Revisiting Jung's concept of innate sensitiveness

Jung suggested that innate sensitiveness predisposes some individuals to be particularly affected by negative childhood experiences, so that later, when under pressure to adapt to some challenge, they retreat into infantile fantasies based on those experiences and become neurotic. Recent research by the author and others is reviewed to support Jung's theory of sensitiveness as a distinctly thorough conscious and unconscious reflection on experiences. Indeed, this probably innate tendency is found in about twenty percent of humans, and, in a sense, in most species, in that about this percentage will evidence a strategy of thoroughly processing information before taking action, while the majority depend on efficient, rapid motor activity. Given this thorough processing, sensitive individuals readily detect subtleties-including whatever is distressing or threatening. Hence, as Jung observed, given the same degree of stress in childhood as non-sensitive individuals, sensitive persons will develop more depression, anxiety, and shyness. Without undue stress, they evidence no more of these difficulties than the non-sensitive-or even less, being unusually aware of supportive as well as negative cues from caregivers. Given this interaction, one treatment task is to distinguish the effects of such childhood difficulties from what does not need treatment, which are the typical effects of the trait itself on an adult without a troubled developmental history.     

Learning and transfer from a simple dynamic system

The amount of learning gained from being assisted in completing the task of bringing a predator-prey system into equilibrium by controlling the predator population was investigated. Learning was explored both by post-task questioning and by testing for transfer to another predator-prey task. Participants were 28 undergraduate psychology students, all female. They were randomly and evenly split into an experiment group that was subjected to a learning session with the first task before being tested in the second task, and a control group that only performed the second task. What was most needed in the first task was help in sticking to analytically derived conclusions by resisting "common sense" responses. There was a significant transfer effect on performance to the second task, stemming from learning shown by half the participants in the experiment group. The other half showed hardly any learning. Learning in about half the subjects has proven a stable finding.     

论柏格森对现代新儒学思潮的影响

20世纪20年代,柏格森哲学曾在中国思想界人为流行,此时也恰好是现代新儒学思潮开始萌芽和兴起的时候,梁漱溟和熊十力均受到了柏格森思想的深刻影响。梁漱溟试图融合佛教唯识学和柏格森生命哲学的观点,用以阐释和发挥儒家“生”之哲学的精义,以重建儒家的理想人格。熊十力则通过反省和比照柏格森哲学的生命观与自然观,提出了他对于生命本体的独特看法,从而创立“翕辟成变”的大化流行论和“默识证会”的直觉说。     

Shadowed reality or the 'Prometheus-complex': analytical psychotherapy after political imprisonment and persecution

Traumatic experiences of violence like those that were brought about by the communist regime of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) are still present as if they happened yesterday, causing severe disadvantages in everyday life even after all those years. Consequently, in cases of extreme traumatization induced by political imprisonment, persecution and applied psychological methods of disintegration, regressive processes take place which corrode the ego. The breakdown of cathexis, i.e., the failure of empathic connection at the time of the trauma, is the strongest characteristic of severe traumatization. As a result of this destruction for the traumatized there is an inability to keep upright an inner empathic, emotional connection. As we try to grasp, from a Jungian point of view, the psychodynamics of severe traumatization, we can speak of a powerful pathogenous complex, which I call the 'Prometheus-complex'. Gustav Bovensiepen speaks of this complex as a sub-network, a limited fragment of the matrix of all internalized experiences, consisting of internal working models, feelings and patterns of anticipation which interact mutually. The human being, captured in such isolation and paralysis of the mind, can find himself 'in the therapist' on a mental level.     

Without Intuitions

This paper criticizes Analytic philosophy with its reliance on intuitions in pursuit of conceptual analysis. Rejecting naturalism as an alternative philosophical method, I offer in its place a pragmatic and revisionary conception of philosophical method. I explain the method of Analytic philosophy and show why reliance on intuitions is essential to that method, which is unable to provide substantive answers to philosophical problems. I further show that reflective equilibrium or wide analysis requires some criterion of intuition choice and that this criterion can be applied directly to definitions themselves.     

心理体验及其对象类型--试论迈农的意向性理论

意向性作为现代哲学的核心概念之一,在迈农这里有着与在胡塞尔那里同样重要的决定意义。迈农在布伦塔诺意向性理论的基础上,通过对心理体验及其各自所对应的对象类型的这一深入探讨,不仅将对象概念发展到了极致,而且为价值的存在争取了一个独立的领域,从而也使得价值的意向性构建成为可能。因此,迈农的意向性理论不仅是对象理论意义上的深化,更是价值维度上的深化。     

应用层次分析法建立最优心理结构的探讨

层次分析法是一种新的将定量分析与定性分析相结合的系统分析与决策方法。通过分析当前在心理系统中应用层次分析法存在的问题,首次提出了应用层次分析法来为心理系统建立最优心理结构的设想。应用这种方法要求所研究的心理系统必须有操作性定义,并能形成判定“最优心理结构”的统一标准,因此这种方法特别适用于心理量表。文章通过一个例子具体介绍了如何应用层次分析法的基本思想和计算方法来给心理量表中的各个维度赋予理想化的权值及其进一步应用与验证的方法。     

Intuition and The Junctures of Judgment in Decision Procedures for Clinical Ethics

Moral decision procedures such as principlism or casuistry require intuition at certain junctures, as when a principle seems indeterminate, or principles conflict, or we wonder which paradigm case is most relevantly similar to the instant case. However, intuitions are widely thought to lack epistemic justification, and many ethicists urge that such decision procedures dispense with intuition in favor of forms of reasoning that provide discursive justification. I argue that discursive justification does not eliminate or minimize the need for intuition, or constrain our intuitions. However, this is not a problem, for intuitions can be justified in easy or obvious cases, and decision procedures should be understood as heuristic devices for reaching judgments about harder cases that approximate the justified intuitions we would have about cases under ideal conditions, where hard cases become easy. Similarly, the forms of reasoning which provide discursive justification help decision procedures perform this heuristic function not by avoiding intuition, but by making such heuristics more accurate. Nonetheless, it is possible to demand too much justification; many clinical ethicists lack the time and philosophical training to reach the more elaborate levels of discursive justification. We should keep moral decision procedures simple and user-friendly so that they will provide what justification can be achieved under clinical conditions, rather than trying to maximize our epistemic justification out of an overstated concern about intuition.     

Wisdom won from illness: The psychoanalytic grasp of human being

From its inception psychoanalysis claimed not merely to be an effective therapy for psychological suffering, but to shed light on the human condition. But what kind of insight does psychoanalysis offer? This paper locates psychoanalysis in the western philosophical tradition, arguing that psychoanalysis provides not only theoretical wisdom about the human, but practical wisdom of a peculiar kind. The human mind, through its self‐conscious understanding can be immediately and directly efficacious in shaping its own structure.