Psychic Life Research Articles

Psychopolitics and Instagram: A Qualitative Study of the Psychic Life of Iranian Women Micro-Celebrities on Instagram

ABSTRACT In the last decade, Instagram has seen a dramatic increase in users, with women playing a significant role in its growth. Much scholarship and criticisms have been conducted on the concerns and opportunities that this platform has created for women, however almost all of which have been exclusively about white women. The present research seeks to address this gap by studying how Iranian women experience Instagram and its dominant discourse, and how visual storytelling on Instagram affects their psychic life. By drawing on over 17 in-depth interviews with women who became famous through Instagram, micro-celebrities, this article adds to our understanding of how there is an interactive relationship between Instagram architecture, users’ subjectivity and neoliberalism.

Contact barriers between Freud, Bion and Winnicott.

The author discusses the idea that psychoanalysts could benefit from a common paradigm, not necessarily a single theory, but a general frame through which to view their work. Focusing on perception as a basic modality of psychic life, in combination with the system-environment approach, could provide this common baseline. The text explores how this approach relates to the work of Freud, Bion, and Winnicott, emphasizing the interconnectedness of systems and their environments, the role of perception, and the concept of a contact barrier. The notion of tangential interlocking is proposed as a way of illustrating how the system Freud called perception-consciousness is the contact-barrier common to all the psycho-somatic functions of interest to psychoanalysis.

Ambivalence when faced with e-sports competition among nursing home residents. Rivalry and depressiveness stakes: Marie-Louise's case, 93 years old

This article comes from an academic research, conducted with old persons living in French nursing homes and doing esports workshops, led by young volunteers. With the case of a 93-year-old resident, recently introduced to technological tools, we show how the stakes of videogames competition were at first met with her fear not to be good enough. However, her involvement in the competition mustered, through afterwardness, some elements from her childhood and adolescent psychic life. More precisely, by questioning her place in esports competition, this resident mobilized both the depressiveness necessary to aging, related to the confrontation to the limits inherent to the aging process, and tried to resolve a childhood trauma reactived after 80 years. This analysis also enabled to understand how these esports workshops, beyond the opportunity for entertainment and activity in order to take the mind off a monotonous life, could become devices supporting a potential therapeutic project.

When Multispecies Ethnography Encounters a Shelter-Based Clinic: Uncovering Ecological Factors for Cultural Psychiatry.

Through a longstanding collaboration, psychiatrists and anthropologists have assessed the impact of sociocultural context on mental health and elaborated the concept of culture in psychiatry. However, recent developments in ecological anthropology may have untapped potential for cultural psychiatry. This paper aims to uncover how "ecologies" inform patients' and clinicians' experiences, as well as their intersubjective relationships. Drawing on my ethnography with Jerome, a carriage driver who became my patient in a shelter-based psychiatric clinic, and on anthropological work about how psychic life is shaped ecologically, I describe how more-than-human relationality and the affordances of various places-a clinic and a stable-influenced both Jerome's well-being and my perceptions as a clinician. I also explore how these ecologies shaped our different roles, including my dual roles as psychiatrist and ethnographer. In the discussion, I define ecological factors, describe their implications for clinical practice, and suggest how they could be integrated into DSM's cultural formulation.

Emotional intelligence development techniques

Affectivity, as a particular part of psychic life, plays an imperatively important role in man’s relationship with the world and with others around him. Emotions are involved in building interpersonal relationships and conditioning harmony in groups and collectives. There is no social situation or communicative influence that is not predicated and evaluated affectively and that does not generate reactions and emotional states. Thus, depending on the nature, criteria and intensity of emotional experiences and states, emotions can be constructive or destructive. An important contribution in maintaining the functional nature of emotions and the performance of activities in stressful conditions is due to emotional stability, which combines the role of regulation and stabilization, allowing the maintenance of inner emotional balance, and the role of flexible adaptation to the changes that occur, without negative repercussions, caused by emotional reaction.

The Unthought Asian American Subject: A Conversation with David L. Eng and Shinhee Han

ABSTRACT In this conversation David L. Eng and Shinhee Han sit down with the guest editor of this issue, Mary Kim Brewster, to speak informally about their 25-year collaboration, how they came to write together about the psychic lives of Asian Americans, their observations regarding the mental health and well-being of Asian Americans from their individual perspectives of the clinic and the classroom, and their recent work exploring the racial rage and racial guilt that Asian Americans are socialized to hold for others. Reflecting on the arc of their writing and clinical work Eng and Han speak to how centering the experience of the unthought Asian American subject, in the context of an untaught Asian American history, illuminates the disturbing thought of race at the heart of psychoanalytic theory and practice. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Fixed fantasies of loss and reunion in a mother-baby treatment of intergenerational trauma

ABSTRACT Mother-baby pairs referred to the Anni Bergman Parent-Infant Outreach Program, in New York, are offered clinical services in urgent circumstances. Mothers are typically contending with crises stemming from poverty, loss, mental illness, and the various forms of social neglect, abuse, and racism built into New York City’s legal, educational, and foster-care systems. While dyadic interventions aim to develop parents’ attunement and reflective functioning towards their babies, the nature of the trauma these mothers have endured often shuts down the critical functions necessary for growth and change. In fact, aspects of their psychic life, in a unique survival mode, actively foreclose on new ways of relating; rather they remain tethered to early trauma with varied levels of representation. For example, the mother whom I write about in this paper, Janine, was transfixed by her own birth history in a way that preserved the force of her earliest pain and occluded the reality of her baby. A central therapeutic question is how to find a way into a mother’s closed system and build upon her healthy, loving wishes to care for her child. The therapist's capacity to enter these psychic voids and revive herself through reverie creates a path for intervention.

Psychoanalytic object relations theory revised: Affect systems and the notion of drives

ABSTRACT This paper explores the concept of drives as basic motivational neurobiological structures determining the organization of psychic life. I express my agreement with Mark Solms’ radical reformulation of the general principles organizing human behaviour at the neurobiological and psychodynamic levels, his combination of Friston’s computational information theory and Panksepp’s affect systems. I agree with him that the affect systems described by Panksepp constitute the primary drives and that the conflicts between affect systems are the origin of unconscious intrapsychic conflict. I disagree with Solms in my proposition that, while the original unconscious conflicts indeed reflect conflicts between antagonistic affects, I believe that the integration of affect systems into internalized object relations determines a significant motivational shift: now unconscious conflicts are between complex organization of idealized and persecutory object relations at oedipal and preoedipal levels, and no longer between affect systems themselves. At the various developmental levels, the integrated fusion of affective components of these conflicts in effect evolves into libido and aggression as supraordinate motivational systems, but they no longer can be considered biological drives.

Hegel, Selbstischkeit, and the experiential self

ABSTRACT In this essay, I offer a corrective to the standard reading of Hegel as a social constructivist when it comes to matters of the self by shifting the focus from the Phenomenology to his ‘Philosophy of Spirit’ and ‘Anthropology.’ There, a kind-of self or Selbstischkeit is revealed, anticipating the pre-reflective, experiential of the likes of Zahavi and, by extension, Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. I argue that Hegel's conception of the self enhances our understanding of the relationship between the pre-reflective, experiential self and the self of self-consciousness, contributing to the discourse on the continuity between biological and mental life. The self, as it emerges in consciousness, traces its origins to a primarily bodily selfness which is foundational to psychical life. Habit emerges as a vital bridge between this selfness and the self of self-consciousness, offering a dynamic, dialectical framework for thinking the development of the self of self-consciousness in and out of its bodily context.

Yogalebrities: The postfeminist, fashionable construction of ‘psychic life’ on social media

The appeal and impact of social media influencers within contemporary consumer culture has been a much-explored topic in fashion and media research. However, there are limited studies of yogalebrities – celebrity yoga practitioners who gain global visibility and following through branded product endorsements and modelling contracts – despite their leading role within the culturally and economically significant wellness industry. Furthermore, while the existing scholarship considers the intersections between consumer culture and spirituality, it is yet to grant due recognition to the active production and consumption of fashionable spiritual feminine identities produced on and through prevalent social media. Drawing on the combined insights from media, fashion and feminist studies, we discuss how yogalebrities represent and perpetuate normative ideals about femininity and its spiritual dimensions. We ground the discussion in the analysis of two different cases of yogalebrities: celebrity influencer Sjana Elise and micro-influencer Jessamyn Stanley. We demonstrate how they fold entrepreneurial opportunities into self-actualizing, self-branded intimate narratives to seek legitimacy and commercial success, and how their audience engagement capitalizes on, commodifies and stylizes spiritual values that underpin western yoga philosophy. By documenting these complex tactics, we contribute to fashion studies’ and feminist media studies’ understanding of the mediatized and increasingly fashionable psychic life of women.

The Psychic Life of Liberation: From the Shatat

In the face of Israel’s ongoing genocidal atrocities in Palestine, Arab activists in the shatat articulate rage, grief, and resistance within the confines of a colonial tongue. They do so in continuity with multiple histories of Arab resistance against European and US imperial and colonial violence. In this context, the author contends that they embody a communal source of strength she calls the psychic life of liberation, a force that sustains a collective struggle for liberation. This essay shows how the psychic life of liberation is constituted by intergenerational grief, collective love and care, and a profound sense of sumud that transcends time and space.

Un soin psychique sans Psyché ? Idéologies identitaires, psychophobie généralisée et pratiques en santé mentale

Psychiatric care practices have long been inspired by humanist conceptions of psychic life, which attribute an anthropological depth to the human being, and an intentionality to symptoms. However, in recent decades, there has been a shift towards a reeducational approach. We propose to link this evolution with the emergence in society of ideological identity movements, characterized by their psychophobia and distrust of unconscious psychic life. Drawing on psychoanalytical concepts, we examine the extent to which these ideologies are rooted in a two-dimensional anthropological conception: a human being without psychic depth or internal conflictuality, perfectly identified with his or her discourse. The unconscious is denounced as the source of discrimination. It must therefore be condemned and neutralized, in favor of an ideal of transparency, purity, and homogeneity. Secondly, we argue that this generalized psychophobia has inspired normative and reeducational practices in mental health over the past half-century. In particular, we look at psychoeducation for psychotic patients, the recovery approach to schizophrenia, and activist clinical practices whose political and ideological commitments are detrimental to neutrality and an unconditional acceptance of subjectivity. Finally, we recall how psychoanalysis provides mental health professionals with ethical benchmarks for thinking about their practices, against the temptation to totalize.

Psychical Inertia: Origins and Transformations

In this article I map a set of points that could begin to tell the story of inertia’s trajectory from physics and physiology to figurations of psychic life in Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Both preceding and contemporaneous with Freud’s use of the concept of inertia to describe an element of psychic life, work was taking place in other intellectual and geographical contexts to translate this law of physics and physiology to a property of mental life. As a particular illustration of this, I examine a lecture given by British scientist Michael Faraday in 1818, wherein he makes the leap from the inertia of matter to ‘mental inertia’ and is arguably the first recorded thinker to do so in the English language. I then explore the use of the phrase ‘psychic inertia’ in 1900 by Scottish physiologist D.F. Harris and argue that Harris’s work is not only emerging at the same time as Freud’s discoveries, but that he prefigures Freud’s ideas about the relationship between inertia and the death drive in interesting ways. The final part of the paper returns to sketch out Freud’s engagement with the concept in several of his papers.

Notes on Vibratory Models of Care

This text documents a workshop presented at the Witch Institute at Queens University, August 2021. In this workshop, we experimented with the medium of the dream. We draw from the onto-ethico-epistemology of Karen Barad to refigure the boundaries of the psychoanalytic method of containment. We consider practices of care and their cosmologies outside of the enclosure of psychic life as circumscribed by psychoanalysis. Rather than interpreting the dream as personal poeisis, we play with/in the practice of collective dreaming, re-casting the dream as a spell—that is, an agential and animating vibratory force.

Collaborative or Independent? Buddhist Monks’ Perceptions of Nonconflict Between Religion and Science

AbstractFew studies have explored religious professionals’ interactions with scientific authority in work settings. Fewer still examine professionals outside Western contexts. We analyze the science‐religion interface as it exists in Shaolin Temple—an ancient Chan Buddhist temple with a worldwide reputation for Shaolin Kungfu. Drawing on a near‐exhaustive survey within Shaolin monastery and 23 interviews with Shaolin monks, we discern and differentiate two modes of nonconflict operating in monks’ psychic lives. One group understands Buddhism and science as comprising independent realms—nonconflictual by virtue of their noninteractivity. Another views science and religion as being interpenetrative and nonconflictual in the sense of being mutually constitutive. These differing orientations, which reflect established categories of “transcendentalist” versus “immanentist” religion, further correlate with different facets of religiosity: Monks with high religious knowledge tend to view Buddhism and science as independent, while monks with high levels of piety tend to see them as collaborative or mutually constitutive.

‘Teleological Mechanics of the Mind’: Herbart and Lipps on Tendency

This article sheds light on a today mostly forgotten though highly influential thinker: Theodor Lipps. It explores the notion of ‘tendency’ in his work, a hitherto insufficiently examined yet central concept of the Munich philosopher. More specifically, the paper examines how Lipps utilizes the term to describe important structures of experience. By illuminating the various ways in which Lipps refers to tendencies, it aims to reconstruct important pillars of his theory of experience. This theory emphasizes that experience has a teleological character, striving towards the complete determination and realization of the objects as they are represented (vorgestellt) in our experience. As will be shown, the description of different tendencies serves Lipps to conceptualize the laws that govern the related dynamics of our psychic life and to distinguish and examine the diverse range of conscious phenomena within it. To unveil the core ideas that guide Lipps’s development of his proposal, the article will first identify and reconstruct the primary source for his philosophical analysis of the mind’s motions: the metaphysics of Johann Friedrich Herbart. Subsequently, Lipps’s critical examination of Herbart’s proposal will be presented. This discussion will serve as a backdrop to illustrate how Lipps integrates Herbartian themes, reformulates related concepts, and ultimately develops his unique understanding of tendency and its roles in experience. By delving into his comprehensive analysis of tendencies, it will be argued that Lipps offers a version of Herbartianism.

Denial, Responsibility, Bad Faith, and Blues in Lewis Gordon’s Fear of Black Consciousness

Lewis R. Gordon investigates myriad questions in Fear of Black Consciousness (2022). He brings out the complexity of Black consciousness and the psychological, ontological, and epistemic upheavals that it provokes in a White world. Gordon examines contradictions, paradoxes, and aporias that find their coherence in his continual call to an emerging form of transcendence. Struck by Gordon’s analysis of denial, responsibility, bad faith, and the blues, the author does not explain or summarize Gordon’s thought but rather uses it as a base for an exploration of the psychic life of White power. Denial and bad faith are not mere features of this psychic life; rather, they are fundamental conditions for its continued refusal to acknowledge the epistemic and ontological dimensions of Black humanity. This discussion essay examines how Gordon allows us to see the blues as a musical genre whose relationship to suffering reflects a responsible and liberating way of existing in the world.

TRAJETÓRIAS EDUCACIONAIS PÓS-ESTRUTURALISTAS: NEGRITUDE E TRANS-MASCULINIDADE NAS ESCOLAS

This article arises through the biographical method applied to data collected in field research carried out with two black subjects, with male gender identity. Here, educational aspects that are intertwined with notions of race and gender will be gathered. To analyze the roles assumed by language in the action of construction of these subjectivities in contact with educational ideological devices. The professional performances of educators are analyzed as agents that produce perceptions of themselves and the world for subjects whose school trajectories are marked by repression. Violence appears as an epiphenomenon of violence internalized by raped students. One of the main inferences of violence found is through interpellations that interfere in the formation of the psychic life of subjects crossed by race and gender. The structuring national bases of eugenic public policies also appear as precursors of age-grade distortions and low educational esteem of trans blacks in schools.

Introduction: The legacy of Bhekizizwe Peterson for Psychology in Society

This special issue of PINS commemorates and celebrates the work and thought of the late renowned Professor of African literature and award-winning film-maker, Bhekizizwe Peterson. From different angles, the authors in this volume place psychology in dialogue with Peterson’s work, continuing a transdisciplinary conversation in which he was a consistently generous and enlivening interlocutor. Contemporary imperatives to decolonise intellectual traditions and reconceptualise personhood and psychic life in historical, social and political terms, are articulated in a societal context (South Africa and beyond, across the continent and the globe) that is repeatedly described as ‘in crisis’. In the here-and-now, the explicit agenda of PINS to explore psychology in society, entails theorising human life in pervasively dehumanising conditions of inequality, intergenerational trauma, and the precarity of planetary life. Peterson has much to say to these critical questions, and this special issue provides a unique opportunity for the readers of PINS to engage with his remarkable oeuvre of scholarly, artistic and activist work across the fields and modalities of lliterature, film, and literary and social criticism, opening up invigorating lines for re-thinking the disciplinary praxis of psychology.

Decolonising the Humanities: Reimagining Black Intellectual Life and Personhood in Southern African Contexts

This review article explores possibilities for transdisciplinary entanglements between the disciplines of critical psychology and literary criticism through a reading of the volume, ʻFoundational African Writers’, edited by Bhekizizwe Peterson, Khwezi Mkhize and Makhosazana Xaba. In this article, ‘Foundational African Writers’ is approached as a distillation of Peterson’s investment in excavating the world-making activities, writing lives and activities of ordinary people as a central dimension of the project to decolonise the Humanities. As this edited volume attests, Peterson’s creative and critical oeuvre continues to provoke thinking about the ways in which the reading of the African literary archive can assist in the wider project of decolonising and re-imagining intellectual and creative history in the Global South while also providing opportunities for new modes of thinking about personhood and psychic life in contexts of precarity, intergenerational trauma and economic exclusion.