Emotional intelligence, a concept coined by Goleman,1 is the ability to dis-cern, utilize, and shape the emotional reactions of self and others. Emotions represent an area rich in tradition and span fields of study, as well as culture and time. This is the latest book in the series, Innovations in Psychology. Professor Kathleen Gilbert, through this book, introduces the field to an important new area, emotion-focused research. Emotions include, but are not limited to, stress and flow or lack of it (the manifestation of emotions), feelings (that represent and cause the emotion stress), and emotional controls (our efforts to modulate our emotional effects). Emotions account for an extraordinary amount of the human expe-rience. It is remarkable how little we know about this phenomenon. It is about time that we address the emotional nature of research. “How do we manage the emotions stimulated by researchers? What does it mean if the researcher is profoundly affected by the experience, even to the extent of going through a spiritual epiphany?”Dr. Gilbert, a professor at Indiana University for many years, addresses these and other related questions in a book for researchers and practitioners who wish to apply qualitative (as opposed to simply quantitative/data analysis-driven) research methods to human research. The tradition of this book series represents substantial and trendsetting innovations in psychology, has set new agendas for burnout in families, 2and has opened new areas of clinical innovation by introducing energy psychol-ogy, 3 traumatology, 4,5 and poetry therapy. 6 In a period of substantial scholarly activity in the social and medical sciences, giving voice to research participants is suddenly more acceptable beyond anthropology and those practitioners of qualitative research meth-ods. This trend is part of a larger cultural trend, even a global trend. In part this is due to the impersonal aspects of the internet, the growing concentration of people in the cities, and other demographic explanations. However, some suggest that psychology has lost its heart and soul. Gone are the influences of social psychology that led to major breakthroughs in......
How, and what, can we know?
Transpersonal psychology is a branch of psychology that recognizes and accepts spirituality as an important dimension of the human psyche and of the universal scheme of things. It also studies and honors the entire spectrum of human experience, including various levels and realms of the psyche that become manifest in non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSC). Here belong, for example, experiences and observations from meditation and other forms of systematic spiritual practice, spontaneous mystical raptures, psychospiritual crises (‘spiritual emergencies’), psychedelic therapy, hypnosis, experiential psychotherapy, and near-death situations (NDE). (Boorstein, 1996, p. 44).
Among all the sciences, psychology is perhaps the most mysterious to the general public, and the most prone to misconceptions. Even though its language and ideas have infiltrated everyday culture, most people have only a hazy idea of what the subject is about, and what psychologists actually do. For some, psychology conjures up images of people in white coats, either staffing an institution for mental disorders or conducting laboratory experiments on rats. Others may imagine a man with a middle-European accent psychoanalyzing a patient on a couch or, if film scripts are to be believed, plotting to exercise some form of mind control.
Dreaming might seem like a strange place to start up the conversation between Jung and Luce Irigaray. Yet it brings together Hegelian Dialectic, the unconscious and the body. Once we encounter the body, we need to imagine what kind of body we are engaging with; and since bodies are not neutral with respect to their material properties, their social locations and how they are valued, then we are on the road to exploring just what is entailed in the dreaming process. In the ®rst instance my discussion explores Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious by examining his notion of dreaming. I argue that Jung understands dreaming as both a collective affect and as a personal or individual response to one's lived-in world which is structured by and structures, in part, the collective uncon-scious: the relation implied here is dialectical. The focus on the collective unconscious draws attention to the role the body plays as a limit of both consciousness and the unconscious. I then propose that the body question provides a link to Luce Irigaray's work because her conception of the body is never simply `body' but always `sexed' body. The argument I advance about dreaming and the unconscious constitutes a signi®cant intervention in our considerations regarding our embedded-ness in the world, as both conscious and unconscious selves. It raises some salient questions about the mode of embeddedness, viz. as bodies that are lived-in bodies and the kind of effect that has on us. Carl Jung's insight regarding the restricting role the body plays in the production of con-sciousness out of unconsciousness, and the ubiquitous presence of uncon-sciousness, requires careful deliberation, however, because, as we all know, our bodies are sites of differences as well as similarity. His theory misses out on an important feature: it speaks in generalities; it is not speci®c to sex/ gender, race, age or class.
