AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

Despite all the cultural conservatism, then, the Confucian view of civilized life is, in the end, optimistic. Sigmund Freud, to take a prominent Western counterexample, saw the tension between hot and cold cognition as the ineradicable tragedy at the heart of modern life. We were miserable in the state of nature because a world where everyone alliowed their id—their hot cognition—to run wild would be chaotic, capricious, and brutish...A civilized life is better for everyone overall, but it also exacts a cost: everyone is required to either rpress or sublimate a large portion of their instinctual drives and to live under the iron rule of cold cognition. The result is a state of what Freud calls Unbehagen, which is usually translated as "discontent" or "dissatisfaction" [as in Civilization and its Discontents, aka Das Unbehagen in Kultur] but also includes a sense of physical unease (p76)

In the context of Freudian psychology, the large-scale structure of the mind or of theories of mind. (That is kind of unclear, but I that's because I am highly unclear on the concept).

Freud's great discovery was that not all represdentations were accessible to consciousness; he never seemed to doubt that the unconscious, for all that it might operate on a different symbol system that the conscious, was fully symbolic. fully intentional, and fully representational. (p47)

book by Norman O. Brown, something of a cult classic, a psychoanalysis interpretation of history.

Frederick Crews notable Freud critic and Fredric Jameson the writer on postmodernism, I can never keep them straight.

A central concept of Freudian theory. I have this nagging suspicion that I don't really understand what it means or how it works, not at the proper level of depth.

Notes for a paper I was asked to write on some relationships between psychoanalysis and AI, for an edited volume from Jon Mills. Never did write it, because I was intimidated. Whatever else you can say about psychoanalysts, they are a scholarly bunch, and I thought my flippant half-assed style of thinking wouldn't go over. But I can publish these notes, mostly from mid 2021.

In the 1910s, Freud wrote a series of twelve essays, to be collected as Preliminaries to a Metapsychology. Five of these were published independently under the titles: "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," "Repression," "The Unconscious," "A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams," and "Mourning and Melancholia." The remaining seven remained unpublished, an expression of Freud's ambivalence about his own attempts to articulate the whole of his vision of psychoanalysis. In 1919 he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salome, "Where is my Metapsychology? In the first place it remains unwritten".10 In 1920 he published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a text with metaphysical ambitions.

It is not enough to say that Freud created a fundamentally radical doctrine that was somehow captured by bourgeois interests – it is necessary to recognize and spell out the points within Freud's psychoanalysis which already represented those interests and sought their embrace. Freud was ambivalent, but ultimately believed in reason, knowing it be but the 'bound or outward circumference of desire – yet he had no faith in the desire which gave reason life.

Freud didn't get Buddhism, dismissed mediation as infantile "oceanic" feeling. But in fact both are dealing with the fundamentals of mind and have both points of similarity and also complement each other in interesting ways.

See of course Freud, Ainslie, Society of Mind, and too many other pages here to list. In fact don't I have an appropriate page for this concept already? Hm, no! Weird. It's too pervasive I guess.

psychoanalysis

13 Aug 2023 - 02 Oct 2026

THE PHENOMENON OF TRANSFERENCE-HOW WE ALL INvent each other according to early blueprints-was Freud's most original and radical discovery. The idea of infant sexuality and of the Oedipus complex can be accepted with a good deal more equanimity than the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities-personal relations-is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems. Even (or especially) romantic love is fundamentally solitary, and has at its core a profound impersonality. The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: we cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain. A horrible · kind of predestination hovers over each new attachment we form. "Only connect," E. M. Forster proposed. "Only we can't," the psychoanalyst knows.