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Glossary
The term ‘abreaction’ was first thought up by ancient Greek dramatists to describe the purging or cathartic effect that the release of emotion gives. Abreaction is actually a flow of different emotions, and it takes several forms. The overall effect is to release anxiety from the subconscious mind.
What I have found is that some particular emotions are linked together to form four kinds of invariable sequence, which are ways in which the unconscious mind operates. These sequences link together positive emotions with negative ones, or happiness with unhappiness. I give the name ‘abreaction’ to these sequences. The two main ones are the abreaction of guilt and the abreaction of pride. The first sequence links excitement to guilt and resentment, and the second one links sorrow and sadness to bitterness.
The abreaction of guilt is the
sequence :
Narcissism leads to jealousy ; then jealousy leads to guilt ;
then guilt leads to resentment.
The abreaction of pride is the
sequence :
Jealousy leads to narcissism ; then narcissism leads to pride ;
then pride leads to bitterness.
These abreactions flow in a
dialectical way – thesis, antithesis, and then synthesis.
For example, in the abreaction of guilt :
Initially narcissism and jealousy produce excitement, and then we
end up with the guilt and resentment that oppose it. Finally we
have the steady state of detachment when the contents of the
excitement and the resentment phases no longer interest us.
These ideas mean that abreaction generates dialectical change. Abreaction releases anxiety from the subconscious mind during the process of character transformation, and this release occurs by an oscillation between states of mind. Therefore the process of character transformation is a dialectical one.
Social Abreaction is just the extension of the sequences of abreaction to society as a whole, and they produce what I call laws of social change. The morality of an age determines what is good and evil, and these ideas form the content of social abreaction. The intensity of these abreactions depend on the rate of social change : the faster the change the greater are the effects of abreaction.
The first law of social change is the abreaction of guilt : it starts from a catharsis , which often contains left-wing or progressive views, but always ends in a right-wing backlash of resentment. Politically the resentment generates Conservative, even Fascist, attitudes.
The second law of social change is the abreaction of pride : it starts from sorrow and ends in bitterness. This abreaction usually ends in forms of Nazism, such as police death squads, the Stalinist political show-trials of the 1930s, and political or sectarian genocide. Bitterness is always worse than resentment. So Nazism is always worse than Fascism.
For an in-depth analysis, read the articles on Abreaction on any of my psychology sites.
Absorption & Identification
Initially the infant takes its mother as a role model. It identifies with the parental image. As the child grows up it changes its identification model several times, to father, to adolescent peers, to teachers. The resulting adult is a montage of different models, of different foci of identification. Identification can be viewed as a psychological union with an external source ; the emotion that facilitates bonding is jealousy.
A different drama is enacted by the introverted child. Identification with an external source ceases to have any intensity beyond the parental models. The narcissistic child begins to take itself as its own model : it begins to identify with itself. A better way of expressing this identification is to say that the child becomes self-absorbed.
Identification is based on jealousy, whereas self-absorption is based on narcissism.
The psychological model that I use most of the time is a static one. This has three levels of activity: conscious, subconscious, and unconscious. However, when I need to describe agency I use a dynamic model.
Static model : consciousness is a state of being that has three modes, those of will, mind and feeling. Therefore, for me, consciousness is not the same as mind (and neither is mind identical to the brain). This model is for understanding how the various factors of consciousness relate together, in ways that are independent of agency.
Dynamic model : consciousness is a state of being that can act as a channel for agency. This model is for understanding the purpose of consciousness. Consciousness contains an agent, the ego, that can make choices.
Self-consciousness implies that agency is internal to the state of being, as in people and some of the higher animals. When consciousness has no aspect of self, as in insects and plants, then agency is external and utilises instinct (for example, such agency may be a group mind, and so consciousness would be a group consciousness).
Functional model : consciousness is a state of being that constructs a paradigm of reality from the results of awareness. This model describes what consciousness does. Awareness is that aspect of mind by which the agent develops consciousness.
The mechanism of this construction is thought. Thought is a sequence of awareness states, or thought is the activity of awareness. The content of thought can be images or words. Images are either images of something or an image of nothing (mental silence). Attention or concentration is the means of emphasising some states of awareness rather than other ones.
Desire
is the activity of will directed into a mental concept. Hence
desire is the combination of will + mind.
Emotion is the activity of feeling directed into
a mental concept. Hence emotion is the combination of feeling +
mind. More accurately,
An emotion is an unconscious idea powered by either a pleasant or an unpleasant feeling.
These definitions are explained on my psychology websites.
Diachronic & Synchronic
When any aspect of the linguistic sign is examined using a perspective of time, such as how the sign actually evolved in history, this examination is termed ‘diachronic’. When any aspect of the sign is examined in its present state, without regard to how it became the way it is, this examination is termed ‘synchronic’.
I use the term ‘dialectical ’ in the Hegelian sense. It represents a movement of thought through three stages. First there is the opening idea, the thesis ; then thought switches to the opposite conception, the antithesis. Finally both stages are blended together in the third stage, the synthesis. In moral ideas, if the thesis is a concept of goodness then the antithesis is a concept of badness. If the thesis represents some badness, the antithesis is that of some goodness. The synthesis is the resolution of the conflict.
This is the personality ; it is the conscious aspect of the person, and excludes the subconscious and unconscious minds. It is agency, or the agent of consciousness. The ego has to make choices, and these produce effects. So the realm of the ego is the realm of cause and effect. See also Consciousness.
Some emotions are compound ones and consist of two simpler emotions (these two emotions are factors of the compound emotion). The factors do not exert their influence simultaneously ; only one is dominant at any particular time. I use the term mode to indicate which factor is being dominant at that time, that is, to indicate the manner in which the compound emotion is being experienced.
A summary of the factors of some important emotions is :
Guilt = self-pity + self-hate.
Pride = vanity + hatred of other people.
Narcissism = love + vanity.
Jealousy = love + self-pity.
Anxiety = fear + vanity.
Paranoia = fear + pride (mode of vanity).
Resentment = guilt + idealism.
Bitterness = pride + idealism
Emotions are not
the same as feelings. There are just three feelings : the
positive, the negative, and the neutral feelings. Emotions are
partly derived from feelings and partly from the mind. An emotion
is the activity of feeling directed into a mental concept. This
gives rise to a definition of emotion :
An emotion is an unconscious idea powered by either a
pleasant or an unpleasant feeling.
This is the way of exploring the meaning of relationships as the person experiences them now, without regard to past or future. The person explores relationships from within his own individuality. For comparison, a psychological relationship is anchored in the past because of limitations produced by subconscious determinism.
An existential perspective means
how relationships are understood now.
A psychological perspective means why such relationships are as they are.
Insight - See Intuition and Insight.
This has two parts: rationality and intuition.
These two parts work together in conceptual analysis, that is, when we try to analyse something, when we think about concepts and their meanings. Conceptual analysis can be split into three modes:
Intelligence and Intellect
Intelligence expresses the activity of the mind, whilst intellect is an indication of the degree of maturity of the mind.
One way of defining intelligence is that it is the ability to learn from experience, the ability to apply logical thought to experience. Whereas intellectuality is a mental trait that is cultivated by applying that intelligence to problems in order to generalise the answers. Intellectual capability is the intelligent application of theory, the ability to see beyond the immediate problem, the ability to think at the level of abstraction.
In the articles on this site I treat these two terms as being equivalent. However, I separate them in my philosophy articles on my website A Modern Thinker. The difference is :
Insight is an inference that is validated by reason.
Intuition is an inference that is validated by the thinker’s belief systems.
There are several forms of determinism : some are rigid (such as the social class that a person is born into), whilst others can be more variable (such as the effects of childhood conditioning). The Indian term ‘karma’ is ideal as a general-purpose term.
Overall, karma is the effects of a person's behaviours, actions, and thinking. The most important way to understand the concept of karma is that it is the effects of the fixed ideas, beliefs and attitudes that the person carries with him through life (and lifetimes!) : these aspects of character help to generate a person’s actions and behaviours.
Karma has two forms, relative
and dialectical.
One form relates to the person's behaviour and fixed beliefs (that
is, beliefs which have formed his character) ; whatever the
person does produces an effect. This form is a relative one, and
includes everything that is not caused by abreaction.
The other form relates to the mental processes, particularly to the subconscious mind ; when this is active, the person's mental states oscillate in a dialectical way. Abreaction is the source of this dialectical form of karma.
I use this term partly to denote intellect, and partly to denote the way that it helps to give rise to desires and emotions. (See also Consciousness for a definition of thought).
Mind, Subconscious & Unconscious
I use the term ‘subconscious mind’ for what is personal to the individual,
and the term ‘unconscious mind’ for what is general to humanity.
For example, emotions are general to humanity, so part of their origin lies in the unconscious mind. Whereas the desires that influence a person are his own, and so come from his subconscious mind.
This is a technique derived from Buddhist meditation that can be used to neutralise the power of desires and emotions. It is an essential component of the practice of self-awareness. It consists in watching states of mind instead of evaluating them or acting on them. Perception is switched into neutral mode, so that no values are projected or introjected.
The standard way of formulating mindfulness in a concise manner is :
in the seeing, only the seen,
in the hearing, only the heard,
in the touching, only the touch,
in the smelling, only the smell,
in the tasting, only the taste.
Hence no evaluation is made of sensory impressions.
Morals and Ethics
A distinction needs to be made between moral rules that are adhered to because of the person’s social conditioning and moral rules that are accepted through free personal choice. I call ‘morality’ those rules that are a part of a person’s social conditioning ; these rules are subject to erosion from stress during periods of social change or in times of sorrow. ‘Ethics’ is the term that I use for the acceptance of rules through free choice and understanding. Another way to put this difference is:
Morality implies ideas of right and wrong based on social conditioning.
Ethics implies ideas of right and wrong based on critical reflection.
Projection & Introjection
Projection means that we imagine that our own virtues and vices and attitudes are embodied in other people. We see in other people what is in ourself. This psychological stratagem is particularly noticeable with regard to our vices. We try to escape from our faults by denying them ; we see them only as aspects of other people – it is always other people that are the source of conflict.
Introjection is the complementary process. We emulate the virtues (and vices) in the people that we admire. We incorporate into ourself the attitudes of people that are significant to us. Our own idealised image of ourself can also act as a source for introjection : we can use such an image as an object from which we can introject virtues that we need. It is through introjection that a child absorbs the values of the parents.
The general meaning of relativity is that a subjective effect always goes hand in hand with an objective effect. Relativity ties subjectivity to objectivity.
The ego is a relative construction created by the infant in order to tie its subjective world to an objective reality. Since it is relative, the ego has existence but no essence. The relativity of the ego is the ground of the relativity of all values, moral codes, and beliefs.
See the article Ego and Relativity.
My use of ‘soul’ is equivalent to the term ‘higher self ’. Soul is the source of spiritual idealisms, and it is ‘the silent watcher’. Another common name is ‘the witness’. The soul is a ‘higher self ’ to the ego (this should not be confused with the creation by an ego of an idealised ‘self ’). The soul acts as a guide to the ego, trying to steer it through the confusion of a human life. The ego reincarnates (though in a complicated manner), but the soul does not.
Spirituality
For me, spirituality does not necessarily equate to religiosity. A religious person can also be spiritual, but a spiritual person does not have to be religious. A religious perspective is a self-sufficient belief system containing all acceptable values and meanings within it. It is a belief system that has boundaries around it, since the world of the subconscious mind is excluded from it. A spiritual perspective can be more open and flexible. I view spirituality as the attempt to live in harmony with life. This view entails the necessity to aim for harmony in all of one’s personal relationships and situations.
Emotions are partly derived from ideas or mental concepts that influence us below the level of normal consciousness. The mental concept that is associated with an emotion actually creates the boundaries of that emotion. If the mental concept changes, the emotion does not change ; instead, it fades away and a different emotion arises, one that fits the current mental concept. To work out the underlying concept, the overall theme or motif of the emotion needs to be considered, that is, what the emotion is trying to express.
Emotions are not unique to any particular individual, so the ideas or concepts that underlie them come from the unconscious mind. Since the concepts are unconscious they are extremely difficult to identify. The concept is normally unconscious, so I call it an unconscious concept or an unconscious idea.
My psychology websites contain a table of unconscious ideas that determine several important emotions. The table is in the first article on Emotion. See Refs & Links page for the addresses of the sites.
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Ian Heath
London, UKwww.relative-mindmatter.co.uk
e-mail address:
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