Unconscious mind

Interpretation of the latent meaning of manifest content is the core of the traditional approach to psychoanalytic treatment. The main purpose of such interpretation is to enhance the patient's self-knowledge, in particular his or her awareness of unconscious wishes and their embeddedness in inner conflicts. An assumption of classical psychoanalysis is that veridical interpretations-as Freud put it, interpretations that tally with what is real in the patient-will be especially effective therapeutically. These basic assumptions have been called into question, as reflected in such concepts as "narrative truth" and the overriding importance of the patient's "assured conviction" regarding interpretations...

Two distinct spaces can be seen as operating in a session-a private one in the analyst's mind, where formulations take shape, and one shared between patient and analyst, in which interpretations are offered. By maintaining a focus on the here and now in the latter space, taking care to protect it from intrusions from the analyst's theory except as hypotheses (in the form of interpretations derived from those formulations) aimed at eliciting unconscious responses that further the analytic inquiry, a basis for analytic work is established that aligns with ordinary scientific processes: theory is generated in the mind of the researcher, and hypotheses derived from it are tested systematically in a laboratory setting...

AIMS: To investigate how nurses' implicit and explicit attitudes towards people with disabilities (PWD) compare to (1) other healthcare providers and (2) non-healthcare providers. METHOD: We present an analysis of secondary data from the publicly available disability Implicit Association Test (IAT). We compare the explicit and implicit attitudes towards PWD for (1) nurses (n = 24,545), (2) other healthcare providers (n = 57,818) and (3) non-healthcare providers (n = 547,966) for a total of 630,238 respondents, between 2006 and 2021...

Many famous scientists have reported anecdotes where a new understanding occurred to them suddenly, in an unexpected flash. Do people generally experience such "Eureka" moments when learning science concepts? And if so, do these episodes truly vehicle sudden insights, or is this impression illusory? To address these questions, we developed a paradigm where participants were taught the mathematical concept of geodesic, which generalizes the common notion of straight line to straight trajectories drawn on curved surfaces...

BACKGROUND: Hypnotherapy continues to be a controversial practice in medicine. It is surrounded by myth and misuses that instill doubts about its legitimacy and usefulness. PURPOSE: In this paper, we will distinguish pseudoscientific claims from evidence-based uses of hypnotherapy. RESULTS: The use and acceptability of hypnotherapy has varied over history. Pseudoscientific uses, based on outdated theories that it can access the unconscious mind, have delegitimized hypnotherapy...

It is not well known that The Ego and the Id, where Freud presented his second model of the mind, and introduced a new role for the Ego, was ignored by many of the major theorists that followed. I will attempt to demonstrate the importance of this new view of the ego for clinical psychoanalysis, and what has been lost by its being ignored.

In this note I have limited myself to describing some convergent and divergent developments arising from the innovative concepts present in The Ego and the Id. It could be argued that a part of the psychoanalytic movement wished to emphasize the function of the Ego (Anna Freud, Hartmann, Rapaport), while another part (Melanie Klein and her followers) delved into the dynamics of the Superego and the Id in primitive and pathological states of mind. I will examine three themes presents in The Ego and the Id: the assertion that a part of the Ego is unconscious; the idea that the death drive becomes part of the dynamics of melancholia and its Superego; the concept of fusion and defusion of the life and death instinct...

When we are confronted with the challenge of trying to fully convey or describe something about human life and emotional experience, we find ourselves up against the very limitations of language. This problem becomes especially relevant as we attempt to expand psychoanalytic theory so as to enable us to "approach a mental life unmapped by the theories elaborated for the understanding of neurosis" (Bion1962, p. 37). This paper seeks to aid in that expansion by revisiting Bion's early writings about the beta screen, extending his conclusions about communication from the psychotic part of the mind to the broad area of the unrepresented (the unstructured unconscious), suggesting that there is often a potentially communicative meaning, a mute plea for intersubjective regulatory assistance (alpha function), embedded in the unconscious evocation of emotions in the object and that this cry for help may be encrypted in even the most seemingly destructive, resistant and oppositional patients...

Laboratory testing can provide information useful to promote patient health literacy and ultimately patient well-being. The human state of mind involves not only cognition but also emotion and motivation factors when receiving, processing, and acting upon information. The cognitive load for patients acquiring and processing new information is high. Modes of distribution can affect both attention to and receipt of information. Implicit unconscious biases can affect whom and what patients believe. Positive wording and framing of information with salience for patients can evoke positive emotions...

This paper explores the contemporary trend towards relativization and perversion of truth increasingly prominent in American culture, which, in Bion's terminology (1970), has become an ever more hospitable "home to the lie." The anti-COVID vaccine movement emerging in the United States in 2021, and its related network of conspiracy theories, is presented as an example. To make sense of these phenomena the author presents clinical vignettes illustrating (1) Bion's (1970) notions of catastrophic change, the lie/thinker relation, and the messianic idea; (2) Freud's (1921) thinking on group leaders; and (3) Matte-Blanco's (1975) bi-logical theory of mind...

The field of psychology has been shaped by the views and perspectives of Sigmund Freud and his former students: Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Erik Erikson, and Karen Horney. These psychologists and their respective schools of thought provide distinct views on psychology and influences on personality and psychosocial development. The foundation for psychoanalysis was laid by Freud, his work on the unconscious mind, and his emphasis on early childhood experiences. His students also made substantial contributions that expanded, sharpened, and challenged his theories...

Using a large-scale corpus of 706 coronavirus cartoons by male and female Arab artists, this study takes a fresh and more cognitive look at sexism in multimodal discourse. Specifically, it examines the role of salience and grammar (and hence of metaphor and metonymy) in gender bias and/or in discrimination against women. It argues that both men and women are vulnerable to the influence of stereotypical and outdated beliefs that create unconscious bias. But this raises the crucial issue of whether we can speak of 'overt' sexism in images...

Misnomers have dogged medical practice seemingly since its inception. They may arise out of initial misunderstanding of the underlying disease process, a fanciful personification of the disease itself, or simple confusion encountered early in the disease's discovery. Misnomers are not harmless. By increasing unneeded complexity, they add to challenges in medical education without increasing understanding. Practicing clinicians may experience difficulties in communicating with patients. For example, a diagnosis of "ringworm" may be made but the patient may not understand why an antiparasitic is not being prescribed, requiring an explanation that it is a dermatophytic condition and not a parasitic one...

In this paper, we offer some ideas for the treatment of somatoform patients and related pathologies based on the concept of embodiment. Embodiment refers to the interplay between body and mind in behavior. The word refers to giving a body to something, "incarnate". Spinoza wrote extensively about the topic in the 17th century. In the 20th century, picking up on Spinoza's work, Damasio presented extensive and important neuro-scientific evidence that feelings can be direct perceptions of internal body states, substantiating the growing understanding of emotions and feelings as a core component of the embodied experience...

INTRODUCTION: Postoperative nausea and vomiting is a common complication for patients after anesthesia and surgery, which may result in increased parasympathetic activity, such as diaphoresis, pallor, or bradycardia. However, few cases of fatal bradycardia induced by postoperative nausea and vomiting have been reported before. Clinicians generally attribute bradycardia to certain anesthetics, instead of postoperative nausea or vomiting. PATIENT CONCERNS: A fifty-year-old female with a history of well-controlled hypertension underwent elective radical mastectomy...

This paper attempts to deal with a specific kind of pathological identification-"raw object identification"-which tends to appear as concrete physiological phenomena, trying to escape meaning and integration. These somatic manifestations stem from early traumatic experiences with a meaningful object and entrap-as revealed through analysis-specific significant qualities of that object. A massive splitting ensues between body and mind, self and object, relation and identification. Certain properties of the object are then experienced as a foreign body in the subject and are defensively identified with...

In the present paper, we develop a theory of thinking based on an attempt to formalize the construction of mental representations as described in psychoanalytic theory. In previous work, we described Freud's and Matte Blanco's structural Unconscious in a formal model in which the properties of unconscious representations are captured by particular sets-infinite singletons-that can be derived in first-order logic language. Here, we afford the issue of the finitization of unconscious representations by assuming that the mind can form an all-purpose modality, originating from abstraction from infinite singletons; in this way, a symmetric prelogical setting for mental representations is formally created, and this is interpreted in a quantum spin model by a modal (necessity) projector...

When reality is too much to bear, bodymind unity can fracture, creating self-deceptions, distortions, and disguises of emotional experience that amount to unconscious lies. Without clarity regarding what is real and what is imaginary, emotional truth is difficult to discern. Lies disrupt the development of a subjective sense of self, making it difficult to trust sensations, emotions, or thoughts. In the absence of this trust, a patient may form a delusion that they do not exist. Working psychoanalytically with patients traumatized in infancy and early childhood requires the analyst to experience a somatic link between herself and the patient, thereby enabling a process that was inhibited and, in some cases, nearly aborted to resume functioning...

In the present paper, we aim to develop a formal quantum logic theory of the interplay between conscious and unconscious processes of the human mind, a goal that has already been envisaged in quantum cognition; in doing so, we will show how the interplay between formal language and metalanguage allows for characterizing pure quantum states as infinite singletons: in the case of the spin observable, we obtain an equation defining a modality that is then re-interpreted as an abstract projection operator. By including a temporal parameter in the equations and by defining a modal negative operator, we derive an intuitionistic-like negation, for which the non-contradiction law is seen as an equivalent of the quantum uncertainty...

Based on the author's clinical experience, the aim of this paper is to conceptually analyse the theory of psychological functioning and action mechanisms in the way mindfulness meditation works. Meditation is a method of revealing unconsciousness. It works in a similar way to the inhibitory and excitatory mechanisms of neurones. Block pathogenic thoughts and emotions that reach the unconscious to the conscious mind. The long-term implementation of mediation may be more effective than the short-term and interrupted implementation...