This book offers an interdisciplinary approach - historical, literary, art-historical and archaeological - to the topics of ideology and identity in the medieval East Roman world. The individual chapters explore ideological discourses and practices in various contexts. In particular, they focus on the content of ideas and their role in shaping different kinds of group attachments and identifications within the imperial social order. Moreover, they explore the various visions of community which different collective identity discourses projected within and (...) beyond the political boundaries of the empire. Including both top-down and bottom-up perspectives, and exploring both the empire's centre and its periphery, this collection offers new insights into ideology and identity in the Byzantine world. (shrink)

This new book proposes a way out of the crisis by letting go of the idea that psychology needs ‘new’ foundations or a new identity, whether biological, discursive, or cognitive. The psychological is not narrowly confined to any one aspect of human experience; it is quite literally ‘everywhere’. Drawing on a range of influential thinkers including Michel Serres, Michel Foucault, AN Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze, the book proposes a strong process-oriented approach to the psychological, which studies ‘events’ or (...) ‘occasions.’. (shrink)

Towards Identity in the Psychoanalytic Encounter addresses the theme of identification and identity in the psychoanalytic clinic as elaborated by Jacques Lacan over the course of his teaching. In psychoanalysis the subject who is summoned "to speak himself", is by definition lacking in identity. His question is "What am I?" but, as he is only represented by his words, his being is "always elsewhere", within other words that are yet to come. Thus a paradox: one seeks via (...) speech the identity of a being who, through his speech, is not identifiable. Yet the fact remains, he has a body, and he is riveted to sufferings that psychoanalysis, from Freud to Lacan, identified, which are not accidental, which we call repetition and symptom, and which shift the question of identity, because a One, real, is at play in them. Towards Identity in the Psychoanalytic Encounter will be key reading for the study and research of Lacanian psychoanalysis and all practitioners interested in Lacan's teaching, as well as other discourses such as philosophy, art, literature and history. (shrink)

Since Erik Erikson's clinical and psychohistorical writings of the 1950s and 1960s, the notion of identity has served as a bridge between formulations of personality development and the psychosocial aspects of cultural cohesiveness. More recently, under the influence of a postmodern perspective, clinical writers have questioned the notion of a stable, integrative identity or self as an organizing agent in human behavior. In the area of gender identity, particularly, feminist theorists have criticized the construction of polarized gender (...) identities both for their psychological inadequacy and their cultural bias.A parallel line of criticism has developed at the cultural or historical level. Writers such as Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner have effectively contrasted the shallow ideological and historical roots of nationalism with the effort to base national identity on the appeal to tradition and continuity. Other writers have emphasized the heterogeneous condition of the contemporary nation in a postcolonial world. They contrast a static concept of cultural or national identity to a more fluid notion which incorporates the ongoing process of displacement that, they argue, characterizes national discourse. The identity structures that emerge from this critique, both within a clinical and a historical setting, are more ambiguous and unstable, and reflect the heterogeneous experience of contemporary culture.World historians such as William McNeill and Theodore von Laue have cited the boundedness of historians within their own cultural identities as a significant obstacle to the development of an intercultural approach to world history. These postmodern reformulations of identity theory challenge the notion of cultural boundedness by emphasizing the discontinuities endemic to modern life and the inescapably plural character of contemporary identity. (shrink)

This book is an examination of how the law understands human identity and the whole notion of 'human being'. On these two notions the law, usually unconsciously, builds the superstructure of 'human rights'. It explores how the law understands the concept of a human being, and hence a person who is entitled to human rights. This involves a discussion of the legal treatment of those of so-called "marginal personhood" (e.g. high functioning non-human animals; humans of limited intellectual capacity, and (...) fetuses). It also considers how we understand our identity as people, and hence how we fall into different legal categories: such as gender, religion and so on. The law makes a number of huge assumptions about some fundamental issues of human identity and authenticity - for instance that we can talk meaningfully about the entity that we call 'our self'. Until now it has rarely, if ever, identified those assumptions, let alone interrogated them. This failure has led to the law being philosophically dubious and sometimes demonstrably unfit for purpose. Its failure is increasingly hard to cover up. What should happen legally, for instance, when a disease such as dementia eliminates or radically transforms all the characteristics that most people regard as foundational to the 'self'? This book seeks to plug these gaps in the literature. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to Analysed the influence of Chinese traditional culture identity education on the positive psychology of university students. The study selected 200 students as the research object and divided into experimental group and control group. The students in the experimental group received traditional cultural identity education courses combined with practical activities, while the control group implemented conventional courses. After implementing the program, students’ learning efficiency is significantly improved and their learning anxiety is (...) reduced. The learning effectiveness, cultural identity, and interpersonal communication barriers of the experimental group students have all improved, and the improvement in positive psychological status of the experimental group is significantly higher than that of the control group. The difference between the two groups is statistically significant. Chinese culture has a long history and contains profound life truth and positive thoughts. Good traditional cultural identity education can cultivate college students’ correct political position and establish correct outlook on life, values and the world. This study showed effective cultural identity education and practical activities in colleges and universities can effectively promote the cultivation of students’ positive psychology, improve students’ self-confidence and enhance national pride. Contribution: The result of this study is applicable for scholars in the field of psychology of religion and the sociology of religion, as well as cultural studies and public theology. (shrink)

Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea is the first comprehensive history of the concept that answers the question, "who, or what, am I?" Gerald Izenberg contends that our most important identities, while historically conditioned, are rooted in permanent categories of human existence, such as sexuality, sociality, and labor.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXII, Number 2, November 1996, pp. 273-298 Hume's Psychology of Identity Ascriptions ABRAHAM SESSHU ROTH Introduction Hume observes that we naturally believe ordinary objects to persist through time and change. The question that interests him in the Treatise1 is, What causes such a belief to arise in the human mind? Hume's question is, of course, the naturalistic one we would expect given that the (...) project of the Treatise is the construction of a "science of man." This paper seeks to clarify Hume's discussion of how we acquire the notion of persisting objects. In the first section, I note that several observations Hume makes about the actions of the mind may all come under the heading of "seeing successions as simple." These observations pose a problem for Hume's system, revealing a tension between his accounts of our ideas of time and persistence: if (as Hume believes) only successions, which are not simple, endure through time, how is it that bodies seen as simple are nevertheless thought to endure or have duration as well? In the second section I show how Hume answers this question. The third section is devoted to an interpretation of Hume's notions of the identity relation and what he calls an "object existent at a time." Identity through time is standardly treated in contemporary analytic philosophy using the notion of a unity relation connecting various temporal parts or stages of a persisting object. One interpretation of Hume takes his talk of the identity relation as signifying just such a unity relation, and "object existent at a time" as referring to a temporal part of an object. Another interpretation makes use of the notion of substance Abraham Sesshu Roth is at the Department of Philosophy, Brandeis University, Waltham MA 02254-9110 USA. Email: [email protected] 274 Abraham Sesshu Roth and of qualities inhering in a substance at different times. These interpretations concentrate upon metaphysical issues, and neglect the psychological aspects of Hume's discussion of identity. I demonstrate that these interpretations are unacceptable because they cannot be reconciled with Hume's psychologically significant distinction between vulgar or commonplace views on the one hand, and those views held by philosophers on the other. Finally, I propose and defend an alternative view of Hume's account of identity. This new understanding makes use of the notion of distinctions of reason to interpret Hume's idea of an object existent at a time. It turns out that a focus upon Hume's psychology of identity ascriptions will allow us to discern an interesting metaphysical alternative to the temporal parts view of identity. 1. Seeing Successions as Simples There has been some dispute in the literature about the temporal nature of Humean impressions. According to Barry Stroud, Hume holds that if one stares at an unchanging object (in unchanging conditions) for some more than minimal amount of time, one's experience takes the form of a sequence of qualitatively identical impressions, each of which occupies a temporal minimum.2 Thus when I fix my gaze upon an object, I am subject to a temporal series of impressions which may be represented as follows: (1) A A A A Eli Hirsch and Don Baxter question Stroud's assumption that a Humean perception occupies only a temporal minimum.3 Baxter holds that in Hume's view an impression will last as long as you keep looking and the conditions under which you look remain unchanged. So to stare fixedly at an object would on his view be represented in this way: (I') A I side with Baxter and Hirsch on this matter.4 But the dispute in any case has minimal ramifications for the purposes of this paper. My concern is with how Hume thinks a sequence or succession of impressions such as (1) would normally be experienced, i.e., with what idea the common person would derive from such a succession, and with how such an individual would characterize this succession. According to Hume, regardless of whether or not perceptions are extended, if a perceiver were to be presented with a succession like (1), it would be experienced or taken as (V). Hume... (shrink)

By attending just to conceptual analysis and metaphysics in connection with Locke's theory of personal identity, but ignoring psychology, one can know that, in Locke's view, consciousness via memory unifies persons over time, but not how consciousness unifies persons, either over time or at a time, nor why, for Locke, the mechanisms of self-constitution are crucially important to personal identity. In explaining Locke's neglected thoughts on the psychology of personal identity, I argue, first, that he (...) was not trying to analyze personal identity so as to allow that persons could persist through change of substance and were accountable for their thoughts and deeds and, second, that to do this Locke tried to explain how persons are byproducts of the development in at least normal humans of reflexive consciousness. (shrink)

A volume in International Advances in Self Research Series Editors Rhonda G. Craven, University of Western Sydney; Herbert Marsh, University of Western Sydney; and Dennis M. McInerney, Hong Kong Institute of Education The concept of the Self has a long history that dates back from the ancient Greeks such as Aristotle to more contemporary thinkers such as Wundt, James, Mead, Cooley, Freud, Rogers, and Erikson (Tesser & Felson, 2000). Research on the Self relates to a range of phenomena including (...) self-esteem, self-concept, self-protection, self-verification, self-awareness, identity, self-efficacy, self-determination etc. that could be sharply different or very similar. Despite this long tradition of thinkers and the numerous studies conducted on the Self, this concept is still not very well defined. More precisely, it is not a precise object of study, but rather a collection of loosely related subtopics (Baumesiter, 1998). Also, in the philosophical literature, the legitimacy of the concept of "self" has been brought into question. Some authors have argued that the self is not a psychological entity per se, but rather an illusion created by the complex interplay between cognitive and neurological subsystems (Zahavi, 2005). Although no definitive consensus has been reached regarding the Self, we emphasis in this volume that the Self and its related phenomena including self-concept, motivation, and identity are crucial for understanding consciousness and therefore important to understand human behavior. Self-concept, motivation and identity: Underpinning success with research and practice provides thus a unique insight into self-concept and its relationship to motivation and identity from varied theoretical and empirical perspectives. This volume is intended to develop both theoretical and methodological ideas and to present empirical evidence demonstrating the importance of theory and research to effective practice. (shrink)

"Identity" has become a core concept of the social and cultural sciences. Bringing together perspectives from sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and literary criticism, this book offers a comprehensive and critical overview on how this concept is currently used and how it relates to memory and constructions of historical meaning.

This book brings together a group of scholars from around the world who view psychology as the science of human ways of being. Being refers to the process of existing - through construction of the human world - here, rather than to an ontological state. This collection includes work that has the goal to establish the newly developed area of cultural psychology as the science of specifically human ways of existence. It comes as a next step after the (...) "behaviorist turn" that has dominated psychology over most of the 20th century, and like its successor in the form of "cognitivism", kept psychology away from addressing issues of specifically human ways of relating with their worlds. Such linking takes place through intentional human actions: through the creation of complex tools for living, entertainment, and work. Human beings construct tools to make other tools. Human beings invent religious systems, notions of economic rationality and legal systems; they enter into aesthetic enjoyment of various aspects of life in art, music, and literature; they have the capability of inventing national identities that can be summoned to legitimate one's killing of one's neighbors, or being killed oneself. The contributions to this volume focus on the central goal of demonstrating that psychology as a science needs to start from the phenomena of higher psychological functions, and then look at how their lower counterparts are re-organized from above. That kind of investigation is inevitably interdisciplinary - it links psychology with anthropology, philosophy, sociology, history, and developmental biology. Various contributions to this volume are based on the work of Lev Vygotsky, George Herbert Mead, Henri Bergson, and on traditions of Ganzheitspsychologie and Gestalt psychology. Psychology as the Science of Human Being is a valuable resource to psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, biologists, and anthropologists alike. (shrink)

Rewriting the Self is an exploration of ideas of the self in the western cultural tradition from the Renaissance to the present. The contributors analyze different religious, philosophical, psychological, political, psychoanalytical and literary models of personal identity from a number of viewpoints, including the history of ideas, contemporary gender politics, and post-modernist literary theory. Challenging the received version of the "ascent of western man," they assess the discursive construction of the self in the light of political, technological and (...) social changes. Contributors include: Peter Burke, Roger Cardinal, Stephen Connor, Jonathan Dollimore, Terry Eagleton, Kate Flint, E.J. Hundert, John Mullan, Linda Nead, Daniel Pick, Nikolas Rose, Jonathan Sawday, Jane Shaw, Roger Smith, Sylvana Tomaselli and Carolyn D. Williams. (shrink)

This essay attempts to provide a preliminary outline of a theory of identity. The first section addresses what the sociologist Niklas Luhmann has called ‘the problem of identity’, or, in other words, the mind–society (rather than the mind–body) problem: In how far can the internal (psychological) self and the external (social) persona be integrated into a unit? The second section of the essay briefly defines a basic vocabulary of a theory of identity. ‘Identity’ is understood as (...) the existentially necessary formation of a coherence between the ‘self’ (the ‘I’ as it is experienced in thoughts and feelings), its body and its social ‘persona’ (the individual person with its social attributes). Three different major paradigms of identity formation are distinguished from one another: a sincere identity is constructed through a firm commitment of the self to its social roles; an authentic identity is constructed through the creation of a social persona on the basis of one’s unique and original self; a ‘profilic’ identity, as we call it, is shaped by successfully presenting a personal profile under conditions of second-order observation as they prevail, for instance, in the social media, but also in other contemporary social systems. In the third section of the essay, we present a sketch of the historical sequence of these three paradigms of identity. Although these paradigms are not mutually exclusive and can coexist, it seems that sincerity flourished in pre-modern society, while authenticity came to prominence along with the functional differentiation of modern society and is now, along with the increased significance of second-order observation, gradually overshadowed by the influence of profilicity. (shrink)

_Naturalization of the Soul_ charts the development of the concepts of soul and self in Western thought, from Plato to the present. It fills an important gap in intellectual history by being the first book to emphasize the enormous intellectual transformation in the eighteenth century, when the religious 'soul' was replaced first by a philosophical 'self' and then by a scientific 'mind'. The authors show that many supposedly contemporary theories of the self were actually discussed in the eighteenth century, (...) and recognize the status of William Hazlitt as one of the most important Personal Identity theorists of the British Enlightenment, for his direct relevance to contemporary thinking. Now available in paperback, _Naturaliazation of the Soul_ is essential reading for anyone interested in the issues at the core of the Western philosophical tradition. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the historicity of love requires an appreciation of the irreplaceability of the beloved. I do this through a consideration of ideas that were first put forward by Robert Kraut in “Love De Re” (1986). I also evaluate Amelie Rorty's criticisms of Kraut's thesis in “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds” (1986). I argue that Rorty fundamentally misunderstands Kraut's Kripkean analogy, and (...) I go on to criticize her claim that concern over the proper object of love should be best understood as a concern over constancy. This leads me to an elaboration of the distinct senses in which love can be seen as historical. I end with a further defense of the irreplaceability of the beloved and a discussion of the relevance of recent debates over the importance of personal identity for an adequate account of the historical dimension of love. (shrink)

Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity, and Politics in 21st Century Film and Literature applies historical and contemporary political and rhetorical theory to current popular culture to discuss the problem of the displaced autonomous self and the quest for a meaningful life.

Nations usually define themselves in positive terms; they proclaim themselves strong and victorious, or developed and prosperous. But what does it mean when the opposite is true - when negative feelings like regret, nostalgia, melancholy and fatalism are said to be the true essence of a culture? And what does it mean when these feelings are encapsulated in a single, untranslatable word?Bringing together three such word-concepts from Europe's periphery - saudade in Portugal, the Czech litost of Milan Kundera and Orhan (...) Pamuk's of Istanbul - this book investigates claims that they embody the historical experiences and character of a people. In each case, it explores the historical, cultural and psychological mechanisms behind the invention of negative autostereotypes to offer new ways of thinking about individual and collective identities. This eclectic and broad-ranging study is not only a historical survey of emotions, but also a meditation on hope, belonging and the search for authenticity in the modern age. (shrink)

The history of pedagogics gives the impression that pedagogics has never had an identity of its own. Throughout history it has borrowed its identity from philosophy, theology, psychology and sociology. Against the background of this historical challenge, the article proposes pedagogical practice as an alternative identity to pedagogics, although not in the classical sense of an absolute and self‐sufficient identity, and it develops one particular ontological theory of pedagogical practice viewed from a life‐world (...) approach with the ambition of suggesting a theoretical point of departure for pedagogical research. (shrink)

CHAPTER 1 Narrative Psychology and Historical Consciousness Relationships and Perspectives DONALD E. POLKINGHORNE Postmodern theory has severely undercut ...

In recent decades, memory has become one of the major concepts and a dominant topic in philosophy, sociology, politics, history, science, cultural studies, literary theory, and the discussions of trauma and the Holocaust. In contemporary debates, the concept of memory is often used rather broadly and thus not always unambiguously. For this reason, the clarification of the range of the historical meaning of the concept of memory is a very important and urgent task. This volume shows how the concept (...) of memory has been used and appropriated in different historical circumstances and how it has changed throughout the history of philosophy. In ancient philosophy, memory was considered a repository of sensible and mental impressions and was complemented by recollection-the process of recovering the content of past thoughts and perceptions. Such an understanding of memory led to the development both of mnemotechnics and the attempts to locate memory within the structure of cognitive faculties. In contemporary philosophical and historical debates, memory frequently substitutes for reason by becoming a predominant capacity to which one refers when one wants to explain not only the personal identity but also a historical, political, or social phenomenon. In contemporary interpretation, it is memory, and not reason, that acts in and through human actions and history, which is a critical reaction to the overly rationalized and simplified concept of reason in the Enlightenment. Moreover, in modernity memory has taken on one of the most distinctive features of reason: it is thought of as capable not only of recollecting past events and meanings, but also itself. In this respect, the volume can be also taken as a reflective philosophical attempt by memory to recall itself, its functioning and transformations throughout its own history. (shrink)

Like philosophy itself, Dune explores everything from politics to art to life to reality, but above all, the novels ponder the mysteries of mind. Voyaging through psychic expanses, Frank Herbert hits upon some of the same insights discovered by indigenous people from the Americas. Many of these ideas are repeated in mainstream American and European philosophical traditions like pragmatism and existential phenomenology. These outlooks share a regard for mind as ecological, which is more or less to say that minds extend (...) beyond the brain into the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. -/- The cross-cultural strands in Dune tie closely to Herbert’s life and interests. An outdoorsman born in the Pacific West, he had an abiding bond with a friend from the Quileute tribe, Howie Hansen. Herbert advocated for aboriginal rights and crafted well-intentioned if slightly stereotypical tales about indigenous characters, partly based on his visits with Northwest tribes. Carl Jung (1875-1961), whose idea of collective consciousness echoes aboriginal views, was among Herbert’s European influences. So was existential phenomenology, especially as developed by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). The names of characters in one of Herbert’s novels—The Santaroga Barrier—in fact coincide with terms that Heidegger used to articulate how emotionally colored coping with our environment defines our existence. Many indigenous philosophers have treated phenomenology and its American cousin pragmatism in approving ways. Indeed, the ideas of North America’s first inhabitants seem to have been absorbed by pragmatists and even earlier by transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). -/- These different philosophies all advance a place-based psychology. Anne Waters, herself of mixed tribal heritage, generalizes the mindset of her people this way: “American Indian consciousness, and hence American Indian identity is … interdependent with our land base.” Lee Hester, a Choctaw thinker, adds that practices—not mere beliefs—are most important for native thought. American transcendentalists and pragmatists, as well as European phenomenologists, similarly see hands-on practices and environmental interactions as the core of experience. Extending this a little, they sometimes suggest experience isn’t individual but instead cultural. “Culture” is here understood as interactions within communities that define our worlds and experiences, as when we talk about the “French experience,” “culture” or “world,” or the “experience of parenthood.” This theme also shows up in indigenous thought. -/- Exploring the Dune universe, we find everything from land-based concepts of personal identity, to the idea of sharpening the mind through hands-on training, to collective notions of experience in cooperative tribes or through the genetic memory of central characters. The stories explore fate versus free will in cosmic contexts, introducing views from indigenous thought and the pragmatic philosophy of William James (1842-1910). Different forms of spiritualism mingle to shape minds and cultural mixtures around the globe, and the same occurs in the Dune series. The customs and personalities of characters fuse elements from Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Taoism, and especially Islam. The series not only highlights that religion shapes psychology, but also that faith connects to place, especially paralleling Judeo-Christian-Islamic desert faiths. In capturing these points, the Dune novels show that “our values, our lifestyles and even the ways we think and feel have been strongly influenced by our locations in history and geography. The study of the human mind is fundamentally the study of place.”. (shrink)

During his more than fifty-year writing and teaching career, Horace M. Kallen (1882-1974), the American Jewish philosopher who coined the term "cultural pluralism," incorporated into his pragmatism-infused philosophy of life a number of different sciences, from racial science to psychology and physics. Part biography, part cultural history, "Horace Kallen Confronts America" offers fresh insight into the larger question of how social discourses shape modern American Jewish identity.

This paper examines the plays of African-American playwright Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro (1962) and The Owl Answers (1963), which remain important for their engagement with notions of African-American identity, resistance and agency through their attention to mixed race female characters or mulattos who experience bodily and psychological traumas that demonstrate the abuse of the colonized on a deeply visceral level. Kennedy's plays have remained controversial because of their failure to comply with the nationalistic orientation of the Black (...) Arts Movement (BAM) of 1960s America. I aim to examine these plays through a framework of postcolonial-feminist performance analysis that finds its way back to histories of colonization and slavery, enabling through such returns, a compelling critique of the manoeuvrings of racial hierarchies and power imbalances. As well, I argue that Kennedy's protagonists are de-essentialized fractured beings who fail to embody either White superiority or Black nationalist pride, as they oscillate between two polarities. Such failure (on the part of Kennedy's mulattos) allows for a strategic de-essentialization of identity that interrogates fixed categorization. As well, through a form that is fluid, fragmented and blurs the distinctions among history, memory, space and time, her works impart political agency to the characters and enable an empowered sense of the ‘self-in-process.’. (shrink)

This article presents critical psychology in some new light. First, it presents the history of US critical psychology in terms of the overall foundation of its critique (identity-based, ideologically-based, and epistemologically-based). Second, it broadens the population that can be called critical psychologists. The argument is made to include: (1) philosophers of language, science, and mind critical of psychology’s foundational assumptions, conceptions, and methods of inquiry; and (2) non-professional, ordinary people who live their lives critical of (...) psychology by eschewing mainstream approaches and taking alternative routes to getting help with their emotional and physical pain, or the education of their children. Third, the article discusses ontology-based critique through the example of the practical-critical theory/practice of social therapy. (shrink)

_Jung, Psychology, Postmodernity_ explores points of confluence and, more often, contradictions between Jungian and postmodern ideas. Throughout the book Raya Jones examines how personal meaning emerges in human activity. Jung addressed this in terms of symbol formation, with particular attention to dreams, myths, art and other fantasy productions. Postmodern psychologists tend to address issues of meaning in terms of peoples self-understanding and identity construction, with a focus on self-positioning in actual conversation or on autobiographical narratives. Jones draws a (...) line of critical comparison between postmodern psychology and Jung’s descriptions of the symbolic dimension, myth, and the structure of the psyche. The book culminates with an evaluation of Jung’s psychic energy concept, for which there is no direct counterpart in postmodern psychology. _Jung, Psychology, Postmodernity_ is an original critique of two key moments in the history of psychology. It will be welcomed by Jungians, as well as psychotherapists, and students of psychology. (shrink)

The historical continuity of spinal catastrophism, traced across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology. Drawing on cryptic intimations in the work of J. G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Elaine Morgan, and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the late twentieth century Daniel Barker formulated the axioms of spinal catastrophism: If human morphology, upright posture, and the possibility of language are the ramified accidents of natural history, then psychic ailments are ultimately afflictions of the spine, which itself (...) is a scale model of biogenetic trauma, a portable map of the catastrophic events that shaped that atrocity exhibition of evolutionary traumata, the sick orthograde talking mammal. Tracing its provenance through the biological notions of phylogeny and "organic memory" that fueled early psychoanalysis, back into idealism, nature philosophy, and romanticism, and across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology, Thomas Moynihan reveals the historical continuity of spinal catastrophism. From psychoanalysis and myth to geology and neuroanatomy, from bioanalysis to chronopathy, from spinal colonies of proto-minds to the retroparasitism of the CNS, from "railway spine" to Elizabeth Taylor's lost gill-slits, this extravagantly comprehensive philosophical adventure uses the spinal cord as a guiding thread to rediscover forgotten pathways in modern thought. Moynihan demonstrates that, far from being an fanciful notion rendered obsolete by advances in biology, spinal catastrophism dramatizes fundamental philosophical problematics of time, identity, continuity, and the transcendental that remain central to any attempt to reconcile human experience with natural history. (shrink)

Ego psychology, more existential than scientific in tone, has made psychoanalytic theory more congenial to historical studies, especially when they deal with creative and conflicted leaders. Erikson's concept of the identity crisis points to the intersection of family-centered conflicts with social and cultural history. It also orients the historian to the reanimation of problems in earlier stages of the life-cycle, the importance of work to identity formation, and the neurotic function of over-identification with a troublesome parent. (...) Phenomenologically descriptive rather than causally explanatory, psycho-biography mediates between Freud's naturalism and Collingwood's idealism by relating conscious and unconscious purposes. It establishes congruences and resonances, helping to explain in narrative form the meaning, timing, and urgency of a leader's characteristic ideas. (shrink)

The history of pedagogics gives the impression that pedagogics has never had an identity of its own. Throughout history it has borrowed its identity from philosophy, theology, psychology and sociology. Against the background of this historical challenge, the article proposes pedagogical practice as an alternative identity to pedagogics, although not in the classical sense of an absolute and self‐sufficient identity, and it develops one particular ontological theory of pedagogical practice viewed from a life‐world (...) approach with the ambition of suggesting a theoretical point of departure for pedagogical research. (shrink)

What is it for the same word or expression to occur in two different contexts? One is inclined to say that the word “rat” does not occur in “Socrates loved Plato,” but it is harder to justify this statement than might be thought. This issue lies in the midst of a tangle of issues, a number of which are investigated in an important but little-discussed article of Anscombe’s, in which she considers the question whether the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations (...) can be read as proposing a “micro-reductionist” theory of language: i.e., a theory which states non-circular conditions for any given sound’s having a meaning. Anscombe answers the question negatively; and indeed there are obstacles faced by any such theory of language. Our investigation turns out to have implications not only within philosophy of language, but also within philosophy of psychology. (shrink)

In this insightful set of essays, the concept of the psychological humanities is defined and explored. A clear rationale is provided for its necessity in the study and understanding of the individual and identity in a discipline that is largely occupied by empirical studies that report aggregated data and its analysis. Contributors to this volume are leading scholars in theoretical psychology who believe that psychology must be about persons and their lives. In these essays, they draw from (...) a variety of disciplines that include art, literature, life writing, and history to make a case for the psychological humanities. A final chapter provides a critical commentary on the value of the psychological humanities. It is argued that psychology must draw on the knowledge and practices of the humanities, as well as the sciences and social sciences, in order to attain a greater understanding of personhood. This book is aimed at upper level undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars of psychology, particularly theoretical psychology, philosophy of the mind, and those from a humanities background interested in exploring the concept of the psychological humanities. (shrink)

Are OCypersonsOCO physical things, members of the species homo sapiens which exist solely in materialist form, continuous in structure with other living things? Or is the issue a more complex one: are there more dimensions to being a person than mere physical, biological existence? These are matters of interest and discussion in many fields of study in this age of individuality. In this wide-ranging essay, the author addresses various aspects of the issue, including the history of self and (...) class='Hi'>identity. The ancient tradition of dualism is rejected in favour of a straightforward holistic and naturalistic account of selfhood; it is argued that the mind arises in an emergent sense from the body and personal identity is best expressed in terms of a self-reflective and meaningful narrative. The approach is principally from an analytic philosophy point of view but also takes onOCoboard psychological and sociological aspects of self and identity. (shrink)

What is it for the same word or expression (written, spoken, or otherwise produced) to occur in two different contexts? One is inclined to say that the word “rat” does not occur in “Socrates loved Plato,” but it is harder to justify this statement than might be thought. This issue lies in the midst of a tangle of issues, a number of which are investigated in an important but little-discussed article of Anscombe’s, in which she considers the question whether the (...) Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations can be read as proposing a “micro-reductionist” theory of language: i.e., a theory which states non-circular conditions for any given sound’s (or shape’s) having a meaning. Anscombe answers the question negatively; and indeed there are obstacles faced by any such theory of language. Our investigation turns out to have implications not only within philosophy of language, but also within (for example) philosophy of psychology. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive examination of the police role from within a broader philosophical context. Contending that the police are in the midst of an identity crisis that exacerbates unjustified law enforcement tactics, Luke William Hunt examines various major conceptions of the police—those seeing them as heroes, warriors, and guardians. The book looks at the police role considering the overarching societal goal of justice and seeks to present a synthetic theory that draws upon history, law, society, (...) class='Hi'>psychology, and philosophy. Each major conception of the police role is examined in light of how it affects the pursuit of justice, and how it may be contrary to seeking justice holistically and collectively. The book sets forth a conception of the police role that is consistent with the basic values of a constitutional democracy in the liberal tradition. Hunt’s intent is that clarifying the police role will likewise elucidate any constraints upon policing strategies, including algorithmic strategies such as predictive policing. This book is essential reading for thoughtful policing and legal scholars as well as those interested in political philosophy, political theory, psychology, and related areas. Now more than ever, the nature of the police role is a philosophical topic that is relevant not just to police officials and social scientists, but to everyone. (shrink)

The genomics “revolution” is spreading. Originating in the molecular life sciences, it initially affected a number of biomedical research fields such as cancer genomics and clinical genetics. Now, however, a new “wave” of genomic bioinformation is transforming a widening array of disciplines, including those that address the social, historical and cultural dimensions of human life. Increasingly, bioinformation is affecting “human sciences” such as psychiatry, psychology, brain research, behavioural research (“behavioural genomics”), but also anthropology and archaeology (“bioarchaeology”). Thus, bioinformatics is (...) having an impact on how we define and understand ourselves, how identities are formed and constituted, and, finally, on how we (on the basis of these redefined identities) assess and address some of the more concrete societal issues involved in genomics governance in various settings. This article explores how genomics and bioinformation, by influencing research agendas in the human sciences and the humanities, are affecting our self-image, our identity, the way we see ourselves. The impact of bioinformation on self-understanding will be assessed on three levels: (1) the collective level (the impact of comparative genomics on our understanding of human beings as a species), (2) the individual level (the impact of behavioural genomics on our understanding of ourselves as individuals), and (3) the genealogical level (the impact of population genomics on our understanding of human history, notably early human history). This threefold impact will be assessed from two seemingly incompatible philosophical perspectives, namely a “humanistic” perspective (represented in this article by Francis Fukuyama) and a “post-humanistic” one (represented by Peter Sloterdijk). On the basis of this analysis it will be concluded that, rather than focussing on human “enhancement” by adding or deleting genes, genome-oriented practices of the Self will focus on using genomics information in the context of identity-formation. Genomic bioinformation will increasingly be built into our self-images and used in order to tailor and adapt our practices of Self to our “personalised” genome. We will keep working on ourselves, no doubt, not by modifying our genomes, but rather by fine-tuning our behaviour. What we are experiencing is a bioinformatisation of the life-world. Genomics-based technologies will increasingly pervade our daily lives, our autobiographies and narratives, as well as our anthropologies, rather than our genomes as such. (shrink)

_Cultures and Identities in Transition_ returns to the roots of analytical psychology, offering a thematic approach which looks at personal and cultural identities in relation to Jung’s own identity and the identities of contemporary Jungians. The book begins with two clinical studies, representing a meeting point between the traditional praxis of Jungian analysis, on the one side, and the current zeitgeist, world events and collective anxieties as impacting on persons in therapy, on the other. An international range of (...) expert contributors go on to discuss topics including: issues of national and personal identity – looking back to a shared history and forward to novel applications of Jungian ideas. Jung’s cross-disciplinary dialogues with Victor White. what the designation "Jungian" actually means. Based on papers given at the joint IAAP and IAJS conference held in Zurich in 2008, this book will be essential reading for all Jungians. (shrink)

This article is a speculative review of psychology’s approach to the cultural and civilizational determinants of the development of human identity. It discusses the relation between human freedom and necessity as it is determined by culture and its alternative suggestions concerning normative human existence. As his point of departure the author adopted Feliks Koneczny’s quincunx philosophy of history together with its five basic categories of existence. One can try to transpose these categories into the factors which constitute (...) human intra-psychic space and also into measures of description of the mechanics of human behavior. Attention is drawn to the fact that, in this context, the axiological shortcomings of psychology are exposed, especially the deliberate refusal to evaluate behavior in terms of good and evil or the exclusion of ethics, moral obligations, conscience and responsibility from psychological discourse. (shrink)

This article is a speculative review of psychology’s approach to the cultural and civilizational determinants of the development of human identity. It discusses the relation between human freedom and necessity as it is determined by culture and its alternative suggestions concerning normative human existence. As his point of departure the author adopted Feliks Koneczny’s quincunx philosophy of history together with its five basic categories of existence. One can try to transpose these categories into the factors which constitute (...) human intra-psychic space and also into measures of description of the mechanics of human behavior. Attention is drawn to the fact that, in this context, the axiological shortcomings of psychology are exposed, especially the deliberate refusal to evaluate behavior in terms of good and evil or the exclusion of ethics, moral obligations, conscience and responsibility from psychological discourse. (shrink)

• Examines the Oldawan, the Ancient Soul of Africa, and its correlation with what modern psychologists have defined as the collective unconscious • Draws on archaeology, DNA research, history, and depth psychology to reveal how the biological and spiritual roots of religion and science came out of Africa • Explores the reflections of our African unconscious in the present confrontation in the Americas, in the work of the Founding Fathers, and in modern psychospirituality The fossil record confirms that (...) humanity originated in Africa. Yet somehow we have overlooked that Africa is also at the root of all that makes us human--our spirituality, civilization, arts, sciences, philosophy, and our conscious and unconscious minds. In this African-revisioned look at the unfolding of human history and culture, Edward Bruce Bynum reveals how our collective unconscious is African. Drawing on archaeology, DNA research, history, depth psychology, and the biological and spiritual roots of religion and science, he demonstrates how all modern human beings, regardless of ethnic or racial categorizations, share a common deeper identity, both psychically and genetically, connected with a primordial African unconscious. Exploring the beginning of early religions, spirituality, and mysticism in Africa, along with philosophy, art, and science, the author looks at the Egyptian Nubian role in the rise of civilization and the emergence of Kemetic Egypt, revealing how and why ancient Egypt was separated from the rest of Africa in the Western mind--despite it being the most sophisticated expression of the Mother Continent. He examines the Oldawan, the Ancient Soul, and its correlation with what modern psychologists have defined as the collective unconscious. Revealing the spiritual and psychological ramifications of our shared African ancestry, the author examines its reflections in the present confrontation in the Americas, in the work of the Founding Fathers, and in modern Black spirituality, which arose from African diaspora religion and philosophy. By recognizing our shared African unconscious, the matrix that forms the deepest luminous core of human identity, we can learn to see and feel that the differences between one person and another are merely superficial and ultimately there is no real separation between the material and the spiritual. (shrink)

Psychiatric labeling has been the subject of considerable ethical debate. Much of it has centered on issues associated with the application of psychiatric labels. In comparison, far less attention has been paid to issues associated with the removal of psychiatric labels. Ethical problems of this last sort tend to revolve around identity. Many sufferers are reticent to relinquish their iatrogenic identity in the face of official label change; some actively resist it. New forms of this resistance are taking (...) place in the private chat rooms and virtual communities of the Internet, a domain where consumer autonomy reigns supreme. Medical sociology, psychiatry, and bioethics have paid little attention to these developments. Yet these new consumer-driven initiatives actually pose considerable risks to consumers. They also present complex ethical challenges for researchers. Clinically, there is even sufficient evidence to wonder whether the Internet may be the nesting ground for a new kind of identity disturbance. The purpose of the present discussion is to survey these developments and identify potential issues and problems for future research. Taken as a whole, the entire episode suggests that we may have reached a turning point in the history of psychiatry where consumer autonomy and the Internet are now powerful new forces in the manufacture of madness. (shrink)

The question of how to exist, to dwell, within one’s physical and psychological home has become an urgent one in an increasingly globalized world. Yet the answer to this question has never been more fleeting. Lacking universal political or sociological narratives in what can be oversimplified as a post-colonial or post-modern milieu, reformulating the question of how one dwells within one’s home has become both relevant and essential. This essay explores a return to the question of how one dwells, not (...) in pursuit of a theoretical harmonizing answer, but to reevaluate how the question is generally framed—a return to the foundation of how one exists, or more precisely, how a one exists. Through Martin Heidegger’s essay on dwelling and Michel Foucault’s understanding of history as power, my reading of two works of modern fiction captures the struggles of subjects attempting to define their place in the world. Examining how the protagonists of Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout dwell within their homes provides much insight into how race, identity, and history impact dwelling in a global age. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.2 (2000) 187-191 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences. Ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997. Pp. 393. $59.50, cloth; $19.95, paperback. According to its editors, the point of this anthology of previously published essays is to (...) "illustrate the ways in which 'narrative' has been used as an organizing concept in the human sciences over the last few decades" (ix). They argue that a "paradigm shift" is occurring in the human sciences, "one that leads away from nomological models and toward a more humanistic language and approach, in which narratives are central." Accordingly, the collection features essays about narrative written by authors who represent fields as disparate as philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, religion, law, gender studies, political science, speech communication, and environmental studies. The collection reprints a few essays that are well known within the humanities. For example, the Hinchmans include an excerpt from Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981), as well as Gertrude Himmelfarb's often-reprinted attack on social history, entitled "History With the Politics Left Out."As their title indicates, the editors divide their collection into three sections entitled "Memory," "Identity," and "Community." Their rationale for this division is that memory serves humans as a narrative stream that makes sense of the otherwise inchoate data given by experience. The narrative structured by memory produces what the Hinchmans call identity. Identity in its turn is influenced by narratives that circulate in the communities in which an individual exists. This collection aims to demonstrate that narrative plays a fundamental role within all three of these conceptual categories. The Hinchmans put it this way: As historians, social scientists, or (for that matter) prophets and bards weave narratives of the second order--stories that connect the individual mind to the social world--they create artifacts that soon take on a life of their own. These stories, told and retold, furnish the stock from which individual life narratives can be constructed. In other words, the story of an individual life usually plays off of one or more historically and socially transmitted narratives, which serve as prototypes of the elaboration of personal identity. Narrative theory is thus always implicitly a theory of how communities are formed and maintained, and how individuals are drafted into available social roles. (xxii-xxiii) [End Page 187]Each of the three major sections contains one or two theoretical essays, as well as two or three more that consider ways in which the concepts of memory, identity, and community play out in specific disciplinary contexts. For example, the section on community is introduced with MacIntyre's meditation on the relation of narrated selves to communities. It contains a theoretical essay by Edward M. Bruner on the malleability of community narratives, entitled "Ethnography as Narrative," and Walter Fisher's "Narration, Reason, and Community." Philip Abbott examines the use of narrative in political theory in an essay entitled "Storytelling and Political Theory," while Jim Cheney demonstrates the fruitfulness of communal narrative to environmental rhetoric in "Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative." (Cheney's is the most intriguing piece in the collection).The editors introduce each section of the collection with brief essays that raise interesting questions. For example, introducing the section called "Memory," they ask: "Is the past something that can be reconstructed, on the basis of memories, or can it only be constructed?" and "Is there such a thing as prereflective, prenarrative, unemplotted experience, or does all experience possess at least an implicit narrative structure?" (1-2). Two of the essays collected under this head, David Carr's "Narrative and Real World: An Argument for Continuity" and Stephen Crites's "The Narrative Quality of Experience," are theoretical attempts to answer these questions. Other essays in this section investigate the role played by memory and narrative in the construction of specific discourses. W. Lance Bennett examines the role played by storytelling in criminal trials, and Misia... (shrink)

This trans-disciplinary, socio-spatial study analyzes the history of decolonial existentialist and phenomenological theory in the work of figures such as Simone de Beauvoir, Richard Wright, Franz Fanon, Lewis Gordon, Audre Lorde, Sylvia Wynter, and Jamaica Kincaid to decolonize dominant discourses on femininity, Blackness, and Black peoples.

The last two centuries have been the centuries of the discovery of the cell evolution: in the XIX century of the germinal cells and in the XX century of two groups of somatic cells, namely those of the brain-mind and of the immune systems. Since most cells do not behave in this way, the evolutionary character of the brain-mind and of the immune systems renders human beings formed by two different groups of somatic cells, one with a deterministic and another (...) with an indeterministic (say Darwinian) behavior. An inherent consequence is that of the generation, during ontogenesis, of a dual biological identity. The concept of the dual biological identity may be used to explain the Kantian concept of the two metaphysical worlds, namely of the causal necessity and of the free will (Azzone, 2001). Two concepts, namely those of complex adaptive systems (CAS) and of emergence (Holland, 2002), are useful tools for understanding the mechanisms of adaptation and of evolution. The concept of complex adaptive systems indicates that living organisms contain series of stratified components, denoted as building blocks, forming stratified layers of increasing complexity. The concept of emergence implies the use of repeating patterns and of building blocks for the generation of structures of increasing levels of complexity, structures capable of exchanging communications both in the top-down and in the bottom-up direction. Against the concept of emergence it has been argued that nothing can produce something which is really new and endowed of causal efficacy. The defence of the concept of emergence is based on two arguments. The first is the interpretation of the variation-selection mechanism as a process of generation of information and of optimization of free energy dissipation in accord with the second principle of thermodynamics. The second is the objective evidence of the cosmological evolution from the Big Bang to the human mind and its products. Darwin has defended the concept of the continuity of evolution. However evolution should be considered as continuous when there is no increase of information and as discontinuous when there is generation of new information. Examples of such generation of information are the acquisition of the innate structures for language and the transition from absence to presence of morality. There are several discontinuity thresholds during both phylogenesis and ontogenesis. Morality is a relational property dependent on the interactions of human beings with the environment. Piaget and Kohlberg have shown that the generation of morality during childhood occurs through several stages and is accompanied by reorganization of the child mental organization. The children respect the conventions in the first stage and gradually generate their autonomous morality. The transition from absence to presence of morality, a major adaptive process, then, not only has occurred during phylogenesis but it occurs again in every human being during ontogenesis. The religious faith does not provide a logical justification of the moral rules (Ayala, 1987) but rather a psychological and anthropological justification of two fundamental needs of human beings: that of rendering Nature an understandable entity, and that of increasing the cooperation among members of the human societies. The positive effects of the altruistic genes in the animal societies are in accord with the positive effects of morality for the survival and development of the human societies. (shrink)

In Part IV of Book I of Hume’s Treatise Hume frequently appeals to an identity-ascribing mechanism of the imagination. A psychological mechanism of which it is a special case, to ‘compleat the union’, is also prominent. These mechanisms belong to the imagination narrowly conceived according to a distinction in section ix of Part III. The role and significance of these mechanisms in the development of Hume’s scepticism is explored. Appreciation of their significance is also argued to cast light on (...) Hume’s refusal to locate necessity in objects and to suggest a plausible explanation of his second thoughts about personal identity. (shrink)