Passions of the Mind

Unheard Melodies, the Third Principle of Mental Functioning

• Author(s): Harold N. Boris,
• Publisher: NYU Press
• Pages: 294
• ISBN_10: 0814712045
  ISBN_13: 9780814712047
  
• Language: en
• Categories: History / Military / Revolutions & Wars of Independence , Medical / Psychiatry / General , Philosophy / Political , Political Science / Political Ideologies / Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism , Psychology / General , Psychology / Cognitive Psychology & Cognition , Psychology / Emotions , Psychology / Movements / Psychoanalysis , Psychology / Social Psychology , Psychology / Movements / General , Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social ,

Description:... Passions of the mind advances the view that, as social animals, we are only partly understandable in terms of individual psychodynamics. Within us, another principle is at work - to preserve the Group, even at the expense of the individual. As we pursue our own individual courses in life, seeking egoistic satisfactions, we are bound by countervailing forces, biologically rooted, social in nature, which cause us to identify with the aims of the Group, even if that requires of us a failure to thrive - indeed our very deaths. In this three-way synthesis of classical psychoanalysis, recent interpersonal and object relations psychology, and current selectivistic evolutionary biology, Professor Harold N. Boris draws on the work of Melanie Klein and Wilfred R. Bion and provides a bridge between the personal and biosocial psychologies of which we are made up. He elaborates on his concepts of the Couple, which involves the pleasure principle and egoistic identity, and the Pair, which enlists his newly proposed selection principle in representing social identity and biological imperatives. Professor Boris shows how these two states of mind, each with its own characteristic themes and variations, feelings and fantasies, and presences and absences, at once compete, conjoin, and intertwine in the paradoxical dialectic of psychoanalysis. In the latter half of the book, Professor Boris provides a transcript of an "analysis," a composite of what the experience in the consulting room is both for the patient and analyst. These illustrative sessions, complete with commentary, give the reader a rare glimpse of a living psychoanalysis in process. In addition to his day-to-day work in the psychoanalytic consulting room, Boris brings to this subtle and scholarly book his analytic work in many other settings - in day and overnight schools for normal and disturbed children, in rural villages and urban centers, and with individuals and groups.