Conscious Ego Research Articles

The collapse problem as a consistency problem. Is the quantum measurement hypothesis consistent with conservation laws?

In his book Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics von Neumann asserted that the state vector must collapse upon measurement of any self-adjoint operator. This assertion was based on his reading of the Compton-Simon experiment. However, comparing von Neumann’s account with the Compton-Simon paper itself, we find that von Neumann had completely misinterpreted the experiment. Compton and Simon had measured two angles on the same photographic plate; in von Neumann’s reading it became two successive measurements which gave identical results, where the experimenter could choose which measurement to perform first. In short, von Neumann’s case for collapse simply did not exist!In quantum mechanics, superpositions of different eigenvalues of conserved observables are freely admissible, but conservation laws require successive measurements of a conserved quantity upon the same object to return the same value (if the object is isolated and moves under a Schrödinger equation). This can be guaranteed only if the first measurement has caused the state vector to collapse. Thus collapse is a consistency condition which the theory must satisfy.Consistency problems are solved by displaying examples, or models, which fulfil the conditions in question. We therefore have to construct a mathematical model of the measurement process. This requires taking a stand on whether the measuring instrument does (Bohr) or does not (von Neumann–Wigner) have a classical description. If it does not, the ‘quantum measurement problem’ is insoluble. If it does, the problem – for conserved quantities – does have a solution, given by Sewell in 2005.The model displays collapse while evolving under the Schrö- dinger equation with a time-dependent hamiltonian; it does not have to call upon the observer’s ‘conscious ego’. Its existence shows that additive conservation laws are consistent with the superposition principle and Schrödinger evolution. Measurement of a conserved observable returns an eigenvalue of the observable; measurement of a non-conserved observable returns a diagonal matrix element of the observable in the basis of energy eigenvectors.If ‘classical descriptions’ of the apparatus are essential for these consistency conditions to be satisfied, what does it imply about the relation between classical and quantum mechanics? If the two are on the same footing, is it not possible that ‘dark matter’ is purely classical?

Cross-Pollination of Freudian Psyche and Kantian Imperatives in Dubliners

The foundation of Dubliners of James Joyce was laid on the cross-pollination of Freudian and Kantian theories. Cross-pollination of Kantian imperatives and Freudian psyche is conspicuous in ‘Eveline’ and ‘Painful case’ in Dubliners, where lies the focal point of this analysis. Cross-pollination is highly obvious in the protagonists of two short stories ‘Eveline’ and ‘Painful case’. Psychological and scientific analysis of the characters brought the embedded cross-pollination into the limelight. For Freud, humans exist as a composite of a natural, biological matrix (termed unconsciousness) and another part, the conscious ego (Tauber, 2009). Sigmund Freud’s super-ego is the womb of guilt feeling, which functioned so well in the characters of Joyce. The explicit dilemma of Eveline and the implicit dilemma of Mr. Duffy have been analyzed through the lens of Kantian imperatives.

Addendum to: Binswanger and Wittmann (2019): Reconsidering Freud’s dream theory. International Journal of Dream Research Volume 12 (1), 103-111.

Our paper aimed at facilitating the understanding and han­dling of Freud’s dream theory. We are grateful for critical comments on our contribution by Volker Hartmann which prompt us to differentiate more explicitly between verbal and perceptual representations of the latent dream thought within Freud´s dream theory. We will thus integrate the differentiation between the following two concepts in our previous arguments: The unconscious formation of the preconscious and verbal latent dream thought: The dream work by the unconscious ego replaces the sleep-disturbing stimuli – demands upon the ego – by a harmless preconscious wish-fulfilment that still has a verbal form, called latent dream thought. This process is dominated by the different defense-mechanisms of the ego, including displacement, condensation, reversal to the contrary and symbolization. The transformation of the verbal dream-thought into a perception of things: Dream work continues by transforming – in a regressive cerebral direction – the verbal latent dream-thought into hallucinatory perceptions of things. This process is dominated by considerations of representability. What comes out is a preconscious sensory perception of the latent dream thought, characterized by the primary process functioning of the unconscious ego. In this form, it is still incompatible with secondary process functioning of the conscious ego. This distinction allows for a further clarification of the term secondary revision: The sensory perception of the latent dream thought undergoes – as every sensory perception – secondary revision by the preconscious ego, forming the manifest dream content, characterized by the secondary process. In this form, the manifest dream content is compatible with the conscious ego.

Unclean stream: Representing selfhood in Joyce and Lewis

AbstractThis article explores questions of selfhood in Joyce's Ulysses and the early work of Wyndham Lewis. I argue that although Joyce apparently uses the stylistic technique of “stream of consciousness” to unravel the consistent agency of the conscious ego, in so doing his writing both echoes the discoveries of early twentieth century science and re‐inscribes the ethical potential of subjectivity. I follow the trajectory of Scott Klein by examining the supposed literary rivalry between Joyce and Wyndham Lewis in terms of contrasting strategies for representing the “I” and the eye, the ego and the gaze. In Lewis' early work with its “wild anthropology,” I trace a critique of the model of subjectivity implied by “stream of consciousness,” a critique that anticipates key aspects of psychoanalytic theory. By switching the narrative centre from the logocentric “I” to the toxic gaze of the Other, Lewis aims to challenge the metaphysical presuppositions of “stream of consciousness” and thus expose one of the defining techniques of modernist writing as deluded or fraudulent. I conclude by examining the political dimension of Lewis' early work, arguing that the modernist stream of consciousness should be seen not merely as a stylistic practice but as an ethical one (in the sense indicated by Marian Eide).

Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung by Carolyn Brown (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung by Carolyn Brown Ping Zhu Carolyn Brown. Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2018. 312p. Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung is the fruit of Carolyn Brown’s reading, thinking, and researching of Lu Xun in the past thirty years. Brown has found a recurring and clear paradigm in twenty-three out of the twenty-six stories in Lu Xun’s two short story collections, Call to Arms (1923) and Wandering (1926). Perfectly exemplified in the famous slide-show scene in “Preface to Call to Arms,” the paradigm consists of the victim, the persecutor, the onlookers, and an outside observer. Brown uses this to produce a radically autobiographical reading of “Preface to Call to Arms.” She discovers that the four most prominent scenes in the preface—namely the slide-show scene, the metaphor of the boundless desert, the vignette of the hanged woman, and the image of the iron house—all exhibit this same structure, and that they also represent four different phases in Lu Xun’s life. In each scene, the author occupies a different position in the structure, and this change not only shows the transformation of Lu Xun’s understanding of China’s problems and his deep feelings, but also registers the writer’s shifting focus from the nation, to the community, to the family and to the self. Brown later explains the shifting focus: as someone who started a literary career to heal the diseased spirit of Chinese people, Lu Xun could only imagine healing “within the domains of the family and the self but not within those of the nation or community” (211). This preoccupation with healing the spiritual disease connects Lu Xun with his contemporary Carl Jung, although there is no evidence that Lu Xun had read or discussed Jung. Brown proposes to apply Carl Jung’s theory of the human psyche to Lu Xun’s short stories, since Jung’s analysis presents a more dynamic interrelationship (compared with Freud’s theory) between the conscious and the unconscious, offering a useful model for understanding Lu Xun’s analysis of Chinese spiritual illness. Jung emphasized the psyche’s own impulse towards healing; that is, the conscious and the unconscious are pressed to integrate with each other into a greater wholeness. Viewed in this light, Lu Xun’s short stories are also narratives of healing. Brown has masterfully shown in all four chapters of her book how Lu Xun retold “the [End Page 316] same tale of an archetypal relationship of the conscious and the unconscious, of the need for and resistance to the coming into being of a whole Self ” (74) in order to create a potentially healing literary narrative for Chinese people. Lu Xun’s story-writing is thus therapeutic: it is his way of “working through” the cultural and personal realities in order to heal the social structure and the human heart. Except for Chapter One, which presents an exhaustive reading of “Preface to Call to Arms” as an autobiography of Lu Xun’s psyche, each of the other three chapters treats a cluster of Lu Xun’s short stories through the Jungian model. Chapter Two, “The True Story of Ah Q” and “Medicine” are two prophetic stories that show the conscious ego’s violent suppression, expulsion, and execution of the unconscious shadow. In this process of collective violence, Ah Q is scapegoated and the revolutionary Xia Yu becomes a martyr, and the old social order prevails. These two stories reveal the gloomy reality of China’s social malaise and Chinese people’s spiritual disease. Chapter Three offers a compelling close reading of “The New Year’s Sacrifice,” and discusses more than a dozen of Lu Xun’s short stories in Call to Arms and Wandering using the Jungian model. Brown argues that “The New Year’s Sacrifice” shows the failed dialogues between ego and shadow in the community arena. In this story Lu Xun projects himself imaginatively as both subject and object, victim and victimizer, which represents his attempt of healing by integrating the ego (the narrator) and the shadow (Xianglin’s Wife). All stories discussed in this chapter mark Lu...

Improvisation: The Astonishing Bridge to Our Inner Music

Musical improvisation is the expressive capacity of a performer fostered by access to their own “productive” (creative) or “reproductive” (mnestic) tonal imagery: a field of consciousness that includes experiences, images that are internal, combined, distorted, associated, or in competition between themselves. In the highly original form of life that is jazz, narrating means directing time: a time of epiphanies and introversions, of intuitions and revelations, of syncopated rhythms and aesthetic insights, which appear and disappear on the edges of interference between consciousness and the unconscious. The performing urgency of gestures, voices, and sounds, although arranged in the same scene, highlights the difference in individual time. In this intense activity of opposition and resolution the experience becomes an unstable territory that rests on the capacity of the body to remember, decide, anticipate, and invent. The ego reveals itself to be an emerging representation of our nerve structures and, even if conscious organization continues to be attributed to it, its role is not at all crucial. Unity, if anything, means coordination. The conscious ego is the expression of the body. In its ultimate form its unity is a biological problem.

Between Desire and Jouissance: Lacanian View of a Clinical Group Vignette

ABSTRACTUsing Lacanian theory, Macario Giraldo pays attention to two dialogues: the dialogue IN the group (the conscious and preconscious ego narrative) versus the dialogue OF the group (the dialogue of the unconscious). Lacan’s three registers of Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic are presented as background. The therapist’s listening is guided by the central concept of desire and how to access it through the uses of language in the group. Examples from the group vignette are selected as manifestation of the two dialogues.

Threshold Poetics: Stevens and D. W. Winnicott’s “Not-Communicating”

Threshold Poetics:Stevens and D. W. Winnicott’s “Not-Communicating” John W. Steen BY TURNS HIDEBOUND and exuberant, recondite and sententious, Wallace Stevens’ poems invite readers to track the orientation of an ever-changing self. “What counted was mythology of self,” Stevens writes in “The Comedian as the Letter C” (CPP 22). But especially in this poem, whose main character stands apart from and then, suddenly, among human and inhuman others, the self is rarely still enough to locate, much less to become the object of a myth. Two epigrams in the posthumously published collection of Stevens’ aphorisms “Adagia” suggest the tension at work in developing a poetics of the self in transition. The first urges the poet to advance from the individual imagination to a fictive poetics that would address a community outside the poet: “The transition from make believe for one’s self to make believe for others is the beginning, or the end, of poetry in the individual” (CPP 908). Such a mandate is consistent with Stevens’ bold, if critically contested, claims about the ends of poetry in society—that it may “help people to live their lives” (CPP 661). But Stevens checks his own boldness in a second adage, one that suggests the difficult labor of poetry consists of making the opposite movement, from external concerns to a resolutely inward site: “We have to step boldly into man’s interior world or not at all” (CPP 909). What is striking, though, is that neither adage assumes the fixity of an external or internal location. Rather, both speak from the threshold of “man’s interior” and exterior worlds about a necessary “transition” or “step” toward the proper location of poetic experience. These prose fragments suggest that the self imaged and articulated in Stevens’ poems dwells fitfully between solitude and society. In the analysis that follows, I suggest that the poetic strategies in this space, which marshal sounds and speech at the limits of audibility and intelligibility, are consonant with the poetic self’s transient and transitional temperament. By now, criticism has fully established that Stevens’ investments in the exterior world—history, politics, the news—deserve an important place in our understanding of his work. In the first few decades of Stevens scholarship since the middle of the twentieth century, most assessments of the poet granted pride of place to a world-avoiding interiority that some critics [End Page 15] have scorned as solipsism and others have praised, at times hyperbolically, as American poetry’s closest approximation to the quintessence of the lyric. Yet in the last three decades, led by Milton Bates, Alan Filreis, James Longenbach, and Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, a new perspective that recognizes Stevens’ engagement in the events of his day has emerged as a corrective. While none of these scholars claim that contemporary history was, to use a phrase from “Local Objects,” the “absolute foyer” of Stevens’ work (CPP 474), they do furnish the necessary reminder that his poetry privileges change, variation, and modulation—the desire for a foyer rather than the sense of already inhabiting it.1 To those critics who have argued that Stevens’ poems demonstrate movements in accordance with natural cycles (George Lensing), the mercurial variations of mood and emotion (Helen Vendler), and the instability of language (J. Hillis Miller), I would add that a dual obligation to the challenges of self-knowledge and the conflicts of ethics drives Stevens’ poems. The restless movement that his poems observe and demand also describes the instability characteristic of his writing’s oscillation between internal and external sites of concern. Writing roughly contemporaneously with the earliest poems of Harmonium, Sigmund Freud claims in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis of 1915–17 that psychic defenses play a role analogous to flight in the “flight or flight” response.2 Rather than provide a physical escape from danger, however, defenses permit the conscious ego a mental escape from threats by means of denial, splitting, reaction formation, and other unconscious processes of reality distortion. In my own reading, I have no wish to psychologize Stevens as neurotic, or even to apply the analogy. Instead, I propose to undertake a psychoanalytically inflected reading of his poetry because Freud...

Poincaré: el método, lo inconsciente y el caso Dreyfus

The last man who had an universal knowledge of mathematics and its applications died just a hundred years ago. He always said that mathematics should be encouraged for themselves, and its first aim was to enjoy them in the same way that painting and music allow us to. He did never pretend to be only a specialist, his way of working was to choose the ‘interesting’ facts. On the other hand, maybe we could find serendipity. It is worthwhile to know how to implement the unconscious machine, the unconscious ego beside the conscious ego. In the famous affaire Dreyfus, Poincare was asked for advise and he wrote a dossier about the graphological system that had been erroneously used.

The Problem of Representation

In Postmetaphysical Vision: Art Education's Challenge in an Age of Globalized Aesthetics (A Mondofesto) (2008) and Beyond Aesthetics: Returning Force and Truth to Art and Its Education (2009), jan jagodzinski argued for politics that go representation-a project that radically questions visual culture pedagogies that emphasize the dynamics of representation as the key for social change. Despite jagodzinski's willingness to dispute theoretical positions that are easily taken for granted, he has sustained a very specific understanding of visual culture in his theorization that neglects various forms of digital media. In this commentary, I critically examine the focus of his critique and expand it outside the realm of fine art and cinema by introducing new arenas of scrutiny, where art educators may tackle problems of designer capitalism.The underlying theme throughout jagodzinski's (2008) theorization was the tension between control and attempts to escape it. From Lacanian perspective, this followed the distinction between the non-discursive site of the unconscious (the Real) and the Symbolic-Imaginary axis that restrains the former, jagodzinski's theoretical shift from Lacan to the works of Deleuze and Guattari put his political emphasis on strategies that aim to break despotic forms of social control and free the flows of desire that are captured and commodified by the libidinal economy of neoliberal market economy. For jagodzinski (2008), the problem of representation was connected to the fluid non-identity (p. 148) of capitalism: arguing over better or more authentic and/or critical depictions of various subject positions (representing different genders, sexualities, social classes, races, abilities) does not only produce more representation but, implicitly, promotes new possibilities for capitalism to expand its markets into more refined target audiences.To seek for lines of flight from the neoliberal politics of representation, jagodzinski turned to Badiou (2005), whose writings on inaesthetics (contra aesthetics) attempt to establish a relation between art and philosophy that challenges every trait of didacticism that haunts artistic movements and artmaking. For Badiou, the ephemeral nature of an artistic event (contra object) did not offer subjects a stagnant point of identification that could be captured by despotic regimes of control. In this respect, jagodzinski (2008) called for relocation of subjectivity in art education as a necessary strategic move against capitalism because [capitalism] continues to target the conscious ego by enlarging and gratifying its narcissism through the demand of (p. 156).It is notable that jagodzinski seemed to locate the narcissist enjoyment primarily to the screen society (p. 149) and its increasingly popular production of visuality. This appears to fortify a dichotomy that stagnates various locations of visual culture ('high,low', 'commercial','emancipatory', etc.) into alwaysalready fixed relation to control. For example, he referred to digital technologies of communication as synopticon,coined from panopticon, where no longer do the few watch the many, but the many watch the few on the screens that pervade our lives (p. 149), which assumes that there is something inherently persuasive in these screens, something that determines their place in jagodzinski's signifying order. However, instead of labeling these technologies as merely forms of control, I believe that art educators need to theorize their potential as sites of visuality that can go beyond any predetermined formations and create new forms of subjective, societal, and cultural relations.In order to grasp subjects'affective investments in the despotic didactics of capitalism, jagodzinski (2009) introduced the term self-refleXivity, where the X refers to the void of the Real, the level of molecularization of forces (p. 346), which is a critical answer to discourses on cognition that do not recognize the level of non-symbolic affects (the Real) as part of subject's being. …

Violent Cases and Mr. Punch: Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean reflect darkly on the imagery of individuation

This study considers aspects of personality development present in the autobiographical visual narratives of childhood created by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean in the graphic works Violent Cases (1987) and The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch (1994). In particular, Carl Jung's theories of individuation are implemented to investigate the use of light and shadow in the presentation of childhood memory and adult narrative perspective. Archetypical expressions, such as the shadow and the trickster form the basis of dialogue between the conscious ego and the unconscious psyche in the works. This dialogue results in transcendent symbols of interrelationship between the ego and the psyche. Exploration of the graphic narratives illustrate the ways in which early childhood forms an identification with the shadow, while later childhood and adulthood assimilate the personal shadow and reject the shadow's collective aspects in order to regulate society. The sequential narratives present Jungian 'active imagination' in motion through the adult contributions of narrator and artist, illustrating development towards balanced selfhood. An investigation of the 'dark reflections' present within these works results in a deeper understanding of imagery associated with individuation and affirms the process of visual narrative as a mode for psychological exploration. The place of psychological autobiographical graphic narratives within the wider genre of autobiographical graphic narratives is also discussed, highlighting a need for further consideration of genre classification.

Interpreting Psychoanalytic Interpretation: A Fourfold Perspective

Following an overview of psychoanalytic interpretation in theory, practice, and historical context, as well as the question of whether interpretations have scientific validity, the author holds that hermeneutics, the philosophical and psychological study of interpretation, provides a rich understanding of recent developments in self psychology, inter-subjective and relational perspectives, attachment theory, and psycho-spiritual views on psychoanalytic process. He then offers four distinct hermeneutical vantage points regarding interpretation in the psychoanalytic context, including (1) Freud's adaptation of the Aristotelian view of interpretation as the uncovering of a set of predetermined meanings and structures; (2) the phenomenological view of interpretation as the laying bare of "the things themselves," that is, removing the coverings of objectification and concretization imposed by social norms and the conscious ego; (3) the dialogical existential view of interpretation as an ongoing relational process; and (4) the transformational understanding in which interpretation evokes a "presence" that transforms both patient and analyst. He concludes by contending that these perspectives are not mutually exclusive ways of conducting an analysis, but rather that all occur within the analyst's suspended attention, the caregiving and holding essential to good therapeutic outcomes, and the mutuality of the psychoanalytic dialogue.

Seeing double: the transforming personalities of Alan Moore's Promethea and the Ulster Cycle's Cuchulain

This article explores the physical and psychic transformation of Sophie-Promethea®, of Alan Moore's Promethea, and Cuchulain, of the Irish Ulster Cycle, into dual heroic identities, illustrating the psychological concerns present in the texts. This heroic process of establishing a dual identity dramatizes the creation of a balance between the conscious ego and the unconscious psyche, a pattern of individuation put forward by theorist Carl Jung and subsequently explored by Erich Neumann and James Hillman. The plot structure of the texts, as well as elements of visual/descriptive detail concerning transformation support this comparative examination and confirm a concern for an attempted resolution between conflicting psychological aspects of the heroic individual. This study highlights both the heroic failure of Cuchulain to attain this desired resolution and Moore's creation of a new paradigm for potential synthesis between the worlds of the ego and the psyche as illustrated through his character, Promethea®.

Animals and Analysis: The Grimm’s Tale “The Three Languages”

The Grimms’ tale “The Three Languages” revolves around the common folklore trope of speaking the language of the animals, the psychological analysis of which forms the basis of this article. The folklore theme of learning to understand the sounds of animals is amplified by contemporary dreams of persons in analysis, Egyptian and African mythology, shamanism, Eastern yoga, folklore from around the world, Western alchemy, and Romantic poetry. A psychological perspective on this theme of human beings learning the nonhuman animal languages is suggested, one that centers on Jung’s theory of the individuation process as the experience of the conscious ego living in relationship to the unconscious psyche, to the “spirit of the depths,” as Jung wrote in The Red Book. In addition, there is a brief discussion of differences between the personalistic and archetypal approaches to the interpretation of fairy tales in the field of depth psychology. My hypothesis is that the motif of learning to speak with the animals, present not only in folklore but also in contemporary dreams, compensates for the rationalistic spirit of the times in the contemporary world by expressing the value of listening to, taking seriously, and acting upon the archetypal images and dynamics present in the soul.

Unconscious Drives Reimagined

Freud's early concepts about the unconscious are presented along with his later definition of the id as a portion of the larger unconscious. He described this id as holding genetically determined drives that comprise the fusion of two primal forces, Eros and destructiveness. Influenced by Freud and Jung's mythological analogies, the author identifies three unconscious drives (rather than two), which she refers to as “motivators” to distinguish them from Freud's drives. In the spirit of Jung, these unconscious motivators are imagined as Olympian goddesses named Survia, Passia, and Transcia. Each may affect a person independently or in combinations by stimulating particular feelings and thoughts that may surface in any ego state. Since motivators have divergent aims and functions, inner conflicts can occur if they do not take turns influencing a person. For better or worse, the conscious Parent or Adult ego states can sometimes control or steer behaviors stimulated by one or more of the motivators.

Archetypal Patterns of Behavior

Guillemette Johnston , “Archetypal Patterns of Behavior: A Jungian Analysis of the Mandala Structure in the Dialogues of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” Jung Journal: culture & psyche, 1:4, 43-68. This study argues that Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiographical work, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, provides a reflection of the process of individuation as described in analytical psychology. Rousseau's Dialogues, a series of fictional conversations inspired by actual occurrences, is viewed in relation to the structural pattern of the mandala, a pattern that Jung saw as offering an archetypal representation of balance in reaction to disturbances of psychic equilibrium. The crisis Rousseau faced while writing the Dialogues involved the merging of introverted thinking with extraverted feeling, bringing conscious ego together with unconscious content. Rousseau articulated this merging through spontaneously creating a literary mandala that joins fiction and reality via three dialogues in which opposing voices interact and gradually move toward reconciliation. Because the Dialogues is only one of Rousseau's autobiographical texts, this study positions the Dialogues in Rousseau's œuvres and gives insight into his understanding of his intentions in writing the Dialogues and other works. It presents a brief biography of Rousseau and also offers background to and a summary of the Dialogues. Finally, it analyzes the Dialogues in light of Jung's quaternary analysis of the psyche.

Unthinking the Closed Personality: Norbert Elias, Group Analysis and Unconscious Processes in a Research Group: Part I

At first, Elias' approach to psychoanalysis and group analysis was emphatically thought out and scientific, even when he submitted to experiencing it personally. In this article, a number of hitherto unknown documents will be discussed which reveal Elias as being in the triangle between psychoanalysis, group analysis and sociological research, but above all in a bipolar tension field which he describes in numerous variations and which can be characterized as moving between an intellectually distanced, scientifically disciplined procedure appealing to the conscious ego on the one hand, and a more strongly emotionally involved technique such as free group association, which takes the unconscious into account, on the other. The second part of this article will focus on the development and dynamics of the first Congress Group (the `C-Group') of the Group-Analytic Society, focusing on the relationship between Foulkes and Elias.

Time is Out of Joint—And So Are We

We should say of this identity and this resemblance that they are 'simulated': they are products of systems which relate different to different by means of difference (which why such systems are themselves simulacra). same and the similar are fictions engendered by the eternal return. This time, there no longer error but illusion: inevitable illusion which the source of error, but may nevertheless be distinguished from it. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 126 Immanence and the Optical Illusion of Identity Consider a place where two flows of water converge-for example, where water diverted by a weir, and then flows back into the main body of a river. Regular patterns of lines and bubbles appear on the surface, forming shapes that are never fully stable but persist over time. These shapes can be compared to each other or to some model of a particular type of shape; the distances between them can be measured and their relative positions can be plotted; and, if one were to freeze the scene in a snapshot, these patterns might appear to be not surface shapes but something more stable and substantial-which would make far easier to establish resemblances, differences, and measurements. But this focus on superficial-albeit visible-effects will necessarily fail to grasp the dynamics of the invisible water flows that produce them. Moreover, the principles of similarity, dissimilarity, and spatial and temporal difference and distance, which can certainly be applied to examine these surface patterns if they are taken in abstraction, will likely be wholly inappropriate to the depths. Transpose these considerations onto the realm of the self. Freud's topographical model of the psyche often described in terms of an iceberg: only the tip, the conscious ego, appears to the outer world, while the vast depths of the psyche remain hidden. But suppose, rather than ice rising from the water, there are only the surface patterns and the projection of solidity as a kind of ego effect. ego, then, would not be the product of a repression that forms a never-fully-stable unity of the self, so much as what Nietzsche maintains is: an erroneous interpretation of the flows of psychic life.' Repression might still be involved in this error, but would play a decidedly secondary role, consolidating a misunderstanding rather than forming a substance. error would be that such a substance actually exists, regardless of whether taken to be pre-existent or constructed. One of the central themes of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy that identities are nothing more than optical illusions. They are merely apparent stabilities, which have been used as markers in order to comprehend change and difference. These pseudo-stabilities, for Deleuze, are the products of the disjointed convergence of flowing differences, and, like the patterns on the water's surface, they are no less real for being surface effects, but they do not have the substantiality often attributed to them. Deleuze's thesis parallels those of Bergson and Nietzsche, which treat the notion of a substratum persisting through change-a body, an ego, etc.-as an error that may be necessary for action (Bergson) or for life (Nietzsche), but that has no higher truth.2 Indeed, for both Nietzsche and Bergson, not identity, as a substantiality persisting over time, that grounds difference and change; rather, change and becoming engender a simulated identity or solidity: as Bergson says, it a certain regulating of mobility on mobility which produces the effect of immobility.3 status of identity as a surface effect a necessary consequence of Deleuze's project of a philosophy of pure immanence. When treated as more than they are, these optical illusions generate the transcendental illusions that surround representation,4 leading thought towards transcendence. The poisoned gift of Platonism, Deleuze writes, is to have introduced transcendence into philosophy, to have given transcendence a plausible philosophical meaning. …

Fascination as a Result of Confluence of Conscious and Unconscious States of the Ego

This article considers the psychological mechanism by which some people come to regard sadistic and murderous leaders with fascination. The initial formation of the ego in the species and in the individual is reviewed. Berne (1961, p. xix) reported that ego states of former age levels are maintained in potential existence within the personality. The authors describe how these early, primitive states of the ego reside in an unconscious state within what may be defined as a third dimension of the conscious and observable ego state diagram. A definition of unconscious states of the ego is provided that allows us to account for their influence on observable, conscious states of the ego and how and why this influence may in some people transform realistic fear of sadistic and dangerous individuals into fascination.

Shape shifting from anthropomorphic to human form: Conscious body ego development in a recovering substance abuser

Shape shifting from anthropomorphic to human form: Conscious body ego development in a recovering substance abuser