Winckelmann on Taste: A Somaesthetic Perspective

This article argues that somaesthetic thinking is central to Winckelmann's theory of artistic taste, rendering it more relevant to contemporary aesthetic contexts. After briefly defining this perspective and the importance of somatic cultivation in Winckelmann's life, the article first explores how somatic factors are crucial in Winckelmann's account of how good artistic taste originated in ancient Greece. It then examines how somatic feelings play a central role in determining a person's aptitude for properly appreciating beauty in art and how those feelings operate in the judgment of taste. The article concludes by examining Winckelmann's use of bodily reactions and somaesthetic reflection in his own critical practice, purveying a somatically grounded model of strong feelings tempered with composed understanding.     

The identity of Brexit: A cultural psychology analysis

In this paper, we propose a culturalist interpretation of the outcome of the Brexit referendum. This interpretation is grounded on the analysis of the U.K.'s cultural milieu, which is part of a more general study of the cultural milieus of several European countries. Specific to the United Kingdom, our analysis is based on a questionnaire carried out on a representative sample of U.K. respondents stratified by sociodemographic variables and geographic region (NUTS1). Responses to the questionnaire were subjected to multidimensional analysis—a combination of multiple correspondence analysis and cluster analysis. Findings about the multicountry analysis show how cultural milieus are characterized by five basic, embodied, affect‐laden, generalized worldviews (defined as “Symbolic Universes”). Four out of five symbolic universes consist of a way of interpreting reality by a specific anchorage (i.e., the ethical norm, the institutional order, the emotional experience interpersonal bond, and the belongingness). One symbolic universe can be viewed as the anomic reaction to the failure of those anchorages. Focusing on Brexit, by means of a discriminant analysis, it is showed how the incidence of the symbolic universes (and of the underpinning basic dimensions of meaning within the 12 U.K. macroregions') enables to identify differentially the macroregions with high proportion of “leave” at the Brexit referendum against those with low proportion. More specifically, the high “leave” macroregion are characterized by higher relevance of cultural forms anchored on local identity/belongingness. Findings are discussed within the wider aims of the project and its implications for a cultural psychology informed policymaking.     

Threats of suicide

For patients in treatment, how do suicidal feelings emerge, how do we judge the seriousness of suicide threats and what do we do? The literature on suicidal thinking, suicidal threats and suicidal acts is reviewed as well as some of the accumulated statistics for adults, adolescents and children. Some treatment principles and countertransference reactions are presented. The values of the therapist and the therapist's feelings toward death are seen as coloring the therapist's reaction to suicidal patients.     

To Have and to Hold: Thoughts on Admiration/Envy: Commentary on Paper by Joye Weisel-Barth

Using the author's definition of “envy,” I try to separate out fleeting feelings of envy that lead to “admiration” from very disturbing feelings of envy that have to remain hidden because they are so shameful. I try to explore the reasons why it is so unlikely that analysts will feel envy of their patients no matter how rich and famous they may be. Instead, I try to show that this really is a paper on “admiration” and quote the relevant literature on how to distinguish these two affects. A careful reading of the case material shows that the analyst's admiration of her patient's artwork served a very positive role in the treatment of a severely narcissistic man whose self-esteem had plummeted after suffering several losses. It seemed that by being a “container” and “self-object” for a long period, the analyst was able to rescue pieces of the patient's self that he felt were falling through a “colander.” The case is also used as an example of some of the work that started in the 1970s about how to work with narcissistic and nonclassical cases in a noninterpretative manner.     

The Subjective Basis of Kant's Judgment of Taste

Kant claims that the basis of a judgment of taste is a merely subjective representation and that the only merely subjective representations are feelings of pleasure or displeasure. Commentators disagree over how to interpret this claim. Some take it to mean that judgments about the beauty of an object depend only on the state of the judging subject. Others argue instead that, for Kant, the pleasure we take in a beautiful object is best understood as a response to its qualities, and that, accordingly, feelings of pleasure or displeasure are no different from other representations, such as colors or smells. While I agree that the judgment of taste is best understood as asserting a claim about an object's qualities, I argue that the distinction Kant makes between feelings of pleasure or displeasure and other representations should not be ignored. I show that one's liking or disliking for an object is merely subjective in the sense that its significance depends on what one has made of oneself through one's aesthetic education. The judgment of taste, then, is merely subjective because one must first become the kind of person whose feelings have the right significance at the right time before one can determine whether an object's qualities make it beautiful.     

The interplay between parental beliefs about children's emotions and parental stress impacts children's attachment security

This study investigated how parental beliefs about children's emotions and parental stress relate to children's feelings of security in the parent–child relationship. Models predicting direct effects of parental beliefs and parental stress, and moderating effects of parental stress on the relationship between parental beliefs and children's feelings of security were tested. Participants were 85 African American, European American, and Lumbee American Indian 4th and 5th grade children and one of their parents. Children reported their feelings of security in the parent–child relationship; parents independently reported on their beliefs and their stress. Parental stress moderated relationships between three of the four parental beliefs about the value of children's emotions and children's attachment security. When parent stress was low, parental beliefs accepting and valuing children's emotions were not related to children's feelings of security; when parent stress was high, however, parental beliefs accepting and valuing children's emotions were related to children's feelings of security. These findings highlight the importance of examining parental beliefs and stress together for children's attachment security. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Couples' Perceptions of Each Other's Daily Affect: Empathic Accuracy,Assumed Similarity,and Indirect Accuracy

This study examined couples' perceptions of each other's daily affect, using a daily diary methodology. Specifically, we tested the extent to which couples accurately inferred how their partner was feeling (empathic accuracy) and the extent to which spouses used their own feelings as a gauge for how their partner was feeling (assumed similarity). We also tested for indirect accuracy in couples' perceptions; that is, that assumed similarity in the context of actual similarity leads to empathic accuracy. Participants were 51 couples who completed daily diaries for seven consecutive nights. Results based on the Actor‐Partner Interdependence Model indicated that couples showed both empathic accuracy and assumed similarity in their perception of their partner's positive affect; however, they used assumed similarity in rating their partner's hard negative (anger, hostility) and soft negative (sadness, fear) affect. Furthermore, tests of indirect accuracy found that wives were indirectly accurate in perceiving their husbands' positive affect and both husbands and wives were indirectly accurate in perceiving each other's hard negative affect because they were biased. Complementing laboratory studies, the present study highlights that examining couples' perceptions of each other's feelings in contexts of daily life, and differentiating positive and negative emotions, can further our understanding of the role of emotions for healthy relationship functioning.     

‘It's not that we hate you’: Understanding children's gender attitudes and expectancies about peer relationships

Widespread gender segregation, evident throughout elementary school, seems to imply that girls and boys have negative feelings and thoughts about one another, and classic theories of inter‐group processes support this idea. However, research has generally overlooked children's feelings and perceptions about gender‐related interpersonal interactions. This paper investigates the nature of children's attitudes about same‐ and other‐gender peers, and explores how those attitudes relate to the expectancies and beliefs children hold about same‐ and other‐gender peer interactions. Children (N= 98 fifth graders) completed questionnaires assessing their global liking of own‐ and other‐gender peers ( Yee & Brown, 1994 ), positive and negative attitudes about own‐ and other‐gender peers, and outcome expectancies related to interacting with own‐ and other‐gender peers. Results indicated that rather than being characterized by out‐group negativity, children's inter‐group gender attitudes are best characterized by an in‐group positivity bias. Children's positive and negative affective attitudes were also significantly associated with outcome expectancies. In contrast, global liking of own‐ and other‐gender peers was less predictive of outcome expectancies. Thus, the greater specificity of the affective attitude measures appeared to be a more predictive and potentially fruitful gauge of children's feelings about own‐ and other‐gender peers. Results are discussed in terms of the need for finer grained and more extensive studies of children's gender‐related feelings and cognitions about own‐ and other‐gender peers.     

The Analyst's Anticipatory Fantasies: Aid and Obstacle to the Patient's Self-Integration

In this paper I explore instances of enactment related to the analyst's feelings and fantasies about how analysis will proceed. As I discuss a patient who was developing a new capacity to experience conflict, I explore how the analyst's fantasies about the impact of his interpretations may be utilized in helping him to elaborate and understand the patient's unconscious fantasies and identifications and unintegrated feeling states. In so doing, we sometimes discover how we are unwittingly influencing or avoiding understanding our patient's own version of their psychic catastrophe. As we develop language where there was previously no integrative language for the patient's internalized and interactive version of catastrophe, we always project particular kinds of expectations into the therapeutic situation.     

Five Issues in Training Edited by Irving R. Weschler and Edgar H. Schein

This case study illustrates how combined therapy (individual, group, and marital) by the same therapist was used to resolve a woman's narcissistic transference. The author's position is that combined therapy creates a psychologically stimulating environment, which uniquely elicits a depth and range of transference feelings, thereby generating multiple therapeutic opportunities to experience and work through transference resistance in the here-and-now. Highlights of the treatment demonstrate how the synergy of three modalities is used to elicit, modulate, and resolve positive and negative aspects of the narcissistic transference. Four guidelines are suggested for treatment of patients in combined therapy.     

Schopenhauer on the Values of Aesthetic Experience

In this essay, I argue that Schopenhauer's view of the aesthetic feelings of the beautiful and the sublime shows how a “dialectical” interpretation that homogenizes both aesthetic concepts and reduces the discrepancy between both to merely quantitative differences is flawed. My critical analysis reveals a number of important tensions in both Schopenhauer's own aesthetic theory—which does not ultimately succeed in “merging” Plato's and Kant's approaches—and the interpretation that unjustly reduces the value of aesthetic experience to a merely preliminary stage of ethical will‐less salvation.     

When Unfair Treatment Leads to Anger: The Effects of Other People's Emotions and Ambiguous Unfair Procedures1

The present research examines how emotions of a third party interacting with an authority who has treated him or her unfairly affect one's feelings of anger toward the authority as a function of the ambiguity of the unfair treatment. Across a scenario and a laboratory study, it was found that when participants did not receive voice and it was unclear whether this was the result of an authority's unfair intentions, participants were less angry when the third party expressed shame, rather than anger, toward the same enacting authority. A second laboratory study replicated this effect, but now by showing that one's feelings of anger (in the case of ambiguity) were lower when the other person expressed guilt, relative to anger.     

Lay discourses about Brexit and prejudice: “Ideological creativity” and its limits in Brexit debates

Much research on Brexit has studied whether the vote to leave the EU is a marker of growing prejudice. In this article, we study instead how the relationship between support for Brexit and prejudice is constructed, negotiated and contested in lay discourse. Our analysis of focus groups (N = 12) conducted prior to and following the EU referendum shows that support for Brexit was predominantly constructed as based on nationalism and anti-immigration prejudice, especially in Remain-supporting accounts. This prompted identity management strategies and counter-arguments by Leave supporters, such as providing alternative constructions of prejudice and racism; relating Brexit with “progressive” values; and presenting it as rational and economically sound. In our discussion, we draw attention to the “ideological creativity” that underpins these accounts and also reflect on the possibilities and constraints of developing alternative political narratives under conditions of political polarisation.     

Comfortable and safe spaces? Gender,sexuality and ‘race’ in night-time leisure spaces

This article aims to contribute to the fields of emotional geographies and geographies of sexualities by exploring the relationship between emotions and gender, sexuality, and ‘race’ in sexualised night-time leisure spaces. By drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Manchester's Gay Village, the article highlights the importance of taking into account intersections of social identities when exploring how people feel in certain spaces. It explores how relations of ‘othering’ work through emotions, in particular how people are othered through feelings of comfort and safety. Whilst these feelings are triggered by a particular reading of bodies and spaces, they also produce bodies and spaces that are gendered, sexualised, and racialised (and classed). The article offers a rethinking of comfort and safety as not just feelings individuals have but as being constitutive of sexual, gender, and racial subjectivities and spaces.     

CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVES,MORAL REQUIREMENTS,AND MORAL MOTIVATION

Abstract: Kant has argued that moral requirements are categorical. Kant's claim has been challenged by some contemporary philosophers; this article defends Kant's doctrine. I argue that Kant's claim captures the unique feature of moral requirements. The main arguments against Kant's claim focus on one condition that a categorical imperative must meet: to be independent of desires. I argue that there is another important, but often ignored, condition that a categorical imperative must meet, and this second condition is crucial to understanding why moral requirements are not hypothetical. I also argue that the claim that moral requirements are not categorical because they depend on desires for motivation is beside the point. The issue of whether moral requirements are categorical is not an issue about whether moral desires or feelings are necessary for moral motivation but are rather an issue about the ground of moral desires or moral feelings. Moral requirements are categorical because they are requirements of reason, and reason makes moral desires or feelings possible.     

Can an organization's philanthropic donations encourage consumers to give? The roles of gratitude and boundary conditions

This study examines whether an organization's charitable donation will prompt consumers who closely identify with the organization to give to the charity as well. We posit that identifying with a benefactor will enhance the perception that consumers are involved in the donation process, which evokes grateful feelings. We also predict that the amount of the organization's donation will positively moderate the influence of organization identification on charity‐evoked feelings of gratitude, while attitude toward the organization's charity will positively moderate the gratitude–donation relationship. In Study 1, we show how gratitude arises in the context of corporate social responsibility by demonstrating the mediating role of perceived donation contribution in the relationship between organization identification and gratitude. In Study 2, we demonstrate that organization identification has a significant indirect effect on donation intention through gratitude. Multigroup analyses show that the identification–gratitude link is more salient when the organization commits to donating a larger amount of money to a charity. Furthermore, the impact of gratitude on donation intent is significantly stronger for individuals who hold a favorable attitude toward the organization's corporate social responsibility activity. Our findings indicate that an organization's charitable giving also encourages consumers to give to the community via vicariously felt gratitude. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The ego and the id revisited Freud and Damasio on the body ego/self

Freud's statement in The Ego and the Id (1923) that the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego is well known. This paper tempts to clarify the premises underlying Freud's thesis. Particular attention is paid to Freud's investigation of internal perceptions. Freud argued that internal perceptions are more primordial than perceptions arising externally. In Freud's opinion the roots of the ego, the id, are to be found in body sensations and feelings, but he had to admit that very little was known about these sensations and feelings. Only much later was neuroscience in a position to offer evidence that feelings can be the direct perception of the internal state of the body. Damasio (2010) has recently suggested that the core of the self might be found in what he, like Freud, terms primordial feelings. Not only was Freud able to conceive of the ego as the perception and feeling of our own body but also to conceive of knowing the mental life of another by means of recreating the bodily state of another through imitation.     

Moral Reasons: Internal and External1

The view defended is one sense externalist on the relation between moral reasons and motivation: A's having a moral reason to do X does not necessarily imply that A has a motivation that would support A's doing X via some appropriate deliberative route. However, it is in another sense externalist in holding that there are the kind of moral reasons there are only if the relevant motivational capacities are generally present in human beings, if not in all individuals. The process of socialization is an attempt to embed the recognition of what we have moral reason to do in the intentional content of one's feelings. E.g., learning that about others' suffering embeds their suffering as a reason to help in the intentional content of incipient compassionate feelings. This endows the reason with motivational efficacy while conferring further direction to the feelings in ways that shape us for social cooperation.     

Collective Guilt and Collective Guilt Feelings

Can collectives feel guilt with respect to what they have done? It hasbeen claimed that they cannot. Yet in everyday discourse collectives areoften held to feel guilt, criticized because they do not, and so on.Among other things, this paper considers what such so-called collectiveguilt feelings amount to. If collective guilt feelings are sometimesappropriate, it must be the case that collectives can indeed beguilty. The paper begins with an account of what it is for a collectiveto intend to do something and to act in light of that intention.According to this account, and in senses that are explained, there is acollective that intends to do something if and only if the members of agiven population are jointly committed to intend as a body to do thatthing. A related account of collective belief is also presented. It isthen argued that, depending on the circumstances, a group's action canbe free as opposed to coerced, and that the idea that a collective assuch can be guilty of performing a wrongful act makes sense. The ideathat a group might feel guilt may be rejected because it is assumed thatto feel guilt is to experience a ``pang'' or ``twinge'' of guilt –nothing more and nothing less. Presumably, though, there must becognitions and perhaps behavior involved. In addition, the primacy, eventhe necessity, of ``feeling-sensations'' to feeling guilt in theindividual case has been questioned. Without the presumption that it isalready clear what feeling guilt amounts to, three proposals as to thenature of collective guilt feelings are considered. A ``feeling ofpersonal guilt'' is defined as a feeling of guilt over one's own action.It is argued that it is implausible to construe collective guiltfeelings in terms of members' feelings of personal guilt. ``Membershipguilt feelings'' involve a group member's feeling of guilt over what hisor her group has done. It is argued that such feelings are intelligibleif the member is party to the joint commitment that lies at the base ofthe relevant collective intention and action. However, an account ofcollective guilt in terms of membership guilt feelings is found wanting.Finally, a ``plural subject'' account of collective guilt feelings isarticulated, such that they involve a joint commitment to feel guilt asa body. The parties to a joint commitment of the kind in question may asa result find themselves experiencing ``pangs'' of the kind associatedwith personal and membership guilt feelings. Since these pangs, byhypothesis, arise as a result of the joint commitment to feel guilt as abody, they might be thought of as providing a kind of phenomenology forcollective guilt. Be that as it may, it is argued the plural subjectaccount has much to be said for it.