Download or read book The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Consciousness Free Will Language and Reason written by Robert Samuels and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-08 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Consciousness, Free Will, Language, and Reason examines the ways in which we can use psychoanalysis in order to better understand humanity and explores the question of what makes us human. For thousands of years, thinkers have been trying to define what makes us human. Some of the main questions they have asked is: What is consciousness? Do we have free will? Do animals use language? And what does reason mean? Samuels argues that we need to better understand the psychoanalytic approach to human nature in order to answer these questions, as well as using it to provide a new way of understanding issues such as addiction, political conflict, ideology, and destructive personal relationship. This book will be of vital interest to psychotherapists, as well as students and researchers across the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and psychology.
Download or read book Consciousness and the Aconscious in Psychoanalytic Theory written by Ahmed Fayek and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last few decades consciousness has become a major topic of interest for neurologists, psychologists, and a host of other professionals in various disciplines. Their concerted efforts to define consciousness led them mostly to the same impasse: the leap from the body to the mind, or to the particular link that makes the mind an attribute of consciousness. In 1895 Freud put together a project for a Psychology for the Neurologists. It comprised the elements of a theory of consciousness as a manifestation of the continuous homeostatic pursuit of stability; an aconscious condition. Although he made a distinction between the aconscious and the unconscious in many of his important works, he did not clearly define the ways in which the two could co-exist in a unified theory. In Consciousness and the Aconscious in Psychoanalytic Theory, Ahmed Fayek summarizes current arguments and debates stemming from neurological and phenomenological perspectives. He presents the notion that consciousness needs to be considered a human phenomenon and not simply a manifestation of brain activity, which is an occurrence shared by all organisms. Using Freud’s theories as they relate to consciousness, Fayek places his own theory of the aconscious within the context of Freudian thought.
Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Download or read book The Conscious in Psychoanalysis written by Antonio A. Semi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-10 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we psychoanalysts, first and foremost concerned with the Unconscious, go about thinking about consciousness? And why should we be interested in the first place? The author's answer is simply this: because there is no talk regarding the unconscious if not from the standpoint of consciousness. In answering this, we are already, on the one hand, linking consciousness with language and speech, and the author elegantly shows how the figures of discourse teach us a lot about the interface between consciousness and the unconscious.
Download or read book A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason written by Léon Chertok and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This original and provocative work begins by examining the shift of scientific paradigms that took place in the late eighteenth century, a shift illustrated by the report of a French Royal Commission appointed in 1784 to investigate Mesmerism. The reactions to Mesmerism among the Commission members--in particular the chemist Lavoisier and the botanist Jussieu--crystallized conflicts about the notion of reason and its role as a scientific ideal, about how science ought to be done. The Commission's denunciation of Mesmerism as the work of the "imagination" then serves as the starting point for the authors' reconsideration of the history of psychoanalysis, notably its suppression and repression of phenomena associated with hypnosis--imagination, suggestion, and empathy--in its search to establish itself as a science in accord with the new ideal of scientific reason. Examining the new and often troubled relationship in psychoanalysis between therapeutic effectiveness and advances in theory, the authors highlight the challenge to Freudian ideals in the 1920's by Otto Rank and Sandor Ferenczi. The discrediting of Ferenczi--engineered to a large extent by Ernest Jones and Freud himself--was an attempt to "purify" psychoanalysis of the effects of suggestion. The authors discuss Freud's own therapeutic nihilism occasioned by his recognition that suggestion, by means of the transference relationship, played an uncontrollable role in psychoanalytic therapy. In assessing Freud's legacy, the authors examine evolving notions of psychoanalysis, especially the role played by the effects of suggestion in recent theoretical representations of the development of the subject. Asserting that hypnosis and the challenge it poses to our understanding of human motivation, reason, and the mind/body relationship constitutes the fourth narcissistic wound to the human ego (after those introduced by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud), the authors analyze Lacan's rejection of hypnosis and explain current resistance to hypnosis through its challenge to the modern scientific notion of reason.
Download or read book A New Language for Psychoanalysis written by Roy Schafer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1976-01-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should be of considerable interest to a wider public, since it proposes a radical reformulation of psychoanalytical theory which, if accepted, would render outmoded almost all the analytical jargon that has crept into the language of progressive, enlightened post-Freudian people.-Charles Rycroft, The New York Review of Books Schafer's arguments have considerable cogency. The tendency to over-theorize so that the translation of abstractions into the language of ordinary discourse between analyst and patient has become increasingly difficult is a fault; Schafer goes a long way towards redressing it, and his efforts to include meaning and the person in the form of his language is an achievement.-Michael Fordham, The Times Higher Education Supplement
Download or read book The Hidden Spring A Journey to the Source of Consciousness written by Mark Solms and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory new theory of consciousness that returns emotions to the center of mental life. For Mark Solms, one of the boldest thinkers in contemporary neuroscience, discovering how consciousness comes about has been a lifetime’s quest. Scientists consider it the "hard problem" because it seems an impossible task to understand why we feel a subjective sense of self and how it arises in the brain. Venturing into the elementary physics of life, Solms has now arrived at an astonishing answer. In The Hidden Spring, he brings forward his discovery in accessible language and graspable analogies. Solms is a frank and fearless guide on an extraordinary voyage from the dawn of neuropsychology and psychoanalysis to the cutting edge of contemporary neuroscience, adhering to the medically provable. But he goes beyond other neuroscientists by paying close attention to the subjective experiences of hundreds of neurological patients, many of whom he treated, whose uncanny conversations expose much about the brain’s obscure reaches. Most importantly, you will be able to recognize the workings of your own mind for what they really are, including every stray thought, pulse of emotion, and shift of attention. The Hidden Spring will profoundly alter your understanding of your own subjective experience.
Download or read book Consciousness Language and Self written by Michael Robbins (M.D.) and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consciousness, Language, and Self proposes that the human self is innately bilingual. Conscious mind includes two qualitatively distinct mental processes, each of which uses the same formal elements of language differently. The "mother tongue," the language of primordial consciousness, begins in utero and our second language, reflective symbolic thought, begins in infancy. Michael Robbins describes the respective roles the two conscious mental processes and their particular use of language play in the course of normal and pathological development, as well as the role the language of primordial consciousness plays in adult life in such phenomena as dreaming, infant-caregiver attachment, creativity, belief systems and their effects on social and political life, cultural differences, and psychosis. Examples include creative persons, extreme political figures and psychotic individuals. Five original essays, written by the author's current and former patients, describe what they learned about their aberrant uses of language and their origins. This book sheds new light on several controversies that have been limited by the incorrect assumption that reflective representational thought and its language is the only conscious mental state. These include the debate within linguistics about whether language is the expression of a hardwired instinct whose identifying feature is recursion; within psychoanalysis about the nature of conscious and unconscious mental processes, and within cognitive philosophy about whether language and thought are isomorphic. Consciousness, Language, and Self will be of great value to psychoanalysts, as well as students and scholars of linguistics, cognitive philosophy and cultural anthropology.
Download or read book Consciousness Language and Self written by Michael Robbins (M.D.) and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consciousness, Language, and Selfproposes that the human self is innately bilingual. Conscious mind includes two qualitatively distinct mental processes, each of which uses the same formal elements of language differently. The "mother tongue," the language of primordial consciousness, begins in uteroand our second language, reflective symbolic thought, begins in infancy. Michael Robbins describes the respective roles the two conscious mental processes and their particular use of language play in the course of normal and pathological development, as well as the role the language of primordial consciousness plays in adult life in such phenomena as dreaming, infant-caregiver attachment, creativity, belief systems and their effects on social and political life, cultural differences, and psychosis. Examples include creative persons, extreme political figures and psychotic individuals. Five original essays, written by the author's current and former patients, describe what they learned about their aberrant uses of language and their origins. This book sheds new light on several controversies that have been limited by the incorrect assumption that reflective representational thought and its language is the only conscious mental state. These include the debate within linguistics about whether language is the expression of a hardwired instinct whose identifying feature is recursion; within psychoanalysis about the nature of conscious and unconscious mental processes, and within cognitive philosophy about whether language and thought are isomorphic. Consciousness, Language, and Self will be of great value to psychoanalysts, as well as students and scholars of linguistics, cognitive philosophy and cultural anthropology.
Download or read book Looking After Nietzsche written by Laurence A. Rickels and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, like the post-Heideggerian reception of Nietzsche, rides out the splits and frays of the text offering an up-to-date look at international Nietzsche scholarship. Included are topics such as the collaboration of German thought with the rise of National Socialism and the alliance between Nietzschean genealogy and Freudian culture criticism in regard to technology and the unconscious, the status of moral imperatives from Kant to Heidegger, and Heidegger's alleged rediscovery of Nietzsche as the "last metaphysician." Looking After Nietzsche is nonexclusionary in the risks it takes; every thread of "Nietzsche" is pursued throughout its labyrinthine entanglements.
Download or read book Critical Theory Today written by Lois Tyson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-09-10 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical Theory Today is the essential introduction to contemporary criticial theory. It provides clear, simple explanations and concrete examples of complex concepts, making a wide variety of commonly used critical theories accessible to novices without sacrificing any theoretical rigor or thoroughness. This new edition provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading.
Download or read book Inwardness and Existence written by Walter Albert Davis and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A profound, challenging, wide-ranging book, back in print for a new generation "Inwardness and Existence accomplishes what no book before or after has even approximated: it demonstrates with great lucidity and insight the shared philosophical project that animates psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, and Hegelian dialectics. Davis roots the reader in the enterprise of questioning what is given and probing beyond what is safe in order to demonstrate that psychoanalytic inquiry, Marxist politics, existential reflection, and dialectical connection all move within the same orbit. No one who reads it will ever think about existence itself in the same way again. Davis's landmark work will profoundly transform anyone who reads it."--Todd McGowan, author of The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan
Download or read book Law and the Unconscious written by Anne C. Dailey and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we bring the law into line with people's psychological experience? How can psychoanalysis help us understand irrational actions and bad choices? Our legal system relies on the idea that people act reasonably and of their own free will, yet some still commit crimes with a high likelihood of being caught, sign obviously one-sided contracts, or violate their own moral codes--behavior many would call fundamentally irrational. Anne Dailey shows that a psychoanalytic perspective grounded in solid clinical work can bring the law into line with the reality of psychological experience. Approaching contemporary legal debates with fresh insights, this original and powerful critique sheds new light on issues of overriding social importance, including false confessions, sexual consent, threats of violence, and criminal responsibility. By challenging basic legal assumptions with a nuanced and humane perspective, Dailey shows how psychoanalysis can further our legal system's highest ideals of individual fairness and systemic justice.
Download or read book Freud and Beyond written by Stephen A. Mitchell and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic, in-depth history of psychoanalysis, presenting over a hundred years of thought and theories Sigmund Freud's concepts have become a part of our psychological vocabulary: unconscious thoughts and feelings, conflict, the meaning of dreams, the sensuality of childhood. But psychoanalytic thinking has undergone an enormous expansion and transformation since Freud's death in 1939. With Freud and Beyond, Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black make the full scope of twentieth century psychoanalytic thinking—from Harry Stack Sullivan to Jacques Lacan; D.W. Winnicott to Melanie Klein—available for the first time. Richly illustrated with case examples, this lively, jargon-free introduction makes modern psychoanalytic thought accessible at last.
Download or read book The Psychoanalytic Movement written by Ernest Gellner and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this book is the understanding of how psychoanalysis came to be so generally accepted by the public at large. The author, a sociologist, focuses on reconstructing the system of ideas upon which the theory and practice of psychoanalysis rests.
Download or read book New Media Cultural Studies and Critical Theory after Postmodernism written by R. Samuels and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-12-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that we have moved into a new cultural period, automodernity, which represents a social, psychological, and technological reaction to postmodernity. In fact, by showing how individual autonomy is now being generated through technological and cultural automation, Samuels posits that we must rethink modernity and postmodernity.
Download or read book Open Minded written by Jonathan Lear and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1999-09-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freud is discredited, so we don’t have to think about the darker strains of unconscious motivation anymore. We know what moves our political leaders, so we don’t have to look too closely at their thinking either. In fact, everywhere we look in contemporary culture, knowingness has taken the place of thought. This book is a spirited assault on that deadening trend, especially as it affects our deepest attempts to understand the human psyche—in philosophy and psychoanalysis. It explodes the widespread notion that we already know the problems and proper methods in these fields and so no longer need to ask crucial questions about the structure of human subjectivity.“What is psychology?” Open Minded is not so much an answer to this question as an attempt to understand what is being asked. The inquiry leads Jonathan Lear, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, back to Plato and Aristotle, to Freud and psychoanalysis, and to Wittgenstein. Lear argues that Freud and, more generally, psychoanalysis are the worthy inheritors of the Greek attempt to put our mindedness on display. There are also, he contends, deep affinities running through the works of Freud and Wittgenstein, despite their obvious differences. Both are concerned with how fantasy shapes our self-understanding; both reveal how life’s activities show more than we are able to say.The philosophical tradition has portrayed the mind as more rational than it is, even when trying to account for irrationality. Psychoanalysis shows us the mind as inherently restless, tending to disrupt its own functioning. And empirical psychology, for its part, ignores those aspects of human subjectivity that elude objective description. By triangulating between the Greeks, Freud, and Wittgenstein, Lear helps us recover a sense of what it is to be open-minded in our inquiries into the human soul.
