Joona Taipale

Self-regulation and Beyond: Affect Regulation and the Infant–Caregiver Dyad

In the available psychological literature, affect regulation is fundamentally considered in terms of self-regulation, and according to this standard picture, the contribution of other people in our affect regulation has been viewed in terms of socially assisted self-regulation. The present article challenges this standard picture. By focusing on affect regulation as it unfolds in early infancy, it will be argued that instead of being something original and fundamental, self-regulation developmentally emerges from the basis of a further type of affect regulation. While infants’ capacities in recognizing, understanding, and modifying their own affective states are initially immature and undeveloped, affect regulation is initially managed by the other: it is initially the self, and not the other, that plays the role of an assistant in affect regulation. To capture this phenomenon, the concepts of “auto-matic,” “hetero-matic,” and “altero-matic” affect regulation will be introduced and their interrelations elaborated. By showing how the capacity of affective self-regulation, which is characteristic to maturity, is developmentally achieved by internalizing regulative functions that, at the outset of development, are managed by the caregiver, it will be argued that altero-matic affect regulation is an autonomous type of affect regulation and the developmental basis for self-regulation.

Social mirrors. Tove Jansson’s Invisible Child and the importance of being seen

ABSTRACT This article examines the experience of being seen and analyzes its central role in the formation of a coherent sense of self. Tove Jansson’s short story from 1962, ‘The Invisible Child’, serves as the red thread of the article, and the story is analyzed in the light of Donald Winnicott’s work on social mirroring. The analysis is enriched by the psychoanalytic insights of Veikko Tähkä and Heinz Kohut, and complemented by Axel Honneth’s philosophical elaborations as well as by recent developmental findings as presented by Vasudevi Reddy. The article is divided into an introduction and three sections. After summarizing Jansson’s story in the introduction, the first section elaborates and examines different senses of social invisibility. The second section assesses developmental factors that promote social invisibility and highlights the importance of being seen. The third and final section interprets Jansson’s story as an analogy to an intensive therapeutic process, while pinpointing those elements that facilitate the restructuring of a disturbed sense of self. As a whole, the article thus discusses an issue that is often simply taken for granted in discussions of empathy and interpersonal experience: social visibility.

Group-Directed Empathy: A Phenomenological Account

This paper is an attempt to build a bridge between the fields of social cognition and social ontology. Drawing on both classical and more recent phenomenological studies, the article develops an account of group-directed empathy . The first part of the article spells out the phenomenological notion of empathy and suggests certain conceptual distinctions vis-a-vis two different kinds of group. The second part of the paper applies these conceptual considerations to cases in which empathy is directed at groups and elucidates the sense in which individuals can empathically target not only other individual’s emotions, but also shared emotions as such. Clarifying the structure of group-directed empathy, it will also be argued that the latter is, by default, more informative than individual-directed empathy. The third and last section of the paper is devoted to one central consequence of the proposed account: if it is possible to empathize with groups as such, and if empathy necessary builds on body-perception, then both ideas seem to be conducive to the claim that groups as such have a body.

Facts and Fantasies: Embodiment and the Early Formation of Selfhood

Husserlian phenomenology and Freudian psychoanalysis both offer a theory of the emergence of the self-other relationship, but end up in very different accounts. Husserl argues that all experiences are essentially accompanied by primordial self-awareness, and that there is, from the start, an insurmountable difference between self and others. Freud and his early successors famously claim on the contrary that infantile experience originally involves no clearly demarcated borderline between self and other, and that selfhood is rather something that the infant comes to acquire in the course of development. In this paper, I will set off with the received view which suggests that there is an unbridgeable gap between Husserlian phenomenology and Freudian psychoanalysis. I will argue that the relationship between phenomenology and psychoanalysis is more complex than that. By explicating the different ways in which the early distinction/indistinction between self and other is portrayed in psychoanalytic scholarship, my central claim will be that instead of comprising two contradictory views concerning the early distinction/indistinction between self and other, the psychoanalytic view is united in a peculiar sense: although the self-other distinction is there from the start thanks to kinesthesis, the distinction might still, at the same time, be absent in the register of fantasy. I argue that, considered in this manner, the psychoanalytic view is not incompatible with, but complementary to the phenomenological account.

The unseen, the discouraged and the outcast: Expressivity and the foundations of social recognition

Abstract This article analyzes different pathologies of social affirmation and examines the grounds of social recognition from the point of view of the concept of expression. The red thread of the text is provided by Tove Jansson’s fictional works, and the focus will be on three cases in particular (the magic hat, the invisible girl and the figure of the Groke). The article sets out from the phenomenological distinction between the sensible expression, on the one hand, and the expressed content, on the other. By focusing on the three cases, the article distinguishes and analyses the fundamental structures of communal life and explicates different ways in which social affirmation can be one-sided or distorted.

Controlling the uncontrollable. Self-regulation and the dynamics of addiction

ABSTRACT The multidisciplinary research on addictions generally promotes the assumption that addictive behavior is caused and maintained by the external psychoactive substance, which accordingly is considered to be ‘addictive in itself’. The present article challenges this widespread assumption by engaging in a detailed examination of the psychodynamic structures of addiction. Tracing addictive behavior back to problems in affect regulation, the article discusses the object, motivation, dynamics, and developmental origins of addiction. Linking the problem with the topic of transitional object relations, the article eventually argues that addictive behavior amounts to a desperate pursuit for self-control. The tragedy of the addict is that he or she only manages to replace one sense of uncontrollability with another.

Christian Lotz: From Subjectivity to Affectivity: Husserl's Phenomenology Revisited. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2007 (169 pp.)

In the past decades the traditional interpretation of Edmund Husserl’s (1859–1938) work has been radically revised. Whereas the old interpretation refers only to the works published by Husserl himself (mostly to Logische Untersuchungen, Ideen I, Cartesianische Meditationen,1 and Krisis ), the new and revised interpretation builds upon Husserl’s work as a whole, referring also to the unpublished and posthumously published manuscripts.3 Since the late 1970’s, 39 volumes of the Husserliana series have been published (about 17.000 pages). As the published works constitute less than a quarter of Husserl’s ouevre, it is understandable that the interpretation has changed remarkably after the publication of the manuscripts. The publication of the manuscripts has shed new light upon the published works not only by offering them a broader context, but also by establishing many remarkable expansions that are invisible in the published works. This, again, has revealed the old interpretation as outdated. As Husserl’s published writings focus mainly on problems of intentionality, the old interpretation take the problems of intersubjectivity and self-awareness, for instance, as particular intentional relations, and thus considers them as contingent and secondary phenomena in the context of Husserl’s thought (and Husserl was often therefore labeled as an “idealist” and even “solipsist”). This interpretation was thoroughly questioned by several scholars who, by studying carefully also the manuscripts, argued that in Husserl’s view intersubjectivity and self-awareness are essential and intrinsic features of all intentional consciousness, and not particular intentional relations. In other words, it was established that Husserl not only studied consciousness as a relation to the world, but just as originally considered consciousness as a relation to itself and to other selves.