Protoself
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All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (2)
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#01
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.57
3. > A New Approach to the Self
Theoretical move: The passage deploys Damasio's neuroscientific account of a tripartite self (protoself, core self, autobiographical self) to reframe autoaffection as a nonconscious, homeostatic biological process, thereby challenging classical subject-centered accounts of consciousness and opening a comparison with Freudian ignorance of the psyche's own extension.
The protoself is the nonconscious, purely organic-neural self. It is made of the interconnected and coherent collection of neural patterns that, moment by moment, represent the internal state of the organism.
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#02
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.245
13. > The Paradoxes of the Principle of Constancy > Psychoanalysis: Are There Unconscious Feelings?
Theoretical move: The passage argues that homeostasis is not a mechanistic energetic process but an affective, auto-representative structure: the brain's self-regulation constitutes a "cerebral unconscious" grounded in autoaffection rather than in Freudian energetics, thereby challenging the classical psychoanalytic separation of the unconscious from biological self-regulation and redefining the unconscious as the autoaffection of the brain in its entirety.
The core 'protoself,' the primitive form of identity, is therefore a constant interaction between the internal milieu and the external world… The proto-self is a coherent collection of neural patterns which map, moment by moment, the state of the physical structure of the organism in its many dimensions.