Yesterday, I discussed a certain passage in Anna Aragno's contribution to an anthology about Psychoanalysis and the Mind-Body Problem, a book published by Routledge last year. I'd like to discuss something that bugs me about that contribution a bit more here. Aragno has written the book's chapter nine, entitled "A Revised Psychoanalytic Model of Mind and Communication in Body-Mind Continuity." The essay begins with a quote from Freud dated 1937, "For in the psychical field, the biological field does in fact play the part of the underlying bedrock." That sentence does support Aragno's general argument, as I laid it out yesterday. It supports it so conveniently that I naturally want to pursue the matter. Unfortunately, the source of that quote is not obvious. Aragno's endnotes reference five works of Freud, none of which was published (or translated into English) in 1937. So she has created a bit of a mystery. Googling the quote got me no res...
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"Without Piaget's ... genetic-epistemology, arriving on the heels of Freud's death, or the integration of semiotic mediation,the fundamental continuity between body and mind, and therefore the translation from unconscious to conscious modes of thought, remained highly polarized and mired in physicalist metaphors describing, but not explaining, the functional/formal shifts in organization of a multi-tiered, polysemic, sign-infused psyche." I believe I've already mentioned in this blog the anthology in psychoanalysis and the mind-body problem published recently by Routledge. The above passage is drawn from that anthology, from an essay by Anna Aragna. The passage is quite difficult to follow (and no, not because I have removed it from a context that would otherwise have been illuminating -- it just IS.) But, abstracting where I can from the jargon, what I gather is this. Aragna sees the "fundamental continuity of body and mind" as both a premise and a p...
Psychologists and philosophers continue the study of cognitive development: discussion didn't freeze with Piaget's work. Though I'm afraid that realization would have made him frown, as pictured here. And it appears that some new acronyms have come into vogue in the field. There are three zones of conceivably-accomplishable tasks. There are things a growing child at a particular moment just cannot do yet, things the child could do, with a little help from his friends, more knowledgeable others, and things he can do solo. The as-yet-undoable tasks don't appear to have an acronym. The more knowledgeable others are, unsurprisingly, called MKOs. The things the kid can do solo represent together his "actual development level" (ADL). The things he can do if assisted by an MKO are his "zone of proximal development (ZPD)." So says Bekah's Blog, here: https://bekahbblade.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/vygotsky-and-learning/