Psychology has long been enamored of the dark side of human existence, rarely exploring a more positive view of the mind. What has psychology contributed, for example, to our understanding of the various human virtues? Regrettably, not much. The last decade, however, has witnessed a growing movement to abandon the exclusive focus on the negative. Psychologists from several subdisciplines are now asking an intriguing question: "What strengths does a person employ to deal effectively with life?" The Handbook of Positive Psychology provides a forum for a more positive view of the human condition. In its pages, readers are treated to an analysis of what the foremost experts believe to be the fundamental strengths of humankind. Both seasoned professionals and students just entering the field are eager to grasp the power and vitality of the human spirit as it faces a multitude of life challenges. The Handbook is the first systematic attempt to bring together leading scholars to give voice to the emerging field of positive psychology.

Handbook of positive psychology

The concept of dehumanization lacks a systematic theoretical basis, and research that addresses it has yet to be integrated. Manifestations and theories of dehumanization are reviewed, and a new model is developed. Two forms of dehumanization are proposed, involving the denial to others of 2 distinct senses of humanness: characteristics that are uniquely human and those that constitute human nature. Denying uniquely human attributes to others represents them as animal-like, and denying human nature to others represents them as objects or automata. Cognitive underpinnings of the "animalistic" and "mechanistic" forms of dehumanization are proposed. An expanded sense of dehumanization emerges, in which the phenomenon is not unitary, is not restricted to the intergroup context, and does not occur only under conditions of conflict or extreme negative evaluation. Instead, dehumanization becomes an everyday social phenomenon, rooted in ordinary social-cognitive processes.

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Dehumanization: An Integrative Review

This paper focuses on Foucault's analysis of two forms of neo-liberalism in his lecture of 1979 at the College de France: German post-War liberalism and the liberalism of the Chicago School. Since the course is available only on audio-tapes at the Foucault archive in Paris, the larger part of the text presents a comprehensive reconstruction of the main line of argumentation, citing previously unpublished source material. The final section offers a short discussion of the methodological and theoretical principles underlying the concept of governmentality and the critical political angle it provides for an analysis of contemporary neo-liberalism.

/pdf/the-birth-of-bio-politics-michel-foucault-s-lecture-at-the-29dqkf8weq.pdf

'The birth of bio-politics': Michel Foucault's lecture at the Collège de France on neo-liberal governmentality

Despite substantial work in a variety of disciplines, substantive areas, and geographical contexts, social memory studies is a nonparadigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless enterprise. To remedy this relative disorganization, we (re-)construct out of the diversity of work addressing social memory a useful tradition, range of working definitions, and basis for future work. We trace lineages of the enterprise, review basic definitional disputes, outline a historical approach, and review sociological theories concerning the statics and dynamics of social memory.

Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices

The extended self was proposed in 1988. Since it was formulated, many technological changes have dramatically affected the way we consume, present ourselves, and communicate. This conceptual update seeks to revitalize the concept, incorporate the impacts of digitization, and provide an understanding of consumer sense of self in today’s technological environment. It is necessarily a work in progress, for the digital environment and our behavior within it continue to evolve. But some important changes are already clear. Five changes with digital consumption are considered that impact the nature of self and the nature of possessions. Needed modifications and additions to the extended self are outlined, and directions for future research are suggested. The digital world opens a host of new means for self-extension, using many new consumption objects to reach a vastly broader audience. Even though this calls for certain reformulations, the basic concept of the extended self remains vital.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1086/671052.pdf

Extended Self in a Digital World

Shortly before his death in 1984, Michel Foucault spoke of an idea for a new book on "technologies of the self." He described it as "composed of different papers about the self..., about the role of reading and writing in constituting the self... and so on." The book Foucault envisioned was based on a faculty seminar on "Technologies of the Self," originally presented at the University of Vermont in the fall of 1982. This volume is a partial record of that seminar. In many ways, Foucault's project on the self was the logical conclusion to his historical inquiry over twenty-five years into insanity, deviancy, criminality, and sexuality. Because Foucault died before he completed the revisions of his seminar presentations, this volume includes a careful transcription instead...as a prolegomenon to that unfinished task.Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic.This volume was edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton.

Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault

The Political Technology of Individuals

With a broad, interdisciplinary command of the subject, Patrick H. Hutton considers the ideas of philosophers, poets, and historians, focusing especially on the work of Giambattista Vico, Maurice Halbwachs, Philippe Aries, and Michel Foucault. He surveys such questions as the roots of contemporary historical interest in the memory topic, the eternal paradox of repetition and recollection as moments of memory, the ways in which the art of memory has been refashioned to serce the needs of the modern age and becomes integrated into historical thinking, and historians changing attitudes toward the historiographical tradition of scholarship on the French Revolution."

History as an art of memory

Technologien des Selbst

A few years ago, French historians began using the expression "history of mentalities" to characterize their work in the field of intellectual history. While awkward in French and infelicitous in English translation, the phrase has survived; for it expresses a need to assign autonomy to a kind of historical inquiry which offers new perspectives on the civilizing process. Briefly stated, the history of mentalities considers the attitudes of ordinary people toward everyday life. Ideas concerning childhood, sexuality, family, and death, as they have developed in European civilization, are the stuff of this new kind of history. Work in the history of mentalities is closely identified with the long-standing investigations of the Annales school, which portrays the history of mentalities as but one dimension of the "total" history it is their ambition to write.1 But the history of mentalities, even among its Annales practitioners, does have its own specific concerns. While Annales historians are most likely to address the material realities conditioning man through economic processes, social structures, and environmental influences, those historians investigating mentalities prefer to consider the psychological realities underpinning human conceptions of intimate relationships, basic habits of mind, and attitudes toward the elemental passages of life. The history of mentalities, moreover, has obvious affinities with approaches to intellectual history developed before the arrival of the French school. In effect, "mentalities" is a code name for what used to be called culture. It takes up again themes pursued by idealist historians such as Burckhardt in the nineteenth century and Huizinga early in the twentieth. For these historians, problems of culture were essentially problems of world-views and their interpretation. They took pains to evaluate these in their social and political context. But the history of ideas served as their basic frame of reference. Culture in this historiographical tradition meant high culture, and for this reason these historians directed their attention toward the role of valueforming elites. Though they did not treat culture as the exclusive preserve of

Patrick H. Hutton

Papers

Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault

The Political Technology of Individuals

History as an art of memory

Technologien des Selbst

The History of Mentalities: The New Map of Cultural History