David A. Jopling

Talking cures and placebo effects

1. Placebos and psychotherapy 2. Kinds of insight 3. The standard view 4. Placebos and placebo effects 5. Insight placebos 6. Placebos, deception and self-deception 7. Conclusion

“Take away the life‐lie … “: Positive illusions and creative self‐deception

Abstract In a well‐known paper “Illusion and well‐being”, Taylor and Brown maintain that positive illusions about the self play a significant role in the maintenance of mental health, as well as in the ability to maintain caring inter‐personal relations and a sense of well‐being. These illusions include unrealistically positive self‐evaluations, exaggerated perceptions of personal control, and unrealistic optimism about ones future. Accurate self‐knowledge, they maintain, is not an indispensable ingredient of mental health and well‐being. Two lines of criticism are directed against the creative self‐deception hypothesis, one methodological and one substantive. First, it is argued that Taylor and Browns method of eliciting experimental subjects’ self‐reports and comparative self‐ratings under artificial experimental conditions lacks ecological validity and phenomenological realism. Second, it is argued that positive illusions diminish the range of reactive other‐regarding attitudes and emotions that peop...

Sartre's moral psychology

Across its long history moral philosophy has been as concerned with the cultivation of certain moral dispositions, or traits of character, or moral psychologies, as it has been with establishing the validity and universality of moral rules and principles. Moral psychology begins with the inner person: not how we outwardly conform to external moral rules, but how we are in our hearts and souls and, particularly, how we are when we are truly flourishing as human beings. It is therefore concerned with the ethics of virtue, and a casual glance at the respective moral psychologies of Aristotle, Augustine, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and the existentialists would reveal analyses of such virtues as integrity, justice, prudence, courage, magnanimity, sincerity, and authenticity. These are not innate dispositions, or inherited traits of personality like shyness or cheerfulness. They are acquired by teaching or practice or reflection, and to a certain extent reveal what we have made of ourselves; thus they express our moral way of being, and our fundamentl moral outlook, and not just something we happen to have. Sartres concern with the ethics of character, the conditions of self-determination and human agency, and the phenomenology of moral life, places him within this tradition of moral and philosophical psychology. This essay is concerned with elaborating and clarifying a number of interrelated aspects of Sartres moral and philosophical psychology, particularly as they are developed in Being and Nothingness : self-determination and agency, responsibility for self, the unity of a life, moral reasoning, and self-knowledge.

Kant and Sartre on self-knowledge

ConclusionThe similarities between the Copernican and existentialist approach to self-knowledge can be clearly summarized by the combined effect they have on the correspondence model of self-knowledge. The self-knower who holds that knowledge conforms to its object is not only wrong but deceived if his goal is the complete one-to-one correspondence between, on the one hand, objectively validated propositions, and on the other an independently existing, recalcitrant reality (the Self). Both Kant and Sartre hold that we can know ourselves in terms of appearances or quasi-objects, but they both deny that we can know what we “really” are over and above the empirical, contingent and finite knowledge we have. For Kant, this is because we are, most fundamentally, something unknowable; for Sartre, it is because we are, most fundamentally, nothing. In both cases, the self we purport to know is in an important sense other than itself: in saying “I,” more is being said than we know — and less. The “I” is spoken only through and across that which is not “I.”

Much ado to know myself...: insight in the talking cures.

Psychoanalysis, psychodynamic psychotherapy, and the other talking cures claim to help clients acquire insight into their selves. With insight, the unruly forces that govern lives and that make people strangers to themselves finally come to be understood and rendered subject to conscious control. These insights, it is claimed, are true, and fit the facts like a key fits a lock; they are not merely coherent fictions or confabulated cause‐and‐effect stories designed to please clients. But is this credible? The argument developed here is that some of the therapeutic changes in the talking cures are functions of placebos that rally the minds native healing powers in much the same way that placebo pills rally the bodys native healing powers and that some of these placebos are insight placebos. The talking cures rightfully claim that it is only talking with others that unlocks the soul and opens it up to ways of self‐knowing and to caring for self that would otherwise be unavailable, but they fail to acknowledge the presence of placebo effects, and they operate with restrictive models of dialogue that may unintentionally encourage placebo effects and cognitive suggestibility.

Who am I? Beyond “I think, therefore I am”

Can we ever truly answer the question, “Who am I?” Moderated by Alex Voorhoeve (London School of Economics), neuro‐philosopher Elie During (University of Paris, Ouest Nanterre), cognitive scientist David Jopling (York University, Canada), social psychologist Timothy Wilson (University of Virginia), and ethicist Frances Kamm (Harvard University) examine the difficulty of achieving genuine self‐knowledge and how the pursuit of self‐knowledge plays a role in shaping the self.