296‐c.1352), a fourteenth‐century Italian clergyman, mystic, miniaturist, and cartographer. Jung interpreted Opicinus’ images as a series of mandalas in which the Shadow, the dark principle, does not manage to be integrated into a balanced system. Opicinus tried to settle this division into opposites, which constitutes the main problem in modern times, while remaining inside the system of Christian doctrine. However, he did not succeed in his attempt to integrate the principle of the Shadow on the doctrinal level because he was not aware of the very same division in his own unconscious. Our article points out the features in the seminar where Jung seemed to show much more originality in his interpretation than other psychoanalytic studies on Opicinus or other analytical‐psychological readings of medieval Christian art.     

Exploring and integrating discrete and dimensional approaches while inducing negative emotional states

Selecting visual stimuli for inducing specific emotional states is very challenging, since the choice relies on specific conceptualization of emotions. In this work, we present a set of 55 stimuli, realized integrating discrete and dimensional theories of emotions, and specifically selected to investigate anger, fear, and disgust reactions in non-clinical and clinical contexts. Our set of stimuli presents several aspects of novelty since (1) a large and heterogeneous sample of subjects from the general population was involved in the labelling task, and (2) bivariate and multivariate statistical techniques were applied to integrate emotion models. The proposed set of stimuli could be useful for researchers and other professionals in the affective sciences to address negative emotion recognition issues within a broader perspective both in general population and in psychiatric samples. The obtained comprehensive characterization of the stimuli allowed us to confirm the sexual dimorphism in emotional processing.     

Effects of a REBT Based Training on Children and Teachers in Primary School

Rational Emotive Education (REE) is a psychological educational program offering a preventative psycho-educational curriculum to children in order to teach them emotional literacy skills. REE helps children by teaching them to challenge irrational thinking, to minimize their reactions to disappointment and frustrations, to cope more effectively with problems, and to more fully accept themselves. The efficacy of REE training for children and teachers was examined in a sample of 211 third grade students from nine different classes and 26 teachers. Each class was randomly assigned to one of three different groups, two experimental groups and a control group, each receiving different training. First objective of our study was to evaluate the efficacy of a REE training based on storytelling in changing children’s irrational beliefs. Second objective of our study was to observe the efficacy of a teachers’ training similar to that applied in REBT-focused school consultation groups in enhancing their self-efficacy. Results show an improved tendency in children to think rationally and an enhanced perception of self-efficacy in teachers for those groups that underwent the training compared to the control group. Our results suggest that REBT based trainings for children and teachers should be integrated into the classroom curriculum in order to prevent mental health problems and encourage positive social and emotional well-being.     

Objects and Events: an Investigation into their Identification

Philosophia - John goes out for a walk. If John endures and his walk perdures, they are different entities. However, what if both John and his walk perdure? Is John’s walk identical to his...     

THE DREAM'S NAVEL BETWEEN CHAOS AND THOUGHT3

The authors begin by drawing attention to the problem of the transition from the biological to the psychic, noting that Freud himself, with his background in the neurosciences, grappled with it throughout his career. Certain recent paradigms more commonly applied to the natural sciences, such as in particular chaos and complexity theory, can in their view prove fruitful in psychoanalysis too, and it is shown how these notions are inherent in some of Freud's conceptions. The unconscious is stated to operate like a neural network, performing the kind of parallel processing used in the computing of highly complex situations, whereas the conscious mind is sequential. Dreams, in the authors' opinion, are organisers of the mind, imparting order to the turbulence of the underlying wishes and unconscious fantasies and structuring them through the dream work. Through dreams, the structured linearity of conscious thought can emerge out of the non‐linear chaos of the drives. The dream's navel can be seen as the chaotic link, or interface, between the unconscious wish, which constitutes an attractor, and the conscious thought. The attractor may be visualised as having an hourglass or clepsydra shape, the narrow section being the dream's navel, and, being the same at any scale of observation, has the property of fractality.     

Generic generalized Rosser fixed points

To the standard propositional modal system of provability logic constants are added to account for the arithmetical fixed points introduced by Bernardi-Montagna in [5]. With that interpretation in mind, a system LR of modal propositional logic is axiomatized, a modal completeness theorem is established for LR and, after that, a uniform arithmetical (Solovay-type) completeness theorem with respect to PA is obtained for LR. This paper supersedes: Franco Montagna, Extremely undecidable sentences and generic generalized Rosser's fixed points, Rapporto Matematico, No. 95, Siena, 1983.     

Interest in entering helping activities and self-disclosure to three targets on the Jourard self-disclosure scale.

Jourard's 40-item Self-disclosure Questionnaire was administered to 50 students in a training and selection program for a quasi-counseling position and 52 randomly selected students. Subjects indicated past disclosures to three target persons, parents, best friend, and stranger. Results indicated: highest disclosures were reported to best friends, lowest to strangers; subjects interested in the quasi-counseling position reported more disclosure than subjects not interested in this position; females reported more disclosure than males only to strangers.     

On Legal Order: Some Criticism of the Received View

The author discusses a number of topics related to the concept of legal order and the structure of legal orders. In particular, the following theses are challenged: (1) legal orders are sets of rules; (2) the criterion of membership to such sets is validity; (3) legal orders are dynamic sets; (4) legal orders are provided with a hierarchical configuration; (5) legal orders are coherent and consistent sets.     

On the proof of Solovay's theorem

Solovay's 1976 completeness result for modal provability logic employs the recursion theorem in its proof. It is shown that the uses of the recursion theorem can in this proof be replaced by the diagonalization lemma for arithmetic and that, in effect, the proof neatly fits the framework of another, enriched, system of modal logic (the so-called Rosser logic of Gauspari-Solovay, 1979) so that any arithmetical system for which this logic is sound is strong enough to carry out the proof, in particular I₀+EXP. The method is adapted to obtain a similar completeness result for the Rosser logic.     

Paradoxical decrease of imitation performance with age in children

Imitation development was studied in a cross-sectional design involving 174 primary-school children (aged 6–10), focusing on the effect of actions' complexity and error analysis to infer the underlying cognitive processes. Participants had to imitate the model's actions as if they were in front of a mirror (‘specularly’). Complexity varied across three levels: movements of a single limb; arm and leg of the same body side; or arm and leg of opposite body sides. While the overall error rate decreased with age, this was not true of all error categories. The rate of ‘side’ errors (using a limb of the wrong body side) paradoxically increased with age (from 9 years). However, with increasing age, the error rate also became less sensitive to the complexity of the action. This pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that older children have the working memory (WM) resources and the body knowledge necessary to imitate ‘anatomically’, which leads to additional side errors. Younger children might be paradoxically free from such interference because their WM and/or body knowledge are insufficient for anatomical imitation. Yet, their limited WM resources would prevent them from successfully managing the conflict between spatial codes involved in complex actions (e.g. moving the left arm and the right leg). We also found evidence that action side and content might be stored in separate short-term memory (STM) systems: increasing the number of sides to be encoded only affected side retrieval, but not content retrieval; symmetrically, increasing the content (number of movements) of the action only affected content retrieval, but not side retrieval. In conclusion, results suggest that anatomical imitation might interfere with specular imitation at age 9 and that STM storages for side and content of actions are separate.