Living Systems, Evolving Consciousness, and the Emerging Person: A Selection of Papers from the Life Work of Louis Sander

ISBN-13: 9780881634648 / Angielski / Twarda / 2007 / 294 str.

Louis Sander

Opis

This collection of previously published papers can be viewed as a story of the gradual emergence of an overarching idea through the course of a life's work. The idea is one that describes an essential principle of process for living systems - that there is a continuing impetus, both energizing and motivational, that moves the system toward enhanced coherence in its engagement with its surround as it achieves increasing inclusiveness of complexity. The papers have been selected from a career of developmental research within the framework of psychoanalytic thinking. One might say they represent an outcome of a search for basic principles governing life as an ongoing creative process. As principles they should be found to be operative at each and every level of complexity in living systems - from that of the single-cell organism to the organization of human consciousness. while he or she goes through the papers. The sequence of papers is an example of the emerging complexity in Sander's thinking over many decades. It was a thinking that began with his struggle to integrate in some real way a simple rural childhood, that had generated a deep devotion to, and fascination with, the wonders of nature that he had grown up within - with the deeper actualities of the structure and function of the anatomy, biochemistry, and physiology of the human body, brain, and mind that he encountered at the clinical level. As time went on, he became aware that an ever-present background to this ongoing task was the emergence of his own integrative core - his self. The underlying impetus to pursue this open-ended, bumpy trajectory was the dim but endless question: but, who am I, who do I want to be, and, what difference does it make?

Spis treści

Part I: Issues in Early Mother-Child Interaction. Adaptive Relationships in Early Mother-Child Interaction. The Longitudinal Course of Early Mother-Child Interaction: Cross-case Comparison in a Sample of Mother-Child Pairs. Infant and Caretaking Environment: Investigation and Conceptualization of Adaptive Behavior in a System of Increasing Complexity. Part II: Investigation of the Infant and its Caregiving Environment as a Biological System. Investigation of Interactive Regulation in Three Infant-caretaking Systems. The Event-structure of Regulation in the Neonate-caregiver System as a Biological Background for Early Organization of Psychic Structure. Paradox and Resolution: From the Beginning. Recognition Process: Context and Experience of Being Known. Part III: Reflections on Developmental Process: Wholeness, Specificity, and the Organization of Conscious Experiencing. Awareness of Inner Experience: A System Perspective on Self-Regulatory Process in Early Development. Thinking Differently: Principles of Process in Living Systems and the Specificity of Being Known. Development as a Creative Process.

O autorze

Louis Sander, M.D., received his medical degree at the University of California Medical School, followed by three years in the USAAF Medical Corp (1943-46), then advancing from resident in psychiatry to Professor of Psychiatry and psychoanalyst and Boston University School of Medicine (1947-68), completing his professional career as Senior Scholar and Professor of Psychiatry at University of Colorado Medical School (1979-87). His early developmental research contributions stemmed from data collected in the 25 year Boston Longitudinal Study in Early Development.