Unconscious Knowing and Other Essays in Psycho-Philosophical Analysis

Unconscious Knowing and Other Essays in Psycho-Philosophical Analysis
Author: Linda Brakel
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2010-06-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199581479

In 'Unconscious Knowing and Other Essays in Psycho-Philosophical Analysis', Linda Brakel tackles a range of fascinating and puzzling phenomena that lie at the border between psychoanalysis and philosophy of mind. These include - unconscious knowing, vagueness, agency, the placebo effect, and even explanation itself. Unique in its use of tools and concepts from both philosophy and psychoanalysis, the book demonstrates how this interdisciplinary approach can provide some unique solutions to some impenetrable problems. Following the introduction, chapter two on 'unconscious knowing' puts forward a radical epistemological view of knowledge and belief, providing evidence from psychoanalytic data and empirical research, using the subliminal method. Chapter three considers philosophical accounts of vagueness in relation to a-rational mentation, finding surprising similarities. In Chapter four, an original account of agency is developed whilst discovering that a central problem for analysands is quite analogous to an important philosophical problem: namely, when I am concerned with my own survival, just what is the nature of the 'me' of concern? In Chapter five the mysterious placebo effect is made more understandable in terms of the basic psychoanalytic concepts that are shown to underlie it. Finally, chapter six concludes the book with an examination of explanations in general, including those in the proceeding chapters. This is a book that will be of great interest to those within both psychoanalysis and philosophy of mind, offering up some compelling explanations for some puzzling phenomena.

Knowing Emotions

Knowing Emotions
Author: Rick Anthony Furtak
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2018-02-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190862076

How do our emotions enable us to know? When Pascal noted that the heart has its own reasons, he implied that our rational faculty alone cannot grasp what is revealed in affective experience. Knowing Emotions seeks to explain comprehensively why human emotions are more than physiological disturbances, but experiences capable of making us aware of significant truths that we could not know by any other means. Recent philosophical and interdisciplinary research on the emotions has been dominated by a renewal of the debate over how best to characterize the intentionality of emotions as well as their bodily character. Rick Anthony Furtak frames this debate differently, however, arguing that intentionality and feeling are not two discrete parts of affective experience, but conceptually distinguishable aspects of a unified response. His account captures how an emotion's phenomenal or 'felt' quality (what it is like) relates to its intentional content (what it is about). Knowing Emotions provides a solid introduction to the philosophy of emotion before delving into the debates that surround it. Furtak draws from a wide range of analytic and Continental philosophers, including Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, among others, and bolsters his analysis with empirical evidence from social psychology, neuroscience, and psychiatry. Perhaps most importantly, Furtak investigates all varieties of affective experience, from brief episodes to moods and emotional dispositions, loves and other longstanding concerns, and overall patterns of temperament and affective outlook. Ultimately, he argues that we must reject the misguided aspiration to purify ourselves of passion and attain an impersonal standpoint. Knowing Emotions attempts to clarify what kind of truth may be revealed through emotion, and what can be known - not despite, but precisely by virtue of, each person's idiosyncratic perspective.

The Ontology of Psychology

The Ontology of Psychology
Author: Linda A.W. Brakel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2013-08-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1135232482

In this volume, Brakel raises questions about conventions in the study of mind in three disciplines—psychoanalysis, philosophy of mind, and experimental philosophy. She illuminates new understandings of the mind through interdisciplinary challenges to views long-accepted. Here she proposes a view of psychoanalysis as a treatment that owes its successes largely to its biological nature—biological in its capacity to best approximate the extinction of problems arising owing to aversive conditioning. She also discusses whether or not "the mental" can have any real ontological standing, arguing that a form of reductive physicalism can be sufficient ontologically, but that epistemological considerations require a branch of non-reductive physicalism. She then notes the positive implications of this view for psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Finally, she investigates the role of "consistency" in method and content, toward which experimental philosophers strive. In essence, Brakel articulates the different sets of challenges pertaining to: a) ancient dilemmas such as the mind/body problem; b) longstanding debates about the nature of therapeutic action in psychoanalysis; and c) new core questions arising in the relatively young discipline of experimental philosophy.

Psychoanalysis and Creativity in Everyday Life

Psychoanalysis and Creativity in Everyday Life
Author: Gemma Corradi Fiumara
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2013-05-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1135051429

Psychoanalysis and Creativity in Everyday Life: Ordinary Genius is an attempt to create a psychoanalytic space for the quest and questions of our everyday creativity. Official creativity is normally applauded to the point of obscuring all other types of creativity, with detrimental consequences for our psychic life. However, as Gemma Corradi Fiumara demonstrates, the creative force of ordinary subjects can be as vigorous as that of our acclaimed, official accomplishments. Corradi Fiumara focuses on the unsung creativity which emerges from relationships and the world at large. She explores how understanding the operation of creative impulses in an everyday setting can crucially inform psychoanalytic clinical work. There are three main themes: Donald Winnicott’s Psychoanalytic Will Melanie Klein and the Other Side of Genius Genius: Ordinary and Extraordinary. Psychoanalysis and Creativity in Everyday Life advocates an inclusionary view of human genius, and demonstrates that creativity and genius can be manifested in everyday life with the ordinary as its focus of attention. It will be key reading for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, philosophers and scholars in social studies.

Metapsychology and the Foundations of Psychoanalysis

Metapsychology and the Foundations of Psychoanalysis
Author: Simon Boag
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2016-11-10
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1317404963

Metapsychology and the Foundations of Psychoanalysis redresses faults in Freud’s original conception to develop a coherent theoretical basis for psychodynamic theory. Simon Boag demonstrates that Freud’s much maligned ‘metapsychology’, once revised, can provide a foundation for evaluating and integrating the plethora of psychodynamic perspectives, by developing a philosophically-informed position that addresses the embodied, interconnected relationship between motivation, cognition and affects. The book centres upon the major concepts in psychoanalysis, including the notion of unconscious mental processes, wish-fulfilment, fantasy, and repression. Both philosophical considerations and empirical evidence are brought to bear upon these topics, and used to extract the valuable insights from major approaches. As a result, Boag’s revised general psychology, which stays true to Freud’s intention, addresses psychoanalytic pluralism and shows it is possible to develop a unified account, integrating the insights from attachment theory and object relational approaches and acknowledging the rightful role for neuropsychoanalysis. Metapsychology and the Foundations of Psychoanalysis will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, philosophers of mind and psychologists, as well as anyone concerned with neuropsychoanalysis or psychoanalysis and attachment theory.

Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry

Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry
Author: Kenneth S. Kendler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2017
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0198796021

The revisions of both DSM-IV and ICD-10 have again focused the interest of the field of psychiatry and clinical psychology on the questions of nosology. This work reviews issues within psychiatric nosology from clinical, historical and particularly philosophical perspectives. It brings together an interdisciplinary group of distinguished authors

Intentional Behaviorism

Intentional Behaviorism
Author: Gordon Foxall
Publisher: Academic Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2020-04-10
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0128145854

Intentional behaviorism is a philosophy of psychology that seeks to ascertain the place and nature of cognitive explanation of behavior by empirically determining the scope of an extensional account of behavior based on the limitations of a behavioral approach to explanation. This book draws on an empirical program of research in economic psychology to establish a route to a reliable and justifiable intentional explanation of behavior. Since the cognitive revolution in psychology, intentional explanations of behavior have become the norm, and as the methodology that provides the normal science component of psychology, cognitivism is sometimes accepted relatively uncritically. However, there is a lack of understanding of the role of psychological research in determining the place and shape of intentionality. This book explicates the philosophy of psychology that the author has devised and applied in his work on economic psychology and behavioral economics. Given the provenance of intentional behaviorism, economic and consumer psychology forms the primary application basis for the book. This book provides a theoretical background to understanding how and why consumers make the choices they do. The book integrates behavioral economics, consumer psychology, and decision-making research to explore intentional behaviorism, which is proposed as a philosophical framework for consumer psychology, viewing economic behavior in the contexts of modern human consumers in affluent marketing-oriented societies. - Integrates research in behavioral economics, decision-making, cognitive psychology, and consumer psychology. - Offers readers an interdisciplinary look at intentionality and intentional explanations. - Proposes a theory of intentional behaviorism to explain economic behavior, consumer choice, and other decision-making. - Examines the methodologies of philosophers of mind such as Dennett and Searle.

Philosophical issues in psychiatry III

Philosophical issues in psychiatry III
Author: Kenneth S. Kendler
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2014-10-02
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0191038857

Psychiatry has long struggled with the nature of its diagnoses. The problems raised by questions about the nature of psychiatric illness are particularly fascinating because they sit at the intersection of philosophy, empirical psychiatric/psychological research, measurement theory, historical tradition and policy. In being the only medical specialty that diagnoses and treats mental illness, psychiatry has been subject to major changes in the last 150 years. This book explores the forces that have shaped these changes and especially how substantial "internal" advances in our knowledge of the nature and causes of psychiatric illness have interacted with a plethora of external forces that have impacted on the psychiatric profession. It includes contributions from philosophers of science with an interest in psychiatry, psychiatrists and psychologists with expertise in the history of their field and historians of psychiatry. Each chapter is accompanied by an introduction and a commentary. The result is a dynamic discussion about the nature of psychiatric disorders, and a book that is compelling reading for those in the field of mental health, history of science and medicine, and philosophy.