Polyglutamine (polyQ) diseases are genetically inherited neurodegenerative disorders. They are caused by mutations that result in polyQ expansions of particular proteins. Mutant proteins form intranuclear aggregates, induce cytotoxicity and cause neuronal cell death. Protein interaction data suggest that polyQ regions modulate interactions between coiled‐coil (CC) domains. In the case of the polyQ disease spinocerebellar ataxia type‐1 (SCA1), interacting proteins with CC domains further enhance aggregation and toxicity of mutant ataxin‐1 (ATXN1). Here, we suggest that CC partners interacting with the polyQ (...) region of a mutant protein, increase its aggregation while partners that interact with a different region reduce the formation of aggregates. Computational analysis of genetic screens revealed that CC‐rich proteins are highly enriched among genes that enhance pathogenicity of polyQ proteins, supporting our hypothesis. We therefore suggest that blocking interactions between mutant polyQ proteins and their CC partners might constitute a promising preventive strategy against neurodegeneration. (shrink)

At the end of his attack on my use of the psychoanalytic model for the interpretation of literature, Heller raises the question concerning what the task of the literary critic is or ought to be. His own "sketch of the Kleistean theme's historical ancestry and its later development," he says, seeks to deepen and enrich the reader's appreciation of Kleist's literary art, the artistry of his phrasing, the persuasiveness of his incidents, the conclusiveness of his examples." By implication he suggests (...) that my method does not have this end—that is, appreciation—for its goal. In this he is partially right. "Appreciation" in Heller's sense is not as directly a goal for me. But does Heller's method of intellectual history and literary relation meet his own criteria of deepening and enriching the reader's appreciation of Kleist? In his capsule treatment of Great Thinkers of the Western World from Plato to Marx, we learn that many writers besides Kleist treated Kleist's theme of man's fall from unconscious grace. What exactly does this tell us about Kleist's treatment of it? How does it deepen the reader's appreciation of Kleist's literary art, the artistry of his phrasing, the persuasiveness of his incidents? It doesn't. It isn't even about Kleist. Although Heller tells us that it is the "thought" and "imagery" which "make for the great distinction of the essay" , his evidence for this consists, in the case of the former, in his tracing the history of the essay's thought and, in the case of the latter, in his statements that Kleist's use of the puppet as the exemplar of the unselfconscious graceful being is "unusual" and "novel" and that his bear story, though it may lack "in immediate plausibility," "gains in making Kleist's point" and is "a memorable exemplar" of the "art of grotesque inventions that are capable of floating for quite a while above and between the comic and the serious before landing with scintillating effect in one domain or the other" . Margret Schaefer is a lecturer in the department of psychiatry at Northwestern University Medical School. She responds here to Erich Heller's "The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater; or, Psychology and the Misinterpretation of Literature" , in which he discussed her article, "Kleist's 'About the Puppet Theater,". (shrink)

The force of [Heinrich von] Kleist's story "On the Marionette Theatre" . . . derives from roots deeply sunk into the soil of the past. It is a novel variation on a theme the first author of which may well be Plato. For according to Plato the human mind has been in the dark ever since it lost its place in the community of Truth, in the realm, that is, of the Ideas, the eternal and eternally perfect forms, those now (...) unattainable models which man in his exile is able to see and recognize only as shadows or imperfect copies. And this Platonic parable of the damage suffered by man's soul and consciousness is not unlike the Fall as it is narrated in Genesis. The Fall was the consequence and punishment of man's free will that for the first time had asserted itself against the universal God and rejoiced in a consciousness and pleasure entirely its own—tragically its own; for man had to forsake the indwelling in the supreme Intelligence and thus the harmony between himself and Being as such. The reward for this betrayal was the embarrassment and shame of self-consciousness, the hard labor of maintaining himself in his state of separation, and, soon to follow, the murderous misdeeds of the self-will named Cain. Better to have no mind than a mind thus deprived and impoverished and cruel. Erich Heller, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, is the author of The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought; The Ironic Gentleman: Thomas Mann; The Artist's Journey into the Interior; and Franz Kafka. These books have also appeared in Germany in the author's own translations, and his Dir Wiederkehr der Unschuld [The return of innocence] was recently published there. See also: "Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality" by Murray Krieger in Vol. 1, No. 2; "Psychoanalysis and the Marionette Theater: Interpretation is Not Depreciation" by Margret Schaefer in Vol. 5, No. 1. (shrink)

I will return to the second point in a different context later; at this moment I will discuss only the issue raised by my pointing up the fact that the essay in question was written by someone in Professor Heller's field. What motivated me to make the statement was not my belief that the use of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of art should be restricted to certified psychoanalysts—indeed, I have always been a staunch advocate of the opposite view. My motive (...) for this, I assumed harmless, and not, of course, irrelevant, indiscretion was that I wanted to show that Professor Heller's critique of psychoanalysis was not broadly based, that his representative example was a piece that happened to have crossed his way, that he was not using the work of an established writer in the field that he was condemning. My statement that your essay is an unacceptable text in a sermon preaching against applied analysis is unrelated to the value of your article. Even if in the future it should turn out that your essay—as far as I know your first contribution to applied psychoanalysis—was the forerunner of a significant oeuvre that would put you into the class of the great contributors of psychoanalytic interpretations of literature, it is at this point not an acceptable text for a sermon against our field. Heinz Kohut, M.D., is Professorial Lecturer in Psychiatry at the University of Chicago, teacher and training analyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, and author of many influential works on the psychology of the self. His works include The Restoration of the Self, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders - which has appeared in German, French, and Italian translations - and a collection of his essays, Scientific Empathy and Empathic Science. His "Psychoanalysis and the Interpretation of Literature: A Correspondence with Erich Heller" was published in the Spring 1978 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Dear Professor Heller . . . Your paper had started out superbly. It was a great aesthetic and cognitive pleasure to follow you as you guided us through the intellectual history of the main idea of Kleist's essay, from Plato through the biblical Fall of Man, to Schiller, and Kierkegaard, and Kafka. Indeed the perceptive listener's experience was so satisfying that his disappointment was doubled when he came to realize that all this erudition and beauty had been displayed only in (...) order to serve as a contrast-providing background for the sharp delineation of a reductionistic explanation which you consider to be characteristic of psychoanalysis: the interpretation of the disturbance of man's naive, unselfconscious pre-Fall state as nothing more than a portrayal of sexual impotence—the reduction of a deep existential preoccupation to a case of phimosis. I am certain that the relief I felt when you then took up Freud's demonological-neurosis paper was not an idiosyncratic response on my part but an experience shared by many open-minded listeners in your psychoanalytic audience. Let us, therefore, disregard the "text" of your sermon and consider the substantial questions that you raised after you turned to Freud; these are to my mind the most central ones that you undertook to examine in your—despite its disappointing aspects—splendid address to us. Put into my own words, your most important question was this: What is the purpose of the psychoanalyst's efforts outside the clinical setting, in particular when his contributions take the form of a pathography? That is, To what end do analysts study the psychopathology of the creators of great works? I, too, have asked myself this question, and since you read my old essay "Beyond the Bounds of the Basic Rule" , you know some of my answers. But important basic questions are hardly ever answered once and for all; and I will, therefore, under the impact of your lecture, respond as if I had heard the question for the first time. Heinz Kohut, M.D., is Professorial Lecturer in Psychiatry at the University of Chicago and a teacher and training analyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. His works include The Restoration of the Self, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders—which has appeared in German, French, and Italian translations—, The Restoration of the Self and collection of his essays, Scientific Empathy and Empathic Science. His "A Reply to Margret Schaefer"" was published in the Spring 1978 issue of Critical Inquiry. See also: "Psychoanalysis and the Marionette Theater: Interpretation is Not Depreciation" by Margret Schaefer in Vol. 5, No. 1. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Discusses how the conscious self is created by the brain, explains brain structure, and explores the mind-body connection.

Publisher's Foreword As the present book is reissued, The American Mental Health Foundation celebrates its 86th anniversary. Organized in 1924, AMHF is ...

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Weltgebäude, Weltgesetze, Weltentwicklung" verfügbar.

Theories in the usual sense, as characterized by a language and a set of theorems in that language ("statement view"), are related to theories in the structuralist sense, in turn characterized by a set of potential models and a subset thereof as models ("non-statement view", J. Sneed, W. Stegmüller). It is shown that reductions of theories in the structuralist sense (that is, functions on structures) give rise to so-called "representations" of theories in the statement sense and vice versa, where representations (...) are understood as functions that map sentences of one theory into another theory. It is argued that commensurability between theories should be based on functions on open formulas and open terms so that reducibility does not necessarily imply commensurability. This is in accordance with a central claim by Stegmüller on the compatibility of reducibility and incommensurability that has recently been challenged by D. Pearce. (shrink)

Our brains are characterized by sensory pathways that are highly reflexive, allowing higher cortical centres to control neural activity patterns at peripheral sensory areas. This feature is characterized as an internal sketchpad and involves recursive interactions between central symbols and peripheral images. The process is assumed to be the fundamental mechanism underlying most cognitive functions. The paper attempts to portray the beginnings of art and language as natural extensions of these pre-existing internal processes, made possible by the greatly enlarged human (...) prefrontal cortex. It views these highly social activities as originating in subjective, private discourse between the emerging self and its externalized expressions. (shrink)

Several political philosophers have recently pointed out that current electoral democracies fail to facilitate accurate and reliable feedback on the performance of public officials. Rather than rejecting democracy as a hopeless ideal, we defend an institutional reform called Service Responsibility, which introduces a superior incentive structure that better aligns the interests of citizens and public officials. Service Responsibility requires increasing or decreasing the income of public officials insofar as they succeed or fail to achieve democratically chosen goals. Later, we consider (...) an alternative institutional scheme, recently proposed by Claudio López-Guerra: Piloting Responsibility. According to this alternative proposal, public officials must utilize a public provider whenever they seek out a basic service. We show that Piloting Responsibility fails to realize the democratic ideal because it generates a perverse incentive structure for public officials. We conclude that Service Responsibility outperforms both the status quo and Piloting Responsibility as an institutional scheme for ensuring competent governance and public justification. (shrink)