Abstract Purpose Although most neuroscientists and physicians would argue against Cartesian dualism, Descartes's version of the psyche/soma divide, which has been controversial since he proposed it ...in the seventeenth century, continues to haunt contemporary neurological diagnoses through terms such as functional , organic , and psychogenic . Drawing on my own experiences as a person with medically unexplained seizures, I ask what this language actually means if all human experience has an organic basis. Methods Close reading of a textbook chapter on psychogenic seizures. Results I expose the author's unreflective embrace of psyche and soma as distinct entities, his inherent bias against illnesses labeled psychogenic, and the implicit sexism of his position. I further argue that even when a patient's symptoms are not alleviated, heightened self-consciousness and narrative framing can strengthen his or her sense of agency and have therapeutic benefits. Conclusion The ethical treatment of patients requires a respect for their stories.
Hustvedt reflects on Susan Sontag's lecture "On Classical Pornography," one of the five she delivered at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. She emphasizes that her adjective "classical" for ...pornography is something of a joke and that her definition of porn is unconventional: It is a literary form that must embody or act against the idea that lustful acts are inherently immoral. Unlike the erotic texts of China and India, she tells us, works that celebrate sexual joy, pornography pits virtue against vice in an ethical struggle. Furthermore, she argues that pornography partakes of a necessary distance: its readers do not enter the internal psychological reality of the characters.
The Real Story HUSTVEDT, SIRI
Salmagundi (Saratoga Springs),
10/2015
188/189
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Hustvedt offers his thoughts on the difference between writing fiction and memoirs. He opines that writing fiction takes place in a mental zone of free inventions that memoir does not, for the simple ...reason that when a person picks up a book labeled "memoir," she expects that the writer of the volume has told the truth. The question touches on the puzzling boundary between what one regards as the real and imaginary.
As science continues to explore the mysteries of the unconscious, two critical questions remain. First, can unconscious impulses, desires, and feelings be willfully raised to the level of the ...conscious self?, and, if so, would the unveiling of unconscious mechanisms lead to genuine self‐knowledge or empowerment? Second, can we methodically tap into the unconscious to gear ourselves along more creative lines? If the unconscious is a source of intuitive and creative inspiration, how might a more expansive understanding of consciousness help us to flourish? How can we harness the intuitive parts of ourselves to think “outside the box,” transcending the limitations of preconceived categories? And along those same lines, how would an expanded view of the unconscious frame our spiritual experiences or offer spiritual nourishment? Writer Siri Hustvedt, historian of psychology Sonu Shamdasani, and neuropsychologist Mark Solms will tackle everything from noetic experiences and the role of intuition to the phenomenon of peak experience and Jung's “collective unconscious.”
Visual artists Pablo Picasso, Max Beckmann, and Willem de Kooning all made comments about women, love and their work of art. Their words speak to an orientation or an idea, but those orientations and ...ideas are never complete. All three claim that there is a fundamental feeling relation between their inner states and the reality of the canvas, and in one way or another, an idea of womanhood haunts their creativity. Here, Hustvedt elaborates on how emotion affects the artists in creating their work of art.
In this essay, I propose that memory and the imagination partake of the same mental processes: that they are driven by emotion and often take narrative form. Through reflective self-consciousness, ...human beings are not bound to the phenomenal present. They can recall themselves in the past, imagine themselves in the future, and inhabit fictive realms. Borrowing William James's distinction between narrative thought and reasoning, as well as the difference between first- and third-person perspectives, I describe the varying approaches of fiction, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience to remembering and imagining. Conscious episodic memories are consolidated by emotion, but they are also reconsolidated-subject to Freud's "deferred action"-to fictionalizing over time. Story organizes the affective material of memory into a temporal, linguistic schema that is necessarily dialogical: "I" implies "you." As articulated representation, narrative recollection inevitably distances and cools past emotion. This is not true of involuntary and traumatic memories that are sensorimotor, affective replays of an event, are not codified in language, and cannot be located in a subjective time or space. Research into self-versus other-"processing" in the brain has largely failed to understand that at an explicit, representational level, there is no difference between memories and fantasies about self and other. Culling insights from Freud and research in neuroscience and phenomenology, I argue that a core bodily, affective, timeless self is the ground of the narrative, temporal self, of autobiographical memory, and of fiction and that the secret to creativity lies not in the so-called higher cognitive processes, but in dreamlike reconfigurations of emotional meanings that take place unconsciously.
PDF
