WITHIN THE NETWORK OF THE MIND: EMOTIONS, FEELINGS, THOUGHT (original) (raw)
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Interiority/Exteriority: Rethinking Emotions, eds. Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber. New York: Walter de Gruyter., 2014
Abstract We are prone to think that the emotions someone undergoes are somehow revelatory of the sort of person she is, and philosophers working in the field have frequently insisted upon the existence of an intimate relation between a subject and her emotions. But how intimate is the relation between emotions and the self? I first explain why interesting claims about this relation must locate it at the level of emotional intentionality. Given that emotions have a complex intentional structure—they are about an object and evaluate it—this means that the relation between emotions and the self may take different shapes. My discussion focuses on three different claims about this relation. According to the first claim, all emotions are about the subject who undergoes them. The second claim appeals to a more moderate form of reflexivity and affirms that emotions always feature a representation of other psychological states of the subject. The third understands the relation between emotions and the self in evaluative terms: emotions are said to evaluate relationally, one of the terms of this relation being the subject who undergoes it. I argue that all three claims apply, at best, only to a limited subset of emotions and that they must sometimes give way to claims that do not presuppose any intentional connection between emotions and the self.
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Several studies discuss positive and negative affectivity as two dominant and relatively independent aspects of human emotionality (e.g., Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988; Bryant, Yarnold, & Grimm, 1996). While this approach assumes the valence of emotions as a dominant individual difference characteristic we present a different idea. Our approach is based upon tow basic ideas. First, we assume that the emotional appraisal of a situation depends on the personal goals, motives, values, or concerns that are affected by the situation. Therefore emotional experiences should be associated with central aspects of the individual self-construal. The second central point is the distinction between independent and interdependent aspects of the self. Many situations vary according to the extent to which they foster and reinforce or threaten an independent or an interdependent construal of the self. The general significance of independent and interdependent aspects of an individual self-construa...
Ego, drives, and the dynamics of internal objects
Boag, S. (2014). Ego, drives, and the dynamics of internal objects. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1-13., 2014
This paper addresses the relationship between the ego, id, and internal objects. While ego psychology views the ego as autonomous of the drives, a less well-known alternative position views the ego as constituted by the drives. Based on Freud’s ego-instinct account, this position has developed into a school of thought which postulates that the drives act as knowers. Given that there are multiple drives, this position proposes that personality is constituted by multiple knowers. Following on from Freud, the ego is viewed as a composite sub-set of the instinctual drives (ego-drives), whereas those drives cut off from expression form the id. The nature of the “self” is developed in terms of identification and the possibility of multiple personalities is also established. This account is then extended to object-relations and the explanatory value of the ego-drive account is discussed in terms of the addressing the nature of ego-structures and the dynamic nature of internal objects. Finally, the impact of psychological conflict and the significance of repression for understanding the nature of splits within the psyche are also discussed.
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Introduction In the book dedicated to the Ego as a subject of identity, I dealt with how perception and thinking function in an individual self. Here, I deal with images which appear to be even earlier than thinking as they come from the web of impressions. I assume that the creative Ego is based on an identification of the perceived world which gives perception a form of images and then they are tagged mentally, emotionally or sensually. The Ego in its multi functions emerges from the 'non-Ego' (inheritance, relationships and transcendence) and tends to be the self understood as a whole which stabilises these functions and gives them a new meaning.