Search

This paper analyses the development of UNESCO's Mahatma Gandhi Institute on Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP), examining its record from global, national and institutional perspectives. The global perspective encompasses challenges to UNESCO's attempts to articulate a distinctive, humanistic vision in competition with other multilateral bodies. The national perspective relates to India, which hosts MGIEP, provides the bulk of its funding and exerts significant influence over its governance. Consideration is also given to the relationship between MGIEP's work and Mahatma Gandhi's ideas. Finally, the institutional perspective relates both to the author's own experience with MGIEP, and to information gained through interviews with others involved with the institute. It is argued that MGIEP's story illuminates challenges to attempts, within India and internationally, to sustain a humanistic vision of education in the face of powerful countervailing interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the mechanisms that lead to a destructive tendency in the formation and functioning of the psychic apparatus, to the characteristic states of subjects who are drawn to non-life. The dynamics of the primary mother-child relationship involve a structural interaction between mind and body, subject and object. The dialectic between the life drive and the death drive is conceptualized as the structuring of homeostatic dynamic equilibria, in which both drives belong to the living, provided they are kept in a non-isolated system. This conception has analogies with other disciplines that have changed their paradigms, such as neurobiology, which, for living beings in open systems, hypothesises a continuous interconnected Becoming of undivided separation and of discontinuity. In unitary psyche-soma functioning, a dynamic homoeostatic balance marks the state of health of the relating subject; or if, instead, the system is isolated, a pathological dysregulation depending on the emotional-affective vicissitudes it undergoes. Two clinical cases illustrate these dynamics. For this tendency on the level of the somatopsychic unit, the name alloiosis has been put forward, in analogy with cellular apoptosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a renewed interest in the clinical applications of psychedelics, with increasing use for a variety of psychiatric conditions. Individuals often describe psychedelic sessions as among the most significant experiences in their lives, emphasising the sense of awe, connectedness, and spiritual transformation they undergo. They can also feel they are experiencing truth and becoming aware of reality in deeper ways than ever before. As elusive as it is inescapable, Wilfred Bion’s ‘O’ denotes contact with absolute truth, approachable through an intuitive awareness of reality that goes beyond cognitive strategies seeking to ‘know’. The state of mind cultivated to enter into such realms, to reach O, and indeed to achieve mystical experiences under psychedelics, is one of surrender and transcendence of a cognitively weighted, sensorially bound interfacing with reality. This paper outlines the neurophenomenology of psychedelic use, the concept of O, and their clinical significance vis-à-vis contemporary psychodynamic thinking. As our understanding deepens regarding the changes associated with use of psychedelics, we can draw parallels between acquisition of insight and subsequent reshaping of one’s templates and perspectives taking place through use of these drugs, and the process that occurs over the course of a psychoanalysis or psychodynamic therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article 'Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology', published in 2017, Ienca and Andorno review the current stage of neuroscience and neurotechnology development, proposing four new human rights that shall protect the individual from the dangers arising from said development. The authors accept the idea of infiltration into our interior castle -- the mind -- requiring only the proper level of protection against the described probable misuse of techniques, especially their use against the individual's will. Although their proposal seems a needed addition to the human rights system, it raises doubts as to the very definition of human it was designed to protect. Is the whole concept of the technical infiltration of the brain to alter the mind processes reconcilable with human freedom, especially with freedom of thought, conscience, and religion? In the article, the authors deliberate the inadequacy of two visions of human: the one that was the foundation of the human rights system and another emerging from Ienca and Andorno's article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Global Perspectives, we bring you interviews with psychoanalysts from around the world in an effort to explore the influence of culture, politics, and socio-economics on training, theory development, and adherence to clinical technique and psychoanalytic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]