 |
|
|
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
Studies in the Development of ConsciousnessBy Yves Chesni, M.D.
Our highest activity is linked to consciousness and disappears with it. In this latter case, however, a number of vital activities persist, and physiology teaches us that, even when we are awake, a large part of our normal functioning remains unconscious. It is about the unconscious nature of a number of our deepest motives, whether healthy or pathological, normal or neurotic, that psychoanalysis, Pavlovian reflexology, and ethnology, the science of comparative behavior, speak to us. Along with them genetic epistemology helps us to understand the psychological growth of children and animals; botany, for its part, dares not infer a consciousness analogous to ours among plants, no matter how close they are to us in certain respects. Sociology views the world in terms of the growth of civilization's goods, the Third World of Popper, unconscious in itself but the result of consciousness and a possible source of consciousness, spiritual enrichment and true happiness, as well as one of emptiness, illusion, and injustice. Our engineers provide us with computers, sophisticated and unconscious extensions of ourselves. Nothing stops us from imagining that some day these may be programmed to reproduce and perfect themselves without us, and that man will little by little become a simple appendage, vaguely conscious, of some machine of yore invented by a race long since vanished, by men who here and there had tried to manipulate the multitude... In fact, History foreshadows an entirely different evolution, allowing us to anticipate an entirely different future, and to hope for it. A supplement of information and motivation, an interiorization of actions that allows reversible operations...: perhaps it makes some sense to ask what is the purpose of consciousness. But let us not forget that even though it does not make for a quantitative increase in performances according to other criteria, what consciousness brings to living beings above all is itself: a qualitative change. At Annecy, Chicago, and Geneva, between 1975 and 1979, Yves Chesni gave five conferences on some selected points about the development of consciousness from a multidisciplinary perspective. Four of them were published in professional reviews. The fifth, given before the Groupe Genevois de la Société Romande de Philosophie, appears in print for the first time. In the five conferences reproduced in this volume, the author has treated some selected points in the development of consciousness, with special emphasis on the perspectives of critical philosophy, psychology, psychotherapy, and spirituality. The first conference situates the study of consciousness. Contrary to Descartes and Husserl, the realist philosopher does not cast doubt on the existence of the world, other people, his own body, and a large part of his own consciousness. Contrary to Kant, he does not believe that he is separated from things by his own sensorial and intellectual structures. Like Aristotle, he sees in knowledge the common act of a subject capable of knowing and an object capable of being known, but for all that he does not despair of his ability to determine the respective parts played by each of the two factors. Contrary to physiological reductionism, he does not pretend to understand a system that is endowed with consciousness and yet abstracts from consciousness. Contrary to the absurdity of solipsism, he infers a consciousness more or less analogous to his own among his peers and a number of other animal species. In consciousness he perceives simultaneously a sign, a consequence, and a factor of differentiation and correlation, a higher form of unity requiring, respecting, and promoting the originality of the parts. The second and fourth conferences deal with the fetters of neurosis in human development and their suppression, through psychoanalysis--which is a part of cognitive therapy--behavioral psychotherapy, or through the one and the other conjointly. These neurotic automatisms, repetitive, unconscious, involuntary and coercive--the contrary of free behavior--result from the unfortunate conjunction of an inadequate environment during infancy and from certain hereditary virtualities, particularly the tendency to react totally to signs isolated from context, as new-born children and instinctual animals do, who still have only minimal intelligence and are adapted by means of innate behaviors served up whole and entire by the evolution of species. While shedding light on their prevention or treatment, the understanding of neurotic mechanisms contributes at the same time to that of normal development: i.e., the growth within us of the power to grasp the whole, to situate the parts in their relationships with each other and in respect to the whole, to be neither blinded nor bound by any of them; the power within us, to put it succinctly, of expanding that inner freedom that penetrates, humanizes, and enlarges our humblest joys. The third conference speaks of spirituality. In every age throughout the entire world, spiritual men and women have desired to wipe out the obstacles, and not only the neurotic ones, to inner freedom: "If you stop at something," St. John of the Cross counsels us, "you fail to push forward towards the All." It is the purgative way that attempts to rid us of all pettiness in order that we might be attuned to the essential, to the All, that we may even, as Christian mystics believe, be rendered "divine by participation." But opinions differ regarding the nature of the All, the place of man within and in respect to the All, and the possibility of knowing the All--which is not the same as knowing all. Thought has a neuro-motor aspect. It disappears, completely or selectively, as the eye and speech muscles relax. This "relaxation of the mind," this putting to rest of the spirit, is, according to Jacobson, the essential element of progressive relaxation. It is not foreign to the technics of spiritual disencumberment, purification, and perfecting at issue in the following chapters. Such is the object of the fifth conference. Contents
For more information please e-mail us using the link on our home page. Copyright © 2007, The Live Oak Press®, LLC. All rights reserved. [Home] [Books] [Production] |
