This article presents a neuropsychoanalytically informed framework conceptualizing human thinking along an affect-to-symbol continuum. Seven modes of thought-concrete, alexithymic, magical, paranoid, delusional, symbolic, and reflective-are positioned to illustrate how affective experience is progressively transformed into symbolic and reflective meaning. The framework integrates psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and neuroscientific perspectives, emphasizing that symbolic capacity arises not only as a cognitive achievement but also as an affect-regulatory process. Clinical and everyday thinking are reframed as variations in affect-symbol integration, with metaphorical references to archetypal drives (e.g., sloth, gluttony, greed, wrath, pride, lust) highlighting culturally intelligible dimensions of motivation and affect regulation. The model provides a heuristic tool for bridging psychodynamic theory, cognitive neuroscience, and phenomenological insights and invites further empirical and theoretical exploration of the processes through which affect becomes symbolically mediated.
Attempts to define psychotherapeutic competence have prevalently relied on a positive epistemology. This epistemology seeks to define competence by affirming the manifold properties of competent therapists. However, this approach has led to tautological definitions of competence and to endless lists of competences, none of which can be said to be specific to psychotherapists. This article proposes an alternative approach inspired by the via negativa in philosophy. After an excursus on the via negativa as a method to define concepts by abstraction, privation, and negation, we show how such a negative epistemology might be applied to psychotherapy. Instead of cataloging what competent therapists do, this approach focuses on where nontherapists fall short. Revisiting the empirical findings of the Vanderbilt I study (Strupp & Hadley, 1979), we suggest that the essence of psychotherapeutic competence may not lie in the possession of any particular set of skills, but in the sustained capacity and willingness to renew one's engagement with the therapeutic process in the face of intrinsic difficulties that the therapist chooses to make their own. We name this foundational competence the "competence zero" of professional psychotherapy.
The STRIVE-4 model, aimed at the integration of philosophical and psychological conceptualization and research on virtue, has recently been proposed. Although the model incorporates a great deal of Aristotelian virtue theory, the model itself does not explicitly adopt Aristotelian metaphysical underpinnings. In this article, we argue that a psychological theory of virtue cannot avoid making such deep philosophical commitments. We review the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical approach (as the most related to the STRIVE-4 model) and compare it to a materialist, and particularly computationalist, approach (as the most common in current psychology and neuroscience). We conclude that the Aristotelian-Thomistic approach provides a better underpinning for STRIVE-4 and encourage psychologists to more deeply investigate this approach.
This article examines the complex interplay between law, violence, fear, and decision making by integrating classical political philosophy with modern psychological research. Drawing on the works of Niccol & ograve; Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Baruch Spinoza, it explores how power is legitimized and maintained through both coercion and consent. The article analyzes the dual role of law as a protective force and a mechanism of control, emphasizing how fear operates as a psychological and political tool in shaping obedience and authority. While Machiavelli frames fear as a strategic instrument of rule, Hobbes sees it as the rational basis for surrendering individual liberty to a sovereign. Spinoza, in contrast, proposes a vision of collective empowerment rooted in rational cooperation. By bringing these perspectives into dialogue with psychological models of aggression, threat perception, and moral decision making, the article offers a novel interdisciplinary account of how laws, emotions, and cognitive processes intersect in the dynamics of political power. This synthesis contributes to ongoing debates on governance, justice, and the conditions under which individuals uphold or resist authority.
People from Western and East Asian cultures exhibit systematic differences in perception, attention, and cognition. Why do people from these cultures think differently? According to an influential proposal, psychological differences between Westerners and East Asians reflect, and may derive from, differences between ancient Greek and ancient Chinese philosophies. Here, we question this proposal and suggest a different relationship between ancient philosophies and modern psychologies. We argue that the way ancient Greek and Chinese philosophies are represented in the cultural psychology literature is skewed, highlighting differences between ancient Greek and Chinese beliefs and obscuring similarities. We review these ancient traditions and conclude that ancient Greek and Chinese philosophies do not predict the cross-cultural differences found in modern psychologies. Rather than paralleling modern psychologies, ancient East Asian and Greek philosophical traditions embraced ways of thinking that are stereotypically associated with both Eastern and Western mindsets. We propose an explanation for why spurious parallels between ancient philosophies and modern psychologies may have been drawn and how misinterpretations of the ancient traditions may have occurred: Instead of ancient philosophies helping us to understand modern psychologies, modern mindsets act as lenses through which we view the past and which distort contemporary views of ancient philosophies.
In 2025, the American Psychological Association Committee on Accreditation suspended enforcement of key training standards relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Taking this decision as an example, I ask how American psychology understands and teaches ethics. An examination of American Psychological Association policy and research on ethics and training finds little discussion of foundational ethical theory. In its place, I identify a tacit "reciprocity assumption" that takes psychological competence as normative. I then identify three iterations of the resultant notion of "ethico-competence": communitarian, compulsory, and acculturative, each of which attempts grounding for ethics but fails to escape the reciprocity assumption. Because of their reliance on psychological competence, these models force the abdication of autonomy, authorship, and risk and are therefore insufficient to ground an ethics.
This article presents a psychodynamic and developmental understanding of realistic flexibility, a capacity that integrates coping and defense within a unified system of psychological regulation. Coping research has more often organized regulation around appraisals of demands, resources, and strategy selection, whereas psychodynamic theory has more explicitly elaborated the protective modulation of emotional accessibility under affective strain. The present framework views these processes as interdependent aspects of a dynamic system. Realistic flexibility refers to the ability to remain authentic while adapting to reality, maintaining coherence amid tension, loss, and uncertainty. Drawing on contemporary research on emotion-regulation flexibility, authenticity, and psychological maturity, this framework conceptualizes flexibility as a regulatory capacity grounded in relatively enduring forms of psychological organization, including self-cohesion and ego strength. Psychological maturity, from this perspective, is not defined by the absence of pain but by the ability to bear it consciously and to coordinate inner and outer realities without fragmentation or falseness. Further, it represents a living equilibrium that preserves authenticity while continuing to evolve through contradiction, stress, and change.
Common conceptualizations of empathy in mainstream psychology frame the phenomenon as the vicarious experiencing of another person's feelings, perceptions, and thoughts that results from imaging oneself in another's situation and replicating their mental state. Although commonly regarded as foundational for interpersonal relationships, as well as moral and altruistic action, contemporary neuroscientific and evolutionary accounts of empathy routinely employ reductive and mechanical explanatory strategies to account for the phenomenon. As many scholars have shown, however, such approaches ultimately rob human actions of their meaning and moral content because they deny human agency in favor of mechanism and efficient causality. By way of alternative, this article will explore the pioneering work of the German philosopher Edith Stein, whose phenomenological account of empathy, though often overlooked, offers a novel perspective in which empathy is a fundamentally relational and genuinely meaningful and moral event (Stein, 1989). Empathy, according to Stein, is a basic way of knowing in which other embodied, experiencing subjects are given to us. Stein's work, we will argue, offers a deeper understanding of human empathy.
This article offers a structural rereading of Jacques Lacan's 1945 essay "Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty" (Lacan, 1966/2006). It argues that the text already contains, in logical form, the operations of subjectivation later theorized as alienation and separation. Logical time is not treated as a psychological sequence or a proto-game-theoretic puzzle but as a formal model of situations in which action becomes necessary despite the unavailability of epistemic certainty. The three moments-seeing, understanding, and concluding-are shown to articulate a temporality in which the subject must act without justification and only afterward comes to appear as certain. On this basis, the article brings Lacan into dialogue with Wittgenstein's reflections in On Certainty. The comparison is structural rather than exegetical: It compares the roles played by "certainty" in each framework rather than offering a line-by-line interpretation. In different vocabularies, both thinkers show that certainty is not a form of knowledge but a condition that must be assumed or enacted for action and assertion to be possible at all. The article argues, however, that where Wittgenstein's analysis tends toward philosophical quietism, Lacan's account illuminates why the demand for certainty persists. This persistence is understood as desire-not as a desire for recognition or satisfaction but as an orientation toward an impossible ground that nevertheless structures subjective action and responsibility.
Gratitude is a positive emotion that most individuals experience when someone benefits them and which plays a fundamental role in personal relationships. Despite its ubiquity, the study of gratitude has occupied a relatively marginal role in the western tradition. It is true that several philosophers and theologians have devoted insightful reflections to it, and some psychologists have also done it, but few, if any, have made it central to their thought. However, the last two decades have witnessed an increasing attention to the study of the experience of gratitude. The terrain was opened up by the publication of the influential book The Psychology of Gratitude (Emmons & McCullough, 2004). One of its ideas started to circulate widely through a vast corpus of articles in positive psychology, self-help books, and posts on social media-that gratefulness contributes to happiness and to well-being and that this is a strong reason to try to feel grateful, the more often the better. The goal of this article is to examine this new account of gratitude through the views of highly influential motivational coach Tony Robbins to determine whether it complements the traditional western view on gratitude or whether they are rather mutually exclusive. In particular, the article argues that his account of gratitude, insofar as it promotes gratitude as an emotional technology to optimize one's well-being and productivity, shares a neoliberal logic and its corresponding notion of the self, which sets it apart from previous accounts of gratitude, which are other-centered.
Logic-based therapy is uniquely culturally sensitive and can be viewed both as a philosophical counseling approach and as a therapeutic model grounded in standard rational-emotive behavior therapy, while further developing Albert Ellis's ideas. It includes the philosophies embedded in rational-emotive behavior therapy but permits clients to choose these among many other philosophical perspectives consistent with their individual worldviews. In doing so, it guides them toward philosophical virtues that integrate rational thinking, constructive ethics, philosophical and spiritual principles, and values.
This special issue of Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology on logic-based therapy (LBT) focuses on aspects of LBT that distinguish it from other types of cognitive-behavior therapy, notably rational-emotive behavior therapy. As a preliminary to the latter investigations, this introduction provides an overview of the basic concepts, methods, and theoretical orientations of LBT as a form of philosophical counseling and psychotherapy. In particular, it discusses LBT's deductive method (construction of practical syllogisms and identification of types of fallacious speech acts embedded in them), the nature of cognitive emotions, guiding virtues, and philosophical antidotes, and it shows how all the latter elements of LBT are systematically integrated into its six-step method.
Logic-based therapy provides a multimodal structural analysis of cognitive emotions in terms of a logico-linguistic framework that interfaces synergistically with affective, behavioral, and neurological aspects. This framework consists of intentional objects and evaluative speech acts embedded in chains of emotional reasoning, which manifest differently in different cognitive emotions. For instance, the intentional objects and speech acts involved in anxiety are different than in depression and in their subtypes. The latter speech acts consist of various combinations of catastrophizing, awfulizing, damnation, demanding, and disavowing. These speech acts, in turn, give an illocutionary force to their respective emotions. This article provides an analysis of different types of cognitive emotions in terms of the stated framework. It shows how logic-based therapy therapists can symbolize the illocutionary force operators ranging over the premises of clients' emotional reasoning in diverse emotions. It also demonstrates how the latter linguistic operators relate to logical operators such as modal operators of necessity and possibility in the premises of emotional reasoning. In this way, logic-based therapy therapists can gain greater clarity in interpreting the emotional reasoning underlying their clients' emotions.
This article proposes a look at can'tstipation through the lens of a hybrid logic-based therapy-five elements (wuxing) counseling approach. First, it presents the can'tstipation fallacy of logic-based therapy in detail in the context of philosophical consulting. Then, we use the yin-yang theory to map out what canstipation is. Last, we deploy the wuxing ontology that Chinese health care practitioners use to underline the most common 10 causes for both can'tstipation and canstipation.
This article suggests a new way to combine logic-based therapy and attachment theory, with a focus on the phenomenology and clinical structure of the preoccupied attachment style. Using Elliot D. Cohen's theory of logic-based therapy and our phenomenological research on relational insecurity, we say that the epistemic, emotional, and embodied aspects of preoccupied attachment can be positively altered through philosophical argument, emotional virtue development, and embodied reflection. We look at how internal working models act as hidden cosmologies and suggest that logic-based therapy's focus on characterological virtues and rational-emotive templates is a unique philosophical addition to therapies based on attachment theory. The end result is a preliminary therapeutic sketched blueprint that crosses disciplines and tries to turn insecure relational logic and emotions into moral (in the sense of virtue-based) and emotional agency.
Logic-based therapy (LBT) is a psychological modality of significant importance. Developed by Elliot D. Cohen, LBT has its roots in the history of philosophy and in the ethical viewpoint of Aristotle. It draws from and uses Aristotle's practical syllogisms to capture the emotional and behavioral reasoning of its clients. In conjunction with practical syllogisms, LBT employs eleven cardinal fallacies which pinpoints the emotional and behavioral mistakes people make. Although the practical syllogisms are a cornerstone of LBT, instead of using Aristotle categorical statements, LBT uses a more modern approach to logic. This means that LBT takes advantage of the power of truth-functional logic to represent the deductive nature and relationship between a client's beliefs, emotions, and behavior. Along with truth-functional logic, LBT utilizes and incorporates S5D modal logic. It does so to capture more clearly the way a client integrates possible world-thinking into the way they understand the world. Cohen illustrates this type of thinking with two analyses of situational anxiety. The first version focuses primarily on the purely modal aspects of anxiety. The second version not only highlights the modal aspects of anxiety it also adds the notion of illocutionary-force operators. Such illocutionary-force operators clearly indicate the way individuals often exaggerate their problems at the expense of their happiness.
This article attempts an exploratory engagement between Nyaya logic and logic-based therapy (LBT), a leading modality of philosophical counseling rooted in Aristotelian syllogistic reasoning. Although Nyaya's five-step syllogism, as articulated in its original text Nyaya Sutra, was developed to understand knowledge and guide debate and not for therapeutic intent, its structure can offer useful tools for addressing everyday emotional and thinking problems. In LBT, counselors help clients identify irrational premises and replace them with rational, virtue-based alternatives, with the help of philosophical antidotes. This article suggests that the Nyaya syllogistic steps-especially hetu (reason), udaharana (example), and upanaya (application)-can be used in the first step of LBT to identify client's emotional reasoning in a more illustrative way. The structure helps clients understand the flaws in their reasoning through examples and personal relevance. Rather than replacing the traditional LBT method, this article sees Nyaya logic as enriching it-especially in culturally diverse contexts, making counseling more inclusive, thoughtful, and grounded in different philosophical traditions. Public Significance Statement This article highlights how an ancient Indian system of logic, Ny & amacr;ya, can complement logic-based therapy by adding analogical and reflective depth to understanding emotional reasoning. Integration shows the practical value of intercultural philosophy in addressing emotional distress and improving therapeutic clarity.
