The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Consciousness, Free Will, Language, and Reason

The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Consciousness, Free Will, Language, and Reason PDF Author: Robert Samuels
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000880184
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
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.

The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Consciousness, Free Will, Language, and Reason

The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Consciousness, Free Will, Language, and Reason PDF Author: Robert Samuels
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000880184
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 84

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Consciousness

Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Consciousness PDF Author: Edgar A. Levenson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315532395
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
Edgar A. Levenson is a key figure in the development of interpersonal psychoanalysis whose ideas remain influential. Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Consciousness builds on his previously published work in his key areas of expertise such as interpersonal psychoanalysis, transference and countertransference, and the philosophy of psychoanalysis, and sets his ideas into contemporary context. Combining a selection of Levenson’s own writings with extensive discussion and analysis of his work by Stern and Slomowitz, it provides an invaluable guide to how his most recent, mature ideas may be understood and applied by contemporary psychoanalysts in their own practice. This book explores how the rational algorithm of psychoanalytic engagement and the mysterious flows of consciousness interact; this has traditionally been thought of as dialectical, an unresolvable duality in psychoanalytic practice. Analysts move back and forth between the two perspectives, rather like a gestalt leap, finding themselves listening either to the "interpersonal" or to the "intrapsychic" in what feels like a self-state leap. But the interpersonal is not in dialectical opposition to the intrapsychic; rather a manifestation of it, a subset. The chapters pick up from the themes explored in The Purloined Self, shifting the emphasis from the interpersonal field to the exploration of the enigma of the flow of consciousness that underlies the therapeutic process. This is not the Freudian Unconscious nor the consciousness of awareness, but the mysterious Jamesian matrix of being. Any effort at influence provokes resistance and refusal by the patient. Permitted a "working space," the patient ultimately cures herself. How that happens is a mystery wrapped up in the greater mystery of unconscious process, which in turn is wrapped into the greatest philosophical and neurological enigma of all—the nature of consciousness. Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Consciousness will be highly engaging and readable; Levenson’s witty essayist style and original perspective will make it greatly appealing and accessible to undergraduate and postgraduate students of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, as well as practitioners in these fields.

The Conscious in Psychoanalysis

The Conscious in Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Antonio A. Semi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429906110
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
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.

Law and the Unconscious

Law and the Unconscious PDF Author: Anne C. Dailey
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300188838
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
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.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind PDF Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547527543
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description
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

Consciousness and the Aconscious in Psychoanalytic Theory

Consciousness and the Aconscious in Psychoanalytic Theory PDF Author: Ahmed Fayek
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442242523
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 125

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Book Description
In this book, 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.

A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason

A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason PDF Author: Léon Chertok
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804719506
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
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.

A New Language for Psychoanalysis

A New Language for Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Roy Schafer
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300027617
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
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

Freud and Beyond

Freud and Beyond PDF Author: Stephen A. Mitchell
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465098827
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
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.

Psychic Reality and Psychoanalytic Knowing

Psychic Reality and Psychoanalytic Knowing PDF Author: Barnaby B. Barratt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317382218
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
How do we know our mental life, and how is our mental life altered by our efforts to know it better? Originally published in 1984, this title attempts an epistemological and ontological discourse concerning the understanding of human mental processes, and it aims toward a definitive thesis on the dialectics of knowing and being in this work of psychological understanding. What this work reconfronts are questions pertaining to all psychology and to all human sciences. Yet much of its focus is on the understanding of unconscious mental contents, on the question of knowing and being in Freud’s psychology.