«two fundamentally opposed but complementary views of the mind. I will call these alternative conceptions of the mind and of psychopathology, epistemological and ontological, and will contrast Freud’s fundamentally epistemological approach with Merleau-Ponty’s ontological account.

The epistemological conception of mind is roughly that the mind contains ideas which correspond or sometimes fail to correspond to what is out there in the world. This view of the mind as a subjective consciousness containing representations of objects begins with Descartes and reaches its culmination in Franz Brentano’s notion of intentionality. According to Brentano, mental states such as perception, memory, desire, intention, fear, etc. are all "of" something, or "about" something. It is this directedness, or intentionality, Brentano claimed, which is characteristic of the mind and of nothing else.

Brentano had many famous students. One of these, Edmund Husserl, developed an elaborate account of the sort of representations which would have to be in the mind for the mind to be about anything. He called the special attitude in which the mind is able to reflect on its own intentional content instead of on the objects towards which it is directed, the "phenomenological reduction," and the account of the structure of the mental representations discovered by this method he called "phenomenology."

Another student who followed Brentano’s courses in Vienna was Sigmund Freud. He also accepted the intentionalist conception of mind as directed towards objects by means of representations. But, unlike Husserl, Freud learned from his work with hypnotism that not every mental representation was immediately accessible to reflection. Thus Freud was led to introduce the notion of an unconscious which, just like the conscious mind, was directed towards objects by means of its representations, but whose representations were not directly accessible to the conscious subject.»

— Hubert Dreyfus. Alternative Philosophical Conceptualizations Of Psychopathology

«Recently philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, reacting against the Cartesian tradition, have developed an alternative model of the mind`s relation to reality. This account is so radical that, strictly speaking, they do not refer to the mind at all. Rather they prefer to speak of the way that the whole human being is related to the world. Indeed, even "relation" is misleading, since it suggests the coming together of two separate entities -- human being and world -- so these recent philosophers are finally driven to replace the epistemological relation of subject and object with a way of being they call "being-in-the-world".

These philosophers do not deny that human beings have mental states by which their minds are directed towards objects, rather they assert that mental states presuppose a context in which objects can show up and make sense. According to Heidegger, this context is provided by social practices. The shared practices into which we are socialized provide a background understanding of what counts as objects, what counts as human beings and ultimately what counts as real, on the basis of which we can direct our minds towards particular things and people. Heidegger calls this background understanding of what it means to be, which is embodied in the tools and institutions of a society and in each person growing up in that society but not represented in his/her mind, the understanding of Being. According to Heidegger it is this understanding of Being which creates what he calls a clearing (Lichtung) in which entities can then show up for us. The clearing is neither on the side of the subject nor the object -- it is not a belief system nor a set of facts -- rather it contains both and makes their relation possible.

Merleau-Ponty, following Heidegger, compares this clearing to the illumination in a room which makes directedness towards objects possible but is not itself an object towards which the eye can be directed. He argues that this clearing is correlated with our bodily skills, and thus with the stance we take towards people and things. Each person not only incorporates his culture, but also his sub-culture and the understanding of human beings and of objects which is his family`s variation of the current social practices. Finally, each person has his or her own embodied understanding of what counts as real, which is, of course, not private but is a variation on the shared public world.»

— Hubert Dreyfus. Alternative Philosophical Conceptualizations Of Psychopathology

«Wittgenstein’s methods are for loosening the grip of misleading pictures and analogies, which hold our thinking in a cramp and stand in the way of our recognising the extraordinariness of the ordinary. The particular pictures that we fix on are rooted in our human way of life and culture, and therefore connected to our desires, fears and aspirations. They may be the expression of a wish to control the seemingly arbitrary world, especially if our childhood experiences were chaotic and unjust. […]

When we seek knowledge and explanations of mental conflict, we are caught in a confusion whose character is not transparent to us. We are driven by a wish to find an explanation for the conflict, as if that will enable us to cure it. But this search for an answer is also the driving force in the conflict; we need to be liberated from the persistent inclination to seek answers to all questions.»

— John Heaton. The Talking Cure: Wittgenstein's Therapeutic Method for Psychotherapy

не такая смешная, как две предыдущие в этом списке, но тоже хорошая книга. По крайней мере обложка

Оказалось, автор фразы “Every time I find the meaning of life, they change it” —Reinhold Niebuhr. Ему же приписывается знаменитое “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

«It is not lack of intelligence but the presence of pride that gets in the way of genuine understanding in much philosophy and therapy. For pride involves lying to oneself because we may want to be something we are not, or conversely, not want to be something we are.»

— John Heaton. The Talking Cure: Wittgenstein's Therapeutic Method for Psychotherapy

«As has been said, confusions between concepts and objects are endemic in psychoanalysis and in neurosis. One confusion it leads to is the nature of the inner and outer world. The distinction between them is endemic to psychological theorising. Psychologists tend to take opposing camps. Psychoanalysts and their offshoots emphasise the inner world – the unconscious. Behaviourists and many cognitive therapists emphasise the outer world. To Wittgenstein: ‘The world and life are one’ (TLP ¶5.621) and much of his work was to show this. The problem is a very old one. Thus Heraclitus in about 500 BC wrote: ‘Although the account (logos) is shared, most men live as though their thinking were a private possession’. (Heraclitus 1979, Fragment 3)

[…]

Confusions between concepts and objects can be further illustrated in confusions about thought. One is the widespread belief that we think with our heads. If people in Western society are asked where they think they often point to their heads. Now teachers sometimes say ‘Use your head’ which roughly means attend more closely, and we all know that we must have a brain to think. But is thinking a process in the head? Or is this belief a symptom of dissociated thinking in which we imag- ine that thoughts are ghostly entities in the head, in the inner world, dissociated from language use?

‘One of the most dangerous of ideas for a philosopher is, oddly enough, that we think with our heads or in our heads.

The idea of thinking as a process in the head, in a completely enclosed space, gives him something occult.’

[…]

Thinking does not take place anywhere inside the mind or brain although it is a necessary condition of thought that we have human brains. It is people who think and report or express thoughts. The thinker will be somewhere when he thinks, in his bath perhaps, and that is where he thought. Of course to report a thought requires very complicated processes occurring in the brain but these are not the same as the report of a thought. […]

Thinking is a very varied concept. It is interchangeable with belief, imagine, mean and calculate. It is not a definite mental process that occurs privately in our mind. We can ‘have a thought’, a thought can occur to us, it can cross our mind, we can confess one, we can keep it to ourselves, tell someone what we think, express one, be tortured by them, have our head full of them, be thoughtful and so on. It is totally misleading to impose unity on this diversity; it leads to elevating one aspect of thinking to a defining principle of all thought. Instead of forcing it into the Procrustean bed of theory, it requires careful attention to the use of language in the particular situations in which the concept is used. […]

Thinking is not an activity of the mind, as speaking is of the mouth. When we talk about the activity of the mind all we are doing is using a mental image and probably forgetting that the mind is not an entity and thinking is not a process.»

— John Heaton. The Talking Cure: Wittgenstein's Therapeutic Method for Psychotherapy

«…a student was asked to see someone who was paranoid. The patient had received a lot of treatment and felt that therapists were trying to steal her mind. For some weeks she would come into the room and just search it, as she thought it was bugged; in psychoanalytic terms she was projecting her suspicions into the room. Instead of interpreting this, after a bit the student joined in and searched too. Soon the patient began to see the ludicrousness of the situation and they both began to laugh. There was a change of aspect and so a meeting between them became possible.»

— John Heaton. The Talking Cure: Wittgenstein's Therapeutic Method for Psychotherapy