Frances Clayton

I too have lots of questions about repression! It does not seem so shocking that some memory can be buried way down below and emerge later on, but it is shocking when it comes to the kind of traumatic situations some people repress. Defense mechanisms are a powerful thing. (This is all assuming that you are not one of the decenters of belief in repressed memories.) It seems to me clear (and I think it is stated in this weeks readings althought I can’t put my finger on it) that Freudian unconscious is different from the unconscious we speak of here, yet there must be some simple overlap. Is it – oversimplified – that things in Freudian unconscious are less capable of being retrieved whereas unconscious in the readings for this week means two different things: first, it is talking about the state of alertness and secondly that they are not presently in working memory but that does not mean that they are buried in the Freudian sense?
I also understand that behavior can be caused by those things that a person is not conscious of (Tsuchiya and Adolphs, 165). Not only can the things we are not conscious of result in behaviors and “feelings”, we can also attribute feelings to what is currently in consciousness even when it is not the correct root of the feeling. This leaves lots and lots up in the air! Can we ever really know what is causing our feelings?
Another topic that came up a good bit for me is the awareness of or sense of self. I am not sure I totally understand what is meant by a sense of self. The Tsuchiya article cleared it up for a moment, saying that it was not a concept of ones own body but had more to do with awareness of that one is perceiving through ones own eye’s for example. However it then goes on to say to talk about the psychological idea of core self and how it is the basis for the autobiographical self and a sense of continuity. What does this say about people who deal with sensory integration issues? In regards to emotion is it that they loose a sense of self in sensory overload (for example) that they loose a sense of the continutity of emotional self as well?
In this same sense, we saw some brain images of a woman with dissociative identity disorder in one of my classes today. The brain scans were actually different for the different personalities. Is this to say that the same biological person, because they have different autobiographical selves, they also have differing emotional selves?

I found the Emotion and Consciousness article very straight forward in defining the different parts of emotion and consciousness.

I will also have to say that the Southern use of the word “state” ran through my head throughout these readings: “She was really in a state.” “Now don’t get yourself in a state.” ☺