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Freud embarked on his exploration of an unconscious domain hand in hand with his clinical practice. He was thus forced to think deeply about the relationship between doctor and patient. He could not afford—quite literally—to do otherwise. In the postscript to ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905), he pondered Dora’s abrupt decision to end treatment and spelled out what he had failed to appreciate in good time: transferences. Subsequent generations of psychoanalysts, particularly Melanie Klein, Bion, and Betty Joseph, pressed on along two separate—but certainly not parallel—tracks: first, stretching the concept of transference; second, introducing the concept of projective identification and rethinking countertransference. The first took off from the expansion of psychoanalytic practice to include children; the second from its expansion to include the seriously disturbed. Taken together these advances, in theory and in practice, led to reconceptualizing the analytic relationship.

What are actions? And how are actions to be explained? These two central questions of the philosophy of action call, respectively, for a theory of the nature of action and a theory of the explanation of actions. Many ordinary explanations of actions are offered in terms of such mental states as beliefs, desires, and intentions, and some also appeal to traits of character and emotions. Traditionally, philosophers have used and refined this vocabulary in producing theories of the explanation of intentional actions. An underlying presupposition is that common-sense explanations expressed in these terms have proved very useful. People understand their own and others' actions well enough to coordinate and sustain complicated, cooperative activities integral to normal human life, and that understanding is expressed largely in a common-sense psychological vocabulary. This article focuses on these issues.

This chapter enters into a debate with the analytic theory of action, especially the version developed by Donald Davidson, who makes it clear that the upsurge of a desire to perform a specific action is a natural event that is causally responsible for the action in question. The narrative interpretation of selfhood was initiated by Hannah Arendt. Selfhood is certainly assured on a passive and affective plane. Edmund Husserl maintains that in the passive sphere, a self is constituted preceding active reflection. As Paul Ricœur clearly determines, the complicity with reality entails a ‘decentred self’ that is strictly opposed to the self-centred, self-controlled, and self-assured ego of modern philosophy. Emmanuel Levinas never accepted Wittgenstein's constraint on philosophy to remain silent with regard to the ‘unsayable’.

There are two main motivations for action-based approaches to perception: the parsimonious assumption that action and perception belong to a single overlapping functional system and the tendency to minimize the load of internal processing in perception. For example, according to the ecological paradigm, visual perception consists in detecting affordances for action. Many advocates of action-based accounts of perception reject the computational/representational approach and embrace instead an embodied approach to perception and an empiricist view of the contents of concepts. For example, enactivists argue for constitutive links between an agent’s bodily movements and the content of her perceptual experiences. While, enactivism is not easy to reconcile with evidence for the two-visual systems model of human vision, further support for action-based accounts of social perception has been derived from the discovery of mirror neurons and mirroring processes.

This introduction provides an overview of the chapters in this section, which explores the role of psychoanalysis in aesthetics. More specifically, the chapters examine some psychoanalytic concepts with which to think more deeply about human creativity and aesthetic sensibility, such as wish and wish fulfilment, the depressive position, projection, containment, and mentalization. The focus is on what Sigmund Freud thinks about art, how we should understand it (the question of criticism), what makes an experience distinctively aesthetic, and how we should understand artistic creativity. One of the chapters deals with film theory, arguing against the cognitive turn in favour of the view that ‘the creation and experience of film is driven by desire and wish fulfilment and functions so as to satisfy certain psychological, protective, expressive needs of both artists and audiences’. Another chapter considers the developmental, transformative nature of art, and the particular importance of its form in this respect.

This chapter discusses the phenomenology of affective temperaments as well as their subjective nuances and potential pathogenetic trajectories. It first considers the notion that different kinds of temperament are constitutionally based affective-behavioral dispositions, tracing it back to Hippocratic medicine with the theory of the four humors. It then explains how the modern concept of affective temperaments has been operationalized in a clinical descriptive framework. In particular, it explores the works of Emil Kraepelin, Ernst Kretschmer, and Hubertus Tellenbach on affective psychoses, human emotions, and Typus Melancholicus (TM), respectively. The chapter also examines the pathogenic role of TM as a specific personality structure, how despair intervenes in the transition from the pre-melancholic to the melancholic phase, and the status of temperaments within the context of affective phenomenology.

Affectivity and Its Disorders draws on Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology of moods and his conception of Befindlichkeit in an effort to critique traditional psychological and behaviorist views of affectivity. On Heidegger’s account, moods are not fleeting or contingent aspects of experience but rather constitutive of what it means ‘to be’ human insofar as they serve as the mediating horizon or atmosphere that makes it possible for things to affectively matter to us. The primary aim of this chapter is to explore the ways in which psychopathologic experience disrupts and modifies the structure of Befindlichkeit and the mediating capacity of moods. This structural disruption is examined from the perspectives of embodiment, being-with-others, and temporality.

This article explains the complexity argument as offered by Peter Kivy in relation to absolute music. The next section looks at a particular criticism of the complexity argument: that feelings often alert us to what is important in one's current environment (for these purposes, what is important in the work one is reading) in a way that cannot be accomplished by reason or cognition, ‘intellectual’ activity, or even by affectless perception. Such a view of feelings in general currently enjoys substantial popularity among a variety of psychologists and philosophers. The next section presents one intellectualist model for appreciation, courtesy of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: the Tralfamadorean view, which connects the absence of time from the reading process, and from the process of living one's life, with the absence of feelings that reflect the human capacity for agency.

The distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons, at least in its explicit form, is a fairly recent contribution to normative ethics. That the distinction is both well-defined and significant is often taken for granted in contemporary normative ethics. For example, it is supposed to help us characterize many aspects of common-sense morality, such as personal duties, and deontological restrictions or constraints. The main question of this chapter is whether there is a well-defined distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons that has this high level of significance. Is the distinction really “an extremely important one,” as Nagel said, or perhaps even one of “the greatest contributions of recent ethics,” as Tom Hurka suggests? A variety of accounts of this distinction is discussed and it is argued that none live up to this hype, at least if the distinction is supposed not to beg other important questions in normative ethics.

Alterity examines a key notion in phenomenology, viz. that of otherness or alterity, and distinguishes between a broad and a narrow definition of alterity. Broadly understood, “alterity” refers to anything that eludes or transcends a subject’s grasp. Narrowly understood, it refers exclusively to another agent, subjectivity or mind, or what is experienced as such. The chapter outlines classical and contemporary phenomenological analyses of experiences of alterity in the narrow sense of the term. It considers analyses of normal experiences of alterity found in the philosophical literature—focusing in particular on Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Levinas—as well as analyses of pathological experiences of alterity described in phenomenological psychopathology, such as auditory verbal hallucinations. Finally, it suggests that “radical alterity” is a central feature of the phenomenology of schizophrenia.

This article focuses on comparative psychology, ethology, and cognitive ethology which explain animal behaviour. The same old questions raised by ancient Greek are discussed by scientists today. Morgan's pioneer work show that a quantitative approach to the physical features of animals and their behavioral products was not beyond imagination. He believed that a scientific understanding of the mental states of animals depends on a “double inductive” process, combining inductive inferences based on observation of animal behavior with knowledge of our own minds. The ethological work concentrated on non-mammalian species. Later “cognitive ethology” was used to describe the research program which combines both cognitive science and classical ethology. The fact that emotion plays a more significant role in animal behaviour was inferred. There have been various attempts to develop a fully integrative approach to animal behavior, but the study of behavior moves in different directions.

Anomalous monism is a view about the relationship between the mind and the body, which attempts to strike a delicate balance between the thesis of materialism, on the one hand, and the irreducibility of the mental, on the other. Its current formulation is found in Donald Davidson's landmark paper, ‘Mental Events’, and concerns only intentional states — contentful mental states, such as the belief that p, the desire that q, and other propositional attitudes. Anomalous monism consists of two theses, one concerning monism, the other concerning anomalism. The ‘monism’ part of anomalous monism is the claim that all events, including the mental ones, essentially fall under one class; namely, the class of physical events.

It is not an overstatement to say that no other figure in the history of philosophy has exercised a stronger influence on phenomenology than Aristotle. It suffices to recall Franz Brentano’s decisive role in the genesis of phenomenology or to enumerate the Aristotelian concepts and patterns of thought that phenomenological research—from Husserl to its contemporary practitioners—has appropriated or assimilated. But the most critical element of that influence is the fact that Aristotle has served as the privileged pivot for phenomenology’s own development. The present chapter presents a brief overview of phenomenological approaches to Aristotle and focuses on two episodes in that long story, namely, on Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s interpretations of Aristotle’s practical philosophy and how they contributed to the elaboration of their conceptions of phenomenology.

This article discusses some core theorems of Aristotle's account of persuasion as it is set out in the Rhetoric. It is the declared ambition of Rhetoric I and II to develop a technê, or art, of rhetoric, and the central tool of this technê is, as it were, the introduction of three technical means of persuasion: êthos, pathos, and logos. Probably the best point to start with is two claims that Aristotle eventually makes in the course of his work on rhetoric, the first of which consists in saying that proofs and arguments are central to persuasion. The second claim states that proofs and arguments, however central and important they may be, are not sufficient to persuade. The article examines the relation between these two claims in order to elucidate certain assumptions that Aristotle seems to make concerning the moral psychology of persuasion.

In De Anima, Aristotle addresses the problem of whether the mind is separable from the body. In book I, he broaches the broader question of whether the affections of the soul, including emotion, desire, and perception, are separable from the body. In book II, Aristotle follows his explication of the general definition of the soul with the remark that “neither the soul nor certain parts of it, if it naturally has parts, are separable from the body. Yet nothing prevents some [parts from being separable], because they are not the actualizations of any body.” By “parts,” Aristotle means separable faculties or powers, including nutrition, perception, mind, and desire. The issue of separability is signalled at the beginning of the treatment of mind in book III. If mind alone turned out to be separable from the body, the study of the soul would not belong exclusively to physics but would spill over into first philosophy. This would imply either that psychology consists of two separate sciences, or else that first philosophy and physics are not mutually exclusive.

The theory of art in which the abiding philosophical interest in the connection between art and emotion is most explicit is expression theory, of which there have been several, significantly different, versions. Common to all of these is the thought that the value of art lies at least largely in the value of its expression of emotion; but theorists have differed markedly in how they understand the nature of such expression. On what might be called the full-blown version of expression theory — instances of which were held by Leo Tolstoy and by Clive Bell — expression is understood as a matter of the communication or transmission of emotion or feeling from artist to audience via the work of art. The value of a work of art, on this view, will be a function both of the value of the feeling that it transmits (Tolstoy, for instance, held that sincerity and individuality of feeling were crucial criteria of value in this respect), and of its ‘infectiousness’ (to use a Tolstoyan metaphor) and the clarity with which it transmits that feeling.

In this article the central philosophical issues concerning human-level artificial intelligence (AI) are presented. AI largely changed direction in the 1980s and 1990s, concentrating on building domain-specific systems and on sub-goals such as self-organization, self-repair, and reliability. Computer scientists aimed to construct intelligence amplifiers for human beings, rather than imitation humans. Turing based his test on a computer-imitates-human game, describing three versions of this game in 1948, 1950, and 1952. The famous version appears in a 1950 article in Mind, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (Turing 1950). The interpretation of Turing's test is that it provides an operational definition of intelligence (or thinking) in machines, in terms of behavior. ‘Intelligent Machinery’ sets out the thesis that whether an entity is intelligent is determined in part by our responses to the entity's behavior. Wittgenstein frequently employed the idea of a human being acting like a reliable machine. A ‘living reading-machine’ is a human being or other creature that is given written signs, for example Chinese characters, arithmetical symbols, logical symbols, or musical notation, and who produces text spoken aloud, solutions to arithmetical problems, and proofs of logical theorems. Wittgenstein mentions that an entity that manipulates symbols genuinely reads only if he or she has a particular history, involving learning and training, and participates in a social environment that includes normative constraints and further uses of the symbols.

This article traces a new line of thought through, or actually to, Ludwig Wittgenstein's writings on aspect perception. Its point of bearing is the second part of the Brown Book. It show that the trail of philosophical reflection that apparently naturally leads Wittgenstein in the Brown Book from questions concerning how we ought to conceive of our various mental states (and processes) — that is, from what is arguably one of the underlying overall concerns of the first part of Philosophical Investigations — to the topic of aspect perception, is in fact philosophically interesting. It is also different from what previous attempts to relate the remarks on aspects to the first part of the Investigations would have made one expect. An important point of departure for Wittgenstein's work was that he found literally incredible the dominating conception of philosophy. This article explores aspect perception, aspect-blindness, and philosophical difficulty. It discusses the ‘illusion’ or ‘delusion’ that Wittgenstein detects in those moments in which we attend to instances of Φing in order to find out what Φing is.

Atmospheres in the clinical encounter are intersubjective phenomena experienced by the participants in that situation. In this chapter we will first unveil essential aspects of the ontology and the phenomenology of atmospheres and their role in the process of understanding. We will suggest a specific attitude during the psychiatric interview that allows the assessment of these phenomena, which we coin fragile understanding, relying on the pre-reflective domains of experience. We conclude that the training of psychiatrists in this kind of understanding might have important implications in the extension of the science of psychopathology, adding to the accuracy of diagnosis and enhancing the therapeutic dimension of the psychiatric interview.