Perverse thought

Based on Bion's work on the 'psychotic and non-psychotic parts of the personality', the author hypothesises the existence of a special type of thought disorder known as 'perverse thought'. First the author presents an overview of the major contributions to the concept of perversion that have a bearing on 'perverse thought'. These include Freud's splitting and disavowal concepts, Klein's projective identification concept, Bion's - K link and Meltzer's transference perversion. Then, by means of a case study and some vignettes, the author illustrates how this thought disorder is configured within the analytic process. The author focuses on three main aspects of this pathology: the specific modality of projective identification in a perverse scheme, the lie and some important clinical events that reveal an attack against knowledge through the formation of the - K link. Perverse thought is an important resistance mechanism in the analytic process. Its clarification is essential, given that its main objective is to attack the knowledge process, and therefore truth, in order to pervert the analytic relationship.     

Introduction to Focus Issue on Laudato Si'

The encyclical Laudato si’ can be read as a religious ethic in several different ways. Contributors to this focus issue read it as magisterial teaching, as environmental thought, as Global South criticism, as Latinx theology, and as philosophy of religion. Foregrounding South American and Latinx receptions, the cumulative argument of this focus issue is that LS represents a cultural event that invites interpretations from contexts and disciplines beyond North Atlantic theological ethics.     

Structure in the stream of consciousness: Evidence from a verbalized thought protocol and automated text analytic methods

A key question about the spontaneous stream of thought (SST), often called the stream of consciousness, concerns its serial structure: How are thoughts in an extended sequence related to each other? In this study, we used a verbalized thought protocol to investigate “clump-and-jump” structure in SST—clusters of related thoughts about a topic followed by a jump to a new topic, in a repeating pattern. Several lines of evidence convergently supported the presence of clump-and-jump structure: high interrater agreement in identifying jumps, corroboration of rater-assigned jumps by automated text analytic methods, identification of clumps and jumps by a data-driven algorithm, and the inferred presence of clumps and jumps in unverbalized SST. We also found evidence that jumps involve a discontinuous shift in which a new clump is only modestly related to the previous one. These results illuminate serial structure in SST and invite research into the processes that generate the clump-and-jump pattern.     

Synchronicity and the capacity to think: a clinical exploration

Synchronicity blurs the boundaries of psyche and physis. This invisible dance of mind and matter suggested to Jung an interconnection between physical and mental events reflecting a unified 'psychophysical space-time continuum'. His idea of exteriorization put forth the notion that unconscious thoughts can manifest themselves in the external world. I have related this to Bion's theory of thinking, where thoughts, which should be a prelude to action, become actions in themselves, projections of unthought thoughts. Through detailed clinical work with dreams I will explore the effects of early trauma on the development of the capacity to think, and the way in which synchronistic events relate to projections of early traumatic experiences which have not been 'mentalized'.     

认知与误读--宋代儒士佛教思想论略

至有宋一代,佛教已成为中国思想文化的一个重要组成部分。宋代儒士对佛教常识、佛教教义都有较深入的认知与把握,但也存在大面积的误读;宋代儒士一方面主观地批佛、排佛,另一方面却客观地成就了“批判的佛教”。宋代儒士对佛教的认识、理解和评价,不仅有助于弄清宋代新儒学与佛教之关系,也有助于进一步把握宋代学术之分野,而且可以加深我们对佛教中国化的理解。     

乾坤并建超越内在--牟宗三后期易学思想研究

牟宗三先生后期易学研究和他早年对<周易>的研究有所不同,他强调了<易传>是孔门义理,并发掘了<周易>的辨证思维模式.乾坤两卦是牟宗三先生后期易学研究的主要内容,通过对这两卦的研究他提出了"乾坤并建"原则.乾坤并建包括创生原则和终成原则,乾元代表了创生原则,儒家的道德形上学全都藏在乾卦;坤元代表了终成原则,包含了儒家的道德修养、道德实践.易简原则也是乾坤并建的重要部分,易简原则就指出了道德修养的方法,确立了道德实践的第一义.超越内在则概括了<周易>的总体特征和儒家的智慧,是儒家道德形上学的集中体现.     

The cognitive regulation of emotions: The role of success versus failure experience and coping dispositions

Attention deployment and generating specific types of cognitions are central cognitive mechanisms of emotion regulation. Two groups of hypotheses make contradicting predictions about the emotion-cognition relationship. The moodcongruency hypothesis expects the emergence of mood-congruent cognitions (i.e., negative mood leads to negative and positive mood to positive cognitions). Similarly, a substantial body of research suggests that negative mood induces selffocus, whereas positive mood elicits an external focus of attention. The moodrepair hypothesis, on the other hand, assumes that persons in a negative mood state summon thoughts incongruent with that state and divert attention away from the self. However, the temporal sequence of cognitions assessed as well as coping dispositions, such as vigilance and cognitive avoidance, may moderate these relationships. Positive and negative emotional states were elicited by exposing the participants to the experience of success or failure in a demanding cognitive task. Cognitions that were present after emotion induction were assessed by means of a thought-listing procedure. For the total sample, results clearly confirmed the moodcongruency hypothesis. Thought order was a critical factor only for changes in self-focus. Thought valence (positive, neutral, negative) as well as self-focus were substantially influenced by coping dispositions.     

“The primary process”: The vicissitude of a concept

Abstract

During the first twenty years that Freud spent creating his theory, he assumed that most of the functions responsible for creating mental-thought structures were organized according to two different forms or principles of thought. He called these forms “primary process” and “secondary process”. The “secondary process” is identified with rational thinking and the ego, and it is easy to follow the changes that this concept underwent in the works of Freud that followed. The concept of “primary process”, on the other hand, disappeared from his later works with no explanation. This article traces the changes that the “primary process” underwent in Freud's thinking and examines the connection between his analytical technique and his research method. A close study of the changes that the “primary process” underwent reveals that Freud's developmental thought process included concepts whose directional changes may be termed “regressive”.     

The schema provokes a disparity of false recollection between actions and objects in an everyday scene

We explored the effect of the schema on recognition memories and subjective experiences for actions and objects in an everyday scene. At first, participants watched slides of a man cooking in a kitchen. The man performed schema‐consistent actions, and schema‐consistent objects were left. After watching the slides, participants completed a recognition test, a remember/know test, and a Perception/Thought/Emotion/Context questionnaire. We confirmed three main results. First, participants made more false recognitions for schema‐consistent distracters than for schema‐inconsistent distracters with more “remember” judgments accompanied by perceptual, thought, and contextual details, and with more “know” judgments. Second, participants made more false recognitions for schema‐consistent object distracters than for schema‐consistent action distracters. Third, participants more frequently recognized schema‐consistent action targets than schema‐consistent object targets with more “remember” judgments. Both action memory and object memory were reconstructed under the schema, provoking false recognitions for schema‐consistent distracters. However, the memories of schema‐consistent action targets were so recollective that they could prevent false recognitions for schema‐consistent action distracters.