X HORIZON

Julian Jaynes

(February 27, 1920 – November 21, 1997) was an American psychologist, best known for his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind(1976), in which he argued that ancient peoples were not conscious.

Jaynes' definition of consciousness is synonymous with what philosophers call "meta-consciousness" or "meta-awareness", i.e., awareness of awareness, thoughts about thinking, desires about desires, beliefs about beliefs. This form of reflection is also distinct from the kinds of "deliberations" seen in other higher animals such as crows insofar as it is dependent on linguistic cognition.

Jaynes wrote that ancient humans before roughly 1000 BC were not reflectively meta-conscious and operated by means of automatic, nonconscious habit-schemas. Instead of having meta-consciousness, these humans were constituted by what Jaynes calls the "bicameral mind". For bicameral humans, when habit did not suffice to handle novel stimuli and stress rose at the moment of decision, neural activity in the "dominant" (left) hemisphere was modulated by auditory verbal hallucinations originating in the so-called "silent" (right) hemisphere (particularly the right temporal cortex), which were heard as the voice of a chieftain or god and immediately obeyed.

Jaynes wrote, "[For bicameral humans], volition came as a voice that was in the nature of a neurological command, in which the command and the action were not separated, in which to hear was to obey." Jaynes argued that the change from bicamerality to consciousness (linguistic meta-cognition) occurred over a period of ten centuries beginning around 1800 BC. The selection pressure for Jaynesian consciousness as a means for cognitive control is due, in part, to chaotic social disorganizations and the development of new methods of behavioral control such as writing."

Sigmund Freud

born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939), was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the defense mechanism of repression. He is also renowned for his redefinition of sexual desire as the primary motivational energy of human life which is directed toward a wide variety of objects; as well as his therapeutic techniques, including his theory of transference in the therapeutic relationship and the presumed value of dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires.

Freud is commonly referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis" and his work has been highly influential—popularizing such notions as the unconscious, the Oedipus complex, defense mechanisms, Freudian slips and dream symbolism—while also making a long-lasting impact on fields as diverse as literature, film, Marxist and feminist theories, and psychology. However, his theories are disputed by numerous critics.

Carl G Jung

was a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of the extroverted and the introverted personality, archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, literature, and related fields.

Individuation is the central concept of analytical psychology. Jung considered individuation, the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious while still maintaining their relative autonomy, to be the central process of human development.

Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity.

Jung saw the human psyche as "by nature religious", and made this religiousness the focus of his explorations. Jung is one of the best known contemporary contributors to dream analysis and symbolization.

Though he was a practicing clinician and considered himself to be a scientist, much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. His interest in philosophy and the occult led many to view him as a mystic.

Wilhelm Reich

(March 24, 1897 – November 3, 1957) was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.
Reich was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure, rather than on individual neurotic symptoms. He promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives and abortion, and the importance for women of economic independence. Synthesizing material from psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, economics, sociology, and ethics, his work influenced writers such as Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, A. S. Neill, and William Burroughs.

He was also a controversial figure, who came to be viewed by the psychoanalytic establishment as having gone astray or as having succumbed to mental illness. His work on the link between human sexuality and neuroses emphasized "orgastic potency" as the foremost criterion for psycho-physical health. He said he had discovered a form of energy, which he called "orgone," that permeated the atmosphere and all living matter, and he built "orgone accumulators," which his patients sat inside to harness the energy for its reputed health benefits. It was this work, in particular, that cemented the rift between Reich and the psychoanalytic establishment.

Shohei Imamura

Shohei Imamura's ribald, darkly comic films about messy human relationships and coarse, indomitable women repelled early European critics who had grown to cherish the graceful, exotic image of Japan typified by Kenji Mizoguchi films. Yet Imamura remains a critically important director, both as one of the seminal Japanese New Wave directors (along with Nagisa Oshima and Masahiro Shinoda) and as a chronicler of a side of Japan rarely seen in Mizoguchi movies or tourist brochures.

Imamura reached his first creative peak with his1963 masterpiece Insect Woman, a tragicomedy about one of Imamura's signature amoral survivors, followed by Intentions of Murder, and The Pornographers, a brilliant though disturbing black comedy about a pathetic man who becomes obsessed with his lover's daughter. Through most of the 1970s, he made a number of well-received documentaries; until 1979, when he released Vengeance Is Mine, a brilliantly ribald film about a serial killer and his father. Since then, Imamura's international acclaim has soared. His 1983 film The Ballad of Narayama and his 1997 film Unagi both won the Palme d'Or from the Cannes Film Festival.

Osho

A professor of philosophy, he travelled throughout India in the 1960s as a public speaker. His outspoken criticism of socialism, Mahatma Gandhi and institutionalised religions made him controversial. He also advocated a more open attitude towards sexuality: a stance that earned him the sobriquet "sex guru" in the Indian and later international press. In 1970, Osho settled for a while in Bombay. He began initiating disciples (known as neo-sannyasins) and took on the role of a spiritual teacher. In his discourses, he reinterpreted writings of religious traditions, mystics, and philosophers from around the world. Moving to Poona in 1974, he established an ashram that attracted increasing numbers of Westerners. The ashram offered therapies derived from the Human Potential Movement to its Western audience and made news in India and abroad, chiefly because of its permissive climate and Osho's provocative lectures.

His syncretic teachings emphasize the importance of meditation, awareness, love, celebration, courage, creativity and humour—qualities that he viewed as being suppressed by adherence to static belief systems, religious tradition and socialisation. Osho's teachings have had a notable impact on Western New Age thought, and their popularity has increased markedly since his death.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

(October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was a nineteenth-century German philosopher. He wrote critiques of religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science, using a distinctive German language style and displaying a fondness for aphorism. Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism. His style, and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth, raise considerable problems of interpretation, generating an extensive secondary literature in both continental and analytic philosophy. Nonetheless, his key ideas include interpreting tragedy as an affirmation of life, an eternal recurrence that has become subject to numerous interpretations, a reversal of Platonism, and a repudiation of (especially 19th-century) Christianity.

Nietzsche began his career as a philologist before turning to philosophy. At the age of 24 he became Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems, which would plague him for most of his life. In 1889 he exhibited symptoms of a serious mental illness, living out his remaining years in the care of his mother and sister until his death in 1900.

Giorgio de Chirico

July 10, 1888 – November 20, 1978) was an influential pre-Surrealist Greek-Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father who as a railroad engineer. He studied art in Munich from 1905 through 1909 and then in Paris until he entered the Italian military. After the First World War, in 1918, he moved to Ferrara, Italy. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement.

From 1909-1918, de Chirico made paintings termed pittura metafisica or metaphysical painting that were a dreamlike fusion of reality and unreality. These works present stagelike townscapes with distorted perspective and deserted spaces that evoke loneliness and nostalgia. These images of frustration, tension and charged ambiguity strongly influenced the Surrealist painters of the 1920’s especially Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and René Magritte.

A constant theme of de Chirico’s early work is the loss of his father, commemorated in precisely painted white statues, smokestacks, towers and trains. Later, mannequin iconography and ambiguous forms that seem to evoke ancient myth and modern science populate de Chirico’s pictorial stages.

Michelangelo Antonioni

was born in 1912 into a middle-class family and grew up in bourgeois surroundings of the Italian province. In Bologna he studied economics and commerce while he painted and also wrote criticism for a local newspaper. In 1939 he went to Rome and worked for the journal "Cinema" studying directorship at the School of Cinema. As he was a debter of the neorealism his films reflect his bourgeois roots like in his first movie Cronaca di un amore (1950) or Signora senza camelie, La (1953) or Amiche, Le (1955). His biggest success was the trilogy Avventura, L' (1960), Notte, La (1961), and Eclisse, L' (1962), with which he won several prizes of minor importance. This success allowed him to go abroad and to work on international scale in English.

Charles Robert Darwin

(12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, eminent as a collector and geologist, who proposed and provided scientific evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors through the process he called natural selection. The fact that evolution occurs became accepted by the scientific community and the general public in his lifetime, while his theory of natural selection came to be widely seen as the primary explanation of the process of evolution in the 1930s, and now forms the basis of modern evolutionary theory. In modified form, Darwin’s scientific discovery remains the foundation of biology, as it provides a unifying logical explanation for the diversity of life.

Nagisa Oshima

An unflinchingly iconoclastic and ceaselessly inventive filmmaker, Nagisa Oshima (1932- ) has scorched an indelible path across postwar Japanese cinema. Devoted to political activism since his days as an outspoken student leader at the prestigious Kyoto University, Oshima was led by the traumatic experience of Night and Fog in Japan towards a different mode of political cinema, increasingly turning away from party politics towards a broader and ultimately more ambitious critique of Japanese history and national identity. In a series of important mid-career films, Oshima adopted controversial crime headlines from across modern Japanese history – the serial killer in Violence at Noon, the cruel, exploitative parents in Boy, the prostitute's murderous act in In the Realm of the Senses –transforming their crimes into desperate but deliberate acts of rebellion against the status quo. The figure of the transgressive criminal outlaw has remained a seminal touchstone of Oshima's cinema, closely linked to his interest in the strange illogic of the sexual unconscious, whether of individuals or of Japanese society as a whole.

X HORIZON

Nov 4, 2012

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