Psyche

Learning from experience

Join brother and sister, and hand them
the cup with the love potion.

The Constellation of Gemini
Ruth El Shaffar: Persiles' Retort: An Alchemical Angle on the Lovers' Labors
Karen-Claire Voss: Spiritual Alchemy: Interpreting Representative Texts and Images
Sparks of the Divinity: Keats' Gnostic Vision of Soul-Making
Bygone Beliefs: Being a Series of Excursions in the Byways of Thought
the Phallic Element in Alchemical Doctrine

The achievement of every vital impregnation: this number opens the field of every possible possibility. The evolution of the Zodiac, starting with Hay, concerns the related states of two basic energies, Aleph and Yod, the Intemporal and the Temporal.

"Higher order consciousness depends on building a self through affective intersubjective exchanges. These interactions - with parental figures, with grooming conspecifics, and with sexual partners - are of the same kind as those guiding semiotic exchange and language building. Affectively colored exchanges through symbols initiate semantic bootstrapping. The result is a model of a world rather than of an econiche, along with models of the past, present, and future. At the same time that higher-order consciousness frees us from the tyranny of the remembered present, however, primary consciousness coexists and interacts with the mechanism of higher-order consciousness. Indeed, primary consciousness provides a strong driving force for higher-order processes. We live on several levels at once (Gerald Edelman 1992, p. 150)."

Scott William Gremmels: Wild Analysis: Chaos and Complexity in Therapeutic Practice
Book II: Mapping the Psyche: Psychoanalysis

"Bion is obviously the author who, at least in the psychoanalytic tradition, has placed emotion at the very heart of the matter of mental functioning and the development of the personality. This can be seen in many of his texts from 1962 on, where he comments on the primitive aspect of emotions, and the possibility/necessity that the alpha function should operate on those (aspects of) emotions of which the individual is aware (as well as on his other sense impressions), and that this function (called dream-work-alpha in the first part of his private notes) processes and transforms them symbolically. If this happens, one can learn from experience; if this function is not operating (for different reasons), the emotions (as well as the perceptions) remain unmodified, as beta elements, and have to be somehow evacuated. The road for evacuation (ejection) can be: projective identification, generating responses in the receptor (through realistic projective identification) or hallucinations and/or bizarre objects (through massive or excessive projective identification); psycho-somatic (or somato-psychotic, as Bion also calls them) disturbances or diseases; meaningless (unthought) actions; group behavior of a primitive or basic assumption level; and/or unmentalized, contractual, automatic behavior."   Elizabeth T. de Bianchedi

Elizabeth T. de Bianchedi: The Passionate Psychoanalyst or Learning from the Emotional Experience

The more the analyst becomes expert in excluding memory, desire, and understanding from his mental activity, the more he is likely, at least in the early stages, to experience painful emotions that are usually excluded or screened by the conventional apparatus of “memory” of the session, analytical theories, often disguised desires or denials of ignorance, and “understanding” (which consists more often than not of column 2 elements). (p. 48)   Bion, W.R. (1981). Notes on memory and desire

Discussion of “The Passionate Psychoanalyst"

Emotion and cognition work together in the brain
PsycheProject: Psychological Models

Posted by psyche at June 25, 2003 09:29 PM