Wish-fulfilment as a singular means of satisfying ineluctable desire is a pivotal concept in classical psychoanalysis. Freud argued that it was the thread that united dreams, daydreams, phantasy, omnipotent thinking, neurotic and some psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions, art, myth, and religious illusions. The concept's theoretical exploration has been largely neglected within psychoanalysis since, but contemporary philosophers have recognised it as providing an explanatory model for much of the kind of irrational behaviour so problematic for psychiatry, social (...) psychology and the philosophy of mind. Although critically neglected in contemporary psychological and psychoanalytic thought, the concept remains clinically fundamental, under different labels: it encompasses the processes of omnipotent phantasy, symbolic or substitutive satisfaction, actualisation in transference and acting out, symptom formation and defenses such as projective identification. Wish-fulfilment can be shown to be a specifically psychoanalytic compartment of a common-sense psychological theory of action that illuminates not just clinical material but also the paradoxes of irrationality – such as weakness of will and self-deception – that preoccupy philosophers. The first half of this book develops a comprehensive and novel theory of wish-fulfilment, explores its radical implications for the structure of mind, and locates it against the backdrop of both contemporary psychoanalytic and philosophical thought. In the second half, the book applies the theory to illuminate important features of self-deception and delusion, religion, insanity defences, creative writing and the exclusion of mind and intention in the biological drift of modern psychiatry. The book will be essential to philosophers of mind, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, social theorists, and students in these disciplines; as well as readers interested in understanding how the mind works in mental illness, self-deception, religion, and creative writing. (shrink)

There has been a move in medicine towards patient-centred care, leading to more demands from patients for particular therapies and treatments, and for wish-fulfilling medicine: the use of medical services according to the patient's wishes to enhance their subjective functioning, appearance or health. In contrast to conventional medicine, this use of medical services is not needed from a medical point of view. Boundaries in wish-fulfilling medicine are partly set by a physician's decision to fulfil or decline a patient's (...) wish in practice. In order to develop a better understanding of how wish-fulfilling medicine occurs in practice in The Netherlands, a qualitative study (15 semistructured interviews and 1 focus group) was undertaken. The aim was to investigate the range and kind of arguments used by general practitioners and plastic surgeons in wish-fulfilling medicine. These groups represent the public funded realm of medicine as well as privately paid for services. Moreover, GPs and plastic surgeons can both be approached directly by patients in The Netherlands. The physicians studied raised many arguments that were expected: they used patient autonomy, risks and benefits, normality and justice to limit wish-fulfilling medicine. In addition, arguments new to this debate were uncovered, which were frequently used to justify compliance with a patient's request. Such arguments seem familiar from conventional medicine, including empathy, the patient–doctor relationship and reassurance. Moreover, certain arguments that play a significant role in the literature on wish-fulfilling medicine and enhancement were not mentioned, such as concepts of disease and the enhancement–treatment dichotomy and ‘suspect norms’. (shrink)

There is a growing tendency for medicine to be used not to prevent or heal illnesses, but to fulfil individual personal wishes such as wishes for enhanced work performance, better social skills, children with specific characteristics, stress relief, a certain appearance or a better sex life. While recognizing that the subject of wish-fulfilling medicine may vary greatly and that it may employ very different techniques, this article argues that wish-fulfilling medicine can be described as a cohesive phenomenon with (...) distinctive features. Following a few examples of well established wish-fulfilling medical practices and a brief definition of the phenomenon, both theoretical aspects and ethical implications of such practices are discussed and the question is raised how wish-fulfilling medicine should be evaluated from an ethical point of view. It is concluded that modern medicine is currently ill equipped to provide reasons why wish-fulfilling medicine should be banned or discouraged. The phenomenon of wish-fulfilling medicine serves as a prime example of the vagueness of the descriptive and the lack of decisive orientation of the normative categories employed in modern medicine. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis regards many previously inexplicable phenomena as wish?fulfilments, which have meaning inasmuch as they express the person's wishes or affects. This might appear to make such psychoanalytic explanations rather like ordinary explanations of conduct and to enlarge the area of intentional and possibly that of responsible behavior. But a critique of these psychoanalytic accounts will show that they are very unlike accounts in terms of ordinary notions of fulfilling or expressing wishes and that the psychoanalytic concept of wish?fulfilment (...) differs sufficiently from the ordinary one for it to be difficult to determine how to test psychoanalytic hypotheses concerning wish?fulfilment by merely considering the way in which we assess claims utilizing the ordinary notion. In fact, such a critique will show that for a certain type of claim regarding wish?fulfilments, psychoanalysts have not indicated ways of confirming or disconfirming such claims ? in the sense that they have not shown how to find any evidence which would support these claims to a higher degree than contrary or contradictory claims. After offering the first part of this critique, which is a comparison of psychoanalytic and ordinary notions of fulfilling and expressing wishes, some considerations concerning a second part of the critique are presented regarding the connection between the construct of psychic energy and that of wish?fulfilment. (shrink)

Die wachsende Nachfrage nach Anti-Aging-Medizin wirft die Frage auf, welche medizinischen Leistungen ein solidarisches Gesundheitssystem tragen sollte. Die deutsche Entscheidungspraxis beruft sich auf den Begriff der Krankheit. Im Blick auf Anti-Aging wäre demnach 1) zu klären, was der Krankheitsbegriff bedeutet, 2) zu prüfen, ob das Altern sich unter diesen Begriff subsumieren lässt, um 3) abzuleiten, inwieweit Anti-Aging-Maßnahmen zur Verfügung zu stellen sind. Dieses Prozedere führt jedoch zu keinem brauchbaren Ergebnis. Unter Berufung auf den Krankheitsbegriff allein ist der Umfang solidarischer Gesundheitsversorgung (...) nicht zu bestimmen. Allerdings lässt sich durch Reflexion auftretender Probleme ein gangbarer Entscheidungsweg aufzeigen. Er sieht eine faire Verständigung über die Frage vor, wie wir alt werden wollen. (shrink)

Questions concerning the parent/ patient’s autonomy are seen as one of the most important reasons for requesting Ethics Consultations. Respecting parent/ patient’s autonomy also means respecting the patient’s wishes. But those wishes may be controversial and sometimes even go beyond legal requirements. The objective of this case series of 32 ECs was to illustrate ethically challenging parent / patients’ wishes during the first stages of life and how the principle of patient’s autonomy was handled. The case series has a qualitative (...) retrospective approach. A documentary sheet was designed de novo and information was gained from EC minutes and medical charts. The cases originate from the following specialties: reproductive medicine, obstetrics and neonatology as well as two interdisciplinary cases. Through the structured EC minutes aspects of patient / parents’ wishes could be identified explicitly. Overall the patient / parents’ wishes were not supported in 61% of the cases. Central reasons for rejection of patient / parent wishes were mainly the protection of the best interest of the unborn / new-born child as well as the rejection of clinical approaches that were regarded as being substandard treatment. The study shows that treatment decisions in reproductive medicine, obstetrics and neonatology raise substantial ethical questions leading to the request for ethics consultation. The systematic case series presented here gives insight into the ethical reflection carried out to support the clinicians in their decision-making and counselling. It shows that clinicians, after using ethics consultation, make deliberate decisions that do not “automatically” fulfil the treatment requests of the patients and parents. (shrink)

This article considers why institutionalized commemoration of the Holocaust in the United Kingdom developed in the 1990s. It finds that the answer may have less to do with Jewish lobbies, or the influence of a “Holocaust Industry” and much, more to do with state political objectives in the ebb of the Cold War. It argues that by repackaging and ritualizing the Holocaust into a “sacred” event in which Western states themselves were absolved of responsibility but also sought to come to (...) Jewish rescue, it became an invaluable prop with which to promulgate Western values while at the same time acting as a moral alibi for interventions against anti-Western regimes. By focusing on the example of specifically British relations with Iraq, it is demonstrated that the moral high ground which Western states have attempted to milk from a Holocaust association is meretricious cant.Appalling and inhuman acts of genocide changed the course of history in the twentieth century. Millions of people perished or had their lives hideously damaged. This is an opportunity for us to recognize and act upon the lessons of the past. Our aim in the twenty-first century must be to work towards a tolerant and diverse, society which is based upon the notions of universal dignity and equal rights and responsibilities for all citizens. The Holocaust Memorial Day is a symbol of this. (shrink)

'Wolterstorff (2009) provides an important explanation to the question: What caused the surprising resurgence in philosophical theology that has occurred over the last 50 years—a resurgence that rivals its zenith in the Middle Ages? This article supplements that with a more fine-grained answer to the question. Recent discoveries in Arthur Norman Prior’s correspondence with J.J.C Smart and Mary Prior, between November 1953 and August 1954 on the possibility of necessary existence, demonstrates the importance of Prior’s discussion of the Barcan formulae (...) in Time and Modality (1957) for the resurgence of analytic theology. The correspondence establishes that Prior’s discovery of tense-logic, and his discussion of quantified tense-logic constituted the perfect opportunity for him to challenge key anti-metaphysical assumptions in analytic philosophy, from which four important consequences can be drawn for the resurgence of philosophical theology. First, Prior’s discussion of time and existence challenged the idea of Russell (1945) and Findlay (1948) on the logical status of a necessary existing being. Second, the discussion challenged the Analytic school’s view of analysis and gave Prior the opportunity to introduce a different perspective on the relationship between logic and metaphysics. Third, it gave Prior a good opportunity to demonstrate that the then-prevailing attitude towards medieval logic was wrong. Fourth, it made it possible for Prior to demonstrate that the highly surprising metaphysical conclusions of quantified tense-logic brings modern logicians into a discussion with the theologically minded medieval logicians. (shrink)

The most contentious tenet of Husserl's phenomenology of feelings is his conclusion that there is an analogy between axiological reason and theoretical reason. Simply, Husserl asserts that the axiological validation of feelings is analogical to the theoretical validation of judgments. While the scholarship has debated the merits of Husserl's analogy over the last 120 years, this paper presents a new accurate interpretation, because it is the first to highlight how Husserl develops this analogy by most often comparing the fulfillment (...) of judgments to the fulfillment of wish feeling intentions. Specifically, I examine how Husserl analogizes wish fulfillment to theoretical fulfillment at different times; in the 1901 Logical Investigations, in his 1908 Lectures on Ethics, and in 1910 manuscripts from Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. In light of this original interpretation, I conclude by arguing – contra popular readings – that Husserl does not over‐intellectualize feelings and their validation. (shrink)

ArgumentThe analogy between dream and film represents a central thread in the psychoanalytic discussion of cinema. Using examples taken from films created between 1900 and 1906, this paper develops a typology of dream scenes in early film. The basis for the proposed typology is provided by the dream knowledge in circulation toward the end of the nineteenth century. This knowledge was fed by a great variety of sources, some of them in the proximity of scientific research and some of them (...) far from it, including wish-fulfilling prognostic models and those based on the reservoir of memory or on bodily stimuli. By setting cinema in a context of contemporary dream psychologies, it is possible to trace the specific conditions under which the analogy between dream and cinema could become effective. (shrink)

Aristotle's account of external goods in Nicomachean Ethics I 8-12 is often thought to amend his narrow claim that happiness is virtuous activity. I argue, to the contrary, that on Aristotle's account, external goods are necessary for happiness only because they are necessary for virtuous activity. My case innovates in three main respects: I offer a new map of EN I 8-12; I identify two mechanisms to explain why virtuous activity requires external goods, including a psychological need for external goods; (...) and I show the relevance of Aristotle's distinction between wishing and choosing. On the view I attribute to Aristotle, our capacity to choose virtuously requires, first, that we wish for external goods (because virtue requires the right attitudes of evaluation) and, second, that these wishes are generally fulfilled (because the social consequences and psychological pain of unfulfilled wishes undermine our opportunity to act virtuously and to take pleasure in acting virtuously). I close with discussion of how Aristotelians should defend this approach. (shrink)

The paper aims at characterising self-deceptive hope, a certain kind of ir-rational hoping. The focus is on ordinary, intentional hope exclusively, i. e. on acts of hoping with a definite object (in contrast to dispositional forms of hope such as hopefulness). If a person S hopes in this way that p, she desires that p, she has a belief about the probability of p, and she affec-tively evaluates this probability in one of two ways: We can distinguish between anxious and (...) confident hope. Both may involve self-deception. In self-deception, desire tampers with belief, such that S’s belief that q is based on reasons which in turn are based on a distorted perception or mis-interpretation of evidence available to S. Self-deceptive hopes, I argue, are based on self-deceptive probability beliefs. We are particularly prone to such hoping when we attach great importance to what we hope for but are confronted with evidence which would give us reason to think that our hope cannot be fulfilled. Although even under these conditions there is no necessary but only a contingent connection between self-deception and hope, it is a very natural one. (shrink)

If one considers the Collingridge dilemma to be a dilemma awaiting a solution, one has implicitly abandoned a genuinely historical conception of the future and adopted instead a notion of the future as an object of technical design, the realisation of technical possibility or as wish-fulfilment. The definition of technology assessment (TA) as a successful response to the Collingridge dilemma renders it a technoscience that shares with all the others the conceit of being able, supposedly, to shape the future. (...) An alternative way of pursuing TA begins with an analysis of our age of technoscience, including its impoverished conception of the future. A critical appreciation of this conception gives rise to a forensics of wishing. (shrink)

In memoriam of Elliot Eisner, I wish to commend his book Educating Artistic Vision for advancing a distinction between contextual and essential arguments that has become classical to justify the purposes of the arts in education.1 Contextual arguments typically focus on transferring artistic qualities to nonartistic school areas and aim at achieving extrinsic outcomes such as higher academic results, a better school climate, improved cognitive development, and the like. Essential arguments are those that deal with intrinsic artistic qualities like (...) the development of aesthetic awareness, the exploration of feeling and emotion as ways of interpreting reality, the capacity to make good judgments in the absence of... (shrink)

This paper gives a sketch for a reconstruction of the Freudian unconscious, and an argument for its existence. The strategy followed attempts to side-step the extended debates about the validity of Freud's methods and conclusions, by basing itself on the desire/belief schema for understanding and explaining human behaviour – a schema neither folk psychology nor scientific psychology can do without. People are argued to have, as ideal types, two fundamental modes of fulfilling their desires: engaging with reality, and wishful thinking. (...) The first mode tries to acknowledge the constraints reality imposes on the satisfaction of desires, while the second mode tries to ignore, deny or disguise these constraints, inasmuch as they threaten to make such satisfaction impossible or unfeasible. Crucially, wishful thinking can be used so as to ignore or deny any desire that is incompatible with other strong desires. Thus we end up unaware of the existence or nature of some of our desires, of the fact that they are in flu enc ing our thought and be hav iour, and of the process our own mind has used to thwart awareness of them. Once we acknowledge this possibility, we are already seriously entertaining the possibility of the Freudian unconscious, or something fairly close to it. The more aware the subject is that her wishful thinking is just that, the less effective it becomes. Wishful thinking thus requires an unconscious; it is inimical to a clear, complete and unambiguous acknowledgement of its own status. Next, various aspects of my account (and Freud's) that allow a conception of the unconscious in non-Cartesian terms are emphasised: the unconscious is largely constituted by semantic phenomena of a particular type: forms of representation which would conceal their meaning even if the full light of 'attention', Cartesian 'consciousness' or 'introspection' were cast upon them. If wishful thinking is an integral part of mental life, philosophers and others wishing to “educate humanity” will have to proceed differently from what would have been appropriate had rational thought and action been the only available option for satisfying desires. Mankind cannot bear too much reality – T.S. Eliot S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.22(4) 2003: 361-377. (shrink)

This paper examines the surprisingly central role of sympathetic love within Margaret Cavendish’s philosophy. It shows that such love fulfils a range of metaphysical functions, and highlight an important shift in Cavendish’s account vis-a-vis earlier conceptions: sympathetic love is no longer given an emanative or mechanistic explanation, but is naturalized as an active emotion. It furthers investigate to what extent Cavendish’s account reveals a rift between the realm of nature and the realm of human sociability, and whether this rift really (...) prompts an inward turn, as some interpreters have suggested. (shrink)

In the _Nichomachean Ethics_, Aristotle defines three kinds of friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue. The characters in the films of Sean Baker fit into none of these categories. Friendship is central to all of Baker’s films, but it takes the non-Aristotelian form of “friends, no matter what,” which I interpret as a description of the aporia of friendship, of an impossible friend, or a friend in the realm of fantasy. In other words, friends are only friends when they resist everything (...) friends are supposed to do. Betrayal, lies, and complications sit at the heart of this new definition. One mechanism for this kind of friendship is _mourning_. Friends are only friends when friendship is mourned, or when it is part of a crypt, or a vault for losses that are too traumatic to confront fully, as set out in the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török, and developed by Laurence Rickels. This reading of mourning puts a particular spin on fantasy, for if fantasy is generally assumed to be about wish-fulfillment, then when fantasy reaches into the crypt for inspiration, it is retooled into a vehicle for confronting what is too hard to face. This is the function of friendship in Baker’s films: his friends are Judas figures going against their friends in order to keep their friendship alive. In _Tangerine_ (2015), two transgender sex workers in West Hollywood develop their friendship around a fight over a man. In _Starlet_ (2012), a young woman hides a secret from her elderly female friend, and this friendship is only saved when another actress betrays this secret. In these films, friendship is paradoxically formed by attempting to ruin friendship. Thought on fantasy and mourning will help in defining this type of non-Aristotelian friendship, as well as Freud’s work on the “ambivalence of feeling” from his writing on the First World War. (shrink)

I did not write this work merely with the aim of setting the exegetical record straight. My larger target is those contemporaries who -- in repeated acts of wish-fulfillment -- have appropriated conclusions from the philosophy of science and put them to work in aid of a variety of social cum political causes for which those conclusions are ill adapted. Feminists, religious apologists (including ``creation scientists''), counterculturalists, neoconservatives, and a host of other curious fellow-travelers have claimed to find (...) crucial grist for their mills in, for instance, the avowed incommensurability and underdetermination of scientific theories. The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time. (shrink)

Definition of the problemThe options of reproductive medicine are expanding. In some cases, it is unclear whether there is a medical indication for applying procedures of assisted reproduction or whether this application is wish-fulfilling. The distinction between medical indication and wish fulfilment depends on the concept of indication. Thus, the concept of indication has a special status in reproductive medicine. The distinction between medical indication and wish-fulfilling treatment is mostly based on implicit or explicit normative judgements, rather (...) than on mere clinical facts. The use of “indicated” suggests a purely empirical-clinical judgment, whereas the normative judgements behind the concept are concealed. The aim of this paper is to analyze the normative implications of indication in reproductive medicine. Therefore, the concept of indication and its special status within reproductive medicine is scrutinized.ArgumentsThe analysis shows that the normative implications of indication are tied to a sociocultural script of parenthood, which manifests in the regulations of reimbursement. This script encompasses societal views, norms, and role models, and can be described as “good parenting”. The script of good parenting acts as a regulatory instance that determines the access to procedures of assisted reproduction. It is based on traditional heteronormative concepts of marriage and family, and reserves reproduction exclusively for heterosexual, married couples.ConclusionThe sociocultural script of good parenting in reproductive medicine implies a contradiction: Assisted reproduction technologies provide the opportunity of reproduction for individuals outside the heteronormative frame, yet they are legitimized and limited by this exact frame. (shrink)

This chapter offers an overview of the phenomenological approach to delusions, emphasizing what Karl Jaspers called the "true delusions" of schizophrenia. Phenomenological psychopathology focuses on the experience of delusions and the delusional world. Several features of this approach are surveyed, including emphasis on formal qualities of subjective life and questioning of standard assumptions about delusions as erroneous belief. The altered modalities of world-oriented and self-oriented experience that precede and ground delusions in schizophrenia, especially the experiences of revelation that Klaus Conrad (...) termed the outer and inner apophany, are then discussed. The chapter first considers the famous "delusional mood", then the role of ipseity-disturbance. In both cases it is explained how delusions can develop out of these distinctive alterations of perception and feeling. The classic question of the understandability or comprehensibility of schizophrenic delusion, together with the related issues of wish-fulfillment and rationalizing motives are then considered. The chapter addresses the crucial but neglected issue of the felt reality-status of delusions or the delusional world, discussing derealization, "double bookkeeping", and "double exposure". The chapter concludes by discussing delusions typically found in paranoid and affective psychoses, and monothematic delusions found in certain organic conditions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Multidisciplinary Inquiry in the Study of Religion:The Next GenerationF. LeRon Shults (bio)Bob Neville and I began our introduction to Religion in Multidisciplinary Perspective: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Approaches to Wesley J. Wildman, by describing the latter as "the most original, audacious, creative, encyclopedic, and integrative thinker working within and across the fields of philosophy, ethics, theology, and the scientific study of religion in our time."1 Notice we did not (...) say "one of the most," but "the most." We stand by the claim. Active members of the Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought (IARPT), the professional association that sponsors the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy (AJPT), will be familiar with Wildman's work and not at all surprised by this assertion. For those less well acquainted with Wildman, and so understandably somewhat suspicious of such a claim, I hope that the essays in the special issue—and of course the Festschrift to which they respond—will diminish their skepticism and pique their curiosity.It was Wesley who invited me to join IARPT all those many years ago (when it was still HIARPT), a unique group of pragmatist and process philosophers, most of whom are (more or less religious) naturalists. It is an association of professionals and friends within which I have found a happy home. It has been a joy to be able to put together the book and this special issue to honor Wesley and promote further engagement with his work.It was a difficult task for Bob Neville and me to categorize Wildman's multidisciplinary corpus, but eventually we decided to invite contributors to approach his work from the general direction of one of three areas—philosophy, theology, or science—while simultaneously reaching across disciplines. In the aforementioned introduction, we offered a brief academic biography and summary of some of Wildman's most significant books for those not familiar with his writings. The three major parts of the volume, which I will summarize below, offer several scholarly engagements with Wildman's thought, each approaching it with a multidisciplinary perspective. For those unfamiliar with his philosophy, a good place to start for understanding his approach to philosophy is Religious Philosophy as [End Page 5] Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry.2 A good place to begin getting familiar with his approach to theology is In Our Image: Anthropomorphism, Apophaticism, and Ultimacy.3 A good place to get a feel for his approach to the scientific study of religion is Science and Religious Anthropology: A Spiritually Evocative Naturalist Interpretation of Human Life.4Whether in philosophy, theology, or the scientific study of religion, Wildman has not hesitated to "boldly go where no one has gone before." With the courage of a Captain Kirk and the intelligence of a Mr. Spock, not to mention the ingenuity of a Scotty and therapeutic skills of a Dr. McCoy, Wildman has trekked through the unknown (and in the case of theology, he would add, unknowable) conceptual space of more disciplinary systems that one would think possible. His intellectual voyages exploring strange new multidisciplinary worlds have been an inspiration to many in the next generation of scholars interested in engaging American religious and philosophical thought. People who know Wesley well also know how much energy he has committed to nurturing this next generation. The younger authors who have contributed to this special issue may not even get my references to the original Star Trek, which aired in the 1960s, and are perhaps even too young even to remember Star Trek: The Next Generation, which first aired in 1987, with Captain Jean Luc Picard and the gang. Well, one gets to a certain age and one has to come to terms with using the cultural references one has.In the film Star Trek Generations, which came out 30 years ago, the same year (indeed, the same month) that I met Wesley, Captain Picard finds himself facing another galactic crisis and (spoiler alert) ends up being pulled into the "Nexus," an extra-dimensional realm of wish fulfillment, where he finds Captain Kirk, long presumed dead, enjoying himself immensely. Kirk agrees to help Picard alter space-time and together they save the universe (again). OK, let... (shrink)

This chapter offers an overview of the phenomenological approach to delusions, emphasizing what Karl Jaspers called the "true delusions" of schizophrenia. Phenomenological psychopathology focuses on the experience of delusions and the delusional world. Several features of this approach are surveyed, including emphasis on formal qualities of subjective life and questioning of standard assumptions about delusions as erroneous belief. The altered modalities of world-oriented and self-oriented experience that precede and ground delusions in schizophrenia, especially the experiences of revelation that Klaus Conrad (...) termed the outer and inner apophany, are then discussed. The chapter first considers the famous "delusional mood", then the role of ipseity-disturbance. In both cases it is explained how delusions can develop out of these distinctive alterations of perception and feeling. The classic question of the understandability or comprehensibility of schizophrenic delusion, together with the related issues of wish-fulfillment and rationalizing motives are then considered. The chapter addresses the crucial but neglected issue of the felt reality-status of delusions or the delusional world, discussing derealization, "double bookkeeping", and "double exposure". The chapter concludes by discussing delusions typically found in paranoid and affective psychoses, and monothematic delusions found in certain organic conditions. (shrink)

Though it is acknowledged that Nietzsche read Ludwig Feuerbach, little attention has been given to the significance of Feuerbach’s anthropological re-imagination of religion for the trajectory of Nietzsche’s own vision for liberated humanity, the Übermensch. For Feuerbach, the Christian religion represents a form of wish-fulfillment and subconscious worship of the human being as divine, where many of the presuppositions of orthodox Christianity (monotheism, human fallenness, other-worldliness, etc.) only impede human flourishing. The acknowledgement of the psychological damage wrought by (...) the scheme and implications of Christian metaphysics is, for Feuerbach and Nietzsche alike, a necessary step in liberating humans from their own self-imposed shackles and enabling the human spirit to actualize its latent potentialities. This paper aims to identify Feuerbachian themes that Nietzsche appropriates for his own purposes in Thus Spake Zarathustra, attending to Nietzsche’s early reading of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841) during a key period of his intellectual development (1861–1863), and arguing that Feuerbach’s impact on Nietzsche is far more subtle and profound than commonly recognized. (shrink)

The solipsist, on the analogy of our dream-experience, imagines a higher mode of selfhood or spirit to whom the world is like a dream; his own self is a lower or deluded mode of this selfhood and to it the world appears as real. Thus objectivity appearing to the lower self is illusory and contingent, not ultimate. This analogical argument for a higher self, as against an alien God, has this counter-argument. In dreams I have unpleasant experiences because of certain (...) external causes, such as physiological and psychological. But what compels my higher self to have the unpleasant dreams that are my waking experiences of life? In other words, why cannot my higher self have nothing but rosy dreams when there cannot be anything else than itself to force on it bad ones? The answer to this is that in our dreams and fantasies we do not have unpleasant experiences due to external causes only, but also due to our inherent love of experience for its own sake. Our dreams are our wish-fulfilments too. We love to have all sorts of experiences, to taste all kinds and shades of emotion. Thirst for passions, curiosity after the unknown, and adventure for the strange and the new mark our empirical self. So it is not absurd to conceive the higher self fashioning its dreams, our waking experiences, as a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant elements rich in variety and complexity. And just as my empirical self is said to enjoy the experiences of my dreams, so this higher self may be said to enjoy his dreams, my waking experiences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comic RomanceBenjamin La FargeIOn the surface, it would seem that nothing could be more different from comedy than romance. Comedy deflates, romance inflates. Comedy is realistic, romance fantastical. Comedy reduces, romance elevates. Comedy is democratic, romance heroic. Yet there are underlying similarities. Both involve a conflict between destructive and restorative impulses. In both, appearances are typically mistaken for reality, and both end happily. Above all, both are governed by (...) a structure of illogical logic that generates laughter in one and fantasy in the other.The generic differences between comedy and romance are crucial to a proper understanding of their functions. Comedy celebrates the renewal of life, the relation of man to woman and of man to man, in a spirit of tolerant acceptance, while romance celebrates a narcissistic dream of the self. If the former is best enjoyed in a crowded theater, the latter is usually enjoyed in solitude. Romance is a fiction of wish fulfillment. Since wishful thinking is generally understood as childish, romance is often regarded as a poor cousin among literary genres, haughtily dismissed by highbrows who associate it with the infantile pleasures of their childhood reading and with lowbrow fiction in general. This is precisely why so many sophisticated readers are reluctant to grant science fiction and other forms of fantasy any enduring literary value. In their view the pleasures of such works can not be taken seriously.Yet those childhood pleasures have a lasting appeal that lingers in the mind of every adult. There must be few grown readers who do not harbor a special fondness for the first heroes and heroines they encountered in their favorite childhood stories. Many of those heroes possess [End Page 18] some magical power; and when they place that power in the service of justice, especially the justice of revenge, their appeal is irresistible. I have seen grown men, armed and dressed for battle, avidly reading Superman comics. What stirred them, as it stirred many educated men and women in their childhood, was the spectacle of an omnipotent hero fighting to overcome the wrongs of this world.Even if our sentimental memory of these heroic figures is nothing more than nostalgia for irrecoverable pleasures, their initial impact may be seen as having a formative influence on a child's expectations, as many commentators have thought. In either case, they are all descended from a venerable tradition of literary figures. Superman himself is a direct descendant of Sherlock Holmes, who comes from a long line of English heroes going back to Robin Hood and Merlin, each of whom is involved in righting some injustice. Ultimately, all of them are descended from Odysseus, who reclaimed his rightful kingdom, after an absence of twenty years, by murdering his wife's suitors.Romance, like comedy, is a conflict between destructive and restorative impulses, and these impulses are embodied in the characters that inhabit this dream fiction.1 Like comic characters, the characters of romance evoke in us the same responses of wish and fear, and like comedy itself romance builds toward a catharsis of those two emotions. To achieve that catharsis, romance requires our "willing suspension of disbelief" (as Coleridge put it so memorably), which we have no difficulty in granting, provided only that the story is skillfully told. What we want from romance is the fulfillment of the wishes it arouses; what we get from their fulfillment is the pleasure of story-for-the-sake-of-story. It is this pleasure, in fact, that constitutes the basic, generic purpose of romance.The difference between the two genres, however, can be seen in the kinds of wish and fear they evoke in us, for unlike comedy the feelings of wish and fear evoked by romance are uncomplicated by ambivalence. We may wish to experience the destructive impulse vicariously through the protagonist, but only in order to see him triumph in the end. We are so entirely sympathetic to his enterprise that we cannot possibly wish for his destruction. If he is destroyed, as in the case of Tristan, the hero of the eponymous medieval romance, we are forced to recognize that the love potion he drank with Isolde was his... (shrink)

Recent neuropsychological data indicating that an absence of dreaming follows lesions of frontal subcortical white matter have been interpreted by Solms as supportive of Freud's wish-fulfillment, disguise-censorship dream theory. The purpose of this commentary is to call attention to Solms's commitment to Freud and to challenge and contrast his specific arguments with the simpler and more complete tenets of the activation-synthesis hypothesis. [Hobson et al.; Nielsen; Solms].

Recent philosophical work attempts to understand irrational acts on the model of practical reasoning. Such acts are regarded as intelligible in the light of ordinary propositional attitudes which are nevertheless conjoined in a way that explains the irrationality. It is here argued that some irrational acts cannot be so understood; that they are not actions, per se; and that Freud’s notion of “primary process”, particularly in its emphasis on hallucinatory wish-fulfillment and on what he calls “omnipotence of thought”, (...) provides a useful description of such acts. Where hallucinatory wish-fulfillment (or phantasy) is operative, an anxiety or need causes an agent to see the world as one in which the anxiety-provoking state does not exist or has- somehow been dealt with satisfactorily. The need or lack is not acknowledged, as it is when one can properly speak of desire and of a reasoning that attempts to implement it. (shrink)

Of the topics found in psychoanalytic theory it is Freud's philosophy of mind that is at once the most contentious and enduring. Psychoanalytic theory makes bold claims about the significance of unconscious mental processes and the wish-fulfilling activity of the mind, citing their importance for understanding the nature of dreams and explaining both normal and pathological behaviour. However, since Freud's initial work, both modern psychology and philosophy have had much to say about the merits of Freudian thinking. Developments in (...) psychology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis raise new challenges and questions concerning Freud's theory of mind. This book addresses the psychoanalytic concept of mind in the 21st century via a joint scientific and philosophical appraisal of psychoanalytic theory. It provides a fresh critical appraisal and reflection on Freudian concepts, as well as addressing how current evidence and scientific thinking bear upon Freudian theory. The book centres upon the major concepts in psychoanalysis, including the notion of unconscious mental processes and wish-fulfilment and their relationship to dreams, fantasy, attachment processes, and neuroscience. (shrink)

A minority position is presented in which evidence will be cited from the Hobson, Solms, Revonsuo, and Nielsen target articles and from other sources, supporting major tenets of Freud's theory of dreaming. Support is described for Freud's view of dreams as meaningful, linked to basic motivations, differing qualitatively in mentation, and wish-fulfilling. [Hobson et al.; Nielsen; Revonsuo; Solms].

Interventions in the human germline have been regarded as a red line in genetic engineering up to now. However, with the recent progress in genome editing techniques, first and foremost CRISPR-based methods, the tide seems to be turning. The therapeutic benefits in particular are brought forward as an argument in favor of germline genome editing. According to this view, the main benefit of GGE is disease prevention. The procedure could be used to prevent monogenetic conditions for which no treatment is (...) available so far. This leads many commentators to the view that the benefits of GGE outweigh the risks. In this article, I examine the status and ethical implications of GGE as a means of disease prevention. I intend to show that the notion of GGE as disease prevention is only true for one specific application. Instead of being preventive treatments, most applications of GGE are advanced techniques of assisted reproduction. As such, they can be thought of as wish-fulfilling medicine, that is the use of medical techniques for non-medically indicated purposes. Thus, it is necessary to reconsider the risk-benefit analysis of GGE for most of its applications. (shrink)

The primary narrative problem of the analyst is, then, not how to tell a normative chronological life history; rather, it is how to tell the several histories of each analysis. From this vantage point, the event with which to start the model analytic narration is not the first occasion of thought—Freud's wish-fulfilling hallucination of the absent breast; instead, one should start from a narrative account of the psychoanalyst's retelling of something told by an analysand and the analysand's response to (...) that narrative transformation. In the narration of this moment of dialogue lies the structure of the analytic past, present, and future. It is from this beginning that the accounts of early infantile development are constructed. Those traditional developmental accounts, over which analysts labored so hard, may now be seen in a new light: less as positivistic sets of factual findings about mental development and more as hermeneutically filled-in narrative structures. The narrative structures that have been adopted control the telling of the events of the analysis, including the many tellings and retellings of the analysand's life history. The time is always present. The event is always an outgoing dialogue. Roy Schafer is clinical professor of psychology and psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College, adjunct professor of psychology at New York University, and a supervising and training analyst at Columbia University's Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He is the author of A New Language for Psychoanalysis, Language and Insight, and Narrative Actions in Psychoanalysis: Narratives of Space and Narratives of Time. (shrink)

Among objections to Christian belief, we can distinguish between de facto objections and de jure objections, i.e., between those that claim that Christian belief is false and those that claim that Christian belief, whether or not true, is at any rate unjustifiable, or rationally unjustified, or irrational, or not intellectually respectable, or in some other way rationally unacceptable. In Chs. 3 and 4, I argued that no viable de jure objection to Christian belief can be developed in terms of justification (...) or rationality ; in this chapter, I turn to the objections offered by Freud and Marx, objections best understood in terms of warrant. At the heart of the criticism of religious belief due to Freud and Marx is the claim that religious belief is not produced by cognitive faculties that are functioning properly and aimed at truth: according to Freud, religious belief arises from the psychological mechanism of wish fulfillment, while according to Marx, religious belief is produced by cognitive faculties malfunctioning due to a perversion in the social structure. After an initial examination of these objections, I briefly recapitulate the account of warrant I proposed in Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function. I then point out that the criticisms of Freud and Marx amount to the objection that religious belief lacks warrant; in the next chapter, I evaluate this objection. (shrink)

There are religious thinkers of Kierkegaard's ilk who concede that their belief in an afterlife is the expression of a wish and an offense to the understanding. Freud could not agree more. The collision that this essay plots comes when a Freud and a Kierkegaard try to decide what the individual is to do with such inherently human, unrealistic desires. Freud urges us to forsake all wish?fulfilling thoughts of everlasting life; however, this requires nothing less than the acceptance (...) of imminent, everlasting death. This is a difficult thought to think I half argue, half insist. The question is raised as to whether or not psychoanalysis can help us come to terms with the reality it compels us to face. A negative conclusion is reached. (shrink)

In a reconstruction of the theories of Freud and Klein, Sebastian Gardner asks: what causes irrationality, what must the mind be like for it to be irrational, to what extent does irrationality involve self-awareness, and what is the point of irrationality? Arguing that psychoanalytic theory provides the most penetrating answers to these questions, he rejects the widespread view of the unconscious as a 'second mind', in favour of a view of it as a source of inherently irrational desires seeking expression (...) through wish-fulfilment and phantasy. He meets scepticism about psychoanalytic explanation by exhibiting its continuity with everyday psychology. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay examines Satyajit Ray’s children’s film Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne to interrogate the ways it signals the utopian. Contending that its utopian desire manifests through the trope of wish-fulfillment, it illuminates the trope’s centrality in the film’s imagination and articulation of freedom. Moreover, the essay suggests that the film’s utopianism is also anchored in its irrealist aesthetics. Engaging with the film’s figuration of ghosts and its violation of the narrative structure of the real, the essay illuminates (...) how these formal features inform, and are informed by, a utopian desire. Furthermore, the essay notes that despite its inherent utopianism, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne fails to resolve some of the more obdurate social contradictions in its diegetic world, especially around questions of class, gender, and caste. Arguing that these “failures” are in keeping with its utopian spirit, I suggest they draw our attention to the imperfections of our real conditions of existence and flag the limits of textual utopianism. In so doing, they refer negatively to the social field beyond pointing to the abiding importance of class struggle as the ultimate agent of transformative social change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.4 (2002) 641-644 [Access article in PDF] Erich Segal. The Death of Comedy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. xiv + 589 pp. Cloth, $35. "In a grand tour of comic theater over the centuries," says the jacket blurb, "Erich Segal traces the evolution of the classical form from its beginnings... to Samuel Beckett. With fitting wit, profound erudition lightly worn, and instructive [End Page (...) 641] examples from the mildly amusing to the uproarious, his book fully illustrates comedy's glorious life cycle from its first breath to its death in the Theater of the Absurd." I agree, in part: It's a grand tour, after the fashion of Segal's Dionysian Ivy-League lectures, mixing pleasure with instruction and reminding the reader of comedy's changing devices, delights, and powers in the different periods and locales in which Segal has made himself comfortably at home. He doesn't, of course, "fully illustrate"—and I don't think he's gotten comedy's "life cycle" quite right, especially that titular death. Rival comedy tour guides like myself will question this or that judgment call, especially in their specialties (and still more when their own supremely valuable writings go unacknowledged). Yet there is much to praise in this highly readable, highly entertaining book, which I shall happily put on the reserve shelf next time I teach Honors 28 ("Comedy and Satire") to my laughter-loving sophomores and juniors at UNC.Segal's first 250 pages, more than half the book, take us from comedy's hypothetical beginnings in holiday fun and revelry to Terence's beleaguered Hecyra. To the usual etymologies of "revel-" and "country-song" (from komos and kome) he adds the less familiar "nightsong" (from koma, "sleep"), anticipating the prominent place of dreamlike disguises, confusions, and misadventures in comedy and in the human unconscious as explored by Freud. In subsequent chapters, Segal sketches the rise and fall of Old Comedy, which reaches new heights in the imaginatively playful erections of Aristophanes' Acharnians, Peace, and Birds, thenceforth declining towards Middle Comedy as sex gives way to money, Phales to Plutus. A chapter on Euripides' Ion entitled "The Comic Catastrophe" (why not "Eucatastrophe"?) provides a helpful bridge to the familial concerns and dramatic conventions of the New Comedy of Menander. From there, pivoting on Plautus and Terence, Segal follows "the evolution and transmutations of the classical literary form" (256), from Machiavelli and Marlowe, through Shakespeare, Molière, Jonson, Wycherley, and Beaumarchais, to what he regards as its foul and unnatural murder by the Surrealists and Absurdists of the last century—even as the beginning of Beckett's Waiting for Godot ironically completes a great circle by recalling the beginning of Aristophanes' Birds.Through all this, Segal keeps up a good, brisk pace. He chooses his plays well, discussing them with a skillful mix of plot summary, paraphrase, quotation (the good, clear translations are his own), and lively running commentary. As classicists, we readers of AJP will have our professional quibbles, our personal bones to pick (some of them juicy) about Aristophanes' Clouds (underrated by Segal), say, or Terence's borrowings from Plautus (which he plays down); but we are amateurs, too, more easily pleased when it comes to Shakespeare or Molière. Here, two of Segal's leitmotifs seem most effective and affecting: First, the dreamlike movement of events in Comedy of Errors (after Menaechmi, but we should add Amphitruo for the twice-doubling) and in Twelfth Night, drifting out of shipwreck, through confusion of identity approaching nightmare and madness, to the komos and gamos of festive comedy—or is it Freudian wish-fulfillment?; second, the sad clown or playwright, poor old cuckolded Molière, pushing to his life's very [End Page 642] end the comic enactments of cuckoldry, sickness, aging, and (near) death. Which reminds me, painfully, of what a difference it would make to our overly naive or sophisticated readings of Aristophanes or Terence if we knew more, even a little more, about their life and work than the usual, all too meager hearsay.Like his beloved Plautus, Segal... (shrink)

Both early and later forms of Buddhism developed a set of arguments to demonstrate that the self is an illusion. This article begins with a brief review of some of the arguments but then proceeds to show that these arguments are not themselves sufficient to dispel the illusion. It analyzes three ways in which the illusion of self manifests itself – as wish fulfillment, as a cognitive illusion, and as a phenomenal illusion. With respect to this last, the (...) article reviews some recent developments in cognitive neuropsychology and neuroscience to discuss the way in which the phenomenal illusion of self is encoded within our brain processes. This article also considers the way in which the illusion of self is constructed through social interaction, by episodic memory, and by narrative construction. Finally, it focuses on how the illusion of self developed as an evolutionary necessity to make it possible for the human organism to navigate physical and social reality; and that it continues to be useful today. This poses a dilemma for the Buddhist soteriological project of extinguishing the illusion of self. Specifically, while it is possible to develop a non-self perspective though the continued practice of vipassanā, it is not possible to maintain it consistently. The article concludes that even fully enlightened individuals must sometimes oscillate between a non-self perspective and a self-perspective and suggests an analogy between this oscillation and what occurs in the Kanizsa square illusion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Only a Wet Dream? Hope and Skepticism in Horace, Satire 1.5Kenneth J. ReckfordLong enjoyed as an entertainment piece, Horace’s “Trip to Brundisium” has continued to baffle its readers by recounting trivialities while ignoring politics. A brief, tactful hint at great affairs is quickly abandoned:huc venturus erat Maecenas optimus atque Cocceius, missi magnis de rebus uterque legati, aversos soliti componere amicos. hic oculis ego nigra meis collyria lippus illinere. interea (...) Maecenas advenit...(S. 1.5.27–31)In his first hic ego (7), Horace missed dinner because of stomach trouble. In the second (30), he misses Maecenas’ arrival—and its meaning—because of eye trouble. Is he unable to see what is going on around him? 1Horace’s persona in Satires 1.5 is well crafted: the naive, good-humored traveling companion, concerned primarily with his own intrusive comforts and discomforts. He likes good food, drink, and sleep, good health and good company, and he especially enjoys his friends: nil ego contulerim iucundo sanus amico (44). He was taken along, it would appear, rather passively from the first (egressum magna me accepit Aricia Roma), on a mission that had something to do with “reconciling [End Page 525] friends” who had fallen out. That is all he knows, and all he needs to know. 2We may well suspect that Horace was keeping a diplomatic silence, that Maecenas confided in him, here and elsewhere, precisely because he did not have a “leaky ear.” 3 He would be teasing, then: teasing prospective readers who would suspect that he was withholding privileged information with intent to annoy, and (rather beyond his intent?) teasing modern scholars who cannot even take the satire’s date for granted, let alone follow the diplomatic maneuvers of Octavian and Antony in 38-37 B.C. 4 If we follow Horace’s lead, all those amusing particulars that render the political picture so opaque convey us insistently into the “little world” of poetry, friendship, and simple human satisfactions. It is tempting to confine our attention to this “little world,” accepting Horace at face value as an amiable entertainer, with brief excursions, perhaps, into comparing the esthetics of his narrative with the reconstructed narrative of the casually autobiographical Lucilius—an attempt that, from insufficient evidence, must also end in frustration. But there is more. I propose here that the poem is both more public and more private than it seems. Reading between the lines, though without abusing allegory, we find Horace deeply implicated in issues of war and peace. Through the distorting lens of the satiric and comic imagination he portrays how a sensitive and thoughtful person might waver between hope for a peaceful, even “friendly” resolution of conflict and skepti-cal awareness of the gap between personal wish-fulfillment (the “wet [End Page 526] dream” of my title) and political reality. Yet this same wavering, and Horace’s consequent, very human vacillation between emotional involvement with Rome and Epicurean disengagement, are the stuff of which genuine poetry—and, consistently over time and through different genres, Horatian poetry—is made.My argument focuses on three aspects of Satire 1.5: the theme of amicitia, private and public; the agon, or insult-match between Sarmentus the scurra and Messius Cicirrus; and the “wet dream” and “failed miracle” sequences toward the end. But first, because Horace’s satires are in part exploratory, like all good poetry, and because meanings notoriously shift as a work progresses in time and is made available to different audiences or circles of readers, I begin with a hypothetical framework consisting of (1) the occasion and first plan, (2) the sketching-out and refining of the satire, (3) its first reading(s) to friends, and (4) its first publication in book form. Further questions of reader reception and the organization of the libellus are deferred until the close of the essay.Hypothetical Stages Of Composition And Reception(1) The poem is conceived. We begin with the happy conjunction of two opportunities (kairoi), Roman and Horatian. The larger kairos involves the diplomatic mission of 37, a renewed attempt to prevent (or postpone) conflict between Octavian and Antony, to settle their differences, and to provide... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Jesus the World-Protector:Eighteenth-Century Gelukpa Historians View Christianity1Michael J. SweetThe assumption that religion was so seamlessly woven into non-Western and preindustrial cultures that it was not even distinguished as a separate entity, let alone regarded as an object for study, has been a commonplace among Western scholars of religion for some decades.2 From this point of view, which can be broadly characterized as postmodernist and postcolonialist, the concept of religion (...) "is not a native category... it is a category imposed from outside... it is the other... colonialists who are solely responsible for the content of the term."3 This is a somewhat reductionistic and Eurocentric perspective that ignores the universal human capacity to empathically understand other belief systems.One counterexample to this school of thought is found in the works of three eighteenth-century religious historians, all of whom were learned monks in the Gelukpa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism: Gombojab (Mgon po Skyabs, late seventeenth century–after 1766),4 Sumba Khembo (Sum pa Mkhan po Yes shes dpal 'byor, 1704–1776), and Tuken (Thu'u Bkwan Blo bzang Chos kyi Nyi ma, 1737– 1802), authors of The History of Buddhism in China, The Auspicious Wish-Fulfilling Tree,5 and The Crystal Mirror,6 respectively. These scholars had clear conceptions of their own and other religious systems (Tib.: chos lugs), and compared to earlier Tibetan accounts they present relatively tolerant evaluations of other religious philosophies—for example, Chinese Buddhism, Daoism, and the Literati Tradition (Ru jiao, "Confucianism")—while asserting the superiority of the Gelukpa form of Tibetan Buddhism.7As a case in point, we will see how they describe and evaluate Christianity, a religion that was quite foreign to them and that they appear to have understood only imperfectly. Earlier Tibetan Buddhist religious histories, of which the best-known are the Blue Annals of 'Gos Lotsawa and Bu ston's "History of the Dharma," are immensely valuable sources, but they are more parochial in their range of interest than those of the eighteenth-century Tibeto-Mongol scholars.8 For the earlier historians Indo-Tibetan Buddhism was the only religious system worth serious consideration, and Chinese Buddhism, Indian non-Buddhist religious philosophies, Bon, [End Page 173] and Islam were dealt with in a polemical or (especially in the case of Islam) a frankly hostile fashion. Something changed in the eighteenth century that produced works closer to modern comparative religion than to medieval heresiography.A major motive for this shift was surely the triumph of the Manchu Qing dynasty, which by the mid-eighteenth century had incorporated Tibet and Mongolia definitively into its sphere. Thus, the horizon of the Tibeto-Mongol intelligentsia widened to include the vast Manchu empire, whose leadership in its turn was becoming increasingly aware of other Asian societies and of the European colonial powers. I believe it is significant that Sumba Khembo, Tuken, and Gombojab were all of Mongol ethnicity, the first two from Amdo and the last from Mongolia; they were able to combine an encyclopedic mastery of Tibetan Buddhist texts and ritual with the greater objectivity available to people stemming from the geographical and cultural periphery of that tradition. All three of them were exposed to the cosmopolitan world of imperial Beijing, where they had ample opportunity to meet followers of non-Buddhist religions of a wide range of ethnicities.9By the mid-eighteenth century there were four Catholic churches in Beijing, serving thousands of Chinese Christian converts. Dozens of European priests were employed by the imperial court as well.10 The prevailing syncretic view of the three major Chinese religious philosophies (sanjiao)—Buddhism, Daoism, and the Literati Tradition—as being mutually complementary,11 prevailed in the capital. This is the view that is approvingly cited by Tuken: "there are three great traditions (lugs srol) which clarify the ultimate nature of things, the Literati Tradition, Daoism, and Buddhism."12In turning to these scholars' treatment of Christianity, we find the earliest notice of this religion in Gombojab's History of Buddhism in China,13 written around the mid-1730s.14 Gombojab renders the name of Jesus in its traditional Chinese form of Yesu; he is called the World... (shrink)

This (1982) essay sets out the claim that psychoanalysis is a cogent extension of the intuitive common sense psychology by which we naturally understand human action. In this psychology explanation proceeds by relating actions to the logically and causally cohering desires and beliefs of agents. As Freud showed, this kind of explanation is systematically deepened and extended by the explanation of dreams, the symptoms of mental disorder, and other related phenomena via the Freudian concept of wish fulfilment, which was (...) later extended to the more inclusive post-Freudian concept of phantasy. In this extension everyday actions, such as Freud's writing up his patient Irma's case history on the day before his dream of Irma's injection, are seen to be rooted in the same unconscious motives as are represented as fulfilled in dreams and symptoms -- e.g., in this case, by unconscious stirrings of deep guilt on the topic of injection, of which Freud was unaware until he analysed the dream. As this illustrates, the understanding of wishfulfilments and other formations of phantasy enables us fill out our account of agents and their actions by adding a stock of previously unacknowledged desires and modes of expression of desire. These are seen to cohere with, and also to deepen, our previous understanding: after understanding Freud's dream, we also have a deeper and firmer (and so more cogent) understanding of his behaviour on the previous day. In this way Freud effected an extension of our everyday mode of understanding that was cogent, cumulative, and radical, as illustrated further by examination of Freud's case history of the patient described as the Rat Man. (shrink)

In this essay we argue for the Janus-faced nature of hope. We show that attempts to sanitise the concept of hope either by separating it conceptually from other phenomena such as wishful thinking, or, more generally, by seeking to minimise the negative aspects of hope, do not help us to understand the nature of hope and its functions as regards religion. Drawing on functional accounts of religion from Clifford Geertz and Tamas Pataki, who both—in their different ways—see the function of (...) religion in terms of its capacity to satisfy deep psychological needs, we demonstrate that religion uniquely positions itself with regard to hope’s two faces, simultaneously exploiting positive and negative aspects of hope. (shrink)