Individual Psyche Research Articles

The Self as Hypernoetic Intellect in Plotinus’ Philosophy

The article examines the nature of the self in Plotinus’ philosophy and particularly what scholars have called the mobile or fluid self, as opposed to the static, hierarchical structure of the individual soul. This freely moving self, able to fall into the sensible realm and return to the One, is one of the most intriguing ideas of Plotinus. However, there seems to have been little attempt to locate this self within the Plotinian metaphysics and anthropology. In the paper it is argued that the most probable metaphysical seat of this self is the transcendent, hypernoetic aspect of the intellect, due to its inchoate and potential nature as well as to its closeness to the One.

MATERIAL BASIS OF ETHICAL ATTITUDE TOWARDS DESIRE IN ANCIENT EASTERN RELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEMS

Purpose of this article is to study the phenomenon of desire in Ancient Chinese and ancient Indian society, to reveal a material basis for the appearance and formation of the specific ethical attitude towards desire in the philosophical reflection of ancient thinkers. To fulfil this purpose, we should study and analyse methodology of desire studies in philosophical and psychological literature, analyse the ethical attitude towards desire in religious and philosophical texts of Chinese and Indian thinkers, understand social and economic basis of such an ethical attitude, that is to establish material basis of desire as the specific form of psychic activity and to recreate the logic of its development. Theoretical basis. Culturological and economic studies of orientalists and dialectical logic. Originality. The paper presents the analysis of the perspectives and drawbacks of different approaches in desire studies. Research of ethical attitude towards the desire in Ancient China and India allowed us to recreate the logic of social relations and the level of productive forces in that society. The ideological foundation of conservation and recreation of power and property relations was found in the religious doctrine of suppression of individual desires. The connection between desire formation and division of labour and its preservation in the religious, political and legal forms of social consciousness was shown. Methodological perspectives of dialectical logic were defined in the study of logical and historical coincidence in the further development of the phenomenon and the notion of desire. Conclusions. Analysis of modern philosophical and psychological literature has revealed methodological drawbacks in desire studies, as they are focused on studying desire’s notion, its representation or separate aspects of desire in individual psyche disregarding its inner logic and material basis of its becoming. Studies of the ethical attitude towards desire in Eastern culture have shown the consensus in desire suppression of individuals and similarities between Ancient Chinese and Indian cultures. There is shown significance and material basis of the transcendental law suppressing the desires even of the higher classes of the oriental society. The methodological approach stated in this article can be applied for further desire studies of Ancient Greece culture, Christian ethics and modern society.

Place Memory and the Body

Christopher Bache’s work, Dark Night Early Dawn (2000) draws on his experiences in altered states of consciousness to illustrate how the individual psyche is deeply interlaced with the minds, emotions and life events of others across time and space. He suggests that this interconnectedness enables us to go beyond healing personal psychological pain, to help heal individual and collective suffering. Bache’s account concentrates on what might be called the world of “spirit” rather than matter. The current paper is an endeavour to extend his work into the world of matter through theoretical exploration and physical engagement with body and land. To this end, I present a heuristic enquiry into two psycho-geographic journeys made at sites of collective suffering in rural Scotland. While working in altered states of consciousness and engaging in somatic practice, I felt residues of what seemed to be this suffering, coming to consciousness through my body. The work of understanding and honouring this involved performance, ritual and artwork. My suggestion is that such embodied practice allows both a profound acknowledgement of historical events and a therapeutic release of pain. Working in this way may also show us how deeply our bodies and minds are woven into the rest of nature. Once we experience this, places can come alive to us in a different way. Matter is no longer a dead substance for humans to use at will. It is a mystery that we are all part of, and one that invites our deepest respect and care. KEYWORDS interconnectedness, parapsychology, altered states of consciousness, ecopsychology, place memory.

The Rule of Law in the International Context

Among the ‘hot topics’ of the 21st century, proudly sits the doctrine of the rule of law. A mysterious and vastly debated concept which still baffles even the most highly regarded academics of our times, mainly because the concept of the rule of law has become so far removed from its original meaning so as to create discontent in the souls of individuals. The international context of the rule of law is met with even more disapproval. The domestic discontent regarding the precise meaning of the principle is magnified ten times and combined with vagueness because of the lack of proper and explicit codification of the principle in the international framework. This article will address those issues which are identified in the universal context of the rule of law through analysing various positions as presented in the international framework. Moreover, the rule of law will also be examined in light of the democratic principle and whether these two are interlinked so as to form a more absolute form of justice. By observing the concept of the rule of law using the established international framework, it will be concluded that the rule of law, in its form is not just a mere nameless principle floating in the ether. However, the principle lacks an essential element which arguably determines its validity.

Identified Patient: Apartheid Syndrome, Political Therapeutics, and Generational Care in South Africa.

In contemporary South Africa, racism, economic exclusion, and spatial segregation remain trenchant features of everyday life 25 years after the end of apartheid. In this article, I show how therapeutic practices by black South Africans in one of the country's largest townships address the ongoing legacies of this history. Rather than treat individual psyches, therapists' practices are oriented toward the relational space between generations, a political therapeutic driven by the affective force of the therapists' own history of struggle toward a different future for black youth, who continue to be marked by the legacies of colonialism and apartheid. In the process, I track how this political therapeutic confronts the normative demands of psychiatric knowledge. Overall, I argue that rather than solely focusing on the violence of care in clinical settings, we should interrogate political generation and embodied history as forms of expertise and their constitutive potentialities.

THE NOTION OF ANIMISM: SOME VIEWS FROM PROPHETIC TRADITION AND WESTERN ANTHROPOLOGIST PERSPECTIVES

Purpose of Study: The prophetic tradition (al-Sunnah) as the second authentic source for Muslims includes guidance that touches all aspects of life, from economics, politics, laws, anthropology, etc. Some Western anthropologists stressed on debating the notion of animism which is a belief that everything exists in the universe has soul, spirit and must be respected. In fact, animism had been revered by all religions, and this theory was introduced by Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) in the 19th century.
 Methodology: This article discusses on animism from the perspectives of prophetic traditions and Western Anthropologist. By applying content analysis method, this article found that both parties have some similarities and differences. In lieu of this, Islam concluded that animism or the belief in the power of invisible spirits of people’s ancestors and the spirits of nature to influence the fortunes of humans on earth are blasphemous and deviant. While in view of Anthropologist, animism puts more emphasis on the uniqueness of each individual soul. Animists see themselves on roughly equal footing with other animals, plants, and natural forces, and subsequently, have a moral imperative to treat these agents with respect.
 Implications/Applications: The implications for this kind of studies will open to discussions about anthropology through multi background and methods of data collection.

The Corpus of Hebrew and Jewish Autos Sacramentales: Self-deception and Conversion

Abstract This article identifies a set of plays written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by ‘new Jews’ in the Western Sephardi Diaspora, as autos sacramentales. It discusses essential characteristics of this genre, such as the dual—theomachic and psychomachic—level, the triangle constellation of allegorical characters with human nature in its center and the representatives of good and evil on both sides, and the parallelism created in the play between the cosmic story, the story of humanity, and the story of the individual human soul. It is argued that these characteristics are to be found in plays written by Jews in the Early Modern Era. The article maintains that the appearance of this corpus of plays in the history of Jewish writing indicates that an underlying structure of the psychic and historical consciousness of Western culture had not skipped the Jewish cultural world.

Introduction

Ugly emotions like envy and greed tend to emerge ethnographically through accusations (as opposed to self-attribution), de-centring the individual psyche and drawing attention to how emotions are deployed in broader projects of moral policing. Tracking the moral, social dimension of emotions through accusations helps to account concretely for the political, economic and ideological factors that shape people’s ethical worldviews – their defences, judgements and anxieties. Developing an anthropological understanding of these politics of accusation leads us to connect classical anthropological themes of witchcraft, scapegoating, and inter- and intra-communal conflict with ethnographic interventions into contemporary debates around speculative bubbles, inequality, migration, climate change and gender. We argue that a focus on the politics of accusation that surrounds envy and greed has the potential to allow for a more analytically subtle and grounded understanding of both ethics and emotions.

Maud Mannoni and Piera Aulagnier on Mental Illness and Disability: Parents at the Boundary between Society and Childhood (France, 1960–80)

This article reads Maud Mannoni's The Retarded Child and the Mother (1973) and L'éducation impossible (1973) in the context of French ‘institutional analysis’ in order to nuance criticism of Mannoni's work, particularly the criticism that Mannoni blamed mothers for the conditions of their children. Institutional analysis emerged in France after World War II. Institutional analysts drew from psychotherapy, sociology, and education in order to question power dynamics and the consequences of bureaucracy in their areas of research. Although often overlooked, this movement influenced Mannoni just as much as commonly acknowledged influences like Jacques Lacan and the anti-psychiatry movement. Moreover, connecting the preoccupations of institutional analysis with a more Lacanian approach, the thought of the understudied yet brilliant French psychoanalyst Piera Aulagnier (1923–90) offers crucial insights into the way political and social structures shape individual psyches. Retrieving these influences, we argue that Mannoni did not blame individual mothers for their children's pathologies. Instead, she identified the social and political dimensions of psychopathologies and suggested tackling the roots of psychic diseases in social institutions.

Psychosis and the Desire for Externalization in the Individual Psyche and Neo‐Liberal Society

Psychoanalysts have written about working with psychotic and severely disturbed people, but most of this work comes from the 1970s. Since then, there has been a notable absence of this pioneering clinical work. Reflecting on why this may have occurred, the author also suggests that many of these valuable theories around psychosis and its causes, such as trauma or unrecognized trans‐generational pain, are applicable to some of the current political and social malaise that confronts our time.

Bates, C.Vital Bodies: Living with Illness. Bristol: Policy Press. 2019. 113 pp £75.00 (hdbk) £21.99 (pbk) £21.99 (ebk) ISBN 978‐1‐4473‐3506‐1

Over the last two decades sociological debates around the body and embodiment have gained momentum, not the least in answer to predominant figures calling for the body to be brought into the focus of research. In her book “Vital Bodies: Living with Illness” Charlotte Bates seeks to add to these discourses by analysing the lived experience of illness in everyday life. The book is the result of a 1-year-long ethnographic research with twelve participants who were all navigating their everyday life experiences under the influence of a chronic condition. The conditions, which participants had been diagnosed with, ranged from asthma, bipolar disorder, depression, type 1 diabetes, epilepsy and joint hypermobility syndrome to muscular dystrophy and rheumatoid arthritis. The author highlights that despite this wide range of illness experiences, there are commonalities in individuals’ narratives and in how these participants navigated their everyday lives. For Bates, the aim of the book was not to mull over negative experiences, but to describe how individuals manage and indeed triumph over difficult situations. Bates emphasises how for chronically ill individuals the body is never truly “absent” as Leder (1990) describes, but becomes the focus of attention in situations that would not warrant any thoughts among non-ill individuals. To demonstrate the extraordinary impact mundane activities may have, the book's first three chapters focus on these mundane everyday experiences: 1 Eat, 2 Exercise and 3 Sleep. These three chapters are followed by an insert of 41 pages of images produced, co-produced and supplied by the participants. The subsequent chapters discuss wider bodily functions in 4 Genes and organs, 5 Feet and legs and 6 Hands and hearts. The introduction and conclusion bring together the key themes from all chapters into one coherent narrative. An additional 14-page appendix outlines Bates's approach towards the methodology and methods in the research she describes in the book. The book makes for fascinating reading around the ill body and everyday activities that would otherwise not be considered as worthy of research and relevant enough to be discussed. For example, for some individuals eating is no longer satisfying hunger or a social event as it would be for the general population. For Bates's participants, eating becomes a way to monitor health as weight-loss or weight-gain may be an indication for a progressing illness and to manage symptoms, especially where specific food groups are considered to exacerbate or even trigger pain responses. Similarly, exercise and sleep are also tightly organised endeavours. The routines around eating, exercising and sleeping therefore take on an entirely new meaning. On the other hand, the internal and external bodily functions described in chapters 4–6 allow the reader to understand empathically how in-tune with their bodies and their environment these twelve ill individuals are. For example, Bates explains that losing muscular strengths in legs not only results in individuals’ appearances changing outwardly, but also in adjusting everyday activities and distances. Not having the usual strength means participants need to know whether they can cope to walk to their local shops and amenities or not; they therefore gain an unusually in-depth understanding of their living environments. Throughout the book Bates seeks to highlight the longitudinal aspect of her work, which, for many participants, meant a deterioration of their initial health status. During the process of writing up her book, which was 7 years after the original study, Bates decided to contact her participants to follow up on their experiences. In each chapter Bates is able to add an update on some participants’ journeys, which indicates the personal relationship Bates would have developed with her participants whilst in the field. It is this emerging personal relationship and the methodological approach to embodied and sensory research that would have made this book an outstanding contribution to the field. As it stands, the book feels like an attempt to reconcile what is assumed to be an academic book on bodies, embodiment and the sociology of health and illness with what must have been an emotional, transformative and exciting research endeavour. The presentation of the image insertions, the appendix and the ad-hoc updates render the book somewhat disjointed. That being said, the rich detail of raw data enables the reader to engage with the illness narratives at an experiential level that conventional sociological treatises of the body may lack. Overall, the book provides an exceptional insight into the psyche and everyday negotiations of individuals with illnesses by truly encapsulating what it means to live with an illness, and as such presents an important contribution to the sociology of health and illness.

System System dynamics in in-depth psychology - a possible study of the dream

Everything existing in this world exists in some kind of system. No living being or matter can be abstracted from the system where it came from and to which it belongs. Therefore, the mental life of the human being is part of the so-called world soul and is subjected to the invisible laws of the system dynamics like, for example, in the family, the social system, the national dynamics, and in the whole existence as well. The dreaming, on the other hand, as a psychological aspect of the sleep, is part of the mental system and is subjected to the laws of the individual soul, but also to the influence of the broader mental dimension, especially the subsystem called unconsciousness. This theoretical paper will deal with in-depth analysis, exploration, and explanation of the phenomenon of system dynamics in the dreaming and tries to inform about the world of the dream from a system-dynamic aspect, thus looking at the dream as part of the overall bio-psycho-social whole.

Neurophenomenology and Neoplatonism

Abstract The worldview emerging from neurophenomenology is consistent with the phenomenological insights obtained by Neoplatonic theurgical operations. For example, gods and daimons are phenomenologically equivalent to the archetypes and complexes investigated in Jungian psychology and explicated by evolutionary psychology. Jung understood the unconscious mind and physical reality to have a common root in an unus mundus (with physical and psychical aspects). Parallel reductions in the phenomenological and neurological domain imply elementary constituents of consciousness associated with simple physical systems, that is, natural processes experienced both externally (objectively) and internally (subjectively). Analysis reveals they have both an eternal formal structure and a material substrate that allows the formal structure to evolve in time with both phenomenal and physical aspects. Since all physical processes fit this description, a form of panpsychism is implied. These developments can inform our understanding of the Forms, the World Soul, and individual souls in Neoplatonism.

Narrative bioethics in the search of “other” world (on example of the J. Steinbeck’s novel “the grapes of wrath”)

The perspective foreshortening of bioethical discourse known as narrative bioethics is analysed in article. This analysis is realized on example of the novel “The Grapes of wrath” of the outstanding American author John Steinbeck. Deconstruction in its ethical aspect of the discourse of justice is used as method of bioethical reflection. The text of the novel is interpreted as pharmacon, medical remedy, medicine for the human individual soul and for all social organism. The result of the analysis is the principle that “other” world is not at all real socially-cultural place existing somewhere on the Earth. People themselves (Joads’family in the novel) are bringing in themselves this “other” world: world of humanity, good, justice which excludes individualism and aggression. Thus “other” world is the discourse of bioethics as the “science of survival” in the face of inhuman capitalistic system. Given discourse can serve for the basis of the creation of global bioethos as real space of justice and new, bioethical metanarrative which is able to be real alternative to economical discourse of total capital.

Analisis Penggunaan Gadget Terhadap Pola Komunikasi Keluarga

Indonesia merupakan negara yang menempati urutan kedua didunia dalam penggunaan gadget. Semakin meningkatnya jumlah pengguna gadget di era modern ini, banyak menyebabkan efek negatif bagi manusia, dimana salah satunya yakni menurunnya pola komunikasi efektif antara anak remaja dengan orang tua. Tujuan penelitian ini yaitu untuk mengetahui hubungan antara penggunaan gadget terhadap pola komunikasi dengan keluarga pada siswa-siswi kelas x di SMK Yabhinka Kota Cilegon. Desain penelitian cross sectional, penelitian dilakukan pada bulan juni 2018, dan responden 77 orang. Hasil penelitian menunjukan bahwa dari 45 responden dengan penggunaan gadget sering terdapat 44 orang (97,8%) yang pola komunikasi dengan keluarganya kurang baik dan 1 (2,2%) yang pola komunikasi dengan keluarganya baik. 32 responden dengan penggunaan gadget kadang-kadang terdapat 5 orang (15,6%) yang pola komunikasi dengan keluarganya kurang baik dan 27 orang (84,4%) yang pola komunikasi dengan keluarganya baik. Berdasarkan hasil uji chi square menunjukan bahwa nilai p = 0,000 (< 0,05) dan nilai OR (Odss Ratio) 237. Kesimpulannya adanya hubungan antara penggunaan gadget terhadap pola komunikasi dengan keluarga karena ditemukan banyaknya responden yang menyalahgunakan gadget, yakni kecanduan gadget (bermain game disaat jam pelajaran berlangsung), mempunyai jiwa individual, minimnya komunikasi yang efektif, dan interaksi yang serba membutuhkan gadget sebagai medianya

Castration, Circumcision, Binding: Fathers and Agents of Socially Accepted Violence

This paper focuses on the psychology of a neglected phenomenon—that of socially accepted violence. It offers a Lacanian informed model for the understanding of those who are granted with the authority to carry out particular forms of sanctioned violence—parents in relation to their authoritative role as agents of Law in the family. The paper discusses both the rite of circumcision and the biblical story of the Akedah as paradigmatic examples of socially accepted violence and builds on them to explore potential psychological configurations that parents may assume when they are socially expected to apply violence as part of their parental role. The paper concludes by applying the model on agents of law who choose to avoid or refuse the use of sanctioned violence, and with an emphasis on the role of social discourse and social conventions in the individual's psyche.

An Integrative Psychic Life, Nonviolent Relations, and Curriculum Dynamics in Teacher Education

This paper draws upon both Carl Jung’s theory of the psyche and nonviolence philosophy to re-examine curriculum dynamics in the context of teacher education. An integrative psychic life is enabled by the transcendent function of assimilating the unconscious to expand the horizon of consciousness while the integrative power of nonviolence heals the wounds of violence and promotes compassionate relationships. These theories follow different directions—the primary focus of Jung’s theory is the individual person and that of nonviolence theory is humane relationality—but their underlying philosophical principles also intersect in ways that have important implications for today’s education. This paper focuses on three major intersections: the thread of interconnectedness is the undercurrent of an integrative psychic life and the underlying foundation for nonviolent relations; the shadow awareness within the individual psyche creates a social space for compassionate relationships with others; and complementary modes of psychic and nonviolent integration provide multiple pathways for teacher educators’ pedagogy and students’ self-education. After elaborating on these intersecting aspects and their curriculum implications, the final section discusses curriculum dynamics for subjective and social transformation through analysing the interactive relationships between and among teacher educators, students, texts, and contexts.

Socially accepted violence by “agents of law”: Sublimation of aggression as a model

Abstract The term “Socially accepted violence” refers to the use of physical force in a manner that is perceived as legitimate in certain cultures. The exploration of psychological processes characteristic to those who carry-out such forms of violence must, therefore, take into careful consideration the mutual influences between social constructions and the individual's psyche. This paper proposes a psychoanalytic study of a certain type of socially accepted violence, that which is committed by “agents of law” – members of institutions responsible for the execution of the state monopoly of violence. It examines the potential contribution of the underdeveloped Freudian concept of sublimation – the directing of drive towards a socially valued goal. Ideas by Freud, Elias and Girard regarding the elementary role of violence in social institutions servers to highlight the part of sublimation of aggression in the complex psychology of individuals who carry out socially accepted violence in the name of law.

Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities. David Lawton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xii+243.

The movement of the book is recursive rather than linear; the chapters, Lawton acknowledges, are “a series of overlapping investigations” and “concentric essays,” not a “developing monograph” (11). Some of the claims that come up for repeated, and increasingly nuanced, reflection over the course of Voice in Later Medieval English Literature are as follows. Scholars need better literary-historical and literary-critical tools to account for the vivid achievements of medieval poetry, especially fifteenth-century poetry. The resources for such interpretive revitalization are scattered widely in the cultural tradition and may be unlocked by cross-period juxtaposition as well as by historical contextualization. Medieval revoicing was a creative and subtle undertaking, in which aesthetic skill, subjective self-definition, and social relation were all at work. As interpreters, modern scholars need to be better at recognizing real literary indeterminacy—and this is particularly vivid in the case of narratorial voice, which is too often collapsed prematurely into character or autobiography. Finally, our scholarly paradigms need richer midlevel concepts to account for the collective and performative dimensions of literary culture—as with voice mediating between style and character, and public interiorities at work between individual psyches and the social field.

Writing Gender with Sexuality: Reflections on the Diaries of Lou Sullivan.

In contemporary psychoanalytic writing, gender tends to be disarticulated from sexuality. While this has been a theoretically useful approach, especially as regards the critical appraisal of early traditional literature (which often assumed a facile coherence between sex, sexuality, and gender), this position too often leaves gender stripped of one of the most compelling forces in psychoanalytic theorizing, namely, its relation to the sexual. Here the diaries of Lou Sullivan (1951-1991)-a transsexual man who began writing long before considering sexual transitioning-are used to present an extended example of the intimate linkage between gender and sexuality. The diaries stand as a unique historical archive: a fairly comprehensive, prospective, first-person account of transsexuality, begun before the subject self-identified as transsexual, which documents a complex and candid subjective evolution. Situated historically during a time of enormous upheaval in both psychoanalysis and the culture at large on questions of gender and sexuality, the diaries offer an additional opportunity to consider the nexus of individual psyche and social forms.