Endogenous opioid functions and personality

According to our proposal the endogenous opioid functions, activated mainly by social interactions in early childhood and by stress later in life, serve multiple roles both in early ontogenesis and in adulthood. First, they might insure social cohesion. Second, they can mediate a special kind of homeostatic regulation, and third, they seem to determine characteristic cognitive functions: primary process thinking, primitive forms of defense mechanisms and basic conceptual structures guiding prosocial behavior. We propose that an alternation of two biological states, one with and one without the involvement of the endogenous opioid mechanisms, characterizes the normal course of life. These two states are supposed to represent different forms of homeostatic regulation and different kinds of cognition. Physical and psychological health seems to be dependent on the relative part each takes in the life of an individual. On the basis of some considerations discussed in this paper the endogenous opioid functions seem to be relevant factors of human cognition. The conceptual scheme of psychoanalysis, worked out on the basis of empirical data, could be Led to describe the cognitive characteristics which, in our proposal, were suggested to ensue on the endogenous opioid activity.     

Grading the ‘cultural literacy’ project

The essay examines the argument advanced by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., for instituting ‘cultural literacy’ as a fundamental priority of schools. A number of confusions and equivocations in Hirsch's reasoning are identified, and the propensity of his project to indoctrinate is exposed. Among the features of Hirsch's argument shown to be troubling are his shifting construal of ‘language’, his inconsistency about the requirements of cultural literacy, and his uncritical relation to traditional images of the American past and present. The upshot is to raise the question why Hirsch's project has elicited wide support and praise.