Individuation

Abstract: The pioneering contribution to infant psychology that gave us separation and individuation documents with standard-setting care the intrapsychic process of a child's emergence from symbiotic fusion with the mother toward affirmation of his own psychological birth. Available for the first time in paperback to a new generation of students and clinicians on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its original publication.

Abstract: Preface 1. Personal identity and individuation 2. Personal identity and bodily continuity 3. Imagination and the self 4. The self and the future 5. Are persons bodies? 6. The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality 7. Strawson on individuals 8. Knowledge and meaning in the philosophy of mind 9. Deciding to believe 10. Imperative inference 11. Ethical consistency 12. Consistency and realism 13. Morality and the emotions 14. The idea of equality 15. Egoism and altruism Bibliography.

Abstract: HE TERhl SYhlBIOSIS is borrowed from biology, where it is used to refer to a close functional association of two organisms to their mutual advantage. In the weeks preceding the evolution to symbiosis, the newborn and very young infant’s sleeplike states far outweigh in proportion the states of arousal. They are reminiscent of that primal state of libido distribution that prevailed in intrauterine life, which resembles the model of a closed monadic system, self-sufficient in its hallucinatory wish fulfillment. Freud‘s (12) use of the bird’s egg as a model of a closed psychological system comes to mind. He said: “A neat example of a psychical system shut off from the stimuli of the external world, and able to satisfy even its nutritional requirements uutisticully . . . , is afforded by a bird’s egg with its food supply enclosed in T

Abstract: Which words do children learn earliest, and why? These questions bear on how humans organize the world into semantic concepts, and how children acquire this parsing . A useful perspective is to think of how bits of experience are conflated into the same concept . One possibility is that children are born with the set of conceptual conflations that figures in human language . But assuming (as we will) that most semantic concepts are learned, not innate, there remain two possibilities . First, aspects of perceptual experience could form inevitable conflations that are conceptualized and lexicalized as unified concepts. In this case, we would have cognitive dominance : concepts arise from the cognitive-perceptual sphere and are simply named by language. A second possibility is linguistic dominance : the world presents perceptual bits whose clumping is not pre-ordained, and language has a say in how the bits get conflated into concepts . We propose that both cognitive and linguistic dominance apply, but to different degrees for different kinds of words (Gentner 1981, 1982). Some bits of experience naturally form themselves into inevitable (preindividuated) concepts, while other bits are able to enter into several different possible combinations.