Jean Knox

Memories, fantasies, archetypes: an exploration of some connections between cognitive science and analytical psychology

The value of cognitive science as a means of investigating psychodynamic theory and practice is discussed and the limitations of this approach are described. Research findings from cognitive science are drawn on to clarify the nature of memory, which is seen to be a mixture of reproduction and reconstruction and the concepts of true and false memory are explored in this light. The part played by implicit memory and internal working models in producing transference is also examined. New ways of conceptualizing fantasy, which describes it as another facet of internal working models, and the role of transgenerational transmission of attachment patterns in creating internal working models are explored. The nature of archetypes is considered in the light of cognitive science research and a minimalist model is proposed, in which they can be likened to image schemas, that is, primitive conceptual structures that exist in a form which can never be experienced directly or indirectly.

Mirror neurons and embodied simulation in the development of archetypes and self‐agency

In this paper I explore the role of mirror neurons and motor intentionality in the development of self-agency. I suggest that this will also give us a firmer basis for an emergent view of archetypes, as key components in the development trajectory of self-agency, from its foundation in bodily action to its mature expression in mentalization and a conscious awareness of intentionality. I offer some ideas about the implications of these issues of self-agency for our clinical work with patients whose developmental trajectory of self-agency has been partially inhibited, so that their communications have a coercive effect. I discuss the possibility that this kind of clinical phenomenon may relate to Gallese and Lakoffs hypothesis that abstract thought and imagination are forms of simulated action, and that the same sensory-motor circuits that control action also control imagination, concept formation and understanding, but with a crucial development, that of an inhibition of the connections between secondary pre-motor cortical areas and the primary motor cortex. I shall speculate that in the earlier developmental stages of self-agency, the separation of secondary from primary motor areas is not complete, so that imagination and thought are not entirely independent of physical action.

Responses to Erik Goodwyn's 'Approaching archetypes: reconsidering innateness'

Goodwyn’s paper is written to support Jung’s view that archetypes are innate organizing structures in the collective human psyche, based on an implicit assumption that there is a ground plan or blueprint of the human psyche inherited in our genes and that this blueprint contains the potential for specific types of imagery, such as the archetypes of the collective unconscious. In this response, I shall explore the evidence that suggests that Goodwyn’s polarization between a ‘tabula rasa’ view of the mind and a view that the mind contains inherited packages or modules of conceptual information (algorithms) does not accurately reflect the current evidence for the complexity and interdependence of biological and psychological developmental processes. A point to be made in passing is that behaviourism is not the same as a ‘tabula rasa’ view of the mind, and both of these also differ in significant respects from Piaget’s view of the mind. A detailed discussion of the similarities and differences between them would be a diversion from addressing Goodwyn’s main arguments, but to lump them together under the umbrella of the ‘blank slate’ (page 503) and then suggest we have to choose either that view or the evolutionary psychologists’ model of domain-specific inherited algorithms is an oversimplification that does not serve his argument well. To give one simple example, Piaget did accept that there are domains (specific areas of knowledge, such as language or numeracy), but he thought that the learning processes of accommodation, assimilation and equilibration, were domain general, not domain specific. On page 504, Goodwyn then goes on to make three assumptions that are inaccurate:

Response to 'Report from borderland'

‘K’ s powerful and moving account of his personal experience of analysis is a generous gift to the analytic profession. It raises a number of crucial questions and challenges some of the basic assumptions of analytic theory and practice in a way which gives us a rare opportunity for a more public dialogue between analysts and analysands than is usually possible. In this paper, ‘K’ does not question the commitment or competence of his previous analysts, but rather, the analytic method itself when it is applied to those, like himself, whose sense of self cannot, at least to begin with, bear the insight which analysis brings. He vividly highlights the danger that premature insight ‘may all too readily— because of the fragility of the sense of self and of identity—be experienced as a pain laid on pain, and if it continues, a terrible and sundering process of loss’ (p. 24), leading inevitably to a ‘slow motion, hypnagogic (my only recourse was to watch it from the outside) disintegration’ (p. 22). He describes the way in which even the lightest interpretation may ‘inadvertently be taking away a whole world’ (p. 25). Sometimes people in analysis describe this kind of feeling as one of falling for ever or of a black hole at the centre of their being. Many analysts have recognized this phenomenon and that its roots lie in the experience in infancy of extreme failures of parental attunement and reflective function. From a developmental perspective, these descriptions reflect the activation of infantile experiences of being related to as a self-object, not as a subject. Bion (1962) described this as ‘nameless dread’, Ogden (1989) as an intense anxiety deriving from the autistic-contiguous condition. Stern (1985) described the acute aloneness which comes from this experience and suggests that it reflects cumulative failures of containment at several crucial stages in the infant’s development of self-in-relationship—those of core, intersubjective and verbal relatedness.

Intersubjectivity in therapeutic interaction: a pragmatic analysis

This study draws on recent observational research on the intersubjective processes that occur in infant–caregiver interactions. It makes the case that similar methods can be used to develop an observational approach to the dynamics of intersubjectivity in the clinical process using methods from the discipline of pragmatics – the study of human interaction. Following an introduction to the research on intersubjective processes in infant–caregiver dyads and a discussion of the pragmatic approach to the study of talk-in-interaction, we present a detailed analysis of an exchange between a psychotherapist and a patient. Rupture and repair, narrative processes and perspective-taking are observed at the level of the turn-by-turn interactions between the participants. The discussion returns to clinical concerns, discussing the implications of the findings for the study of clinical theory and practice.

The ‘blame and shame society’

In this opinion piece, I explore some of the social and cultural factors that contribute to the creation of feelings of shame in those members of society who are vulnerable or disadvantaged in various ways. I suggest that a ‘blame and shame’ attitude has become pervasive in todays political culture, reassuring the comfortable and privileged that they deserve their own success and allowing them to blame the disadvantaged for their own misfortune. Those who feel that they must become invulnerable in order to succeed therefore project their own vulnerable child onto the vulnerable in our society and attack and condemn in others what they most fear in themselves.