Attitudes to death and dying
Catherine Proot, Michael Yorke in Challenges and Choices for Patient, Carer and Professional at the End of Life, 2021
Although set within inevitability and universality in creation, death is unique to each person or creature involved. Within the uniqueness and universality of death and dying, there is a great unknown, and this occurs equally among those who look to no future beyond death and among those who have a faith that death is not a permanent ending but a door to something new or different. Even with people who have been distressed during their final illness, it is important to recognise that we have little idea what is going on inside their hearts and heads when they are close to death, even when seemingly unconscious. We might imagine that they are just asleep, but there may be a lot more happening than we realise. It is well known that people who appear to be unconscious seem able to retain the capacity of hearing, even when they cannot respond (Giacino & White, 2005; McCullagh, 2004).
Alcohol
David J. George in Poisons, 2017
Death from ethanol overdose can occur through several physiological mechanisms. When the concentration of ethanol in the brain becomes high enough to depress the brain areas responsible for the control of consciousness and respiration, the drinker lapses into a coma, stops breathing, and dies within minutes. Although tolerance to ethanol can significantly increase the threshold for some toxic effects, the threshold for lethality does not increase in proportion. Vomiting while unconscious can be fatal. While in a deep sleep from the depressant effects of ethanol, an individual may asphyxiate on vomitus. Aspiration of vomited material into the lungs is a serious medical problem, and blocked respiratory passages account for many ethanol overdose deaths.
The Principle of Avoiding Killing
Robert M. Veatch, Laura K. Guidry-Grimes in The Basics of Bioethics, 2019
In Chapter 7 we looked at three ethical principles that are elements of the notion of respect for persons. A fourth element has generated a great deal of controversy in recent bioethics. Many religious and philosophical commentators as well as healthcare professionals have held that human beings have a moral status that requires that life, especially innocent life, not be taken by human hands. The idea is sometimes expressed that life is sacred, that it is to be preserved (even preserved at all costs), or that one must refrain from killing. All bioethics recognizes that, at least in certain cases, it is morally wrong to kill. Some commentators explain this by relying on the principle of nonmaleficence—that causing harm is a morally wrong-making characteristic of actions. Since killing often would often cause harm, the wrongness of killing in the usual case can be explained by the principle of nonmaleficence. In certain special cases, however, many people would recognize that killing someone might not cause harm. The dying person who is suffering and urgently requests to be put out of his or her misery is an example. Killing the permanently unconscious person is another case in which some would say that it does not cause harm to kill. Some, reflecting on these kinds of cases, nevertheless believe it is morally wrong to kill such people. If so, this cannot be explained by nonmaleficence. Some claim that an element of the broad concept of respect for persons is that it is simply wrong to kill them. In this chapter we discuss this notion as the principle of avoiding killing and examine the differences among the various formulations.
Harm in Hypnosis: Three Understandings From Psychoanalysis That Can Help
Published in American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 2018
Mary J. Peebles
UN-consciousness takes us beyond “consciousness,” even deeper into complexity and unknown. The German philosopher, Friedrich Schelling, is attributed with creating the term “unconscious” (although millennia of secular and religious philosophers have written about an internal space that is seemingly nonmaterial and has a qualitatively unique way of “knowing”).12Earlier discussion of unconscious did not use that term, but spoke, within philosophical, religious, or artistic frames, about a nonmaterial human dimension that lay outside conscious awareness and yet held important information and aspects essential for personal expansion. Such discussions were as early as Plato (5th century BC), through St. Augustine (4th century AD) and even Montaigne (1572/1958). Freud pioneered the development of a clinical methodology for studying how information is processed in the unconscious mental realm. He convincingly demonstrated that the unconscious has its own method of mentation and can direct behavior outside of one’s awareness (Freud, 1900, 1915, 1923, 1939). Westen (1999), among others, has delineated the scientific credibility of Freud’s clinical discoveries (Luborsky & Barrett, 2006; Shevrin, Bond, Brakel, Hertel, & Williams, 1996).
Conscious intelligence is overrated: The normative unconscious and hypnosis
Published in American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 2022
Joel Weinberger, Mathew Brigante, Kevin Nissen
From the beginning, theorists and practitioners of hypnosis have recognized that there is great variability in people’s susceptibility to hypnotic induction (Barnier, Cox, & McConkey, 2014). If hypnosis is a normative unconscious phenomenon, the variables that underlie these individual differences need to be identified. What unconscious processes are involved? Barnier et al. (2014) as well as Cardeña (2014) report that the only personality variable that seems to be reliably related to hypnosis is absorption, usually assessed by the Tellegen Absorption Scale or TAS (Tellegen, 1982). (Also see Kihlstrom, 2014.) But Lynn et al. (2019) argue that the relationship between absorption and hypnosis is not that strong when measured through self-report. Instead, they implicate suggestibility in line with their response set model and report data that supports that view. They found a high correlation between expectancy and performance on a standard hypnotizability measure (the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility – HGSHS – Shor & Orne, 1962).
The Other-Than-Human and the “User Unconscious”
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2018
Patricia Ticineto Clough
In profoundly changing what has been the liberal arrangement separating state and economy, the private and public spheres, digital media are also transforming the individual’s psychology and sociality. Not only has digital media affected the operation of desire as Hartman has explored as a matter of endlessly seeking an object rather than (re)finding one, “allowing one to prioritize possibility and presence over limit and loss” (Hartman, 2017, p. 167) but in reshaping the private and public spheres, digital networks also may have made it necessary to rethink the unconscious in terms of the datafication of everyday life or the reformulation of subjectivity in recognition of the embedding of consciousness and bodily based perception in the nonphenomenological temporality that supersedes them. What of this subjectivity? What of its unconscious?
Related Knowledge Centers
- Consciousness
- Implicit Memory
- Introspection
- Psychoanalysis
- Repression
- Wakefulness
- Subliminal Stimuli
- Dream
- Freudian Slip
- Trance