Intersubjectivity

The present article intends to show that genetic phenomenology, as conceived by Edmund Husserl, implies an essential biological dimension. In his later research manuscripts, from the 1920s and 1930s , Husserl not only reflects on the conceivability of forms of intropathy (Einfühlung) regarding animal and plant bodies, based on dismantling reduction (Abbaureduktion), but also on the embeddedness of the human monad in ontogenetic and phy-logenetic generative becoming. On that basis, the article aims to locate the place of bio-generative phenomena within the field of genetic analysis in the theories of monadic gradualism and of somatic anomalism. However, by taking into consideration that new attempts to approach biological generativity from a Husserlian perspective (A. Steinbock, R. Affifi) are only partly successful , the article ends with a delimitation of certain elements that require further elaboration,namely the investigation into the biological implications of monadology, the determination of forms of corporeal anomality, and the vindication of the notion of essential limit-phenomena.

This article engages critically with Margaret Gilbert's proposal that joint commitments are necessary for collective emotions. After introducing Gilbert's concept of joint commitment (Section 2), and the joint commitment account of collective emotions (Section 3), we argue in Section 4 that research from developmental psychology challenges the necessity of joint commitments for collective emotions. In that section, we also raise a more principled objection to Gilbert's account, independently of developmental considerations. Section 5 develops a complementary line of argument, focused on the notion of mutual recognition. While we agree with Gilbert that mutual recognition has an important role to play in an account of collective emotions, we take issue with her attempt to analyse face-to-face based mutual recognition in terms of the concept of joint commitment. We conclude by sketching an alternative analysis of collective emotions that highlights the role of interpersonal identification and socially mediated self-consciousness.

In joint episodic memory-or joint reminiscing-two or more individuals retrieve together an experience that they had previously encoded while socially engaged with one another. In this commentary, I focus on the question of how Ganeri's analysis of individual episodic memory might be applicable to joint reminiscing. I explore three topics that are of relevance for answering this question: intersubjectivity, attention, and the phenomenology of reminiscing.

Aqui se aborda a relação travada pela população com a violência institucional, particularmente as recorrentes manifestações de aprovação às execuções de civis, levadas a termo por policiais militares, pondo em relevo o funcionamento psíquico predominante no momento em que ocorrem tais manifestações. Após relato de dois casos, a fundamentação freudiana vem apontar a dinâmica subjacente à interação das subjetividades: a identificação constitutiva da subjetividade humana também propicia os vínculos sociais ou relações intersubjetivas. A análise do fenômeno mostra que a aprovação das execuções deriva da identificação com o policial, enquanto o rechaço dessa prática tem sua origem na identifica-ção com a vítima. Isso revela a relação casuística que a cultura brasileira trava com suas leis, impondo uma dificuldade adicional às organizações de defesa dos direitos humanos: o tipo de reação social à violência em foco depende mais da direção da identificação que do apego a valores universalizantes. Considerado esse contexto, podem essas organizações produzir identificações que substituam aquelas oferecidas pelas elites bra-sileiras e pelas autoridades que as representam? Podem oferecer um outro paradigma moral à sociedade? Podem interferir no funcionamento psíquico da coletividade, contribuindo para a construção de uma intersubjetividade cultural liberta e cidadã? Palavras-chave: Violência institucional; intersubjetividade, identificação; direitos humanos.

Ogni proposta morale si concentra sui modi in cui i soggetti si relazionano e sulle norme che dovrebbero regolare tali relazioni.
Rimane, però, spesso inevasa la domanda circa l’esistenza di una pluralità di soggetti a cui applicare l’analisi etica e morale. In questo volume, si studiano le vie entro cui storicamente si è messa in discussione una certezza in cui inevitabilmente confidiamo: l’esistenza degli altri. Ci si chiederà: io sono il solo soggetto? Posso affermare che tutto ciò che vedo e tutti coloro con cui mi relaziono esistono, o sono imprigionato dentro a una convinzione tanto illegittima quanto inevadibile?
Il percorso, che si seguirà per tentare l’impresa di affermare l’intersoggettività, sarà quello dell’argomentazione elenctica: via di “mostrazione” dialettica, dialogica, ma – qualcuno sostiene – non necessariamente inclusa in un contesto intersoggettivo. Sfruttando lo stesso élenchos, si cercherà di mostrare che l’intersoggettività non è solo l’ambiente fattuale in cui ogni affermazione e ogni presa di posizione scettica avvengono, ma è anche loro presupposto pragmatico strutturale e, per questo, necessario.

Zusammenfassung: Der »relational turn« hat sich, ausgehend von starken Anstößen durch Ste-ven Mitchell und seine Gruppe, seit den 1990er Jahren enorm ausgebreitet. Auf der anderen Seite gibt es in der Psychoanalyse eine stärkere Tendenz der Rückentwicklung zu non-relationa-len Positionen, zum Kleinianismus und zu monadischen Denkformen. Ich diskutiere an einem Beispiel zunächst die Form der Auseinandersetzung, gehe dann auf einige Theorieprobleme ein und versuche dann zu vermitteln, dass die sozialwissenschaftliche Konversationsanalyse (KA) ein erhebliches Potenzial hat, relationale Positionen zu unterstützen-wenn nur das Vorurteil, sie sei »behavioristisch« (durch deutsche Rezeptionsbarrieren entstanden), überwunden wür-de. In der amerikanischen relationalen Psychoanalyse wird Gadamers »Gespräch« beständig mit »conversation« übersetzt (etwa bei Donna Orange, 2011), was zu geringeren Rezepti-onsschwierigkeiten führt. Die KA ist ein international breit etabliertes Forschungsprogramm, dessen Potenziale für eine relationale Psychoanalyse attraktiv sind. Sie hat Verzweigungen zu Sozialtheorie und Linguistik, zu Interaktionsforschung und Hermeneutik, zu Intersubjektivität und Erkenntnistheorie. Vergleichbare Interessen haben auch relationale Psychoanalytiker entwickelt, ohne freilich eine eigene Forschungsmethode zu etablieren. Hier bieten sich Allianzen mit der Konversationsanalyse an. Ich skizziere am Schluss einige Möglichkeiten solcher Verbindung und eröffne Diskussionslinien um den Begriff der »Person« und der »Interperso-nalität«.

Short Abstract:

This paper explores intergenerational trauma from the perspective of young Cambodians born after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Their alternative understandings highlight the potential influence of local interpretation and contemporary context on how following generations experience traumatic pasts.

Long Abstract:

The concept of intergenerational trauma has become an increasingly accepted understanding of the potential for trauma experienced by parents to be transmitted to children, having a negative influence on their psychological wellbeing. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores alternative perspectives from young Cambodians regarding the influence of the Khmer Rouge period on themselves. It discusses the role that interpretation, narrative, and socioeconomic circumstances may play in how following generations experience the influence of parental trauma.

In Cambodia the extreme hardship and loss suffered during the Khmer Rouge period was almost ubiquitous, and the impact on survivors and the country’s development has received much attention. While recognising the significance of what their parents endured, the young respondents of this study reported not thinking of themselves or their peers as suffering ongoing effects of this time. Rather, they saw their lack of direct experience as being a distinguishing factor which protected them against personal impact. Much more prominent in their minds were contemporary stressors and structural inequalities which affected their ability to improve their livelihoods and build more stable futures for themselves and their families.

In analysing the formation and implications of these perspectives, I draw from scholars such as Jackson, Kleinman, and Kidron to theorise the role of narrative and interpretation on the influence that the past may have on individuals and their communities. I discuss these findings in the context of global mental health movements, and in how they interact with psychotherapeutic approaches to trauma.

In this article, I argue that anticipation unfolds within a range of experiential modalities. Because moods and emotions, intuitions and imagination, among other forms of experience, can all appear as disclosing something about the future, anticipation is heterogeneous. Building on work in phenomenological anthropology and philosophy, I offer a generative phenomenology of the range of anticipatory experience, arguing that some forms of experience are relatively more implicit while others may prove more salient and offer more explicable forms of anticipation. As anticipation emerges in time, the more implicit experiential modes such as mood and intuition operate as antecedents to more explicit ones such as imagination. Turning to apply these ideas to ethnographic materials from my fieldwork among architectural design teams in San Francisco, I demonstrate how attentiveness to this gradient of anticipatory experience allows us to account for anticipatory experiences as they unfold through time.

How does the material world inform our understandings of others? How can our understandings of others inform our efforts to transform the material world? These questions have a dual significance in my research with American healthcare architects. On the one hand, they adumbrate the practical space of inquiry lived out in everyday architectural labor and discourse. Since the 1970s, American architects have explicitly sought to develop “empathy” for occupants through games, interviews, and other methods for learning about users’ needs, values, and experiences. The healthcare architects with whom I conducted research saw this form of empathic knowledge of “users”–including patients, doctors, nurses–as essential to improving healthcare. In aiming for empathic understanding, architects hope to design built environments that will improve the quality of patient-provider interactions and all users’ overall wellbeing. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork among 6 architectural firms in the San Francisco Bay Area, my research documents and theorizes the practices through which architects attempt to empathize with and respond to the needs of healthcare professionals and patients. Their perennial question: What do we need to know about people and their relationship to their environments in order to design well for them? Working from data running the gamut of architectural activities from conceptualization in user meetings, to completion and retrospective evaluation by both designers and end-users, I documented the production of social knowledge and practices of empathy and perspective taking that architects identify as vital to their efficacy.

On the other hand, these questions – How does the material world inform our understandings of others? And How can our understandings of others inform our efforts to transform the material world? – are implicatures of the phenomenological understanding of the mutual constitution of self, other, and world. Phenomenological accounts of social cognition are consistently premised on our embodied presence in an essentially public world. Others are present to me not only bodily and as signs but also in material vestiges, such as tools and built environments, that manifest traces of others’ activity. Indeed, cultural activities and other’s minds are only conceivable and perceptible as unities of bodily behaviors and artifacts and environments.  It follows that differential ways of constituting cultural objects are concomitantly different ways of construing others. In this coeval foundry of experience it is possible to foreground one or another of self, other, or world in the flux of activity, but doing so, turning our direct attention from others to the tools and other materials with which we can affect or understand them, always concomitantly affects the way those others appear and matter; ways of attuning to others can thus be emergent in an interplay with materials (like the architects’ tracing paper). It’s here that the phenomenological account is resonant with studies of distributed and embodied cognition that show how people offload and share cognitive function with non-cognitive entities. Likewise studies of multimodal interaction have demonstrated how meaning is emergent within an ecology of materials and embodiment processes like gesture. In this vein, the anthropologist of design, Keith Murphy, has demonstrated how multimodal interaction relies on this material ecology to support collaborative imagination in architectural design. Extending this line of thought to consider how modes of intersubjectivity are emergent within ecologies of material, in this paper, I examine how recognition of others’ possibilities emerges and is mediated within architects’ materially embedded activities.

La inclusión de sesiones de grupo dentro de las Unidades de Agudos es frecuente y su importancia está siendo reconocida de manera creciente en la literatura: Brabender (1). Muchos autores han puesto de manifiesto la pertinencia y utilidad de estos grupos en estas Unidades, como Yalom (2); Janssen (3); Brabender y Fallon (4); Galletero y otros (5); Oldham y Russakoff (6); Kibel (7); Powell (8); Farkas-Cameron (9); Gauron (10); Agazarian (11); Clunie (12); Rice y Rutan (13).
Los grupos de psicoterapia en las Unidades de agudos cumplen un papel fundamental para reducir el impacto de los factores potencialmente  estresantes asociados a la hospitalización y a la situación de crisis en la que ingresan los pacientes, constituyéndose como un factor protector
y necesario para disminuir la ansiedad de los pacientes y disminuir las proyecciones paranoides que están en la base de muchas actuaciones violentas (14). Este autor destaca la tensión tan fuerte que soportan los pacientes ingresados en una Unidad de Agudos, consecuencia de estar en
una situación excepcional en sus vidas como es la de afrontar un entorno a menudo desconocido, rodeados de otras personas en crisis, sin un rol específico y claro que pueda facilitar su adaptación y proporcione la sensación de protección implícita en los grupos sociales. La adaptación resulta complicada porque además la persona está sometida a  expectativas por parte del equipo terapéutico y carece de las ayudas habituales de su entorno.

Abstract: A closer look at the schemas emphasizing here Domains and Worlds.

-- Key Words:  Schemas Theory, Systems Theory, Form, Pattern, Meta-system, OpenScape, Domain, World, Spacetime, Phenomenology, Structure of a Pattern, Essence of a Form, Nucleus of a System, Locus of a Meta-system, Systems Science, Systemology, Schematology, Monadology, Facet, Monad.

Violence is an often used but much less theoretically discussed word, even among Foucauldian scholars, with Johanna Oksala being a notable exception. However, she limits her definition of violence to physical forms. In this article, I seek to overcome the quandaries she poses for wide-ranging definitions of violence by incorporating Arendt's critique of violence into a Foucauldian paradigm. While some work, though not a great deal, has been done on comparing Arendt and Foucault, I highlight some points of commonality that makes Arendtian violence accessible to Foucauldian scholars that mostly rest on the concept of freedom. If power is productive to the extent that it provides the potential to act otherwise, Arendt, in many ways, situates violence as the prevention of this, similar to Foucault's account of domination. Violence and power are therefore cast in a symbiotic relationship, not limited to physicality, whereby power produces meaning as well as the ability to act and violence is projected as preventive; in such a scenario, the push for freedom can be positioned as a second-order normative claim.

A pesar de la extraordinaria variedad de estudios sobre la filosofía de Kierkegaard, su concepto de pudor no ha recibido suficiente atención. Mi trabajo tiene como objetivo presentar y analizar el concepto de pudor de Kierkegaard, tal como se desarrolla en El concepto de angustia (1844) del seudónimo Vigilius Haufniensis. Primero, intento brindar una comprensión de algunos de los temas principales del libro de Haufniensis (espíritu, tarea, angustia). Segundo, examino lo que manifiesta el fenómeno psicológico del pudor sobre la estructura de la subjetividad del ser humano.

George H. Mead and Alfred Schutz proposed foundations of an interpretative sociology from opposite standpoints. Mead accepted the objective meaning structure a priori. His problem became therefore the explanation of the individuality and creativity of human actors in his social behavioristic approach. In contrast, Schutz started from the subjective consciousness of an isolated actor as a result of a phenomenological reduction. He was concerned with the problem of explaining the possibility of this isolated actor’s perceiving other actors in their existence, their concreteness, and the motives for their behavior. I treat these two approaches and their associated problems as equally relevant. The evaluation is based on their success in solving their specific problems. The aim is to decide which of the two approaches provides the more adequate foundation for an Interpretative Sociology.

Los procesos humanos más sofisticados son los que se dan en interacción con los otros. Los procesos educativos, se encuentran dentro de esos procesos sociales de interacción.  La lógica tradicional se muestra impotente ante tamaña complejidad. ¿cual es la respuesta de la lógica difusa? ¿la inteligencia artificial podrá manejarse de mejor forma con esta complejidad que el propio ser humano? lo invitamos a la reflexión.

The problem addressed in this paper is the genesis of the empathetic, intersubjective intentionality which underlies second-person interactions. This theme is one of the most intriguing in contemporary philosophy and interdisciplinary research. The article seeks to elucidate the foundations of the phenomenon of the оther which we always already have in our daily embodied practices. First, we present a critical analysis of some aspects of the theory of intersubjectivity, such as analogical inference, anonymity of intersubjective being, inaccessibility of immediate experience of the Other. Then, based on such topics, as corporeity, the enactive nature of subjectivity, historical and social aspects of subjectivity, we elaborate the concept of empathy as lying at the very foundation of any encounter with the Other. As a result, we demonstrate the closeness of Husserlian idea of non-objectifying intentionality to the empathetic approach in contemporary philosophy. As precursors of the latter we mention M. Buber, L. Wittgenstein, M. Sheler, who advocate the dialogical (second-person) structure of consciousness and its em/ sympathetic nature. We also present an interpretation of empathy as an exclusive and unique form of intentional relation (E. Thompson) which permits to experience the Other in а direct, immediate way from second-person percpective (Sh. Gallagher). The analysis of empathy is also promising for contemporary interdisciplinary studies of affective consciousness, which are also mentioned. The article stresses the necessity of further studying «being-with» in both phenomenological and interdisciplinary dimensions to the extent that intersubjectivity constitutes the sense of the self on both transcendental and experiential levels. Данная статья обращается к проблеме генезиса эмпатической, интерсубъективной интенциональности, которая лежит в основании отношений с перспективы второго лица. Эта тема-одна из самых интригующих в современнной философии и в медисциплинарнх исследований. Автор стремится прояснить основания феномена другого, составляющего неотъемлемую часть нашего повседневного опыта. В первой части статьи представлен критический анализ некоторых аспектов теории интерсубъективности, таких как аналогический перенос, анонимности интерсубъективного бытия, недоступность непосредственого переживания другого. Затем, ориентируясь на такие темы, как телесность, деятельностная природа субъективности, историческое и социальное измерение субъективности, автор указывает на разработку понятия эмпатии как необходимого условия встречи с другим. В качестве результата статья демонстрирует близость гуссерлевской идеи не-объективирующей интенционалньости эмпатическому подходу в современной философии. В качестве предшественников последнего можно указать М. Бубера, Л. Витгенштейна, М. Шелера, которые открывают диалогическую структуру сознания и ее эм/симпатическую природу. Автор также представляет интерпретацию эмпатии как исключительной формы интенционального отношения (Томпсон), которая позволяет переживать опыт другого в его непосредственной данности с перспективы второго лица (Ш. Галлагер). Анализ эмпатии, кроме того, может быть многообещающим для современных исследований аффективного сознания, которые также упоминаются. Статья подчеркивает необходимость дальнейшего изучения «бытия-с» в феноменологической традиции и в междисциплинарном пространстве в той степени, в какой интерсубъективность конституирует чувство самости как на оптном, так и на трансцендентальном уровнях. Ключевые слова: аффективность, телесность, традиция, анонимность, социальность, телесные практики, интенциональность.