Selfhood and Consciousness: A Non-Philosopher's Guide to Epistemology, Noemics, and Semiotics (and Other Important Things Besides) [Entries Beginning with "G/H/I"]

Copyright Notice: This material was written and published in Wales by Derek J. Smith (Chartered Engineer). It forms part of a multifile e-learning resource, and subject only to acknowledging Derek J. Smith's rights under international copyright law to be identified as author may be freely downloaded and printed off in single complete copies solely for the purposes of private study and/or review. Commercial exploitation rights are reserved. The remote hyperlinks have been selected for the academic appropriacy of their contents; they were free of offensive and litigious content when selected, and will be periodically checked to have remained so. Copyright © 2006-2007, Derek J. Smith (Chartered Engineer).

First instalment [v1.0] published 13:00 GMT 28th February 2006; this version [v3.8 general tidy up] published 09:00 BST 12th July 2007

BUT UNDER CONSTANT EXTENSION AND CORRECTION, SO CHECK AGAIN SOON

G.3 - The Glossary Proper (Entries G to I)

G-Protein: See protein kinase studies and second messenger neurotransmission.

GAF: See global assessment of functioning.

Gage, Phineas: See case, Phineas Gage.

Galvani, Luigi: [Italian physiologist (1737-1798).] [Click for external biography] See materialism and underlying mechanism.

Garcia Effect: Garcia and Koelling (1966) investigated whether two unpleasant stimuli - nausea and electric shock - were equally effective (in rats) at creating an aversion to a normally pleasant stimulus. They found that a single trial in which sweetened water was paired with nausea induced by injection was enough to suppress subsequent intake of sweetened water almost totally. A mild electric shock, however, was far less effective. This seems to reflect a very primitive biological capacity for one-trial learning when the stakes are high enough in survival terms. [See now unpleasure, why it has to be so unpleasant.]

Gate: [Computer terminology.] Logic circuits were originally invented by the likes of Charles Wynn-Williams, Konrad Zuse, George Stibitz, and John Atanasoff, and their basic physical components are called "logic gates". Fundamentally, they are electronic switches capable of executing Boolean decision making, that is to say, combinatory binary symbolic logic of the form developed in the nineteenth century by George Boole and Augustus de Morgan. Lewin (1985) describes logic circuits as "combinational networks", and summarises their operating principles as follows: "A combinational logic circuit is one in which the output (or outputs) obtained from the circuit is solely dependant on the present state of the inputs. [] The classical objective of combinational design is to produce a circuit having the required switching characteristics but utilising the minimum number of components [] Switching problems are usually presented to the designer [] specifying the logical behaviour of the circuit. From this specification a mathematical statement of the problem can be formulated [and] simplified where possible. These simplified equations may then be directly related to a hardware diagram ....." (Lewin, 1985, pp53-54; emphasis original).

Gatekeeper: The Gatekeeper is/was one of the "troops", the alter personalities, in case, Truddi Chase.

Geben: [German = "to give" (Past participle gegeben = "given").] This everyday German word was brought centre stage within mental philosophy by Kant as a way of describing the presentation of an object to our experience [for more on which, see the entry for "givenness".]

Gegeben: See geben.

Gegenstand: [German = "object, thing; subject (matter), theme, topic; item, matter, affair, issue" (C.G.D.).] [See firstly consciousness, Meinong's theory of.] This everyday German word was first incorporated into the lexicon of mental philosophy by Kant (1781, 1787/1996), who used it (e.g., p211) to refer to the external object of perception, and was then made a fundamental element of Gegenstandstheorie by Meinong. The point about Gegenstand is that it refers to the "material 'thing'" itself, and not to the "multiplicity of associated sensorial impressions" which "enrich" it (Rizzuto, 1990, p242). [Compare entity and Vorstellung.]

Gegenstandstheorie: [German Gegenstand = "object, etc." + theorie = "theory".] The central thesis of Meinong's mental philosophy is that there are four distinct elements to cognition, namely (1) the act [Akt] of perceiving, (2) the content [Inhalt] of experience, (3) the object [Gegenstand], and (4) the experiences [Erlebnisse]. The resulting theoretical position is commonly referred to as Gegenstandstheorie [= "theory of objects"], and the only initial complication was that there were important orders of complexity to the resulting Gegenstände, including, for example, a four-way classification into (1) Objeckte, i.e. objects simpliciter, (2) Objektive [henceforth "objectives"], i.e. thoughts, (3) Dignitative, i.e. feelings, and (4) Desiderative, i.e. desires. Here is Russell's pen-picture of how Meinong sees objects .....

"The first great division of objects is into three classes, those which exist, those which subsist (bestehen), and those which neither exist nor subsist. It is obvious that abstracts such as diversity or numbers do not exist; propositions, again, are non-existent; thus certainly there are objects which do not exist, and which yet in some sense subsist. But even when we include subsistence, we do not, it would seem, find a place for all objects; some, such as false propositions, the round square, etc., are objects and yet do not subsist. There are two sorts of judgments, which may be called thetic and synthetic; the former assert the being of something, the latter assert its being so-and-so (Sein and Sosein). The latter sort may subsist when their subjects do not subsist; the round square is certainly both round and square, although the round square does not subsist" (Russell, 1905, p531).

Meinong's distinction between objects and objectives is not totally dissimilar to the classical distinction between ειδος and ιδεα [see G.2], whilst feelings and desires are recognised members of Hamilton's triad, that is to say, they constitute two thirds of the soul, tripartite.

Gemüt: [German = "mind, soul, heart, disposition, nature, [etc.]" (C.G.D.).] See mind.

Gene: A gene is a subsection of a chromosome. It contains just enough genetic material to manufacture a single molecule of protein (although it can do this many times). Each human chromosome contains of the order of 100,000 genes, each of which has a molecular weight of the order of 1 million and contains perhaps 1500 nucleotide pairs.

General Learning Disability: See learning disability and special educational need, the basics.

Generalised Event Memory (GEM): See event memory.

Genetic Epistemology: See epistemology, genetic.

Gestaltism: See Gestalt School.

Gestalt Laws: These are the laws of early perceptual processing identified by the Gestalt School as being responsible for organising sensory input prior to the act of perceptual recognition. Perception, in other words, is not regarded as a single process, but as a combination of perceptual organisation followed by pattern recognition. To explain their observations, the Gestalt School (workers such as Wertheimer, Kohler, Koffka, Lewin, and Duncker) argued that the brain had certain innate electrical characteristics which actively organise sensory input [see field]. The individual laws were held by Koffka (1935) to be examples of a more basic law, the Law of Pragnanz, which holds simply that where there are several geometrically possible organisations for a given perceptual scene, the one which will be "chosen" is the one with the simplest and most stable shape. [See now the separate entries for closure, common fate, continuity, proximity, and similarity.]

Gestalt School: [See firstly perspectives and schools of psychology.] This is the name given to a school of German-speaking psychologists founded in effect by the University of Prague's Christian Von Ehrenfels in a book called Über Gestaltqualitäten [= "On Gestalt Qualities"] (Ehrenfels, 1890). Ehrenfels had studied as a young man under Franz Brentano at Vienna, and was therefore fully aware of the latter's views on the power of the "presentation" [Vorstellung] in deciding a given perceptual identification [for more on which see consciousness, Brentano's theory of]. He had also closely studied Ernst Mach's Analyse der Empfindungen ["Analysis of the Sensations"] (Mach, 1886), in which representations of "space form" and "time form" had been proposed in order to explain the theoretically troublesome phenomena of "superordinate form" or "configuration" .....

TEST YOURSELF NOW: For a simple, yet compelling, graphical demonstration of the problem of superordinate form in two-dimensional visual perception, check out the following Navon figure - click here. Which did you perceive first, the superordinate "EA" or the component "AE"?

At that time, the canonical form of the superordinate form problem was one's ability to recognise a tune when we hear it in a key in which it has never been heard before (Flugel and West, 1964; Smith, 1994/2007 online), and it is this constant emphasis on the higher-order arrangement of lower-order elements which subsequently led to some commentators describing Gestalt psychology as "Configurationism". Ehrenfels felt, however, that Mach's book drew attention to but fell short of adequately explaining this class of phenomenon. Specifically, Mach did not sufficiently separate the raw sensory input (complete with all the "qualities" it conveyed) from the perception of "form in space or time" which then rather magically took place. Ehrenfel's own proposal was that there had to exist two levels of perceptual judgment, one more primitive than the other. The first and lower of these levels was responsible for early sensory analysis [identifying the individual notes of our melody, say], whilst the second and higher was responsible for detecting and recognising the over-arching "Gestalt qualities" [the melody as a recognisable whole]. Raw sensory information arrives at, and is dealt with, by the first level of processing, producing information of a fundamentally different sort for passing to the second level of processing.

ASIDE: Readers must bear in mind that Ehrenfels was working long before the age of "processing stages" or parallel distributed processing architectures [his paper was published in the same year that Herman Hollerith's electro-mechanical punched card tabulators started to take on bulk data from the 1890 US Census]. Such architectures think little of passing progressively metamorphosed streams of information between functionally specialised processing modules. For an industry-standard example of the staged-processing approach to auditory perception, see the upper left quadrant of the Ellis (1982) transcoding diagram.

Promising though they were, Ehrenfels' ideas did not catch on, and responsibility for unravelling the functional architecture of aesthesis reverted for a full generation to being the preserve of mental philosophers, not least those other students of Brentano, Husserl and Meinong (Smith, 1994). One of the places where empirical research into perception survived was at the University of Berlin, where Carl Stumpf, another who had studied sound perception in the 1880s, had taken over Ebbinghaus's laboratory in 1894. Stumpf's position on the melody question was as follows .....

"Stumpf considers, in particular, the conditions that must be satisfied if a sequence of tones is to possess that specific sort of Gestalt which we call a melody. Such a sequence must, first of all, have a sense for the hearer, a notion which Stumpf explicates by developing a comparison between that system which is given tonality and analogous systems of a linguistic sort, for example in the sphere of phonology. It must secondly have a more or less definite rhythm [.....] must be a relatively self-contained whole or formation, not part of any continuation [, and] it must be non-decomposable: its parts must be dependent entities, not themselves capable of existing as musical categoremata in their own right" (Smith, 1994/2007 online, p257).

As it turned out, it was Stumpf's students who were to make Gestaltism famous, and most noteworthy amongst these was a certain Max Wertheimer. Wertheimer, who had sat through Ehrenfels' lectures as an undergraduate at Prague (1901-1904) and Külpe's tutorials while doing his doctorate at Würzburg (1905), now commuted between (amongst other places) the laboratories at Frankfurt and Berlin, devising innovative yet always excruciatingly simple practical demonstrations of the vicissitudes of perceptual judgment, and trying them out on himself and his colleagues. The best known of these early demonstrations concerned the phenomenon of "apparent movement", that is to say, movement which objectively has not taken place, but which is nevertheless phenomenally real to the observer(s) concerned. In perhaps the simplest of its (many) variations, this demonstration simply exposed the observer to two alternately flashing lights .....

TEST YOURSELF NOW: This being the age of the Internet, the apparent movement phenomenon is available online for all to experience for themselves. We particularly recommend the applets generously provided by the Department of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University, which allow the viewer to vary the speed of alternation, the number and spatial separation of the lights, their diameter, their form, the colour scheme, and so on. There are number of demonstrations to get through, but try this one for starters: RUN THE BASIC PURDUE APPLET - the separate sensations are the individual stimulus on-offs, and the superordinate experience is what you think you see going on [and, needless to say, the objective record and the subjective experience do not match].

Wertheimer called the illusions of movement he was producing the "phi phenomenon", and published his account in (Wertheimer, 1912). As an easily replicable illusion, it soon became a classroom classic worldwide, and the problems of Gestaltqualitäten were on everyone's lips. Gestaltism as a recognisable school had arrived.

ASIDE: Wertheimer (1912) is a classic paper, and the problem with classic papers is that they lose a lot en route from the laboratories in which they were conceived to the provincial classrooms in which the rest of us learn about them. People stop thinking about the underlying problem, run the demonstration, and present the theory to the limits that they themselves understand it. The Purdue website includes an interesting exposé of what seems to have happened in this particular case, as one textbook misinformed the next, and so on for nigh on a century - see the entry for phi phenomenon for the necessary link [and make sure you RUN THE ADVANCED PURDUE APPLET while you're there - it's fascinating stuff].

Wertheimer lectured at Berlin from 1916 to 1929 (latterly as emeritus professor), gradually expanding his research interests to include learning, memory, problem solving, and creativity. Other influential members of the Gestalt movement were Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Goldstein, and Kurt Lewin in Germany, Edgar Rubin in Denmark, and Albert Michotte in Belgium (e.g., Michotte, 1927), and their corporate findings are nowadays summarised in the so-called Gestalt laws. The term which best describes what these individual authors had in common is "holistic", that is to say, incapable of analysis into sub-components. This is why Gestaltism is so widely known today for its explanatory dictum that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". Köhler puts it this way in his retrospective introduction to the science .....

"When the Gestalt problem first arose, nobody could foresee that later it was to be closely related to the concept of dynamic self-distribution; nor were the facts of sensory organisation immediately given the central position which they deserve. [.....] While a sensation is supposed to occupy its place in the field independently, i.e., determined by its local stimulus alone, the curious thing about the qualities which Ehrenfels introduced into scientific psychology is their relation to sets of stimuli. Nothing like them is ever brought about by strictly local stimulation per se; rather, the 'togetherness' of several stimuli is the condition which has these specific effects in a sensory field" (Köhler, 1929/1947, p102).

Note Köhler's use of the term "dynamic" in the above quotation. Gestaltism is often described nowadays as a "dynamic" psychology, but not in the same sense that psychodynamic theory was dynamic. Freudian dynamics are the dynamics of keeping a highly mobile but invisible enemy under some sort of control. The dynamics of Gestaltism, on the other hand, are the dynamics of the transient mental "fields" set up during the end-to-end processes of aesthesis [see the separate entry for fields, noting that Kurt Lewin's expertise in this latter area travelled with him when he emigrated to America in the 1930s]. It also relied on the theoretical principle of "psychophysical isomorphism" and, led by Wertheimer (in humans) and Köhler (in apes), did much to extend the scientific literature on insight learning and creativity in the mid-20th century. The term "Berlin School" seems to be used in two distinct ways in the literature - firstly it is used to describe the department of experimental psychology which Stumpf built up in the period 1894 to 1921, and secondly it may be describing the body of Gestaltist theory and research which came out of said department in the period between 1920 and 1933, when Wertheimer, Köhler, Goldstein, and Lewin were all based at that university at one time or another.

Gewahren: [From the German Gewahr werden = "become aware of; see, perceive, notice, observe, discern, catch sight of" (C.G.D.).] This everyday German word for the act of becoming aware of something was used in a philosophical sense by Husserl to describe a particular grade of awareness, as follows .....

"In perception properly so-called, as an explicit awareness (Gewahren), I am turned towards the object [to] apprehend it as being this here and now" (Husserl, Ideas, p105).

[In fact, many grades of awareness have been identified over the millennia. Compare, for example, Husserl's here and now awareness (above) with Freud's (1896) Bewusstsein and Wahrnehmungszeichen. And the final classification has yet to be determined.]

"Ghost in the Machine": See consciousness, Ryle's theory of.

Gist: The key points in a story. [See now Bartlett (1932) and memory for gist.]

"Givenness": [See firstly intuition and the discussion thereof in the entry for consciousness, Kant's theory of.] This is Kant's (1781-1787) notion of a grade of immediate phenomenal awareness, short of activation of the full concept, thus (two passages concatenated) .....

"Now there are two conditions under which alone there can be a cognition of an object. The first condition is intuition; through it an object is given, though only as appearance. The second condition is the concept; through it an object is thought that corresponds to this intuition. [.....] If a cognition is to have objective reality, i.e. if it is to refer to an object and have in that object its signification and meaning, then the object must be capable of being given in some way" (Kant, 1787; Pluhar translation, p147/p226).

Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF): [See firstly axis (of mental health disorder).] This is the DSM-IV overall assessment score for a person's mental health status across all axes of impairment. It is derived by thorough clinical assessment and helps plan and monitor therapy. Scores range from 0 to 100, in bands, as follows [all direct quotations from DSM-IV (2000, p34)] .....

GAF 91 to 100: "Superior functioning in a wide range of activities".

GAF 81 to 90: "Absent or minimal symptoms".

GAF 71 to 80: "Transient or expectable reactions to psychosocial stressors"

GAF 61 to 70: "Some mild symptoms".

GAF 51 to 60: "Moderate symptoms".

GAF 41 to 50: "Serious symptoms (e.g., suicidal ideation, severe obsessive rituals, frequent shoplifting) OR any serious impairment in social occupational or school functioning (e.g., no friends, unable to keep a job)" (emphasis original).

GAF 31 to 40: "Some impairment in reality testing or communication [] OR major impairment in several areas, such as work or school, family relations, judgment, thinking, or mood" (emphasis original).

GAF 21 to 30: "Behaviour is considerably influenced by delusions or hallucinations".

GAF 11 to 20: "Some danger of hurting self or others".

GAF 1 to 10: "Persistent danger of severely hurting self or others".

GAF 0: "Inadequate information".

RESEARCH ISSUE: The extent to which the more devious personality disorders are able to deceive clinicians into awarding them higher GAF scores than they strictly deserve is not known. In the present author's observation of life there are many GAFs 31 to 50 who are not in therapy at all and are informally assessed by the world as GAF 71 to 80 "much as to be expected".®

Glucocorticoid: [See firstly homeostasis.] Glucocorticoids are one of two classes of corticosteroid hormone (the other being mineralocorticoids), and have the specific biological function of controlling the body's metabolism of glucose. They are relevant in the context of the present glossary, because glucose metabolism - responsible as it is for powering all forms of behaviour, mental and physical - is one of the main functional elements in the body's homeostatic and emotional response systems. With blood sugar homeostasis, for example, a monitoring system situated in the hypothalamus compensates for falling blood sugar levels by automatically releasing reserve stocks [check out the technicalities]. Glucocorticoids are thus the mainstay of our famed "fight, flight, or fornicate" instincts, all of which burn energy (some more than others, of course). [full Wikipedia briefing].

Glutamate: A "glutamate" is an organic salt of a glutamic acid and a protein [full Wikipedia briefing]. Glutamates are noteworthy in the context of the present glossary for their role in neurotransmission in general, and for their role in glutamatergic neurotransmission in particular. Grosjean and Tsai (2007) summarise its effects as follows .....

"Glutamate was recognised as a neurotransmitter in the 1970s, and the subtypes of glutamate receptors were differentiated in the early 1980s. Today we know that glutamate is the primary excitatory neurotransmitter in the mammalian brain: 60% of brain neurons use glutamate as their primary neurotransmitter. Ionotropic receptors for glutamate are divided into NMDA and non-NMDA receptors, including AMPA [] and kainate subtypes. The involvement of NMDAR in working memory has been shown in primate studies where NMDA antagonists impair their working memory, and potentiation of NMDA transmission can correct the memory deficits" (pp106-107).

As the name suggests, glutamatergic neurotransmission is a subtype of neurotransmission which characterises a "glutamatergic synapse", that is to say, one in which the transmitter substance itself is a glutamate and the post-synaptic membrane contains receptor sites for glutamate binding. [See now NMDA.] 

BREAKING RESEARCH: See the mention of Grosjean and Tsai's (2007) work on the potential role of NMDA dysregulation in the aetiology of borderline personality disorder.

Gmelin, Eberhardt: [No convenient online biography.] Gmelin is relevant to the present glossary for having been one of the first clinicians to report a case of multiple personality (Gmelin, 1791). Gmelin's case was a 20-year old German woman who could present either of two personae, one French-speaking and the other German-speaking.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: [German scientist-philosopher (1749-1832).] [Click for external biography] Although best remembered for his achievements as a writer, Goethe contributed significantly both to the philosophy of science and to psychology, where he produced one of the earliest theories of colour perception (Goethe, 1810).

Goffman, Erving: [Canadian sociologist (1922-1982).] [Click for external biography] Goffman is noteworthy within the context of the present glossary for his work on frame analysis.

Golgi Apparatus: This is an extension of the endoplasmic reticulum, seemingly responsible for directing newly formed proteins back into the cytoplasm. It does this by forming them into small vesicles known as secretory granules which can then be passed in through the reticular membrane by a process known as endocytosis. The lysosomes are a type of secretory granule.

"Good Enough" Parenting: This is Winnicott's (e.g., 1956, p386) term for everyday parenting by average people in average places with average cognitive architectures, possessed of average financial resources, and of average sanity (i.e., not themselves fatally traumatised). [For what happens when parenting is not quite "good enough" in any of these respects, see firstly holding environment and then (having taken a deep breath) the series of toxic parenting entries.]

Gorgias (of Leontini): [Greek Sophist Philosopher (483-375 BCE).] [Click for external biography]

Graded Potential: [See firstly potential difference and propagation.] In the context of the present glossary, a graded potential is a small change in neural (or glial) membrane potential which dies away by decremental propagation, that is to say, smoothly with time or distance and without inducing an action potential.

Grand Illusion: This is Blackmore's (2002) term for the possibility that what we experience as a smoothly flowing stream of consciousness is dangerously illusory, and can be exposed as exactly that by suitably designed probe tasks. For the details of the argument here, see the entry for stream of consciousness.

Graz School: This is the name given to a school of philosopher-psychologists founded by Alexius Meinong at the University of Graz, Austria, in 1894, and including in its numbers Wilhelm Frankl, Franz Weber, and the subsequent founder of the Gestalt School, Christian von Ehrenfels [for a longer introductory, see Boudewijnse (1999/2007 online)].

Grey Level Description: See perception, Marr's theory of.

Grieving Process: This is Kubler-Ross's (1969) notion that grieving has a natural history to it, and has to work itself out in a more or less standard sequence of phases. She arrived at this conclusion by observing how people coped over the passing weeks following the death of a loved one, but it is now accepted that the same grieving profile accompanies any emotional shock, including sickness and redundancy. The grieving process is particularly relevant in the field of disability and mental health, since it will affect both the patient/client (the loss of their own health and prospects) and their caregivers (the loss of their loved one). The phases of grieving are as follows .....

(1) Shocked Immobility: This is the state you are thrown into when you hear the bad news for the first time, and are at a loss to know how to react or what to say.

(2) Denial: You then start to reject the news as essentially untrue [see denial, grief work for more on this].

(3) Anger: You then accept the news as true, but get angry at it (and whoever happens to be in the way at the time).

(4) Bargaining: You offer gifts and promises to "the gods" to have the truth somehow miraculously taken away.

(5) Depression: You enter a period of reactive depression.

(6) Testing: You begin to find your feet again, as life persists in going on despite your personal troubles.

(7) Acceptance: Finally, personality type and ego strength permitting, you come fully to terms with the trauma, whatever it was.

Guilt:

"And throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed" (Matthew, 27:5).

In everyday English, the word "guilt" describes not just the factual state of having done something immoral or illegal, but also the "sense of guilt" which tends to go with that factual state and which in a properly reflective self is characterised by often quite intense experiences of regret, loss, anxiety, and self-recrimination. Both phenomena fascinate us and readily command our attention - issues of factual guilt or innocence have inspired countless detective novels and courtroom dramas down the ages, and issues of remorsefulness - not least its erosive effects on the souls of those afflicted by it - have been popular topics with tragedians and their audiences ever since theatre was first invented. Here are some well-known examples of the latter genre [note that the first of the listed works is the one which inspired psychology's "Oedipus complex"] .....

- In Sophocles' play Oedipus, the Tyrant, (ca. 428 BCE), the tragedy hinges on the guilt felt by a son upon learning that he has - albeit unwittingly - killed his father, had sexual intercourse with his mother, and inspired the larger part of Freudian theory in the process.

- In the New Testament story of the Crucifixion, Judas Iscariot is reported as having hanged himself out of remorse once the enormity of his treachery had dawned upon him. 

- In Shakespeare's play Macbeth, the eponymous central character, ambitious to the extent of doing murder but not wicked enough to prevent the resulting guilt from clouding his judgment, is eventually done to death himself [see synopsis].

- In Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, the eponymous central character is driven mad by the guilt he felt for having brought about the death of his shipmates by ignoring the sailors' superstition against killing albatrosses. [Note that feelings of guilt for having survived when others did not seem to have a large part to play in survivor syndrome.]

All in all, therefore, we should not be at all surprised that guilt was one of the first affects to be studied by the pioneers of psychodynamic theory. For example, both Freud and Breuer mention it a number of times under the name "self-reproach" - Freud's case, Elisabeth von R. felt guilty about resenting having to care for her ailing father when she would rather have been pursuing her personal affaires, and Breuer's case, Anna O. had periods of lucidity in which she could report being aware of a "bad self" responsible for "all the nonsense" which she regretted being unable [or was it merely unwilling?] to keep under control (both cases in Freud and Breuer, 1893-1895). Freud persisted with the topic in Draft K of the Fliess letters, listing feelings of reproach as significant in cases of obsessional neurosis (e.g., Freud, 1896, p220), and pointing out that several associated affects can arise out of the initial sense of guilt, thus .....

"The affect of the self-reproach may be transformed by various psychical processes into other affects, which then enter consciousness more clearly than the affect itself: for instance into anxiety (fear of the consequences of the action to which the self-reproach applies), hypochondria (fear of its bodily effects), delusions of persecution (fear of its social effects), shame (fear of other people knowing about it), and so on" (Freud, 1896, Letters to Fliess (Draft K) [Standard Edition (Vol. 1)], p224 [there is a similar mention in Freud's 1909 case, Rat Man - see the separate entry, particularly the fourth session of analysis]).

Freud eventually dealt with the problem of guilt by incorporating it into his notion of the "superego". Following your personal resolution of the Oedipus complex [see Freudian theory for the bare bones of this], guilt was what you were conditioned into feeling whenever your internalised same-sex parent spoke out like some inner voice telling you that this or that id-driven impulse was a non-runner because it was morally "wrong" [see the endnote below for a hyperlink to follow if interested in the particular issues of inner speech]. Freud then went even further out on a limb in his Totem and Taboo (Freud, 1917/1938), inspired in equal measure by Charles Darwin's notion of the "primal horde" and by Sir James Frazer's notions of "totemism".

HISTORICAL ASIDE: Despite their obvious differences of purpose, the intrepid explorer, the military man, the missionary, and traders in far-off lands have one very important thing in common - they go to places and they see things which their less adventurous compatriots can only dream about. As a result, they have always provided science with an important stream of biological specimens, cultural artefacts, and comparative observational data, and this has always been useful in widening the theoretical horizons of the scientific community back at home. This datastream became particularly influential in the 19th century, as the planet's continental interiors were inexorably lost to the "march of civilisation". The British Empire led the opening up of hitherto "Darkest" Africa, the Americans linked their East and West Coasts with railroads and sparred for territory with the Hispanics to the South, the Russian Bear pushed down from Moscow towards India in what has aptly been called "The Great Game", and everybody who had a sail to hoist vied for influence in the Far East. As for the aboriginal cultures who stood in their way, they simply fell like ninepins to the "pacification" and rapine of their colonial occupiers. We mention this because it was common practice to embed [to use the modern term] peripatetic academics in with the colonising forces, armed with notebook and microscope and keen to catalogue the flora and fauna of these strange new places and to wonder at the generally ungodly ways of the "savages" who lived there. Charles Darwin is entirely typical in this respect, having used a Royal Navy survey ship - the now-legendary H.M.S. Beagle - as a mobile laboratory on his [in fact, her] voyages of discovery [see Darwin's log]. The topic of primitive belief systems came up time and time again in all this. James (1948) mentions an 1866 publication by Edward Tyler entitled "The Religion of Savages" (subsequently enlarged as Tyler, 1871), and, in the years which followed, three classic works deserve particular mention. The first is Sir James Frazer's "The Golden Bough". This was originally published between 1890 and 1915, and is currently available in condensed form as Frazer (1993). Supported by a detailed review of taboo, ritual, and legend from societies great and small around the world, Frazer argues for a fairly standard progression from magic and primitive superstition to religious belief, and then from religious belief to scientific thought. The other classics are Lucien Levy-Bruhl's (1910) "How Natives Think" and Emile Durkheim's (1912) "Les Formes Élémentaires de la vie Religieuse", both of which emphasised the role played by the social system in producing a set of beliefs characteristic of that social system. It is one of Frazer's less well-known works - his 1887 Totemism - which inspired Freud's Totem and Taboo.

All this cultural comparison brought a strong anthropological angle to Freud's consideration of the problem of guilt. He noted specifically that not all societies viewed certain transgressions the same way, but that - curiously enough - they all had formal taboos against incest. Could it be possible, he wondered, that the sexual dynamics of individual development somehow dictated a culture's beliefs and social mores? Was guilt, indeed, a causative factor in religion and ritual, rather than an artefact of it; was it, itself, in some way "primal"? Could Frazer's totemism simply be the Oedipus complex blown up out of all proportion, and was the totem on your totem-pole simply the father you had wanted to kill ever since you were five years old? Here are two quick extracts introducing the totem systems of primitive societies .....

"Among the Australians the system of Totemism takes the place of all religious and social institutions. Australian tribes are divided into smaller septs or clans, each taking the name of its totem. Now what is a totem? As a rule it is an animal, either edible and harmless, or dangerous and feared; more rarely the totem is a plant or a force of nature (rain, water), which stands in a particular relation to the whole clan. The totem is first of all the tribal ancestor of the clan, as well as its tutelary spirit and protector; it sends oracles and, although otherwise dangerous, the totem knows and spares its children. The members of a totem are therefore under a sacred obligation not to kill (destroy) their totem [..... and a]ny violation of these prohibitions is automatically punished" (Freud, 1917/1938, Totem and Taboo [Brill Translation], pp16-17).

"'A totem', wrote Frazer in his first essay [Frazer (1887)], 'is a class of material objects which a savage regards with superstitious respect, believing that there exists between him and every member of the class an intimate and altogether special relation. The connection between a person and his totem is mutually beneficent; the totem protects the man and the man shows his respect for the totem in various ways" (op. cit., pp141-142).

And here is the basic thesis .....

"Psychoanalysis has revealed to us that the totem animal is really a substitute for the father, and this really explains the contradiction that it is usually forbidden to kill the totem animal, that the killing of it results in a holiday and that the animal is killed and yet mourned. The ambivalent emotional attitude which today still marks the father complex in our children and so often continues into adult life also extended to the father substitute of the totem animal. [.....] The Darwinian conception of the primal horde does not, of course, allow for the beginning of totemism. There is only a violent, jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away the growing sons. This primal state of society has nowhere been observed. The most primitive organisation we know, which today is still in force with certain tribes, is associations of men consisting of members with equal rights, subjected to the restrictions of the totemic system, and founded on matriarchy, or descent through the mother. Can the one have resulted from the other, and how was this possible? By basing our argument upon the celebration of the totem we are in a position to give an answer: One day the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde. [.....] Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength. The totem feast, which is perhaps mankind's first celebration, would be the repetition and commemoration of this memorable criminal act" (op. cit., pp188-190; bold emphasis added).

After Totem and Taboo, Freud returned his attention to the neurotic Europeans who paid his fees, further developing his theory of guilt in The Ego and the Id (Freud, 1923/1960). Basically, he saw different ways of handling our unconscious guilt as responsible for different forms of psychopathology, but with one important property in common, namely that at some deep level neurotics grow addicted to, like in some perverse way, and generally come to feed off what guilt can do to them. Thus [a long extract, heavily abridged] .....

"There are certain people who behave in a quite peculiar fashion during the work of analysis. When one speaks hopefully to them or expresses satisfaction with the progress of the treatment, they show signs of discontent and their condition invariably becomes worse. [.....] They exhibit what is known as a 'negative therapeutic reaction'. There is no doubt that there is something in these people that sets itself against their recovery [.....]. If we analyse this resistance in the usual way [..... we find] a negative attitude towards the physician and clinging to the gain from illness. In the end we come to see that we are dealing with what may be called a 'moral' factor, a sense of guilt, which is finding its satisfaction in the illness and refuses to give up the punishment of suffering. [.....] But as far as the patient is concerned this sense of guilt is dumb; it does not tell him he is guilty; he does not feel guilty, he feels ill. This sense of guilt expresses itself only as a resistance to recovery which it is extremely difficult to overcome. [.....] An interpretation of the normal, conscious sense of guilt (conscience) presents no difficulties; it is based on the tension between the ego and the ego ideal and is the expression of a condemnation of the ego by its critical agency. [.....] In certain forms of obsessional neurosis the sense of guilt is over-noisy but cannot justify itself to the ego [..... and i]n melancholia the impression that the superego has obtained a hold upon consciousness is even stronger. [.....] We understand the difference. In obsessional neurosis what were in question were objectionable impulses which remained outside the ego, while in melancholia the object to which the superego's wrath applies has been taken into the ego through identification. [..... And in hysteria,] the mechanism by which the sense of guilt remains unconscious is [.....] an act of repression. It is the ego, therefore, that is responsible for the sense of guilt remaining unconscious. [..... Indeed, o]ne may go further and venture the hypothesis that a great part of the sense of guilt must normally remain unconscious, because the origin of conscience is intimately connected with the Oedipus complex, which belongs to the unconscious" (Freud, 1923/1960, The Ego and the Id [Standard Edition], pp49-53; bold emphasis added).

Moving forward a generation, Eriksonian theory also made much of guilt, seeing it as one of the bipolar markers for the third of their eight stages of identity development, namely the stage of "identity versus guilt". This third stage covers ages four to five years, the very period of the Oedipus conflict, and your personal outcome depends on how successfully your ego copes with the changes described above. If the conflict works itself through well, then a sense of identity results, as follows .....

"Being firmly convinced that he is a person, the child must now find out what kind of person he is going to be. And here he hitches his wagon to nothing less than a star: he wants to be like his parents, who to him appear very powerful and very beautiful, although quite unreasonably dangerous" (Erikson, 1959, p74)

If, on the other hand, the particular individual resolution of the Oedipal conflict does NOT produce an appropriate balance of ego and superego resources, then the sense of guilt takes over instead, and pervades both the conscious and unconscious minds for the remainder of that individual's life, thus [a long passage, heavily abridged] .....

"A sense of self-control without loss of self-esteem is the ontogenetic source of a sense of free will. From an unavoidable sense of loss of self-control and of parental overcontrol comes a lasting propensity for doubt and shame. [.....] Shame is an infantile emotion insufficiently studied because in our civilisation it is so early and easily absorbed by guilt. Shame supposes that one is completely exposed and conscious of being looked at - in a word, self-conscious. One is visible and not ready to be visible [.....]. Shame is early expressed in an impulse to bury one's face or to sink, right then and there, into the ground. [.....] The destructiveness of shaming is balanced in some civilisations by devices for 'saving face'. [.....] Too much shaming does not result in a sense of propriety but in a secret determination to try to get away with things when unseen, if, indeed, it does not result in deliberate shamelessness" (Erikson, 1968, pp109-112; bold emphasis added).

 In fact, Erikson dates the emergence of the sense of guilt to a combination of "vastly increased imagination" (p118) and that "great governor of initiative", conscience, as follows .....

"The child, we said, now not only feels afraid of being found out, but he also hears the 'inner voice' of self-observation, self-guidance, and self-punishment, which divides him radically within himself: a new and powerful estrangement. This is the ontogenetic cornerstone of morality. But [.....] if this great achievement is overburdened by all too eager adults, it can be bad for the spirit and for morality itself. For the conscience of the child can be primitive, cruel, and uncompromising, as may be observed in instances where children learn to constrict themselves to the point of over-all inhibition; where they develop an obedience more literal that the one the parent wishes to exact; or where they develop deep regressions and lasting resentments [.....]. One of the deepest conflicts in life is caused by hate for a parent who served initially as the model and the executor of the conscience, but who was later found trying to 'get away with' the very transgressions which the child could no longer tolerate in himself" (Erikson, 1968, p119).

WHERE TO NEXT: For more on the psycholinguistics of the superego's magical inner voice, see the Research Exercise at the end of the entry for inner speech. For a general development of the material presented above, see the entries for identity, large group, guilt, denial of, and guilt, persecutory. Compare also Räikkä's (2007 online) "Regret and Obligation".

 Hallucinations: Hallucinations are a major element in differential diagnosis under DSM-IV, and have been defined as "sensory perceptions without external stimulation" (First, Frances, and Pincus, 1995, p64).

Halstead-Reitan Battery: [See firstly frontal lobe syndrome and dysexecutive syndrome.] This test is described in Section 5 of our e-paper "From Frontal Lobe Syndrome to Dysexecutive Syndrome". One disadvantage of the test is that it takes around six hours to work through all the sub-tests (Anastasi, 1990).

Hamilton's Triad: This is a convenient way of referring to Sir William Hamilton's modernisation of Plato's notion of the tripartite soul in the form of a three-headed taxonomy of the "primary classes" of mental phenomena, thus: "Let the mental phenomena, therefore, be distributed under the three heads of phenomena of cognition, or the faculties of knowledge; phenomena of feeling, or the capacities of pleasure and pain; and phenomena of desiring or willing, or the powers of conation" (Sir William Hamilton, p.p. Mansell and Veitch, 1865, p189). The second heading, feeling, is nowadays better known as affect. Hamilton went on to argue, however, that the three primary classes were then all subordinate to "one universal phenomenon - the phenomenon of consciousness" (ibid.).

Hard Problem, The: This is Chalmers' (1995) much quoted description of the problem of the subjectivity of consciousness. Here is the source text in full .....

"..... I find it useful to distinguish between the 'easy problems' and the 'hard problem' of consciousness. The easy problems are by no means trivial - they are actually as challenging as most in psychology and biology - but it is with the hard problem that the central mystery lies. The easy problems of consciousness include the following: How can the human subject discriminate sensory stimuli and react to them appropriately? How does the brain integrate information from many different sources and use this information to control behavior? How is it that subjects can verbalize their internal states? Although all these questions are associated with consciousness, they all concern the objective mechanisms of the cognitive system. Consequently, we have every reason to expect that continued work in cognitive psychology and neuroscience will answer them. The hard problem, in contrast, is the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience. This puzzle involves the inner aspect of thought and perception: the way things feel for the subject. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations, such as that of vivid blue. Or think of the ineffable sound of a distant oboe, the agony of an intense pain, the sparkle of happiness, or the meditative quality of a moment lost in thought. All are part of what I am calling consciousness. It is these phenomena that pose the real mystery of the mind." (Chalmers, 1995, pp62-63; bold emphasis added.) [Compare the discussion of "the hard question" in consciousness, Dennett's theory of.]

Hartmann, Heinz: [Austrian psychoanalyst (1894-1970).] [Click for external biography] Heinz Hartmann is noteworthy in the context of the present glossary for his contribution to ego psychology. 

Hartmann, Karl Robert Eduard Von: [German philosopher (1842-1906).] [Click for external biography] See unconscious, the.

Hatred: [See firstly anger and sibling rivalry.] Psychology uses the word "hatred" pretty much in its everyday sense, that is to say, as "the emotion or feeling of hate; active dislike, detestation; enmity, ill-will, malevolence" (O.E.D.). As such, it is one of the most extreme and enduring affective states of mind, and therefore theoretically highly significant in most variants of psychodynamic theory.

WHERE TO NEXT: If interested in group (including international) hatreds, then see hatred, large group aspects of. If interested in interpersonal hatreds, then see hatred, Oedipal aspects of.

Hatred, Large Group Aspects of: [See firstly hatred.] There is no shortage of anecdotal report from battlefields throughout history to the effect that most soldiers bear no personal malice against those they are trying to kill. "I had to do it," they reassure you, "it was either him or me" [click for typical memoir]. To see why it is so easy to get them to do it nonetheless, see identity, large group.

Hatred, Oedipal Aspects of: [See firstly hatred and Oedipus conflict.] For Freud, hatred was nothing less than a biological certainty should a given child's Oedipus conflict fail to resolve [that is to say, should the same-sex parent fail to get properly internalised at around age five years]. This was because hatred of your father-rival [or mother-rival, if a girl] in your first attempt at a more-than-just-reflex pair bond was nothing less than "the first hatred". Here is some early Freud on this .....

"A solution to this difficulty is afforded by the observation that dreams of the death of parents apply with preponderant frequency to the parent who is of the same sex as the dreamer: that men, that is, dream mostly of their father's death and women of their mother's. [.....] It is as though - to put it bluntly - a sexual preference were making itself felt at an early age: as though boys regarded their fathers and girls their mothers as their rivals in love, whose elimination could not fail to be to their advantage" (Freud, 1900/1958, The Interpretation of Dreams [Standard Edition (Vol. 4)], p356; bold emphasis added].

Moreover, if the necessary identification was defective, then not only would the relationship with the opposite-sex parent fail to fulfil itself vicariously, but the nascent superego would be unable to alleviate any residual pain by redefining the hatred as somehow inherently "wrong". Freud subsequently produced more of an object-relations interpretation of hatred in Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (Freud, 1915), where one of the vicissitudes [= "uncertainties, especially of form"] of love is its tendency to flip catastrophically into hatred if the love object in question becomes the source of unpleasure, as now explained .....

"If the object becomes a source of pleasurable feelings, a motor urge is set up which seeks to bring the object closer to the ego and to incorporate it into the ego. We then speak of the 'attraction' exercised by the pleasure-giving object, and say that we 'love' that object. Conversely, if the object is a source of unpleasurable feelings, there is an urge which endeavours to increase the distance between the object and the ego [.....]. We feel the 'repulsion' of the object, and hate it; this hate can afterwards be intensified to the point of an aggressive inclination against the object - an intention to destroy it" (Freud, 1915/1957, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes [Standard Edition], p137; bold emphasis added).

ASIDE: Freud made much the same point two years later in Mourning and Melancholia (Freud, 1917/1957) when discussing narcissistic hatred, and then again in The Ego and the Id (Freud, 1923/1960) where he uses the "unexpected regularity" (p41) with which love and hate go hand in hand to reflect upon the existence of a death-instinct. 

For their part, the Kleinian School assumes hate as "a complex process whereby an internal object is damaged or destroyed and the ego is faced with the exceedingly daunting task of renegotiating internal reality in the wake of such hate" (Bollas, 1987, p117). Kernberg, for example, makes much of it in his explanation of aggression, personality disorders and. And for his part, Erikson (1968) also notes a source of Oedipal hatred arising later in life, in the event that the parents - once so keen to impose their rules - ever get exposed as hypocritical of those rules in their own behaviour [see the fuller quotation towards the end of the entry for guilt]. More recently, Bollas (1987) has identified what he calls "loving hate", as follows .....

"It is my view that in some cases a person hates an object not in order to destroy it, but to do precisely the opposite: to conserve the object. Such hate is fundamentally nondestructive in intent and, although it may have destructive consequences, its aim may be to act out an unconscious form of love. I am inclined to term this 'loving hate', by which I mean a situation where an individual preserves a relationship by sustaining a passionate negative cathexis of it. If the person cannot do so by hating the object he may accomplish this passionate cathexis by being hateful and inspiring the other to hate him. A state of reciprocal hate may prevail [.....] Viewed this way, hate is not the opposite of, but a substitute for, love" (Bollas, 1987, p118; bold emphasis added).

WAS THIS A SENSITIVE TOPIC FOR YOU?: If for any reason you have been emotionally affected by any of the issues dealt with in this entry, you will find suitable helpline details in the entries for child abuse and infanticide and/or partner abuse and/or toxic caring.

H.D.: See case, H.D.

"Hebb-Marr Network": Same as neural network. [For a broader introduction to this topic, see our e-paper on "Connectionism".]

"Hebb's Rule": [See firstly cell assembly.] The law of contiguity applied to synaptic learning. Originally stated as follows: "Let us assume then that the persistence or repetition of a reverberatory activity (or 'trace') tends to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability. The assumption can be precisely stated as follows: When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased." (Hebb, 1949, p62; italics original.)

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: [German Idealist philosophy (1770-1831).] The German philosopher Georg Hegel [floruit 1807-1830] studied Kantian philosophy at Jena in the opening years of the 19th century, and became inspired thereby to devote a lifetime to the bold pursuit of "the whole truth" of mental philosophy (Loewenberg, 1929, ix), setting out his conclusions in "Phenomenology of Mind" (1807), "Science of Logic" (1812-1816), and "Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences" (1817-1830). Although acclaimed for his phenomenology, Hegel's accumulated writings dwell almost exclusively on the broad process of aesthesis rather than progressively zooming in on the all-critical central act of aesthesis - that magical moment of suddenly being aware of something. Admittedly, Hegel helps us to a number of important insights, but in the final analysis we are being asked to agree that these insights render the problem of subjectivity a non-problem, and in our judgment the evidence for this is insufficient.

Heidegger, Martin: [German philosopher (1889-1976).] [Click for biography.] See consciousness, Heidegger's theory of.

Heimann, Paula Gertrude: [Polish (later British) psychotherapist (1899-1982).] [Click for external biography] Heimann is noteworthy in the context of the present glossary for her work on the dynamics of the internalisation of objects in early development. There is a particularly valuable mention of her approach in the entry for object relations theory.

Helmholtz, Hermann von: [German physicist (1821-1894).] [Click for external biography] Although best remembered for his achievements as a physicist, Helmholtz contributed significantly both to the philosophy of science and to the psychology of perception [for details of which, see the entry for psychophysics]. For present purposes, his major works were "On Goethe's Scientific Researches" (1853) and "The Facts in Perception" (1878).

Help-Rejecting Complaining: This is one of the defense mechanisms postulated by psychoanalytic theory, and recognised by the DSM-IV as belonging to the "action" defense level. It presents as "complaining or making repetitious requests for help" (DSM-IV, 2000, p811), and then rejecting whatever is offered.

Hemispheric Loop Line: In his Principles, William James attempted to provide what he called a "general notion" (1890, p20) of the physiological layout of the nervous system. This was that "the lower centres act from present sensational stimuli alone; the hemispheres act from perceptions and considerations" (Ibid.). James summarized that notion graphically, using a circle to represent the nervous system below the level of the cerebral hemispheres, and a larger horizontal ovoid to represent the hemispheres themselves [click here to see reproduction]. There is a large and constant flow of information from the senses to the lower processing centres. This information is then analysed and used to support behaviour of the muscles. James describes this basic biological layout as the "direct line". He then describes the hemispheres as adding a "long circuit" or "loop-line" "through which the [nervous] current may pass when for any reason the direct line is not used" (p21).

Herbart, Johann Friedrich: [German educational psychologist (1776-1841).] [Click for external biography] Although Herbart was ostensibly an educational theorist, he is worth noting in the present context for three important contributions to mental philosophy. The first of these contributions is that he took a very "dynamic" view of what went on in the mind, seeing ideas as akin to forces and thoughts akin to the resulting movements. He also presumed that these movements and forces could be fitted to mathematical formulae, which could then be used, in turn, to design experiences for particular ends [this, of course, being the primary duty of any educator]. Herbart's second contribution is that he coined the term "limen" to indicate what has since been termed the "threshold of consciousness". Things would be happening in a given mind at a given point in time which were not yet fully formed or conscious. This he saw as a point beyond which a required idea needed to be excited in order to retrieve that idea back into consciousness. His third contribution arises from what happens once one or more new ideas has/have been raised above the limen of consciousness. What happens in this instance is that the individual mind's "apperceptive mass" expands to "assimilate" the new content.

Hermeneia: [Greek <ερμηνεια> ermeneia = "speech, interpretation" (O.C.G.D.).] This classical Greek word for the act of explaining the nature of something in words was adopted by Heidegger (1927) as the root concept for his hermeneutic philosophy. In his commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Sheehan (1984) explains the relevance of the term as follows .....

"In ordinary experience human beings live in their concerns and projects and thus already have a practical, if unthematic, understanding (hermeneia) of the being of themselves, other people, tools and nature. For example, when we employ tools for purposes, we know the tool as for something, and this pragmatic as-factor indicates that human being already understands the being-dimension of the tool (X as being Y). In fact, Heidegger claims that the Greeks basically experienced being in this practical modality, as evidenced by their appropriation of the word ousia - which refers to things of practical concern, like tools and houses - for 'being'" (p294).

Hermeneutic Cycle: [See firstly hermeneutics.] This is Dreyfus's (1991) term to describe the fact that applications of the hermeneutic method need to be sustained iteratively, thus: "In general, the so-called hermeneutic cycle refers to the fact that in interpreting a text one must move back and forth between an overall interpretation and the details that a given reading lets stand out as important" (Dreyfus, 1991, p36).

Hermeneutic Phenomenology: See phenomenology, hermeneutic.

Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics is "the art or science of interpretation, esp. of scripture" (O.E.D.). The word was popularised within mental philosophy by Heidegger (1927/1962), as a way of explaining what it was about his Dasein construct which suddenly made it capable of interpreting itself. Thus: "The phenomenology of Dasein is a hermeneutic in the primordial signification of this word, where it designates this business of interpreting [..... and also] in the sense of working out the conditions on which the possibility of any ontological investigation depends" (p62). Dreyfus (1991) adds .....

" For Heidegger, hermeneutics begins at home in an interpretation of the structure of everydayness in which Dasein dwells. [..... It is] 'the attempt first of all to define the nature of interpretation' [.....] Hermeneutic phenomenology, then, is an interpretation of human beings as essentially self-interpreting, thereby showing that interpretation is the proper method for studying human beings" (p34).

Heron of Alexandria: [Alexandrian Greek inventor (19-75 CE; but dates contentious).] According to the O'Connor and Robertson (1999/2006 online) biography, Heron was probably a lecturer in mechanics and pneumatics at the Museum of Alexandria, and is famous for compiling a textbook of this technology and its application. These mechanisms and mechanical amusements included primitive attempts at automatic doors, the first steam turbine, and a entire range of animated statues and monumental ornaments. Woodcroft's (1851) compilation of Heron's Pneumatics is available online, courtesy of the Department of History at the University of Rochester [take me there].

Herophilus [Greek physician (properly Herophilus of Chalcedon) (fl. ca. 280 BCE). Herophilus was one of the first empirical anatomists, and was responsible for the modern terms choroid, retina, and duodenum.

Higher (Cognitive) Functions: [See firstly cognition.] This term is popular in the psychological literature as a broad-brush description of advanced thinking skills, although (ominously) there is no definitive list thereof. Norman (1990), for example, proposes six clusters of higher processes, all accessing a core of memory resources [click to see diagram], and our own analysis is set out in Smith (1993) [click to see diagram].

Higher-Order Consciousness: See consciousness, Edelman and Tononi's theory of.

Hillman, James: [American Jungian psychoanalyst (1926-).] [Click for external biography] Hillman is noteworthy in the context of the present glossary for his work on psychology, archetypal and self, polycentric.

Hipp Chronoscope: This is Hipp's (1848) apparatus [picture] for recording reaction time to an accuracy of a thousandth of a second. It was heavily used for the study of psychophysics in the 19th century.

Historia: [Greek = "inquiry, knowledge, information; science, narration; history" (O.C.G.D.).]

Hobbes, Thomas: [British Materialist philosopher (1588-1679).] [Click for external biography] Our interest with Hobbes derives primarily from his notion of the mind as mechanism, as dealt with in greater detail in the entry for machine consciousness.

Holbach, Paul: [German Materialist philosopher-encyclopaedist (1723-1789).] [Click for external biography] See Materialism and underlying mechanism.

Holding Environment: [See firstly object relations theory.] This is Winnicott's term for the relationship between an infant and its primary caregiver during that infant's most helpless months of life. Winnicott chose the word "holding" because of the literal physical contact involved, but nevertheless liked to observe the entire situation in which that contact took place, trying to locate the all-important but extremely fragile area within which the mother moved freely and felt in charge, thus .....

""Satisfactory parental care can be classified roughly into three overlapping stages: (a) Holding. (b) Mother and infant living together. Here the father's function (of dealing with the environment for the mother) is not known to the infant). (c) Father, mother, and infant, all three living together. The term 'holding' is used here to denote not only the actual physical holding of the infant, but also the total environmental provision prior to the concept of living with. [.....] The term 'living with' implies object relationships, and the emergence of the infant from the state of being merged with the mother, or his perception of objects as external to the self" (Winnicott, 1960, p588; bold emphasis added).

Here is the fuller theory .....

"Freud was able to formulate a theory of the very early stages of the emotional development of the individual at a time when theory was being applied only in the treatment of the well-chosen neurotic case. [.....] As we look back now we may say that cases were well chosen as suitable for analysis if in the very early personal history of the patient there had been good enough [note this term - Ed.] infant-care. [.....] At that time theory was groping towards a deeper insight into this matter of the mother with her infant, and indeed the term 'primary identification' implies an environment that is not yet differentiated from that which will be the individual. When we see a mother holding an infant soon after birth, or an infant not yet born, at this same time we know that there is another point of view, that of the infant if the infant were already there; and from this point of view the infant is either not yet differentiated out, or else the process of differentiation has started and there is absolute dependence on the immediate environment and its behaviour. It has now become possible to study and use this vital part of old theory in a new and practical way in analytical work, work either with borderline cases or else with the psychotic phases or moments that occur in the course of the analyses of neurotic patients or normal people. This work widens the concept of transference since at the time of the analysis of these phases the ego of the patient cannot be assumed as an established entity, and there can be no transference neurosis [without] an ego [.....]. I have referred to the state of affairs that exists when a move is made in the direction of emergence from primary identification. Here at first is absolute dependence. There are two possible kinds of outcome: by the one environmental adaptation to need is good enough, so that there comes into being an ego which, in time, can experience id-impulses; by the other environmental adaptation is not good enough, and so there is no true ego establishment, but instead there develops a pseudo-self which is a collection of innumerable reactions to a succession of failures of adaptation" (Winnicott, 1956, p386; emphasis added).

Or from the baby's point of view .....

"The baby takes for granted all things like the softness of the clothes and having the bath water at the right temperature. What cannot be taken for granted is the mother's pleasure that goes with the clothing and bathing of her own baby. If you are there enjoying it all, it is like the sun coming out for the baby. [If not,] the whole procedure is dead, useless, and mechanical" (Winnicott, 1957, p27).

Hopkins (1991) has looked in greater detail at the effects of physical rejection in the holding environment on the child's subsequent attachment behaviour. She presents case, Clare, case, Laura, and case, Paddy for consideration, and argues from those data that it is the availability and accessibility of the mother which is critical rather than the holding per se. [See now true self versus false self.]

Holism: Holism is a philosophical doctrine predicated upon the assertion that complex sociocultural and psychological phenomena can never ultimately be explained in terms of underlying chemical or physiological processes [in which respect it is diametrically opposed to the position known as "reductionism"]. The holistic approach is far from universally supported, because complex systems actually need to be dissected in order to obtain experimental data, and thus expose them to the rigours of the scientific method. The price of the data, however, is that you lose sight of the wood for looking at the trees. For canonical examples of holistic theories of psychology, see the work of the Gestalt school (cognition),

Holism-Reductionism Problem: See the separate entries for holism and reductionism. 

Holocaust, the: This is the received term for the systematic and institutionalised genocide inflicted upon the European Jews and other minorities by the Nazis during World War II. [See now aggression, institutionalisation of and case, Butrimonys.]

Homunculus Fallacy: [See firstly consciousness, Dennett's theory of and consciousness, Ryle's theory of.] The term "homunculus" [sometimes "homonculus"] is Latin for "little man", and was popularized within cognitive science by Penfield and Boldrey (1937), following a major exercise mapping the somatotopic organization of the cerebral cortex. Penfield and Boldrey's Figure 28 shows a deformed, but nevertheless recognizable, mapping of the skeletomuscular body onto a transverse section of the primary sensory and motor areas. Now it so happened that Penfield and Boldrey's neuroanatomical data reflected on the long and bitter philosophical debate about soul, and the notion of an inner spirit of some sort in the mind was about to be severely criticised in Ryle's "The Concept of Mind" (Ryle, 1949). Ryle has argued that the very notion of "inner" and "outer" worlds was "notoriously charged with theoretical difficulties" (Ryle, 1949, p14), and had described as "Descartes' myth" the idea that there could be such a thing as a "ghost in the machine". Attneave (1960) wrote a paper entitled "In Defence of Homunculi" in which he argued that the problem of regression only applies "if we try to make the homunculus do everything" (p778). He sides with Bullock (1961) that there has to be a trigger neural unit somewhere which decides on the basis of the information available to it whether to authorise a particular piece of behaviour - that is to say, a "final functional unit", which, "like a military general" (Bullock, 1961, p718) acts as a "decision unit". We like Baars' (1997) distillation of Ryle's position, as follows: "If we had an observing self contemplating the contents of consciousness, he [= Ryle] argued, how would we explain the self itself? By another observer inside the inner self?" (p143). This particular problem is not new, however, being quite clearly seen in Aristotle's De Anima, thus: "..... if the sense that perceives sight were some other sense than sight, the only alternative to an infinite regress [note this phrase] will be that there be some sense that perceives itself [so] why not let this be a feature of the first of the series?" (p192, Lawson-Tancred translation). The topic became mainstream as part of the 1980s debate on whether a machine could ever be conscious, with Searle (1990) judging that most computational theory is guilty of the homunculus fallacy. Dennett's even more substantial point is that the whole notion of perceptual representation is riddled with the homunculus fallacy. This is because "nothing is intrinsically a representation of anything; something is a representation only for or to someone" (Dennett, 1981, p122; emphasis added).

Hope of Success (HS): See personality, motivation and.

Hot Cognition: See hyperconnectivity model.

Hrdy, Sarah B.: [American anthropologist-primatologist] [Click for external biography] Hrdy is noteworthy in the context of the present glossary for her work on infanticide and the selfish gene.

Hughlings Jackson, John: [British neurologist (1835-1911).] [Click for external biography] John Hughlings Jackson graduated from medical school in 1856, and took up a residency at the York Dispensary under Thomas Laycock, from whom he quickly acquired a fascination with neurology. He moved on to the then-recently-founded National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, Queens Square, London [now the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery] in 1862, specialising initially in epilepsy and gradually developing an reputation for the thoroughness of his clinical observation and the originality of his analyses [although apparently he eschewed formal experimentation and rarely used a microscope]. Amongst the career achievements identified by Meares (1999/2006 online), we have the following (abridged, and with individual citations removed; note carefully the point about representation, re-representation, and re-re-representation) .....

1. On the Self: "Jackson's approach to an understanding of mental illness began with a working model of 'mind'. He saw mind, or self, as a manifestation of brain function. [.....] He believed that one arose our of the other, so that there emerges a 'concomitant parallelism'. [.....] The next step in his argument concerned an adequate description of 'self'. Jackson believed himself to be the first to use the term in medical writing. He conceived it as double, consisting of subject and object or, as he put it, of 'subject consciousness...symbolised by 'I' [and] object consciousness...Each by itself is nothing; [each] is only half itself'. In essence, self depended on the emergence of what he called the 'introspection of consciousness'" (Meares, 1999).

2. On Basic Nervous System Organisation: "Early in his career Jackson worked under the physician Thomas Laycock and was impressed by his doctrine of reflex cerebral action. Jackson was also influenced by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, who suggested an evolutionary organization of the brain. These two ideas were joined in Jackson’s quest for an understanding of the evolution of self. He conceived of the central nervous system (CNS) in terms of its simplest functional unit. For Jackson, this unit was reflexive, the smallest element of sensorimotor function. Each of these units is a representing system. The brain, in his view, evolves and develops through an increasingly complex coordination of these units. As the organism evolves to a higher stage of function, it is not as if something new were being tacked on, which provides new representations. Rather, there is a re-representation. At a higher stage still, there is a re-re-representation, so that the most recently evolved part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, is 'universally representing'. 'The whole nervous system is a sensori-motor mechanism, a co-ordinating system from top to bottom'" (Meares, 1999).

3. On the Mind-Brain Problem: "Jackson rejected the idea that the mind or self requires a special new form of neural function to be built into the human brain. He wrote: 'There is no autocratic mind at the top to receive sensations as a sort of raw material, out of which to manufacture ideas, etc., and then to associate these ideas'. The appearance of self is the manifestation of a more complex coordination than previously. What is new, then, is a new, or higher, system of unification of the whole organism whereby the organism as a whole is adjusted to the environment. Self, however, is dependent on the evolution of anatomically new structures. Jackson suggested that the evolutionary development of the prefrontal cortex is necessary to the emergence of self. In this sense it could be called the 'organ of mind'. However, this is not to say that self resides in the prefrontal cortex. Rather, the new structure allows a more complex coordination of what is 'anatomically a sensori-motor machine'" (Meares, 1999).

Here is Jackson himself, firstly on the architectural principles of the intact system .....

"Beginning with evolution, and dealing only with the most conspicuous parts of the process, I say of it that it is an ascending development in a particular order. I make three statements which, although from different standpoints, are about the very same thing. 1. Evolution is a passage from the most to the least organised; that is to say, from the lowest, well organised, centres up to the highest, least organised, centres [.....] 2. Evolution is a passage from the most simple to the most complex; again, from the lowest to the highest centres [.....] 3. Evolution is a passage from the most automatic to the most voluntary. The triple conclusion [] is that the highest centres, which are the climax of nervous evolution, and which make up the 'organ of mind' (or physical basis of consciousness) are the least organised, the most complex, and the most voluntary" (Jackson, 1884; extracted in Herrnstein and Boring, 1965, p234).

..... and then on what happens when such a system is damaged (note the use of the word "layer" to apply to the brain centres as anatomical structures, and of the phrase "level of evolution" to apply to the relative functional complexity of those centres) .....

"So much for the positive process by which the nervous system is 'put together' - Evolution. Now for the negative process, the 'taking to pieces' - Dissolution. Dissolution being the reverse of [evolution] is a process of undevelopment; it is a 'taking to pieces' in the order from the least organised, from the most complex and most voluntary, towards the most organised, most simple, and most automatic. [..... T]he statement, 'to undergo dissolution' is rigidly the equivalent of the statement, 'to be reduced to a lower level of evolution' [..... and] the assertion is that each person's normal thought and conduct are, or signify, survivals of the fittest states of what we may call the topmost 'layer' of his highest centres: the normal highest level of evolution" (Jackson, 1884; extracted in Herrnstein and Boring, 1965, pp234-235).

For Jackson's views on the cognitive series, see that entry. Note also the pre-sensation as a sort of rudimentary consciousness of a lower level of nervous activity by a higher level.

[BREAKING RESEARCH: For more on the potential role of "abnormal connectivity" in preventing or degrading the maximal integration of multi-modular cognitive processing, see functional connectivity and its onward links.]

Hume, David: [Scottish Empiricist philosopher (1711-1776).] [Click for external biography] Hume's "Treatise of Human Nature" (Hume, 1748-1752/1911) is a late-Enlightenment classic on such topics as the association of ideas, causality, and moral philosophy. As an Associationist, Hume is remembered for his "three principles of association", namely "resemblance", "contiguity in time or place", and "cause and effect". Of these, the third is the most effective, there being no relation, he asserts "which produces a stronger connection in the fancy, and makes one idea more readily recall another, than the relation of cause and effect betwixt their objects" (Hume, Treatise; Nidditch edition, p11). The fundamental processes of association are responsible for the development of complex ideas out of simple ones.

Humour: This is one of the defense mechanisms postulated by psychoanalytic theory, and recognised by the DSM-IV as belonging to the "high adaptive" defense level. It works by emphasising "the amusing or ironic aspects of the conflict or stressor" (p812).

Hurley, Susan L.: [British cognitive scientist ().] [Academic website] Hurley is noteworthy in the context of the present glossary for her work on mirror neurons and shared circuits.

Husserl, Edmund: [German Phenomenologist philosopher (1859-1938).] [Click for external biography] The works analysed in this glossary are Logical Investigations (Husserl, 1900/2001) and Ideas (Husserl, 1913/1931). [See now consciousness, Husserl's theory of for the generalities, and the entries for act vs content debate, ego, ego cogito, eidetic singularity, function, genus, idea, immanent, intentionality (1), and intuition, for the specifics.]

Hyle: [<υλη> Greek = "that out of which something is made; material, matter".] See substance, and contrast morphe. Then see also hylomorphism.

Hyletic: See consciousness, Husserl's theory of.

Hyletic Phenomenology: See phenomenology, hyletic.

Hypercathexis: [See firstly cathexis.] This is the standard (i.e., Strachey) translation of Überbesetzung in Freud's Project and later writings. It indicates a system of neurons which, having been charged up with more than the normal amount of excitation (the result of trauma, say), has gone into a state of troublesome overload, threatening, consequently, to overwhelm the Ego's (often delicately balanced) defense mechanisms. The extent to which painful memories are then re-experienced depends on how effectively further defenses can be deployed relative to the strength of the overload. The physiological processes are simply an extension of those involved in cathexis in general, and may also be involved in the entirely non-emotional processes of attentional control.

 Hyperconnectivity Model: [See firstly aggression, hearing voices and.] This is Beck and Rector's (2003) attempt to explain schizophrenic auditory hallucinations in terms of "hypervalent", or "hot", cognitions. The model incorporates a number of conceptual building blocks, as follows .....

(1) Hyperactive Cognitions: The first important consideration when trying to understand the mechanisms of hallucination is to remember that the mind "consists of suborganisations composed of representations embedded in cognitive schemas" (p27). These representations are of external entities and the schemas organise recall from the confusion of available memories and memory types. Here is how the authors themselves see this arrangement in operation .....

"When any of the schemas is activated, it elicits a derivative cognition: a memory, a rule, an expectation. Externally oriented cognitions present as fears, predictions, and projected evaluations by others. Internally oriented cognitions assume the form of self-evaluations, self-control, self-commands and prohibitions, self-criticism, and self-praise. These kinds of cognitions occur normally in individuals but tend to be accentuated in the setting of psychopathology. They also often provide the content of hallucinations. When activated, the schemas play a role in information processing providing meaning to experiences. When hyperactive, they can preempt the central processing and produce interpretations (cognitions) that are congruent with their content rather than with external reality" (Beck and Rector, 2003, p27).

(2) Predisposition to Auditory Imaging: The next important consideration is to recognise that hallucinators have "a special predilection" (p28) for involuntary auditory hallucinations (although the explanation for this is far from apparent). There is, however, a mixed literature on the issue whether they are, or are not, deficient at voluntary auditory imaging. There have also been reports of a possible link to the phenomenon of inner speech. Here Beck and Rector mention a fMRI study by Shergill, Cameron, and Brammer (2001), which looked at the neural activity associated with auditory hallucinations. They reported that the pattern of said neural activity was "remarkably similar" to that seen in normal subjects asked to imagine another person talking to them. There was, however, reduced activity in the supplementary motor area when hallucinations were ongoing, which they speculated might be related to the lack of awareness that inner speech was being generated.

(3) "Perceptualisation": This is Beck and Rector's answer to the question how internally originated phenomena might be experienced as identical to externally originated ones. They begin by pointing out that the process of perception is prone to "gross distortion" (p30) of reality in the best of us, and then point to a defect in allocating current excitation to internal or external sources. 

(4) Disinhibition: Beck and Rector then note that schizophrenics show differences in their ability to inhibit certain mental processes.

(5) Externalising Bias: Hallucinators also appear to be unusually prone to attribute feedback of their own voice to an external source.

(6) Deficient Reality Testing: The next problem to be overcome by the would-be hallucinator is to fail to detect that the perceptualised and externalised voices are in any way inconsistent. Beck and Rector here point out that psychotics are well known for having hypoactive [= weaker than normal] "reality-testing tendencies" (p35), and probably favour "'easy' (but erroneous" (p35) methods of information processing as a result. They illustrate what is at stake by contrasting the behaviour of hallucinators - which is to accept the hallucination more or less at face value - and those who hear sounds as the result of tinnitus - who go out of the way to validate their perception in some way. 

(7) Reasoning Biases: Another factor in predisposing people to auditory hallucinations is that they are curiously subject to circular reasoning of the following sort .....

"Another patient Hank heard voices that he attributed to the Knights of King Arthur's Round Table. Because he heard voices from the past, he inferred that he must have lived in the past. Consequently, because he lived in the past, this confirmed that the voices came from people in the past and consequently were real" (Beck and Rector, 2003, p37).

(8) Progression of Hot Thoughts to Voices: Finally, Beck and Rector note that hallucination-prone patients may have the same basic inner speech processes as normals, but only up to the point where inner speech shades into "external voice". Thus .....

"A woman, for example, was working on a manual project and became frustrated when she ran into difficulties. She thought, 'I can't do anything right. I'm a wimp.' Following this charged cognition, she heard a voice saying, 'You can't do anything right'. Because thoughts like these trigger an emotional response, they are often labelled 'hot cognitions'. Another patient, a man, had a different ultimate vocalised cognition after a frustration, 'But you will accomplish great things'" (Beck and Rector, 2003, p39).

Hypersexuality: [See firstly differential diagnosis, psychiatric.] Clinically significant increases in sexual activity (to the extent that that judgment can actually successfully be made, for not all clinicians believe that it can, provided it has no underlying physical cause) is a clinical sign used in the differential diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, specifically the manic phase of the bipolar disorders [it is not, rather significantly, dealt with under the heading of sexual and gender identity disorders]. It has also been suggested that hypersexuality might productively be regarded as a coping behaviour which is somehow failing to deliver, or as a difficulty establishing and maintaining emotional intimacy (Mayo Clinic). As explained by the Mayo Clinic, "many people who engage in compulsive sexual behaviour report a past history of sexual or physical abuse", and use sex "as an escape from other problems, such as loneliness, depression, anxiety, or stress". The condition is characterised in a number of ways, including: having multiple sexual partners; excessive masturbation; engaging in sexual activity when stressed or depressed; exposing yourself in public; using pornography frequently.

Hyperthymia: [From the Greek "heightened mood".] This is a recently identified disorder not yet officially accepted into the DSM-IV. It consists of recurrent hypomanic episodes, not accompanied by depression. 

Hypnosis: Hypnosis is "artificially produced sleep; esp. that induced by hypnotism; the hypnotic state" (O.E.D.). The term was coined by Braid (1843) as an alternative to Mesmerism.

Hypomania: Interpreted literally, hypomania is a sub-mania, that is to say, it displays many of the behaviours belong to full mania, but tends to fall short of disrupting everyday life. The distinguishing behaviours of a hypomanic episode include talking incessantly, feeling full of ideas, switchbacking between euphoria and irritability, being easily distracted, and being "unusually friendly" (Mind website). Hypomanic individuals are often difficult to help as friends, because they often respond with anger if anyone suggests they might have a problem. Beck (1967) describes hypomania this way .....

"The thought content is opposite that of depression. The dominant cognitive patterns are exaggerated ideas of personal abilities, minimisation of external obstacles, and overly optimistic expectations. These patterns lead to euphoria, to increased drive, and to overactivity" (p270).

Hysteria: [See firstly hysterikos.] Historically speaking, hysteria was one of the first "mental" disorders ever to be documented and theorised about (the ancient Egyptians attributed it to a "wandering uterus"). It presents clinically as a dramatic physical dysfunction, capable of kicking in more or less instantaneously, and disabling the patient's normal interaction with the world. It is characterised by a loss of volitional control, showing itself in a number of possible objective signs, such as unconsciousness, emotional outbursts, heaviness of limb, cramps, convulsions, etc. Probably the earliest explanation of hysteria (and, indeed, any loss of identity or consciousness occurring in the absence of an obvious physical cause) would have been that it involved possession by demons. Ancient "psychiatry" was thus based on the warding off or casting out of the troublesome others from an otherwise blameless host, the process commonly known as "exorcism". It is convenient to focus on four separate aspects of the disorder, namely (a) whether there is a background "hysterical personality" of some sort, more than usually prone to this sort of breakdown, (b) the nature of the periods of acute attack, (c) the nature of the triggering events, and (d) what to do about it. The classical explanation for this package of symptoms was that the sufferer - always a woman - had an affliction of the womb [check this out]. Hippocrates's view of hysteria was as follows .....

"Hysteria was shrewdly considered by him to be due to the movement of the womb (hysteron) throughout the body. He antedated by two thousand years the modern findings of the place of sexuality in the neurosis. Although Hippocrates prescribed the traditional tight bandage around the abdomen for hysterical paroxysms, with fumigation by warm vapours conveyed through a funnel into the vagina, he astutely advised as a more practical remedy for hysteria 'to indulge the intentions of nature and to light the torch of Hymen [the Goddess of marriage - Ed.]'" (Bromberg, 1954, p28).

The Middle Ages were never enlightened times, but the treatment of mental health disorders reached a new low in the late 15th century with the publication of Kramer and Sprenger's (1484) Malleus Maleficarum ("The Witches' Hammer"). Fathers Kramer and Sprenger - carrying their papers from Pope Innocent VIII as "Inquisitors of heretical pravities" - explicitly promoted the idea "that women are closely allied to sin" and that it was "to the devil's advantage to encourage carnal pleasures" (in Bromberg, 1954, p51). Unfortunately for the innocently neurotic and the politely confused, the signs of demonic possession overlapped in many key respects with those of witchcraft [one of the officially recognised signs of possession, for example, was that your disorder simply defied alternative diagnosis], and so for a long while psychiatry's treatment of choice was burning at the stake (in the patient's own best interests one hastens to add)! The burnings began at once, but in fact did not peak until the 1640s, when the arch-Puritan Matthew Hopkins - "witch-finder general" to the Parliamentarians in the English Civil War - whipped the populace up into a frenzy of Christian fundamentalism [tell me this story].

ASIDE: There is, of course, no shortage of witch-hunts in the modern world, as any NHS or civil service "whistle-blower" will confirm, nor is there any shortage of fundamentalist idiocy on offer either.

So powerful was the belief in witchcraft, indeed, that only slowly did the Enlightenment - when finally it did start to arrive - become properly enlightened. Bromberg notes, for example, that as late as 1769 the University of Edinburgh physician William Cullen, in his textbook of "Physick", was still actively having to dismiss the notion of demonic possession in mental disease. As Descartes had before him, Cullen recognised that there had to be some basic form of "motion" within the nervous system, and that this could therefore go wrong, but too little was known about the mind and soul. He coined the term "neurosis" to designate diseases not accompanied by fever, "bad habit" (such as scurvy), or focal lesion (such as cancer). Hysteria was thus a neurosis, rather than possession, and as to what caused it, Cullen sided with Hippocrates .....

"[Hysteria] affects the barren more than the breeding woman, and therefore frequently young widows ..... It occurs in those females who are liable to the nymphomania; and the nosologists [diagnosticians] have properly enough marked one of the varieties of the disease by the title Hysteria libidinosa. [.....] In what manner the uterus and in particular the ovaria ..... rise upwards to the brain so as to cause convulsions .... I cannot explain" (Cullen, 1769, Physick; in Bromberg, 1954, p75).

The 18th century also saw the rise of the great "mad-houses". Bethlehem Hospital in London (the archetypal "bedlam") had been specialising in "lunaticks" (and other ne'er-do-wells such as beggars, prostitutes, and petty criminals) since 1547 and the Salpêtrière had been doing much the same in Paris since 1675. These were then joined by Norwich Bethel in 1713, the lunatic wards at Guy's Hospital in 1723, Manchester Asylum in 1766, and Newcastle Asylum in 1767, and, in the US, by Williamsburg Asylum, VA, in 1773, and Frankfort Asylum, PA, in 1817. But although physicians like Cullen were doing their best to be enlightened, they were not at the front line, and those that actually ran the institutions relied mainly on brutality and physical restraint. Then, in a short period of time now known as "the humane period", each of the asylums suddenly acquired its own relatively enlightened director. Pride of place is traditionally given to Philippe Pinel, who joined the Salpêtrière in 1792, and (ably assisted by Baptiste Pussin) freed its inmates of their chains - literally as well as figuratively. In Britain the key figures included William Tuke at York (1795), Charles Worth and Gardner Hill at Lincoln, and John Conolly at Hanwell. In America it was Benjamin Rush [whom we met in the entry for multiple personality, and who had studied as a young man under Cullen at Edinburgh]. One of the products of the humane period was the technique of hypnosis. The first "modern" student of hysteria was Jean-Martin Charcot, resident physician at the Salpêtrière Psychiatric Hospital, Paris, between 1862 and 1893. He had some 4000 female inmates at his disposal (Didi-Huberman, 2003), and simply described what he saw. He was also free to devise experimental new therapies, including hypnosis. Now one of Charcot's students during the winter of 1885-6 was a not-long-qualified Sigmund Freud, and so impressed was he with Charcot's use of hypnosis that he and his colleague Josef Breuer adopted the technique themselves. The essence of their method was to use a hypnotic state to get back to the patient's suppressed memories of some earlier trauma, and the two men published their results in Studien über Hysterie ("Studies on Hysteria") (Freud and Breuer, 1895). Here is an indicative extract .....

"For we found, to our great surprise at first, that each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly into the light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words" (Breuer and Freud, 1893, in Freud and Breuer, 1895, p57).

The main theoretical coverage of the new technique was in Breuer's Part III of the book. Here he reviews the main points to be reflected upon, including whether hysterical phenomena are wholly ideogenic, the physical pathways and mechanisms involved, the role of symbolism in the association of ideas, the nature of the hypnoid state and the transitions into and out of it, and the nature of the unconscious ideas which were doing the damage. And one factor turned out to be especially puzzling in its own right, even to the extent of helping to define the essence of the disorder. Here is Breuer himself on this .....

"We call those ideas conscious which we are aware of. [..... But w]hat seems hard to understand is how an idea can be sufficiently intense to provoke a lively motor act, for instance, and at the same time not intense enough to become conscious" (Breuer, 1895, in Freud and Breuer, pp300-302).

The explanation, Breuer suggests, is that the conscious element gets "converted" (p302) into somatic stimuli. This would allow the ideas which triggered the acute episodes to not be recognised as such by the patient, and it was to bring this causal link to consciousness that the method of hypnosis was used. The neurologist Pierre Janet also specialised in the hysterias, and he, too, emphasised the defining role of somehow-badly-managed ideation in the disorder .....

"The first psychological notion that appears to me to result with the greatest clearness from all the contemporary works is a notion relative to the importance of ideas in certain hysterical accidents. Charcot, studying the paralyses, had shown that the disease is not produced by a real accident, but by the idea of this accident. [..... I]deas have a greater importance, and, above all, a greater bodily action than with the normal man. They seem to penetrate more deeply into the organism, and to bring about motor and visceral modifications. [.....] 'What characterises hystericals,' [Mathier and Roux] said, 'is less the fact of accepting some idea or other than the action exercised by this idea on their stomachs or intestines.' [..... Other workers] have repeated [.....] quite similar definitions. 'A phenomenon is hysterical,' said Babinski, 'when it can be produced through suggestion and cured through persuasion'." (Janet, 1907, pp310-311).

Janet goes on to suggest that a "dissociation of consciousness" (p314) of some sort might be involved somewhere along the line, thus .....

"Suggestion itself is but a case of this dissociation of consciousness. [.....] The point which seems to me to be the most delicate in this definition is to indicate to what depth this dissociation reaches. [.....] What is dissolved is personality, the system of grouping of the different functions around the same personality. [..... Hysteria] is a malady of the personal synthesis, [namely] a form of mental depression characterised by the retraction of the field of personal consciousness and a tendency to the dissociation and emancipation of the systems of ideas and functions that constitute personality" (pp314-315).

Myerson (1920?/2006 online) described hysteria as "a weapon in marital conflicts", and presented a case history of a 38-year old female which makes an interesting read [take me there]. Hysteria has not been recognised as a diagnostic category since DSM-III in 1980, and the syndrome is treated under the 1995 DSM-IV as a "somatoform disorder".

[BREAKING RESEARCH: For more on the potential role of "abnormal connectivity" in preventing or degrading the maximal integration of multi-modular cognitive processing, see functional connectivity and its onward links.]

Hysteria, Epidemic: [See firstly hysteria.] [Often "mass hysteria".] The term "epidemic hysteria" refers to "the rapid spread of conversion symptoms and anxiety states" in "enclosed settings, such as schools and factories" in response to either a maliciously placed or spontaneously emerging triggering rumour [compare "meme"]. The classic example of epidemic hysteria is that of the supposed demonic possessions which led to the witch-hunts of the mid-to-late 17th century .....

click here for the story of the "witches of Salem"

Bartholomew and Goode (2000/2007 online) provide a generally humorous introduction to the modern subject area [we confess to being particularly fond of the Great Lagos Penis Theft case (Nigeria, 1990), even though innocent people are reported to have lost their lives]. More seriously, the following have been claimed as hysterical phenomena by at least some authorities .....

chronic fatigue syndrome; Gulf War syndrome; recovered memory syndrome; satanic ritual abuse; multiple personality disorder; alien abduction

 So what are the distinctive signs of epidemic hysteria? Here are Bartholomew and Goode again .....

"Mass hysteria is characterised by the rapid spread of conversion disorder, a condition involving the appearance of bodily complaints for which there is no organic basis. In such episodes, psychological distress is converted or channeled into physical symptoms" (emphasis added).

The writer Elaine Showalter adds .....

"Hysteria not only survives in the 1990s, it is more contagious than in the past. [.....] The cultural narratives of hysteria, which I call hystories, multiply rapidly and uncontrollably in the era of mass media, telecommunications, and e-mail. [.....These h]ystories have internal similarities or evolve in similar directions as they're retold - which has convinced many doctors and researchers that these stories must be true. [.....] Literary critics, however, realise that similarities between two stories do not mean that they mirror a common reality [..... because] writers inherit common themes, structures, characters, and inmages; critics call these common elements intertextuality. We need not assume that patients are [.....] lying when they present similar narratives of symptoms. Instead, patients learn about diseases from the media, unconsciously develop the symptoms, and then attract media attention in an endless cycle" (Showalter, 1997, pp5-6)

Mohr and Bond (1982) have studied an outbreak of hysteria in a girl's school, and conclude as follows .....

"A typical outbreak of mass hysteria lasts for a few days and affects about a third of the school. Most victims are adolescent girls who are affected by hyperventilation and fainting [etc.]. Epidemics are often triggered by a general fear or rumour [.....]. The Eysenck Personality Inventory [.....] showed that affected girls could be differentiated by the neurotic score (N factor); furthermore, children with behavioural abnormalities were more likely to be affected" (Mohr and Bond, 1982, p962).

Hysterikos: Greek = "of, from, or pertaining to the womb". [See now hysteria.]

Iconic Memory: Very short-term visual memory, first formally investigated by Sperling (1960).

ASIDE: The distinction between very short-term memory and ordinary short-term memory is unlikely to be a physiological one. Both forms are probably "electrical STM" as defined in memory, physiological types, albeit probably located in different processing modules, one more peripheral than the other.

ICS: See interacting cognitive subsystems.

Idea: [See firstly the G2 pump-priming material on forms and ideas.] Here is an extract from the Catholic Encyclopedia concerning Plato's conceptualisation of ideas .....

"The word was originally Greek, but passed without change into Latin. It seems first to have meant form, shape, or appearance, whence, by an easy transition, it acquired the connotation of nature, or kind. It was equivalent to eidos, of which it is merely the feminine, but Plato's partiality for this form of the term and its adoption by the Stoics secured its ultimate triumph over the masculine. Indeed it was Plato who won for the term idea the prominent position in the history of philosophy that it retained for so many centuries. With him the word idea, contrary to the modern acceptance, meant something that was primarily and emphatically objective, something outside of our minds. It is the universal archetypal essence in which all the individuals coming under a universal concept participate. By sensuous perception we obtain, according to Plato, an imperfect knowledge of individual objects; by our general concepts, or notions, we reach a higher knowledge of the idea of these objects. But what is the character of the idea itself? What is its relation to the individual object? And what is its relation to the author or originator of the individual things? The Platonic doctrine of ideas is very involved and obscure. Moreover, the difficulty is further complicated by the facts that the account of the idea given by Plato in different works is not the same, that the chronological order of his writings is not certain, and, finally, still more because we do not know how far the mythological setting is to be taken literally. Approximately, however, Plato's view seems to come to this: — To the universal notions, or concepts, which constitute science, or general knowledge as it is in our mind, there correspond ideas outside of our mind. These ideas are truly universal. They possess objective reality in themselves. They are not something indwelling in the individual things, as, for instance, form in matter, or the essence which determines the nature of an object. Each universal idea has its own separate and independent existence apart from the individual object related to it. It seems to dwell in some sort of celestial universe (en ouranio topo). In contrast with the individual objects of sense experience, which undergo constant change and flux, the ideas are perfect, eternal, and immutable" [see the full entry].

Aristotle provides a competing definition, thus: "By eidos", he wrote, "I mean the essence of each thing and its primary substance" (Metaphysics, 1032b; Ross translation [yet again non-classicists are at the mercy of the translator. Lawson-Tancred (1998) renders the same phrase as: "By form I mean the what-it-was-to-be-that-thing for each thing and the primary substance" (p190)]), and on behalf of the British Empiricists, John Locke offers the notion of the "simple idea", a class of idea arising either from sensation or thought, and characterized by not being a compound of lesser ideas, thus .....

"The coldness and hardness which a man feels in a piece of ice being as distinct ideas in the mind as the smell and whiteness of a lily [.....] which, being each in itself uncompounded contains in it nothing but one uniform appearance or conception in the mind, and is not distinguishable into different ideas" (Locke, 1690, p71).

However, Locke then allows for "complex ideas", that is to say, ideas which are "made by the mind out of simple ones" (Locke, 1690, p108), and which are "ultimately resolvable into simple ideas" (Op. cit., p206). With ideas of substance, for example, this happens whenever the mind notices "that a certain number of these simple ideas go constantly together" (p208). Locke goes on to identify three subclasses of complex idea, respectively "modes", "substances", and "relations". The philosopher Willard Quine even rejects the notion altogether, arguing that "there is no place in science for ideas" (Quine, 1990, p89), recommending instead the term universals. [See now idea, simple and idea, complex.]

Idea, Simple: See idea.

Idea, Complex: See idea.

Idealisation: This is one of the defense mechanisms postulated by psychoanalytic theory, and recognised by the DSM-IV as belonging to the "minor image-distorting" defense level. It involves dealing with emotional conflict "by attributing exaggerated positive qualities to others" (DSM-IV, 2000, p812). [For the role of idealisation in the aetiology of borderline personality disorder, see personality, splitting of.]

Idealism: Idealism is one of the two possible monist positions in the mind-brain debate (the other being physicalism). In its strictest interpretation, it is the notion that there exist laws of the mind which will (once they have been finally and fully established) be able to explain not just the workings of the mind, but the workings of the brain as well. Less strictly interpreted, Kant refers at one point in his Critique to "material idealism" as "the theory that declares the existence of objects in space outside us either to be merely doubtful and unprovable, or to be false and impossible" (p288). The most notorious of the "strict" Idealists was Berkeley, as the quotations in the entry for reality will illustrate. [See also Idealism, Objective.]

Idealism, Objective: This is Smith's (1989/2005 online) term for a variant form of Idealism proposed by the philosophers Bergmann and Lotze, in which judgments of truth are required to be made against "some objective standard, transcendent to the judgment". In Bergmann's case, the standard was expressed in his notion of the Sachverhalt. Knowledge for Bergmann, he explains, was the sort of thinking "whose thought content is in harmony with the Sachverhalt, and is therefore true". In Lotze's (1880) case, it was the sachliche Verhältnis [= "material relation"] which mattered, because this was free to differ whenever the contents of a perceptual scene were simply rearranged. Indeed, one has to "picture" the relation of those objects before you can express its truth in sentence form as a proposition. [See now, and carefully compare, Sachverhalt and Sachverhältnis.]

Ideation: See the G.2 pump-priming definitions.

Ideational Complex: See complex. 

Identification (E/0/1/2/3): [See firstly internalisation.] In everyday language, the phrase "to identify with someone" means "to make one in interest, feeling, principle, action, etc." with that someone, and has been in use with that meaning since at least the middle of the 18th century (O.E.D.). The derived noun "identification" means "the becoming or making oneself one with another, in feeling, interest, or action", and has been in use with that meaning since about the middle of the 19th century (ibid.). To identify with someone (and we have to recognise that the someone in question might as easily be fictional as real) is to empathise in some way with them, or to model your behaviour, your interpretation of the world, your ambitions, and even your whole being, upon theirs. This process - part imitation, part idealisation, part self-betterment by self-rejection - is typically triggered by it being noted (a) that the person thus identified with is (or has been, or might one day be) possessed of some crucial physical or mental or behavioural attribute, and (b) that said physical or mental or behavioural attribute has an emotional side to it which strikes an important chord. To put it plainly, something in the person identified with "clicks with you", "does it for you". Identification is thus .....

a process whereby the self improves its own jigsaw picture using parts of another's

It follows that identification is automatically a major topic within psychology. What, for example, are the mechanisms of this self-modelling process, and to what extent do they operate unconsciously? And where does it all end - because if we are just patchworks of fragments copied from others - just Frankenstein selves, so to speak - what does that make us? Identification, in short, is one of the keys (if not the key) to understanding what it means to be human, and in the remainder of this entry we shall endeavour to trace the evolution of this entire philosophical construct. In the event, we shall be recognising four distinct technical uses of the notion [numbered 0 to 3 below], and three of the word itself [numbered 1 to 3 below], as follows .....

Identification (0) - As Implicit Construct in Freud's Early Writings (to 1895): Freud once confessed to being "far from satisfied" (Freud, 1933/1964, New Introductory Lectures, pp94-95) with his ability to conceptualise the process of identification, even though he had by then long regarded it as one of the fundamentals of psychoanalytic theory. To understand this concern, we need to go back to the early 1890s, when Freud was facing the problem of how to develop further the model of mind he had woven so successfully into his monograph On Aphasia (Freud, 1891) [readers unfamiliar with the cognitive architecture proposed in On Aphasia should familiarise themselves with the summative diagram reproduced in the companion resource before proceeding]. We also need to understand that Freud was already an accomplished interdisciplinary theorist. As we explained in the first sidenote to the entry for Freud's Project, he was able to move with equal authority between the micro- and the macro- levels of neurophysiology. He had also acquired first-hand clinical experience working under Charcot in the hysteria wards at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris (1885-1886), as well as in his own private practice in "nervous disease" in Vienna, where he worked closely with Josef Breuer. None of these bodies of experience bears directly on the process of identification, but the point is that they do not have to, because the mere fact that identification is such a fundamental process means that every patient Freud had ever seen had done his or her fair share of it (and pathologically, too, in many cases). Nevertheless, identification was not yet the central topic of Freud's emerging theories, although there are two early areas where it seems to be at work, but only silently; that is to say, where the term itself was not explicitly used. The first of these areas was hysteria, the focus of Freud's writing in the years 1891 to 1894, where it can easily be argued that identification is what causes hysterical patients to produce physical behaviours similar to those seen in others - the process which is at the heart of the phenomenon of epidemic hysteria. Freud complains of case, Elisabeth von R., for example, that .....

"From the beginning it seemed to probable that Fräulein Elisabeth was conscious of the basis of her illness, that what she had in her consciousness was only a secret and not a foreign body. Looking at her, one could not help thinking of the poet's words: Das Mäskchen da weissagt verborgnen Sinn [= "her mask reveals a hidden sense]" (Freud, 1893-1895, Studies on Hysteria [Case History #5], p206; bold emphasis added).

The second area where the processes of identification were only obliquely acknowledged was in the detailed neurophysiological theory put forward in Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud, 1895/1966) [for full details of which, see Freud's Project]. In this highly "reductionist" work, Freud turns to the micro-anatomical knowledge he had acquired while working for Brücke between 1875 and 1881, and focuses on an entirely different subset of the mind's mysteries, namely its underlying neurophysiology. Again he does not resort to the words "identification with" or the construct "identification", but, as the following extract demonstrates, he was gradually homing in on what it meant to the brain to gaze outwards on a "fellow human-being", thus ..... 

"We come now to a third possibility that can arise in a wishful state: when, that is, there is a wishful cathexis and a perception emerges which does not coincide in any way with the wished-for mnemic image (mnem.+). Thereupon there arises an interest for cognizing this perceptual image, so that it may perhaps after all be possible to find a pathway from it to mnem. +. [.....] If the perceptual image is not absolutely new, it will now recall and revive a mnemic perceptual image with which it coincides at least partly. The previous process of thought is now repeated in connection with this mnemic image [.....]. In so far as the cathexes coincide, they give no occasion for activity of thought. On the other hand, the non-coinciding portions 'arouse interest' and can give occasion for activity of thought in two ways. [Examples given.] Let us suppose that the object which furnishes the perception resembles the subject - a fellow human-being. If so, the theoretical interest [taken in it] is also explained by the fact that an object like this was simultaneously the [subject's] first satisfying object and further his first hostile object, as well as his sole helping power. For this reason it is in relation to a fellow human-being that a human-being learns to cognize" (Freud, 1895/1966, Project for a Scientific Psychology [Standard Edition (Volume 1)], pp330-331; bold emphasis added)

Identification (1) - As Basic Psychodynamic Process (1897 onwards): After the Project, Freud began to use the term "identification"explicitly. He began with a number of instances in various of his letters to Wilhelm Fliess [details below], but only in the everyday sense noted at the head of this entry. Gradually, however, he started to note that the defining function of identification was not mere admiration or compassion, but rather a reduction of the anxiety associated with a particular individual or class of individuals by becoming more like them. Identification was therefore slowly re-characterised as the motivated adjustment of one's relationships with those who most influence our lives. In his detailed early history of the construct, Compton (1985) itemises the following early mentions of the term .....

1897 - Letter 58 (8th February 1897): There is a brief mention in this letter concerning hysterical cataleptic fits, in which Freud suggests that the paralysis is the result of "imitation of death with rigor mortis, that is, identification with someone who is dead" (Freud, 1897, Letters to Fliess [Masson (1985)], p230).

1897 Draft L (2nd May 1897): This is another brief mention of identification when talking about the role played by "servant-girls" in inducing hysterical tendencies in higher-born females, thus: "An immense load of guilt [.....] is made possible for a woman by identification with these people of low morals, who are so often remembered by her as worthless women connected sexually with her father or brother" (Freud, 1897, Letters to Fliess [Standard Edition, Volume 1 (1966)], pp248-249).

1897 - Draft N (31st May 1897): There is a similar mention a few weeks later, when talking about patients' hostile impulses towards their parents. [This manuscript, incidentally, has been identified [e.g., by Strachey (SE14, p240)] as Freud's formative statement on the Oedipus complex.]

1899 - Letter 125 (9th December 1899): And there is another on the subject of hysteria two years later, thus: "Hysteria (and its variant, obsessional neurosis) is allo-erotic: its main path is identification with the person loved" (Freud, 1899, Letters to Fliess [Standard Edition, Volume 1 (1966)], p280).

1900 - The Interpretation of Dreams: Freud continued on the subject of hysteria in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900/1958), and it is in this work that the psychodynamic potential of the process of identification started to show itself. Consider this, from one of the dreams discussed .....

"..... the dream will acquire a new interpretation if we suppose that the person indicated in the dream was not herself but her friend, that she had put herself in her friend's place, or, as we might say, she had 'identified' herself with her friend. I believe she had in fact done this; and the circumstance of her having brought about a renounced wish in real life was evidence of this identification. What is the meaning of hysterical identification? It requires a somewhat lengthy explanation ....." (Freud, 1900/1958, The Interpretation of Dreams [Standard Edition (Volume 4)], pp231-232 [to see this extract in its fuller context, see case, the butcher's wife]).

Freud's (indeed lengthy) explanation is that the science of interpreting dreams has a number of basic rules (not least that they arise from the dreamer's real-life experiences during the day preceding the dream), but that identification can cloud the issue of who, within the single dreaming brain, is the functional dreaming person! Identification allows the host ego to assume various "alter egos". Moreover, as soon as that vicarious expression starts to protect the host ego from the pains of reality, identification starts to evolve into just another ego defense. Here is Freud on this .....

"Identification is a highly important factor in the mechanism of hysterical symptoms. It enables patients to express in their symptoms not only their own experiences but those of a large number of other people; it enables them, as it were, to suffer on behalf of a whole crowd of people and to act all the parts in a play single-handed. [..... It] is not simple imitation but assimilation on the basis of a similar aetiological pretension; it expresses a resemblance and is derived from a common element which remains in the unconscious. Identification is most frequently used in hysteria to express a common sexual element. A hysterical woman identifies herself in her symptoms most readily - though not exclusively - with people with whom she has had sexual relations or with people who have had sexual relations with the same people as herself. [.....] In hysterical phantasies, just as in dreams, it is enough for purposes of identification that the subject should have thoughts of sexual relations without their having necessarily taken place in reality. Thus [in the above-mentioned case] my patient put herself in her friend's place in the dream because her friend was taking my patient's place with her husband and because she (my patient) wanted to take her friend's place in her husband's high opinion" (op.cit., pp232-233; bold emphasis added).

1905 - A Case of Hysteria: Freud returned to the process of identification in his detailed analysis of case, Dora. The following snippet shows how he now suspected the process of identification as being the first fundamental phase in the aetiology of the Oedipus complex ..... 

"After a part of her libido had once more turned towards her father, the symptom obtained what was perhaps its last meaning; it came to represent sexual intercourse with her father by means of Dora's identifying herself with Frau K. [her father's mistress - Ed.]" (Freud, 1905, A Case of Hysteria [Standard Edition (Volume 7)], p83).

All in all, Freud used the term "identification" some 18 times in his early works (Compton, 1985), sometimes conflating it with the terms "incorporation", "introjection", and "internalisation".

ASIDE: Introjection is actually Ferenczi's contribution to this history - see separate entry. 

Then, in Mourning and Melancholia (Freud, 1917/1957), with his emerging cognitive model now a quarter of a century old, Freud moved the construct to centre-stage. The reason for this is that Mourning and Melancholia looks at what (and in whom, and why) makes some people permanently and pathologically bereaved - melancholics as type, rather than mourners for a period and with a good cause. His answer - in a phrase - is their "sense of guilt", and the keys to understanding the mechanisms of that guilt are the processes (a) of identification, and (b) of object representation and cognition. Thus ..... 

"We have elsewhere shown that identification is a preliminary stage of object-choice, that it is the first way - and one that is expressed in an ambivalent fashion -- in which the ego picks out an object. The ego wants to incorporate this object into itself, and, in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do this by devouring it. [.....] Identifications with the object are by no means rare in the transference neuroses either; indeed, they are a well-known mechanism of symptom-formation, especially in hysteria. The difference, however, between narcissistic and hysterical identification may be seen in this: that whereas in the former the object-cathexis is abandoned, in the latter it persists" (Freud, 1917/1957, Mourning and Melancholia [Standard Edition (Volume 14)], pp249-250; bold emphasis added).

Finally, Freud was able to offer the following encyclopaedic description of the process in 1921 .....

"Identification is known to psychoanalysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person. It plays a part in the early history of the Oedipus complex. A little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to grow like him and be like him, and take his place everywhere. We may say simply that he takes his father as his ideal. [.....] At the same time as this identification with his father, or a little later, the boy has begun to develop a true object-cathexis toward his mother [.....]. He then exhibits, therefore, two psychologically distinct ties: a straightforward sexual object-cathexis toward his mother and an identification with his father which takes him as his model. The two subsist side by side for a time without any mutual influence or interference. In consequence of the irresistible advance towards a unification of mental life, they come together at last; and the normal Oedipus complex originates from their confluence. The little boy notices that his father stands in his way with his mother. His identification with his father then takes on a hostile colouring and becomes identical with the wish to replace his father in regard to his mother as well. Identification, in fact, is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone's removal. It behaves like a derivative of the first, oral phase of the organisation of the libido, in which the object that we long for and prize is assimilated by eating ....." (Freud, 1921/1955, Group Psychology [Standard Edition (Volume 18)], p105).

He went into slightly more detail in the summative New Introductory Lectures, towards the end of his productive life [note the opening apology] .....

"I cannot tell you as much as I should like about the metamorphosis of the parental relationship into the superego, partly because that process is so complicated that an account of it will not fit into the framework of an introductory course of lectures [and] partly also because we ourselves do not feel sure that we understand it completely. So you must be content with the sketch that follows. The basis of the process is what is called an 'identification' - that is to say, the assimilation of one ego to another one, as a result of which the first ego behaves like the second in certain respects, imitates it and in a sense takes it up into itself. Identification has been not unsuitably compared with the oral, cannibalistic incorporation of the other person. It is a very important form of attachment to someone else, probably the very first, and not the same thing as the choice of an object. The difference between the two can be expressed in some such way as this. If a boy identifies himself with his father, he wants to be like his father; if he makes him the object of his choice, he wants to have him, to possess him. In the first case his ego is altered on the model of his father; in the second case that is not necessary. Identification and object-choice are to a large extent independent of each other; it is however possible to identify oneself with someone whom, for instance, one has taken as a sexual object, and to alter one's ego in his model. It is said that the influencing of the ego by the sexual object occurs particularly often with women and is characteristic of femininity. [As to] the most instructive relation between identifications and object-choice [it] can be observed equally easily in children and adults, in normal as in sick people. If one has lost an object or has been obliged to give it up, one often compensates oneself by identifying oneself with it and by setting it up once more in one's ego so that here object-choice regresses, as it were, to identification" (Freud, 1933/1964, New Introductory Lectures, pp94-95; emphasis added).

For her part, the post-Freudian Edith Jacobson sees the process as being heavily involved at the stage of superego development, as follows .....

"Whereas part of himself, the ego that is in continuous contact with reality, gradually tones down illusions and accepts reality, another part of the self, that cannot cease to believe in magic, is split off. [.....] This is accomplished by virtue of special identifications, the superego identifications [..... which serve] to accept and internalise the moral standards, the moral directives, and the moral criticism handed down by the parents [.....]" (Jacobson, 1964, p111).

Interestingly, Jacobson also notes at this juncture how this process may involve what we would today describe as inner speech .....

"Interwoven with it, identifications develop which, using especially acoustic pathways (Isakower, 1939), internalise the daily parental demands and prohibitions, the do's and don'ts, the approvals and disapprovals expressed by the parents [etc.]" (Jacobson, 1964, p112).

Identification (2) - As Eriksonian Mechanism of Identity Formation: [See firstly identity, Erikson's approach to.] The processes of identification get under way soon after birth, but operate slowly at first because the infant's cognitive system lacks the necessary sophistication, both structurally and functionally, to abstract itself out from the world at large. Eventually, however, there takes place the sort of "primary identification" described in the entry for personality and personal identity, that is to say, the identification which emerges at the infant end of the infant-mother bond when the infant first becomes able to exert an element of direction over the supply of food, warmth, and contact comfort from the mother object. More sophisticated identification then follows, as the developing mind becomes progressively more competent. This means integrating "the various identifications he[/she] brings from childhood into a more complete identity" (Miller, 1983, p170). If the process fails, then there occurs an "identity crisis". The situation changes once the child becomes old enough to recognise, and respond emotionally to, the behaviour patterns it observes in adults. [For more on this usage, see identification, Cramer's theory of.]

Identification (3) - As Ego Defense Mechanism, Simpliciter: We have already seen [(1) and (2) above] how identification in infants and young children defends, but at the same time also builds and shapes by that defending. In older children and in adults, where the building and shaping has already taken place, identification just defends, switching in automatically and habitually as and when needed. In this latter sense, projective identification has become one of the defense mechanisms recognised by the DSM-IV.

WHERE TO NEXT: For additional core commentary, see identification, Chessick's theory of, identification, Cramer's theory of, and identification, Volkan's theory of. If browsing for general interest, see personality and personal identity and self. If seeking insight into how identification can go wrong, see self, incestuous sexual abuse and and toxic parenting. For specifics from clinical caselore, see case, Clare. For the particular issues of identification with an aggressor, see identification with aggressor. For the role played by identification as the basis of any psychodynamic cure, see both countertransference and transference. For the use of identification in Moreno's (1934) deliberately abreactive methods, see psychodrama.

Identification, Chessick's Theory of: [See firstly identification (all subtypes).] As categorised by Schafer (1968), "identification" is one of the three subtypes of internalisation [the other two being incorporation and introjection]. Here, in the words of one of Schafer's disciples, are its distinguishing features .....

"Identification is the most mature, less directly dependent on drives, more adaptively selective, less ambivalent, and a modelling process. It is often automatic and unconscious, and a mental process whereby an individual becomes like another person in one or several aspects. It is part of the learning process, but also of adaptation to a feared or lost object. The crucial clinical point is that identification is growth promoting, and can lead to better adaptation" (Chessick, 1996, p125; bold emphasis added).

Identification, Cramer's Theory of: [See firstly identification (all subtypes).] Cramer (1991, 1997, 2001, 2007) confirms the distinction between identification as a developmental process and identification as a mechanism of defense [that is to say, our identification (1) and identification (3), respectively]. As a developmental phenomenon, it begins to work at a very young age with imitations of parents' "mannerisms and speech" (2001, p667), and then continues as a major shaper of the child's "personal identity" in the Eriksonian sense [see identity, Erikson's approach to]. As a defense mechanism, Cramer (1991) warns us that different "defense-mixes" [our term] seem to predominate at different developmental stages. This is because their respective actions and effects mutually support each other in some age-characteristic way. She names denial, projection, and identification as one such cluster, and is concerned that science knows "virtually nothing" (Cramer, 2007, p17) about how the use of childhood favoured defense mechanisms is related to adult personality. She has therefore been studying children (e.g., Cramer, 1997) and young adults (e.g., Cramer, 1991), trying to track how and why particular early defense practices build particular adult frames of mind. The overall pattern seems to be that the defense of denial characterises early childhood (ages 4 to 7 years), that projection characterises the period to late childhood and adolescence (ages 8 to 16 years), and that identification takes over towards late adolescence (ages 17 to 18 years). Here is a summative comment from the latest paper in our possession .....

"The findings of these cross-sectional studies have been consistent. At each developmental period, there is evidence for the use of all three defenses, but one of the three is found to be predominant" (Cramer, 2007, p3; bold emphasis added).

Identification, Volkan's Theory of: [See firstly identification (all subtypes).] Volkan (2003, 2006) has recently applied the notions of identification to political history itself - see identity, large group for the details. 

Identification with Aggressor: [See firstly identification (3).] Because the particular function of identification as a defense mechanism is to reduce the anxiety associated with a particular individual or class of individuals by becoming more like them, it is often seen when adults are exposed to physical hostility. The Internet, for example, hosts many stories of victims "identifying with the aggressor", including the 1973 bank robbery which spawned the name "Stockholm Syndrome" [tell me this story]. [See also the mention of this process in the entry for borderline personality disorder.] TO BE EXTENDED .....

Identity: [See firstly identification (all subtypes, but especially 2).] In everyday English, one's "identity" is "the condition or fact that a person or thing is itself and not something else; individuality, personality" (O.E.D.). Within psychology, there is a major classical tradition which equates identity with soul, but for the purposes of the present glossary, we recommend regarding identity as the accumulation of cognitive structures which is left in place as a residue of life's formative experiences to date. In fact, all the major developmental theorists agree that identity emerges in qualitatively discrete stages. Where the self relies upon any form of conceptualisation, for example, it will have to work its way through the Piagetian stages, whilst in its social and psychosexual aspects it will have to follow, say, the Eriksonian eight-stage developmental scheme, wherein the most sensitive stage is Stage #5, the appropriately named stage of "Identity versus Identity Diffusion". This takes place between ages 12 and 21 years and requires adolescents to decide how they and their "new" bodies wish to appear to others. [See now identity, Erikson's approach to and then compare all entries beginning ego-. See also individuality, illusion of.]

Identity, Comparative Approaches to:

"The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls, and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, or Mother of all Living, the ancient power of fright and lust - the female spider or the queen-bee - whose embrace is death" (Graves, 1948, p24). "The Queen of the Woods has cut bright boughs of various flowering [and] knows who is most lord between the high trees and on the open down. Some she gives white berries some she gives brown" (David Jones, In Parenthesis, Part 7). [The wood in question is Mametz Wood, site of some very unforgiving fighting in July 1916. Both Graves and Jones were there. Both lived to use their poetry as self-therapy for what has since been named "survivor syndrome".]

The comparative study of identity, large group can often yield major new insights into the relationship between the identity we feel as individuals and that which is required of us, implicitly or explicitly, by the groups we happen to belong to. What is harder to pin down theoretically (and even harder to investigate with demonstrably valid empirical research) is the relationship between what a culture believes in and the way those accumulated beliefs shape our individual minds. We might ask, for example, whether belief systems make us wiser or more foolish, or why we can be so different from each other in some of our beliefs and yet so alike in others, or why left-right political affiliations so often divide societies more or less precisely down the middle. Here is an extract from one of the anthropological classics, Frazer's (1890-1922/1993) The Golden Bough ..... 

ASIDE: Before proceeding with this extract, we all need to note Evans-Pritchard's (1965) caution against over-reliance on "highly selective" (p8) anecdotal evidence such as is about to be presented. By giving sustained and possibly unbalanced weight to "the occult and mysterious", Evans-Pritchard argued, we are led to believe that the mystical plays more of a part in the lives of primitive peoples than the data objectively demonstrates. Yes it might well be painstaking scholarship, but the point is that scholarship alone does not make good science. Anecdote is useful, in other words, but only if great care is taken not to allow its strengths to obscure its weaknesses. [For a fuller discussion of the relative value of different types of data in forming and evaluating scientific judgment, see the entry for level of evidence in the companion Rational Argument Glossary.]

"The Salish or Flathead Indians of Oregon believe that a man's soul may be separated for a time from his body without causing death and without the man being aware of his loss. It is necessary, however, that the lost soul should be soon found and restored to its owner or he will die. The name of the man who has lost his soul is revealed in a dream to the medicine-man, who hastens to inform the sufferer of his loss. Generally a number of men have sustained a like loss at the same time; all their names are revealed to the medicine-man, and all employ him to recover their souls. The whole night long these soulless men go about the village from lodge to lodge, dancing and singing. Towards daybreak they go into a separate lodge, which is closed up so as to be totally dark. A small hole is then made in the roof, through which the medicine-man, with a bunch of feathers, brushes in the souls, in the shape of bits of bone and the like, which he receives on a piece of matting. A fire is next kindled, by the light of which the medicine-man sorts out the souls. First he puts aside the souls of dead people, of which there are usually several; for if he were to give the soul of a dead person to a living man, the man would die instantly. Next he picks out the souls of all the persons present, and making them all to sit down before him, he takes the soul of each, in the shape of a splinter of bone, wood, or shell, and placing it on the owner's head, pats it with many prayers and contortions till it descends into the heart and so resumes its proper place" (Frazer, The Golden Bough, p187).

What the Flathead Indians seem to be telling us through the medium of their folklore is that identity, soul, and self are never totally synonymous. For example, if you were to ask one of these soulless men "Who are you?", you would be enquiring of his self (his reality-processing ego) about that most enduring of all the personas available to it, namely the face he puts on when no-one else is there to be impressed [it is beside the point that he might choose not to reveal this to you, and adopt some form of masking persona instead], and in answer to your question he might well reply: "I am So-and-So, of the Salish people, son of So-and-So, born in year such-and-such" [and so on, the precise identifying attributes being themselves a topic of study]. If you then extended your enquiry to ask whether his soul was currently "in" or "out" (so to speak), you would be enquiring of his self not just how complete it believed itself to be but (more importantly) also how it believed itself to be constructed. What Frazer's anecdote has done, therefore, is to raise a Grade-A question, but one which its own Grade-E evidence is not just wholly unable to resolve but also highly likely to make more obscure. Nor will the situation improve if you simply go out and gather further cross-cultural comparisons. Frazer himself identified a string of other cultures where souls were conceived of as mannikins, or shadows, or reflections, or images, and so on, and within these he noted a number of recurring themes, not least tree-worship and the religiously highly-charged proposal that humans are possessed of a separable, perhaps immortal, soul to which some sort of "afterlife" is available. This is fascinating stuff, of course, but ultimately it teaches us nothing more substantial than that the Flatheads are not the only ones who mutter wishful entreaties to the wind: it does nothing to unravel the various causal lines which might be involved, and thereby to deepen the broader understanding of the structures and functions of human belief. Frazer's problem, in short, was that there was at that time no definitive psychology, let alone a workable psychology of religion.

ASIDE - THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION BEFORE FREUD: Aside from cross-cultural observation, there are basically only three other streams of evidence capable of reflecting upon the make-up of a religious belief system. The most substantive of these is archaeological excavation, especially when it is directed at the ruins of temples and tombs. Then there is the fact that primitive beliefs and rituals are frequently alluded to in classical prose, poetry, and drama [we need look no further than Homer for a class-defining instance of this data stream (although Gilgamesh, with its seance, is a thousand years older, even, than that)]. And finally, there are a number of classical textbook sources on comparative ritual, which have survived down the ages [we may take Hesiod's theory of daimones (= "demons") (check it out) as an early instance of this data stream]. Space prevents us reviewing the full adventure of 19th century cultural anthropology. Suffice it to mention as typical Tylor's (1865) "Researches into the Early History of Mankind", Baring-Gould's (1871) "The Origin and Development of Religious Belief", Frazer (as above), and Rohde's (1897) "Psyche". What was difficult-to-impossible in all of these offerings was separating out the scientific substance from the uncritical Romanticism, the presumptive ethnocentrism, and/or the downright religious bigotry.

Then, with the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 (in which a skeletal theory of the Oedipus complex was first introduced to a general audience), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905 (where that topic was dealt with in greater detail), and Leonardo in 1910 (where it was explicitly related to religious belief), came Freudian theory, complete with its new and intriguing set of analytical principles. Could it be, for example, that belief systems served some form of ego defense function, helping the ego to cope with the fear and pain which came from just being alive, and from witnessing every day the death, suffering, illness, crime, and human frailty around us? Could it be that the average ego is - frankly - just not up to delivering on the reality principle unsupported? If so, then more (and more strictly conducted) cross-cultural research ought to be able to correlate the particular subtypes of ritual and belief systems with the known repertoire of defense mechanisms. A competing, but equally powerful, basic theory was being put across at the same time by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his "Les Formes Élémentaires de la Vie Religieuse" (Durkheim, 1912/1915), namely that belief was an instrument of "social cohesion" in the sociological and political senses. Durkheim was followed, in turn, by a young Polish researcher named Bronislaw Malinowski, who set off in 1914 to do fieldwork with the Trobriand Islanders - the Kula - of the Papuan archipelago. Unhappy with the scientific worth of some of the older research, Malinowski pioneered a new method of observation, one in which the observer went out of his/her way to factor h/self out of the equation, so as not to be influencing the behaviour currently being recorded.

ASIDE: Readers who are unfamiliar with the notion of "demand characteristics", and how easily they totally invalidate research findings, should check out that entry in the companion "Research Methods and Psychometrics Glossary", and follow the onward links.

This new method involved "participant observation", that is to say, joining the society, being accepted by it as one of its own, and observing its ways unobtrusively from within. He observed, for example, that culture provided you with your only real protection against the harsh realities of life noted above, that it was a system dedicated to your survival, but one which, at the same time as it serviced your needs, raised needs - "culturally derived needs" - of its own. In two of the resulting papers - Malinowski (1924) and his "Sex and Repression in Savage Society" (Malinowski, 1927) - he provided an analysis in Oedipal terms of matrilineal forms of society (the Kula being just this), and of the beliefs and behaviours of the people who lived out their lives in such societies. Oedipal theory would predict primacy of the identified-with father-figure, and yet the available data showed nothing of the sort, for the Trobriand father traditionally played no disciplinary role in their family life. Specifically, it was usually the father's brother who did the disciplining, the father who had sex with the mother, and the former, not the latter, who received the resentment of the son. Similarly, their totemism had more to do with filling the belly than emptying the seminal vesicals. So it seemed that the evolution of man and woman within the family, and of the family within society, were more Durkheimian in origin than Freudian. Malinowski's conclusion, in a nutshell, was that the Oedipus complex was NOT an absolute and inevitable world-wide law, as Freud had proposed. 

ASIDE: Dawson's (1933/2007 online) essay on matriarchies versus patriarchies is well worth a visit. Evans-Pritchard explicitly praises Malinowski for the scientific value of his version of the observational method. He did not, as the earlier authors had, simply rely on a "scissors and paste" method of anthropological argument, that is to say, one in which you fit fragments of observational truth onto a pre-formed explanation. [For an alternative review of the history of myth, see Sienkewicz (1996/2007 online), and for more on the "schools" of anthropology, see Ferdinando (2001/2007 online).] We should also note Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's "Primitive Mentality" (1923) for its emphasis on what we would today describe as a cognitive deficit in "the primitive's" ability to grasp causation, Schmidt's (1934/1936) "The Dawn of the Human Mind" for its attempt to decipher the belief systems of extinct hominids from their art and other artefacts, and Robert Graves' (1948) "The White Goddess", for its observations on the pervasiveness of leucothea [Greek leuco = "white" + thea = "goddess] in myth. Graves saw the critical feature of identity as lying in one's ability to reflect - preferably poetically, but not necessarily so - about the sway the White Goddess holds over each one of us. Interestingly, however, he carries his analysis off with no substantive mention of either the Oedipal legend or of Freudian theory, and, in the specific myths he cites, it is usually Goddess-fear rather than Goddess-lust which lurks beneath the surface.

Modern anthropologists are still working on these self-same problems [see, for example, Fine, Perron, and Sacco (1994) and Dunbar, Knight, and Power (1999)], but we take as indicative Sökefeld (1999). Sökefeld was interested in the inter-related notions of identity and self, and tried to find better definitions of where they overlap and where they do not. He noted the widely accepted notion of "persistent sameness" as the defining quality of a personal identity - it was this sameness over time which elevated the self to being an "agent of knowing and doing" in the world (1999, p417). But the explanation was immediately inconsistent (a) with clinical psychology's liking for theories of multiple personality [which we have amply covered in the entry for multiple personality disorder], and (b) with the sort of parallel identities we maintain in social interactions. Worse, the notion of the single human soul might itself be a culturally bound "Western self" (p418). To reflect on these problems, he presented for analysis "a case of plural and conflicting identities" which he had studied while carrying out field research in Gilgit, a mountain town in Northern Pakistan. Here is his core thesis ..... 

"In anthropological discourse, the question of identity is almost completely detached from the problem of the self. In the vast body of literature about ethnic identity the self is rarely mentioned, and in writings about the self a relation between the self and identities is sometimes noted but remains unexplored [.....]. However, if we look at analyses of non-Western concepts of the self, it cannot go unnoticed that these [.....] are modelled precisely on the anthropological understanding of identity: they are sociocentric [.....], just as identities are social and shared" (Sökefeld, 1999, p419).

See now the separate entry for case, Ali Hassan.

Sökefeld's conclusion is that we have to recognise that the self is action-oriented, and that consequently, if you know how someone is constrained to act, then you are getting close to understanding who they are within themselves. Consider ..... 

"An inevitable premise is that all humans are able and required to act, which means that there is no culture (or identity) acting for them or uncontradictably prescribing which mode of behaviour must be chosen in any situation. This becomes utterly clear in situations of plural identities, where individuals are obviously not bound to a cultural consensus but exposed to a plurality of conflicting perspectives and interests ad must, like Ali Hassan in his uneasy wedding visit, make their way through a maze of different identities. Attention to selves accordingly demands 'ethnographies of the particular' [citation] that examine what people actually do in the specific circumstances of their daily lives. Action requires a self that reflexively monitors the conditions, course, and outcome of action. [.....] My argument that agency is characteristic of the self and the self is a precondition of action may seem circular, but in fact the two or, better, the three aspects cannot be separated: agency, reflexivity, and the self go hand in hand, each requiring both the others" (Sökefeld, 1999, p430; bold emphasis added).

WHERE TO NEXT: We indicated when opening this entry that it was hard to do demonstrably valid empirical research at the intersection of identity, culture, and belief. There is plenty of data, but little practical scope for flexibility of research design and even less ethical scope for intervention studies [because science, like the USS Enterprise, is tightly bound by rules of non-interference in alien cultures]. Nevertheless, there are moves afoot to bring the power of machine simulation studies to bear upon this problem - so watch this space.

Identity, Corporate: The notion that the psychology of personal identity might have something of value to offer management theory only surfaced comparatively recently, despite the fact that business corporations are merely instances of the sort of "large groups" already discussed in the entry for identity, large group. Alessandri (2001) has reviewed the history of this branch of management science, and dates it to a paper by Pilditch (1970), which distinguishes corporate identity from corporate image. Here is the critical difference .....

"Today there is a generally accepted distinction between corporate identity (what the firm is) and corporate image (what the firm is perceived to be), even in the absence of a clear meaning of corporate identity itself" (Alessandri, 2001, p174; bold emphasis added).

Another early commentator, Margulies (1977), defined corporate identity as "all the ways a company chooses to identify itself to all its stakeholders" (p175), whilst Ackerman (1988) focussed on the uniqueness of a particular company's capabilities and Balmer (1993) stressed the necessary "fusion" of corporate strategy with corporate culture. Alessandri's personal synthesis of no less than 20 earlier works is as set out in the following model .....

"The corporate mission is assumed in this model to be the firm's philosophy [.....], whether tacit or codified. This philosophy is personified through the behaviour of the firm as well as in the visual presentation of the firm; these two complementary parts form the corporate identity. [.....] Moving to the upper part of the model, we cross the line of what the firm can control into the area of public perception of the firm. Directly over this 'control line' is the concept of corporate image [.....]. Interaction or an experience with a corporate identity is what produces a corporate image in the minds of the public [.....]. To take the model to its natural conclusion, then, the corporate reputation is formed over time by repeated impressions of the corporate image, whether positive or negative" (Alessandri, 2001, p177).

Identity Crisis: [See firstly identity, Erikson's approach to.] This is Erik Erikson's (e.g., 1968) term for the (developmental or traumatic) loss of some all-important "sense of personal sameness and historical continuity" (Erikson, 1968, p17) [the fuller quotation is in the entry for ego identity, if interested].

Identity, Erikson's Approach to: [See firstly identity and identity, group.] The root of Erikson's dissatisfaction with the way conventional Freudian theory handled the dynamics of psychosexual development lay in the latter's insistence on applying its Oedipal theory "as an irreducible schema" (Erikson, 1968, p47). In his view, this took insufficient notice of how the prevailing group identity also contributed to the process by providing "basic ways of organising experience" (ibid.). Far better, in his opinion, to distinguish between "personal identity" and "ego identity", the former coming from the fact of a person's recognising "the selfsameness and continuity of one's existence" (p50), and the latter from "the style" of that individuality.

Check out the separate entries for personal identity and ego identity before proceeding.

Here are a couple of indicative passages ..... 

"The ego's beginnings are difficult to assess, but as far as we know it emerges gradually out of a stage when 'wholeness' is a matter of physiological equilibration, maintained through the mutuality between the baby's need to receive and the mother's need to give. [.....] The ontological source of faith and hope which thus emerges I have called a sense of basic trust: it is the first and basic wholeness [..... and b]asic mistrust, then, is the sum of all those diffuse experiences which are not somehow successfully balanced by the experience of integration. One cannot know what happens in a baby, but direct observation as well as overwhelming clinical evidence indicate that early mistrust is accompanied by an experience of 'total' rage, with fantasies of the total domination or even destruction of the sources of pleasure and provision; and that such fantasies and rage live on in the individual and are revived in extreme states and situations" (Erikson, 1968, Youth and Crisis [Faber Edition], p82).

"The end of childhood seems to me the third, and more immediately political, crisis of wholeness. Young people must become whole people in their own right, and this during a developmental stage characterised by a diversity of changes in physical growth, genital maturation, and social awareness. The wholeness to be achieved at this stage I have called a sense of inner identity. [.....] Individually speaking, identity includes, but is more than, the sum of all the successive identifications of those earlier years when the child wanted to be, and often was forced to become, like the people he depended on. Identity is a unique product, which now meets a crisis to be solved only in new identifications with age mates and with leader figures outside of the family. The search for a new and yet reliable identity can perhaps best be seen in the persistent adolescent endeavour to define, overdefine, and redefine themselves and each other in often ruthless comparison [.....]. Where the resulting self-definition, for personal or collective reasons, becomes too difficult, a sense of role confusion results. [.....] It must be realised, then, that only a firm sense of inner identity marks the end of the adolescent process and is a condition for further and truly individual maturation" (Erikson, 1968, Youth and Crisis [Faber Edition], pp87-89)

Identity, Group: This is Erikson's (e.g., 1968, p45) term for those aspects of individual identity held in common by all the members of a social grouping. Erikson explains what this involves with a concrete example, thus .....

"Let me first illustrate the concept of group identity by a brief reference to anthropological observations made by H.S. Mekeel and myself in 1938. We described how in one segment of the re-education of the American Indian, the Sioux Indians' historical identity of the buffalo hunter stands counterposed to the occupational and class identity of his re-educator, the American civil service employee. We pointed out that the identities of these groups rest on extreme differences in geographic and historical perspectives (collective ego-space-time) and on radical differences in economic goals and means (collective life plan). In the remnants of the Sioux Indians' identity, the prehistoric past is a powerful psychological reality. The conquered tribe has never ceased to behave as if guided by a life plan consisting of passive resistance to a present which fails to reintegrate the identity remnants of the economic past; and of dreams of restoration in which the future would lead back to the past, time would again become ahistoric, hunting grounds unlimited, and the buffalo supply inexhaustible [.....]. Their federal educators, on the other hand, preach values with [other] goals: homestead, fireplace, bank account ....." (Erikson, 1968, Youth and Crisis [Faber Edition], p48).

Erikson's point was then that group identity and all its confirming ritual and traditions play in different ways on our biological givens, making different cultures more or less secure, more or less independent, and more or less repressed. Here is how he nicely summarises these effects .....

"A child has many opportunities to identify himself, more or less experimentally, with real or fictitious people of either sex and with habits, traits, occupations, and ideas. Certain crises force him to make radical selections. However, the historical era in which he lives offers only a limited number of socially meaningful models for workable combinations of identification fragments. Their usefulness depends on the way in which they simultaneously meet the requirements of the organism's maturational stage, the ego's style of synthesis, and the demands of the culture" (Erikson, 1968, Youth and Crisis [Faber Edition], pp53-54).

[See now identity, Erikson's approach to, noting especially how group identity can influence the development of individual identity. See also and compare identity, large group, which is not quite the same concept.]

 Identity, Kant on: Here are two extracts from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason specifically on the topic of identity, which should be read in the broader context of the existing entries for identity and consciousness, Kant's theory of .....

"The topic of rational psychology, from which whatever else it may contain must be derived, is thus the following: (1) The soul is substance. (2) In terms of quality it is simple. (3) In terms of the different times in which it exists, it is numerically identical, i.e., unity (not plurality). (4) It stands in relation to possible objects in space. From these elements arise all concepts of pure psychology, merely by the assembly of these elements and without the least recognition of another principle. This substance, merely as object of inner sense, yields the concept of immateriality; as simple substance, that of incorruptibilty. Its identity as intellectual substance yields personality; all three of these components together, spirituality. [..... W]e can lay at the basis of this science nothing but the simple, and by itself quite empty, presentation I, of which we cannot even say that it is a concept, but only that it is a mere consciousness accompanying all concepts" (Kant, 1781/1789, Critique [Pluhar Translation] pp384-385; bold emphasis added).

"If I want to cognize the numerical identity of an external object through experience, then I shall pay attention to the permanent (element in) that appearance to which, as subject, everything remaining refers as determination, and shall note the identity of that permanent (element) in the time wherein the remainder varies. I, however, am an object of inner sense and all time is merely the form of inner sense. Consequently, I refer each and every one of my successive determinations to the numerically identical self found in all time, i.e., in the form of the inner intuition of myself. On this basis, the personality of the soul would have to be regarded not even as inferred, but as a fully identical proposition of self-consciousness in time; and this is indeed the cause of its holding a priori. For it actually says nothing more than that in the entire time wherein I am conscious of myself, I am conscious of this time as belonging to the unity of myself [.....]. In my own consciousness, therefore, identity of the person is unfailingly to be met with. But if I contemplate myself from someone else's point of view (as object of his outer intuition), then this external observer considers me first of all in time, for in apperception time is in fact presented only in me" (op. cit., p397; bold emphasis added).

Identity, Large Group:

"It is one of the most impressive facts about the war, that while Germany is the very type of a perfected

aggressive herd, England is perhaps the most complete example of a socialised herd" (Trotter, 1916, p201).

[See firstly aggression, institutionalisation of, aggression, priests and politicians and, and aggression, psychodynamic theory, and; see also identity, group, and identification, Volkan's theory of.] As explained in detail elsewhere [see the various header links], society at large often places a higher price on obedience of mind than it does on mere obedience of body. If you want to "belong" to a social institution of some sort, then you need to toe that institution's party line in thought, as well as in deed. And once we do "belong", the resulting sense of common purpose and shared fate decides what we are likely to enlist to defend, and perhaps die for. As such, group identity has been a driving factor in shaping human history and in providing legitimate targets for war, conquest, and other forms of confrontation. The Western classical view of large group identity was that there was a Greek (or Roman, etc.) way, much as there was a Confucian way in Ancient China, the way of the Samurai in Japan, a British way in the 19th century, and an American way nowadays. Such ways are ways of both doing and thinking, and are implicit in the definition of citizenship applied by the civilisation in question. It was thus something which you either inherited if you were born into that civilisation, or freely and eagerly swore to if you acquired citizenship later in life. Indeed, in one of history's first sociologies - Hobbes' Leviathan - the Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes speaks of "the common power" (Hobbes, 1651, p89).

ASIDE: Other elements of the "imperial package" include an imperial city, a creed, a liturgy, a flag, the apparatus for enforcing power, and the raising of tribute [the centripetal flow of goods or cash]. Defined in this way, the modern world has plenty of empires to contend with, actual and wannabe, and, like tectonic plates, their points of confrontation can be positively "volcanic".