In psychology, emotional detachment, also known as emotional blunting, is a condition or state in which a person lacks emotional connectivity to others, whether due to an unwanted circumstance or as a positive means to cope with anxiety.
Such a coping strategy, also known as emotion-focused coping, is used when avoiding certain situations that might trigger anxiety. It refers to the evasion of emotional connections. Emotional detachment may be a temporary reaction to a stressful situation, or a chronic condition such as depersonalisation–derealisation disorder. It may also be caused by certain antidepressants. Emotional blunting, also known as reduced affect display, is one of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia.
Signs and Symptoms
Emotional detachment may not be as outwardly obvious as other psychiatric symptoms. Patients diagnosed with emotional detachment have reduced ability to express emotion, to empathize with others or to form powerful emotional connections. Patients are also at an increased risk for many anxiety and stress disorders. This can lead to difficulties in creating and maintaining personal relationships. The person may move elsewhere in their mind and appear preoccupied or “not entirely present”, or they may seem fully present but exhibit purely intellectual behaviour when emotional behaviour would be appropriate. They may have a hard time being a loving family member, or they may avoid activities, places, and people associated with past traumas. Their dissociation can lead to lack of attention and, hence, to memory problems and in extreme cases, amnesia. In some cases, they present an extreme difficulty in giving or receiving empathy which can be related to the spectrum of narcissistic personality disorder. Additionally, emotional blunting is negatively correlated with remission quality. The negative symptoms are far less likely to disappear when a patient is experiencing emotional blunting.
In a study of children ages 4–12, traits of aggression and antisocial behaviours were found to be correlated with emotional detachment. Researchers determined that these could be early signs of emotional detachment, suggesting parents and clinicians to evaluate children with these traits for a higher behavioural problem in order to avoid bigger problems (such as emotional detachment) in the future.
A correlation was found of higher emotional blunting among patients treated with depression who scored higher on the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) and were male (though the frequency difference was slight).
Emotional detachment in small amounts is normal. For example, being able to emotionally and psychologically detach from work when one is not in the workplace is a normal behaviour. Emotional detachment becomes an issue when it impairs a person’s ability to function on a day-to-day level.
Scales
While some depression severity scales provide insight to emotional blunting levels, many symptoms are not adequately covered. An attempt to resolve this issue is the Oxford Depression Questionnaire (ODQ), a scale specifically designed for full assessment of emotional blunting symptoms. The ODQ is designed specifically for patients with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) in order to assess individual levels of emotional blunting.
Another scale, known as the Oxford Questionnaire on the Emotional Side-Effects of Antidepressants (OQESA), was developed using qualitative methods.
Causes
Emotional detachment and/or emotional blunting have multiple causes, as the cause can vary from person to person. Emotional detachment or emotional blunting often arises due to adverse childhood experiences, for example physical, sexual or emotional abuse. Emotional detachment is a maladaptive coping mechanism for trauma, especially in young children who have not developed coping mechanisms. Emotional detachments can also be due to psychological trauma in adulthood, like abuse, or traumatic experiences like war, automobile accidents etc.
Emotional blunting is often caused by antidepressants, in particular selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) used in MDD and often as an add-on treatment in other psychiatric disorders. Individuals with MDD usually experience emotional blunting as well. Emotional blunting is a symptom of MDD, as depression is negatively correlated with emotional (both positive and negative) experiences.
Schizophrenia often occurs with negative symptoms, extrapyramidal signs (EPS), and depression. The latter overlaps with emotional blunting and is shown to be a core part of the present effects. Schizophrenia in general causes abnormalities in emotional understanding of individuals, all of which are clinically considered as an emotional blunting symptom. Individuals with schizophrenia show less emotional experiences, display less emotional expressions, and fail to recognize the emotional experiences and/or expressions of other individuals.
The changes in fronto-limbic activity in conjunction with depression succeeding a left hemisphere basal ganglia stroke (LBG stroke) may contribute to emotional blunting. LBG strokes are associated with depression and often caused by disorders of the basal ganglia (BG). Such disorders alter the emotional perception and experiences of the patient.
In many cases people with eating disorders (ED) show signs of emotional detachment. This is due to the fact that many of the circumstances that often lead to an ED are the same as the circumstances that lead to emotional detachment. For example, people with ED often have experienced childhood abuse. Eating disorders on their own are a maladaptive coping mechanism and to cope with the effects of an eating disorder, people may turn to emotional detachment.
Bereavement or losing a loved one can also be causes of emotional detachment.
Unfortunately, the prevalence of emotional blunting is not fully known.
Behavioural Mechanism
Emotional detachment is a maladaptive coping mechanism, which allows a person to react calmly to highly emotional circumstances. Emotional detachment in this sense is a decision to avoid engaging emotional connections, rather than an inability or difficulty in doing so, typically for personal, social, or other reasons. In this sense it can allow people to maintain boundaries, and avoid undesired impact by or upon others, related to emotional demands. As such it is a deliberate mental attitude which avoids engaging the emotions of others.
This detachment does not necessarily mean avoiding empathy; rather, it allows the person to rationally choose whether or not to be overwhelmed or manipulated by such feelings. Examples where this is used in a positive sense might include emotional boundary management, where a person avoids emotional levels of engagement related to people who are in some way emotionally overly demanding, such as difficult co-workers or relatives, or is adopted to aid the person in helping others.
Emotional detachment can also be “emotional numbing”, “emotional blunting”, i.e. dissociation, depersonalisation or in its chronic form depersonalisation disorder. This type of emotional numbing or blunting is a disconnection from emotion, it is frequently used as a coping survival skill during traumatic childhood events such as abuse or severe neglect. After continually using this coping mechanism, it can become a response to daily stresses.
Emotional detachment may allow acts of extreme cruelty and abuse, supported by the decision to not connect empathically with the person concerned. Social ostracism, such as shunning and parental alienation, are other examples where decisions to shut out a person creates a psychological trauma for the shunned party.
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Common coding theory is a cognitive psychology theory describing how perceptual representations (e.g. of things we can see and hear) and motor representations (e.g. of hand actions) are linked. The theory claims that there is a shared representation (a common code) for both perception and action. More important, seeing an event activates the action associated with that event, and performing an action activates the associated perceptual event.
The idea of direct perception-action links originates in the work of the American psychologist William James and more recently, American neurophysiologist and Nobel prize winner Roger Sperry. Sperry argued that the perception–action cycle is the fundamental logic of the nervous system. Perception and action processes are functionally intertwined: perception is a means to action and action is a means to perception. Indeed, the vertebrate brain has evolved for governing motor activity with the basic function to transform sensory patterns into patterns of motor coordination.
Background
The classical approach to cognition is a ‘sandwich’ model which assumes three stages of information processing: perception, cognition and then action. In this model, perception and action do not interact directly, instead cognitive processing is needed to convert perceptual representations into action. For example, this might require creating arbitrary linkages (mapping between sensory and motor codes).
In contrast, the common coding account claims that perception and action are directly linked by a common computational code.
This theory, put forward by Wolfgang Prinz and his colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, claims parity between perception and action. Its core assumption is that actions are coded in terms of the perceivable effects (i.e. the distal perceptual events) they should generate. This theory also states that perception of an action should activate action representations to the degree that the perceived and the represented action are similar. Such a claim suggests that we represent observed, executed and imagined actions in a commensurate manner and makes specific predictions regarding the nature of action and perceptual representations. First, representations for observed and executed actions should rely on a shared neural substrate. Second, a common cognitive system predicts facilitation of action based on directly prior perception and vice versa. Third, such a system predicts interference effects when action and perception attempt to access shared representations simultaneously.
Evidence for Common Coding
From the year 2000 onwards, a growing number of results have been interpreted in favour of the common coding theory.
For instance, one functional MRI study demonstrated that the brain’s response to the 2/3 power law of motion (i.e. which dictates a strong coupling between movement curvature and velocity) is much stronger and more widespread than to other types of motion. Compliance with this law was reflected in the activation of a large network of brain areas subserving motor production, visual motion processing, and action observation functions. These results support the common coding and the notion of similar neural coding for motion perception and production.
One of the most direct evidence for common coding in the brain now stems from the fact that pattern classifiers that can differentiate based on brain activity whether someone has performed action A or B can also classify, above chance, whether that person heard the sound of action A or B, thereby demonstrating that action execution and perception are represented using a common code.
In the early 21st century, the common coding theory received increased interest from researchers in developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, robotics, and social psychology.
Commensurate Representation
Common coding posits, on top of separate coding, further domains of representation in which afferent and efferent information share the same format and dimensionality of representation. Common coding refers to ‘late’ afferent representations (referring to events in the environment) and ‘early’ efferent representations (referring to intended events). Such representations are commensurate since they both exhibit distal reference. They permit creating linkages between perception and action that do not rely on arbitrary mappings. Common coding conceives action planning in terms of operations that determine intended future events from given current events (matching between event codes and action codes). In particular perception and action may modulate each other by virtue of similarity. Unlike rule-based mapping of incommensurate codes which requires preceding acquisition of mapping rules, similarity-based matching of commensurate codes requires no such preceding rule acquisition.
Ideomotor Principle
In line with the ideomotor theory of William James (1890) and Hermann Lotze (1852), the common coding theory posits that actions are represented in terms of their perceptual consequences. Actions are represented like any other events, the sole distinctive feature being that they are (or can be) generated through bodily movements. Perceivable action consequences may vary on two major dimensions: resident vs. remote effects, and ‘cool’ versus ‘hot’ outcomes (i.e. reward values associated with action outcomes).
When individuals perform actions they learn what their movements lead to (Ideomotor learning). The ideomotor theory claims that these associations can also be used in the reverse order (cf. William James, 1890 II, p.526): When individuals perceive events of which they know (from previous learning) that they may result from certain movements, perception of these events may evoke the movements leading to them (Ideomotor control). The distinction between learning and control is equivalent to the distinction between forward and inverse computation in motor learning and control. Ideomotor learning supports prediction and anticipation of action outcomes, given current action. Ideomotor control supports selection and control of action, given intended outcomes.
Related Approaches
While most traditional approaches tend to stress the relative independence of perception and action, some theories have argued for closer links. Motor theories of speech and action perception have made a case for motor contributions to perception. Close non-representational connections between perception and action have also been claimed by ecological approaches. Today common coding theory is closely related to research and theory in two intersecting fields of study: Mirror neurons systems and embodied cognition. As concerns mirror systems, common coding seems to reflect the functional logic of mirror neurons and mechanisms in the brain. As concerns embodied cognition, common coding is compatible with the claim that meaning is embodied, i.e. grounded in perception and action. Common coding theory has further sparked refined theoretical frameworks that build on its notion of a shared representational format for action and perception. A recent example for these refinements is the Binding and retrieval in action control (BRAC) framework.
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Behavioural contagion is a form of social contagion involving the spread of behaviour through a group (Social contagion involves behaviour, emotions, or conditions spreading spontaneously through a group or network). It refers to the propensity for a person to copy a certain behaviour of others who are either in the vicinity, or whom they have been exposed to. The term was originally used by Gustave Le Bon in his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind to explain undesirable aspects of behaviour of people in crowds. In the digital age, behavioural contagion is also concerned with the spread of online behaviour and information. A variety of behavioural contagion mechanisms were incorporated in models of collective human behaviour.
Behavioural contagion has been attributed to a variety of different factors. Often it is distinguished from collective behaviour that arises from a direct attempt at social influence. A prominent theory involves the reduction of restraints, put forth by Fritz Redl in 1949 and analysed in depth by Ladd Wheeler in 1966. Social psychologists acknowledge a number of other factors, which influence the likelihood of behavioural contagion occurring, such as deindividuation (Festinger, Pepitone, & Newcomb, 1952) and the emergence of social norms (Turner, 1964). In 1980, Freedman et al. have focused on the effects of physical factors on contagion, in particular, density and number.
J.O. Ogunlade (1979, p. 205) describes behavioural contagion as a “spontaneous, unsolicited and uncritical imitation of another’s behavior” that occurs when certain variables are met:
a) the observer and the model share a similar situation or mood (this is one way behavioural contagion can be readily applied to mob psychology);
b) the model’s behaviour encourages the observer to review his condition and to change it;
c) the model’s behaviour would assist the observer to resolve a conflict by reducing restraints, if copied; and
d) the model is assumed to be a positive reference individual.
Types of Contagion
Social contagion can occur through threshold models that assume that an individual needs to be convinced by a fraction of their social contacts above a given threshold to adopt a novel behaviour. Therefore, the number of exposures will not increase chances of contagion unless the number of source exposures pass a certain threshold. The threshold value can divide contagion processes to two types:
1) Simple contagion; and
2) Complex contagion.
Simple Contagion
The individual needs only one person displaying the novel behaviour to copy. For instance, cars travel in groups on a two-lane highway since the car in each cluster travels at a slower speed than the car behind it. This relative speed spreads through other cars who slow down to match the speed of the car in front.
Complex Contagion
The individual needs to be in contact with two or more sources exhibiting the novel behaviour. This is when copying behaviours needs reinforcement or encouragement from multiple sources. Multiple sources, especially close friends, can make imitation legitimate, credible and worthwhile due to collective effort put in. Examples of complex contagions can be copying risky behaviour or joining social movements and riots.
Factors
Strength of Ties
Social contagion in simple contagion models occurs most effectively through ‘weak’ and ‘long’ ties between social contacts. A ‘weak’ tie between two people means they do not interact as frequently and do not influence each other as close friends. However, a relationally ‘weak’ tie is structurally strong if it is ‘long’ because it connects socially distant people, showing greater outreach than a relationally ‘strong’ tie. These ‘long’ ties allow the flow of new information increasing rate of transmission that relationally strong ties cannot do. Even though close friends can strongly influence each other, they will not help each other learn about new opportunities, ideas or behaviours in socially distant settings if they all know the same things. Few ‘weak’ and ‘long’ ties can help spread information quickly between two socially distant strong networks of people. ‘Strong’ ties within those networks can help spread information amongst the peers.
On the other hand, complex social contagion processes require multiple sources of influence. This is not possible with few ‘weak’ ties: they need to be long and multiple in number to increase the probability of imitation between socially distant networks.
Structural Equivalence
However, social contagion can also occur in the absence of any ties during competition. This happens when two people are structurally equivalent i.e., they occupy the same position in a social network and have the same pattern of relationships with the same people. For instance, two students publishing the same kind of research under the same professor are structurally equivalent. The more similar their relations are with other people i.e. the more substitutable they are with one another, the more they will copy what the other is doing, if it makes them look better, to stay ahead of competition.
Reduction of Restraints
Behavioural contagion is a result of the reduction of fear or restraints – aspects of a group or situation which prevent certain behaviours from being performed (restraints or self-control is an aspect of inhibitory control, one of the core executive functions). Restraints are typically group-derived, meaning that the “observer”, the individual wishing to perform a certain behaviour, is constrained by the fear of rejection by the group, who would view this behaviour as a “lack of impulse control”.
An individual (the “observer”) wants to perform some behaviour, but that behaviour would violate the unspoken and accepted rules of the group or situation they are in; these rules are the restraints preventing the observer from performing that action. Once the restraints are broken or reduced the observer is then “free” to perform the behaviour; this is achieved by the “intervention” of the model. The model is another individual, in the same group or situation as the observer, who performs the behaviour which the observer wished to perform. Stephenson and Fielding (1971) describe this effect as “[Once] one member of a gathering has performed a commonly desired action, the payoffs for similar action or nonaction are materially altered. … [The] initiator, by his action, establishes an inequitable advantage over the other members of the gathering which they may proceed to nullify by following his example.”
Density and Number
Density refers to the amount of space available to a person – high density meaning there is less space per person – and number refers to the size of the group. Freedman (1975) put forth the intensification theory, which posits that high density makes the other people in a group more salient features of the environment, this magnifying the individual’s reaction to them. Research has shown that high density does in fact increase the likelihood of contagion (Freedman, 1975; Freedman, Birsky, & Cavoukian, 1980). Number also has an effect on contagion, but to a lesser degree than density.
Local Trend Imitation
However, the probability that an individual will copy a behaviour can also decrease with higher density and number of neighbours. For instance, a person might praise and go to a restaurant with good food based on others’ recommendations but avoid it when it becomes over-crowded. This depicts the local trend imitation phenomenon i.e. the adoption probability first increases with increase in number of adopted neighbours and then decreases.
Identity of the Model
Stephenson and Fielding (1971, p.81) state that the identity of the model is a factor that influences contagion. Depending on the behaviour, sex of the model may be a factor in the contagion of that behaviour being performed by other individuals – particularly in instances of adult models performing aggressive behaviour in the presence of children-observers (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1963) {Imitation of film-mediated aggressive models}. In this particular series of experiments – Albert Bandura’s Bobo doll experiments from 1961 and 1963 – where the behaviour of children was studied after the children watched an adult model punching a bobo doll and the model received a reward, a punishment, or there were no consequences, the analyses revealed that the male model influenced the participants’ behaviour to a greater extent than did the female model; this was true for both the aggressive and the nonaggressive male models (p.581).
Dominant Leaders
Aggressive behaviour or using coercion, fear or intimidation to imitate a behaviour is known as dominance. People are likely to follow dominant leaders to avoid the cost of punishment. However, such behaviour is more influential amongst children rather than adults: coercive children are thought to be more likeable whereas coercive adults are less likeable and, hence, influential.
Prestigious Influencers
While dominant behaviour is displayed in the animal kingdom as well, prestigious behaviour is unique to humans. Unlike animals, we understand the intentions behind someone’s actions rather than just being able to copy their movements precisely. This is important since it is easier to learn from the best models rather than learning by ourselves: We might know which behaviour contributes to someone’s success at mastering a skill. Hence, we look to see who everyone else is copying i.e. we tend to copy prestigious individuals. Prestigious people enjoy a high degree of influence and respect and are generally the people with the most information.
Ordinary People
A study done on the rate of information transmission via retweets on Twitter found that popular people i.e. people with a large following, are ‘inefficient hubs’ in spreading concepts. The more followers someone has, the more overloaded they are with information and lower the chances that they will retweet a particular message due to limited attention. Hence, rate of social contagion slows down.
Rather, social contagion can amplify amongst ‘ordinary’ users with low following if they are closely connected in a peer network. People are more likely to retweet messages by close friends to facilitate social bonding. Peers also have higher similar interests and are more influenced by each other than an ‘ordinary’ and ‘popular’ user who do not have mutual ties. Hence, social contagion can occur efficiently amongst tight community structures, in the absence of prestigious and dominant leaders.
Media
Mass media can greatly influence people’s opinions and amplify social contagion by reporting stories from socially distant and unconnected networks. They can help to turn minority opinions into the popular opinion, independent of the degree of connectivity between people.
Moreover, Bandura (1977) showed that children can learn and imitate fictitious characters on television.
Personality of the Observer
Ogunlade (1979) found that extroverts, who are described as impulsive and sociable individuals, are more likely to be susceptible to contagion than introverted individuals, who are described as reserved and emotionally controlled.
Social Norms
Gino, Ayal and Ariely (2009, p.394) state that an important factor influencing contagion is the degree to which the observer identifies with the others of the group. When identification with the rest of the group is strong, the behaviours of the others will have a larger influence.
However, high homophily or the likelihood of being connected to others with similar interests, can lead to both minority and majority groups overestimating their sizes and vice versa. This can cause people to falsely predict the frequency of their behaviour in the real world since they estimate based on their personal networks. When people overestimate the frequency of a particular behaviour, they may think that they are following social norms and, hence, are less willing to change. Encouraging interactions within heterophilic rather than homophilic social networks can facilitate social contagion more.
Similarities and Differences with Other Types of Social Influence
Contagion is only one of a myriad of types of social influence.
Conformity/Social Pressures
Conformity is a type of social influence that is very similar to contagion. It is almost identical to another type of social influence, “pressures toward uniformity” (social pressures) (Festinger, 1954), which differ only in the research techniques they are associated with (Wheeler, 1966, p.182).
Both conformity and contagion involve some sort of conflict, but differ in the roles other individuals play in that conflict. In conformity, the other individuals of the group try to pressure the observer into performing a behaviour; the model then performs some other behaviour in the vicinity of the observer. This results in the observer creating restraints against the pressured behaviour and a conflict between the pressured behaviour and the behaviour performed by the model. In the end, the observer either performs the model’s behaviour his-/herself, rejects the model, or pressures the model to perform the original pressured behaviour (Wheeler, Table 1). In contagion, the model’s behaviour results in the removing of restraints and the resolving of the conflict, while in conformity, the model’s behaviour results in the creation of restraints and of the conflict.
Social Facilitation
Social facilitation, another type of social influence, is distinguished from contagion, as well as from conformity and social pressures, by the lack of any marked conflict. It is said to occur when the performance of an instinctive pattern of behaviour by an individual acts as a releaser for the same behaviour in others, and so initiates the same line of action in the whole group (Thorpe, 1956, p.120). Bandura and Walters (1963, p.79), give the example of an adult, who has lost the unique aspects of the dialect of the region where they were raised, returns for a visit and “regains” those previously lost patterns of speech. Starch (1911) referred to this phenomenon as an “unintentional or unconscious imitation”.
Imitation
Imitation is different from contagion in that it is learned via reward and punishment and is generalised across situations. Imitation can also be a generic term for contagion, conformity, social pressures, and social facilitation.
Wheeler (1966)
Dynamics of Selected Influence Processes
Stages in Influence Process
Behavioural contagion
Social pressures and conformity
Social facilitation.
Observer’s Initial Conditions
Instigated to BN. Internal restraints against BN.
Instigated to BP. No restraints.
No restraints against BN or BP. No instigation to BN or BP.
Model’s Behaviour
Model performs BN.
Model performs BN.
Model performs BN.
Hypothetical Processes
Reduction of model’s restraints against BN. Fear reduction.
Creation of restraints against BP. Conflict between BN and BP.
Observer performs BN (or rejects model or induces model to perform BP).
Observer performs BN.
Notes:
BN = Initial behaviour.
BP = Pressured behaviour.
CS = Conditioned stimulus.
CR = Conditioned response.
Competition Contagion on Non-Competitors
While behavioural contagion is largely about how people might be affected by observations of the expressions or behaviour of others, research has also found contagion in the context of a competition where mere awareness of an ongoing competition can have an influence on noncompetitors’ task performance, without any information about the actual behaviour of the competitors.
Research
Effects of Group Pressure
Behavioural contagion, largely discussed in the behaviours of crowds, and closely related to emotional contagion, plays a large role in gatherings of two or more people. In the original Milgram experiment on obedience, for example, where participants, who were in a room with only the experimenter, were ordered to administer increasingly more severe electrical shocks as punishment to a person in another room (from here on referred to as the “victim”), the conflict or social restraint experienced by the participants was the obligation to not disobey the experimenter – even when shocking the victim to the highest shock level given, a behaviour which the participants saw as opposing their personal and social ideals (Milgram, 1965, p.129).
Milgram also conducted two other experiments, replications of his original obedience experiment, with the intent being to analyse the effect of group behaviour on participants: instead of the subject being alone with the experimenter, two confederates were utilised. In the first of the two experiments, “Groups for Disobedience”, the confederates defied the experimenter and refused to punish the victim (p.130). This produced a significant effect on the obedience of the participants: in the original experiment, 26 of the 40 participants administered the maximum shock; in the disobedient groups experiment, only 4 of 40 participants administered the highest level of voltage (Table 1). Despite this high correlation between shock level administered and the obedience of the group in the disobedient groups experiment, there was no significant correlation for the second of the replicated experiments: “Obedient Groups”, where the confederates did not disobey the experimenter and, when the participant voiced angst regarding the experiment and wished to stop administering volts to the victim, the confederates voiced their disapproval (p.133). Milgram concludes the study by remarking that “the insertion of group pressure in a direction opposite that of the experimenter’s commands produces a powerful shift toward the group. Changing the group movement does not yield a comparable shift in the [participant’s] performance. The group success in one case and failure in another can be traced directly to the configuration of motive and social forces operative in the starting situation.” That is, if the group’s attitudes are similar to or compatible with the participant’s/observer’s, there is a greater likelihood that the participant/observer will join with the group (p.134).
Overweight and Obesity
Network phenomena are relevant to obesity, which appears to spread through social ties. Teenagers of US Army families assigned to counties with higher obesity rates were more likely to become overweight or obese in a 2018 study. This effect could not be explained by self-selection (homophily) or shared built environments and is attributed to social contagion.
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In psychology, introjection (also known as identification or internalisation) is the unconscious adoption of the thoughts or personality traits of others. It occurs as a normal part of development, such as a child taking on parental values and attitudes. It can also be a defence mechanism in situations that arouse anxiety. It has been associated with both normal and pathological development.
Theory
Introjection is a concept rooted in the psychoanalytic theories of unconscious motivations. Unconscious motivation refers to processes in the mind which occur automatically and bypass conscious examination and considerations.
Introjection is the learning process or in some cases a defence mechanism where a person unconsciously absorbs experiences and makes them part their psyche.
In Learning
In psychoanalysis, introjection (German: Introjektion) refers to an unconscious process wherein one takes components of another person’s identity, such as feelings, experiences and cognitive functioning, and transfers them inside themselves, making such experiences part of their new psychic structure. These components are obliterated from consciousness (splitting), perceived in someone else (projection), and then experienced and performed (i.e. introjected) by that other person. Cognate concepts are identification, incorporation and internalisation.
As a Defence Mechanism
It is considered a self-stabilising defence mechanism used when there is a lack of full psychological contact between a child and the adults providing that child’s psychological needs. In other words, it provides the illusion of maintaining relationship but at the expense of a loss of self. To use a simple example, a person who picks up traits from their friends is introjecting.
Another straightforward illustration could be a youngster who is being bullied at school. Unknowingly adopting the bully’s behaviour, the victim youngster may do so to stop being picked on in the future.
Projection has been described as an early phase of introjection.
Historic Precursors
Freud and Klein
In Freudian terms, introjection is the aspect of the ego’s system of relational mechanisms which handles checks and balances from a perspective external to what one normally considers ‘oneself’, infolding these inputs into the internal world of the self-definitions, where they can be weighed and balanced against one’s various senses of externality. For example:
“When a child envelops representational images of his absent parents into himself, simultaneously fusing them with his own personality.”
“Individuals with weak ego boundaries are more prone to use introjection as a defense mechanism.”
According to D.W. Winnicott, “projection and introjection mechanisms… let the other person be the manager sometimes, and to hand over omnipotence.”
According to Freud, the ego and the superego are constructed by introjecting external behavioural patterns into the subject’s own person. Specifically, he maintained that the critical agency or the super ego could be accounted for in terms of introjection and that the superego derives from the parents or other figures of authority. The derived behavioural patterns are not necessarily reproductions as they actually are but incorporated or introjected versions of them.
Torok and Ferenczi
However, the aforementioned description of introjection has been challenged by Maria Torok as she favours using the term as it is employed by Sándor Ferenczi in his essay “The Meaning of Introjection” (1912). In this context, introjection is an extension of autoerotic interests that broadens the ego by a lifting of repression so that it includes external objects in its make-up. Torok defends this meaning in her 1968 essay “The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse”, where she argues that Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein confuse introjection with incorporation and that Ferenczi’s definition remains crucial to analysis. She emphasized that in failed mourning “the impotence of the process of introjection (gradual, slow, laborious, mediated, effective)” means that “incorporation is the only choice: fantasmatic, unmediated, instantaneous, magical, sometimes hallucinatory…’crypt’ effects (of incorporation)”.
Fritz and Laura Perls
In Gestalt therapy, the concept of “introjection” is not identical with the psychoanalytical concept. Central to Fritz and Laura Perls’ modifications was the concept of “dental or oral aggression”, when the infant develops teeth and is able to chew. They set “introjection” against “assimilation”. In Ego, Hunger and Aggression, Fritz and Laura Perls suggested that when the infant develops teeth, he or she has the capacity to chew, to break apart food, and assimilate it, in contrast to swallowing before; and by analogy to experience, to taste, accept, reject or assimilate. Laura Perls explains: “I think Freud said that development takes place through introjection, but if it remains introjection and goes no further, then it becomes a block; it becomes identification. Introjection is to a great extent unawares.”
Thus Fritz and Laura Perls made “assimilation”, as opposed to “introjection”, a focal theme in Gestalt therapy and in their work, and the prime means by which growth occurs in therapy. In contrast to the psychoanalytic stance, in which the “patient” introjects the (presumably more healthy) interpretations of the analyst, in Gestalt therapy the client must “taste” with awareness their experience, and either accept or reject it, but not introject or “swallow whole”. Hence, the emphasis is on avoiding interpretation, and instead encouraging discovery. This is the key point in the divergence of Gestalt therapy from traditional psychoanalysis: growth occurs through gradual assimilation of experience in a natural way, rather than by accepting the interpretations of the analyst.
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Transference (German: Übertragung) is a phenomenon within psychotherapy in which repetitions of old feelings, attitudes, desires, or fantasies that someone displaces are subconsciously projected onto a here-and-now person. Traditionally, it had solely concerned feelings from a primary relationship during childhood.
Brief History
Transference was first described by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, who considered it an important part of psychoanalytic treatment. Transference of this kind can be considered inappropriate without proper clinical supervision.
Occurrence
It is common for people to transfer feelings about their parents to their partners or children (that is, cross-generational entanglements). Another example of transference would be a person mistrusting somebody who resembles an ex-spouse in manners, voice, or external appearance, or being overly compliant to someone who resembles a childhood friend.
In The Psychology of the Transference, Carl Jung states that within the transference dyad, both participants typically experience a variety of opposites, that in love and in psychological growth, the key to success is the ability to endure the tension of the opposites without abandoning the process, and that this tension allows one to grow and to transform.
Only in a personally or socially harmful context can transference be described as a pathological issue. A modern, social-cognitive perspective on transference explains how it can occur in everyday life. When people meet a new person who reminds them of someone else, they unconsciously infer that the new person has traits similar to the person previously known. This perspective has generated a wealth of research that illuminated how people tend to repeat relationship patterns from the past in the present.
Sigmund Freud held that transference plays a large role in male homosexuality. In The Ego and the Id, he claimed that eroticism between males can be an outcome of a “[psychically] non-economic” hostility, which is unconsciously subverted into love and sexual attraction.
Transference and Counter-Transference during Psychotherapy
Transference will appear in the full speech that occurs during free association, revealing the inverse of the subject’s past, within the here and now, and the analyst will hear which of the four discourses the subject’s desire has been metonymically shifted to, beyond the ego, leading to a dystonic form of resistance.
In a therapy context, transference refers to redirection of a patient’s feelings for a significant person to the therapist. Transference is often manifested as an erotic attraction towards a therapist, but can be seen in many other forms such as rage, hatred, mistrust, parentification, extreme dependence, or even placing the therapist in a god-like or guru status. When Freud initially encountered transference in his therapy with patients, he thought he was encountering patient resistance, as he recognised the phenomenon when a patient refused to participate in a session of free association. But what he learned was that the analysis of the transference was actually the work that needed to be done: “the transference, which, whether affectionate or hostile, seemed in every case to constitute the greatest threat to the treatment, becomes its best tool”. The focus in psychodynamic psychotherapy is, in large part, the therapist and patient recognizing the transference relationship and exploring the relationship’s meaning. Since the transference between patient and therapist happens on an unconscious level, psychodynamic therapists who are largely concerned with a patient’s unconscious material use the transference to reveal unresolved conflicts patients have with childhood figures.
Countertransference is defined as redirection of a therapist’s feelings toward a patient, or more generally, as a therapist’s emotional entanglement with a patient. A therapist’s attunement to their own countertransference is nearly as critical as understanding the transference. Not only does this help therapists regulate their emotions in the therapeutic relationship, but it also gives therapists valuable insight into what patients are attempting to elicit from them. For example, a therapist who is sexually attracted to a patient must understand the countertransference aspect (if any) of the attraction, and look at how the patient might be eliciting this attraction. Once any countertransference aspect has been identified, the therapist can ask the patient what his or her feelings are toward the therapist, and can explore how those feelings relate to unconscious motivations, desires, or fears.
Another contrasting perspective on transference and countertransference is offered in classical Adlerian psychotherapy. Rather than using the patient’s transference strategically in therapy, the positive or negative transference is diplomatically pointed out and explained as an obstacle to cooperation and improvement. For the therapist, any signs of countertransference would suggest that his or her own personal training analysis needs to be continued to overcome these tendencies. Andrea Celenza noted in 2010 that “the use of the analyst’s countertransference remains a point of controversy”.
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Wilfred Ruprecht Bion DSO (08 September 1897 to 08 November 1979) was an influential English psychoanalyst, who became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1962 to 1965.
Wilfred Bion in uniform in 1916.
Early Life and Military Service
Bion was born in Mathura, North-Western Provinces, India, and educated at Bishop’s Stortford College in England. After the outbreak of the First World War, he served in the Tank Corps as a tank commander in France, and was awarded both the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) (on 18 February 1918, for his actions at the Battle of Cambrai), and the Croix de Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. He first entered the war zone on 26 June 1917, and was promoted to temporary lieutenant on 10 June 1918, and to acting captain on 22 March 1918, when he took command of a tank section, he retained the rank when he became second-in-command of a tank company on 19 October 1918, and relinquished it on 07 January 1919. He was demobilised on 01 September 1921, and was granted the rank of captain. The full citation for his DSO reads:
Awarded the Distinguished Service Order.
[…]
T./2nd Lt, Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, Tank Corps.
For conspicuous gallantry, and devotion to duty. When in command of his tank in an attack he engaged a large number of enemy machine guns in strong positions, thus assisting the infantry to advance. When his tank was put out of action by a direct hit he occupied a section of trench with his men and machine guns and opened fire on the enemy. He moved about in the open, giving directions to other tanks when they arrived, and at one period fired a Lewis gun with great effect from the top of his tank. He also got a captured machine gun into action against the enemy, and when reinforcements arrived he took command of a company of infantry whose commander was killed. He showed magnificent courage and initiative in a most difficult situation.
“Bion’s daughter, Parthenope…raises the question of just how (and how far) her father was shaped as an analyst by his wartime experiences…under[p]inning Bion’s later concern with the coexistence of regressed or primitive proto-mental states alongside more sophisticated one”.
Education and Early Career
After World War I, Bion studied history at The Queen’s College, Oxford, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1922, before studying medicine at University College London.
Initially attracted to London by the “strange new subject called psychoanalysis”, he met and was impressed by Wilfred Trotter, an outstanding brain surgeon who published the famous Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War in 1916, based on the horrors of the First World War. This was to prove an important influence on Bion’s interest in group behaviour. Having qualified in medicine by means of the Conjoint Diploma (MRCS England, LRCP London) in 1930 Bion spent seven years in psychotherapeutic training at the Tavistock Clinic, an experience he regarded, in retrospect, as having had some limitations. It did, however, bring him into fruitful contact with Samuel Beckett. He wanted to train in Psychoanalysis and in 1938 he began a training analysis with John Rickman, but this was brought to an end by the advent of the Second World War.
Bion was recommissioned in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a lieutenant on 01 April 1940, and worked in a number of military hospitals including Northfield Military Hospital (Hollymoor Hospital, Birmingham) where he initiated the first Northfield Experiment. These ideas on the psychoanalysis of groups were then taken up and developed by others such as S.H. Foulkes, Rickman, Bridger, Main and Patrick De Mare. The entire group at Tavistock had in fact been taken into the army, and were working on new methods of treatment for psychiatric casualties (those suffering post-traumatic stress, or “shell shock” as it was then known.) Out of this his pioneering work in group dynamics, associated with the “Tavistock group”, Bion’s papers describing his work of the 1940s were compiled much later and appeared together in 1961 in his influential book, Experiences in Groups and other papers. It was less a guide for the therapy of individuals within or by the group, than an exploration of the processes set off by the complex experience of being in a group. The book quickly became a touchstone work for applications of group theory in a wide variety of fields.
In 1945, during the Second World War, Bion’s wife Betty Jardine gave birth to a daughter, but Betty died a few days afterwards. His daughter, Parthenope, became a psychoanalyst in Italy, and often lectured and wrote about her father’s work. Parthenope died, together with her 18-year-old daughter Patrizia, in a car crash in Italy in July 1998.
Later Career
Returning to the Tavistock Clinic Bion chaired the Planning Committee that reorganised the Tavistock into the new Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, alongside a new Tavistock Clinic which was part of the newly launched National Health Service. As his interest in psychoanalysis increased, he underwent training analysis, between 1946 and 1952, with Melanie Klein. He met his second wife, Francesca, at the Tavistock in 1951. He joined a research group of Klein’s students (including Hanna Segal and Herbert Rosenfeld), who were developing Klein’s theory of the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions, for use in the analysis of patients with psychotic disorders. He produced a series of highly original and influential papers (collected as “Second Thoughts”, 1967) on the analysis of schizophrenia, and the specifically cognitive, perceptual, and identity problems of such patients. To this he added a valuable final section called Commentary, showing how some of his views on clinical and theoretical matters had changed.
Bion’s theories, which were always based in the phenomena of the analytic encounter, revealed both correspondences and expansions of core ideas from both Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein. At one point, he attempted to understand thoughts and thinking from an ‘algebraic’, ‘geometric’ and ‘mathematised’ point of view, believing there to be too little precision in the existing vocabulary, a process culminating in “The Grid”. Later he abandoned the complex, abstract applications of mathematics, and the Grid, and developed a more intuitive approach, epitomised in Attention and Interpretation (1970).
In 1968, Bion moved to Los Angeles, California, where he remained until 1977. During those years he mentored a number of psychoanalysts interested in Kleinian approaches, including James Gooch (psychoanalyst) and other founding members of the Psychoanalytic Centre of California. Shortly before his death, he returned to Oxfordshire.
Reception and Stature
Bion left a reputation which has grown steadily both in Britain and internationally. Some commentators consider that his writings are often gnomic and irritating, but never fail to stimulate. He defies categorisation as a follower of Klein or of Freud. While Bion is most well known outside of the psychoanalytic community for his work on group dynamics, the psychoanalytic conversation that explores his work is mainly concerned with his theory of thinking, and his model of the development of a capacity for thought.
Wilfred Bion was a potent and original contributor to psychoanalysis. He was one of the first to analyse patients in psychotic states using an unmodified analytic technique; he extended existing theories of projective processes and developed new conceptual tools. The degree of collaboration between Hanna Segal, Wilfred Bion and Herbert Rosenfeld in their work with psychotic patients during the late 1950s, and their discussions with Melanie Klein at the time, means that it is not always possible to distinguish their exact individual contributions to the developing theory of splitting, projective identification, unconscious phantasy and the use of countertransference. As Donald Meltzer (1979, 1981), Denis Carpy (1989, p.287), and Michael Feldman (2009, pp.33, 42) have pointed out, these three pioneering analysts not only sustained Klein’s clinical and theoretical approach, but through an extension of the concept of projective identification and countertransference they deepened and expanded it. In Bion’s clinical work and supervision the goal remains insightful understanding of psychic reality through a disciplined experiencing of the transference–countertransference, in a way that promotes the growth of the whole personality.
‘Bion’s ideas are highly unique’, so that he ‘remained larger than life to almost all who encountered him’. He has been considered by Neville Symington as possibly “the greatest psychoanalytic thinker…after Freud“.
Bion’s work has left a strong impression on a number of contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers, including Antonino Ferro, Thomas Ogden, or Elias Mallet da Rocha Barros.
There is some historical evidence to suggest that the idea of containment may have been suggested to Bion in the mid-1930s, by an encounter with C.G. Jung: Bion attended Jung’s 1935 lectures at the Tavistock Clinic, in which Bion was an active participant (asking three questions of Jung about a range of aspects of Jung’s thinking). The experience was described by James Grotstein, Bion’s biographer and “one of Bion’s most influential pupils”, as having had a “dramatic impact” on Bion.
Group Experiments
Bion performed a lot of group experiments when he was put in charge of the training wing of a military hospital. Besides observing the basic assumptions recurring in these groups, he also has observed some very interesting phenomena to which he believed may well apply to society.
Among his interesting findings was that in a group, the standards of social intercourse lack intellectual content and critical judgement. This observation agrees with Gustave Le Bon’s findings about groups to which he mentioned in his book The Crowd.
Another interesting observation was that whatever a group member says or does in a group illuminates that member’s view of the group and is an illumination of that member’s personality. This phenomenon is what psychologists call Projection.
If the contributions of the group and its members can be made anonymously then the foundations for a system of denial and evasion is established. This phenomenon is better known as Deindividuation.
And perhaps one of the most important findings in his experiments was that whenever a group is formed, it always seeks a leader to follow. The group then searches for someone who has questionable attributes with his or her mental health. Initially, the group will search for someone who is paranoid schizophrenic or someone who is malignant hysteric. If the group is unable to find someone with those attributes, the group looks for someone with delinquent trends and a psychopathic personality. Otherwise, the group would just settle on the verbally facile high-grade defective.
Group Dynamics – The “Basic Assumptions”
Wilfred Bion’s observations about the role of group processes in group dynamics are set out in Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, written in the 1940s but compiled and published in 1961, where he refers to recurrent emotional states of groups as ‘basic assumptions’. Bion argues that in every group, two groups are actually present: the work group, and the basic assumption group. The work group is that aspect of group functioning which has to do with the primary task of the group—what the group has formed to accomplish; will “keep the group anchored to a sophisticated and rational level of behaviour”. The basic assumption group describes the tacit underlying assumptions on which the behaviour of the group is based. Bion specifically identified three basic assumptions: dependency, fight-flight, and pairing. When a group adopts any one of these basic assumptions, it interferes with the task the group is attempting to accomplish. Bion believed that interpretation by the therapist of this aspect of group dynamics would, whilst being resisted, also result in potential insight regarding effective, co-operative group work.
In dependency, the essential aim of the group is to attain security through, and have its members protected by, one individual. The basic assumption in this group culture seems to be that an external object exists whose function it is to provide security for the immature individual. The group members behave passively, and act as though the leader, by contrast, is omnipotent and omniscient. For example, the leader may pose a question only to be greeted with docile silence, as though he or she had not spoken at all. The leader may be idealised into a kind of god who can take care of his or her children, and some especially ambitious leaders may be susceptible to this role. Resentment at being dependent may eventually lead the group members to “take down” the leader, and then search for a new leader to repeat the process.
In the basic assumption of fight-flight, the group behaves as though it has met to preserve itself at all costs, and that this can only be done by running away from someone or fighting someone or something. In fight, the group may be characterized by aggressiveness and hostility; in flight, the group may chit-chat, tell stories, arrive late or any other activities that serve to avoid addressing the task at hand. The leader for this sort of group is one who can mobilize the group for attack, or lead it in flight.
The final basic assumption group, pairing, exists on the assumption that the group has met for the purpose of reproduction—the basic assumption that two people can be met together for only one purpose, and that a sexual one’. Two people, regardless the sex of either, carry out the work of the group through their continued interaction. The remaining group members listen eagerly and attentively with a sense of relief and hopeful anticipation.
Bion considered that “the three basic-assumption groups seem each in turn to be aggregates of individuals sharing out between them the characteristics of one character in the Oedipal situation”. Behind the Oedipal level, however, Bion postulated the existence of still more primitive, part-object phantasies; and “the more disturbed the group, the more easily discernible are these primitive phantasies and mechanisms”. Such phantasies would prove the main focus of Bion’s interest after his second analysis.
Bion on Thinking
“During the 1950s and 1960s, Bion transformed Melanie Klein’s theories of infantile phantasy…into an epistemological “theory of thinking” of his own.” Bion used as his starting point the phenomenology of the analytic hour, highlighting the two principles of “the emergence of truth and mental growth. The mind grows through exposure to truth.” The foundation for both mental development and truth are, for Bion, emotional experience.
The evolution of emotional experience into the capacity for thought, and the potential derailment of this process, are the primary phenomena described in Bion’s model. Through his hypothesized alpha and beta elements, Bion provides a language to help one think about what is occurring during the analytic hour. These tools are intended for use outside the hour in the clinician’s reflective process. To attempt to apply his models during the analytic session violates the basic principle whereby “Bion had advocated starting every session ‘without memory, desire or understanding’—his antidote to those intrusive influences that otherwise threaten to distort the analytic process.”
Alpha Elements, Beta Elements, and Alpha Function
Bion created a theory of thinking based on changing beta elements (unmetabolized psyche/soma/affective experience) into alpha elements (thoughts that can be thought by the thinker). Beta elements were seen as cognate to the underpinnings of the “basic assumptions” identified in his work with groups: “the fundamental anxieties that underlie the basic assumption group resistances were originally thought of as proto-mental phenomena…forerunners of Bion’s later concept of beta-elements.” They were equally conceptual developments from his work on projective identification—from the “minutely split ‘particles'” Bion saw as expelled in pathological projective identification by the psychotic, who would then go on to “lodge them in the angry, so-called bizarre objects by which he feels persecuted and controlled”. For “these raw bits of experience he called beta-elements…to be actively handled and made use of by the mind they must, through what Bion calls alpha-functions, become alpha-elements”.
β elements, α elements and α function are elements that Bion (1963) hypothesizes. He does not consider β-elements, α- elements, nor α function to actually exist. The terms are instead tools for thinking about what is being observed. They are elements whose qualities remain unsaturated, meaning we cannot know the full extent or scope of their meaning, so they are intended as tools for thought rather than real things to be accepted at face value (1962, p.3).
Bion took for granted that the infant requires a mind to help it tolerate and organize experience. For Bion, thoughts exist prior to the development of an apparatus for thinking. The apparatus for thinking, the capacity to have thoughts “has to be called into existence to cope with thoughts” (1967, p.111). Thoughts exist prior to their realization. Thinking, the capacity to think the thoughts which already exist, develops through another mind providing α-function (1962, p.83) – through the “container” role of maternal reverie.
To learn from experience alpha-function must operate on the awareness of the emotional experience; alpha–elements are produced from the impressions of the experience; these are thus made storable and available for dream thoughts and for unconscious waking thinking… If there are only beta-elements, which cannot be made unconscious, there can be no repression, suppression, or learning. (Bion, 1962, p.8).
α-function works upon undigested facts, impressions, and sensations, that cannot be mentalized—beta-elements. α-function digests β-elements, making them available for thought (1962, pp.6–7).
Beta-elements are not amenable to use in dream thoughts but are suited for use in projective identification. They are influential in producing acting out. These are objects that can be evacuated or used for a kind of thinking that depends on manipulation of what are felt to be things in themselves as if to substitute such manipulations for words or ideas… Alpha-function transforms sense impressions into alpha-elements which resemble, and may in fact be identical with, the visual images with which we are familiar in dreams, namely, the elements that Freud regards as yielding their latent content when the analyst has interpreted them. Failure of alpha-function means the patient cannot dream and therefore cannot sleep. As alpha-function makes the sense impressions of the emotional experience available for conscious and dream—thought the patient who cannot dream cannot go to sleep and cannot wake up. (1962, pp.6–7).
Bizarre Object
Bizarre objects, according to Bion, are impressions of external objects which, by way of projective identification, form a “screen” that’s imbued with characteristics of the subject’s own personality; they form part of his interpretation of object relations theory. Bion saw psychotic attacks on the normal linking between objects as producing a fractured world, where the patient felt themselves surrounded by hostile bizarre objects—the by-products of the broken linkages. Such objects, with their superego components, blur the boundary of internal and external, and impose a kind of externalised moralism on their victims. They can also contain ego-functions that have been evacuated from the self as part of the defence against thinking, sensing, and coming to terms with reality: thus a man may feel watched by his telephone, or that the music player being listened to is in fact listening to him in turn.
Later Developments
Hanna Segal considered bizarre objects more difficult to re-internalise than either good or bad objects due to their splintered state: grouped together in a mass or psychic gang, their threatening properties may contribute to agoraphobia.
Knowledge, Love and Hate
Successful application of alpha-function leads to “the capacity to tolerate the actual frustration involved in learning (“K”) that [Bion] calls ‘learning from experience'”. The opposite of knowledge “K” was what Bion termed “−K”: “the process that strips, denudes, and devalues persons, experiences, and ideas.”
Both K and −K interact for Bion with Love and Hate, as links within the analytic relationship. “The complexities of the emotional link, whether Love or Hate or Knowledge [L, H, and K – the Bionic relational triad]” produce ever-changing “atmospheric” effects in the analytic situation. The patient’s focus may wish to be “on Love and Hate (L and H) rather than the knowledge (K) that is properly at stake in psychoanalytic inquiry.”
For Bion, “knowledge is not a thing we have, but a link between ourselves and what we know … K is being willing to know but not insisting on knowledge.” By contrast, -K is “not just ignorance but the active avoidance of knowledge, or even the wish to destroy the capacity for it” – and “enacts what ‘Attacks on Linking’ identifies as hatred of emotion, hatred of reality, hatred of life itself.”
Looking for the source of such hate (H), Bion notes in Learning from Experience that, “Inevitably one wonders at various points in the investigation why such a phenomenon as that represented by −K should exist. … I shall consider one factor only – Envy. By this term I mean the phenomenon described by Melanie Klein in Envy and Gratitude” (1962, p.96).
Reversible Perspective and −K
“Reversible Perspective” was a term coined by Bion to illuminate “a peculiar and deadly form of analytic impasse which defends against psychic pain”. It represents the clash of “two independently experienced views or phenomena whose meanings are incompatible”. In Bion’s own words, “Reversible perspective is evidence of pain; the patient reverses perspective so as to make a dynamic situation static.”
As summarised by Etchegoyen, “Reversible perspective is an extreme case of rigidity of thought. … As Bion says, what is most characteristic in such cases is the manifest accord and the latent discord.” In clinical contexts, what may happen is that the analyst’s “interpretation is accepted, but the premises have been rejected … the actual specificity, the substance of the interpretation”. Reversible perspective is an aspect of “the potential destruction and deformation of knowledge” – one of the attacks on linking of −K.
O: The Ineffable
As his thought continued to develop, Bion came to use Negative Capability and the suspension of Memory and Desire in his work as an analyst, in order to investigate psychic reality – which he regarded as essentially ‘non-sensuous’ (1970). Following his 1965 book Transformations he had an increasing interest in what he termed the domain of “O” – the unknowable, or ultimate Truth. “In aesthetics, Bion has been described as a neo-Kantian for whom reality, or the thing-in-itself (O), cannot be known, only be “be-ed” (1965). What can be known is said by Bion to be in the realm of K, impinging through its sensory channels. If the observer can desist from “irritably reaching for fact and reason”, and suspend the normal operation of the faculties of memory and apperception, what Bion called transformations in knowledge can permit an ‘evolution’ where transformations in K touch on transformations in Being (O). Bion believed such moments to feel both ominous and turbulent, threatening a loss of anchorage in everyday ‘narrative’ security.
Bion would speak of “an intense catastrophic emotional explosion O,” which could only be known through its aftereffects. Where before he had privileged the domain of knowledge (K), now he would speak as well of “resistance to the shift from transformations involving K (knowledge) to transformations involving O … resistance to the unknowable”. Hence his injunctions to the analyst to eschew memory and desire, to “bring to bear a diminution of the ‘light’ – a penetrating beam of darkness; a reciprocal of the searchlight. If any object existed, however faint, it would show up very clearly”. In stating this he was making connections to Freud, who in a letter to Lou Andreas Salome had referred to a mental counterpart of scotopic, “mole like vision”, used to gain impressions of the Unconscious. He was also making links with the apophatic method used by contemplative thinkers such as St John of the Cross, a writer quoted many times by Bion. Bion was well aware that our perception and our attention often blind us to what genuinely and strikingly is new in every moment.
Reverie
Bion’s concept of maternal “reverie” as the capacity to sense (and make sense of) what is going on inside the infant has been an important element in post-Kleinian thought: “Reverie is an act of faith in unconscious process … essential to alpha-function'” It is considered the equivalent of Stern’s attunement, or Winnicott’s maternal preoccupation.
In therapy, the analyst’s use of “reverie” is an important tool in his/her response to the patient’s material: “It is this capacity for playing with a patient’s images that Bion encouraged”.
Late Bion
“For the later Bion, the psychoanalytic encounter was itself a site of turbulence, ‘a mental space for further ideas which may yet be developed’.” In his unorthodox quest to maintain such “mental space”, Bion “spent the final years of his long and distinguished professional life [writing] a futuristic trilogy in which he is answerable to no one but himself, A Memoir of the Future.”
If we accept that “Bion introduced a new form of pedagogy in his writings…[via] the density and non-linearity of his prose”, it comes perhaps to a peak here in what he himself termed “a fictitious account of psychoanalysis including an artificially constructed dream … science fiction”. We may conclude at least that he achieved his stated goal therein: “To prevent someone who KNOWS from filling the empty space”.
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Emotional contagion is a form of social contagion that involves the spontaneous spread of emotions and related behaviours. Such emotional convergence can happen from one person to another, or in a larger group. Emotions can be shared across individuals in many ways, both implicitly or explicitly. For instance, conscious reasoning, analysis, and imagination have all been found to contribute to the phenomenon. The behaviour has been found in humans, other primates, dogs, and chickens.
Emotional contagion is important to personal relationships because it fosters emotional synchrony between individuals. A broader definition of the phenomenon suggested by Schoenewolf is “a process in which a person or group influences the emotions or behavior of another person or group through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion states and behavioral attitudes.” One view developed by Elaine Hatfield, et al., is that this can be done through automatic mimicry and synchronisation of one’s expressions, vocalisations, postures, and movements with those of another person. When people unconsciously mirror their companions’ expressions of emotion, they come to feel reflections of those companions’ emotions.
In a 1993 paper, Psychologists Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson define emotional contagion as “the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person’s [sic] and, consequently, to converge emotionally”.
Hatfield, et al., theorise emotional contagion as a two-step process: First, we imitate people (e.g. if someone smiles at you, you smile back). Second, our own emotional experiences change based on the non-verbal signals of emotion that we give off. For example, smiling makes one feel happier, and frowning makes one feel worse. Mimicry seems to be one foundation of emotional movement between people.
Emotional contagion and empathy share similar characteristics, with the exception of the ability to differentiate between personal and pre-personal experiences, a process known as individuation. In The Art of Loving (1956), social psychologist Erich Fromm explores these differences, suggesting that autonomy is necessary for empathy, which is not found in emotional contagion.
Etymology
James Baldwin addressed “emotional contagion” in his 1897 work Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development, though using the term “contagion of feeling”. Various 20th century scholars discussed the phenomena under the heading “social contagion”. The term “emotional contagion” first appeared in Arthur S. Reber’s 1985 The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology.
Influencing Factors
Several factors determine the rate and extent of emotional convergence in a group, including membership stability, mood-regulation norms, task interdependence, and social interdependence. Besides these event-structure properties, there are personal properties of the group’s members, such as openness to receive and transmit feelings, demographic characteristics, and dispositional affect that influence the intensity of emotional contagion.
Research
Research on emotional contagion has been conducted from a variety of perspectives, including organisational, social, familial, developmental, and neurological. While early research suggested that conscious reasoning, analysis, and imagination accounted for emotional contagion, some forms of more primitive emotional contagion are far more subtle, automatic, and universal.
Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson’s 1993 research into emotional contagion reported that people’s conscious assessments of others’ feelings were heavily influenced by what others said. People’s own emotions, however, were more influenced by others’ nonverbal clues as to what they were really feeling. Recognising emotions and acknowledging their origin can be one way to avoid emotional contagion. Transference of emotions has been studied in a variety of situations and settings, with social and physiological causes being two of the largest areas of research.
In addition to the social contexts discussed above, emotional contagion has been studied within organizations. Schrock, Leaf, and Rohr (2008) say organisations, like societies, have emotion cultures that consist of languages, rituals, and meaning systems, including rules about the feelings workers should, and should not, feel and display. They state that emotion culture is quite similar to “emotion climate”, otherwise known as morale, organizational morale, and corporate morale. Furthermore, Worline, Wrzesniewski, and Rafaeli (2002) mention that organisations have an overall “emotional capability”, while McColl-Kennedy, and Smith (2006) examine “emotional contagion” in customer interactions. These terms arguably all attempt to describe a similar phenomenon; each term differs in subtle and somewhat indistinguishable ways.
Controversy
A controversial experiment demonstrating emotional contagion by using the social media platform Facebook was carried out in 2014 on 689,000 users by filtering positive or negative emotional content from their news feeds. The experiment sparked uproar among people who felt the study violated personal privacy. The 2014 publication of a research paper resulting from this experiment, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks”, a collaboration between Facebook and Cornell University, is described by Tony D. Sampson, Stephen Maddison, and Darren Ellis (2018) as a “disquieting disclosure that corporate social media and Cornell academics were so readily engaged with unethical experiments of this kind.” Tony D. Sampson et al. criticise the notion that “academic researchers can be insulated from ethical guidelines on the protection for human research subjects because they are working with a social media business that has ‘no obligation to conform’ to the principle of ‘obtaining informed consent and allowing participants to opt out’.” A subsequent study confirmed the presence of emotional contagion on Twitter without manipulating users’ timelines.
Beyond the ethical concerns, some scholars criticised the methods and reporting of the Facebook findings. John Grohol, writing for Psych Central, argued that despite its title and claims of “emotional contagion,” this study did not look at emotions at all. Instead, its authors used an application (called “Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count” or LIWC 2007) that simply counted positive and negative words in order to infer users’ sentiments. A shortcoming of the LIWC tool is that it does not understand negations. Hence, the tweet “I am not happy” would be scored as positive: “Since the LIWC 2007 ignores these subtle realities of informal human communication, so do the researchers.” Grohol concluded that given these subtleties, the effect size of the findings are little more than a “statistical blip.”
Kramer et al. (2014) found a 0.07%—that’s not 7 percent, that’s 1/15th of one percent!!—decrease in negative words in people’s status updates when the number of negative posts on their Facebook news feed decreased. Do you know how many words you’d have to read or write before you’ve written one less negative word due to this effect? Probably thousands.
Types
Emotions can be shared and mimicked in many ways. Taken broadly, emotional contagion can be either: implicit, undertaken by the receiver through automatic or self-evaluating processes; or explicit, undertaken by the transmitter through a purposeful manipulation of emotional states, to achieve a desired result.
Implicit
Unlike cognitive contagion, emotional contagion is less conscious and more automatic. It relies mainly on non-verbal communication, although emotional contagion can and does occur via telecommunication. For example, people interacting through e-mails and chats are affected by the other’s emotions, without being able to perceive the non-verbal cues.
One view, proposed by Hatfield and colleagues, describes emotional contagion as a primitive, automatic, and unconscious behaviour that takes place through a series of steps. When a receiver is interacting with a sender, he perceives the emotional expressions of the sender. The receiver automatically mimics those emotional expressions. Through the process of afferent feedback, these new expressions are translated into feeling the emotions the sender feels, thus leading to emotional convergence.
Another view, emanating from social comparison theories, sees emotional contagion as demanding more cognitive effort and being more conscious. According to this view, people engage in social comparison to see if their emotional reaction is congruent with the persons around them. The recipient uses the emotion as a type of social information to understand how he or she should be feeling. People respond differently to positive and negative stimuli; negative events tend to elicit stronger and quicker emotional, behavioural, and cognitive responses than neutral or positive events. So unpleasant emotions are more likely to lead to mood contagion than are pleasant emotions. Another variable is the energy level at which the emotion is displayed. Higher energy draws more attention to it, so the same emotional valence (pleasant or unpleasant) expressed with high energy is likely to lead to more contagion than if expressed with low energy.
Explicit
Aside from the automatic infection of feelings described above, there are also times when others’ emotions are being manipulated by a person or a group in order to achieve something. This can be a result of intentional affective influence by a leader or team member. Suppose this person wants to convince the others of something, he may do so by sweeping them up in his enthusiasm. In such a case, his positive emotions are an act with the purpose of “contaminating” the others’ feelings. A different kind of intentional mood contagion would be, for instance, giving the group a reward or treat, in order to alleviate their feelings.
The discipline of organisational psychology researches aspects of emotional labour. This includes the need to manage emotions so that they are consistent with organisational or occupational display rules, regardless of whether they are discrepant with internal feelings. In regard to emotional contagion, in work settings that require a certain display of emotions, one finds oneself obligated to display, and consequently feel, these emotions. If superficial acting develops into deep acting, emotional contagion is the by-product of intentional affective impression management.
In Workplaces and Organisations
Intra-Group
Many organisations and workplaces encourage teamwork. Studies conducted by organisational psychologists highlight the benefits of work teams. Emotions come into play and a group emotion is formed.
The group’s emotional state influences factors such as cohesiveness, morale, rapport, and the team’s performance. For this reason, organizations need to take into account the factors that shape the emotional state of the work-teams, in order to harness the beneficial sides and avoid the detrimental sides of the group’s emotion. Managers and team leaders should be cautious with their behaviour, since their emotional influence is greater than that of a “regular” team member: leaders are more emotionally “contagious” than others.
Employee/Customer
The interaction between service employees and customers affects both customers’ assessments of service quality and their relationship with the service provider. Positive affective displays in service interactions are positively associated with important customer outcomes, such as intention to return and to recommend the store to a friend. It is the interest of organisations that their customers be happy, since a happy customer is a satisfied one. Research has shown that the emotional state of the customer is directly influenced by the emotions displayed by the employee/service provider via emotional contagion. But this influence depends on authenticity of the employee’s emotional display, such that if the employee is only surface-acting, the contagion is poor, in which case the beneficial effects will not occur.
Neurological Basis
Vittorio Gallese posits that mirror neurons are responsible for intentional attunement in relation to others. Gallese and colleagues at the University of Parma found a class of neurons in the premotor cortex that discharge either when macaque monkeys execute goal-related hand movements or when they watch others doing the same action. One class of these neurons fires with action execution and observation, and with sound production of the same action. Research in humans shows an activation of the premotor cortex and parietal area of the brain for action perception and execution.
Gallese says humans understand emotions through a simulated shared body state. The observers’ neural activation enables a direct experiential understanding. “Unmediated resonance” is a similar theory by Goldman and Sripada (2004).[citation needed] Empathy can be a product of the functional mechanism in our brain that creates embodied simulation. The other we see or hear becomes the “other self” in our minds. Other researchers have shown that observing someone else’s emotions recruits brain regions involved in:
(a) experiencing similar emotions; and
(b) producing similar facial expressions.
This combination indicates that the observer activates:
(a) a representation of the emotional feeling of the other individual which leads to emotional contagion; and
(b) a motor representation of the observed facial expression that could lead to facial mimicry.
In the brain, understanding and sharing other individuals’ emotions would thus be a combination of emotional contagion and facial mimicry. Importantly, more empathic individuals experience more brain activation in emotional regions while witnessing the emotions of other individuals.
Amygdala
The amygdala is one part of the brain that underlies empathy and allows for emotional attunement and creates the pathway for emotional contagion. The basal areas including the brain stem form a tight loop of biological connectedness, re-creating in one person the physiological state of the other. Psychologist Howard Friedman thinks this is why some people can move and inspire others. The use of facial expressions, voices, gestures and body movements transmit emotions to an audience from a speaker.
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Projective identification is a term introduced by Melanie Klein and then widely adopted in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Projective identification may be used as a type of defence, a means of communicating, a primitive form of relationship, or a route to psychological change; used for ridding the self of unwanted parts or for controlling the other’s body and mind.
According to the American Psychological Association, the expression can have two meanings:
In psychoanalysis, projective identification is a defence mechanism in which the individual projects qualities that are unacceptable to the self onto another person, and that person introjects the projected qualities and believes him/herself to be characterised by them appropriately and justifiably.
In the object relations theory of Melanie Klein, projective identification is a defence mechanism in which a person fantasises that part of their ego is split off and projected into the object in order to harm or to protect the disavowed part. In a close relationship, as between parent and child, lovers, or therapist and patient, parts of the self may, in unconscious fantasy, be forced into the other person.
While based on Freud’s concept of psychological projection, projective identification represents a step beyond. In R.D. Laing’s words, “The one person does not use the other merely as a hook to hang projections on. He/she strives to find in the other, or to induce the other to become, the very embodiment of projection”. Feelings which cannot be consciously accessed are defensively projected into another person in order to evoke the thoughts or feelings projected.
Experience
Though a difficult concept for the conscious mind to come to terms with, since its primitive nature makes its operation or interpretation seem more like magic or art than science, projective identification is nonetheless a powerful tool of interpersonal communication.
The recipient of the projection may suffer a loss of both identity and insight as they are caught up in and manipulated by the other person’s fantasy. One therapist, for example, describes how “I felt the progressive extrusion of his internalized mother into me, not as a theoretical construct but in actual experience. The intonation of my voice altered became higher with the distinctly Ur-mutter quality.” However, should one manage to accept and understand the projection, one will obtain much insight into the projector.
Projective identification differs from the simple projection in that projective identification can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby a person, believing something false about another, influences or coerces that other person to carry out that precise projection. In extreme cases, the recipient may lose any sense of their real self and become reduced to the passive carrier of outside projections as if possessed by them. This phenomenon has been noted in gaslighting.
Objects Projected
The objects (feelings, attitudes) extruded in projective identification are of various kinds – both good and bad, ideal and abjected.
Hope may be projected by a client into their therapist, when they can no longer consciously feel it themselves; equally, it may be a fear of (psychic) dying which is projected.
Aggression may be projected, leaving the projector’s personality diminished and reduced; alternatively it may be desire, leaving the projector feeling asexual.
The good/ideal parts of the personality may be projected, leading to dependence upon the object of identification; equally it may be jealousy or envy that are projected, perhaps by the therapist into the client.
Intensity
Projective identification may take place with varying degrees of intensity. In less disturbed personalities, projective identification is not only a way of getting rid of feelings but also of getting help with them. In narcissism, extremely powerful projections may take place and obliterate the distinction between self and other.
Types
Various types of projective identification have been distinguished over the years:
Acquisitive projective identification – where someone takes on the attributes of someone else – versus attributive projective identification, where someone induces someone else to become one’s own projection.
Projective counter-identification – where the therapist unwittingly assumes the feelings and roles projected outward by the patient, to the point where they identify or unwittingly act out this role within the therapeutic setting.
Dual projective identification – a concept introduced by Joan Lachkar. It primarily occurs when both partners in a relationship simultaneously project onto one another. Both deny the projections, both identify with those projections.
A division has also been made between normal projective identification and pathological projective identification, where what is projected is splintered into minute pieces before the projection takes place.
In Psychotherapy
As with transference and countertransference, projective identification can be a potential key to therapeutic understanding, especially where the therapist is able to tolerate and contain the unwanted, negative aspects of the patient’s self over time.
Transactional analysis emphasizes the need for the therapist’s “Adult” (an ego state directed towards an objective appraisal of reality) to remain uncontaminated if the experience of the client’s projective identification is to be usefully understood.
A prior study demonstrated how counsellors may identify and clinically use client projective identification. Additionally, the study specified that splitting and projective identification happen one after the other. Also, the three connected phenomena of transference, countertransference, and projective identification are addressed as the foundation for the therapist’s successful application of the self as a tool in treatment. This is a three-phase therapy procedure that highlights the significance of the timing of treatments.
Wounded Couple
Relationship problems have been linked to the way there can be a division of emotional labour in a couple, by way of projective identification, with one partner carrying projected aspects of the other for them. Thus one partner may carry all the aggression or all the competence in the relationship, the other all the vulnerability.
Jungians describe the resultant dynamics as characterising a so-called “wounded couple” – projective identification ensuring that each carries the most ideal or the most primitive parts of their counterpart. The two partners may initially have been singled out for that very readiness to carry parts of each other’s self; but the projected inner conflicts/division then come to be replicated in the partnership itself.
Responses
Conscious resistance to such projective identification may produce on the one side guilt for refusing to enact the projection, on the other bitter rage at the thwarting of the projection.
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The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Psychological Association that was established in 1965. It covers the fields of social and personality psychology. The editors-in-chief are Shinobu Kitayama (University of Michigan; Attitudes and Social Cognition Section), Colin Wayne Leach (Barnard College; Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes Section), and Richard E. Lucas (Michigan State University; Personality Processes and Individual Differences Section).
The journal has implemented the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines. The TOP Guidelines provide structure to research planning and reporting and aim to make research more transparent, accessible, and reproducible.
Contents
The journal’s focus is on empirical research reports; however, specialized theoretical, methodological, and review papers are also published. For example, the journal’s most highly cited paper, cited over 90,000 times, is a statistical methods paper discussing mediation and moderation.
Articles typically involve a lengthy introduction and literature review, followed by several related studies that explore different aspects of a theory or test multiple competing hypotheses. Some researchers see the multiple-experiments requirement as an excessive burden that delays the publication of valuable work, but this requirement also helps maintain the impression that research that is published in JPSP has been thoroughly vetted and is less likely to be the result of a type I error or an unexplored confound.
The journal is divided into three independently edited sections. Attitudes and Social Cognition addresses those domains of social behaviour in which cognition plays a major role, including the interface of cognition with overt behaviour, affect, and motivation. Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes focuses on psychological and structural features of interaction in dyads and groups. Personality Processes and Individual Differences publishes research on all aspects of personality psychology. It includes studies of individual differences and basic processes in behaviour, emotions, coping, health, motivation, and other phenomena that reflect personality.
Replicability
JPSP is one of the journals analysed in the Open Science Collaboration’s Reproducibility Project after JPSP’s publication of questionable research for mental time travel.
The journal refused to publish refuting replications performed by Ritchie’s team, in relation to an earlier article they published in 2010 that suggested that psychic abilities may have been involved (backward causality).
In Popular Culture
Non-fiction author Malcolm Gladwell writes frequently about findings that are reported in the journal.] Gladwell, upon being asked where he would like to be buried, replied “I’d like to be buried in the current-periodicals room, maybe next to the unbound volumes of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (my favorite journal).”
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In psychology, sublimation is a mature type of defence mechanism, in which socially unacceptable impulses or idealisations are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behaviour, possibly resulting in a long-term conversion of the initial impulse.
Sigmund Freud believed that sublimation was a sign of maturity and civilisation, allowing people to function normally in culturally acceptable ways. He defined sublimation as the process of deflecting sexual instincts into acts of higher social valuation, being “an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an ‘important’ part in civilized life.” Wade and Travis present a similar view, stating that sublimation occurs when displacement “serves a higher cultural or socially useful purpose, as in the creation of art or inventions.”
Nietzsche
In the opening section of Human, All Too Human entitled “Of first and last things”, Nietzsche wrote:
There is, strictly speaking, neither unselfish conduct, nor a wholly disinterested point of view. Both are simply sublimations in which the basic element seems almost evaporated and betrays its presence only to the keenest observation. All that we need and that could possibly be given us in the present state of development of the sciences, is a chemistry of the moral, religious, aesthetic conceptions and feeling, as well as of those emotions which we experience in the affairs, great and small, of society and civilization, and which we are sensible of even in solitude. But what if this chemistry established the fact that, even in its domain, the most magnificent results were attained with the basest and most despised ingredients? Would many feel disposed to continue such investigations? Mankind loves to put by the questions of its origin and beginning: must one not be almost inhuman in order to follow the opposite course?
Freud and Psychoanalytic Theory
In Freud’s psychoanalytical theory, erotic energy is allowed a limited amount of expression, owing to the constraints of human society and civilisation itself. It therefore requires other outlets, especially if an individual is to remain psychologically balanced. The ego must act as a mediator between the moral norms of the super-ego, the realistic expectations of reality, and the drives and impulses of the id. One method by which the ego lessens the stress that unacceptably strong urges or emotions can cause is through sublimation.
Sublimation (German: Sublimierung) is the process of transforming libido into “socially useful” achievements, including artistic, cultural, and intellectual pursuits. Freud considered this psychical operation to be fairly salutary compared to the others that he identified, such as repression, displacement, denial, reaction formation, intellectualisation, and projection. In The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), his daughter, Anna, classed sublimation as one of the major ‘defence mechanisms’ of the psyche.
Freud got the idea of sublimation while reading The Harz Journey by Heinrich Heine. The story is about Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach who cut off the tails of dogs he encountered in childhood and later became a surgeon. Freud concluded that sublimation could be a conflict between the need for satisfaction and the need for security without perturbation of awareness. In an action performed many times throughout one’s life, which firstly appears sadistic, thought is ultimately refined into an activity which is of benefit to mankind.
Sexual Sublimation
Sexual sublimation was according to Freud a deflection of sexual instincts into non-sexual activity, based upon a principle akin to the conservation of energy in physics. There is a finite amount of activity, and it is converted, in a mechanistic fashion like a mechanical engine, from sexual activity to non-sexual. One such example is the case of Wolf Man, a case in which a young boy’s sexual attraction to his father was redirected towards Christianity and eventually led the boy to obsessional neurosis in the form of uncontrollable sacrilegious reverence. Freud travelled to Clark University to speak about instances of sexual sublimation, but he was not wholly convinced of his own theories. 20th century psychological thought by the likes of Melanie Klein has largely relegated the idea and replaced it with subtler ideas. One such idea is that the sexual desires are not made totally non-sexual, but rather transformed into a more appropriate desire.
Although superficially valid, with anecdotal examples from non-psychologists of civilizations at large and specific great achievers repressing sexual urges (e.g. Renoir “painting with his cock”, Wayland Young stating that “love’s loss is empire’s gain”, Lawrence Stone’s view that Western civilisation has achieved so much because of sublimation, and the claims by biographers of many people from Higgins on Rider Haggard to Sinclair on George Grey), it is ill-defined[11] and comes with the caveats that it rarely happens in practice, that many things attributed to it are actually the results of something else, and that it is most definitely not some quasi-physical transfer of some sort of “sexual energy” in the modern psychoanalytical view but rather an internal thought process.
Jung
C.G.Jung argued that Freud’s opinion:
…can only be based on the totally erroneous supposition that the unconscious is a monster. It is a view that springs from fear of nature and the realities of life. Freud invented the idea of sublimation to save us from the imaginary claws of the unconscious. But what is real, what actually exists, cannot be alchemically sublimated, and if anything is apparently sublimated it never was what a false interpretation took it to be.
In the same article, Jung went on to suggest that unconscious processes became dangerous only to the extent that people repress them. The more people come to assimilate and recognise the unconscious, the less of a danger it becomes. In this view sublimation requires not repression of drives through will, but acknowledgement of the creativity of unconscious processes and a learning of how to work with them.
This differs fundamentally from Freud’s view of the concept. For Freud, sublimation helped explain the plasticity of the sexual instincts (and their convertibility to non-sexual ends) – see libido. The concept also underpinned Freud’s psychoanalytical theories, which showed the human psyche at the mercy of conflicting impulses (such as the super-ego and the id). In his private letters, Jung criticised Freud for obscuring the alchemical origins of sublimation and for attempting instead to make the concept appear scientifically credible:
Sublimation is part of the royal art where the true gold is made. Of this Freud knows nothing; worse still, he barricades all the paths that could lead to true sublimation. This is just about the opposite of what Freud understands by sublimation. It is not a voluntary and forcible channeling of instinct into a spurious field of application, but an alchymical transformation for which fire and prima materia are needed. Sublimation is a great mystery. Freud has appropriated this concept and usurped it for the sphere of the will and the bourgeois, rationalistic ethos.
Lacan
Das Ding
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s exposition of sublimation is framed within a discussion about the relationship of psychoanalysis and ethics within the seventh book of his seminars. Lacanian sublimation is defined with reference to the concept Das Ding (later in his career Lacan termed this objet petit a); Das Ding is German for “the thing” though Lacan conceives it as an abstract notion and one of the defining characteristics of the human condition. Broadly speaking it is the vacuum one experiences as a human being and which one endeavours to fill with differing human relationships, objects and experiences, all of which are used to plug a gap in one’s psychical needs. Unfortunately, all attempts to overcome the vacuity of Das Ding are insufficient in wholly satisfying the individual. For this reason, Lacan also considers Das Ding to be a non-Thing or vacuole.
Lacan considers Das Ding a lost object ever in the process of being recuperated by Man. Temporarily the individual will be duped by his or her own psyche into believing that this object, this person or this circumstance can be relied upon to satisfy his needs in a stable and enduring manner when in fact it is in its nature that the object as such is lost—and will never be found again. Something is there while one waits for something better, or worse, but which one wants, and again Das Ding “is to be found at most as something missed. One doesn’t find it, but only its pleasurable associations.” Human life unravels as a series of detours in the quest for the lost object or the absolute Other of the individual: “The pleasure principle governs the search for the object and imposes detours which maintain the distance to Das Ding in relation to its end.”
Lacanian Sublimation
Lacanian sublimation centres to a large part on the notion of Das Ding. His general formula for sublimation is that “it raises an object … to the dignity of The Thing.” Lacan considers these objects (whether human, aesthetic, credal, or philosophical) to be signifiers which are representative of Das Ding and that “the function of the pleasure principle is, in effect, to lead the subject from signifier to signifier, by generating as many signifiers as are required to maintain at as low a level as possible the tension that regulates the whole functioning of the psychic apparatus.” Furthermore, man is the “artisan of his support system”, in other words, he creates or finds the signifiers which delude him into believing he has overcome the emptiness of Das Ding.
Lacan also considers sublimation to be a process of creation ex nihilo (creating out of nothing), whereby an object, human or manufactured, comes to be defined in relation to the emptiness of Das Ding. Lacan’s prime example of this is the courtly love of the troubadours and Minnesänger who dedicated their poetic verse to a love-object which was not only unreachable (and therefore experienced as something missing) but whose existence and desirability also centred around a hole (the vagina). For Lacan such courtly love was “a paradigm of sublimation.” He affirms that the word ‘troubadour’ is etymologically linked to the Provençal verb trobar (like the French trouver), “to find”. If we consider again the definition of Das Ding, it is dependent precisely on the expectation of the subject to re-find the lost object in the mistaken belief that it will continue to satisfy him (or her).
Lacan maintains that creation ex nihilo operates in other noteworthy fields as well. In pottery for example vases are created around an empty space. They are primitive and even primordial artifacts which have benefited mankind not only in the capacity of utensils but also as metaphors of (cosmic) creation ex nihilo. Lacan cites Heidegger who situates the vase between the earthly (raising clay from the ground) and the ethereal (pointing upwards to receive). In architecture, Lacan asserts, buildings are designed around an empty space and in art paintings proceed from an empty canvas, and often depict empty spaces through perspective.
In myth, Pan pursues the nymph Syrinx who is transformed into hollow reeds in order to avoid the clutches of the god, who subsequently cuts the reeds down in anger and transforms them into what we today call panpipes (both reeds and panpipes rely on their hollowness for the production of sound).
Lacan briefly remarks that religion and science are also based around emptiness. In regard to religion, Lacan refers the reader to Freud, stating that much obsessional religious behaviour can be attributed to the avoidance of the primordial emptiness of Das Ding or in the respecting of it. As for the discourse of science this is based on the notion of Verwerfung (the German word for “dismissal”) which results in the dismissing, foreclosing or exclusion of the notion of Das Ding presumably because it defies empirical categorisation.
Empirical Research
A study by Kim, Zeppenfeld, and Cohen studied sublimation by empirical methods. These investigators view their research, published 2013 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, as providing “possibly the first experimental evidence for sublimation and [suggesting] a cultural psychological approach to defense mechanisms.”
Religious and Spiritual Views
As espoused in the Tanya, Hasidic Jewish mysticism views sublimation of the animal soul as an essential task in life, wherein the goal is to transform animalistic and earthy cravings for physical pleasure into holy desires to connect with God.
Different schools of thought describe general sexual urges as carriers of spiritual essence, and have the varied names of vital energy, vital winds (prana), spiritual energy, ojas, shakti, tummo, or kundalini.
In Fiction
One of the best-known examples in Western literature is in Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice, where the protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous writer, sublimates his desire for an adolescent boy into writing poetry.
In The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, sublimation is presented as the source of the Neo-Victorians’ dominance: “…it was precisely their emotional repression that made the Victorians the richest and most powerful people in the world. Their ability to submerge their feelings, far from pathological, was rather a kind of mystical art that gave them nearly magical power over Nature and over the more intuitive tribes. Such was also the strength of the Nipponese.”
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