Rackley 1
Rachael Rackley
10/23/12
Concept Diary Entry Week 8
Concept: Meaning
Quotes:
Freud—“for even if we conclude that every dream has a meaning and psychic value, we must
nevertheless allow for the possibility that this meaning may not be the same in every dream.”
Jung— “Man uses the spoken or written word to express the meaning of what he wants to
convey. His language is full of symbols, but he also often employs signs or images that are not
strictly descriptive… Although these are meaningless in themselves, they have acquired a
recognizable meaning through common usage or deliberate intent.”
Haidt—“ Rationalist approaches in moral psychology, by extension, say that moral knowledge
and moral judgment are reached primarily by a process of reasoning and reflection.”
Analysis:
Meaning is a concept that is especially intriguing when placed in the context of conflict analysis.
The way that an individual creates meaning out of something, whether it be an event, a
relationship with someone else, a material item, a comment, etc is uniquely how they perceive
the situation. I believe that the above quotes fit the idea of meaning creation per each individual
perfectly. How one can create meaning in conflict is quite intriguing. In conflict this becomes
process of understanding a situation or relationship viewed through a lens or blinders if you will,
where the person in conflict does not, and cannot understand and process this situation in a
different light, thus giving the situation a skewed meaning and different perspective than
someone outside of the conflict might have. In conflict analysis, and especially conflict
resolution, this insight or epiphany moment is crucial in bringing someone who is engulfed in the
conflict lens to understand meaning from a different perspective.
Rackley 2
Concept: Symbols
Quotes:
Jung— “Thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious
and immediate meaning. It has a wider “unconscious” aspect that is never precisely defined or
fully explained.”
“…we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully
comprehend.”
Freud— “The dream-thoughts we can understand without further trouble the moment we have
ascertained them. The dream-content is, as it were, presented in hieroglyphics, whose symbols
must be translated, one by one, into the language of the dream-thoughts. It would of course, be
incorrect to attempt to read these symbols in accordance with their values as pictures, instead of
in accordance with their meaning as symbols.”
Analysis:
I love how Jung defines this concept: “Man, we realize if we reflect for a moment, never
perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely.” This concept ties perfectly into
the above concept on meaning. We can create meaning using visual representations, such as
symbols. In the Northern Ireland conflict, the use of symbols became a visual representation of
the divisions in society, the ongoing conflict and distrust. But symbols can give us just one side
of the perspective. We cannot comprehend the other side of conflict, or the other party through
the use of symbols. Freud’s point about understanding a dream and translating dreams through
their meaning as a symbol depicts the need to understand the meaning behind such symbols and
why they are being used.
Rackley 3
Concept: Identity
Quotes:
Jung— “We too can become dissociated and lose our identity. We can be possessed and altered
by moods, or become unreasonable and unable to recall important facts about ourselves or
others…We may think we have ourselves under control; yet a friend can easily tell us things
about ourselves of which we have no knowledge.”
Freud—“ For the purposes of dream-condensation I may construct a composite person in yet
another fashion, by combining the actual features of two or more persons in a single dreamimage.”
Analysis:
Conflict situations can develop a sense of losing oneself, or enacting on some form of an alterego. This dissociation as Jung puts it, can cause us to lose our identity. We may embrace too
much of the ‘other person’ within us and therefore lose track of ourselves. I like Jung’s statement
about a friend being able to tell us when we get into this state and being able to bring us back out
of that. Unfortunately in conflict, this moment of realization is hard to come by when everyone
has thus become out of control and entrenched in warfare.
(Note: I did not use Haidt, Volkan or Adorno on the above diary entries because they did not fit
with the concepts I was developing.)
Rackley 4
Concept: Collective Reasoning
Quotes:
Haidt— “If reasoning is a slow and effortful process that demands attentional resources, while
intuition is fast, effortless, and undemanding (see Table 1), then manipulations that interfere with
reasoning during a moral judgment interview should affect the quality of the post-hoc reasoning
produced, without affecting the quality of the initial judgment. Rationalist models, in contrast,
predict that the quality and speed of a judgment should be heavily dependent on one’s reasoning
ability.”
Adorno— “Freud does not challenge the accuracy of Le Bon's well-known characterizations of
masses as being largely de-individualized, irrational, easily influenced, prone to violent action
and altogether of a regressive nature… Since it would be impossible for Fascism to win the
masses through rational arguments, its propaganda must necessarily be deflected from discursive
thinking; it must be oriented psychologically, and has to mobilize irrational, unconscious,
regressive processes.”
Volkan— “While we recognize that the individual is prone to irrational acts, to having his or her
reason clouded by emotion, we tend to believe that larger social and political units are far more
immune to this natural human tendency. Yet when we consider the interaction of people
organized into collective entities, both recently and throughout history, the idea that these bodies
are less susceptible to the same psychological frailties of the individuals they comprise comes
into question. In the violent and brutal devastation of the former Yugoslavia, the vicious
intertribal warfare in Rwanda, and countless other acts carried out between nations or ethnic
groups, the lines between the rational and irrational, the behavior of the individual and of the
group, seem to overlap.”
Analysis:
Haidt’s piece seeks to describe that previous arguments stating that moral judgment is done
through moral reasoning, are false in a number of ways; mainly, that moral reasoning is done as
an afterthought when the judgment has already been made. This concept is evident in the idea of
a mass revolution, or of collective masses uniting for common goals, etc. All three quotes from
the authors above state that when masses develop, they do not do so out of discursive thinking or
rationalism or reason. Instead, what motivates people to join the collective masses is irrational,
unconscious, effortless and intuitive ideas. I agree with these statements that reasoning is
therefore an afterthought and not developed beforehand, such as the examples in Volkan’s piece
of Rwanda and Yugoslavia.