This paper studies the philosophical conflict between illusion and truth in Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, one of the most significant works of Spanish Golden Age theatre. Written during the Baroque period, the play presents a complex exploration of reality, perception, and human existence through the experiences of the protagonist, Segismundo. Imprisoned from birth because of a...
Anxiety disorders frequently emerge in contexts of chronic interpersonal stress and are often accompanied by disturbances in affect regulation and heightened sensitivity to bodily signals. In patients with chronic somatic conditions, these processes are commonly conceptualised within psychosomatic frameworks emphasising interactions between emotional regulation and stress-related bodily...
This paper asks: if large language models (LLMs) gave rise to phenomenal consciousness, what would it be like? I argue that if LLMs gave rise to phenomenal consciousness, it would be like being an impartial, improvising playwright rather than a character or a (roleplaying) actor or an author writing a first-personal narrative. My argument has three steps. I first argue that if LLMs give rise to...
I treat Proust’s Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu as a fictional case history centered around dynamic tension between dissociation, memory, and creativity. I argue that three pivotal breakthroughs of long dissociated memories and feelings in Proust’s novel result from thawing within a dyadically-determined dissociative process, not simply the chance triggering of involuntary memories as the...
The Freudian concept of the unconscious is generally presented in terms of a region of the mind that is inaccessible to consciousness. Against this background, classical phenomenologists insisted that, be it latent dream-thoughts or repressed wishes, the mind can disguise the inappropriate content and repress the unwanted only if it somehow “knows” what it thereby represses and disguises. What...
Formal thought disorder (FTD), a hallmark of schizophrenia spectrum disorders, manifests as incoherent speech and poses challenges for clinical assessment. Traditional clinical rating scales, though validated, are resource-intensive and lack scalability. Automated speech recognition (ASR) allows for objective quantification of linguistic and temporal features of speech, offering scalable...
Indigenous cosmologies challenge Western anthropocentrism by extending the concept of personhood to non-humans, such as spirits and other elements of nature. This study examines how Indigenous religions view these non-human entities, interact with them, contribute to conservation efforts, and negotiate legal frameworks. In accordance with the PRISMA protocol, a thematic analysis was performed...
Sleep plays an important role in affective processing and affect regulation during wakefulness. Dreaming-the subjective experiences occurring during sleep-has been suggested to reflect, or even contribute to, waking affect regulation. However, the role of dream affect in waking affect regulation has rarely been studied directly. Here, we investigated how dream affect relates to waking affect...
Abstract Background and aims In contemporary psychedelic science, integration is a central construct for describing how individuals process psychedelic experiences and translate insights into their lives (Bathje et al., 2022; Smith et al. 2024). Yet this term emerges from Western therapeutic paradigms and may not resonate with Indigenous peoples who have stewarded what has been called...