This article presents an interview method which enables us to bring a person, who may not even have been trained, to become aware of his or her subjective experience, and describe it with great precision. It is focused on the difficulties of becoming aware of one’s subjective experience and describing it, and on the processes used by this interview technique to overcome each of these difficulties. The article ends with a discussion of the criteria governing the validity of the descriptions (...) obtained, and then with a brief review of the functions of these descriptions. (shrink)

This article examines the role of time as a methodological tool and pathological focus of clinical psychiatry and psychology in the first half of the 20th century. Contextualizing ‘psychopathologies of time’ developed by practitioners in Europe and North America with reference to the temporal theories implicit in Freudian psychoanalysis and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of durée, it illuminates how depression, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders such as obsessive-compulsive behaviours and aphasia were understood to be symptomatic of an altered or disturbed ‘time-sense’. (...) Drawing upon a model of temporal synthesis whereby in healthy individuals, a subjective temporal sense ( Ichzeit, durée, or personal lifetime) was perceived and understood in relation to objective time frameworks ( Weltzeit, clock-time, or quantitative time models like historical chronology), clinicians argued that mentally ill patients were unable to synthesize Ichzeit and Weltzeit, using variations in this disturbance to define specific pathological conditions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTA longstanding tradition in philosophy distinguishes between knowthatand know-how. This traditional “anti-intellectualist” view is soentrenched in folk psychology that it is often invoked in supportof an allegedly equivalent distinction between explicit and implicitmemory, derived from the so-called “standard model of memory.”In the last two decades, the received philosophical view has beenchallenged by an “intellectualist” view of know-how. Surprisingly, defenders of the anti-intellectualist view have turned to the cognitivescience of memory, and to the standard model in particular, todefend their view. Here, (...) I argue that this strategy is a mistake. As it turns out, upon closer scrutiny, the evidence from cognitivepsychology and neuroscience of memory does not support theanti-intellectualist approach, mainly because the standard modelof memory is likely wrong. However, this need not be interpretedas good news for the intellectualist, for it is not clear that theempirical evidence necessarily supp... (shrink)

At the focal point of contemporary biopolitical knowledge and power is human life in its contingent, evolutionary and emergent properties: the living as adaptive and affective beings, characterized in particular by their capacity to experience stress and fear that works together with vital survival mechanisms. This article addresses new techniques of psychiatric power and therapeutic epistemologies that have emerged in present-day military-scientific as well as media technological assemblages to define and capture the human in its psychobiological states of emergency. Specifically, (...) the focus of this article is on one special kind of screen medium, called Virtual Iraq, a virtual reality device designed to treat post-traumatic stress disorder among war veterans. The article analyses Virtual Iraq as an example of new forms and strategies for the management of affectivity and memory that have been developed in conjunction with contemporary neuroscientific discourses on the evolutionary origins of emotional life and its neurobiological functionality among humans qua species. Furthermore, it discusses Virtual Iraq as an example of the biopolitical work of contemporary screen media in which the reality of images starts to concern the organism’s internal functioning instead of being anthropological or communicative, tapping into the brain’s capacity of self-organization as well as contributing to the production and maintenance of psychological immunity. (shrink)

Within Piaget there is an implicit theory of the development of explicit memory. It rests in the dynamical trajectory underlying the development of causality, object, space and time – a complex (COST) supporting a symbolic relationship integral to the explicit. Cassirer noted the same dependency in the phenomena of aphasias, insisting that a symbolic function is being undermined in these deficits. This is particularly critical given the reassessment of Piaget’s stages as the natural bifurcations of a self-organizing dynamic system. The (...) elements of a theoretical framework required to support explicit memory are developed, to include, (1) the complex developmental trajectory supporting the emergence of the explicit in Piaget, (2) the concrete dynamical system and the concept of a non-differentiable time contained in Bergson’s theory required to support a conscious, as opposed to an implicit remembrance, (3) the relation to current theories of amnesia, difficulties posed by certain retrograde amnesic phenomena, the role of the hippocampus and limitations of connectionist models, (4) the fact that nowhere in this overall framework does the loss of explicit memory imply or require the destruction of experience “stored in the brain.”. (shrink)

This article reconstructs French readings and debates of German approaches to Vlkerpsychologie was a symptomatic approach during a transformative period in German, and indeed European, intellectual history: based on the idea of progressand on the belief in the primordial importance of the Volk, it represented the mindset of in an almost pure form. The relevance and importance of Vlkerpsychologie was not restricted to German academics: it was in France where central elements of VThlestin Bougle, Emile Durkheim, and Marcel Mausssocial sciencelkerpsychologie (...) was not a German oddity, but an integral part of the debates that led to the establishing of the modern social sciences, as its French reception shows. (shrink)

L’histoire officielle de la discipline veut que la psychologie sociale française, née et morte aussitôt à la fin du XIXe siècle, ait connu une longue éclipse pour renaître seulement dans les années 1950 sous influence américaine. Cette disparition dans la première moitié du XXe siècle serait due à la domination de la sociologie durkheimienne qui passe pour être hostile à la psychologie. Cet article remet en cause cette vision traditionnelle. Il montre que la sociologie durkheimienne s’est elle-même définie comme une (...) psychologie collective et qu’elle a su, à partir des années 1910 environ, ouvrir un véritable dialogue avec les psychologues au sein de l’université. L’idée durkheimienne que les catégories les plus fondamentales de la pensée sont déjà des constructions sociales provoqua chez les psychologues une véritable petite révolution intellectuelle. Elle les obligea en effet à sortir du champ étroit de la psychophysiologie qu’avaient promu depuis 1870 les fondateurs tels Taine et Ribot, en réaction contre le spiritualisme. Cette nouvelle psychologie sociale a influencé la plupart des grands psychologues de l’époque (Blondel, Dumas, Janet, Meyerson, Wallon), mais le temps et les hommes lui ont manqué pour s’institutionnaliser. De fait, elle disparaît avec la mort de ses principaux artisans (Blondel et Halbwachs) et l’oubli parfois volontaire pratiqué par leurs successeurs. (shrink)

The mind very often sets itself on work in search of some hidden idea, and turns as it were the eye of the soul upon it; though sometimes too they start up in our minds of their own accord, and offer themselves to the understanding; and very often are roused and tumbled out of their dark cells into open daylight, by turbulent and tempestuous passions; our affections bringing ideas to our memory, which had otherwise lain quiet and unregarded. (Locke, Essay (...) concerning Human Understanding, II.x.7). (shrink)

The interdisciplinary field of emotion studies disregarded historical perspectives on translation and left out a substantial body of scientific research on feelings and emotions that was not published in English. Yet these texts were foundational in forging the scientific concept of emotion in experimental psychology in the 19th century. The current approach to emotion science overlooks that translation issues occurred between three languages, German, French, and English, as physiological psychologists at the time were reading each other in these languages all (...) the while writing about the same topics in their respective language. Historical perspectives are important to clarify the ambiguities of emotion terms and include non-Anglophone frameworks into current transdisciplinary debates. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the meaning that the term “experimental” acquires within spiritualism during the second half of the nineteenth century. It builds upon Paul Janet’s notions of “experience” and “experimentation” in psychology, by stressing the role of physiology and pathology in his reflection. Regardless of the role the concept of “experimentalism” took on in Victor Cousin’s psychology, which arguably indicated more an “internal affection” than actual experimentation, in Janet’s spiritualism the term regains its original meaning of empirical verification. Janet (...) highlights the importance of madness to the development of a new psychological paradigm that could reconcile philosophy and medicine, reason and experience, by taking up pathology as a form of natural and indirect experimentation. (shrink)

Butler’s idea of evolution was developed over the publication of four books, several articles and essays between 1863 and 1890. These publications, although never achieving the success expected by Butler, proposed a psychological elaboration of evolution, called ‘unconscious memory’. This was strongly in contrast with the materialistic approach suggested by Darwin’s natural selection. Starting with a historical introduction, this paper aspires to ascertain the logic, meaning and significance of Butler’s idea of ‘unconscious memory’ in the post-Darwinian physiological and psychological Pan-European (...) discussion. Particular attention is devoted to demonstrating that Butler was not only a populariser of science but also an active protagonist in the late Victorian psychological debate. (shrink)