The Book
The book "The Emotional Component - mental functioning
and illusion at the light of the economic transformations
in Brazil since 1985" is the full version of the
dissertation presented by the author at the Department of
Social Psychology of Work, Psychology Institute of the Universidade
de São Paulo - USP, in 1999.
So far only the Portuguese version is available through Editora
Papel Virtual, from Rio de Janeiro, and it was published in
2000. This is a virtual publishing house, but it is possible
to purchase the book either as a regular printed edition,
or in the eletronic form, by download. Both can be ordered
at their website - www.papelvirtual.com.br
- it is necessary to find it with the help of their search
mechanism writing the main title in Portuguese - o componente
emocional - and then follow the instructions - that are
also in Portuguese, and will direct the buyer to provide the
usual credit card information and also ask for the address
- they deliver the book in its printed version, or allow for
download if this is the choice. In the latter, the cover will
not be offered - but it can be seen at their site. One word
about the cover - it is the image of a fractal, made by Fernando
Bresslau, who is also the webdesigner of this page. For those
who are not familiar with 'fractals', it may be worth to visit
his page, where a gallery of these intriguing images may be
found - www.fractal.art.br
.
After the technical-administrative explanations, let's return
to the book itself - since there is no English translation
yet, here goes a little summary of each chapter for those
who may feel curious to get an idea of what it is about.
Summary
In a nutshell I could say it is about the psychological factors
that are present in our economic life - this is why the back
cover says: 'Money is not only money...' - meaning
that the way we handle our money, as well as the professional
life, business, career, work in general, seems to be strongly
influenced by the way we use our mind. I use the word 'mind'
as including not only the intellectual aspects, but also -
and perhaps most importantly - the emotional ones too. In
fact, as emotions come first - they are 'older' in our evolution,
and tend to manifest faster too - they may be responsible
for the rest of the whole thinking processes.
It was essentially this topic that I decided to study, and
it became first the dissertation, and now the book. It might
be included in the field of Economic Psychology - an area
that has its own place in this site - click on Economic
Psychology on the top or at the bottom to read more about
it. This line of research deals with the issues that can be
found at the intersection between economic phenomena and the
way we face and go through them. In my study I have chosen
the instruments offered by psychoanalytic theory, along with
clinical observation and experience, in order to examine how
economic inflation, and later on, the stabilization of the
currency, have been perceived by people considering the angle
of the mental functioning.
The Introduction locates the study in a social and
epystemological background, thus describing the Brazilian
history of economic turbulence, some of the meanings money
may hold, and therefore the need to analyse these issues from
different points of view as well since they display such central
importance in our lives. Here Psychoanalysis is called to
offer a special contribution, considering the moment we go
through now of greater opening for different sources of knowledge.
The 1st chapter, named "The Psychoanalytical Model",
describes the main ideas from Psychoanalysis that were used
to help the investigation of the economic processes. In special,
I have worked with the ideas involving the two principles
of mental functioning, stated by Freud, namely pleasure and
reality. This seems to find a complementation in the theory
of the two positions - schizoid-paranoid and depressive -
developed by Klein, and the further evolution such ideas found
with Bion when he investigated the thinking processes, and
what may happen when this does not develop adequately, and
instead of thinking there is illusion or hallucination. All
this also considering the main frame offered by the theory
of the two basic impulses, life and death, the different levels
of reality, the mechanisms of projection and introjection,
and the basis of it all, that is the extremely close relationship
between emotion and thought.
The 2nd chapter, "Psychic Reality and External Reality",
attempts to take a more thorough look at the important connection
between what is inside us, and the way we tend to see the
world, receive impressions from it and act upon it. To put
it in a more artistic way, we can remember a phrase attributed
to Picasso, and quoted by a psychoanalyst: ''La naturaleza
no la veo como ella es; ella es como la veo'' (''I
don't see nature as it is; it is the way I see it'').
Also on the 2nd chapter, there is a subsection, "A
brief dialogue with Neuroscience'', that presents a series
of ideas from a book written by the Portuguese-American neurologist
Antonio Damásio, called "Descartes' Error -
emotion, reason and the human brain", convergent
with several concepts developed by Psychoanalysis. Damásio
also researches the link between emotion and thought.
The 3rd chapter, "The analyst-researcher'', raises
a number of features displayed by the psychoanalyst in his
quest for training in his area that might be quite useful
to investigate other fields as well - in special his daily
experience of contacting the emotional world, with all the
consequences this brings about, and how this could help whenever
human and social elements are present.
There is also a subsection on this chapter, ''The Method'',
where the methodology and the instruments used to investigate
these issues are discussed at some length, always within the
realm of psychoanalytic epystemology, and the so-called new
paradigms of knowledge.
The 4th chapter is ''Hypothesis: the formulation'',
and it summarizes in a synthetic, and perhaps sharper form
too, the ideas that had been dealt with: an exposition of
the picture of what we understand to be the mind; a special
stress over all the difficulties involved in getting in touch
with reality, that in our case we are selceting around the
phenomenon of inflation and all its illusory aspects; how
this illusory panorama may be tempting in terms of discarding
the possibility of thinking as an alternative to try to work
through these challenges, along with the consequences it may
impose over the mental functioning, management of money, business
or career, and even the country as a whole, although such
wide scope has not been covered by the present study.
The 5th chapter is a ''Case Study'' taken from a consultancy
I have been doing over the past years ("How can you
make the best of a bad job?" - see link),
that focuses the experience of a small businesswoman who had
opened her own business in 86, during the Cruzado Plan , had
it all through the inflationary period and different government
plans that attempted - but could not - reduce it, and in 97,
after Real Plan , was coming to the decision to close it down.
I tried to examine the mental operations involved in the whole
process - and there are always mental operations present whenever
we take actions, as there is no way to eliminate our mind,
or parts of it, when we are at any given situation - and then
questioned what had been the factors responsible for this
economic and administrative outcome. Were they just the external
conditions of the country? Or could we also consider that
functions of the personality might make the managing of the
money and business easier or more difficult depending on the
kind they are?
''Final Considerations'' close the study with some
reflections brought about by the whole investigation, that
points to the need to widen this kind of exchange of ideas
with different areas that also research these topics, which
could bring greater development to all, and also the need
to keep on studying this area that is so important to all
of us - how we think, how we operate, and how we could come
closer to emotional conditions more favourable to the upcome
of alternatives and solutions to our economic and social problems,
as well as those involving more specifically the world of
work.
The book has also the traditional references, in the usual
academic style, taking authors who have previously investigated
the topic. In order to make this consultation easier, I have
selected the quotations by author and organized them in the
section of the site called 'authors and quotations'
(see link) - some of them are in
English, though not all - yet, I hope!
Now the keywords for the book:
KEYWORDS: analyst-researcher; consultancy;
crises; death impulse; depressive position; economic psychology;
emotion; epystemology; group; hallucination; illusion; inflation;
introjection; life impulse; mental fucntioning; methodology;
money; neuroscience; organizational psychology; paradigm;
philosophy of science; pleasure principle; post-modernity;
projection; psychic reality; psychoanalysis; Real Plan; reality
principle; schizoid-paranoid position; social psychology;
stabilization of the currency; thinking; tolerance to frustration;
turbulence.
|
