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Category Archive: Psychology

Keeping in mind - December 26, 2006
Gadamer notes the ambiguity of "keeping something in mind." We sometimes hold something in our mental "gaze" in order to knock into it head on. We watch it carefully until we can grab it. But keeping in mind can also...

Lacan's style again - December 07, 2006
Terry Eagleton puts it this way: "for Lacan all discourse is, in a sense, a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say, or say...

Lacan's style - December 07, 2006
In a web article on the "Cult of Lacan," Richard Webster analyzes a paragraph from one of Lacan's early works. Referring to his "mirror" theory of childhood development (which, Webster shows, Lacan borrowed without much attribution from one Henri Wallon),...

Mimetic desire in Lacan - December 07, 2006
From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Developing Freud's theorisation of sexuality, Lacan's contention is rather that what psychoanalysis reveals is that human-beings need to learn how and what to desire. Lacanian theory does not deny that infants are always born...

Freud and Lacan - December 07, 2006
Louis Althusser offered this helpful description of Lacan's structuralist revision of Freud: "In his first great work The Interpretation of Dreams. . . , Freud studied the 'mechanisms' and 'laws' of dreams, reducing their variants to two: displacement and condensation....

Language of deficit - February 07, 2006
After listing 22 descriptive terms for the self (including stressed, self-alienated, paranoid, bulimic), Kenneth Gergen notes that "they are all terms of mental deficit. They discredit the individual, drawing attention to problems, shortcomings, or incapacities. To put it more broadly,...

Notes on Freud - January 25, 2006
Some notes on Freud, mainly as background for discussion of Ernest Jones psycho-analytic treatment of Hamlet, largely based on Merold Westphal's summary in Suspicion & Faith. FREUD AND SCIENCE Freud is an Enlightenment man who subverted the Enlightenment, an advocate...

Historicist Reduction of Freud - January 24, 2006
As Jones presents it, the logic of repression of sexual desires is as follows: 1) The desires are most likely to be repressed are those that are socially disapproved, disapproved by the "herd." 2) We unconsciously push back those disapproved...

What Psychology Taught Us - January 24, 2006
Ernest Jones notes an essential contribution of modern psychology: "We are beginning to see man not as the smooth, self-acting agent he pretends to be, but as he really is, a creature only dimly conscious of the various influences that...

Money and Sexuality - January 12, 2004
Bailey makes a perceptive comment at one point, drawing on the experience of a Jesuit psychologist of his acquaintance. This psychologist found that he could fairly quickly get his patients to talk openly about their sexual histories and sins, but...

Suppressed Memories - August 31, 2003
Another review from the August 15 TLS summarizes the findings of Richard J. McNally's Remembering Trauma, a study of the issue of suppressed memories. McNally's research, by the reviewer's account, is exhaustive and his conclusions devastating. Here are some excerpts:...

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