For Kurt Goldstein, anxiety has no "object," and is qualitatively different from fear. In fact, for Goldstein, fear is the anticipation of anxiety. For Kierkegaard and Heidegger, anxiety deals with "nothingness." It is a breakdown of both world and self. For Goldstein, the drive to overcome anxiety by the conquest of a piece of the world is expressed in the tendency towards order, norms, continuity, and homogeneity. Deleuze and Guattari echo this diagnosis when they claim that striation is negatively motivated by anxiety in the face of all that passes, flows, or varies and erects the constancy and eternity of an in-itelf.
Read Morepsyche
aphasia
Aphasia is an impairment of language, affecting the production or comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write. Aphasia is always due to injury to the brain. People with aphasia have difficulty with language, but they are not intellectually impaired.
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Hanna Wilke from IntraVenus
body image
Two English neurologists, Lord Russell Brain and Henry Head (!) coined the phrase "body image" for the internal image and memory of one's body in space and time. The body-image mediates the mind / body polarization. It requires input from both sides to be effective.
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Kristi Hargrove, Egg Series, 20004
BwO
in theory, embodiment, psyche
The "body without organs" and the "organs-partial objects" are concepts that Deleuze and Guattari mobilize in opposition to the organism and its organization, in opposition to the functional specificity of organs, so as to release the decoded and deterritorialized flows of desire. The BwO is the "anorganism of the body" a bundle of virtual affects in a non-organic and non-organized multiplicity, "molecular" rather than "molar."
Read MoreCybernetics
in techno-science, biology, mechanism, psyche
Cybernetics: (derives from the Greek word for steersman, which was used by Plato in the sense of "government."):The technology of process control was developed by Norbert Weiner into "the field of control and communication theory (based on statistical information) , whether in the machine or animal" . The terms was first introduced in 1947. See Wiener Cybernetics.
Read Moredesire
Freud's use of the word Wunsch, which corresponds to 'wish' does not have the same connotations as the English word 'desire" or the French désir . His clearest elucidation of the concept is in the theory of dreams. Freud does not identify need with desire. Need can be satisfied through the action which procures the adequate object. (eg. food) Wishes, on the other hand, are governed by a relationship with signs, with memory-traces of excitation, and the desire to re-cathect mnemic images. The Freudian conception of desire refers above all to unconscious wishes, bound to indestructible infantile signs, organized as phantasy.
Read MoreDiscipline
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes the modern "soul" as the real correlative of a certain technology of power over the body. In this vivid and powerful account, he documented the shift in the techniques of punishment away from the body , "from an art of unbearable sensations" to "an economy of suspended rights." For Foucault, it is not just an issue of dehumanization (as Heidegger saw it) but the transformation of the body and of subjectivities.
"On this reality reference, various concepts have been constructed and domains of analysis carved out: psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, etc; on it have been built scientific techniques and discourses, and the moral claims of humanism." (p.30)
(see subject )
See the panopticon as the diagram of modern power. (see also biopower)
The history of work is a history of discipline.
ego
what is the relation between the ego and the subject? According to Freud, the ego is an agency of the psyche,by means of which the subject aquires a sense of unity and identity, "a coherent organization of mental processes." (XIX,17.) Through consciousness , the ego is the site of differentiation between inside and outside, between "subjective" and "objective." The passage from the ego as biological individual to the ego as an agency: "such is the entire problematic of the derivation of the psychoanalytic ego . " (Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, p. 76)
Read Moreembodiment
Embodiment is the line between psychology and biology. One important feature of embodiment is that the interaction between the body and cognition is circular. Thus posture, facial expressions, or breathing rhythm are in a feedback loop with motor movement, mood, and cognition. I am bouncing along the street because I am happy but I am also happy because I am walking with a spring in my step.
Read Moreempathy
In the late nineteenth century, the concept of Einfühlung , as "feeling into," was proposed by Rudolph Lotz and Wilhelm Wundt. E. G. Tichener, a student of Wundt, coined the English translation "empathy" in 1910, using the Greek root pathos for feeling and the prefix em for in. Empathy was developed as an aesthetic theory in the work of Theodore Lipps and others.
Read Moreeroticism
Georges Bataille defines eroticism as the "assenting to life up to the point of death". (Erotism, introduction) For Bataille, eroticism distinguishes man from the animals because it is a consciously intellectualized feeling that is possible only in a context where sexuality is repressed, or at least where erotic pleasure is independent of reproduction as an end. Bataille relates eroticism to a knowledge of evil and the inevitability of death, rather than simply an expression of joyful passion. He quotes de Sade's observation that "There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image." While De Sade's "aberration" may be the logical extreme of this link, "In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation." (p. 16)
Read Morehaptic/optic
In contrast to the optic, the haptic sense, or sense of touch, has a "closeness" and immediacy which seems to escape technological mediation and evokes a more interior sense. The sense of touch is usually subordinated to the visual, which is identified with the conceiving mind over the perceiving body. (cf. also proprioceptive)
Read Moreheimlich / unheimlich
in theory, space, psyche, philosophy
"With Freud indeed, foreignness, an uncanny one, creeps into the tranquility of reason itself...Henceforth, we know that we are foreigners to ourselves, and it is with the help of that sole support that we can attempt to live with others." (Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, p. 170)
In an article published in 1906, the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch published "Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen ", an essay on the uncanny as an affective excitement -- a sensation of unease, of disorientation, of not being quite "at home" -- which a "fortunate formation" of the German language conveys quite clearly, since Heim specifically refers to the home. Thus, for Jentsch the experience of the new, the foreign, and the unusual can provoke mistrust, unease, and even hostility, as opposed to the familiar forms of the traditional, the usual, the hereditary which are a source of comfort and reassurance. While the familiar may even appear self-evident, the unfamiliar can create uncertainty and disorientation, and threats to the everyday sense of intellectual mastery. While the intensity of feeling associated with this disorientation can vary considerably, the sense of the uncanny is most particularly aroused in conditions of "doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate." (The point is taken up by Freud in Das Unheimliche ) Fear, terror, and horror can result. The impression of the uncanny is often provoked by wax figures, automata, panopticons, and panoramas, and in recent years the "uncanny valley" has been proposed to explain the unease that lifelike robots can provoke -- almost but not quite animate.
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First page of Robert Fludd's Ars Memoriae 1619, showing the "eye of the imagination."
imagination
in psyche, consciousness
For Aristotle, in De anima, imagination is the intermediary between perception and thought. The perceptions brought in by the five senses are first treated or worked upon by the faculty of imagination, and it is the images so formed which become the material of the intellectual faculty. (Yates, p 32) Hence "the soul never thinks without a mental picture."
In the eighteenth century, "Fancy" or "imagination" applied to non-mnemonic processions of ideas. When images move in the mind's eye in the same temporal and spatial order as in the original sense-experience, we have "memory" This relation between imagination and memory follows Aristotle as well, for whom memory is a collection of mental images from sense impressions of things past. How do we distinguish between our own memories and our imagination? Modern researchers focus on "source memories" -- where and when we experienced something. Memories are generally accompanied by source memories, while imaginative thoughts do not have the same contextual components in time and space. But the loss of source memories or the imagined sense of location in time and space that can accompany dreams or vivid fantasies can make us unable to distinguish between memory and imagination.
Coleridge distinguished fancy from imagination, paralleling his distinctions between mechanical and organic. His theory of fancy singled out the the basic categories of the associative theory of invention: the elementary particles, or "fixities and definites" derived from sense, which he distinguished from the units of memory only because they move in a new temporal and spatial sequence determined by the law of association, and are subject to choice by a selective faculty -- the judgement of eighteenth-century critics. (Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, p 168. Coleridge Bigraphia Literaria chapt. 13)
As opposed to this "aggregative" mechanical combinatory, Coleridge developed an organicist theory of the imagination, which is modifying and "coadunating." (a term from contemporary biology meaning to 'grow together as one.') He described the imagination as "vital" as "generating and producing a form of its own," whose rules "are the very powers of growth and production." For Coleridge, the imagination is "that synthetic and magical power, which reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant tendencies." This faculty "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and unify. It is essentially vital , even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead."
Thus the free play of the creative imagination makes up its own rules as it goes along and sets them according to the nature of the subject and the inspiration of the poet. "Imagination is no unskillful architect", for "it in a great measure, by its own force, by means of its associating power, after repeated attempts and transpositions, designs a regular and well-proportioned edifice." (Gerard, Essay on Genius, 1774) The "architectonic" impulse of the theoretical imagination renders phenomena intellectually manageable by presenting them in a "corrected fullness." (Sheldon Wolin).
The products of imagination Coleridge adduces most frequently are instances of the poet's power to animate and humanize nature by fusing his own life and passion with those objects of sense which, as objects, 'are essentially fixed and dead.' (Abrams Mirror and the Lamp, p 292) M. S. Abrams points out that almost all examples of this secondary or 're-creative' imagination would fall under the traditional headings of simile, metaphor, and (in the supreme instances) personnification.
"What distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality." Karl Marx, Grundrisse
"Imagination is an act by which we mentally simulate something that previously existed as a vague content of our sensation as sensuous, concrete form. If we then apply the same word to abstract thoughts, we thereby imply that these too are accompanied by mental images. " (Robert Vischer, "On the Optical Sense of Form," 1873) For Robert Vischer, the artist's imagination reunites the senses and the soul. "Both, in fact, were originally one, but in the course of its development the intellect placed itself in opposition to the senses, and only the artist succeeds in achieving their reunion." (p116)
For Kant, the imagination,(Einbildungskraft ) as a productive faculty of cognition, is very powerful in creating another nature, as it were, out of the material that actual nature gives it. Imagination is the faculty of mind which enables us to combine representations. (see Critique of Judgement sect. 49. see also intuition.) Using the etymology of Bild, one can say that the imagination synthesizes the manifold of intuition into a tableau-like unity, and Kant assigns an essential role to the imagination in synthesizing the disparate mental realms of sensibility, understanding, and reason. (See Gasché , p 217) Yet for Kant, the imagination is unequal to the ideas of Reason. The experience of the sublime, either in the form of magnitude or power, causes a painful awareness of the inadequacy of the imagination, but for a rational being there is a pleasure in this awareness, a harmony in this contrast. (see sect. 27)
Freud, too, stressed the inadequacies of the imagination, which he described as "the over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality." (Das Unheimliche , p.244) In his descriptions of the uncanny (unheimlich ), Freud observed a weakening of the value of signs, in which the symbol ceases to be a symbol and "takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes." For Freud, this assertion of "the omnipotence of thought" requires the invalidation of the arbitrariness of signs and the autonomy of reality as well, placing them both under the sway of fantasies expressing infantile desires or fears. (Kristeva, p. 186)
For Gilles Deleuze, imagination is a circuit between the actual and the virtual. Imagination means how we see and how we learn to see, how we suppose the world works, how we suppose that it matters, and what we feel we have at stake in it.
In a very different context, Arjun Appadurai describes the joint effects of media and migration on the work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity. This is a collective imagination, not the faculty of a gifted individual, and it forms the basis for a "community of sentiment." (what anthropologists call a sodality) Here Appadurai follows Benedict Anderson's analysis of the modern nation as "an imagined political community." For Anderson, "it is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion." (Imagined Communities, p. 6) Appadurai describes media and migration as resources for experiments with self-making in all sorts of societies, for all sorts of persons. The mobile and unforeseeable relationship between mass-mediated events and migratory audiences defines the core of the link between globalization and the modern. In this context, the work of the imagination is neither purely emancipatory nor entirely disciplined, but is a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern. (p.4)
(see also public / private)
For Appadurai, "The imagination is today a staging ground for action, and not only for escape." (an expression which should gratify those whose slogan in 1968 was "l'imagination au pouvoir." ) He describes "culturalism" as a mobilization of identities consciously in the making and as the most general form of the work of the imagination.
instinct
Instinct, for both psychology and ethology is a preformed behavioral pattern, often manifesting itself immediately from birth. Its arrangement is determined hereditarily and is repeated according to modalities relatively adapted to a certain kind of object. (from Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis) Instinctive behaviour contributes to the survival of species and is evolved like morphological structure. (Bowlby) Charles Darwin outlined the modern theory of instinct in The Origin of Species.
Read Morelimbs
in psyche
On the one hand, the "phantom limb" -- a kind of mourning for a pre-Oedipal (i.e. pre-castrated) body -- whose painful reality is well documented. On the other hand, the "counterfeit" limb, paralyzed and "cut off" from perception and recognition -- "internal amputation." "How could a thing like that belong to me? I don't know where a thing like that belongs." -- the syndrome of anosognosia. To the nurse clearing away the breakfast: "Oh, and that arm there, take it away with the tray!" (Sachs, A Leg to Stand On, p. 57) For Sachs, this was a "neuro-existential" pathology where some features which could easily have been "hysterical" -- the characteristic dissociation and bland or joking indifference -- were, in those instances extremely organic.
Read Morepain
For Nietzche, "pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics." "Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself." "If something is to stay in the memory, it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory." (Genealogy of Morals, Ecce Homo)
On the other hand, ritual may be seen as a way to keep memory alive without the experience of pain. Bataille echoes Nietzche's description of the role of religious sacrifice. He describes sacredness as the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. (p.22)
"Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt." Samuel Johnson. "To have pain is to have certainty , to hear about pain is to have doubt." (Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 13)
Like consciousness, pain as a philosophical issue raises the questions of subjectivity and of other minds. Wittgenstein rejected the classical status of pain as the paradigm of direct intuition. When one is in pain, he said in the Philosophical Investigations, one cannot say, except perhaps as a joke, that one knows one is in pain. Say that one cannot doubt it and leave it at that, he suggested.
Read Morepanic
Panic rapture, or Panolepsy (which is also related to nympholepsy-- but which entails disappearance) can be specified in Greek medical terms as a range of effects from epilepsy, which is a complete estrangement of the body, to melancholy, which is an estrangement of the mind.
Read Moreparapraxis
Parapraxes are actions committed "not as planned."
In fact, the opposite is the case: the pattern characteristic of symptoms, parapraxes (Freudian slips) and dreams is that the repressed wish will come out, with poetic irony, in precisely the effort to control or avoid it. Unconscious hatred "kills with kindness." One is so busy suppressing a sexual thought that it slips out as an unconscious pun. (Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotions, p.85) (see return of repressed)
primitive
In the progressivist accounts of European civilization, primitive attitudes come to be replaced by rational ones, just as primitive technologies are replaced by modern ones. But recourse to descriptions of the primitive are often motivated by the desire to criticize the civilized or the present. If civilization is thought to rely on "the renunciation of instinct" (Freud) then one is tempted to project a rejection of the modern on to the archaic.
Freud examines the contention that "what we call civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and we should be so much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions." (p.33) Freud adhered to the notion that individual development followed the lines of social development -- beginning with an animistic phase and then followed first by a religious and then by a scientific phase -- the biological notion that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." Thus the child is thought to be more primitive than the adult, just as the "primitive" individual is thought of as a child.
"The European belief in primitive magic has lead to a false distinction between primitive and modern cultures, and sadly inhibited comparative religion."
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