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Time-Consciousness and Affective Identity
Abstract
This chapter combines the problems of the affective unconscious and affective identity with the minimal self, more precisely, with the notion of the (less) minimal self. In order to accomplish this theoretical step, the following discussions take into account the dilemma of the retroactive constitution of the near and distant past. Retroactive constitution is embedded in the larger problem of time-consciousness. The chapter examines the phenomenological notion of the affective retroactive awakening of the past and tries to broaden the view of retroactivity by including the phenomenon of intrusive memories. The chapter also provides extensive analyses of the Freudian idea of afterwardsness (Nachträglichkeit) and compares it with the intentional accomplishment of retroactive sense-bestowing. The general aim of these analyses is to show the importance of retroactivity in the constitution of the affective unconscious and affective identity. In addition, the chapter expands the view of retroactivity to include traumatic retroactivity. Traumatic retroactivity includes intrusive memories and also incorporates the temporal profile of Freud’s afterwardsness.
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Based on the phenomenology of the body and ecological psychology, this paper introduces a series of concepts that enable us to overcome the still prevailing idea of an inner psyche and a corresponding individualistic view of psychopathology. These concepts are the phenomenal field, lived space, intercorporeality, and body memory; they correspond to an embodied, enactive, and ecological view of the mind.
On their basis, psychiatric illnesses may be conceived as relational disorders resulting in various restrictions and impairments of the patient's lived space. The main tasks of psychotherapy , then, are to use the interactive phenomenal field as a means of restructuring the patient's relational patterns and to support his or her capacity to engage in more beneficial interactions with others. In this way, phenomenology can valuably contribute to a deeper understanding of the intricate processes of the psychotherapeutic encounter.
This paper addresses the view that schizophrenia involves disturbance of the minimal self , and that this distinguishes it from other psychiatric conditions. I challenge the distinction between a minimal and an interpersonally constituted sense of self, through a consideration of the relationship between psychosis and interpersonally induced trauma. First of all, I suggest that even minimal self-experience must include a pre-reflective sense of what kind of intentional state one is in. Then I address the extent to which human experience and thought are interpersonally regulated. I propose that traumatic events, in childhood and/or in adulthood, can erode a primitive form of “trust” in other people that the integrity of intentionality depends upon, thus disrupting the phenomenological boundaries between intentional state types. I conclude that a distinction between minimal and interpersonal self is untenable, and that schizophrenia should be thought of in relational terms rather than simply as a disorder of the individual.
Après-coup, Freud’s Nachträglichkeit, is an essential psychoanalytic concept structuring each of four concepts, four mental processes that lie at the foundation of Freud’s thinking: psychic trauma, repression, the creation of the unconscious, and the creation of infantile sexuality. It is argued here that infantile sexual drives, in contrast to the self-preservative instincts, arise from a two-step process of translation and repression in which the residues of failed translation become source-objects of the drives. These residues of failed translation have an associative resonance with adult sexuality, and the child is driven to ongoing attempts to translate them, to make them meaningful après coup. Thus, après-coup is at the heart of the human subject as a sexual creature who requires, desires, and creates meaning.
In Real Hallucinations, Matthew Ratcliffe offers a philosophical examination of the structure of human experience, its vulnerability to disruption, and how it is shaped by relations with other people. He focuses on the seemingly simple question of how we manage to distinguish among our experiences of perceiving, remembering, imagining, and thinking. To answer this question, he first develops a detailed analysis of auditory verbal hallucinations (usually defined as hearing a voice in the absence of a speaker) and thought insertion (somehow experiencing one’s own thoughts as someone else’s). He shows how thought insertion and many of those experiences labeled as “hallucinations” consist of disturbances in a person’s senseof being in one type of intentional state rather than another. Ratcliffe goes on to argue that such experiences occur against a backdrop of less pronounced but wider-ranging alterations in the structure of intentionality. In so doing, he considers forms of experience associated with trauma, schizophrenia, and profound grief. The overall position arrived at is that experience has an essentially temporal structure, involving patterns of anticipation and fulfillment that are specific to types of intentional states and serve to distinguish them phenomenologically. Disturbances of this structure can lead to various kinds of anomalous experience. Importantly, anticipation-fulfillment patterns are sustained, regulated, and disrupted by interpersonal experience and interaction. It follows that the integrity of human experience, including the most basic sense of self, is inseparable from how we relate to other people and to the social world as a whole. © 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.
There are two main approaches in the phenomenological understanding of the unconscious. The first explores the intentional theory of the unconscious, while the second develops a non-representational way of understanding consciousness and the unconscious. This paper aims to outline a general theoretical framework for the non-representational approach to the unconscious within the phenomenological tradition. In order to do so, I focus on three relevant theories: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, Thomas Fuchs’ phenomenology of body memory, and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of affectivity. Both Merleau-Ponty and Fuchs understand the unconscious as a “sedimented practical schema” of subjective being in the world. This sedimented unconscious contributes to the way we implicitly interpret reality, fill in the gaps of uncertainty, and invest our social interactions with meaning. Husserl, however, approaches the unconscious in terms of affective non-vivacity, as a sphere of sedimentation and the horizon of the distant past which stays affectively connected to the living present. Drawing on these ideas, I argue that these two accounts can reinforce one another and provide the ground for a phenomenological understanding of the unconscious in terms of the horizontal dimension of subjective experience and a non-representational relation to the past.
Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement is an interdisciplinary volume with contributions from philosophers, cognitive scientists, and movement therapists. Part one provides the phenomenologically grounded definition of body memory with its different typologies. Part two follows the aim to integrate phenomenology, conceptual metaphor theory, and embodiment approaches from the cognitive sciences for the development of appropriate empirical methods to address body memory. Part three inquires into the forms and effects of therapeutic work with body memory, based on the integration of theory, empirical findings, and clinical applications. It focuses on trauma treatment and the healing power of movement. The book also contributes to metaphor theory, application and research, and therefore addresses metaphor researchers and linguists interested in the embodied grounds of metaphor. Thus, it is of particular interest for researchers from the cognitive sciences, social sciences, and humanities as well as clinical practitioners.
This resource is the first philosophical account of the nature, role and variety of existential feelings in psychiatric illness and in everyday life, including feelings of familiarity, unfamiliarity, estrangement, isolation, emptiness, and belonging.
While the concept of disorders of basic self-experience as the clinical core of schizophrenia spectrum disorders has gained increasing significance and empirical support, several questions remain still unresolved. One major problem is to understand how the basic and prodromal self-disturbances are related to Schneider's first rank symptoms, in particular to the so-called 'ego disorders' found in acute psychotic episodes. The study of the transition from prodromal to first rank symptoms, for example from alienated thoughts to thoughts aloud or thought insertions, is of particular importance for understanding the nature and course of schizophrenia. The paper analyses the emergence of ego disorders from basic self-disorders in phenomenological terms, taking the examples of motor passivity experiences and thought insertion. It is argued that full-blown delusions of alien control are ultimately based on a disturbance of the intentionality of thinking, feeling and acting. This disturbance, for its part, may be traced back to anomalies of self-experience in prodromal stages of schizophrenia.
The Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit is central to the psychoanalytical understanding of trauma. However, it has not received much attention within the contemporary field of trauma studies. This paper attempts to reconstruct the logic inherent to this concept by examining Freud’s remarks on the case of Emma. Furthermore, it is argued that Nachträglichkeit offers an interesting perspective on both (a) the well-established yet controversial finding that traumatic reactions sometimes follow in the wake of non-Criterion A events (so-called minor stressors or life events) and (b) the often-neglected phenomenon of delayed-onset PTSD. These two phenomena will appear to be related in some instances. Nachträglichkeit clarifies one way in which traumatic encounters are mediated by subjective dimensions above and beyond the objective particularities of both the event and the person. It demonstrates that the subjective impact of an event is not given once and for all but is malleable by subsequent experiences.
Describes experiments in which happy or sad moods were induced in Ss by hypnotic suggestion to investigate the influence of emotions on memory and thinking. Results show that (a) Ss exhibited mood-state-dependent memory in recall of word lists, personal experiences recorded in a daily diary, and childhood experiences; (b) Ss recalled a greater percentage of those experiences that were affectively congruent with the mood they were in during recall; (c) emotion powerfully influenced such cognitive processes as free associations, imaginative fantasies, social perceptions, and snap judgments about others' personalities; (d) when the feeling-tone of a narrative agreed with the reader's emotion, the salience and memorability of events in that narrative were increased. An associative network theory is proposed to account for these results. In this theory, an emotion serves as a memory unit that can enter into associations with coincident events. Activation of this emotion unit aids retrieval of events associated with it; it also primes emotional themata for use in free association, fantasies, and perceptual categorization. (54 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
To many psychoanalysts dreams are a central source of knowledge of the unconscious—the specific research object of psychoanalysis. The dialog with the neurosciences, devoted to the testing of hypotheses on human behavior and neurophysiology with objective methods, has added to psychoanalytic conceptualizations on emotion, memory, sleep and dreams, conflict and trauma. To psychoanalysts as well as neuroscientists, the neurological basis of psychic functioning, particularly concerning trauma, is of special interest. In this article, an attempt is made to bridge the gap between psychoanalytic findings and neuroscientific findings on trauma. We then attempt to merge both approaches in one experimental study devoted to the investigation of the neurophysiological changes (fMRI) associated with psychoanalytic treatment in chronically depressed patients. We also report on an attempt to quantify psychoanalysis-induced transformation in the manifest content of dreams. To do so, we used two independent methods. First, dreams reported during the cure of chronic depressed analysands were assessed by the treating psychoanalyst. Second, dreams reported in an experimental context were analyzed by an independent evaluator using a standardized method to quantify changes in dream content (Moser method). Single cases are presented. Preliminary results suggest that psychoanalysis-induced transformation can be assessed in an objective way.
This article provides a critical review of the empirical literature on the role of depression and elation in biasing mnemonic processing. Two classes of effects—state dependence and mood congruence—are examined. The latter, which involves the enhanced encoding and/or retrieval of material the affective valence of which is congruent with ongoing mood, is the more extensively researched of the two and is thus the focus of much of the present review. Though the support for claims of such a phenomenon is impressive in its size, consistency, and diversity, a number of questions remain. These include whether such effects are linked to mood states per se, and the possible role that such effects may play in the development of persistent depression.
»Welt« und »Unendlichkeit« sind nicht nur Grundbegriffe der Philosophiegeschichte, sondern stehen auch im Zentrum gegenwärtiger Debatten um die Möglichkeit und Grenzen von Metaphysik überhaupt. Versteht man unter »Welt« die Gesamtheit dessen, was ist, dann stellt sich die Frage nach dem ontologischen Status dieser Seinstotalität selbst. Wie, wenn überhaupt, kann die Existenz der Welt sinnvoll gedacht werden?
Der Begriff der Unendlichkeit konturiert und verschärft diese ontologische Frage dadurch, dass wir die Ganzheit namens »Welt« als unendlich erfahren, d. h. so, dass sie unsere in epistemischer Hinsicht endlichen Weltbezüge grundsätzlich übersteigt. Mit »Welt« und »Unendlichkeit« ist daher ein begrifflicher Spannungsraum eröffnet, bei dem es im wörtlichen Sinne ums Ganze geht.
Einen der bedenkenswertesten Gegenwartsbeiträge zu dieser durch die Begriffe »Welt« und »Unendlichkeit« abgesteckten Grundfrage der Philosophie hat László Tengelyi (1954–2014) geleistet. Der vorliegende Band versammelt insgesamt elf im Andenken an László Tengelyi und in Anlehnung an sein letztes Buch Welt und Unendlichkeit. Zum Problem phänomenologischer Metaphysik (2014, 32015) verfasste Beiträge deutscher und ungarischer Philosophinnen und Philosophen.
Mit Beiträgen von Bianka Boros, Gábor Boros, Michael N. Forster, Markus Gabriel, Anton Friedrich Koch, Csaba Olay, Sebastian Ostritsch, Inga Römer, Sándor Sajó, András Schuller und Tamás Ullmann.
Not that long ago, discussions of selfhood in philosophy of mind tended to focus on diachronic identity and the so-called persistence question. Important as this question might be, it does, however, not exhaust the topic of selfhood. In recent years, the focus has shifted somewhat from diachronic to synchronic identity and given rise to a lively debate concerning the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and selfhood. Are our conscious experiences self-involving or self-disclosing (in a manner yet to be determined), or was Lichtenberg right in his famous objection to Descartes: Experiences simply take place, and that is all. Is saying cogito and affirming the existence of an I already saying too much?.
Recollections of unexpected and emotional events (called 'flashbulb' memories) have long been the subject of theoretical speculation. Previous meetings have brought together everyone who has done research on memories of the Challenger explosion, in order to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon of flashbulb memories. How do flashbulb memories compare with other kinds of recollections? Are they unusually accurate, or especially long-lived? Do they reflect the activity of a special mechanism, as has been suggested? Although Affect and Accuracy in Recall focuses on flashbulb memories, it addresses more general issues of affect and accuracy. Do emotion and arousal strengthen memory? If so, under what conditions? By what physiological mechanisms? This 1993 volume is evidence of progress made in memory research since Brown and Kulick's 1977 paper.
What is a self? Plenty of competing and complementary definitions abound. Over the years, I have articulated and defended am experientially based minimal conception of selfhood. In the following short text, I reply to some objections and suggestions for revisions that Ratcliffe as well as Ciaunica and Fotopoulou offer in their contributions to this volume. Is it a viable proposal to suggest that the minimal self is interpersonally constituted? My answer is negative.
"This is a very important contribution to the slowly emerging literature on psychoanalysis and time. By examining the influences on Freud’s thinking about time and the development of what were his mostly implicit ideas about temporality, Kelly Noel-Smith offers a lively and impeccably scholarly new way of understanding the background to current developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice." - Professor Stephen Frosh, Birkbeck, University of London, UK.
"Dr Noel-Smith displays deep knowledge of Freud’s oeuvre, the relevant Ancient Greek sources that Freud drew upon, and modern philosophical thought. Her expertise is synthesized into a well-organized inquiry into what Freud thought about time. I learned a huge amount from reading this clear, well-informed and profound exposition." - Professor Charles Stewart, University College London, UK.
Time and timelessness are fundamental principles of psychoanalysis yet Freud does not present a consolidated theory of temporality. In this book Kelly Noel-Smith pieces together Freud's scattered 'hints' and 'suspicions' about time and its negative, timelessness. She traces a careful temporal trail through Freud’s published works and his daunting Nachlass, and provides a compelling reason as to why Freud kept his remarkable thoughts about time to himself.
Kelly Noel-Smith combines a career in law with an academic interest in psychoanalysis and philosophy.
This chapter discusses the relationship between memory and emotions from a phenomenological perspective. Starting with some remarks on Wordsworth’s conception of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility”, the investigation focuses on the three following issues: (1) the overwhelming character of emotional memories; (2) the relationship between the past and the present emotion, and (3) the meaning of “tranquility” in emotional recollection. In order to discuss these issues, an analysis of the intentional structure of affective and emotional experiences is first developed. Thereby, it is shown how the self- and world-relatedness of emotional experience fundamentally structures our implicit and explicit awareness of past emotions. Subsequently, the analysis of the relation between emotions and the temporal structure of experience shall allow us to recognize in the irreversible nature of the temporal stream of consciousness the ultimate ground to understand the relationship between emotions and memory. Finally, discussing how irreversibility eminently comes to the fore in the experience of nostalgia, it is argued that the “tranquility” of emotional memories has a nostalgic note. Such nostalgic note conveys the awareness of one’s own being in a constant process of irreversible temporal becoming.
This book gives the substance of Jung's published writings on Freud and psychoanalysis between 1906 and 1916, with two later papers. The book covers the period of the enthusiastic collaboration between the two pioneers of psychology through the years when Jung's growing appreciation of religious experience and his criticism of Freud's emphasis on pathology led, with other differences, to his formal break with his mentor. © 1961 by Bollingen Foundation, New York, N.Y. All Rights Reserved.
Time and Timelessness examines the development of Jung's understanding of time throughout his opus, and the ways in which this concept has affected key elements of his work. In this book Yiassemides suggests that temporality plays an important role in many of Jung's central ideas, and is closely interlinked with his overall approach to the psyche and the cosmos at large. Jung proposed a profound truth: that time is relative at large. To appreciate the whole of our experience we must reach beyond causality and temporal linearity, to develop an approach that allows for multidimensional and synchronistic experiences. Jung's understanding surpassed Freud's dichotomous approach which restricted timelessness to the unconscious; his time theory allows us to reach beyond the everyday time-bound world into a greater realm, rich with meaning and connection. Included in the book: -Jung's time theory -the death of time -time and spatial metaphors -the role of time in precognition, telepathy and synchronicity -Unus mundus and time -a comparison of Freud's and Jung's time theories: temporal directionality, dimensionality, and the role of timelessness. This book is the first to explore time and timelessness in a systematic manner from a Jungian perspective, and the first to investigate how the concept of time affected the overall development of Jung's theory. It will be key reading for psychoanalytic scholars and clinicians, as well as those working in the field of phenomenological philosophy.
Many millions of people are affected by the trauma of war. Psychologists have a good understanding of how experiences of war impact on memory, but the significance of external environmental influences is often disregarded. 'Memory, War and Trauma' focuses on our understanding of the psychosocial impact of war in its broadest sense. Nigel C. Hunt argues that, in order to understand war trauma, it is critical to develop an understanding not only of the individual perspective but also of how societal and cultural factors impact on the outcome of an individual’s experience. This is a compelling book which helps to demonstrate why some people suffer from post-traumatic stress while other people don’t, and how narrative understanding is important to the healing process. Its multidisciplinary perspective will enable a deeper understanding of both individual traumatic stress and the structures of memory.
The notion of narrative is topical and contentious in a wide range of fields, including philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis, historical studies, literature. The book engages with all these areas of discourse and focuses on the ways in which we think about our lives in narrative terms. The notion of narrative is introduced, and then the way we engage with the past in narrative terms is discussed. This involves an exploration of the essentially perspectival nature of narrative thinking, which gains support from much recent empirical work on memory. A 'case study' of grief, extending to a discussion of the crucial notion of 'closure', draws on literary examples and work in psychoanalysis. The book then turns to narrative thinking about our future. The many structural parallels between our imaginings of the future and our memories of the past and the role of our emotions in response to what we imagine in thinking about our future in the light of our past are discussed. This is followed by a second 'case study', of self-forgiveness. Agreeing with those who are sceptical about the idea that there is such a thing as a narrative self, the book nevertheless argues that having a narrative sense of self, quite distinct from any metaphysical notion of selfhood, is at the heart of what it is to think of ourselves, and others, as having a narratable past, present, and future.
The present paper contributes to the analysis and understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the perspective of Husserlian phenomenology. The particular approach taken integrates the experience of a PTSD trigger into Husserl’s descriptive framework of noematic constitution. By analyzing the constituent makeup of a particular object that acts as a trigger for PTSD symptoms, a descriptive account of how an ordinary noematic correlate becomes a pathological traumatic correlate is provided. This is done in three steps. First, the traumatic correlate is shown to emerge by way of a judgment. Then, the role of the Ego will be examined to identify the point where the intentional relation between sufferer and traumatic correlate becomes pathological. Third, a phenomenological description of belief characteristics indicates the mechanism by which this pathology is maintained. I conclude by showing the connection between a phenomenological account of PTSD triggers and the current therapeutic practice of prolonged exposure therapy.
First published in 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s monumental Phénoménologie de la perception signalled the arrival of a major new philosophical and intellectual voice in post-war Europe. Breaking with the prevailing picture of existentialism and phenomenology at the time, it has become one of the landmark works of twentieth-century thought. This new translation, the first for over fifty years, makes this classic work of philosophy available to a new generation of readers.
Addressing the matter of attention from a phenomenological perspective as it bears on the problem of becoming aware, I draw on Edmund Husserl's analyses and distinctions that mark his “genetic” phenomenology. I describe several experiential levels of affective force and modes of attentiveness, ranging from what I call dispositional orientation and passive discernment to so-called higher levels of attentiveness in cognitive interest, judicative objectivation, and conceptualization. These modes of attentiveness can be understood as motivating a still more active mode of reflective attention, i.e., philosophical attentiveness, and to this extent, even it would be subject to varying influences of affection. What role, if any, does affection play in a peculiar kind of reflective attention that is phenomenological? I conclude by briefly considering phenomenological reflective attentiveness and its relation to affection.
Narrative thinking has a very important role in our ordinary everyday lives—in our thinking about fiction, about the historical past, about how things might have been, and about our own past and our plans for the future. In this paper, which is part of a larger project, I will be focusing on just one kind of narrative thinking: the kind that we sometimes engage in when we think about, evaluate, and respond emotionally to, our own past lives from a perspective that is external to the remembered events. Being able to do this is an essential part of what it is to have a narrative sense of self. Sometimes, I will suggest, we fail to have such responses—we are not able to think and feel as we should about an episode in our lives. On such occasions, there is a gap in our narrative sense of self—a gap which opens up especially where the past is in some sense tragic or traumatic. The desire to close this gap is what I will call a desire for emotional closure.
Nachtrglichkeit provides the memory, not the event, with traumatic signifi cance and signifi es a circular complementarity of both directions of time. Conceived by Freud as early as 1895 in the Project for a scientifi c psychology, the concept remains in his work without offi cial status but through its character of biphasic development and latency indispensable for understanding temporal connections and psychic causality. As an implicit principle it is linked with the postponement and biphasic onset of sexual life … and retains its sometimes hidden importance until the late Moses study. Temporarily virtually forgotten, it was recalled to memory by Lacan in 1953. Translations into French as après-coup and into English as ‘deferred action’ emphasized the two vectors (retroactivity and after-effect) separately which are united in the substantive form coined by Freud. Unnoticed, it played a part in many aspects of clinical practice, especially in Winnicott's Fear of breakdown and the subsequent (nachtrglich) working through of unconscious infantile and transgenerational confl icts. The author uses a clinical illustration to elucidate the belated understanding of the striving for non-existence in Winnicott's sense. Wolfgang Loch extended Freud's concept of Nachtrglichkeit in a constructivist way, advocating an art of interpretation as an innovative enterprise through which connections are not only unmasked but also created, constituted by subsequent (nachtrglich) reinterpretation of a subjective past. Very briefl y the author refers to the interdisciplinary reception of the concept of Nachtrglichkeit, especially in cultural studies.
The phenomenology of inner temporalizing developed by Edmund Husserl provides a helpful framework for understanding a type of experiencing that can be part of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). My paper extrapolates hints from Husserl's work in order to describe those memories — flashbacks — that come so strongly to consciousness as to overtake the experiencer. Husserl's work offers several clues: his view of inner temporalization by which conscious experiences flow in both a serial and a nonserial manner; a characterization of process memory as distinct from representational memory; and the notion of telos, which takes human subjectivity as intrinsically changeable, for example, by means of a retroactive cancellation that would allow the PTSD experiencer to re-process the original meaning of the traumatic experience into a meaning that fits the current situation and thus allows a recovery.
This paper investigates the claims made by both Freudian psychoanalysic thought and Husserlian phenomenology about the unconscious. First, it is shown how Husserl incorporates a complex notion of the unconscious in his analysis of passive synthesis. With his notion of an unintentional reservoir of past retentions, Husserl articulates an unconscious zone that must be activated from consciousness in order to come to life. Second, it is explained how Husserl still does not account for the Freudian unconscious. Freud's unconscious could be called, in phenomenological terms, a repressed retentional zone that differs from both near and far retention. Finally, an analysis is offered for the significance of this psychoanalytic argument for phenomenology. Does phenomenology provide a complete account of the psychical life of the subject without the Freudian unconscious? Does phenomenology suggest, as is often done, that Freud's discovery of the unconscious is a fantastical invention? Or, does the Freudian unconscious represent a true stumbling block for phenomenology?