Theory & Psychology

In the spirit of the Turing test, machines modeled on four theories of emotion are placed in a naturalistic thought experiment and their ability to simulate human emotion is evaluated. Four simulators based on the Darwinian, Jamesian, cognitivist and social constructionist theories of emotion are proposed. Each of the simulators is found to be inadequate to the task. The four theories are deficient because none of them offers explanations for how the simulators could make sense of their particular situations and therefore simulate emotions appropriate to them. It is suggested that this ability to make sense of the particular is at least essential to human emotion and may be precisely what emotions enable persons to do.

The visual arts are arguably psychologically healing in giving outward shape and form to what can otherwise be disquietingly shapeless and formless in our inner psyche or spirit. Psychologists, however, often overlook this. So too do psychoanalysts, so much do they focus on art’s inner, unconscious or fantasy meaning. To counter this prevalent neglect of art’s healing outwardness, this article focuses on a marked exception, namely Adrian Stokes. It compares and contrasts his outwardly oriented aesthetics with that of Ruskin, Pater, Nietzsche, Bradley and Pound; with the inward orientation of the writing about art of Freud, Jung, Klein, Segal and Rivière; and with the attention to the inter-relation of inner and outer reality in the post-Freudian writing about literature and the visual arts of Kristeva, Milner, Ehrenzweig and Bion.

Social constructionist psychology has no adequate notion of embodied subjectivity, a situation causing conceptual errors, raising methodological issues, and serving to entrench within constructionism the dualisms that structure mainstream psychology. The outline of a solution to this problem is offered, drawing on contemporary work in neuroscience. A framework from Harré of three ‘grammars’ of causality and influence (P, or persons; O or organisms; and M or molecules) is described and used to structure the integration of Shotter’s notion of subjectivity with two brain systems. Damasio’s ‘somatic marker’ hypothesis enables the feelingful, sensuous aspects of ‘joint action’, whilst Gazzaniga’s ‘interpreter’ enables their discursive aspects. The benefits of theorizing embodied subjectivity in this way are illustrated by a study of the phenomenon of ‘depression’, and it is concluded that such an integration makes constructionism more coherent, credible and critical.

This article introduces a perspective in which questions at a psychological grain of analysis are integrated with a broad societal frame of interpretation, drawing on interdisciplinary feminist writings that provide alternative ways to theorize the social. It is argued that understanding the constitution of subjectivity, ‘self’ and thought requires a societal-level model of the social with both discursive and material constituents as well as local discursive processes that are deployed within, and configured through, that broader system. It is further argued that the ontological notion of a ‘person’ (in a specific, non-modern sense of ‘person’ and in a specific sense of ‘ontological’) is a conceptually necessary part of the theoretical language, as the anchor for processes of social constitution and as the substrate of agency, where agency is theorized as a multilevel process. One central claim developed in this article is that it is through the dialectic among these societal-level, local, and personal constituents that subjectivity, ‘self’ and thought are constituted, a ‘self’ that is assumed to be situated, hybrid, complex, tension-filled and unstable, yet substantial.

Jared Diamond, in his bestseller, Guns, Germs, and Steel, got it backwards in concluding that environmental factors and not human, psychological factors were the primary determinants leading to Europe’s global extension of power. Findings in Jacques Cauvin’s recent, archaeo-logically grounded The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture mesh with the psychological discoveries of Carl Jung and Erich Neumann to elucidate this point. Cauvin concludes that the Neolithic Revolution was born of a radical new psychology in humans, amounting to the beginning of religion. Great Mother images from depth psychology correspond to Cauvin’s artifacts and mark the formation of the ego. From this beginning in the Near East, the evolution of consciousness can be traced forward through successive cultural mythologies.