“The Lot of Gifted Ladies Is Hard”: A Study of Harriet Taylor Mill Criticism

The question, “Why has Harriet Taylor MM appeared in the history of philosophy as she has?” has several answers. The answers intertwine the personality and polities of Harriet, the sexism of those who wrote of her (which was a reflection of the overall status of women during the period the commentator wrote), misunderstandings of the means and meaning of her collaboration with John Stuart Mill, and the disturbing challenge of her questioning.     

Androgyny: A Goal for Counseling?

Although psychological androgyny is a useful and attractive concept for many counselors, a review of the literature suggests that androgyny cannot now serve as a concrete goal for sex-role counseling. It may also pose its own problems for individuals.     

Successful Resolutions to the Career-Versus-Family Conflict

One hundred and twenty husbands and wives (60 couples) were individually assessed on how conflicted (or resolved) they were about the career-versus-family conflict in their lives. Their written resolutions were also content-analyzed to extract specific themes and conflict-resolution strategies. Data on participants' self-esteem, conflict-related anxiety, life satisfaction, and demographic variables were also collected. Results of t tests, chi-squares, Pearson correlations, and a stepwise multiple regression analysis indicated that high self-esteem and life satisfaction best predicted being resolved about the conflict. The only theme that discriminated between the most and least resolved spouses was “my family comes first” (held by the most resolved). Wives were more rationally resolved about the conflict than their husbands.     

Families' Schemata of Social Relationships

Variation in views of the social environment held jointly by members of family units was examined from a theoretical perspective that specifies distinct kinds of variation among families in their beliefs about the fundamental nature of the social world. Associations compatible with theory were found between direct measures of family interaction and families' schemata of social relationships as assessed by using a felt figure technique. Additional evidence indicated that variation among families in the schemata displayed resulted from similar contributions by all individuals in a family studied. Findings support the existence of family social schemata — a family group's set of views about the organization of relationships in the social world — and indicate several dimensions by which these schemata vary from family to family.     

MORTALITY,INTEGRITY, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS (WHO ARE YOU TO ME? WHO AM I TO YOU?)

The author narrates her experience of mourning her therapist's sudden death. The profession has neglected implications of the analyst's mortality: what is lost or vulnerable to loss? What is that vulnerability's function? The author's process of mourning included her writing and her becoming an analyst. Both pursuits inspired reflections on mortality in two overlapping senses: bodily (the analyst is mortal and can die) and character (the analyst is mortal and can err). The subject thus expands to include impaired character and ethical violations. Paradoxically, the analyst's human limitations threaten each psychoanalytic situation, but also enable it: human imperfection animates the work. The essay ends with a specific example of integrity.     

CAREER SELF-MANAGEMENT: A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL ASSESSMENT OF THE EFFECTS OF A TRAINING INTERVENTION

A growing trend is to encourage employees to become actively involved in the management of their own careers. Career self-management, the degree to which one regularly gathers information and plans for career problem solving and decision making, includes two main behaviors: developmental feedback seeking and job mobility preparedness. Although career self-management training is a commonly used employer intervention to re-socialize individuals to increase their own career management activity, it is rarely rigorously evaluated. Relying on an expectancy theory framework, the goal of this study was to evaluate the general effects of career self-management training using a quasi-experimental design. Based on data from several hundred professionals at a major U.S. employer, the results showed formal training efforts were generally not successful in resocializing people to engage in career self-management activities, and when done as an isolated human resource strategy, decreased trainees' likelihood of engaging in career self-management behaviors. To the extent that Time 2 expectancy perceptions got worse, the results showed that an individual's attitudes toward feedback seeking mediated the relationship between the training intervention and the level of preparation for job mobility conducted 6-8 months following the training.     

Self-esteem as a better predictor of restrained eaters' food intake than attributional style and disinhibition tendency

In the present study, a weight increase or decrease was experimentally manipulated in restrained and unrestrained eating subjects. It was hypothesized that restrained eating subjects in the high-weight condition will attribute the cause of this important negative event to internal, stable, and global factors. Such a depressogenic attributional style was expected to be reflected in a more depressed mood which, in its turn, should trigger disinhibitive eating during a bogus taste test. Moreover, it was hypothesized that high scores on Zuckerman's disinhibition subscale and low self-esteem were related to larger food intake. Main findings were that a manipulated weight increase indeed lowered the mood of restrained eaters, whereas it had no effect on the mood of unrestrained eaters. However, the weight increase and the mood decrease of restrained subjects in the high-weight condition were not reflected in a more depressive attributional style and increased food intake. Level of self-esteem appeared to be the best and only predictor of restrained eaters' food intake with lower-self-esteem subjects eating less during the taste test. Moreover, although the restrained subjects scored significantly higher on a general measure of disinhibition than the unrestrained ones, disinhibition was not a very strong predictor of food intake. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.