Unconscious Construction Research Articles

Social in psychoanalysis as an unconscious construction

There is no subject “in itself.” There is no subject without society. The subject must incorporate in its definition the impact of its social inclusion. It is in function of this “other” that, “from the very beginning,” individual psychology is “simultaneously” social psychology. It is there, in this field, where it is possible to approach how the conflicts that society harbors are expressed in what seems more personal and intimate, since what is lived in one’s own body also expresses, in its own way, something that is outside, in the collective field. From this place we must also think about the unconscious.

"Big, Black, and Dangerous": Primal Scene Of Racial Trauma?

Based on a presentation given at the thirtieth anniversary conference of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy in London, May 2022, this article identifies the transgenerational racial archetype "Big, Black, and Dangerous". It is suggested that this unconscious construct is most accurately regarded as a dangerous state of mind, contributing to the disproportionate rates of adultification, criminalisation, and deaths of vulnerable and distressed Black people by law enforcement agents in the UK, the US, and beyond. Well known to Black people, but not typically mentalized outside of the Black community, I argue that "Big, Black, and Dangerous" non-thinking functions as a primal scene of racial trauma. In the absence of a shared mentalization around this, high profile examples from the media are reviewed in order to elucidate and support this idea. Ideas about how forensic psychotherapy might potentially help address this stubborn dimension of racial trauma are suggested.

Особенности организации когнитивного опыта детей дошкольного возраста

Cognitive experience is one of the substructures of mental experience, which gained a lot of interest recently due to the understanding that the intellectual potential of people is the basis for the progressive development of society. Usually, the concept of experience is addressed during the analysis (or characterization) of mature forms of intelligence. Experience from a peripheral object turns into one of the basic categories of psychology and in difficult conditions of activity can act as a source of knowledge based on the mechanism of intuition. A modern understanding of developmental psychology has shown that the infant is already endowed with the ability to structure and organize the world, and without reliance on its unconscious constructs, it is difficult to understand the development of thinking and the human intellectual sphere. The features of the organization of the cognitive experience of preschoolers based on the model of intelligence where in its hierarchical structure cognitive experience acts as the initial level, over which two others are then built up — metacognitive and intentional, which characterize the structure of intelligence as a whole.

РОБОЧИЙ ПРОСТІР ПОЗНАВАЛЬНОГО ПРОЦЕСУ ЯК ПРОСТІР МЕНТАЛЬНИХ КОНСТРУКТІВ КОГНІТИВНОГО МЕХАНІЗМУ МИСЛЕННЯ

The article is dedicated the workspace of cognitive activities of the individual as a space of mental constructs of the cognitive mechanism of thinking. The relationship between of the mental constructs of cognitive space and the degree of development of cognitive abilities of the individual is studied. Thinking is considered as an unconscious process of constructing a modified model representation. The cognitive mechanism of thinking is represented as a multi-stage process of unconscious construction of the response signal in the form of a model representation of the sensory signal with consideration of information encoded in the cognitive memory space. The workspace of the thought process is considered from the perspective of modern cognitive science on modeling the activity of the neural system in the framework of the concept of neurodynamic organization and functional modes of the cognitive memory space. This approach allows us to understand the relationship between the workspace, mental constructs, the cognitive space of memory and cognitive abilities. The architecture, properties, internal mechanisms, and characteristics of the workspace are discussed. Since the workspace is formed by mental constructs, the analysis of the organization and functioning of internal mechanisms of mental constructs is performed. A dynamic instability of the workspace was found, which is caused by the dynamics of mental constructs. The study of the dynamics of mental spaces is revealed the stages of forming a response by mental constructs to a sensory signal. They can be defined as creating a mental space, creating response signal as the modified model representation, the fading of mental spaces with the display of the generated response in the cognitive memory space. Understanding thinking as a multi-stage process of "unconscious reinterpretation" of the received information can contribute to the improvement of educational technologies for the development of cognitive mechanisms of the cognitive process of the individual.

In Search of Meaning: ‘The Hours’ and Meaning Construction

This paper deals with the way in which certain meanings originate from the participation of a multiplicity of cues that emerge from different modalities. The analysis is based on the implementation of specific linguistic and cognitive mechanisms that trigger the generation of the audience’s unconscious construction of meaning. The corpus of the analysis concentrates on an excerpt of David Hare’s script (2002) of the movie The Hours: three women’s lives, by Stephen Daldry, that acts as the backbone of the analysis. The analysis is cross-referenced with parallel modality inputs (Kress 2009), such as specific filmic or visual details, found either in the scene or the rest of the movie. The approach of this qualitative study is mainly cognitive making special emphasis on the three types of underspecification proposed by Radden (2007a). It also draws from Langacker’s (2008) proposals related to attention and perspective to identify figure-ground relations as determinant in the molding of the characters and their ideological standpoints in the scene.

The myth of the collective unconscious.

This essay challenges the most basic tenet of Jung's analytical psychology, namely, the existence of the collective unconscious. Despite the fact that there are purported to be universal processes and ontological features of mind throughout all psychoanalytical schools of thought, Jung's is unique in the history of psychoanalytic ideas for positing a supraordinate, autonomous transpersonal psyche that remains the source, ground, and wellspring from which all unconscious and conscious manifestations derive. This bold claim is analyzed through a close inspection of Jung's texts that questions the philosophical justification for postulating a supernatural macroanthropos or reified collective mind. Pointing out the problems of agency and fallacies of hypostatization, it is not necessary to evoke a transpersonal cosmogony to explain how universality suffuses individual subjectivity within social collectives. Here we may conclude that the collective unconscious construct is a signifier for the common psychological dynamics and characteristics of shared humanity. In this sense, the myth of the collective unconscious is better understood as a metaphor for a higher abstraction or ideal principle ordained with numinous value.

Implicit Mental Motor Imagery Task Demonstrates a Distortion of the Body Schema in Patients With Eating Disorders

A rich body of literature has established the role of body image distortion and dissatisfaction in the development and maintenance of eating disorders. However, many of the currently used techniques require explicit comparison of the person's body to an external stimulus. As the body schema is a largely unconscious construct, explicit comparison tasks may reflect a proxy, rather than the body schema itself. Here we use an implicit mental motor imagery (MMI) task to interrogate the body schema in healthy control participants (N=40) and participants at a residential eating disorder treatment center (N=42). By comparing the time it takes to imagine making a movement along a part of the body to the time it takes to actually make the same movement, we were able to assess participants' mental image of their body (i.e., body schema). We found that participants with eating disorders, but not healthy controls, exhibited distortions of the body schema such that they believed their abdomen, buttocks, and thighs to be larger than they really are. Additionally, the MMI task used here provided information above and beyond traditional self-report measures (i.e., Body Shape Questionnaire). Together the MMI task and traditional measures provide the most information. Findings using the novel MMI task are in line with the literature; participants with eating disorders consider themselves to be larger than they truly are. Taken together, results of this study suggest that MMI tasks provide complementary information to traditional self-report measures. (JINS, 2018, 24, 715-723).

The Collective Unconscious at the Organizational Level: The Manifestation of Organizational Symbols

Abstract In this research we articulate the concept of collective unconscious at the organizational level and propose a framework based on the organizational symbolism literature regarding the sources and manifestations of the collective unconscious construct. We first present the collective unconscious from the lens of analytical psychology and suggest a theoretical link with organization science in order to develop an understanding regarding “what does collective unconscious indicate” at the organizational context. Then we draw on the organizational symbols literature to explore the sources and manifestations of collective unconscious in the organization. Particularly this research generates an integrative framework between organization science and analytical psychology. It suggests that stories told regarding the processes and relationships of the organization, the metaphors generated to develop and enhance meaning and common language serving to communicate meaning throughout the organizations are the sources where collective unconscious is preserved and manifested through the usage of these symbols. This research is important for theory and practice in two aspect. First this research provides a basis to explain organizational phenomena which cannot be explained through the conventional positivist/functionalist school of thought. Second it encourages organizational scholars to not only focus on the visible but also invisible, hidden aspects of organizational life such as the unconsciousness at the organizational level which is critical in determining the behavior of organizations.

Thinking Poverty: Basic Codes

Abstract The present-day viewing of poverty in a predominantly economic perspective is neither “natural”, nor self-evident, nor the only possible viewpoint. The perception of poverty is always part of an integral worldview (Weltanschauung). This article aims to shed more light on some elements (basic codes) of a somewhat unconscious construction of the world, which predetermine various views on poverty in different societies and civilizations. Here the codes are thought of as the most general ways and modes of perception of social reality, and general strategies of behavior within that reality. These codes characterize the specific stances of practical subjects (individuals, groups or larger communities), stances that represent an alloy of perception and action. Two types of codes are distinguished: structural and formative (cultural, civilizational). The structural codes are only two in number: the dual and the hierarchic, while the formative specifically characterize an individual culture or civilization. The different types are reconstructed with reference to a number of historical studies. Among the formative codes, special attention is devoted to those specific for the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic civilizations.

Dream or Dilemma: The Unconscious Construction of the Modern House

Over time, balloon-frame construction has been debased, promoted, and then submerged into a collective cultural unconscious. In the nineteenth-century, diverse methods of house construction gradually combined into a single way of building. This created a “massive system”—a type of practice that technology historian Thomas Hughes describes as ubiquitous and resistant to change—including every point of material production to every scale of application, from forestry to urban design, including many unsustainable practices. How will things change? Either the system will adopt token improvements or there will be radical change, perhaps returning our ways of building to more diverse practices of construction. This article revisits material presented in this journal nearly twenty years ago, analyzing new data and introducing concepts of knowledge conversion, hybridity, and the social construction of technology to develop a history of wood framing that is rich and contingent, and that reveals, discusses, and elaborates implications of our indifferent use of light-wood frame construction.

I’m not black, I’m not white, what am I? The illusion of the color line

Discussions of the racial “color line” in the United States are often framed in terms of “Black and White,” addressing the historical subjugation and oppression of African-Americans, the dynamics of White privilege, and the relationship between the two. Although a necessary point of critical inquiry, what is at times lost in these conversations are the ways in which the color line functions as an illusion which reifies – and in fact codifies – an unconscious construction in which racial discussions have only two terms, Black and White. Black or Blackness, and White or Whiteness, refer to specific cultural, social, and identity performances which exclude other racialized experiences (for example, Latinos, Asians, South Asians, etc.) as well as those subjectivities which do not fit neatly into their presumed racial identifications (for example, African Americans who are “not Black enough”). Taking my own experience of Latino ethnic ambiguity as a source of data, I will argue that two perpendicular conversations need to be entertained. On the one hand a critical analysis of race and the influence of anti-Black racism and colorism is a necessary, but insufficient, source of emancipatory politics. What is needed in addition to this discourse is a discussion of ways of performing racial/ethnic identification that does not conform to established constructs of “Black and White.” I theorize that a renewal of emancipatory energy can take place at the intersection of these two discourses.

Toward an Integrative Theory of Psychological Defense

According to theories of “psychological defense,” humans are motivated to protect themselves against various types of psychological threat, including death awareness, uncertainty, and other inherently anxiety-provoking experiences. Protective mechanisms include strengthening close relationships; maintaining appraisals of self-worth, accomplishment, and agency; and cultivating meaningful views of the world. Thus, defensiveness theories incorporate research from many areas of psychology (e.g., information-processing biases, attitudes, and interpersonal and intergroup relations), to help explain why people think, feel, and act in the diverse ways that they do. Currently, the study of psychological defense is hindered by contradictory empirical results and a proliferation of theories that make very similar predictions. This article examines a cross-section of defensiveness theories and research, highlighting conclusions that can be drawn and areas where conceptual and research problems linger. It suggests that the field needs methodological innovation (e.g., more reliable and valid manipulations and measures of unconscious constructs, more diverse methodological approaches), a more complete and reliable body of data, and some fresh new ideas from psychological scientists across disciplines.

Writing the Home: Charles Reis Felix’s Autobiography and its Negotiation of Domestic Place and Space

This essay explores how Charles Reis Felix’s autobiography, Through a Portagee Gate (2004), examines everyday practices within the Portuguese American domestic space. The analysis also explores the interaction of the domestic setting with elements outside of this space. In so doing, the essay examines how the description of the domestic space in Felix’s autobiography uncovers the unconscious construction, and negotiation, of place. Within this game of negotiating place, space, culture and identity, the essay explores how the domestic space in Felix’s autobiography represents a site where the daily interaction between the public and the private, and ultimately between societies, occurs. Exclusionary notions inherent within the ethnic discourse in the United States are highlighted by reading Felix’s text through the ethnic signs (Boelhower, Immigrant Autobiography) it generates. In so doing, the essay questions the validity and implications of taking a critical approach that centres on Felix’s autobiography being an ethnic text.

La Modernité et la métropole: Pour une lecture de l’espace urbain au XIXe siècle (review)

Reviewed by: La Modernité et la métropole: Pour une lecture de l’espace urbain au XIXe siècle Michael Marrinan Jovicic, Jelena, ed. La Modernité et la métropole: Pour une lecture de l’espace urbain au XIXe siècle. London, Ontario: Mestengo Press, 2007. Pp. xi-xix, 126, 4 illus. ISBN 978-0-9699145-6-3 The present volume of essays, edited by Jelena Jovicic, is the product of a workshop from the 2006 meeting of the Association canadienne des études francophones du xixe siècle held at York University. In the context of the current economic meltdown, realignment of former colonies, and increased competition for natural resources, it seems almost the relic of a lost past: although the conference encouraged submissions dealing with nineteenth-century cities in general, five of the six essays focus exclusively upon Paris. Moreover, they all engage to some degree the canonical account of Parisian modernity outlined in “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Walter Benjamin’s exposé for his unfinished Arcades Project. Benjamin’s view of modernity, as is commonly known, was deeply influenced by Charles Baudelaire, Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Georg Lukacs: all figure largely between the lines of his exposé and overtly in his accumulated notes. Central to Benjamin’s reading of modern Paris are the concepts of circulation—both of people and goods—and social alienation—of people from one another and from their surroundings. On his account, Georges Haussmann’s wholesale renovations of the city materialized these concepts in pavement and stone. “The inhabitants of the city no longer feel at home there,” wrote Benjamin; “they start to become conscious of the inhuman character of the metropolis.” In my view, the essays of the Jovicic volume gain traction and contemporary interest when challenging—rather than replicating—Benjamin’s dominant paradigm. The essay by Jelena Jovicic is the most sustained immersion in Benjamin’s topos. Jovicic develops parallels between the shopping spaces described in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames and Foucault’s panopticon, as well as Serres’s thermodynamic machine, to bring Benjamin’s thinking up to date, but without dislodging the seminal importance of his thought to her argument (40–2). Her claim that Zola constructs a “livre-magasin” to orient the reader as flâneur (38) is not exactly a fresh insight, but she could have strengthened her point by analyzing at least one image of the commercial interiors [End Page 167] that inspired Zola’s novel. Jovicic recuperates Zola as cultural critic by suggesting that Mouret’s marriage to a somewhat plain but good-hearted salesgirl named Denise, enacts “une sorte d’imagerie utopique” announcing “l’avenir radieux de toute la société moderne” (43). For Jovicic, this “happy ending” is a productive counter-discourse to the novel’s sustained critique of consumer society, one that completely coincides with Benjamin’s formulations of modernité and the métropole (44). By contrast, Michael Graves approaches Benjamin as a theorist rather than a littéraire. His essay attends to the drift in Benjamin’s thinking about Paris, from his first writings of the late 1920s, to the two versions (1935 (1939) of the exposé itself, although Graves is not the first to signal such a move. Central to his argument is a passage from the 1935 exposé deleted in 1839: “Corresponding to the forms of the new means of production, which in the beginning is still ruled by the form of the old (Marx), are images in the collective unconscious in which the old and the new interpenetrate. These images are wish images” (33). Benjamin accepts the Marxist precept that relationships between economic base and cultural superstructure are indirect and out of phase. Graves argues the fissure is masked via unconscious constructs shaped by psychological drives (24). On his account, “lingering remnants of the past are omnipresent, yet not immediately decipherable,” so that individuals do not perceive their environment “as a coherent group of substantial, meaningful things, but rather as traces of things” (24). Traces—visible cultural and social phenomena disconnected from reality—circulate alongside another category also produced by psychological processes: the commodity fetishism that represses “the true nature, value, purpose, and...

Reconstructing multiple identities: portuguese and afro-portuguese immigrantes in São Paolo

In the 1970s and 1980s, migratory flows of Portuguese and luso-Africans from old Portuguese African colonies towards to São Paulo were the result of the pressures of difficult and complex African and Portuguese politics. Three very different cultural experiences were in play: that of the portuguese colony, the african context, and the Brazilian character of the destination, Sao Paulo. This paper explores the migrant's complex displacement experiences, the insertion of the migrant into the new context and the conflicts of identity that this migratory process entailed. We concentrate on the recent past, which has not been extensively researched. We use a method we call "summarized life-histories", which seemed appropriate, as we didn?t know what the immigrants would tell us. We present a number of specific cases to exemplify our analysis. Through them, we can see that memories refer to events, people and places from the three continents, through the conscious and unconscious construction of multiple identities.

Emotional Memory, Metaphor, and Meaning

Advances in neuroscience make it possible to view the construction of meaning as a biological property. Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology in which emotion and memory form a seamless unified system is seen as an attempt to establish psychoanalysis as a neurobiology of meaning. In the unconscious construction of meaning, metaphor plays a salient role; metaphor is the currency of mind. I have suggested that metaphor functions unconsciously as a pattern detector and thus plays a dominant role in the organizing and categorizing of emotional memory. Consideration of the evolution of the limbic system enables us to make a functional distinction between unconscious emotional memory and conscious feelings. These observations should lead to a revision of our current psychoanalytic theory of affects.

Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming

THOMAS H. OGDEN: Conversations at Frontier of Dreaming. Jason Aronson, Northvale, NJ, 2001, 255 pp., $40.00, ISBN: 0-7657-0312-2. The title of Thomas J. Ogden's latest book refers to with oneself take place at unconscious-preconscious of psychoanalysis (p. 11). A proponent of intersubjectivity, Ogden-a Supervising and Training Analyst at Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and a member of Faculty of San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute-is author of five earlier books, including Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Happen (1997), upon which his present book builds. His aim here is to make audible to analyst, analysand, and general reader conversations arise from therapy-conversations affirming psychoanalysis as a form of human relatedness. As he notes at beginning of his book, the dreams and reveries being generated by analyst and patient at frontier of dreaming draw not only on unconscious experience of analyst and as individuals, but also involve a set of unconscious experiences jointly, but asymmetrically, constructed by pair (p. 11). Ogden calls this unconscious construction analytic third, which he defines as subject of psychoanalysis-a view he develops in rest of book. Conversations at Frontier of Dreaming will perhaps most interest psychotherapists for its lively discussions of intersubjective third. Ogden describes what it feels like to be with a patient, including his own anxiety in transference-countertransference relationship. He is refreshingly self-critical, as when he admits There have been times when I have found my voice disappointingly wooden-or cloyingly sweet, or hollowly authoritative, or embarrassingly thin. Voice (my own and patient's) is always an object of scrutiny, and so even (or perhaps in particular) these disturbing surprises are not unwelcome events, nor are they a source of worry. I am far more concerned by long periods of absence of surprise in my experience of my own voice or patient's, (p. 76) Ogden focuses on psychoanalyst's reveries during his waking dreams, and he is interested in describing analyst as both an unself-conscious subject and object of self-scrutiny. Citing D.W. Winnicott, whom he believes to be greatest English-speaking psychoanalyst, Ogden asserts we must live with paradox (without attempting to resolve it) there is no such thing as an apart from relationship with analyst, and no such thing as an analyst apart from relationship with analysand (p. 20). Ogden's fondness for paradoxes-I will conclude this discussion (which does not aspire to be inclusive or conclusive) (p. 44)-may strike reader as liberating or maddening (or perhaps both); rarely does he resolve any of thorny questions he raises. Indeed, he remains more interested in questions than in answers, and his tolerance for paradox and ambiguity recalls poet John Keats's idea of Negative Capability, which he expressed in a letter written in 1817: that is, when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason (p. 525). Unlike many psychoanalytic thinkers, Ogden offers no overarching theory (apart from analytic third), and loose structure of his argument, which gives book a conversational quality befitting its thesis, may be viewed as both a strength and a weakness. Many of chapters were first published in psychoanalytic journals, and connections among chapters are often tenuous. What is not tenuous about Conversations at Frontier of Dreaming is its recognition of centrality of language. Ogden knows language not only expresses thought but creates it: naming and describing 'me' metaphorically creates both 'I' and 'me' as interdependent aspects of human self-awareness (human subjectivity) (p. …