Selfhood and
Consciousness: A Non-Philosopher's Guide to Epistemology, Noemics, and
Semiotics (and Other Important Things Besides)
[Entries Beginning with "E/F"]
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First published online 13:00 GMT 28th February 2006,
Copyright Derek J. Smith (Chartered Engineer). This
version [2.0 - copyright] 09:00 BST 5th July 2018.
BUT UNDER CONSTANT EXTENSION AND CORRECTION, SO CHECK AGAIN SOON
G.3 -
The Glossary Proper (Entries E to F)
Echoic Memory: An auditory
version of iconic memory.
Ecological
Self: See self, ecological.
Ecphory: [From the Greek ekphorein
= to make known; reveal.] A valuable, but oft-ignored, term devised by Tulving
(1972) to describe a largely pre-conscious process in which retrieval cues are
brought into contact with stored information, causing parts of that stored
information to be reactivated, and thus remembered. This would be rather like
shining a flashlight around a darkened room: the cues are what guides your hand
in a particular direction, and the information retrieved is whatever is
momentarily lit up by the beam - what you see at any one instant may not be
what you are looking for, but may well tell you in which direction to look
next. The process must presumably work in close association with the mind's
memory indexing mechanisms.
Edelman,
Gerald M.: [American neuroscientist (1929-).] [Click for
external biography] Edelman is noteworthy in the context of the
present glossary for his work on consciousness and its neural substrates, for
an introduction to which see consciousness, Edelman and Tononi's theory of.
Education
Act, 1990: TO FOLLOW.
Efference
Copy: See
under forward model for the specific mention, and Section 4 of our e-paper on "Basics of
Cybernetics" for the fuller explanation.
Ego: [Latin = "I".]
One's ego is "that which is symbolised by the pronoun I; the conscious
thinking subject, as opposed to the non-ego or object" (O.E.D.). The O.E.D. records examples of the usage of
the word in its modern psychological sense in the early 19th century, and the
word is richly indexed in the psychological literature. For the purposes of the
present glossary, we note firstly that "that which is symbolised by the
pronoun I" was part of the Greek enquiry into the mind and soul [being
seen, for example, in the ability of the "pilot
of the soul" to direct our physical selves through life], and secondly
that it lies, by definition, at the heart of our subjectivity. However, it was only when the use of Greek retreated
in favour of Latin that the word ego was coined, eventually becoming the
term of choice in all discussions of subjectivity, and acquiring
everlasting fame in the works of Descartes
[see ego
cogito] and Freud [see ego, Freudian]. For his part, Kant
ignored the term (but not the problems associated with it) in favour of the
Germanised "das Ich". For Husserl, on the other hand, the notion of
ego was bound up with the way consciousness and Being interacted, thus .....
"Consciousness,
considered in its 'purity', must be reckoned as a self-contained system of Being, as a system of Absolute Being, into which nothing can penetrate, and from which
nothing can escape; which has no spatio-temporal exterior, and can be inside no
spatio-temporal system; which cannot experience causality from anything nor
exert causality upon anything, it being presupposed that causality bears the
normal sense of natural causality as a relation of dependence between
realities" (Ideas, p139).
[See now all entries beginning "ego-".]
Ego
Autonomy: [See firstly defense mechanisms.] This is Heinz Hartmann's (initially
1939/1958) notion of a "realm" of intellectual and affective
development which is characteristically independent of a parallel realm of
instinctual and emotional development, or, to put it in our own words, it
is that subset of the ego (as conventionally described elsewhere in
psychodynamic theory) which is answerable only to itself for its actions, and
not, even in part, to the id.
Hartmann developed his ideas in a 108-page monograph entitled Ich-Psychologie und Anpassungsprobleme
[in English as "Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation"], and
his first substantive point was that psychodynamic theory would always have
implications beyond the confines of the psychiatric consulting room, it being
in its very nature to be concerned with the ego as an instrument of what we
would today describe as adaptive higher-order cognition. He had introduced the
topic of adaptation as his chosen Leitmotiv
in his very first sentence, and generally adopted an already published
definition by Parr (1926), thus .....
"[Adaptation] is a central
concept of psychoanalysis [..... but], though it
appears simple, implies (or if crudely used, conceals) a great many problems.
[.....] Generally speaking, we call a man well adapted if his productivity, his
ability to enjoy life, and his mental equilibrium are undisturbed. [.....] The
concept of adaptation has the most varied connotation in biology, and it has no
precise definition in psychoanalysis either. [.....] The observation underlying
the concept 'adaptation' is that living organisms patently 'fit' into their
environment. Thus, adaptation is primarily a reciprocal relationship between
the organism and its environment. 'Where the real functions, determined
jointly by the organism's whole mechanism and by its environment, are
favourable for its survival, there a relationship of adaptation obtains between
that organism and its environment'
[Parr (1926, p3)] [..... It] will clarify matters if we assume that adaptation
(speaking now mainly about man) is guaranteed, in both its grosser and finer
aspects, on the one hand by man's primary equipment and the maturation of his
apparatuses, and on the other hand by those ego-regulated actions which (using
this equipment) counteract the disturbances in, and actually improve the
person's relationship to, the environment" (Hartmann, 1939/1958, pp22-25;
bold emphasis added).
His second substantive point was then
that ego psychology still had an awful lot of explaining to do, thus .....
"It has often been said that
while the psychology of the id was and remains a 'preserve' of psychoanalysis,
ego psychology is its general meeting ground with nonanalytic psychology. [.....
It is] a cohesive organisation of propositions, and any attempt to isolate
parts of it not only destroys its overall unity, but also changes and
invalidates its parts. Consequently,
psychoanalytic ego psychology differs radically from the 'surface psychologies'
even though [.....] it is, and will be, increasingly interested in the details
of behaviour, in all the shadings of conscious experience, in the rarely
studied preconscious processes, and in the relationships between the
unconscious, preconscious, and conscious ego. The
dynamic and economic points of view, though they apply to all mental life, have
been scarcely applied to these.
The history of the development of psychoanalytic psychology explains why we
understand as yet relatively little about those processes and working methods
of the mental apparatus [note this term - Ed.] which lead to adapted
achievements [note this phrase
- Ed.]. We cannot simply contrast the ego as the nonbiological part of the
personality with the id as its biological part; the very problem of adaptation
warns against such a division" (op.
cit., pp5-6; bold emphasis added).
But of course it is one thing to know
what adaptation is and why you need it, and quite another to be able to specify
in detail what cognitive structures equipped with what functionality might be
needed to deliver it [Hartmann warned, for example, that although the ego
"grows on conflicts", "not every adaptation [.....] is a conflict" (p8)]. The problem was that if you
defined the purpose of having an ego as being to help its owner to thrive in a
hostile world, then that ego has to have the capacity for a whole range
of cognitive skills
.....
ASIDE: Hartmann specifically lists the following cognitive
skills: "perception, intention, object comprehension, thinking, language,
recall-phenomena, productivity, [.....] motor
development, grasping, crawling, walking, [etc.]" (p8). Readers are
reminded, however, that the main body of cognitive theory available at the time
was that provided by the mental philosophers [see consciousness, Heidegger's theory of for perhaps the most advanced
version thereof], with a little empirical support from clinical neurology,
psychiatry, the Gestalt School, and
the Geneva School [Watsonian and
Skinnerian Behaviourists, of course,
explicitly refused to speculate on the subject]. Curiously, Hartmann makes not
a single mention of Piaget's work on the qualitative development of cognition
during human development, and we can only presume that this was because it was
not yet readily available in German. However, this oversight leaves readers
short of a major set of insights into how the intellectual side of the ego
might be structured. For a quick remedial briefing on the subject, see Section
1 of the companion resource on "Experiential
Learning".
.....and that capacity
has, moreover, to be kept at arm's length from the id and all its troublesome
distractions.
Hartmann described this "peaceful" (p11) side of the ego as the "conflict-free
ego sphere"
(p8), and generally sought a more penetrating account of how defense mechanisms
might serve the conflict-free side of things at the same time as keeping the
more highly charged side under control. He was particularly interested in
[Anna] Freud's description of the process of intellectualisation as an "indispensable component" of
the ego, because this process, by definition, is where the irrational id and
the rational ego come most closely together [even though we have to suspect
that neither party to the exchange may actually realise the other is even
there]. Thus .....
"Ordered thinking is always
directly or indirectly reality-oriented. When a defense
against instinctual drives results in heightened intellectual achievements,
this shows that certain forms of conflict solution may involve biological
guarantees of an adaptation process to external reality. [..... For example,] memory, associations, and so
on, are functions which cannot possible be derived from the ego's relationships
to instinctual drives or love-objects, but
are rather prerequisites of our conception of these and of their development" (op.
cit., pp14-15; bold emphasis added).
Hartmann turned next to the process
of fantasy, another of the topics
which had featured heavily in Anna Freud's writings. She had, for example,
already been responsible for the view that a given person's preference for
reality against fantasy was an indicator of the relative "maturity"
of that person's ego (Freud [A.], 1936), and what she meant by
"maturity" was not far removed from Hartmann's own notion of
adaptability. He also referred out to earlier work by Juliaan Varendonck on the psychodynamics of
daydreaming, and by Ernst Kris on
fantasy in art. Here is how Hartmann used these various sources to develop his
own argument ....
"Varendonck (1921) [.....] maintained that the biological significance of fantasy
thinking, in contrast to dream work, lies in its attempts to solve problems of
waking life. As an aside I want to mention that in Varendonck's study of
fantasy we again encounter those preconscious mechanisms whose significance
[was] recently stressed also by Kris (1939). Fantasy is a broad and somewhat
vague concept [..... but is recognised as] fruitful even in scientific
thinking, supposedly the undisputed domain of rational thought. [Indeed,] the
healthy adult's mental life is probably never quite free of the denial and
replacement of some reality by fantasy formation. [.....] The function of play
is a good example [..... and] though fantasy always implies an initial turning
away from a real situation, it can also be a preparation for reality and may
lead to a better mastery of it" (op.
cit., p18).
Viewed in this way, most of the ego's
major defense mechanisms - including even denial
and avoidance - can in at least some
circumstances prove to be adaptive. As Hartmann puts it, it is one thing to know what is real, and quite another to adapt to it (p19). He also points out
that you can adapt not just by changing your ways in a forward-looking,
progressive, sense, but also by changing back to former ways, that is to say,
by "regressing". All that
is required is a system which returns you to an "equilibrium" (p38) every time your relationship with the world
is disrupted by an event [compare the concept of homeostasis and note the role of the negative feedback control loop in delivering it]. The implications
for psychoanalysis are as follows .....
"We must stress the great
elasticity of human adaptiveness: there are always several alternative means
available to master an environmental relationship. But psychoanalytic
experience has also taught us that because of the complex structure of the
mental apparatus, internal disturbances readily cause disturbances in the
relation to reality. Our knowledge of the mental apparatus enables us to
discern, besides the equilibrium between individual and environment, two other
relatively well-defined states of equilibrium. These, the equilibrium of
instinctual drives (vital equilibrium) and the equilibrium of mental
institutions (structural equilibrium), are dependent on each other and on the
first-mentioned equilibrium" (op.
cit., p39).
ASIDE:
The industry standard
model of real-time biological cognition is the Norman-Shallice model of supervisory attention. Readers unfamiliar
with the way in which hierarchically arranged cognitive modules provide both open loop and closed loop cybernetic control of an individual's actions should
familiarise themselves with that entry, and
then carefully re-read the preceding extract, before proceeding.
Another important ego function in the
conflict-free egosphere is that of "anticipation", as follows .....
"[The] reality principal also
implies something essentially new, namely the
familiar function of anticipating the future, orienting our actions according
to it, and correctly relating means and ends to each other. It
is an ego function and, surely, an adaptation process of the greatest
significance" (op. cit., p43; bold emphasis added).
ASIDE:
Hartmann signally fails
to reference what was known, even then, about the executive functions of the
frontal lobes, leaving readers under-informed as to the role of anticipation in
the planning function. Interested readers may care to read up on this area in
the companion resource on "Executive
Function" before proceeding.
Hartmann closes his argument with
chapters on "preconscious automatisms" and "autonomous ego
development". What is interesting him here is the relative importance of
automatisms - unconscious and involuntary behaviours - in the totality of
conflict-free cognition, and what he finds himself facing is the paradox that
an "autonomous" ego actually needs as many automatisms as it can get,
but that they risk undermining the all-important "central regulation"
(p95) which it is trying to maximise. Here is how he introduces these
conflicting notions .....
"Actions always involve the
body: they always imply an awareness of the subject's own body on some level of
consciousness [.....]. The ego uses somatic apparatuses to execute actions [..... , which generally] function automatically: the integration
of the somatic systems involved in the action is automatised, and so is the
integration of the individual mental acts involved in it. With increasing
exercise of the action its intermediate steps disappear from consciousness.
[.....] Not only motor behaviour, but
perception and thinking, too, show automatisation.
Exercise automatises methods of problem solving just as much as it does
walking, speaking, or writing. [..... This] warns us that the conception of
a thoroughly flexible ego is an illusion [..... and o]ur
concern here is only to indicate the place of automatisms within the
superordinate mental structure. In doing so I will avoid the term 'habit'
[..... because it implies] that we always do it in certain situations, without
being able to state its motivation or purpose. [.....] The
place of these automatisms in the mental topography is the preconscious"
(op. cit., pp87-89; bold emphasis added).
Noting that pathological conditions
such as "compulsion neuroses, tics, catatonias, etc." (p90) are
characterised by inappropriate automatisms, he continues
.....
"It cannot be a matter of
'chance' that automatisms play so great a role among those functions which are
either adaptive themselves, or are used by adaptation processes. It is obvious
that automatisation may have economic advantages, in saving attention cathexis
in particular and simple cathexis of consciousness in general [..... meaning
that t]he sweeping assertion that one of the goals of psychoanalysis is to
transform these automatisms into mobile ego processes [.....] does not do
justice to the adaptation value of such preconscious automatic activities.
[.....] What I am implying here is that the control by the
conscious and the preconscious ego, its degree and its scope, has a positive
significance for health"
(op. cit., pp91-93; bold emphasis
added).
He presents his final synthesis as follows .....
"[N]o satisfactory definition of
the concepts of ego strength and ego weakness is feasible without taking into account
the nature and maturational stage of the ego apparatuses which underlie
intelligence, will, and action. [.....] The psychology of the ego apparatuses
seems to me a good example of the interlocking of conflict and adaptation (and
achievement), and this brings us back to our starting point [..... and] I will
be pleased if you should agree with me that the problems of autonomous ego
development, of the structure and rank order of ego functions, of organisation,
of central regulation, of self-suspension of function, etc., and their
relations to the concepts of adaptation and mental health, have a just claim to
our attention" (op. cit.,
pp107-108).
WHERE
TO NEXT: Most
follow-up sources have already been hyperlinked. However, if interested
particularly in "the rarely studied preconscious processes" mentioned
in the second of our above extracts, start with the entry for preconscious, the, and follow the
onward links.
Ego Cogito: [Latin = "I am thinking" (Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy).]
"I see very clearly
that to think it is necessary to be"
(Descartes, Discourse
of Method, IV, ¶33; Haldane and Ross translation,
p92).
This
is the conventionally accepted shorthand form of Descartes' thought-provoking
one-liner concerning the existential impact of possessing higher cognitive functions. The tag derives from the phrase "Je
pense, donc je suis", as used in the French
manuscript of Discourse on Method
(Descartes, 1637), but subsequently translated into Latin as "ego sum,
ergo existo" in the Latin manuscript of Meditations (Descartes, 1641), and then reappearing in Principles of Philosophy (Descartes,
1644 [Latin], 1647 [French]). The "textbook version" of the phrase
[by which we mean any of the veritable cavalcade of secondary sources on the
subject between then and now] is now "cogito, ergo sum", even though
Descartes turns out not to have used that precise phrasing at all [see below].
ASIDE: Our
personal command of Latin lets us down here, for our understanding had always
been that Latin verbs required no first person pronoun, at least as routine.
Just as Julius Caesar's "veni, vidi,
vici" means "I came, I saw, I conquered", so the word cogito
on its own means "I think". At first sight, therefore, the word ego
in ego cogito is redundant. We are assured, however, that in some usages
the pronoun is allowed to be inserted for the sake of added emphasis.
We
therefore have to do a little detective work, and we shall start in the early
5th century with the following extract from
"We
resemble the Trinity in that we exist; we know that we exist, and we are glad
of this existence and this knowledge. [..... However,] we do not apprehend
those truths by the bodily senses by which we are in contact with the world
outside us - perceiving colour by sight, sound by hearing, odour
by the sense of smell, flavours by the taste, hardness and softness by touch.
We can also summon up in thought the immaterial images which closely resemble
those material things apprehended by sense; we retain them in our memory; and
through those images we are aroused to desire the things they represent. But
the certainty that I exist, that I know it, and that I am glad of it, is
independent of any imaginary and deceptive fantasies. In respect of those
truths I have no fear of the arguments of the Academics. They say, 'Suppose you
are mistaken?' I reply, 'If I am
mistaken, I exist' [si enim
fallor, sum]. A non-existent being cannot be mistaken; therefore I must exist, if I am mistaken.
Then since my being mistaken proves that I exist [..... i]t
follows that I am not mistaken in knowing that I know. For just as I know that
I exist, I also know that I know" (
Now it
so happens that Augustine is playing word games with
certain of his critics at this juncture, and so he is deliberately labouring
his point. Nevertheless, the verb he uses is fallo [= "to be mistaken, deceive"], and not cogito [let me check the
Latin]. So what Descartes seems
to have done, more than a thousand years later, was to take Augustine's general
style of argument [as a Latin scholar himself, City of God would have
been perfectly familiar to him] and substitute Je pense, etc. He did
this in the following passage from his Discourse .....
".....
and remarking that this truth 'I think, therefore I am' was so certain and so assured [.....] I
came to the conclusion that I could receive it without scruple as the first
principle of the philosophy for which I was seeking. And then, examining
attentively that which I was, I saw that I could conceive that I had no body,
and that there was no world nor place where I might be; but yet that I could
not for all that conceive that I was not. [.....] After this I considered
generally what in a proposition is requisite in order to be true and certain
[.....]. And having remarked that there was nothing at all in the statement 'I think, therefore I am' [je
pense, donc je suis] which assures me of having thereby made a true
assertion, excepting that I see very clearly that to think it is necessary to
be, I came to the conclusion that I might assume, as a general rule, that the
things which we conceive very clearly and distinctly are all true ....."
(Descartes, 1637, Discourse on Method,
¶32-33; Haldane and Ross translation, p92).
He then reproduced the entire argument in Latin in his
Second Meditation (a long passage, heavily abridged) .....
"So
that after having reflected well and carefully examined all things, we must
come to the definite conclusion that this proposition: I am, I exist [ego
sum, ego existo - let me check the
Latin], is necessarily true each
time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it. But I do not yet know
clearly enough what I am, I who am certain that I am [.....] But what is a man?
Shall I say a reasonable animal? Certainly not; for then I should have to
inquire what an animal is, and what is reasonable [.....] Let us pass to the
attributes of soul and see if there is any one which is in me? [he briefly mentions walking, taking nutrition, and sensation
- Ed.] What of thinking? I find here that thought is an attribute that belongs
to me; it alone cannot be separated from me. I am, I
exist, that is certain. But how often? Just when I think; for it might possibly be the case if I ceased
entirely to think, that I should likewise cease altogether to exist.
[.....] But what then am I. A thing which thinks. What
is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands, [conceives,]
affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels" (Descartes,
1641, Meditations, ¶25-28; Haldane
and Ross translation, pp140-143).
For a long while, "the ego cogito"
stood as the rallying call for all those who would set humankind above the
"brutes" by telling us what was special about us, but it was never a
test of reality in an ontic sense.
It did not seek, as Aristotle had done, to allocate mind to a category, nor was it a challenge to our
very notion of substance. It was simply a yardstick against
which you could assess a rational being, which you could therefore only reject
if you were claiming to have a better criterion. And there was no alternative
analysis until the Phenomenologists started picking their holes in both
the je and the suis 150 years later. Kant,
for example, argues throughout his Critique that "the existence
of an actual object outside us [.....] is never
given straightforwardly in perception" (1781; Pluhar translation, p400),
and Husserl uses the phrase in the context of the
"directedness" of the ego [for details of which, see the entry
for consciousness, Husserl's theory of].
Heidegger then introduces an entire new dimension to the issue of existence
with his notion of Dasein, thus (a long passage, heavily abridged) .....
"We
have shown at the outset [] not only that the question of the meaning of Being
is one that has not been attended to and one that has been inadequately
formulated, but that it has become quite forgotten in spite of all our interest
in 'metaphysics'. Greek ontology and its history [.....] prove that when Dasein
understands either itself or Being in general, it does so in terms of the
'world', and that the ontology which has thus arisen [.....] gets reduced to
something self-evident [.....]. In the Middle Ages
this uprooted Greek ontology became a fixed body of doctrine [..... giving us]
the 'metaphysics' and transcendental philosophy of modern times [.....]. In the
course of this history certain distinctive domains of Being
have come into view and have served as the primary guides for subsequent
problematics: the ego cogito
of Descartes, the subject, the 'I', reason, spirit, person. But these all remain uninterrogated as to
their Being and its structure [.....]. If the question of Being is to have
its own history made transparent, then this hardened tradition must be loosened
up, and the concealments which it has brought about must be dissolved" (Being
and Time, pp43-44).
The
modern take on the ego cogito is a
strange amalgam of the conventional and the unconventional. On the one hand,
the phrase still sits in textbooks and on websites, saying what it always has.
On the other hand, philosophy is getting much sharper teeth nowadays. Pragmatics, for example, will tell you
all about the speech acts preceding
any statement of cogito, Edelman
and a dozen other neuroscientists will present you with real-time brain
scanning data during the act either of the thinking or the speaking, Metzinger will
analyse what access to the self-model is required during the thinking,
and the artificial intelligence
industry will run computer simulations of the problem (but never yet in a
sufficiently lifelike way to pass the Turing
test).
Ego,
"Directedness" of: This term was used by Husserl (e.g., Ideas, p109) in referring to the
role played by "some mode of heeding" in selecting which elements of
a complex external scene are to become immanent.
[For a fuller discussion, see consciousness,
Husserl's theory of.]
Ego,
Empirical: The term "empirical
ego" was used by Husserl (Logical
Investigations, p201) to set apart the ego as created by sensory input. [See now consciousness, Husserl's
theory of.]
Ego, Freudian: [See firstly consciousness, Freud's theory of for the general background,
and ego for the specific
higher-order notion. Note that this entry covers only Freud's personal
position on the nature of the ego. For later variations and emphases see ego,
psychodynamic theories of.] The ego is one of the three component
structures of the mind according to Freudian theory (the others being the superego
and the id). Specifically, it is the component which (a) supports (is,
perhaps, or possesses, perhaps) all the functions already set out in the
entry for ego, but which then (b) operates in such a way as to defend itself
against the often seething mass of psychosexually disturbing content Freud
believed builds up subconsciously within us. Freud wrote extensively on the
ego, but perhaps the most detailed (if not exactly the clearest) exposition is
in "The Ego and the Id" (Freud 1923/1960). Here is the basic
proposition on the subject .....
"We have formed the idea that in each
individual there is a coherent organisation of mental processes; and we call
this his ego. It is to this ego that consciousness is attached; the ego
controls the approaches to motility - that is, to the discharge of excitations
into the external world; it is the mental agency which supervises all its own
constituent processes, and which goes to sleep at night, though even then it
exercises the censorship on dreams. From this ego proceed the repressions, too,
by means of which it is sought to exclude certain trends in the mind not merely
from consciousness but also from other forms of effectiveness and activity.
[.....] Now we find during analysis that, when we put certain tasks before the
patient, he gets into difficulties; his associations fail when they should be
coming near the repressed. We then tell him that he is dominated by a
resistance; but he is quite unaware of the fact [.....]. Since, however, there
can be no question but that this resistance emanates from his ego and belongs
to it, we find ourselves in an unforeseen situation. We come upon something in
the ego itself which is also unconscious, which behaves exactly like the
repressed - that is, which produces powerful effects without itself being
conscious and which requires special work before it can be made conscious"
(Freud, 1923/1960, pp8-9).
Ego
Ideal (1/2/3): (1) To the early psychoanalysts, the phrase "ego ideal"
was used synonymously with what we now understand as superego, that is to say, as
the voice of rectitude in our heads. Freud himself did this in Introductory
Lectures on Psychoanalysis in 1917 .....
"From
the analysis of delusions of observation we have drawn the conclusion that there
actually exists in the ego an agency which unceasingly observes, criticises, and compares,
and in that was sets itself over against the other part of the ego. [..... The
patient] senses an agency holding sway in his ego which measures his actual ego
and each of its activities by an ideal
ego that he has created for himself in the course of his development. We
believe, too, that this creation was made with the intention of re-establishing
the self-satisfaction which was attached to primary infantile narcissism. We
know the self-observing agency as the ego-censor, the conscience ....." (Freud, 1917/1963, Introductory
Lectures, p479).
..... and he did it again in The Ego and the Id in 1923
.....
"The
considerations that led us to assume the existence of a grade in the ego, a
differentiation within the ego, which may be called the 'ego-ideal' [Ich-Ideal]
or 'super ego' [Über-Ich], have been stated elsewhere. They still hold
good. The fact that this part of the ego is less firmly
connected with consciousness is the novelty which calls for explanation"
(Freud, 1923/1860, The Ego and the Id,
p22).
(2) The situation changed somewhat after Freud's
death, with the growing popularity of
object relations theory. Melanie Klein, for example, saw the ego ideal as
the object relation formed by the projection of the perceived "good
feelings and good parts of the self" (Klein, 1946, p184) onto the mother
object [see the entry for projective
identification for the details here]. Somewhat later, Jacobson (1964)
reviewed the emergence of ego ideals through a process known as
"idealisation". She noted as follows [citations removed] .....
"To return to the preoedipal child, it seems that
his identifications with the mother, both as the aggressor and as the person
who imposes instinctual restrictions, pave the way to these new processes of
identification. In contrast to his magic fantasies of fusion and his primitive
affective identifications and merely formal imitations, they have a meaningful
content and a realistic aim. Such an aim can be reached by way of deep-seated
modifications of the ego, which now really assumes certain characteristics of
the admired object. This presupposes [a] distinction between realistic and
wishful self images. In fact, the ego cannot acquire a realistic likeness to
the love object unless admired traits of this object become enduringly
introjected into the child's wishful self images. [..... This]
growing distinction between wishful self images and realistic self
representations has very significant implications regarding the development of
the feelings of identity" (Jacobson, 1964, pp50-51).
She then presented the crux of her argument
.....
"The originally weak boundaries and cathectic vacillations
between self and object images in the small child tend to cast the
glorification and idealisation back from the love object to the self. As the
setting up of idealised parental images protects the child from his aggressive
devaluation of the parents, the constitution first of wishful aggrandised, then
of idealised, self images counteracts the infantile tendency toward rapid self
devaluation. Thus the processes of idealisation not only serve to protect
infantile object relations, which are threatened by the child's sexual desires
and his ambivalence, but also help to heal the narcissistic wounds. Forever close to magic imagery and yet
indispensable to the ego, the ego ideal is eventually moulded from such
idealised object and self images" (Jacobson, 1964, p110; emphasis
added).
Lampl de Groot (1965) offers the alternative narrative .....
"As long as the infant-mother unity is
need-satisfying there is no stimulation for accelerating the maturational
process. However, birth itself causes unpleasurable sensations and soon
afterward the satisfaction of needs does not occur immediately and completely
enough to avoid unpleasure. The experiences of alternate pleasure and pain
stimulate development, and gradually a primitive structuralisation of the mind
comes about. A number of functions begins to develop:
sensual stimuli are laid down in memory traces (structuralisation of the
brain), outside and inside are distinguished (object and self), testing of
reality begins, etc. [.....] In the structured mind they build up the ego
organisation which must attempt to allow sufficient satisfaction of needs and
wishes and at the same time to adjust to the necessities of life and to the
demands of the environment. [.....] The reason why I dwell so long on this early
and primitive ego function is that, in my opinion, we encounter here the basis
of the ego ideal. In terms of structuralisation we could speak of a forerunner
of the ego ideal. [.....] The ego ideal is an agency of
wish fulfilment" (Lample de Groot, 1965, pp318-319; bold emphasis
added).
(3) Given
the conflict between definitions (1) and (2), Schafer (1967) drew a helpful distinction between "ideals",
"ego ideals", and "the ideal self", seeing these as three
separate constructs liable to dangerous and misleading conflation. He
saw "ideals" as just everyday standards of perfection, "ego
ideals" as part of the raw material out of which the structures of the
psychosexual mind are built, and the "ideal self" as a desired "self-representation".
Here is one of the critical distinctions .....
"For purposes of anatomising ideals, it is useful
to differentiate ideal self-representations and experienced
self-representations, and to regard the latter as representing a continuum
ranging from the most deprecated through the objective to the idealised. An ideal
self-representation is an image or concept of oneself as one would be if
one had satisfied a specific ideal. A daydream, recognised as such, of oneself
as a great hero involves an ideal self-representation, for example. [.....] An experienced
self-representation is an image or concept of oneself as one thinks one
is" (Schafer, 1967, p150).
Ego
Identity: This is Eriksonian theory's
core notion of a complex of cognitive structures which provides the phenomenally
aware self with its "continuity and sameness". Here is Erikson's own
initial statement on the subject .....
"The term identity crisis was first used, if I
remember correctly, for a specific clinical purpose in the Mt Zion Veterans'
Rehabilitation Clinic [current
details] during the Second World War, a national emergency which permitted
psychiatric workers of different persuasions and denominations, among them
Emanuel Windholz and Joseph Wheelwright, to work together harmoniously. Most of
our patients, so we concluded at that time, had neither been 'shellshocked' nor
become malingerers, but had through the exigencies of war lost a sense of personal sameness and
historical continuity. They were
impaired in that central control over themselves for
which, in the psychoanalytic scheme, only the 'inner agency' of the ego could
be held responsible. Therefore, I spoke of a loss of 'ego identity'. Since
then, we have recognised the same central disturbance in severely conflicted
young people whose sense of confusion is due, rather, to a war within
themselves, and in confused rebels and destructive delinquents who war on their
society. [.....] As a subjective sense of an invigorating sameness and continuity, what I would call a
sense of identity seems to me best described by William James in a letter to
his wife: 'A man's character is discernible in the mental or moral attitude in
which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensively
active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and
says: "This
is the real me!"'" (Erikson, 1968, pp16-17/19; bold emphasis added).
Ego
Illusion: See free will.
Ego
Maturity: See ego autonomy.
Ego,
Mutability of: This is Anna Freud's
notion that the structures of the ego change - at times quite rapidly - as one
passes through the stages of development. "The immutability of the
id," she writes, "is matched by the mutability of the ego"
(Freud [A.], 1937/1966, p141).
Ego Nucleus: See multiple personality.
Ego Psychology:
[See firstly ego, psychodynamic theories of.] This is the name given to
the sub-perspective within psychodynamic theory which followed the
writings of Anna Freud (e.g., 1936/1968) on defense mechanisms
and Heinz Hartmann (e.g., 1938/1958) on ego autonomy, and
which has been one of the dominant positions in post-WW2 psychoanalytic thought
[but compare
"Egosphere": This is an impressive-sounding compression of David
Rapaport's (1958) "conflict-free ego sphere", itself a translation of
Heinz Hartmann's (1939/1958) term konfliktfreie Sphäre
des Ichs. [See now ego autonomy
for more on the associated psychodynamics, or egosphere, sensory for more on the associated robotics.]
Egosphere,
Sensory: [Robotics term] [See firstly
egosphere.] The term "sensory
egosphere" has recently started to be used by roboticists to describe the
three-dimensional space in which robots can experience the world [click
for example].
Ego Strength:
[See firstly ego psychology.] Wolberg (1977) defines ego strength as
"the positive personality assets that will enable the individual to
overcome his anxieties [and] to acquire new, more adequate, defenses"
(p4). It is what leads the fight against adversity on behalf of the self. The
term is also used to name one of Cattell's (1965) 16 personality factors.
Ego, System:
See system ego.
Ego versus
Self: Unless used in more precise
compound terms, this glossary freely interchanges the words "ego" and
"self".
Eidetic
Image: [CAUTION - not directly related to eidetic
knowledge.]
The adjective "eidetic" comes
from the Greek word eidetikos - pertaining to images, and refers to the
somewhat rare ability to retain, and indeed further inspect, a vivid mental
image of something after that something has disappeared from sight. Haber
(1969) describes eidetic imagery as common in young children, but rare after
puberty. His team investigated children in four US elementary schools in the
late 1960s and found 20 good imagers out of more than 500 children screened
(that is to say, only 4%). They classified as eidetic the 5 to 10 % of subjects
who reported still being able to see elements of a target picture (as opposed
to merely remembering things about it) half a minute after it had been removed.
Such images started to develop after only a few seconds viewing, and the best
imagers would retain them for 10 minutes or more. The three-dimensional
reversals typical of a Necker cube occurred significantly less frequently when
working from images of cubes rather than the real thing: the images were quite
"flat", in other words. Haber's team then profiled the eidetics over
a period of several years. There were no differences in IQ, reading ability,
personality, sex, and racial grouping. Children could control their own imaging
by blinking, which seems to erase the image, or by shifting their attention
from the (now blank) plane of the original. Another way to erase the image is to code it verbally. Once a component
of an image has been verbally named, it disappeared from the imaged scene, and
poor images were found for scenes where the child was forced at the outset to
name the components. This seems to imply that eidetics
"retain information either in the form of an image or in the form of a
verbal memory" (p41), but not both.
As a result, eidetics were surprisingly only marginally better than
non-eidetics at a scene description from memory task.
Eidetic
Knowledge:
[CAUTION - not directly related to eidetic
image.] This is Husserl's
term for knowledge at the level of "the ειδος, the pure essence" (Ideas, p51), as now profiled (a long
passage, heavily abridged) .....
"The
Eidos, the pure essence, can be exemplified intuitively in the data of
experience, data of perception, memory, and so forth, but just as readily also
in the mere data of fancy (Phantasie). Hence, with the aim of
grasping an essence itself in its primordial form, we can set out from
corresponding empirical intuitions [or] non-empirical intuitions, intuitions
that do not apprehend sensory existence, intuitions rather 'of a merely
imaginative order'. [.....] It follows essentially from all this that the
positing of the essence [.....] does not imply any positing of individual
existence whatsoever. [.....] Judgments about essences and essential
relationships on the one hand, and on the other hand eidetic judgments in
general [.....] are not the same thing; eidetic
knowledge has not essences as its object-matter in all its propositions.
[.....] We can be intuitively aware of essences and can apprehend them after a
certain fashion without their becoming 'objects about which'"
(Husserl, Ideas, pp50-52).
Eidolon:
[Greek = "image, shape, phantom; vision, idol" (O.C.G.D.);
"image" (Peters).] This is one of several words used to convey the
general notion of image in classical theories of aesthesis.
Ειδος / Ειδε: See
firstly the G.2 pump-priming definitions.
Eikon: [Greek "likeness,
image, picture, painting; simile; phantom, notion" (O.C.G.D.);
"image, reflection" (Peters).] This classical Greek word for an
artistic likeness [cf. mimema] is one of a number of words which
have contributed various nuances to the modern notion of (mental) image.
It is also the root of the modern English word "icon" and its
derivatives.
Eitinger,
Leo:
[American psychiatrist (1912-1996).] [Click for external biography]
Eitinger is noteworthy in the context of the present
glossary for his work on PTSD and survivor syndrome.
Elder,
Glen H.: [American sociologist.] [Click for external biography] [Homepage] Glen Elder is noteworthy in the context of the
present glossary for his work on the Philadelphia
Inner City Project.
Electrostatic
Force: [See firstly resting potential and equilibrium.]
The charged particles which move back and forth across the cell membrane
in excitable tissues are capable of exerting relatively strong intermolecular
forces. Like charges (both positive or both negative)
repel, and unlike charges (i.e. one of each) attract. This serves to prevent
too many like-charged particles accumulating in the same place, and this, in
turn, creates a limiting back-pressure should you happen to be metabolically
pumping like-charged ions into that place for some purpose.
Electrotonic: An
"electrotonic" electrical potential
is stable, rather than constantly changing ("clonic"). In the
present context, the neuron's resting potential is an
electrotonic potential.
Elena F: See case, Elena
F.
Elevated
Mood: See euphoria.
Ellis,
Albert: [American psychotherapist
(1913-)] [Click for external biography]
Albert Ellis is noteworthy in the context of the present glossary for his work
on rational emotive behaviour therapy.
Elysion: [Greek = "the final resting place
of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous" (Wikipedia);
compare the modern English elysium,
"the supposed state or abode of the blessed after death in Greek mythology
[;] any similarly conceived abode or state of the departed" (O.E.D.) (but
note that there are substantial differences between the Greek notion of the
afterlife and the Christian notion of heaven).] This word was taken as the
title of Jackson Knight's (1970)
monograph on the history of life-after-death in Western mythology.
Embodiment: The issue of "embodiment" was first raised
by McCulloch (1965), who, with more than twenty years of practical experience
in artificial intelligence research,
under his belt, simply pointed out that it might eventually prove impossible to
build an artificially conscious computer brain for the simple reason that it
would have no biological body to go with it. It was not "embodied", and as a result
there would simply be too little for it to be conscious of. This point was
taken up in Lakoff and Johnson's (1999) "Philosophy in the Flesh",
who present the problem the way .....
"Any
reasoning you do using a concept requires that the neural structures of the
brain carry out that reasoning. Accordingly, the architecture of your brain's
neural networks determines what concepts you have and hence the kind of
reasoning you can do. [.....] We have inherited from the Western philosophical
tradition a theory of faculty psychology, in which we have a 'faculty' of
reason that is separate from and independent of what we do with our bodies. In
particular, reason is seen as independent of perception and bodily movement. In
the Western tradition, this autonomous capacity of reason is regarded as what
makes us essentially human, distinguishing us from all other animals. [.....]
The evidence from cognitive science shows that classical faculty psychology is
wrong. There is no such fully autonomous faculty of reason separate from and
independent of bodily capacities such as perception and movement. The evidence
supports, instead, an evolutionary view, in which reason uses and grows out of
such bodily capacities. [.....] These findings [.....] are profoundly
disquieting in two respects. First, they tell us that human reason is a form of
animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities
of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies,
brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious
basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real"
(Lakoff and Johnson, 1999, pp16-17).
EMDR: See
eye-movement desensitisation and reprocessing.
Emergent
Properties: Emergent properties are
properties of complex systems not
individually possessed by the components or sub-assemblies of those systems.
They are what transforms four wheels and a chassis
(interesting enough in themselves) into a fully functioning automobile
(bringing a whole new world of options, and demanding a whole new set of
explanatory laws) at the moment the final wheel-nut is tightened. They are thus
what the Gestalt
Emergentism: [See firstly mind-brain
debate.] This is one of the three main middle-of-the-road philosophical
positions on the mind-brain debate (the others being epiphenomenalism and identity
theory). Like the Gestalt
E-MOP: See episodic
memory organisation packet.
Emotion-Focused
Coping: See coping and defending.
Emotional Intelligence: This is "a set of
skills hypothesised to contribute to the accurate appraisal and expression of
emotion in oneself and others, the effective regulation of emotion in self and
others, and the use of feelings to motivate, plan, and achieve in one's life"
(Salovey and Mayer, 1990, p185). The precise term has been attributed to the
title of a 1985 doctoral dissertation (Payne, 1985), but the basic idea comes
from Leeper (1948). Leeper's position was that emotions are "organising
responses", whose adaptive value resides in their ability to direct
behaviour strategy along surprisingly precise lines (even if it should appear -
like aggression - explosive and undirected). Salovey and Mayer (1990) have
reviewed this area and conclude that emotional intelligence should be regarded
as a subset of social intelligence.
Emotional
Lability: One's emotional state is
said to be "labile" if emotions come and go less predictably and
under less control than normal. It is commonly noted, for example, that even mild
strokes often leave their victims more tearful or less able to bite back a
hurtful word. Similarly, clinically significant emotional lability is
associated with certain mental health conditions, such as bipolar disorder and many of the personality disorders.
Empedocles:[<Εμπεδοκλης>]
[Greek philosopher (floruit ca.
450BCE).] [Click for external
biography] Beare (1906) summarises Empedocles' theory of
visual perception thus: "According to the doctrine first enunciated by
Empedocles, like perceives like. All
bodies [.....] have passages ([poroi])
or 'pores' in them, and from all emanations or
effluences [] come, and enter into the said pores or passages. Thus all bodies
are in a state of physical communion and all interaction whatever between
bodies depends upon the facts thus stated" (p14).
Empirical
Abstraction: See abstraction, empirical.
Empirical
Apperception: See apperception, empirical.
Empirical
Consciousness: See consciousness, empirical.
Empirical
Ego: See ego, empirical.
Empirical Knowledge: Same as a posteriori knowledge.
Empiricism:
Empiricism is a philosophical doctrine predicated upon the assertion that all knowledge
derives either directly or indirectly from sensory experience. According to the
Online Etymology Dictionary, the word
comes from the Greek roots empeirikos
"experienced," empeiria
"experience," and empeiros
"skilled," all originally from en-
"in" + peira "trial,
experiment". As a
philosophical position, the primary reliance on the evidence of the senses
naturally sets Empiricism off against Rationalism,
and paved the way for the scientific method. [See now British Empiricism and all entries beginning "empirical .....".]
Emulation: See imitation versus emulation debate.
Enabling:
See co-dependency.
Encapsulation (0/1/2): (0) In everyday English, "to (en)capsulate" means literally to enclose in a capsule
[Latin capsula = a small container], or similarly seal away and make
self-contained. (1 - in mental philosophy) The word was thus a natural
choice for mental philosophers seeking a descriptor for the quality of functional separatedness and independence which they believed went a long way towards defining
a good mental module [see the entry for modularity for the details here]. (2
- in computer science) The word was also a natural choice for computer
programmers seeking to produce highly modular object code for their machines [see the entry for object (3) for the details here].
Encoding:
Encoding
is what information processing systems (the nervous system included) do to the
stimuli which impinge upon them. It is the mechanism by which
the various attributes of the external stimulus are converted to
an internal - that is to say, neural - signal. With a visual stimulus,
for example, you need to encode size, shape, colour, brightness, and movement
for each of 125 million retinal rods and cones, and to do the necessary
encoding you only have 1.25 million optic nerve fibres to play with [a 100:1
reduction factor!], and all you can do with these nerve fibres is determine
which ones should fire, at what rate, and for how long. Paivio (1986) provides
a useful theoretical overview of the encoding process, and ventures to name the
three basic operations involved. Firstly, there is representational encoding,
which is encoding by external attribute (thus an iconic image would be a
representational encoding of a visual stimulus, and an echoic image would be a
representational encoding of an auditory stimulus). Secondly, there is referential
encoding, which involves producing "referentially related verbal and
nonverbal memory trace components". This creates a dual trace, the
two aspects of which are (a) the thing in question [the concept], and
(b) its name [the symbol]. And thirdly, there is associative encoding,
which involves creating links, or associations, between a given new
memory and as many pre-existing ones as possible. The more numerous the links,
the harder the new memory is to forget. Encoding is thus one of psychology's
major persistent issues (the nature of mental representation) under another
name, and understanding it is one of the keys to understanding the
mind as a whole, let alone memory in isolation! [See now transcoding.
For a detailed example of progressive encoding and recoding/transcoding within
the longitudinal cognitive system, see the flowline annotations in Ellis (1982), and for
quantification of the reduction in information loadings which transcoding
permits, see Frank
(1963).]
Endoplasm: Same as cytoplasm.
Endoplasmic
Reticulum: This is a complex network of intracellular microtubules and cisterns
(small chambers) which permeates the cytoplasm. Its walls - the reticular
membrane - share the four-layered molecular structure of the cell
membrane. Indeed, at some points on the cell membrane there are pores where
selected endoplasmic tubules pass through the cell membrane to communicate with
the interstitial fluid. At other points it is continuous with the Golgi
apparatus. In some regions the reticular membrane is heavily studded with ribosomes,
giving it a granular appearance.
Engram: It has long been
suspected/agreed that the process of retaining information over time requires
some sort of structural change within the nervous system, but opinions as to
the nature of this trace continue to differ. However, its name at least
is fairly well established: it is usually referred to as the "memory
trace", or engram (literally, "that which has been
engraved"). The term engram derives from Richard Semon (1904), who
defined it as "a permanent change wrought by a stimulus on any living
substance". Experience, in other words, must somehow make its mark upon
the brain, and the engram is that mark.
Ens: "Something which has
existence; a 'being', entity, as opposed to an attribute, quality, etc." (O.E.D.). This rarely seen English word derives from the
Latin ens.
Note but avoid, using "entity"
instead, perhaps.
Ens: [(genitive entis) Latin = "a
thing".] This word seems to be the Latin equivalent of the Greek on[ta], and is the root of the
modern "entity".
Ens
Rationis:
[Latin = "a thing in reason (alone)".] An ens
rationis is "a thing which has an existence only as an object of
reason" (O.E.D.), that is to say, as a figment of the imagination. Alternatively, "an object that exists 'in my thought of
it'" (Meinong, 1902/1983, p49). [See now consciousness,
Meinong's theory of.]
Entelecheia: [Greek = "state of
completion or perfection, actuality" (Peters).] This is the sourceword for
the Aristotelian notion of entelechy. Peters explains its derivation from the root telos thus
.....
"Although Aristotle normally uses entelecheia,
which is probably his own coinage, as a synonym for energeia, there is a passage [.....]
that at least suggests that the two terms, though
closely connected, are not perfectly identical. They are related through the
notion of ergon: ergon is the function of a capacity (dynamis)
and so its completion and fulfilment (telos). Thus
the state of functioning (energeia) 'tends toward' the state of
completion (en-telecheia)" (p57).
Entelechy: The word "entelechy" is an Anglicisation of
entelecheia, and signifies
"the realisation or complete expression of some function" (O.E.D.).
Here is a typical example of the word's use within mental philosophy
.....
"We
could give the name entelechy to all
simple substances or created monads, because they have within them a certain perfection; there is a kind of self-sufficiency
which makes them sources of their own internal actions, or incorporeal
automata, as it were. If we want to call anything that has perceptions and
appetites in the general sense that I have just explained a soul, then
all simple substances or created monads could be called souls. But as
feeling is something more than a simple perception, I think that the general
name of monad or entelechy is adequate for simple substances
which have that and nothing more, and that we should call souls only
those which have perceptions which are more distinct and accompanied by memory.
[.....] Memory provides souls with a kind of sequencing ....." (Leibniz, 1714, Monadology [Woolhouse and Francks (1998)
edition, pp270-271], ¶18-26).
Entity: [Ultimately from the Greek on[ta]
and the Latin ens via its genitive
entis.] "1. Being, existence [.....]. 2. That which constitutes the
being of a thing; essence, essential nature [.....]. 3.
Something that has a real existence;
an ens, as distinguished from a mere
function, attribute, relation,
etc." (O.E.D.). Philosophical considerations
of entity-ness go back to the earliest classical philosophers, and to
humankind's long-standing search for the fundamentals of existence. Thus Democritus and his indivisible atoms and the Pythagoreans and their elements
both predate the Platonic analysis of form
and the Aristotelian analysis of substance [the Platonic position has
already been introduced in G.2, and the Aristotelian
in the entries for category and natural kind]. Plato's
views are neatly summarised in the Cratylus
dialogue, thus: "[Things] are not in relation to us [but] are by
themselves, in relation to their own being or essence, which is theirs by
nature" (Plato, Cratylus, 386e;
Reeve translation, p5). Two millennia later, Spinoza (1677) was still defining
substance as "that which is in itself and is conceived through
itself", and attribute as "that which the intellect perceives as
constituting the essence of a substance". Our initial conclusions are
therefore (a) that the notion of the unit of reality is fundamental to mental
philosophy, and (b) that the word "entity" is simply one of many
optional terms for the external objects in the world, with English texts
preferring "object" and
German ones generally preferring Existenz, Dasein, Vorstellung, or Gegenstand. Heidegger (or
more accurately his translators) helped popularise the modern term in Being and Time, as the standard
rendering of the German Seiendes, introducing it as follows .....
".....
we must keep in mind that the expression 'phenomenon' signifies that which shows itself in itself, the
manifest. Accordingly the
φαινομενα or 'phenomena' are the
totality of what lies in the light of day or can be brought to the light - what
the Greeks sometimes identified simply with τα οντα
(entities). Now an
entity can show itself from itself [.....] in many ways, depending in each case
on the kind of access we have to it" (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p51; bold emphasis added).
Heidegger's
main question was whether "material thinghood" (p132) is the same
thing as Being, or, conversely, whether "in an entity which is supposedly
a Thing, there is something that will not become fully intelligible through
Thinghood alone" (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p132). His suggested answer was
that entities need to be "grasped in their Being as 'presence'; this means
that they are understood with regard to a definite mode of time - the
'Present'" (p47). More recently, there have been a number of academic and
technical areas where entities are recognized as "the elements or parts of
a system" (Kramer and de Smit, 1977, p14), "to a significant degree
discontinuous with the environment that contains them" (Salthe, 1985,
p23). The term is also heavily used in database
theory, where the entire process of data modelling is based upon the
entity-relationship diagram [the distinction made by database designers
between entity type and entity occurrence being particularly
illuminating]. Coming right up to date, Fine (2003) has reexamined the
classical texts in the light of her notion of "relational entities" (p326).
Entity Occurrence: [See firstly entity
and entity type.] In database theory,
an entity occurrence is a specific instantiation of an entity type in a
physical database. It is thus a record of
a particular type for a specific
entity in a specific database. Example:
There might be ten million occurrences
of the entity type <person> in
a database of
Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD): [See firstly Bachman diagram.] An ERD is
nowadays the standard graphical tool for the summative presentation of a
system's entity-relationship model.
The technique was first developed in the early 1960s to provide semantic
network database designers with their Bachman diagrams. By the mid-1960s,
however, a surging demand for the necessary design skills prompted formal
system for their production. The key publications here were Codd (1970) and
Chen (1976), and the resulting products - flat-file databases (popularly, but
misleadingly, "relational" databases) - have dominated the
non-volatile database marketplace ever since. So successfully did this new tool
do the job that it rapidly became the industry standard, so that computing
today still works to a de facto philosophy which recognises only three
fundamental building blocks of reality, namely attributes, entity types,
and the relationships between entity
types. Attributes it defines as the PROPERTIES of things; as atomic items of
data, each of which is capable of being named, but of not being further
divided. Entities it defines as the THINGS which matter to, and therefore need
to be identified by, the system; as objects real or conceptual within the world
real or conceptual. Each entity is thus a collection of attributes.
Relationships are the reasons entities may be associated. They are assertions
of truth about the subject area, and take the form "a man can own many
dogs" note that both the subject and object of this truth are themselves
entities]. It is important also to consider the pluralities involved, noting
carefully whether the association is essentially One-to-Many, Many-to-One,
or One-to-One. For example, the
relationship between <NORMAL PERSON> and <HEAD> is One-to-One,
whilst that between <NORMAL PERSON> and <COIN IN POCKET> is One-to-Many.
Insofar as an ERD is a rough and ready ontology, it is not surprising that its
constituent elements are all deeply rooted in mental philosophy. [For some
initial thoughts on what shape a data model of biological cognition might one
day take, see self, Bachman diagram of.]
Entity-Relationship Model: [See firstly data
model.] "The Entity-Relationship Model is a data model for high-level
descriptions of conceptual data models and it provides a graphical notation for
representing such data models in the form of entity-relationship diagrams. Such data models are typically used
in the first stage of information system design and are used for example to
describe information needs and/or the type of information that is to be stored
in the database [.....].In the case of the design of an information system that
is based on a database, the conceptual model is at a later stage, usually
called logical design, mapped to a logical data model, such as the relational
model, which in turn is mapped to a physical model during physical design"
(Wikipedia). [For some initial
thoughts on what shape a data model of biological cognition might one day take,
see self, Bachman diagram of.]
Entity Type:
[See firstly entity.] The concept of
entity type was invented by data
analysts in the late 1950s to assist them in defining what records
needed to be designed into a computer system. In this technical sense, an
entity type's individual qualities are known as attributes, and they influence each other through relationships [note the clear
similarity to the first of Aristotle's categories,
namely that of ousia, as
"substance, entity"]. This technical approach to entities may be seen
in theoretical mathematics (e.g., as Set Theory), in theoretical cognitive
science (e.g., as propositional networks),
in academic computer science (e.g., as semantic
networks), and in commercial data processing. In all these instances,
entities need to be defined and the supporting understanding is achieved by a
process known as data analysis, and
set out in a data model. We hear
echoes of this technical concept in a whole host of far earlier philosophical
concepts, including Plato's ειδος
and Hegel's fürsichsein. [Compare forms and ideas in the pump-priming definitions at the head of this
appendix, because we strongly suspect that the data analyst's entity type
refers to the same species of reality as Plato's ειδε.]
Ependymins: [See firstly calcium switching.] If
calcium-switched post-synaptic sensitisation has a lifetime measured in hours,
then it cannot explain memory for longer periods. Membrane sensitisation, in
other words, is NOT the sort of structural change long believed to be involved
in the formation of LTM engrams, and so we still need a mechanism capable of consolidating
memory into a structural form. A typical worker in this latter area is Victor
Shashoua of the
Epidemic
Hysteria: See hysteria, epidemic.
Epiphenomenon:
[See firstly mind-brain debate.]
"Something that appears in addition" (O.E.D.); a by-product or
accidental spin-off, but one which may nevertheless turn out to have a value in
its own right; "a secondary phenomenon that results from and accompanies
another" (The Free Dictionary). Something which is
"causally inefficacious" (Wikipedia). The term epiphenomenon
is frequently encountered in the mind-brain debate. This is because it allows
the mind to be treated as an emergent property of neural activity, and
accordingly to remain the subject of psychological and philosophical
investigation without interfering too much with the hard neuroscience carried
out by physiologists. [See now epiphenomenalism.]
Epiphenomenalism: [See firstly mind-brain
debate and epiphenomenon.] One
of the three main not-quite-sure-yet philosophical positions on the mind-brain
debate (the others being emergentism
and identity theory). Epiphenomenalists
subscribe to the notion that "mental events are caused by physical events
but have no causal effects themselves" (Gray, 1987, p462). Alternatively,
"the classical form of epiphenomenalism [denies] that mental-to-physical causal
action ever takes place .....] Mental phenomena are totally
causally inert" (Kim, 1993, p104; emphasis added). In fact,
Kim doubts that epiphenomenalism is a valid position in the first place, seeing
it as fatally flawed logically. He follows Lachs (1963) in arguing that the
very fact we are able to discuss events implies that they have caused that at
least! Nevertheless, the term epiphenomenon is regularly encountered in the
mind-brain debate, because it allows the mind to be treated as an emergent
property of this or that underlying neural activity. On balance, however, many
authors regard identity theory as
superior in that it does not rule out mental-to-physical causation quite so
high-handedly. One of Kim's (1993) observations puts the central issue very
succinctly, thus: "Given that any physical event has a physical cause, how
is a mental cause also possible?"
(p281).
Episodic Memory: The concept of a specifically "episodic" memory derives from
a 1972 paper by Endel Tulving,
who argued that the material used in memory experiments was far from
"natural" (Tulving, 1972). In particular, it did not tap the ability
of subjects to record their personal life events in the form of an internal
autobiography. Tulving therefore proposed distinguishing episodic memory - the
memory for occurrence or episode, from semantic memory - the memory of
meaning. Episodic memory is thus LTM for past events - a sort of mental life
history on video [e.g., the ability to recall what you had for breakfast this
morning]. Episodic memory is basically a time-sequenced accumulation of past
perceptual scene analyses, and in the very long term it tends to be the
emotional events which get remembered best [e.g., first kisses, stressful
examinations and interviews, insults, anger, indebtedness, etc.]. The name
"flashbulb memory" [definition] is
sometimes given to events such as assassinations and disasters, where the
emotion is so intense that it freezes the imagery in time [which is why
those who are old enough can remember what they were doing when they
heard of President Kennedy's assassination (younger readers will in due course
experience much the same phenomenon with the September 11th attacks)]. [See now
episodic versus semantic memory, event memory, imagery,
and Script Theory.]
Episodic Memory
Organisation Packet (E-MOP): [See firstly the entry in the
LayNetworks e-glossary.] The episodic memory access mechanisms
proposed here help provide the indexing necessary to achieve effective random
access to the body of LTM.
Episodic versus
Semantic Memory: [See firstly episodic memory.] Tulving gave many examples to
illustrate the difference between episodic memory and semantic memory.
Episodic memories would include the fact that ten years ago one moved house, or
that last Saturday one went to a wedding, or that one passed one
's driving test in 1991. Semantic memories would include one 's ability to know that water boils at 100o
centigrade, that "to wane" means "to get smaller", and that
penguins are birds (but possibly also books or chocolate bars). More recently,
Tulving (1987) has described episodic memory as the "highest memory
system" (p72) because it gives people their uniqueness - their memories of
their personal past lives. Semantic memory, by contrast, is remarkably constant
from person to person, and does not need to relate to specific objects and
events in order to be used (nor, in most cases, can you even remember where or
when you learned something). Thus, whilst we may well have all done different
things yesterday, we would, if asked to define the word "chair",
generate more or less the same definition. In other words, episodic memory is
personalised and unique, but semantic memory is far more encyclopaedic.
Episteme: [<επιστημη>
Greek = "knowledge, intelligence, insight; skill; science, art"
(O.C.G.D.).] See epistemology in
G.2.
Epistemic Subject: [See firstly consciousness, Piaget's theory of.] The
"epistemic subject" is how Piagetian theory approaches the age-old
problem of understanding self. The
term is derived ultimately from the Greek episteme
[= "knowledge"], and thus refers to the subject as known conceptually. In
other words, it is what others have referred to as "self-concept" (e.g.,
"Although the notion of
the epistemic self as contrasted with the individual self appears relatively
late in Piaget's writings, it is foreshadowed by his earlier notion of the
'personality' [.....]. Piaget's later distinction between an individual and an
epistemic self is, it is true, closer to Kant's
distinction between the empirical ego and the transcendental ego.
[.....] Piaget's epistemic self has, nevertheless, some of the attributes of
Kant's transcendental ego. It is concerned with those conceptual structures which it has in common
with other subjects of the same level of development, independently of their
individual interests. But [.....] unlike Kant's a priori concept, the epistemic self is
constructed at the same time as the structures it constructs. As Piaget
puts it, 'In a word, the subject exists because in a general fashion the
"being" of the structures is their structuration'. Piaget does not
therefore accept a Kantian transcendental ego which stands over and above experience, the epistemic self is immanent within consciousness"
(Mays, 1998, p41).
He
also passes on the following helpful quotation .....
"There is a
'psychological subject', centred on the conscious ego whose functional role is incontestable,
but which is not the origin of any structure of general knowledge; but there is
also the 'epistemic subject' or that which is common to all subjects at the
same level of development, whose structures derive from the most general
mechanisms of the coordination of actions" (Mays, 1998, p47n, quoting from Beth and Piaget, 1966,
p308).
Epistemology: See the G.2
pump-priming definitions.
Epistemology,
Genetic: This is the class-defining
Piagetian stance on epistemology in general, as set out in L'épistémologie
Génétique ("Genetic Epistemology") (Piaget, 1970/1970). Here is
Piaget's own introductory definition .....
"Genetic epistemology attempts
to explain knowledge, and in particular scientific knowledge, on the basis of
its history, its sociogenesis, and especially the psychological origins of the
notions and operations upon which it is based" (Piaget, 1970/1970, p1).
Piaget was, however, far from impressed with the
academic insularity shown by his philosophical contemporaries, and was not
above passing the occasional pointed comment, thus .....
"The first principle of genetic epistemology,
then, is this - to take psychology seriously. Taking psychology seriously means
that, when a question of psychological fact arises, psychological research
should be consulted instead of trying to invent a solution by private
speculation" (p9).
Nevertheless, Piaget fully recognised that psychology
could never be the only relevant epistemological discipline. With competing
physics theories, for example, the final judgment could only ever be made by
physicists themselves: it was the genetic epistemologist's job merely "to
explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level
that is judged to be higher" (p13). He stated the "fundamental
hypothesis" of genetic epistemology as follows .....
"The fundamental hypothesis of
genetic epistemology is that there is a parallelism between the progress made
in the logical and rational organisation of knowledge and the corresponding
formative psychological processes" (p13).
This led him to summarise how he saw human thinking
processes being organised, his key point being that "to know is to assimilate
reality into systems of transformations" (p15). As for the role of
language in thought, he judged that it was useful, but that it was not the
whole story .....
"This, in fact, is our hypothesis: that the roots
of logical thought are not to be found in language alone, even though language
coordinations are important, but are to be found more generally in the
coordination of actions, which are the basis of reflective abstraction"
(pp18-19).
Piaget concludes the book as follows .....
"The nativist or apriorist maintains that the
forms of knowledge are predetermined inside the subject and thus again,
strictly speaking, there can be no novelty. By contrast, for the genetic
epistemologist, knowledge results from continuous construction, since in each
act of understanding, some degree of invention is involved; in development, the
passage from one stage to the next is always characterised by the formation of
new structures which did not exist before, either in the external world or in
the subject's mind" (p77).
Epoche: [Greek <εποχη>
= "stoppage, station, position (of a planet), fixed point of time"
(O.E.D.).] [See firstly consciousness,
Husserl's theory of.] Epoche (or,
in full, "phenomenological epoche")
is Husserl's notion of a process by
which convenient blocks of current awareness are progressively "bracketed
off", or "disconnected" from the totality of the available perceptual scene.
EPSP: See excitatory
post-synaptic potential.
Equilibrium: In the context of neurotransmission, equilibrium exists at a given point
on the neural cell membrane for
as long as the ion concentration is such that the three competing
molecular transport forces (random molecular movement, metabolic
pumping, and electrostatic forces) successfully balance each other
out to give a resting potential of -70mV.
Equipment:
This is Macquarrie and Robinson's (1962) rendering of Heidegger's (1927) usage
of the word Zeug. Heidegger was
discussing the role played by what he called "environmentality and
worldhood" in perception, and needed a term to reflect
things-which-had-purpose. He chose Zeug,
and used it thus .....
"We shall call those entities which we encounter
in concern 'equipment' [Zeug]. In our
dealings we come across equipment for writing, sewing, working, transportation,
measurement. The kind of Being which equipment
possesses must be exhibited. The clue for doing this lies in our first defining
what makes an item of equipment - namely its equipmentality. Taken strictly,
there 'is' no such thing as an equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is.
Equipment is essentially 'something in-order-to ...' [..... and i]n the 'in-order-to' as a structure there lies an assignment
or reference of something to something" (Being and Time, p97).
Equipmentality: See equipment.
Erasistratus: [Greek physician (floruit ca. 280BC).] [No significant external biography available]
Erasistratus followed the tradition of Herophilus in carrying out detailed
dissections of the brain, concluding that it was the source of both sensory and
motor nerves.
ERD: See entity-relationship diagram.
Ereignis: [German = "happening, event, occurrence,
incident" (C.G.D.).] This everyday
German term for something which takes place was specifically applied to mental
philosophy by Heidegger, who used it
occasionally in Being and Time
(Heidegger, 1927), but who made a lot more of it in his later writings, where
it came to signify "the opening up of the open space
required for meaning" (Sheehan, 1984, p288).
Erfahrung: [German = "(practical) experience, empirical
knowledge" (C.G.D.).] This everyday German word for experiential experience has inevitably been drawn into the lexicon
of mental philosophy. Kant made much of it in his Critique, for example,
describing it as a "thoroughgoing and synthetic unity of
perceptions", which unity, in turn, is "but the synthetic unity of
appearances according to concepts" (Kant, 1781,1787/1996,
p161), whilst for Husserl
phenomenology was nothing less than the "science of experience" (Ideas,
p39). [Now compare Erlebnis.]
Erfassen: [German = (as verb) "to grasp, to capture, to
embrace, to conceive, etc."; (as noun) "conception"] This
everyday German term for the general behaviour of getting hold of something
was specifically applied to the process of apprehension
by Husserl (e.g., Ideas, p110) as something distinct from
the associated processes of attending to, and noting the nature of, the thing
apprehended. The derived noun Erfassung may occasionally be
seen indicating the acts of grasping, capturing, embracing, etc. which
correspond to the verbs.
Erfassung: [German =
"inclusion" (C.G.D.).] See Erfassen.
Erikson, Erik:
[German psychoanalyst (1902-1994).] [Click for external biography]
Erikson is noteworthy in the context of the present glossary for his work on identity and the stages of its
development.
Erlebnis: [(Pl. Erlebnisse)
German = "(personal) experience, adventure; occurrence, event"
(C.G.D.).] This everyday German word for an occurrence of some sort has inevitably been drawn
into the lexicon of mental philosophy, where, following Husserl (e.g., Ideas, p101), the plural word Erlebnisse
indicates "pure experiences" as lived through. [See now experience,
experiential and compare Erfahrung.]
Ermey, R. Lee: [American actor, previously US Marine Corps drill
instructor (1944-).] [Click for external biography]
Ermey is noteworthy in the context of the present glossary for the real-life
insights he brought to the movie Full
Metal Jacket [as discussed in the entry for bullying in the military].
Eros: See
Freudian theory.
Erotic Complex: See complex, erotic.
Errands Tests: [See firstly executive
function and dysexecutive syndrome.] TO FOLLOW
Erschliessen: [German = "open, open up, make accessible,
exploit, develop [.....] infer, conclude"
(C.G.D.).] [See firstly disclosure.]
This everyday German term for the act of opening something up to get
at what might be inside was specifically applied to mental philosophy by Heidegger, who used it (along with aufschliessen
and entdecken)
for the sort of "laying open" of the things which really currently
matter to a cognizing system, given the particular momentary exposure of that
cognizing system to the complexities of the world.
Essential Insight: [See firstly consciousness,
Husserl's theory of.] This is Husserl's
term for "knowledge of essences independent of knowledge of facts" (Ideas, p407), a concept which he
explains more fully as follows .....
"Pure essential truths do not make the slightest
assertion concerning facts; hence from them alone we are not able to infer even
the pettiest truth concerning the fact-world. Just to think a fact or to
express it needs the grounding of experience [.....], so thought concerning
pure essence [.....] needs for its grounding and support an insight into
the essences of things" (Husserl, Ideas,
p51).
Estelle: See case, Estelle.
Ethics, Aesthetics, and Law: This is one of the three classical branches of philosophy (the others being causation, logic, and scientific method
and mental philosophy), and
incorporates the study of what is moral, beautiful, and legal.
Ethnocentrism:
See personality, authoritarian and ethnocentric.
Euphoria:
[See firstly differential diagnosis,
psychiatric.] [From the Greek eu = "(generic) good" + pherein
= "to bear", via the derivative euphron = "cheerful,
joyous" (O.C.G.D.).] Same as elevated mood.
Euphoria is "the perfect ease and comfort of healthy persons, especially
when the sensation occurs in a sick person" (O.E.D.). As such, euphoria is
a clinical sign used in the differential diagnosis of-and-within the various mood
disorders, personality disorders, and schizophrenia
and other psychotic disorders. First, Frances, and Pincus (1995)
actually treat euphoria and irritability as a single sign, and provide
a detailed decision tree (pp62-63) with major exit points for bipolar
1 disorder, bipolar 2 disorder,
cyclothymic
disorder, borderline personality disorder,
and antisocial personality disorder. [Contrast dysphoria and euthymia.]
Euthymia:
[From the Greek eu = "(generic) good" + thymos = "emotional
intensity".] This is the technical name for normal everyday non-depressed
good mood, that is to say, not elevated as such, as in euphoria.
[Contrast dysthymia.]
Event: In
everyday usage, "anything that happens or is contemplated as happening; an
incident, occurrence [.....]; that which proceeds from the operation of a
cause; a consequence, result" (O.E.D.). In philosophy and science the
same, but (1) as part of a more general search for the fundamental laws of causation in nature, (2) inspired by
the belief that this search will proceed more profitably if guided by the scientific method (rather than, say, by
meditation or oracular consultation), and (3) with a constant battle against
"events" turning out upon closer inspection to consist of lesser
events. Kim (1993, p4) reduces the philosophical issue to the following
question: "In what relation must a pair of events stand to a law [i.e. of
causation] if the law is to 'subsume' the events?".
Kim also points to an interesting hole in the scientific method, namely that it
is deceptively easy to overfocus on events to the exclusion of the matrix of states - the uneventful times - within
which the events take place. [See now macrocausation
versus microcausation.]
Event Memory: Another view of
the episodic versus semantic memory distinction comes from Roger Schank
of
Evolution of Mind: See
abstraction, phylogenetic limits of.
Exchanged Personality: See Gmelin,
Eberhardt.
Excitatory
Post-Synaptic Potential (EPSP): [See firstly post-synaptic potential.]
A local 3-4mV depolarisation of the post-synaptic neural membrane, following
the arrival of an action potential at the pre-synaptic side of the synaptic
cleft, provided only that the neurotransmitter involved is
excitatory. This depolarising event is important, because it moves the
receiving neuron closer to its action potential threshold, thus making
it more likely to fire. [Contrast inhibitory post-synaptic potential.]
Executive Function: [See firstly frontal
lobe syndrome.] That which occupies the processor(s) at
the top of the motor hierarchy, and therefore the faculty (or cluster of
faculties) which is failing in dysexecutive syndrome. In fact,
four major components of executive functioning may be identified, namely (a)
orienting towards and attending properly to the things which really matter in
one's surroundings, (b) inhibiting impulsivity of response, in favour of (c)
appropriate forward planning, (d) executing - and meaningfully
monitoring the execution of - the resulting plans. [See now frontal battery.]
Executive
Existent (1/2): (1) In
everyday English, the word "existent" is used only as an adjective,
as in "an existent [or non-existent] object". (2) In philosophical English, however, the word is also used as a
substantive, to indicate "one that exists independently" (Houghton
Mifflin), that is to say, as an entity occurrence. Here is an example of this latter usage .....
"If
this is so, then it is also an indispensable law of empirical presentation of
the time series that the appearances of past time determine every existent [Dasein]
in the following time; and that these existents, as events, do not take place
except insofar as their existence [Dasein] is determined in time
....." (Kant, Critique, p267).
Exocytosis: This is the
technical name for the releasing of neurotransmitter chemicals into the synaptic
cleft by passing "bubbles" of them - synaptic vesicles -
out through the pre-synaptic cell membrane.
Experience: In everyday English, the word "experience"
is used both as a verb and as a noun. It is also used in a number of subtly
different senses, dealt with in this glossary under the fuller descriptors experience, experiential and experience, phenomenological.
Experience,
Experiential: This is a more formally
precise rendering of one of the two everyday usages of the word
"experience" (the other being experience,
phenomenal). The phrase is widely used in Husserl's Ideas (Husserl, 1913/1931) as a translation for the German word Erlebnis
[although as such it presumably reflects the vocabulary of the translator, W.R.
Boyce Gibson, rather than the author himself], and it refers in a general sense
to the things we have learned by having lived through them. For Heidegger, the
issue was just as fundamental, and he, too, grounds his analytic in an earlier
observation by Dilthey on the
"experiences of this life [die Erlebnisse dieses Lebens]"
(Macquarrie and Robinson, 1962, p72 footnote). The notion of experience as an
accumulation of some sort of life skills overlaps, in part at least, with
Piaget's genetic epistemology, and
the task of breaking that accumulation down into its component nodes and
relationships (or whatever may yet prove to be required) is currently
exercising the semantic network
fraternity.
Experience,
Phenomenal: This is the more precise
philosophical term for one of the two everyday usages of the word
"experience" (the other being experience,
experiential). In this sense, experience is the end result of the process
of aesthesis [see the G.2
pump-priming definitions]. It is "the fact of being consciously the
subject of a state or condition, or of being consciously affected by an
event" (O.E.D.). It is that which, in passing through the processes of perception, has just achieved phenomenal consciousness. Experience -
both what it is and what it tells us about our minds - has been a central topic
of enquiry since classical times. For Plato, for example, it was "the eye
of the soul" (Hare and Russell, 1970, p20), giving us a point of contact with the outside world, and reflecting thereby
"the ability of soul and body to come together in a single experience (pathos)" (Ostenfeld, 1982, p240). Kant, too, recognised phenomenal experience as the problem
of mental philosophy. Indeed, the opening point in his Critique of
Pure Reason (Kant, 1781, 1787/1996) was that you cannot extend the fact
that all cognition "starts with
experience" to the conclusion that it all "arises from experience" (p44). For
Husserl, the notion is encapsulated in his term Erlebnis, with
its connotations of events as things to be lived through, but then needing to
be painstakingly subdivided into experience which can be bracketed off [see epoche]
and pure experience, that which will
remain once all possible bracketings have been carried out [see experience, primordial].
Coming right up to date, Nagel (1979) sees phenomenal experience as key to
his "What's It Like to Be?" Test,
thus: "The fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is
something it is like to be that
organism" (Nagel, 1979, p166). For more recent views on what experience is
and where it fits in to modern theories of consciousness, look firstly at the
role of perception in constructing phenomenal consciousness, and then move
on to consciousness, Metzinger's theory
of to see how big the problem really is and where things might currently be
leading.
Experience, Primordial: See
consciousness, Husserl's theory of.
Experiential Experience: See experience,
experiential.
Experiential
Learning: Term devised by Kolb (1983) to refer to conceptual knowledge acquired
over time from simple performance, and generally applied specifically within educational
theory rather than within mainstream memory theory. The principle of
experiential learning is that conceptual knowledge [ie. semantic memory]
should not be taught explicitly, because that approach verges on rote
learning, and is largely ineffective. Instead, it needs to be based on
natural or contrived learning experiences. These experiences create a corpus of
episodic memory, event memory, and procedural memory,
which, over time, by processes of abstraction and reflection, create
true understanding. Much of the critical acclaim for Kolb's approach derives
from the fact that it integrates the various types of knowledge exceptionally
well. Kolb's disciples Dennison and Kirk (1990) use the motto "Do - Review
- Learn - Apply" to summarise the substages of the overall process.
Explanation:
[See firstly construal.] An explanation is "that which explains,
makes clear, accounts for [..... especially] with a view to
adjust a misunderstanding and reconcile differences" (O.E.D.).
Alternatively, it is "an argument to the effect that the phenomenon to be
explained [.....] was to be expected by virtue of
certain explanatory facts" (Hempel, 1965, p336), although you owe it to
your audience (and yourself) to set the core explanation in as broad a context
as possible. A good explanation thus provides a system of proposed causal rules, which, taken together,
states the "particular 'go'" of a natural phenomenon, and gives some
insight into not just how something works, but of why it makes broad sense for
it to work that way given what else we know about the world. This latter
quality is akin to what Kant (1781/1787) called the "systematic
unity" of the best scientific understanding: our cognitions, he warns,
"must not amount to a rhapsody; rather, they must amount to a system"
(op. cit., p755). [Example: To experience for oneself
what is involved in producing a thorough explanation, try this long-running
poser: How much does smoke weigh, and why (after Kant, 1781/1787, p255).] Reich
(2004) offers a useful systematization of this broader process, in his
eight-step "RCR" [Relational and Contextual Reasoning] heuristic.
Explanatory Gap: [See firstly explanation, mind-brain debate, and reductionism.] This is the name given
to the conceptually grey area between what is explained by neurophysiological
microdata and what is explained by mental world macrodata. It became a popular
topic of scientific discussion following Levine's (1983) focus paper on the
subject, and the central problem seems to be that our minds cannot grasp how
something as intangible as a mind might be reduced to individually
straightforward electrochemical events. Our minds do not feel reducible to
neural crackle, and so, ignorant of the necessary mechanisms of supervenience, we convince ourselves that
that cannot be how they work.
ASIDE: For our own part, we suggested in Smith (1998) that
philosophy's explanatory gap could profitably be regarded as a "compiler
gap", our point being that computer engineers in the 1950s had unwittingly
solved the problem of reduction when they invented compilers, that is to say, systems software products which convert
high-level generalities (known as "source code instructions") by the
dozen into low-level specifics (known as "machine instructions") by
the tens of thousand. Cognitive science would do well to note that source code
supervenes precisely onto object code, and that object code supervenes
precisely onto activity in the underlying circuitry (the non-biological
equivalent of neural crackle), the very requirements of a workable reductionist
theory.
Extended Present: See
consciousness, Humphrey's theory of.
Extended
Self: See self, extended.
Externality:
[See firstly agency.] This is
Russell's (1996) term for "what it means for a subject (a human infant in
particular) to have a conception of objects existing in the external world
independently from his or her experience of them" (p97).
Extracellular Fluid
(ECF): This is the generic term for all non-cellular bodily fluids. There are
three main types of ECF, two of which, lymph and blood, are confined into
circulatory systems and do not concern us here. The third type, the interstitial
fluid is not circulated as such, but simply fills in all the gaps between
the other components of the body.
Extreme Transference: See transference,
extreme.
Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR): This is a recently developed psychotherapeutic intervention in which mild bilateral
physical stimulation by the therapist is used to "stitch together"
[our term] the current contents of consciousness
and preconsciousness, and which, if
properly prepared for and timed, is thus capable of reassociating
previously dissociated memory fragments. The technique was developed by
Francine Shapiro of the Mental Research Institute, Palo Alto, CA,
and is now marketed by the EMDR
International Association. In fact, Shapiro chanced upon the technique back
in 1989 when she noted that a period of fortuitously vigorous later eye
movements brought about a pronounced reduction in her personal stress levels.
It subsequently emerged, however, that it was the bilaterality of the
stimulation which mattered, and that tactile or auditory bilateral stimulation
was just as effective. [See PubMed
for individual papers on the EMDR technique.]
Eysenck, Hans J.: [British personality theorist and psychometrician (1916-1997).] [Click for external biography]
Eysenck is noteoworthy in the context of the present glossary for his work on personality and its measurement.
f-Awareness: See
fact-awareness.
Fact-Awareness: [Or "f-awareness", for short.] This is one
of the three subtypes of awareness suggested by Dretske (e.g., 1997) [the
others being object awareness and property awareness]. For further
details, see consciousness, Dretske's theory of.
Factitious Disorders: This is a psychiatric condition in which physical or
psychological symptoms are feigned "in order to assume the sick
role". The condition is more common in women than men except in its severest
form, known as "Munchausen's syndrome", and lacks obvious financial
or other tangible motivation. Feldman (2004) offers us case, Rhonda to
illustrate.
Facticity:
[Anglicisation of the itself-artificial German Faktizität.]
This is Heidegger's term for the it-knows-it's-really-thereness of a
knowing entity, although he puts it a lot better himself
.....
"Dasein understands its
ownmost Being in the sense of a certain 'factual
Being-present-at-hand'. [.....] Whenever Dasein is, it is as a Fact; and the
factuality of such a Fact is what we shall call Dasein's 'facticity'" (Being and Time, p82).
Fairbairn, William Ronald Dodge: [Scottish psychoanalyst
(1889-1964).] [Click
for external biography] Fairbairn is noteworthy in the context of the present glossary for his
work on object relations theory, schizotypy, and splitting.
Fake Phantom Limb: See phantom
limb.
Faktizität:
Artificial German = "facticity",
q.v.
Falcon, Jean Philippe: [French weaver (fl.
1728).] [No significant external
biography available] See Materialism
and underlying mechanism.
False Belief
Task: The innocently named
"false belief task" is in fact the basis of the one of the most
theoretically incisive research paradigms in the entire field of social
cognition. In its simplest form, the paradigm is a test of "social metacognition", that is to say, of
the subject's understanding of another person's understanding. Looked at in a
different way, it is a test of the "order" of a subject's belief, as
explained and illustrated in the entry for meta-representation.
The test was first devised by Wimmer and Perner (1983) as a puppet-play
scenario entitled Maxi and the Chocolate.
Here is how the task is structured .....
"A story character, Maxi,
puts chocolate into a cupboard x. In his absence his mother
displaces the chocolate from x into cupboard y. Subjects have to indicate the
box where Maxi will look for the chocolate when he returns. Only when they are
able to represent Maxi's wrong belief ('Chocolate is in x') apart from what
they themselves know to be the case ('Chocolate is in y') will they be able to
point correctly to box x. This procedure tests whether subjects have an
explicit and definite representation of the other's wrong belief. Yet there is
neither a problem in framing the test question by using mental verbs (e.g.,
'What does Maxi believe?') nor are
subjects required to verbalise their knowledge about other's beliefs since a
mere pointing gesture suffices" (Wimmer and Perner, 1983, p106).
Wimmer and Perner carried out four
complementary experiments around the general false belief theme. In Experiment
2, for example, they tested 92 children aged three years [n=20], fours years
[n=42], and five years [n=30], on both the "standard" scenario (in
which the children were presented with the scenario and then required to
respond to the following Belief Question: Where will Maxi look for the chocolate?")
as well as variants thereof. In what they described as
a "stop and think" variant, they extended the standard question as
follows: "Think carefully! What did Maxi do before he went off to the
playground? Now he wants to eat the chocolate. Where will he look for the
chocolate?" A selection of their findings appears in the table below .....
|
Age (Years) |
Condition |
n |
Score = 0 |
Score = 1 |
Score = 2 |
|
3 |
Standard |
10 |
n/a |
n/a |
n/a |
|
|
"Stop and Think" |
10 |
10 |
0 |
0 |
|
4 |
Standard |
14 |
7 |
1 |
6 |
|
|
"Stop and Think" |
14 |
8 |
2 |
4 |
|
5 |
Standard |
10 |
5 |
0 |
5 |
|
|
"Stop and Think" |
10 |
0 |
0 |
10 |
Note the impressive improvement in false belief test performance
between age three and age five, and the advantage of including the "stop
and think" warning. The generic approach then became popular in the late
1980s after Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith [U.] (1985) deployed the Sally-Anne variant of it to investigate
the meta-representative abilities of children with autism [for more on this see
theory of mind theory of autism].
False belief tasks have also been extensively used in research into
schizophrenia [see theory of mind theory
of schizophrenia], and, increasingly, are being simulated in artificial
intelligence [see theory of mind,
artificial intelligence and].
False Belief
Task, Artificial Intelligence and: [See firstly false belief task.] It is common
practice for workers on the artificial intelligence (AI) side of cognitive
science to borrow investigative techniques from their colleagues on the
biological side of things. The false belief task is no exception, having been
adopted as a demonstrable criterion of the existence of mindedness
within such areas as robotics (we particularly like Kanda et al, 2006/2007
online, whose robot "pretends" to be listening to you), expert
systems (see, e.g., Barnden and Peterson, 2007
online), ACT-R propositional network systems (see, e.g., Emond and
Ferres, 2001/2007
online), and imitation learning in
man-made systems (see Schaal, 1999).
False Negative: See the entry for diagnostic
tests and screening procedures, and any relevant onward links, in the companion
glossary on "Research Methods and Psychometrics". [Compare false positive.]
False Positive: See the entry for diagnostic
tests and screening procedures, and any relevant onward links, in the companion
glossary on "Research Methods and Psychometrics". [Compare false negative.]
False Self: See true self
versus false self.
Familiar
Pattern Not Recognised: [See firstly cognitive framing and discrimination
errors.] This is one of the four types of discrimination error
described by Rasmussen (1982) (the others being familiar short cut, stereotype
fixation, and stereotype take-over).
It is what happens when an operator fails to recognise that a known complex
control procedure is appropriate to a particular situation.
Familiar
Short Cut: [See firstly cognitive framing and discrimination
errors.] This is one of the four types of discrimination error
described by Rasmussen (1982) (the others being familiar pattern not recognised, stereotype fixation, and stereotype
take-over). It is what happens when an operator fails to recognise that a exceptional control exception has no prepared exception
procedure available to cover it, and uses an incorrect exception procedure
instead.
Family Resource
Management: This is a set of
techniques for consciously adjusting the everyday behaviour of family members
so as to cope more effectively with the needs of a target individual. It is
thus similar to, but less formally managed than, out-and-out family therapy. Family resource management has been used, for
example, in the management of learning disabled children. Heads of activity
include avoiding labelling, giving unconditional positive regard, and setting
clear, consistent, and reasonable disciplinary boundaries and standards.
Family Therapy:
[See firstly interventions.] "Family therapists help family members
find constructive ways to help each other. They work in ways that acknowledge
the contexts of people's families and other relationships, sharing and
respecting individuals' different perspectives, beliefs, views and stories, and
exploring possible ways forward" (Association for Family Therapy, 2006 online). [See online case study] [Contrast family resource management.]
Fatalism: Fatalism is "the doctrine that all things are
determined by fate" (O.E.D.). It is thus one of the two philosophical /
religious systems which deny a role for free will in guiding human
behaviour (the other being Determinism).
Fear of Failure (FF): See
personality, motivation and.
Fechner, Gustav
Theodor: [German physicist
(1801-1887).] [Click for external biography] [See firstly psychophysics in general and the
work of Weber therein in particular.] Although by
first profession a physicist, Fechner contributed significantly both to the
philosophy of science and to the psychology of perception. He was
appointed professor of physics at
Fehlleistung: [German Fehl = "fault, blemish,
flaw" + Leistung = "performance, execution" (C.G.D.).]
See parapraxis.
Felida
X: See case, Felida X.
Ferenczi, Sandor: [Hungarian psychoanalyst (1873-1933).] [Click for external
biography] Ferenczi is noteworthy in the context of the present glossary
for his work on introjection.
Fermion: [Physics term - Click for external
definition] This category of subatomic particles
is noteworthy in the context of the present glossary because it is invoked by
consciousness theorists of the "Quantum Consciousness" School. [See
now consciousness, quantum, and compare
boson.]
Field (1/2):
(1 - Psychology) One of the major
conceptual legacies of the Gestalt School of psychology was the proposal that
the physicist's concept of gravitational and other force fields could
profitably be imported into psychological theory. Kurt Koffka discusses the
value of the field concept at length in Chapter 2 of his Principles (Koffka, 1935), and dates the concept to a 1911
conversation between himself, Wolfgang Köhler, and Max Wertheimer, during which
Wertheimer made much of the notion of an isomorphism
existing between "consciousness and the underlying physiological
processes" (p53).
ASIDE: Note, however, that Freud had used the word Rindenfelder [=
"cortical fields"] 20 years before in precisely this context - see
the entry for Freud's diagrams and
illustrations (On Aphasia,
1891/1992, p126) for details.
Wertheimer saw the physiological processes as
consisting of interacting neural fields and the psychological aspects as
corresponding "behavioral fields". However, the term did not become
popular until it was incorporated into second generation Gestaltism in Kurt
Lewin's Feldtheorie (e.g., Lewin,
1935). Lewin saw brain fields as creating mental "forces", each, in
turn, defined by a "valence" (its direction and strength) and a
"point of application". Recent advances in neuroscience have given
field theory a new lease of life. Prominent here is the fact that one of the
key drivers of neuronal excitability is electrostatic force, by far the strongest
of the forces in the electromagnetic spectrum. Similarly, the entire quantum
field theory of consciousness has been predicated upon the nuclear physics of
field effects of this sort, and McFadden (2002) has recently argued how
admirably placed such theories are to explain the binding problem. For a recent review of this area, see Perlovsky
(2001). (2 - Computing) One of the three levels of data
conventionally recognized in computer system design (the others being file
and record). Specifically, a bit (or several)
or byte (or several) of encoded data, possessing an externally defined significance. EXAMPLES: One's surname,
house number, a postal code, the number of cans of beans on a supermarket
shelf, etc., etc.
Field-Dependent: See cognitive style.
Field-Independent: See cognitive style.
Figan: See impulsivity.
Figure-Ground:
[See firstly field (1) and perception.] This important Gestaltist notion asserts that one of
the early duties of any perceptual system is in some way to pre-process the incoming
visual (or auditory, etc.) scene, so that whatever information then passes up
the system for higher processing stands a proportionately better chance of
being accurately identified. Perception's greatest practical problem, as the
Gestaltists saw it, was that you needed to mark out the object(s) of your
attention - the figure(s) - against
their background - the ground, and
the thrust of the half dozen or so "Gestalt
Laws" is that they help the perceptual system to achieve this
[remember that the Gestalt School is
so named because Gestalt is the
German word for shape or figure]. Unfortunately, the Gestaltist position on the
figure-ground phenomenon conceals some nasty phenomenological complications,
because it allows a peripheral cognitive process to dictate what the more
central processes eventually become aware of [for more on which, see the
discussion of background intuitions in the entry for consciousness,
Husserl's theory of]. Bergson (1911) summarizes the underlying
philosophical issue thus: "All division of matter into independent bodies
with absolutely determined outlines is an artificial division" (Matter and Memory, p259). Merleau-Ponty
adds: "The perceptual 'something'
is always in the middle of something else, it always
forms part of a 'field'" (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962, p4). [Compare
also Husserl's notion of epoche.]
Figures of Speech: Students of rhetoric have long recognized how "figures of
speech" can take a quite basic lexicon and put it to (perhaps infinitely)
rich use. Around 50 figures of speech have been identified, of which four - litotes, metaphor, synecdoche,
and prosopopoeia - warrant dedicated
entries in this glossary. Indeed, litotes and synecdoche are so intricately
involved with what the linguists now call deixis
- the identification of the subject of a particular thought - that they are
worth noting briefly before moving on. Figures of speech are central to the
Aristotelian debate about the nature of substance and how best to refer to it
verbally [for more on which, see the entry for category].
File:
Insofar as the lexicon of computing is concerned, files are sets of records
brought together because they belong together, and so that they can be managed
as a coherent unit. Files can be further classified according to their file type, that is to say, what type of
data they contain and the purpose to which this data is put.
File Types:
[See firstly file.] See variously database dump, database file, and indexed
sequential file.
Final Common Pathway: This is Sherrington's (1906) descriptor for the final
stretch of a skeletomuscular efferent tract, his point being that this
particular pathway has to be used to excite the muscle(s) in question
regardless of whether the excitation was "authorised" [our term] by a
simple reflex, a complex reflex, an instinct, a habit, or any form of higher volition.
[For the impact this structural arrangement has on the organisation of the
control hierarchy, see impulsivity.]
First Messenger
Neurotransmission: See second messenger neurotransmission.
First-Person Perspective: This is the name given to the basic property of
consciousness which centres all experience on the individual possessing it. It
is thus one of three aspects of perspectivalness. One important corollary of this is that it
skews the available data away from the sort of objective (i.e.,
"third-party perspective") data normally required for scientific
proof. Here is how Metzinger (2003) explains what is at stake
.....
"A conscious self-model is not yet a phenomenal
subject, because arguably pathological configurations (as in akinetic mutism)
do exist, where a rudimentary conscious self appears without subjectivity, in the absence of a phenomenal first-person
perspective. In order to meet this constraint, one needs a detailed and
empirically plausible theory of how a system can internally represent itself for itself, and of how the mysterious
phenomenon today called a 'first-person perspective' by philosophers can emerge
in a naturally evolved information-processing system" (pp156-157).
Flashbulb Memory: See episodic
memory and imagery.
Flat File: Same
thing as indexed sequential file.
Flat-File Database: [See firstly entity-relationship diagram.]. One of many possible computer file types. Flat-file
databases are one of the two main types of computer database (the other being network
databases). Fundamentally, they consist of an indexed-sequential file,
accessed using a structured query language.
Flattened Affect: See affect, flattened.
Flavell, John H: [American developmental psychologist (1928-).]
[Click
for external biography]
Forms: See
the pump-priming definitions at the head of this appendix.
Forensic Ergonomics: In the context of this glossary, forensic ergonomics is the science of
cognitive ergonomics extended into the
area of litigation. This might be necessary, for example, if a court of law
could not decide without the expert testimony of an applied psychologist
whether a particular "operator" had been culpably negligent in a
given adverse event.
Forward Model: This is Jordan's (1990) term for an efference
copy memory
store functionally located in the motor hierarchy, where it serves to reduce the nervous system's
reliance on centrally processed sensory feedback in favour of more peripheral processing
[for the history and technicalities of the efference copy/reafference concepts, see Section 4 of
our e-paper on "Basics of
Cybernetics"]. The notion was then adopted by
Frith [C.], Rees, and Friston (1998) to explain defective self-monitoring
behaviour in schizophrenia. These latter authors explain the basics of the
arrangement as follows .....
"We can predict the sensory consequences of our
own actions very precisely on the basis of the motor commands that were issued
to produce those actions and a knowledge of the
sensory state at the time the commands were issued. Such precise prediction is
not possible for independent events in the outside world. The prediction of sensory changes on the
basis of motor commands is known as the 'forward model' (Jordan, 1990; Wolpert et al, 1995)" (Frith,
Rees, and Friston, 1998, p172; bold emphasis added). [Readers may find
Russell's (1996) "Receiver"
thought experiment informative at this juncture.]
Frith et al then considered how cognition as a whole
would perform if there was an artificially induced mis-match between expected and actual
sensation. You might go to move your arm, say, but fail to feel the customary
reafference. Or you might feel the "feedback" in the absence of the
volition. And the implications of this particular mental "loose
connection" are surprisingly far-reaching, thus .....
"In this case the perceiver would erroneously
conclude that external influences were causing his experiences. If his ability
to distinguish between self-generated and other-generated sensations was
generally impaired, then in the long run, his ability to perceived himself
as an agent would also become impaired" (op. cit.,
p173).
Frith et al then present clinical and experimental
data in support of the thesis that precisely such a defect in the sense of
agency [a cognitive deficit if ever there was one], brought about by
prior defects in patients' forward modelling system, underlies such symptoms of
schizophrenia as the hearing of voices. Here are their conclusions
.....
"We have suggested that many of the symptoms
associated with schizophrenia can be explained in terms of failure in a
'self-monitoring' system. Although this system has its origins in a fairly
simple scheme for the control and learning of motor responses, it has features
that give it a key role in making a distinction between the self and the
outside world. This is because the system can distinguish the perceptual
changes which we control ourselves from those that occur independently. It is this experience that we can change so
many of our perceptions 'at will' that provides the sense of agency that is a
key component of the self" (op.
cit., p177; bold emphasis added)
Forward,
Susan: [American psychotherapist and
author.] [See
homepage] Susan Forward is noteworthy in the context of the present glossary
for her work on toxic
parenting.
Fragile Self: See self, fragile.
Frame: [Psycholinguists, you may be better off with sentence
frame; others, see schema and artificial intelligence (AI).] In everyday English, a "frame" is
(amongst many other things) both "4. An established
order, plan, scheme, system" and "11. A structure which serves
as an underlying support" (O.E.D.). The word has thus been a natural
alternative for psychological theorists wishing to convey the notion of cognitive structure without necessarily buying into any of the
older schema-based systems. For example, Goffman (1974) used the term as
such in his discussion of "frame analysis", and MIT's Marvin Minsky did likewise (e.g., Minsky, 1975/1977) when he
was considering the knowledge representation structures which AI workers (not
least roboticists) would need to build into the artificial minds of the
man-made systems they were working on. AI's problem was how best to arrange for
machine minds to encode and use their past experience, and the solution was to
rely whenever possible on pre-formatting current sensory input along lines
which had worked in the past. The process involves relying ultimately on the
cognitive system's known powers of abstraction and association, and is best explained by example
.....
"A frame
is a data structure for representing a stereotyped situation like being in a certain kind of living room or going
to a child's birthday party. Attached to each frame are several kinds of information.
Some of this information is about how to use the frame. Some is about what one
can expect to happen next. Some is about what to do if these expectations are
not confirmed. We can think of a frame as a network of nodes and relations.
[.....] Collections of related frames are linked together into frame-systems. The effects of important
actions are mirrored by transformations
between the frames of a system. [.....] The frame-systems are
linked, in turn, by an information
retrieval network" (Minsky, 1975/1977, pp355-356; bold emphasis
added).
The key elements
within Minsky's notion of framing are (a) that a frame should allow for some
sort of "conceptual viewpoint" (op.
cit., p355) to be taken, and (b) that once a particular frame has been
activated it should have "default assignments" at its
"terminals" in case no specific current input for that
terminal is yet available. The first of these elements, of course, implying as
it does both a point of view (in space and time) and a sense of agency (in function), is the first-person
perspective by another name, while the manipulating of terminal assignments
is effectively what our supervisory attentional system does
for us. Minsky's team at MIT proceeded to develop frame-based AI software
for many years [see the
Wikihistory].
WHERE TO NEXT:
It is important to realise that frame-assisted cognition comes at a
distinct cost. It assists by not
having us constantly repeat past problem solving, but the "top down"
nature of the resulting expectations can be dangerous if not properly managed.
Frames, in a word, are presumptive, and this regularly implicates them
as causes of avoidable disasters. If interested in Minsky's work, per se, start with the entry for frame-system theory and then follow the
link to the companion resource indicated. To explore the issue of avoidable
disaster, start with cognitive framing
and follow the onward links.
Frame
Analysis: [See firstly frame.] This is Goffman's (1974) proposed
system for the analysis of human social interaction in terms of pre-learned
schemas. It is a frame theory as
previously discussed, but it focuses on the management of behaviours
appropriate to social interaction, not on behaviour in general [it would, for
instance, exclude the sort of frame-driven interaction with the physical
environment which is required by non-social activities such as walking,
driving, programming video recorders, etc.]. Here is how Goffman introduces his
system .....
"I assume that
definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles of
organisation which govern events [.....] and our
subjective involvement in them; frame is the word I use to refer to such of
these basic elements as I am able to identify" (Goffman, 1974, p10f, cited
in König, 2007
online).
Goffman presented frame
analysis as an integrated explanatory system, complete with its own vocabulary
[click for detail,
courtesy of Answers.Com].
Frame Error/ Framing Error: See cognitive
framing.
Frame, Sentence: See sentence
frame.
Frame-System
Theory: [See firstly frame.] This is Minsky's (1975/1977)
term for a theory of cognition based on frames and their manipulation [for a
fuller discussion, see the companion resource].
Framework of Construal: See construal.
Free
Association:
This is the basic tactical tool of psychoanalysis as developed by Freud,
probably around 1892 (Masson, 1985, p21n). The phrase itself is the standard
(i.e., Strachey) rendering of the German term freier Einfall [= "spontaneous thought"]. Here are two extracts
reflecting how Freud understood the technique .....
"The next day I made
him [case, Rat Man] pledge himself to submit to the one and only condition
of the treatment - namely, to say everything that came into his head, even if
it was unpleasant to him, or seemed unimportant or irrelevant or senseless.
I then gave him leave to start his communications with any subject he pleased
....." (Freud, 1909/1955, A Case of Obsessional
Neurosis [Standard Edition (Volume 10)], p159).
"I
and many others after me have repeatedly made such experiments with names and
numbers thought of at random [.....]. Here the procedure is to produce a series
of associations to the name which has emerged; these latter associations are
accordingly no longer completely free but have a link, like the associations to
the elements of dreams. One continues doing this until one finds the impulse
exhausted. But by then light will have been thrown both on the motive and the
meaning of the random choice of the name" (Freud, 1916/1962, Introductory
Lectures (Lecture #6), pp136-137).
One
of the "many others after me" mentioned above was Carl Jung. His
preferred procedure was to use a stock list of 100 stimulus words, presented in
two passes. On the first pass, he recorded the response word(s) [shown in the
"reaction" column below] and the response time (RT), whilst on the
second pass he was interested primarily in the items where the original
response had been forgotten, and a different response word used [shown in the
"reproduction" column below] [we recommend Winer (2002/2007
online) for a full tutorial on the technique]. Here is how Jung reported
the associations of case, Miss E. in Jung (1918,
p110) .....
|
Stimulus Word |
Reaction |
Reaction Time (Seconds) |
Reproduction (If Different) |
|
1. Head |
Thoughts |
2.2 |
Hair |
|
2. Green |
Grass |
1.8 |
|
|
3. Water |
Drinker-drink |
2.4 |
Glass |
|
4. Prick |
Needle |
3.6 |
|
|
5. Angel |
Heaven |
2.6 |
|
|
6. Long |
Short |
4.0 |
|
|
7. Ship |
Sea |
1.4 |
|
Jung's
experience with this method was that the appropriate RT was 1.5 seconds, this
being the figure he had obtained by averaging out data from "twelve educated
persons" (Jung, 1918, p110). RTs markedly longer than this [items 4 and 6
above, for example] therefore attracted his analytical attention. Jung's
experience was also that the second pass data could be clinically significant
in their own right, in that if you combed out all of the incorrect items you
would likely be looking at a complex. Jung assessed the impact of the method as follows
.....
"All psychogenic neuroses contain a complex
which is differentiated from normal complexes by being endowed with extremely
strong emotional tones, possessing such constellating
power that it brings the whole individual under its influence. The complex is
hence the causa morbi (given, of course, the predisposition). The
associations often enable us to recognise the nature of the complex, thus
obtaining valuable clues for causal therapy. A by-product, not to be
underestimated, is the scientific knowledge which we thus gain of the origin
and inner construction of the psychogenic neuroses" (Jung, 1918, p108;
bold emphasis added).
[There is a mention of the
free association method in the entry for unthought known.]
Free Recall: This is a memory
research paradigm in which stimulus items can be recalled in any order (as, for example, in the Brown-Peterson technique).
(Those interested in studying free recall will find some
useful standardised data on 925 English nouns in Rubin and Friendly, 1986.)
Free Will:
[See firstly volition.] The notion
of free will is relevant to both mental philosophy (does the thing in fact
exist, and if so how does it work) and ethics (what should we be allowed to do
with it if we decide we have it), but we shall here concern ourselves solely
with the former, where it stands as the polar opposite to Determinism on
the dimension of how much we are free to control our own behaviour. Classical
interest in the topic can be traced to the Greeks. In the Republic dialogue, for example, Plato makes it very clear how easy
it is for the trappings of power and self-interest to corrupt the path of
purity and reason [which is why he lists desire (s) as one third of his soul,
tripartite, and (b) as one of the two horses available to the "charioteer of the soul"]. We see
much the same message in the standard Christian teaching that it is everyone's
individual choice not to sin, thus (a long passage, heavily abridged) .....
"There are those who use the name 'destiny' to refer
[.....] to the connected series of causes which is
responsible for anything that happens [..... ascribing] this orderly series,
this chain of causes, to the will and power of the supreme God [.....
Unfortunately, i]f we choose foreknowledge, free will
is annihilated ....." (St. Augustine, City of God,
V.8-9; Bettenson translation, pp188-191).
Little then changed for more than a thousand years,
and even when fresh minds did eventually come to look at the problem they were
unable to shake off the straightjacket of religious orthodoxy. Descartes,
for example, found it "so evident that we are possessed of a free will
[.....], that this may be counted as one of the first and most ordinary notions
that are found innately in us" (Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, ¶1; Haldane and Ross translation, p291),
whilst for Leibniz "[God]
determines our will to choose what appears to be best, yet without
necessitating it" (Leibniz, 1686, Discourse on Metaphysics;
Woolhouse and Francks translation, p81). It remained for Kant, a century
further down the line, to expose the real complication, namely that we had
seriously underestimated how easy it was going to be to explain the sort of
reasoning mind required for the exercise of free will. The pivotal concept for
Kant was the "transcendental idea of freedom", as now defined
.....
"Extremely noteworthy
is the fact that the transcendental idea of freedom is the basis of the
practical concept of freedom [.....]. Freedom
in the practical meaning of the term is the independence of our power of
choice from coercion by impulses of sensibility [giving us] a causality whereby
we can begin a series of events entirely on our own" (Kant, 1787; Pluhar
translation, p536).
After Kant, things started to hot up. In quick
succession (and more or less coextensively with the lifetime of the Duke of
Wellington, 1769-1852) Leibniz had
(in a posthumous publication) raised the spectre of the unconscious mind
(1765), Galvani had demonstrated the electrical nature of the electrical
impulse (1791), the physicist Volta had devised the electrical circuit and the
notion of electrical potential (1800), Herbart had come up with the
notion of the threshold of consciousness
(1816), Ørsted had devised a method of detecting a passing current using only its
induced electromagnetic field (1820), an idea which Ampère immediately borrowed
to develop the notion of electrical current (1820), Ohm had studied the
phenomena of electrical resistance (1827), and Lordat had noted the sequence
of processing involved in speech production (1843). By 1850, therefore, we had in place the basics of the modern
conceptualisation of the mind as a hierarchical modular control system,
grounded in our neuroanatomy and powered somehow by electricity. By the
1870s, indeed, it was time to update the textbooks, and two of the offerings
from that period - those of Meynert in
ASIDE: Readers wishing to gain a better appreciation of
neuroscience as history, may care to peruse our Neuropsychology
Timeline. Much of James'
and Wundt's inspiration came from Meynert via Kussmaul, whilst
the "Jacksonian model" inspires British cognitive
neuropsychology to the present day.
But what, you might ask, is the relevance of a
hierarchically modular cognitive architecture to the notion of free will? Well
the answer lies in the principle that you can only have one conductor in an
orchestra, because only one of the proposed modules can be allowed a will to
exert.
ASIDE: For the purpose of the present entry alone, we
present the above assertion as fact, although elsewhere we treat it as mere
presumption. The idea of a will-module of some sort is certainly consistent
with the data from split-brain studies [see the entry for consciousness,
Gazzaniga's theory of], but equally there are many who reject the notion of
neat modularity as overly
simplistic.
There is also the problem posed by the unconscious, as
characterised by Freud and Breuer's (1895) monograph on hysteria. Freud and Breuer took Leibniz's earlier suggestion of
unconscious perception, and added in a welter of unconscious semantics and
motivation as well, thus setting the scene for the emergence of psychodynamic theory during the first
half of the 20th century. The picture they painted of an inner welter of
emotionally charged content, clamouring to be heard but only if suitably
camouflaged, still colours our everyday conceptualisation of free will. Indeed,
one common modern view of free will is that it is at least in part just a
"post-hoc rationaliser", a
system which has no editorial control over what our deeper motivations have us
do, but which can then explain the resulting behaviours away. It is a mechanism
which thinks it is in charge, but is
not. [For Fromm's particular contribution to this topic, see free will, Fromm's theory of, and for
Ryle's see free will, Ryle's theory of.]
Free Will, Fromm's Theory of: [See firstly free will.] The Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis sees the mind as a slave
more or less totally to its underlying biology. By contrast, Fromm (1941/1965) saw personal freedom
as able to rise from and above the biology, thus defying the forces of determinism. Unfortunately, to many
people the resulting freedom is itself a stressful state, so they typically put
a lot of effort into trying to escape from it (it was no coincidence, for
example, that ancient societies ended up doing much of your decision making for
you). There are then several popular "mechanisms of escape" (p139)
from the stress of being free, including conformity and submission to
authority, even when this exposes you to the darker side of the human psyche.
He identifies three factors as being particularly worthy of our attention, as follows .....
(1)
Authoritarianism: This is "the
tendency to give up the independence of one's own individual self and to fuse
one's self with somebody or something outside of oneself in order to acquire
the strength which the individual self is lacking" (p140). He coined the
phrase "dynamic adaptation" (p14) to describe how repressed hostility
- frequently directed originally against the father - becomes part of an
individual's make-up, and he saw the same process at work in destructive or
sadistic groups. New drives can emerge which fuel either masochism - a tendency
to belittle oneself and make oneself weak - or sadism
- a tendency to seek power over others and inflict mental and/or physical pain upon
them. "Man's brain," he warns, "lives in the twentieth century;
the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age. The
majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be
rational, to be objective" (foreword to the 1965 edition, xvi).
(2)
Destructiveness: This, too, is rooted
in feelings of individual powerlessness and isolation, but extends beyond
achieving power over others to eliminating them altogether. This creates a
state of "splendid isolation" (p177) in which the threatening forces
can no longer threaten. Fromm warns us not to underestimate the destructiveness
of humankind, and notes how many justifications people can find to carry out
destructive acts, justifications such as love, duty, conscience, and
patriotism.
(3)
"Automaton Conformity":
This is when "the individual ceases to be himself [and] adopts entirely
the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns" (p184). It is
the most common escape mechanism chosen in modern society, and its success
depends upon the ability it gives to the fearful self to be identical with
"millions of other automatons around him" (p184). The ploy works, but
at a high price, namely the loss of self. Fromm sees this as the suppression of
the powers of critical thinking because this is the faculty which best detects
painful/stressful contradictions in the outside world.
More positively, Fromm also had a vision of how the
character might be strengthened, a task in which educators must be expected to
play a large part. Both helplessness and doubt paralyse life, he writes, and
the cure is self-realisation, that is to say, "the active expression of
his emotional and intellectual potentialities" (p257). We possess these
potentialities but "they become real only to the extent to which they are
expressed". Behaviour, for Fromm, must be spontaneous, a quality which is
easily in children when they say and think "that which is really
theirs", but which is lost somewhere during adolescence. Thus .....
"In all spontaneous activity the individual
embraces the world. Not only does this individual self remain intact; it
becomes stronger and more solidified. For the self is as
strong as it is active. [.....] The inability to act spontaneously, to
express what one genuinely feels and thinks, and the resulting necessity to
present a pseudo self to others and oneself, are the root of the feeling of
inferiority and weakness. Whether or not we are aware of it, there is nothing
of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves, and there is nothing
that gives us greater pride and happiness than to think, to feel, and to say
what is ours." (pp260-261.)
Free Will, Ryle's Theory of: [See firstly free
will.] The notion of "the Freedom of the Will" was described by
Gilbert Ryle (as part of his sustained attack on Descartes' myth) as a "tangle of spurious problems"
(Ryle, 1949, p69). Indeed, he compared the value of the term volition to philosophy to that of phlogiston to chemistry, for the simple
reason that we do not know "how to use it" properly! Volition is, he
claims, "an artificial concept" (p61), for which he blames Hamilton's
triad, that is to say, the notion that the mind-soul has three distinct
parts to it, namely thought, feeling, and will. The will, thus conceived,
automatically requires an "I" to do the willing, and so is "an
inevitable extension of the myth of the ghost in the machine" (p62). He
challenges his doubters to describe the volitions of which they are so fond in
more detail, thus .....
"Can they be sudden or gradual, strong or weak,
difficult or easy, enjoyable or disagreeable? Can they be accelerated,
decelerated, interrupted, or suspended? [Etc.]
Champions of the doctrine maintain, of course, that the enactment of volitions
is asserted by implication, whenever an overt act is described as intentional,
voluntary, culpable, or meritorious [..... but when] asked how long ago he
executed his last volition, or how many acts of will he executes in, say,
reciting 'Little Miss Muffet'
backwards, he is apt to confess to [not knowing]" (p63; we recommend the
backwards reciting task as a surprisingly powerful thought experiment).
Frege,
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob: [German
philosopher and mathematician (1848-1925).] [Click for external biography]
Frege joined the lecturing staff at the
"Frege concurred with
Leibniz that natural language was unsuited to [mathematical thinking]. Thus
Frege sought to create a language [.....] in which logical relations and
possible inferences would be clear and unambiguous. Frege's own term for such a
language, 'Begriffsschrift',
was likely borrowed from a paper on Leibniz's ideas written by Adolf
Trendelenburg. Although there had been attempts to fashion at least the core of
such a language made by Boole and others [..... Frege found these] to be
imprecise and antiquated" (Klement, 2006 online, ¶2) [click here to be transferred to
Klement's introduction to the further technicalities of Frege's Begriffsschrift].
With the Begriffsschrift in place, Frege moved
next into the mental philosophy by which both mathematics and logic were enabled
in the first place. He laid out his conclusions in works such as Funktion
and Begriff ("Function and Concept") (Frege, 1891), Űber
Sinn und Bedeutung ("On Sense and Reference") (Frege, 1892), and Űber
Begriff und Gegenstand ("On
Concept and Object") (Frege, 1892), and is now acclaimed for coining the
notions of sense and reference, and for building a workable
"theory of meaning" around them.
Freier
Einfall:
[German frei = "free, independent" + Einfall = (in one
of several usages) "sudden idea, brainwave, fancy, notion" (C.G.D.).]
See free association.
Freud,
Anna: [Austrian child psychoanalyst
(1895-1982).] [Click for
external biography] Anna Freud is noteworthy in the context of the present
glossary for her general support for Freudian
theory, but more specifically for her work on defense mechanisms.
Freud,
Dreams and: Freud's "The
Interpretation of Dreams" (Freud, 1900/1953) was one of his first major
works as a psychoanalyst. It is a long book [our paperback copy runs to 783
pages of primary content], and is crammed with vivid examples of how Freud
believed the unconscious elements of the mind were capable of expressing
themselves indirectly whenever the conscious mind let its defensive guard down
in sleep or under hypnosis. The book begins with a substantial review of the
literature on the interpretation of dreams, and a discussion of the key
theoretical issues. Here are some of the points raised .....
- Are dreams true
mental acts or mere physical processes? (p169)
- Is their content
"symbolic"? (p170)
- If it is symbolic,
how may it be interpreted? What is the "'decoding' method"
(p171) to be?
- What is the role of
"involuntary ideas" in all this? How do they generate the
"visual and acoustic images" (p176) which make up the dream/
Freud's basic position on all these issues is
clear. Having analysed one of his own dreams [night of 23rd-24th July 1895], he
wrote .....
"When the work of interpretation has
been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish"
(pp198-199).
Freud,
Sigmund: [Austrian neurologist and
class-defining psychoanalytic psychotherapist (1856-1939 [reputedly by
physician-assisted suicide]).] [Click for external biography]
Freud is noteworthy in the context of the present glossary on two counts,
firstly as neurologist [see, for example, Freud (1891)], and
secondly as psychoanalyst [see all entries beginning Freud .....].
Freudian
Mental Architecture, the: See indents (1) and (2) in the entry for Freudian theory.
Freudian Theory: The basic essence of "Freudism" [or "Freudianism"] consists of four linked theoretical assertions,
namely (a) that the mind has both unconscious and conscious domains, with only
a fraction of what goes on in the former being available to the latter [for the
pre-Freudian background to this assertion, see unconsciousness, the],
(b) that much of what we do is driven by instinctive forces arising in the
unconscious domain, (c) that the activation of these forces inherently brings
either pleasure or unpleasure, and (d) that the unpleasant forces are so
unpleasant that the conscious mind develops strategies - known as "defense mechanisms" - either to hold them safely at bay, or else to allow
them some form of vicarious indirect expression [as to why this should be
necessary, see the separate entry for unpleasure, why it has to be so
unpleasant.] These four basic assertions then operate in a processing
environment which is traditionally divided up according to two distinct but
simultaneously valid sets of considerations, namely "cognitive structure"
and "mental topography", as follows .....
(1) The
Structural Divisions of the Mind: The most fundamental structural component of the
mind is our instinctive being. Freud
called this the "id" [Latin = "it"], and regarded it as
representing the animal
within us. The id is the only system active at birth, and is
responsible (along with an array of brainstem and spinal reflexes) for keeping
us alive. It is capable only of what Freud called "primary process thinking", that is to say, unplanned and unstrategised thinking,
motivated by some immediate outcome on the pleasure-unpleasure continuum. At
birth, for example, the id knows only what its infant body is telling it at a
particular moment in time (whether it is hungry, say, or too hot or too cold,
or in pain, etc.), and it responds to said input in a primitive instinctual
way, by crying, or by sucking, or by eliminating waste, or by whatever else our
biological hard-wiring has predetermined as appropriate. Gradually, however,
our brains and minds become more mature, and our particular individuality - our
"ego" - starts to develop. Where the id had all along been
providing the mind's emotional and appetitive
component, the ego now starts to provide it with its "cognitive"
component [compare the Platonic notion of soul,
tripartite]. The ego does this by creating and manipulating a storehouse of
mental concepts in the interests of "reality testing",
and its relative success at this task depends on how accurately the mental (or
"internal") "objects" reflect the properties of the physical (or
"external") objects they are representing [compare what cognitive
science has to say about mental models in general]. Note that as cognitive
structures [that is to say, as components of a functional architecture rather than a physical one], neither the id nor the ego maps down onto a
simple brain location in which they might be said to reside. A third
structure, the "superego", is introduced in a page or
so.
(2) The
Topographic Divisions of the Mind: Freud also broke the mind down into spatially
distinct functional zones, the same way a building has different rooms or a
landscape has different geographical regions. He had arrived at this belief in
his early theorising about the stages of aesthesis, and in Freud (1896) he
identified five stages of perception, with sensory information being passed
from one stage to the next, starting with the most consciously inaccessible and
culminating in full conscious awareness. These were, in ascending order, Wahrnehmungen (or perceptions), Wahrnehmungszeichen (or indications of
perception), Unbewusstsein (or unconsciousness), Vorbewusstsein (or preconsciousness), and Bewusstsein (or consciousness).
ASIDE: Freud introduced the term "topographical"
[= "concerning the describing of locations"] in his book The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud,
1900/1958), describing it as "the schematic picture of the Ψ-systems"
(p699) [we explain what Ψ-systems are in the entry for Freud's Project].
Anticipating modern stage-processing multi-modular theories of perception by
nigh on a century, he was explicitly asking us to regard the "mental
apparatus" as "a compound instrument" with the five component
"systems" of aesthesis "in a regular spatial relation to one
another" (p685).
Now as we have explained elsewhere [see aggression,
psychodynamic theory and], Freud insisted in his early writings that
there was only one instinctive force. He called this the "libido", and he saw it as being made up of a number of lesser
"life instincts", the most important of which is the sex drive (which
is why one regularly sees the term "psychosexual development" used to indicate the totality of child development).
Later, however, he came to recognise a set of "death instincts", operating alongside the life instincts and powering the destructive
side of human behaviour. Here is how Freud explained the interplay of the two
sets of forces in 1923 .....
"Recognition of Two Classes of Instincts in Mental Life: Though psychoanalysis
endeavours as a rule to develop its theories as independently as possible from
those of other sciences, it is nevertheless obliged to seek a basis for the
theory of the instincts in biology. [Having considered] the processes which go
to make up life and which lead to death, it becomes probable that we should recognise the existence of two
classes of instincts, corresponding to the contrary processes of construction
and dissolution in the organism. On this view, the one set of instincts, which
work essentially in silence, would be those which follow the aim of leading the
living creature to death and therefore deserve to be called the 'death
instincts'; these would be directed outwards [.....] and would manifest
themselves as destructive or aggressive impulses. The other set of
instincts would be those which are better known to us in analysis - the
libidinal, sexual, or life instincts, which are best comprised under the name
of Eros; their purpose would be to
form living substance into ever greater unities, so that life may be prolonged
and brought to higher development. The erotic instincts and the death instincts
would be present in living beings in regular mixtures [and] life would consist
in the manifestation of the conflict or interaction between the two classes of
instinct; death would mean for the individual the victory of the destructive
instincts, but reproduction would mean for him the victory of Eros. [.....] This view would enable us to characterise instincts as tendencies inherent in living substance
towards restoring an earlier state of things" (Freud, Libido Theory, 1923/1955, [Standard
Edition (Vol. 18)], p258; bold emphasis added).
When Freud eventually brought these various
theoretical building blocks together, he found that they could support both (a)
an integrated theory of normal and abnormal psychosexual development, and (b)
an associated clinical practicum by which the abnormalities - the "neuroses" - might be at least partly mitigated. The theory is
known as "psychoanalytic theory", and the clinical practice is known as "psychoanalysis".
ASIDE: Readers will encounter both one- and two-word
hyphenated versions of the term "psychoanalysis". Google currently
[June 2007] returns around 12 times as many hits for the former as the latter,
and so this glossary follows that precedent. For exhaustive searches it may
nevertheless be wise to keyword both forms.
As for psychosexual development, Freud saw this as a
logical progression through a series of stages common to all humankind, each
stage being given a particular shape and flavour by the particular libidinal
subsystem predominating at the age in question. He identified five such stages
in all, as follows .....
(1) The Oral Stage: The "oral
stage" lasts from birth to about
one year of age, during which period sensations of taste and oral exploration
are presumed to dominate the infant's experiences. This is not to say that
vision and hearing are not important, but rather that they exist to support the
functioning of the ego, not that of the id. Thus while the ego is busily
conceptualising the world as internal objects, the id is working to the rules
of orality in coding the resulting semantic content on the approach-avoidance
dimension. As explained in Freud's Project, Freud believed that a
biologically fundamental process known as "cathexis" was responsible for
"attaching" - or
"cathecting" - instinctive energy to learned conceptual memories.
TEST YOURSELF NOW: The following personality traits are often cited as in some
way "oral". Do they describe you, perhaps? Being
overweight; Acquiring non-food possessions (including knowledge and money);
Being more than normally determined or stubborn; Using "biting" wit
or sarcasm; Sulking.
(2) The Anal Stage: The oral stage is then followed by the "anal stage" of development, lasting from one to three years of
age, during which period sensations of bladder and rectal distension and
release dominate the infant's experience. Freud made much of the child's
involvement at this stage in "potty training", seeing this set of
experiences as an opportunity for the child either to cooperate with (and
please) its mother, or not. The anal stage is thus when the child begins to
understand that it has a
will of its own, and that its
actions have predictable social consequences to go with the physical
consequences it already knew about
[for the cognitive and philosophical issues here, start with the entry for agency
and follow the onward links].
TEST YOURSELF NOW: The following personality traits are often cited as in some
way "anal". Do they describe you, perhaps? Frugality and
miserliness; Neatness AND messiness; Creativity.
(3) The Phallic Stage: The anal stage shades in due course into the "phallic stage", from three to five years of age, during which period
sensations of genital sensitivity dominate the child's experience, and
[genitally derived?] feelings of attraction - which we like to call "love" - start to emerge. And because most cultures have
extremely strict rules controlling the expression of interpersonal attraction,
things suddenly start to become heated. To start with, as the id starts making
its disallowed demands for adult attention, it starts to attract explicit
censure from those very adults, especially where expressions of penile
excitement are directed at the mother or expressions of clitoral excitement at
the father. This exposes for the first time a serious failing on the part of
the ego, namely that the definition of reality it has built into its system of
internal objects (the child's conceptualised parents) suddenly no longer
matches the reality being imposed by those external objects (the child's
physical parents). Up until now the child has probably known only minor
disciplinary action from its carers, because it had never before wished
for anything of particularly high value. Now, however, it gets baulked forcefully and
consistently in perhaps the highest-value wish it has ever had. So with the id wanting what it cannot have, and the
ego equipped neither to deliver what the id wants nor to protect itself from
the emotional turmoil of failing to do so, a crisis point arrives at which the
child's feelings for the opposite sex parent become ever more firmly blocked by
the same sex parent, leading to feelings of intense hostility towards them.
This sudden affective turmoil is called the "Oedipus complex" in boys, and the "Electra
complex" in girls, and it can
only be properly resolved if something can hoodwink both ego and id into
believing that they have won when in fact they have lost. The solution lies in
the process of "identification", the ability to take parts of other persons'
personalities as your own. Boys thus identify with their fathers and girls with
their mother, and this identification brings with it a vicarious satisfaction
of the id's need to possess the other parent. The process also creates the
third of our mind structures, namely the "superego", a derivative of the internalised adult whose inner
voice henceforth acts as our conscience. It is possible that boys, during the
confrontation with their father, will develop "castration anxiety", whilst girls, when they eventually discover that
they lack a penis (a discovery they are presumed to find traumatic), will
develop "penis
envy".
ASIDE: Freud is regularly (and vigorously) accused of
overplaying the issue of a genuinely "sexual" component to early
child-parent attachment. He quite explicitly believed that children wanted
adult-style sexual relations with their opposite-sex parent, in direct
contravention of cultural prohibitions and regardless of their actual physical
immaturity. Others [e.g., Jung (1906)] proposed merely that the child sought
only exclusivity of access to that parent's time and attentiveness; genitality
- even in scaled down form - was neither necessary nor sufficient. Had Freud
survived to witness
(4) The Latency Stage: The phallic stage is then followed by a "latency stage", from five years to puberty, during which period
nothing further of interest seems to happen and the earlier structures have an
opportunity to consolidate.
(5) The Genital Stage: The latency stage is then followed by the "genital stage", from puberty and through adolescence, during which
period genital sexuality is now accompanied by the physical changes of early
adulthood which allow full physical expression to the capacity for possessive
love which emerged in the phallic stage.
Now the point about the stages described above is that
the shape and flavour of a given type of libidinal cathexis tends to endure
beyond the stage in which it was first established. This becomes important when
the conflicts inherent to that stage or a later one are poorly resolved. When
this happens, an individual can "fixate" at (or "regress" to, if already past it) the stage in question, and thereafter work to a basis of cathexis
which becomes progressively out of date with respect to chronological age.
It is perfectly possible, for example, to have an "orally fixated" old-age pensioner, say, in whom the rewarding powers
of oral stimulation have persisted (for whatever reason) all the way down from
infancy. Perhaps the best known of all the "fixations"
of this sort is the "anally
retentive" person. Freud thought
he recognised a deeply ingrained "anal character"
in adults who collected things (including other human things) in later life,
seeing in such habitual behaviours a residue of the wilful withholding of excreta
during potty training; that is to say, of over-using the newly acquired sense
of control as a weapon against its parents.
WHERE TO NEXT: Readers seeking more than
the above introductory sketch will have to put it together from a number of
separated entries, as follows .....
hysteria [exemplified by case, Anna
O and case, Elisabeth
von R.]
Freud's
diagrams and illustrations
Freud's Project
and unconscious,
the
Freud,
dreams and
The Oedipus
complex
[exemplified by case, Little Hans and resolved by the
processes of identification]
Defense mechanisms
Freud's Diagrams and Illustrations: [See firstly Freud,
English versions of.] Freud was not a prolific diagram-drawer, but on several
of the occasions that he resorted to them they have distinct historical
significance. Here is a list of his graphical output, (a) within the 1891
monograph On Aphasia, and (b) within
the 24 [!] volumes of the Standard Edition (SE) of his works …..
On Aphasia (1891/1992 [German]): [This monograph was
reportedly withheld from the SE at Freud's personal instruction.] The following
diagrams are in our 1992 Vogel edition of Zur Auffassung der Aphasien
(Freud, 1891/1992) …..
pp42-43 The Wernicke (1874) Diagram: On p42 (labeled
Figure 1) and p43 (labeled Figure 2), there are two diagrams setting out
Wernicke's (1874) view on Der Aphasische Symptomencomplex
[= "The Aphasic Syndrome"]. Figure 1 is a simple three-arrow flow
diagram showing the logic of Leitungsaphasie [conduction aphasia].
Figure 2 is the same, but superimposed over a lateral aspect anatomic sketch of
the cerebrum and brainstem. This
latter is an historically important early diagram, and
we have ourselves already reproduced it online, with supporting notes, in Wernicke (1874).
p45 The Lichtheim (1885)
Diagram: On p45 (labeled Figure 3) there is a reproduction of Lichtheim's (1885) Schema
des Sprachapparates [= "Schema of the Speech
Apparatus"]. Often
referred to as "Lichtheim's House", this is
another historically important early diagram, and we have ourselves already
reproduced it online, with supporting notes, in Lichtheim
(1885).
p47 (labeled Figure
4) is a variant of p45, enhanced with what would today be called a visual input
lexicon and an orthographic output lexicon. p63 (labeled Figure 5) is an
anatomical diagram referred to from the text.
p75 The Grashey Diagram: Labeled Figure 6,
this is a reproduction of Grashey's (1885)
circle-and-arrow flow diagram of the brain's language areas. This is another historically important early
diagram, and we have ourselves already reproduced it online, with supporting
notes, in Grashey (1885).
p87 The Wernicke (1881) Diagram: Labeled Figure 7,
this is a reproduction from Wernicke's (1881) Lehrbuch der Gehirnkrankheiten [= "Textbook
of Brain Diseases"]. It is basically the same as p43 above, but with more
detailed identification of the brain areas under discussion.
p121 Freud's Word Complex Diagram: Labeled Figure 8,
this is Freud's own synthesis and interpretation of the foregoing diagrams and
the available case literature. It is a
very important early diagram in the aphasiology
literature, and we have ourselves already reproduced it online, with supporting
notes, in Freud (1891).
p126 Freud's Cortical Fields Diagram: Labeled Figure 9,
this is Freud's own suggested explanation for the association of ideas between
the various separate modules of the p121 diagram. It depicts the outward
radiation of Rindenfelder
[= "cortical fields"] from the separate modules, which, where they
intersect, interact to set up a Zentrum [= "centre"] for
the storage of the associational links between the otherwise separate types of
information.
p138 Wernicke's (1886) "Schema of Disturbances of
Standard Edition, Volume 1 (1886-1899/1966): Volume 1 of the SE
was first published as such in 1966, and contains a number of small early
papers, followed by Extracts from the Fliess Papers (1892-1899) and Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895). It also includes the
editorial team's General Preface to
the SE as a whole. It does not include Freud and Breuer’s (1893-1895) writings
on hysteria, since these had already been dealt with separately in Volume 2
[see below], nor his early writings on psychoanalysis, which are in Volume 3
[see below]. The Fliess
Papers contain diagrams as follows .....
p202 [Draft G, headed “Melancholia”, possibly 7th
January 1895]: This sketch, under the title "Schematic Picture of Sexuality"
(and labeled as Figure 1), is part force field diagram, part neuropsychological
flow diagram, and shows how a number of factors act in concert to modulate the
state of excitement of a "psychical group" of sexually charged memory
units.
p205 (upper and lower) [ditto]: These two
sketches, not explicitly titled (but labeled as Figures 2 and 3), are referred
to in the accompanying discussion as showing how neurons close to said
psychical group lose excitation into that group, thereby producing the
experience of pain which can motivate a consequent psychopathology.
p211 [Draft H, headed "Paranoia", 24th
January 1895]: This is a "Summary Table" (labeled as Figure 4) comparing ego
defenses for hysteria, obsessionality, hallucinatory
confusion, paranoia, and hysterical psychosis.
p229 [Letter 46, 30th May 1896]: This is a table
(labeled as Figure 5) showing six developmental ages, or “periods of life” or
"epochs" (p229), namely Ia, Preconscious
(up to 4 years), Ib, Infantile (4 to 8 years),
Transitional “A” (8 to 10 years), II, Prepubertal (11
to 13 years), Transitional “B” (13 to 17 years), and III, Mature (18 years and over).
p230 [ditto]: Using the headings introduced
on p229, this is a continuation table (labeled Figure 6) which indicates how
sexual "scenes" and repression cross-relate differently to hysteria,
obsessional neurosis, and paranoia.
p234 [Letter 52, 6th December 1896]: This is another
"Schematic Picture" (labeled Figure 7), this time of the successive
"registrations" of input during the end-to-end process of perception.
This is another
historically important early diagram, and we have ourselves already reproduced
it online, with supporting notes, in Freud (1896).
p236 [ditto]: This is a table (labeled
Figure 8) showing the four non-transitional developmental epochs introduced on
p229 cross-map differently onto the psychical and sexual phases of development,
although the only point being made is that epochs Ia
and Ib are separate psychologically but merged
sexually.
p237 [ditto]: This is a table (labeled
Figure 9) which takes the successive registrations of perceptual input
introduced on p234 and cross-relates them to hysteria, obsessional neurosis,
paranoia, and perversion.
p241 [Letter 55, 11th January 1897]: This is a sketched
family tree (labeled as Figure 10) of the "degeneracy" in "one
of my male hysterical patients" (p240). It is historically important to
the extent that it includes an early differentiation of the aetiologies
of a neurosis and a psychosis.
p251 [Draft M, 25th May 1897]: This sketch, under
the title "The Architecture of Hysteria" (labeled as Figure 11),
depicts four stratifications of consciousness, numbered I (most superficial) to
IV (most deep), and shows how different grades of repression are supported by each, resulting in different clinical
pictures.
ASIDE - Masson (1985): When dealing with
the Fliess correspondence, the Masson edition
(Masson, 1985) is the more complete record. This contains the following
variations of, and editorial omissions from, the SE …..
p100 - as SE p202
above, but depicting the end organ as T (for terminal organ) [Freud himself
used E in his sketches, so go with the SE on this]. p102 (left and right) - as
SE p205 (upper and lower), again depicting the end organ as T.
p103/4 [not in SE]: This two-sided
photographically reproduced sketch, in its native German under the title Normalschema, was
enclosed with Draft G [see SE p202 above] and is therefore provisionally dated
7th January 1895. Masson suggests that it was excluded from the SE because it
was "too difficult to understand" (p105), but at first sight it is
similar enough to the p100 diagram, only with different annotation. We cannot
trace a formally published translation.
p111
- as SE p211 above. p187 - as SE p229 above. p188 - as SE p230 above. p207 - as SE p234
above. p210 (upper) - as SE p236 above. p210 (lower) - as SE p237 above.
p211 [Letter 52, 6th December 1896; not in SE]: This table
supports a textual argument in which Freud attempts to correlate "the
derivation of the different epochs" (p210) to multiples of 23-day cycles
of physiological state in males and 28-day cycles in females.
p222
- as SE p241 above. p247 - as SE p251 above.
Unnumbered insert between p266 and p267 [Letter 69,
21st September 1897; not in SE]: This is a photographic reproduction of this eight-page
letter (complete with envelope face and verso).
The Project contains two graphs of little
significance on p313 (both labeled as Figure 12), and a schematic
explanation (labeled Figure 16) on p354, which we have already reproduced in case, Emma. It also contains three
primitive nerve net sketches (respectively, Figures 13, 14, and 15) on p314,
p324, and p341, which are well worth a look, because they are not dissimilar to
those subsequently popularised in Hebb's (1949)
description of the cell assembly.
Standard Edition, Volume 2 1893-1895/1955: Volume 2 of the SE
was first published as such in 1955, and contains Studies on Hysteria
(Freud and Breuer, 1893-1895). This work included detailed patient histories
for case, Emmy von N., case, Lucy R., case, Katharina, and case,
Elisabeth von R. It contains neither diagrams nor illustrations.
Standard Edition, Volume 3 (1893-1899): ENTRY TO FOLLOW.
Standard Edition, Volume 4 (1900): ENTRY TO FOLLOW.
Standard Edition, Volume 5 (1900-1901): ENTRY TO FOLLOW.
Standard Edition, Volume 6 (1901): ENTRY TO FOLLOW.
Standard Edition, Volume 7 (1901-1905/1953): This volume
contains Fragments of an Analysis of a
Case of Hysteria (1905) [this being the primary report of case, Dora], Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) [this being the
primary source for such eminently "Freudian" notions as infantile sexuality and penis envy, as well as for his early
views on perversions and inversions [i.e., homosexuality], On Psychotherapy (1905), and a number of
lesser writings. It contains neither diagrams nor illustrations.
Standard Edition, Volume 8 (1905): ENTRY TO FOLLOW.
Standard Edition, Volume 9 (1906-1908): ENTRY TO
FOLLOW.
Standard Edition, Volume 10 (1909/1955): This volume
contains Analysis of a Phobia in a
Five-Year-Old Boy (1909) [this being the primary report of case, Little Hans] and Notes Upon a Case
of Obsessional Neurosis (1909) [the primary report of case, Rat Man]. The Little
Hans account contains the following diagrams …..
p13 (labeled as
Figure 1) is a sketch by Hans' father of a giraffe, on which the youngster had
insisted that the animal's Wiwimacher [literally, "wee-wee-maker", hence
translated into informal English as "widdler"]
be added, p46 and p48 (labeled Figures 2 and 3, respectively) are maps
supporting the text, and p49 (labeled as Figure 4) is a sketch by Hans' father
of a horse's head, complete with heavy mouth harness, one of Hans' particular
phobias.
Standard Edition, Volume 11 (1910): ENTRY TO FOLLOW.
Standard Edition, Volume 12 (1911-1913/1958): This volume of the
SE contains Psychoanalytic Notes on an
Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (1911), The Dynamics of Transference (1912), Dreams in Folklore (1911), and a number of lesser writings. It
contains neither diagrams nor illustrations.
Standard Edition, Volume 13 (1913-1914): ENTRY TO FOLLOW.
Standard Edition, Volume 14 (1914-1916/1957): This volume
contains On the History of the
Psychoanalytic Movement (1914), On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914), Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915), The Unconscious (1915), Mourning and Melancholia
(1917), and a number of lesser
writings. Instincts and Their
Vicissitudes has a diagram on p130 which is set out like a mathematical
equation using words rather than numbers, and supports a textual explanation of
the "scopophilic instinct". The Unconscious re-publishes (p214) the 1891 Word Complex diagram
(the p121 diagram in On Aphasia,
above).
Standard Edition, Volume 15 (1915-1916): ENTRY TO FOLLOW.
Standard Edition, Volume 16 (1916-1917): ENTRY TO FOLLOW.
Freud's
Project:
"Let us picture the ego as a network of cathected
neurons" (Freud, 1895, p323).
Freud's (1895/1966) Project for a Scientific Psychology [Entwurf einer Psychologie],
was written before (and in many important respects inspired) the main body of
his psychoanalytical theory. It presents Freud's early-career conclusions as to
the structure and function of the nervous system, and was informed in this by
his clinical experience using hypnosis and free association in
cases of hysteria (as set out in
Freud and Breuer, 1893-1895), as well as by his work with acquired language
disorders such as aphasia (as set out in Freud, 1891). The Project
uses abbreviations to identify its most important theoretical constructs, as follows .....
M Motor Image.
Freud uses this code to refer to the mental content capable of initiating a
discrete piece of behaviour.
N Neuron.
[It was only in the 1880s that
chemically-minded neurologists like Golgi had developed tissue staining
techniques to the degree of sophistication needed to detect neural dendrites
and synaptic "knobs" under the microscope. Freud was therefore one of
the first to base a full theory of neuropsychology on the long-hypothesised,
but at the time only recently observed, neuron.]
Q Quantity
of Neural Excitation. Freud uses
this code to refer to the physiological processes - whatever they were - which made neurons
"excited" when stimulated, compared to what was going on while they
remained "at rest". [Freud knew from the late 19th century
physiological literature that neural tissue had a peculiar "tonic"
quality - a resting level of excitement (much like muscle tone), which was free
to increase or decrease within certain limits "without necessarily
initiating transmitted impulses" (Pribram, 1969, p399). We know this as
the "graded response" of
excitable tissue rather than the all-or-nothing action potential, or "spike". Given what Freud suspected
was going on in the minds of his hysteria patients, it was not difficult to
attribute concealed and secret motivations to these background activations.]
Qή This is Q,
as above, but now subscripted by the Greek letter eta (non-aspirated inflection) [we suggest reading it as
"queue-eater", therefore, rather than "queue-heater"].
Freud used this term to refer to "quantity of the intercellular order of
magnitude" (Strachey, 1966, in Freud, 1895/1966, p294), but the definition
has to be accepted as vague because Qή is further described [and Strachey
was then the leading editorial scholar on Freud's work] as Q's "mysterious
companion" (p289), in whose usage "Freud himself sometimes seems
inconsistent" (ibid.).
Q'n This
is a font-simplified alternative to Qή, sometimes seen in
type-written (as opposed to word-processed) manuscripts. Comments
as for Qή.
V Idea [see Vorstellung].
W Perception [see Wahrnehmung].
Φ This is the
Greek letter phi, which, as the first
letter of the word phusica, is a common abbreviation for words
beginning "physio-". Freud uses it throughout the Project to indicate a physical system of
"permeable neurons".
Ψ This is the Greek letter psi,
which, as the first letter of the word psuche,
is a common abbreviation for words beginning "psycho-". Freud uses it
throughout the Project to indicate a
system of "impermeable neurons", because he conceived of this system
as being the seat of the ego.
ω This is the Greek letter omega (lower case).
Freud uses it throughout the Project
to indicate a particular subsystem of the Ψ system which supports consciousness.
The Project
recognises three distinct systems of neural organisation, based partly upon
anatomical considerations and partly on the "permeability" of the
neurons involved, that is to say, how readily they transmit excitation rather
than store it as a change in graded potential. The first of these systems, the
"spinal projection system", is a permeable tissue system, and
consists anatomically of the spinal tracts. The second system, the
"nuclear system", is far less permeable, presumably because it exists
to keep hold of information brought to it. It consists anatomically of the
nuclei and ganglia of the brainstem and cerebrum, and its function is to cathect
the mental content which at that moment in time most demands cathecting [more
on what this involves below]. The third system is needed to make sense out of
the information available to the other two, especially where this information
relates to the "qualities" of ongoing sensation. Based in the cerebral
cortex, or "pallium", it is called the "cortical system".
ASIDE: Readers unfamiliar with basic spinal cord
neuroanatomy may care to glance at the diagrams in the companion resource "The Pyramidal and
Extrapyramidal Motor Systems"
before proceeding. Fancher (1976/2007
online) reminds us that Freud had not long earlier been a student both of Ernst Brücke and Theodor Meynert. From Brücke he seems to
have acquired the microanatomical notions of neural excitation, and from
Meynert he seems to have acquired the macroanatomical model of nervous system
organisation.
Against this basic framework, Freud then put a number
of extremely fundamental propositions across. The first of these dealt with the
notions of Q and Qή, the main assertion being
that neurons which become active by receiving a quantity of excitation Q
immediately do their best to "divest themselves" (p296) of it, in a self-correcting process akin to that
we know nowadays as homeostasis. Thus .....
"A primary nervous system makes use of this
Qή which it has thus acquired, by giving it off through a connecting
path to the muscular mechanisms, and in that way keeps itself free from
stimulus. This
discharge represents the primary function of the nervous system" (Freud, 1895/1966, Project for a Scientific Psychology [Standard Edition (Volume 1)],
p296).
ASIDE: This self-correcting
pattern of functioning was particularly noticeable, Freud argued, with
"endogenous" stimulation, that is to say, stimulation which derives
from sensory systems directed internally, within our own bodies. He observed
that where sensations pertained to a physiological state such as hunger, they
were invariably calling for behaviour of some sort. Such excitation-reducing
behaviours are called "primary functions" or "secondary
functions", depending on how directly the behaviour is linked to the
triggering condition.
The second fundamental proposition had to do with how
neurons of different types related to each other when necessary, and avoided
doing so the rest of the time. The argument runs as follows
.....
"The Neuron
Theory: The idea of combining with this Qή theory the
knowledge of the neurons arrived at by recent histology is the second pillar of
this thesis. The main substance of these new discoveries is that the nervous
system consists of distinct and similarly constructed neurons, which have
contact with one another through the medium of a foreign substance, which
terminate upon one another as they do upon portions of foreign tissue, [and] in
which certain lines of conduction are laid down [.....]. They have in addition
numerous ramifications of varying calibre. If
we combine this account of the neurons with the conception of the Qή theory, we arrive at the idea of a cathected
neuron filled with a certain Qή
while at other times it may be empty. The principle of inertia finds its
expression in the hypothesis of a current passing from the cell's paths of
conduction or processes to the axis-cylinder. A single neuron is thus a
model of the whole nervous system"
(op.cit., pp297-298; emphasis added).
Freud went on to discuss the mechanism by which one
neuron transmitted its excitation to another "through the medium of the
foreign substance" mentioned above. He called this mechanism the
contact-barrier" [Contactschranke] - what we know today as the synapse.
Here is how he introduces (a) the construct, and (b) its implications for
biological theories of memory .....
"The
Contact-Barriers: The first justification for this hypothesis arises from
the consideration that there the path of conduction passes through
undifferentiated protoplasm instead of (as it otherwise does, within the
neuron) through differentiated protoplasm, which is probably better adapted for
conduction. This gives us a hint that conductive capacity is to be linked with
differentiation [.....]. Furthermore, the theory of contact-barriers can be
turned to advantage as follows. A main
characteristic of nervous tissue is memory: that is, quite generally, a
capacity for being permanently altered by single occurrences. [.....] The theory of contact-barriers, if it adopts
this solution, can express it in the following terms. There are two classes of
neurons: those which allow Qή to pass through as though
they had no contact-barriers and which, accordingly, after each passage of
excitation are in the same state as before, and those whose contact-barriers
make themselves felt, so that they only allow Qή to pass through
with difficulty or partially. [.....] Thus there are permeable neurons (offering no resistance and retaining nothing),
which serve for perception, and impermeable
ones (loaded with resistance, and holding back Qή), which are the
vehicles of memory and so probably of psychical processes in general.
Henceforward I shall call the former system of neurons Φ and the latter Ψ.
[..... The Ψ neurons] are permanently altered by the passage of an
excitation. If we introduce the theory of contact-barriers: their
contact-barriers are brought into a permanently altered state [.....] less
impermeable, and so more like those of the Φ system. We shall describe the
state of the contact-barriers as their degree of facilitation [Bahnung]. We can then say: Memory is represented by the facilitations existing between the Ψ neurons [..... indeed] by the
differences in the facilitations between the Ψ neurons" (op.
cit., p298-300; bold emphasis added).
ASIDE: The word "synapse" comes from the Greek synapsis
[= "connection"]. Modern techniques have taught us a lot about the
microstructure of the synapse, and yet the original concept goes back to the closing
years of the nineteenth century. The concept itself has been credited to the
French physiologist Dubois-Reymond (1875), but the precise term was not coined
until later (Foster and Sherrington, 1897). Sherrington then made much of
synaptic mechanisms in his now classic discussions of the nature of the reflex
arc (Sherrington, 1906). For further historical background, see Section 2 of
the companion resource "Hebbian Theory".
Freud even hazards a guess at the general location of
"the Ψ system", identifying it with the grey
matter of the brain, because it involved, of necessity, impermeable neurons
(p303). He also suggests why some systems have impermeable neurons and others
do not, thus .....
"But how did Ψ arrive at the
characteristics of impermeability? After all, Φ too has contact-barriers; if they play no part
whatever, why should Ψ's contact-barriers? [..... We] attribute the differences not to the
neurons but to the quantities with which they have to deal. It must then be
supposed that quantities pass on to the
Φ neurons against which the resistance of the
contact-barriers does not come into account, but that only such quantities
reach the Ψ neurons as are of
the same order of magnitude as that resistance" (op.cit.,
pp303-304).
However, Q alone was unable to explain
the problem of phenomenal quality [readers unfamiliar with the qualia
debate within mental philosophy should spend a few minutes on the separate
entry before proceeding]. In Freud's judgment, it required a particular system
design, one in which different components were carefully integrated, for
qualities to emerge, thus .....
"The
Problem of Quality: Hitherto, nothing whatever has been said of the fact
that every psychological theory, apart from what it achieves from the point of
view of natural science, must fulfil yet another major requirement. It should
explain to us what we are aware of, in the most puzzling fashion, through our
'consciousness'; and, since this consciousness knows nothing of what we have so
far been assuming - quantities and neurons - it should explain this lack of
knowledge to us as well. [After all], it follows, from the postulate of
consciousness providing neither complete nor trustworthy knowledge of the
neuronal processes, that these are in the first instance to be regarded to
their whole extent as unconscious [.....]. In that case, however, a place has
to be found for the content of consciousness in our quantitative Ψ
processes. Consciousness gives us what are called qualities - sensations which are different in a great multiplicity of
ways and whose difference is
distinguished according to its relations with the external world. Within
this difference there are series, similarities, and so on, but there are in
fact no quantities in it. It may be asked how qualities originate and where
qualities originate. [.....] Where do qualities originate? Not in the external
world [where] there are only masses in motion and nothing else. In the Φ system perhaps? That tallies with the fact that
the qualities are linked with perception, but is contradicted by everything
that rightly argues in favour of the seat of consciousness being in the upper stories of the nervous system. In
the Ψ system then. [Again no] Thus we summon up courage to assume that
there is a third system of neurons - ω
perhaps [we might call it] - which is excited along with perception, but
not along with reproduction, and whose states of excitation give rise to the
various qualities - are, that is to say, conscious sensations"
(op.cit., pp307-309; bold emphasis added).
With these basic building blocks in place, Freud then
turned to motivation, the topic which would make his Interpretation of
Dreams a best-seller only five years later. The core constructs here were
(a) "wishful
attraction",
and
(b) the "defenses" which would be needed to cope with any hostile
thoughts arising. These constructs were introduced together, as follows .....
"Wishful attraction can easily be explained by
the assumption that the cathexis of the friendly mnemic image in a state of
desire greatly exceeds in Qή
the cathexis which occurs when there is a mere perception, so that a
particularly good facilitation leads from the Ψ nucleus to the
corresponding neuron of the pallium. It is harder to explain primary defence
or repression - the fact that a hostile mnemic image is regularly
abandoned by its cathexis as soon as possible. Nevertheless, the explanation
should lie in the fact that the primary experiences of pain were brought to an
end by reflex defence. The emergence of another object in place of the
hostile one was the signal for the fact that the experience of pain was at an
end, and the Ψ system, taught biologically,
seeks to reproduce the state in Ψ which marked the cessation of the pain"
(op.cit., p322; bold emphasis added).
As for the ego, this too could be reproduced to issues
of Q, etc., properly arranged. Here is how Freud saw it happening .....
"[The states of] 'wishful attraction' and of the
inclination to repression we have already touched on a state of Ψ
which has not yet been discussed. For these two processes indicate that an
organisation has been formed in Ψ whose presence interferes
with passages [of quantity] which on the first occasion occurred in a
particular way [i.e., accompanied by satisfaction or pain]. This organisation is called the 'ego'. It can easily be depicted if we consider that the
regularly repeated reception of endogenous Qή in certain neurons (of the
nucleus) and the facilitating effect proceeding thence will produce a group of
neurons which is constantly cathected and thus corresponds to the vehicle of the store [we like this phrase - Ed.] required by the secondary
function. Thus the ego is to be defined as the totality of the Ψ
cathexes, at the given time, in which a permanent component is distinguished
from a changing one. [.....] While it must be the endeavour of this ego to give
off its cathexes by the method of satisfaction, this cannot happen in any other
way than by its influencing the repetition of experiences of pain and of
affects, and by the following method, which is described generally as inhibition.
[.....] Therefore, if an ego
exists, it must inhibit psychical primary processes" (op.cit.,
pp322-324; bold emphasis added).
Freud even drew circuit diagrams of the neuron
arrangements by which this course of events could be instantiated. Here is the
captioning text for his Figure 14 .....
"Inhibition [is] a decided advantage to Ψ . Let us suppose that a
is a hostile mnemic image and b a key-neuron to
unpleasure. . Then, if a is awakened,
primarily unpleasure would be released [.....]. With an inhibitory action from α
[see sidenote below - Ed.] the release of unpleasure will turn out very
slight and the nervous system will be spared the development and discharge of Q
without any other damage. It is easy now to imagine how, with the help of a
mechanism which draws the ego's attention to the imminent fresh cathexis of the
hostile mnemic image, the ego can succeed in inhibiting the passage [of
quantity] from a mnemic image to the release of unpleasure by a copious
side-cathexis which can be strengthened according to need. Indeed, if we
suppose that the original Qή release of unpleasure is
taken up by the ego itself, we shall have in it itself the source of the
expenditure which is required by the inhibiting side-cathexis from the ego. In
that case, the stronger the unpleasure, the stronger will be the primary
defence" (op.cit., p324).
ASIDE:
The Greek letters α,
β, etc., denote "side cathexis" of a, b,
etc. Freud is here anticipating the sort of "spreading excitation" referred
to by Dell (1986) in his theory of word activation during lexical search [for
more on which, see Section 1 of the companion resource "Speech
Errors"].
The famous psychoanalytic notions of "primary
process" and "secondary process" also both derive from the Project,
thus .....
"It is probably the ω neurons
which furnish this indication: the indication of reality. In the case of
every external perception a qualitative excitation occurs in ω,
which in the first instance, however, has no significance for Ψ.
It must be added that the ω excitation leads to ω
discharge, and information of this, as of every discharge, reaches Ψ.
The information of the discharge from ω is thus the
indication of quality or of reality for Ψ. [.....] Wishful cathexis to the point
of hallucination [and] complete generation of unpleasure which involves a
complete expenditure of defence are described by us as psychical primary
processes; by contrast, those processes which are only made possible by a
good cathexis of the ego, and which represent a moderation of the foregoing,
are described as psychical secondary processes. It will be seen that the
necessary precondition of the latter is a correct employment of the indications
of reality, which is only possible when there is inhibition by the
ego" (op.cit., pp325-327).
To bring Part 1 of the Project to a close,
Freud then comments briefly on how the basic constructs can be applied to
explain complex psychological phenomena such as judgment, thinking,
and dreaming, as the following three snippets respectively illustrate
.....
"The perceptual complex [.....] can be dissected into a component portion, neuron a,
which on the whole remains the same, and a second component portion, neuron b,
which for the most part varies. Language will later apply the term judgment
to this dissection [.....]; it will call neuron a the thing and
neuron b its activity or attribute - in short, its
predicate. Thus judging is a Ψ process which is only made
possible by inhibition by the ego and which is evoked by the dissimilarity
between the wishful cathexis of a memory and a perceptual cathexis which
is similar to it" (op.cit., p328).
"The process of thought consists in the
cathexis of Ψ neurons, accompanied by a change, brought about by
side-cathexis from the ego" (op.cit.,
p334).
"It is an important fact that Ψ
primary processes, such as have been biologically suppressed in the
course of Ψ development, are daily
presented to us during sleep [..... one precondition
of which] is a lowering of the [endogenous] load in the Ψ nucleus, which makes the secondary function superfluous.
In sleep an individual is in the ideal state of inertia, rid of his store of Qή. In adults this
store is collected in the 'ego'; we may assume that it is the unloading
of the ego which determines and characterises sleep. And here, as is immediately
clear, we have the precondition of psychical primary processes" (op.cit., p336).
In Part 2 of the Project, Freud turns to the
problems of psychopathology, specifically those associated with hysteria. On
the phenomenon of "hysterical compulsion" he notes as follows .....
"An idea will, for instance, emerge in
consciousness with particular frequency without the passage [of events]
justifying it; or the arousing of this idea will be accompanied by psychical
consequences that are unintelligible. The emergence of the excessively intense
idea brings with it consequences which, on the one hand, cannot be suppressed and,
on the other hand, cannot be understood - release of affect, motor
innervations, impediments. The subject is by no means unaware of the striking
character of the situation. Excessively intense ideas also occur normally. They
lend the ego its individuality. We are not surprised at them if we know their
genetic development (upbringing, experiences) and their motives. We are
accustomed to regarding such excessively intense ideas as the product of
strong and justifiable motives. Hysterical excessively intense ideas
strike us, on the contrary, by their oddity; they are ideas which in other
people have no consequences and of whose importance we can make nothing. They appear to us as intruders and usurpers,
and accordingly as ridiculous" (op.cit., pp347-348; bold emphasis added).
And as to the essentially hysterical feature of
"hysterical repression", he adds .....
"As we know, the outcome of hysterical
repression differs very widely from that of normal defense, of which we
have precise knowledge. It is quite generally the case that we avoid thinking
of what arouses only unpleasure, and we do this by directing our thoughts to
something else. If, however, we accordingly manage to bring it about that the
incompatible [idea] B seldom emerges in the consciousness, because we have so far
as possible kept it isolated, yet we never succeed in forgetting B
in such a way that we could not be reminded of it by fresh perception. Now an
arousal of this kind cannot be precluded in hysteria either; the difference
consists only in the fact that then, instead of B, A always becomes
conscious - that is, is cathected" (op.cit.,
pp351-352).
Freud then dwells on the motivated irrationality of
the hysteric's thought processes. He begins by presenting case, Emma [q.v.], and by then
invoking the Aristotelian notion of the proton pseudos,
the principle that "a false statement is the result of a preceding
falsity" (op.cit.,
p352; editorial footnote). He sees the proton
pseudos at work in Emma's case in the way her present behaviour was
inappropriate because the prior affect had itself been inappropriate, thus .....
"The position can only be pictured as follows.
Originally, a perceptual cathexis, as inheritor of an experience of pain,
released unpleasure; it [the cathexis] was intensified by the Qή released, and the
proceeded towards discharge along pathways of passage that were in part
pre-facilitated. [.....] Nevertheless, the stronger the release of unpleasure
[the prior affect referred to above - Ed.], the harder was the task of the ego, which,
with its side-cathexes, can after all only [achieve so much]. Furthermore, the
greater the quantity that is endeavouring to effect a passage, the harder for
the ego is the activity of thought [the present behaviour referred to above
- Ed.], which, as everything goes to show, consists in an experimental
displacing of small Qήs. 'Reflecting' is a time-consuming activity
of the ego's, which cannot occur when there are strong Qήs in the level of
affect" (op.cit., p358).
This,
in turn, has implications for the entire organisation of the ego [what many
refer to nowadays as its "functional architecture"],
thus .....
"That
is why when there is affect there is over-hastiness, and a choice of pathways similar to the
primary process. Thus it is the ego's
business not to permit any release of affect, because this at the same time
permits a primary process. Its best
instrument for this purpose is the mechanism of attention"
(ibid., p358; bold emphasis added).
Freud immediately returns to the topic of attention as
he enters Part 3 of the Project, which he devotes to the workings of the
mind during normal cognition. He reviews a number of areas of cognition,
including attention, memory, phenomenal consciousness, understanding, and
reasoning, and as far as attention is concerned he observes as follows .....
"If I have on the one hand the ego and on the
other hand perceptions - that is, cathexes in Ψ coming from Φ
(from the external world) - then I require a mechanism which causes the ego to
follow the perceptions and to influence them. I find it [such a mechanism] in
the fact that, according to my presuppositions, a perception invariably excites
ω and thus gives rise to indications of quality. To put it
more accurately, it excites consciousness (consciousness of a quality) in ω,
and the discharge of the ω excitation will, [like]
every discharge, furnish information to Ψ, which is in fact the
indication of quality. [.....] This would seem to be the mechanism of psychical
attention. [.....] The outcome of psychical
attention is the cathexis of the same neurons which are bearers of the
perceptual cathexis.[.....] Attention thus
consists in establishing the psychical state of expectation even for those
perceptions which do not coincide in part with wishful cathexes. [..... I]t is only a question of guiding the ego as
to which expectant cathexis it is to
establish and this purpose is served by the indications of quality" (op.cit., pp360-361; bold emphasis
added).
As for the processes of thinking, Freud recognises a
major interplay between what we would nowadays call the lexical and the
semantic aspects of language, thus .....
"[Speech association] consists in the linking of Ψ
neurons with neurons which serve sound-presentations and themselves have the
closest association with motor speech-images. These associations have an
advantage of two characteristics over the others: they are limited (few in
number) and exclusive. In any case, from the sound-image the excitation reaches
the word-image and from it reaches discharge. [.....] If now the ego
precathects these word-images as it earlier did the images of ω
discharge, then it will have created for itself the mechanism which directs the
Ψ cathexis to the memories
emerging during the passage of Qή . This is
conscious, observing thought" (op.cit., p365;
bold emphasis added).
ASIDE: In On Aphasia (Freud, 1891), Freud had already
written a full monograph on the organisation of language processing in the
brain. Readers unfamiliar with the terms "sound-presentation" and
"motor speech-image" may find value in the introductory companion
resource Freud (1891).
It is important to note that the mechanisms described - albeit rather datedly -
in the first three sentences above are now subsumed into the modularity proposed by most modern psycholinguistic models, not least
those, like Ellis
(1982), which have been based on the work of Morton (e.g., 1979)
and Marshall
and Newcombe (1973).
During his discussion of the mechanisms of speech
association Freud detected a problem at the point where a particular thought
could either be routed through to become speech or else withheld as thought. To
get around this problem, he presumed that the neural excitations would need to
be considerably amplified if actual muscle movements were required. This
raised, in turn, the requirement that the amplified excitation should not just
trickle away, and to get round this subsidiary problem he invoked the still-popular
term "binding". Here is how he explained it .....
"It is probable that in the process of thought
the displacement-quantities too are not large. In the first place, the
expenditure of large Qή is a loss for the ego which has to be
restricted as far as possible [.....]. In the second place, a large Qή would pass along
several associative pathways simultaneously and leave no time for
thought-cathexis [.....]. No doubt, therefore, the current of
Qή
during the thought-process must be small. Nevertheless, on our hypothesis,
perception and memory during thought must be hypercathected more strongly than
during simple perception. [.....] Here we have two apparently opposing
requirements: strong cathexis and weak displacement. If we want to reconcile
the two, we arrive at the hypothesis of what is, as it were, a bound state in the neuron, which, though there is a high cathexis, permits
only a small current" (op.cit.,
p368; bold emphasis added).
Finally, Freud turns to the generic problem of error, devoting
his closing five pages to the topic which six years later, with the publication
of Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud, 1901), would resurface in
the form of the famous "Freudian slip", or "parapraxis".
Here is his initial review of the problem [we have colour-highlighted the core
problem] .....
"The further question now arises of how error can occur in the course of
thought. What is error? The process of thought must now be considered still
more closely. [..... For example, i]t is an obvious
advantage if the arranging of thought [.....] need not wait to occur till the
state of expectation but can have occurred already. [.....] If the thought-process lasts too long, its
product will have become useless in the meantime. For that reason we 'think ahead'. The
beginning of the thought-processes which have ramified [from practical thought]
is the forming of judgments. The ego arrived at this through a discovery in
its organisation - [.....] that perceptual cathexes coincide in part with information from
one's own body" (op. cit.,
pp383-384; bold emphasis added).
ASIDE: The basic notion here is that one part of a modular
brain can be thinking while another part is doing what has already been thought
about. This property is now presumed in all modern models of the motor
hierarchy, either for behaviour in general [see, for example, Norman (1990)] or
for speech behaviour in particular [see, for example, Garrett (1990)]. It
is also - perhaps significantly - one of the fundamental design principles of
modern electronic computers [compare pipelining and buffering].
..... and here is his
analysis of the types of error which may arise in consequence .....
"As a consequence, the perceptual complexes are
divided into a constant, non-understood, part - the thing - and a
changing, understandable, one - the attribute or movement of the thing. [.....]
Error can already make its way in during the creating of a judgment. For the
thing-complex and movement-complex are never quite identical, and among their
divergent components there may be some the neglect of which disturbs the
outcome in reality. [.....] These are mistakes
in judgment or faults in the premises. Another ground for error may lie in
the fact that the perceptions of reality have not been completely perceived
because they were not within range of the senses. These are errors of ignorance, which no human being
can avoid. Where this determinant does not apply, the psychical precathexis may
be defective [.....] and inaccurate perceptions and incomplete passages of
thought may result. These are errors due to insufficient attention"
(op.cit.,
pp383-384).
Finally, Freud turns to the processes by which the
system monitors its own successful execution of all which has gone before,
observing as follows .....
"We have still to consider one kind of
thought: critical or examining thought. This is occasioned when, in spite of
all the rules having been observed, the process of expectation, followed by the
specific action, leads to unpleasure instead of to satisfaction. Critical
thought seeks [.....] to repeat the whole passage of Qή in order to
detect some fault in thought or some psychological deficit [note this term - Ed.]. [It] is cognitive thought with a given
object - namely, a series of thoughts.
[.....] Action, again, we can only picture as the full cathexis of those
motor-images which have been brought into prominence during the
thought-process, in addition, perhaps, to those which (if there was a state of
expectation) formed part of the volitional component of the specific action.
Here the bound state is renounced and the cathexes of attention are withdrawn"
(op.cit., pp385-386; bold emphasis added).
WHERE TO
NEXT: For a
concise summary of the Project's
basic concepts and propositions, see the quotation from Pribram (1969) in Freud's Project,
Later Commentaries on. For an alternative main narrative, see Fancher
(1976/2007
online). For more on Freud's later conceptualisation of consciousness and
"the Unconscious", see unconscious,
Freudian. For equivalent modern models, begin with cell assembly, follow the onward links to connectionism, and then see both Edelman and Tononi's
(2000) theory of neuronal group
selection and Frith [C.],
Rees, and Friston's (1998) forward model. For more on speech association as speech, see the basics of
Dell's (1986) spreading
activation theory of lexical access
in Section 3.1 of the companion resource on "Speech
Errors". For more on speech association as association, see semantic networks in general and free
association in particular. For more
on binding, see binding
problem. There are further short
extracts from the Project in the
entries for identification (0) and inner speech.
Freud's
Project, Later Commentaries on: [See firstly Freud's
Project.] The 1895 Project was one of the last of Freud's
writings to be translated into English. Strachey produced a version in 1954,
choosing the English title as he did so, and then revised the text for the
popular marketplace in 1966, nearly 30 years after Freud's death. By then, of
course, the practice of drawing neural circuit diagrams had become rather
commonplace - not only was Hebb's (1949) cell
assembly already nearly 20 years old, but Connectionism was beginning to develop working "Perceptrons" [rudimentary neural networks] built out of assemblies of artificial neurons. The
Project therefore generated a lot of
analysis and comment, led by the respected neuropsychologist Karl H. Pribram. Pribram began this in journal
articles (Pribram, 1962, 1969), and followed it up with a full monograph
written as a cross-disciplinary collaboration with the veteran psychoanalyst Merton M.
Gill (Pribram and Gill, 1976). These later works provide useful perspective
comment. For example, Pribram summarises the final architecture as follows .....
"There is a direct projection system. This is
connected with exteroceptors which act as 'sieves that let through' certain
quantities of excitation with specific frequency characteristics. Because of
repeated bombardment, the synapses between projection system neurons have a low
resistance. This system acts essentially as a conduction pathway for the
transmission of neural impulses. Both the quantity and the patterns of
frequency of excitation are transmitted. The connections of the projection
system are both with a nuclear system and with a cortical system. The nuclear
system is directly influenced as well by the internal environment of the
organism through centrally located neuroreceptors. [.....] Quantity of
excitation in the projection system can be recorded in the form of neural
impulses - in the nuclear system this same neural activity becomes cathected,
i.e. bound, nontransmitted excitation, and is recordable as a graded potential
charge" (Pribram, 1969, p406).
Pribram and Gill did more
than just present the technicalities of Freud's scheme, for they saw the Project as something far more
significant for psychoanalytic theory, that is to say, as a body of theory
capable of bringing it nothing less than scientific respectability. For one
thing, the Project [and we would ourselves have preferred it had
Strachey translated the Entwurf of Freud's German manuscript as
"design" (a perfectly legitimate alternative German usage)] was part
of science's continuing search for "a cognitive and control theory which
could become clinically relevant" (p9), and for another, it elevated
psychoanalysis to the status of empirical science by virtue of its ability to
generate empirically testable "neurobiological hypotheses". Pribram
also led the contributors at the 1995 Centennial celebrations of the Project's
publication, subsequently compiled as Bilder and Lefever (1998).
ENDNOTE: But what of Freud himself?
It is routinely reported (after Strachey, op. cit., p290n) that Freud
was strangely reluctant in his later academic life to invoke the Project;
perhaps no longer happy that it held together theoretically. Perhaps he no
longer felt confident at being able to reconcile the microstructures of
cathected Qή with the macrostructures
(ego, etc.) which they eventually gave rise to. It is a shame that in his final years he could
not have seen the computer pioneers Konrad Zuse (in Germany) or George Stibitz
(in America) busily at work on their prototype automatic computing systems [for
more on which, see Smith (2004 online;
Section 3)], or lived long enough to read about McCullough and Pitts' (various
from 1943) "neurodes" [see Smith (2004 online, Section
1)]. He would have been instantly at home with what he would have seen.
Friston, Karl J.: [British neuroscientist] [Homepage] Friston is noteworthy in
the context of the present glossary for inspiring state-of-the-art research
into functional
connectivity.
Frith, Christopher, D.: [British neuropsychologist.] [Academic
homepage] Christopher Frith is noteworthy within the context of the present
glossary for his work on cognitive
deficit - see particularly the entry for theory of mind theory of schizophrenia.
Frith, Uta:
[British neuropsychologist.] [Academic
homepage] Uta Frith is noteworthy within the context of the present
glossary for her work on cognitive
deficit - see particularly the entry for theory of mind theory of autism.
Fromm, Erich: [German
(later American) psychoanalytic theorist (1900-1980).] [Click for external biography] See free
will, Fromm's theory of. Fromm was a self-proclaimed "mystic",
and a student of how humans are actually very afraid of "freedom",
often preferring to run away from it, or otherwise corrupt it.
Frontal Amnesia: See frontal
lobe syndrome.
Frontal
Orienting to Time, Person, and
Place: Price Estimation Tasks; Cognitive Estimates Test; Mannikin
Test
Cognitive Flexibility
(Avoidance of Perseveration): Self-Ordered Pointing Task;
Weigl Sorting Task;
Controlling Impulsivity: Stroop Task
Forward Planning: Multiple
Errands Test; Porteus Maze; Six Elements Test; Tower of
Hanoi; Tower of London
Frontal Lobe
Syndrome: Neurologists and neuropsychologists
use this term to describe a typical package of deficits and dysfunctions
associated with acquired or developmental malfunction of the frontal lobe [for
a full introduction, see Sections 1 and 2 of our e-resource "From
Frontal Lobe Syndrome to Dysexecutive Syndrome"]. Alternatively, it is "the intriguing but
puzzling pattern of deficits sometimes associated with damage to the frontal
lobes" (Baddeley, 1986, p236). One of the earliest accounts of the effects
of a frontal lobe lesion is Bigelow's (1850) [timeline] account
of the brain-injured American railway labourer Phineas Gage. This was followed
by investigations of deliberately inflicted frontal lesions in animals by the
likes of Ferrier (1886) [timeline] and
Bianchi (1895, 1922). Bianchi (1922) summarises the animal studies as showing
five areas of frontal deficit, namely (a) loss of "perceptive power",
leading to defective attention and object recognition, (b) reduction in memory,
(c) reduction in "associative power", leading to lack of coordination
of the individual steps leading towards a given goal, and thus to severe
difficulty solving anything but the most simple problems, (d) altered emotional
attachments, leading to serious changes in "sociality", and (e)
disruption of focal consciousness and purposive behaviour, leading to apathy and/or
distractibility. Similarly, Denny-Brown (1951) surveyed frontal lobe problems
in humans, and found much the same pattern of deficit, concluding, therefore,
that memory defects were common enough following frontal damage, but were far
from being the primary characteristic. Frontal amnesias, in other words, are
not as immediately obvious as those arising from temporal lobe damage. Nor do
many memory tests readily detect frontal lobe damage, for which reason clinical
neuropsychologists have devised special frontal lobe tasks, or frontal
batteries, to be selectively sensitive to frontal lobe damage.
Frustration-Aggression
Hypothesis: See aggression, frustration and.
Function: In everyday English, "function" is both a
noun and a verb. As a noun, "a function" is "the special kind of
activity proper to any thing; the mode of action by which it fulfils its
purpose" (O.E.D.). As a verb, "to function" is "to fulfil a
function; to perform one's duty or part; to operate; to act" (O.E.D.). The
word has acquired a similar range of usages in mental philosophy. We see it,
for example, as that which a neuroanatomical structure is for in the intact and integrated central nervous system, and the localisation of function debate has a
particularly long history. However, it was not until the arrival of Darwin's
(1859) "Origin of Species" that scientists began to appreciate the
importance of the "survival value" of this or that anatomical
structure in having determined (in geological time) what the organism as
a whole currently looks like and how it currently works. Organisms exist to
survive, and it is down to their subsystems to help them do so. The function of
any given structure had to fit in with the function of the subsystem as a
whole, and "pull its weight". Nevertheless, an academic schism soon
opened up. Those who thought that mechanism was paramount were called "Structuralists", while those who
thought that mechanism's function was paramount were called "Functionalists". Husserl, for
example, came down on strongly in favour of function, as may be seen from the following .....
"[The] greatest
problems of all are the functional problems [.....]. They concern the way in
which, for instance, [noeses] so bring into being the consciousness of
something, that in and through it the objective unity of the field of objects (Gegenständlichkeit) may permit of being
consistently 'declared', 'shown forth', and 'rationally' determined. 'Function'
in this sense [.....] is something wholly unique, grounded in the pure essence
of the noeses. Consciousness is just consciousness 'of' something; it is its
essential nature to conceal 'meaning' within itself [.....]. The viewpoint of
Function is the central viewpoint of phenomenology [.....]. Instead of the
single experiences being analysed and compared, described and classified, all
treatment of detail is governed by the 'teleological' view of its function in
making 'synthetic unity' possible" (Ideas,
pp230-231).
Functional Architecture: [See firstly function.]
The functional "architecture" of a
system (as opposed to its physical architecture) is the purpose, arrangement,
and organisation of its inner processes as opposed to their structure. It is
the sense behind any one component part, rather than its physical dimensions. For a little on the
functional architecture of the ego, see Freud's Project. [See now and compare functional
decomposition, functionality, functional primitive, etc.]
Functional Connectivity: [See firstly interface and parallel
distributed processing.] This is Friston's (1994) term for the extent to which the modules of a parallel
distributed brain are successfully able to talk to each other. It is a thus a
measure of the mental left hand knowing what the mental right hand is up to; of
the mental whole to be greater than the sum of its neural parts. It is
"the mechanism for the coordination of activity between different neural
assemblies in order to achieve a complex cognitive task or perceptual
process" (Fingelkurts, Fingelkurts, and Kahkonen, 2005
online abstract). What we have with functional connectivity, therefore, is a new name
for a very important old notion, one which goes back at least to Descartes and his
"tubules". What is uncontrovertibly new, of course, is the scanning
technology available to today's neuroscientists, and the power this gives them
of displaying the co-activity of brain areas graphically. As to the neural
substrate of this connectivity, there are only three physical transmission
options available, and it is likely that all three combine in some
as-yet-undetermined way. Historically speaking, the first connection system to
be discovered was the brain's "white matter", that is to say, the
bundles of axons which interlink the main areas of cerebral cortex [to see
cross-sectional sketches of these, click here].
More recently, there has been a lot of interest in the brain's "lateral
connectivity" system, that is to say, the ultrafine system of dendrites
running horizontally through the surface layers of the cerebral cortex [to see
cross-sectional sketches of these follow the links in the lateral
connectivity entry]. The third method of transmission - usually ignored by theorists -
is (macroscopic) electrostatic induction. Working together in ways not yet
fully understood, these substrates allow an activated brain area to recruit the
areas it needs to have working with it on the task at hand, and to suppress
those which it does not need. This helps
to create what Cherry (1957, p16) termed the "cooperative link".
[See now functional connectivity analysis. For a reader-friendly introduction to the
application of functional connectivity neuroimaging in the area of speech and
language, we recommend the website of the
Functional Connectivity Analysis: [See firstly functional
connectivity.]
This is the formal term for the systematic investigation of the brain's
functional connectivity when performing a given task, with a view to
identifying the comparative health of the inter-modular connections needing to
be activated during that performance. [For a list of specific techniques and an
overview of typical research, see the programme for the 2002 Düsseldorf
conference on the subject - take me there.]
Functional
Connectivity and Dissociation: [See firstly functional connectivity and functional
connectivity analysis.] When two mental modules fail to interface normally, they may legitimately
be described as "dissociated", and, as set out in the entry for dissociation
(1/2/3), there is a significant
history to this term. Psychoanalysts, for example, have discussed dissociation
as a defense mechanism, psychiatrists have used the word to describe the sort
of memory/personality dis-integration seen in certain mental health and
learning disability conditions, and neurologists and neuropsychologists have
used it to describe the selective effect of localised brain lesions on the
overall integrity of cognition. The recent upsurge in functional connectivity
research therefore did not go unnoticed by those who had long been trying to
understand "dissociative phenomena". The
"The most striking
findings arose from the connectivity analyses originating from activation in
the cognitive division of the right anterior cingulate gyrus (Brodmann's area
32) []. The affective division of [this] gyrus has been shown to be involved
during the recall of traumatic material in PTSD [..... and to play] a role in
the conscious experience of emotion and in linking autonomic changes to
emotional stimuli []. PSTD subjects did not show similar patterns of
alterations in brain activation during recall of a neutral autobiographical
memory. [.....] All PTSD patients experienced the traumatic memories in the
form of flashbacks, whereas the comparison subjects recalled the traumatic
events as ordinary autobiographical memories. Re-experiencing of traumatic
events in the form of flashbacks is very different from the recall of events as
ordinary autobiographical memories []. Flashbacks often occur spontaneously and
are triggered by internal or external events, and their occurrence usually
cannot be controlled. Flashbacks also involve a subjective distortion in time.
They are much more vivid in nature and are often experienced as though the
event were happening again in the present. [..... T]he
comparison subjects had greater levels of brain activation in the left superior
frontal gyrus (Brodmann's area 9), left anterior cingulate gyrus (Brodmann's
area 32), left striatum (caudate), left parietal lobe (Brodmann's areas 40 and
43), and left insula (Brodmann's area 13). [.....] The
functional connectivity analyses for PTSD patients revealed a much more
nonverbal pattern of memory retrieval" (pp39-40).
[To see the press release
announcing this research, click
here.]
Functional Decomposition: This is one of the two basic domains of modern
systems analysis [the other being entity-relationship modelling]. The
term refers to the recursive analysis of the sub-processes within a process,
beginning ideally at the very top, and continuing down the hierarchy of
processes until one of two things happens - either (a) you reach the level at
which you have understood enough, or (b) you reach a level beyond which no
further decomposition is possible (the processes at this level being known as functional
primitives). The decomposition begins with a context diagram and continues down the hierarchy of processes until
one of two things happens - either (a) you reach the level at which you have
seen enough, or (b) you reach a level beyond which no further decomposition is
possible (the processes at this level being known as "functional
primitives"). The beauty of this approach lies in the fact that it
works for all systems, functions, and processes, including biological and
psychological ones [for more on the pivotally important role of functional
decomposition in the design of successful commercial computer systems, see
Yourdon and Constantine (1979), De Marco (1979), Martin and McClure (1985), or
Longworth (1989)]. It is lack of progress with the functional decomposition of
cognition in the broad which is to blame for the explanatory gap in the mind-brain
debate. [For practical guidance with this technique, see our e-tutorial on
"How to Draw Cognitive Diagrams" (Section 3).]
Functional
Primitive: See functional decomposition.
Functionalism: Functionalism
is one of the poles on the Structuralism-Functionalism
dimension, one of the five bipolar dimensions by which Flugel and West (1964)
categorise late 19th century schools of psychology. It was the name
given to the philosophical doctrine that the mind's mental operations exist
thanks to their practical value in satisfying the needs of a vulnerable
organism in a hostile environment. The term became popular around the turn of
the 19th/20th centuries from the writings of John Dewey and James Angell
at the
Functionality: The overall benefit accruing from, or provided by, a system.
That which a system does or exists to provide,
and therefore the sum total of products or services specified in that system's Requirements
Specification, if one exists.
See the
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