The Seba library treats Confusion in 8 passages, across 7 authors (including Trungpa, Chögyam, Klein, Melanie, Epstein, Mark).
the spiritual path is the process of cutting through our confusion, of uncovering the awakened state of mind… it is not a matter of building up the awakened state of mind, but rather of burning out the confusions which obstruct it.
Trungpa positions confusion not as pathology but as the ego-produced veil over an ever-present awakened mind, such that liberation is discovery, not construction.
, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, 1973thesis
Since I have referred several times to confusion, it may be useful to summarize some of the important states of confusio
Klein flags confusion as a recurring, clinically significant state requiring systematic summary, situating it within the constellation of envy, splitting, and impediments to analytic gain.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957thesis
I urged her not to discount this feeling of confusion but to stay with it… It was confusion that had emerged out of the void of silence and with which she was still identified; the confusion was the unfinished material that the dream had brought into awareness.
Epstein reframes clinical confusion as psychically saturated material to be inhabited rather than dismissed, integrating Buddhist and psychoanalytic valuations of the state.
, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, 1995thesis
All forms of confusional states may combine with melancholic, manic, and particularly catatonic symptoms, but they need not do so.
Bleuler maps confusional states as a flexible clinical category in schizophrenia, distinguishable yet frequently overlapping with affective and motor symptom clusters.
, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911supporting
This state may occasionally lead to confusion with schizophrenia.
Bleuler highlights differential-diagnostic confusion — the risk of mistaking epileptic hallucinatory states for schizophrenia — underscoring the instability of psychiatric categorical boundaries.
, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911supporting
When men hold on to their wisdom, the world will no longer be confused.
Zhuangzi locates collective confusion as the product of externally displayed Virtue displacing natural inner alignment, so that simplicity and non-action are the antidote.
, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 2013supporting
This may have contributed to the conceptual confusion regarding aesthetic emotions. In order to reduce or fully avoid this confusion, we propose a taxonomy of two complementary classes of aesthetic emotion terms.
Menninghaus invokes terminological confusion in the classification of aesthetic emotions as a methodological problem motivating a corrective taxonomy.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015aside
Jung children seem to have much confusion about the properties of living entities.
Yalom notes developmental confusion about animacy in young children as part of a broader analysis of how the concept of death is acquired, invoking Piagetian animism.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980aside