How to do things with things

J.L. Austin has demonstrated that people can do things—bring about social facts — with words. Here we describe how some people do things with things. This is a study of the symbolic use and situated history of material objects during a business negotiation between two German entrepreneurs: of the practical transformation of things-at-hand from objects of use into exemplars, or into forms-at-hand that can be used for the construction of transitory symbolic artifacts. Arranging boxes in a particular fashion can be the equivalent of an illocutionary act, but unlike words things remain on the scene as indexical monuments to prior interactional arrangements.

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The family life cycle: Impressions

This paper is concerned with the kind of everyday family experiences that most of us have gone through. It is written in a style that is more poetry than science, but, like poetry, probably gets closer to the truth about the nature of family life than does more technical conceptual material. Too often professionals write in such abstract, theoretical terms about families that they end up sounding unlike any family you ever knew. In this paper, I tried to write about the natural, typical incidents that occur to people as they get married, have kids, grow old, and die. It is hoped that the reader will connect and identify with these evocations, get shocks of recognition, as well as, who knows, some private chuckles. Families are where you live, emotionally and physically. Our family experiences — the passions, hates, loves, mysteries, paradoxes, measureless sacrifices, joys, injustices, jealousies, storms, comforts, bonds, and patterns— are burned into the cauldrons of the mind. The family memories lived through intimate others persist through space and time, sometimes sharply, usually as vague wisps of unremembered pasts, shaping the meanings of our lives and those close to us. The family, not anatomy, is destiny.a founder and past president of the American Family Therapy Academy.Editor's Note: This paper by Jim Framo was written 25 years ago, but for various reasons has not been published until now. Despite the fact that it focuses on the traditional middleclass family in the United States, it has wider implications and appeal than that focus.     

Becoming a person—Part II

Conclusion I have tried to tell you what has seemed to occur in the lives of people with whom I have had the privilege of being in a relationship as they struggled toward becoming themselves. I have endeavored to describe, as accurately as I can, the meanings which seem to be involved in this process of becoming a person. I am sure that I do not see it clearly or completely, since I keep changing in my comprehension and understanding of it. I hope you will accept it as a current and tentative picture, not as something final.One reason for stressing the tentative nature of what I have said is that I wish to make it clear that I amnot saying: This is what you should become; here is the goal for you. Rather, I am saying that these are some of the meanings I see in the experiences that my clients and I have shared. Perhaps this picture of the experience of others may illuminate or give more meaning to some of your own experience.I have pointed out that the individual appears to have a strong desire to become himself; that given a favorable psychological climate he drops the defensive masks with which he has faced life, and begins to discover and to experience the stranger who lives behind these masks—the hidden parts of himself. I have pictured some of the attributes of the person who emerges—the tendency, to be more open to all elements of his organic experience; the growth of trust in one's organism as an instrument of sensitive living; the acceptance of the fearsome responsibility of being a unique person; and finally the sense of living in one's life as a participant in a fluid, ongoing process, continually discovering new aspects of one's self in the flow of experience. These are some of the things which seem to me to be involved in becoming a person.     

After Kohlberg: Some implications of an Ethics of Virtue for the theory of moral education and development

It is beyond serious dispute that post-war reflection upon and research into moral education and development has been well nigh dominated by an extensive and ambitious research programme influenced and initiated by the modem cognitive developmental theorist Lawrence Kohlberg — a programme which can also be seen, moreover, as standing in a tradition of philosophical reflection about the nature of moral life going back to such significant enlightenment thinkers as Kant and Rousseau. It will also be familiar, however, that a powerful critique of this essentially liberal conception of the nature of moral life and values has lately gathered momentum under the influence of contemporary post-analytical and communitarian social and moral theorists variously under the spell of Aristotle. In the first place, then, this paper argues that a basically Kohlbergian approach to thinking about moral education is difficult — if not impossible — to sustain in the face of this neo-Aristotelian critique; secondly, however, it attempts to explore the possibilities of an alternative virtue-theoretical basis for understanding the nature of moral life and education.     

Graveyards: Russian ritual and belief pertaining to the dead

The age-old tradition of feasting the dead has been maintained by Russian populations for well over five centuries. Graveyards hold a special place both in traditional Orthodox faith and in the lives of Russians and others in the city of Narva, Estonia. The tradition of feasting the dead for three, nine and forty days after death, can be traced unbroken to pre-Christian Rus’. Details may vary, but always the soul of the deceased must battle its way out of the body and then spend time in both heaven and hell. While this journey is occurring, the living must remember the dead, helping their souls during this period of travail. Even a final feast one year after the death of the individual does not end the relationship between the living and the deceased, for the graves are still visited on a regular basis as a sign of respect to the dead, who are potential saints in the Russian Orthodox tradition. This ‘saintly’ land — Russian graves — defines homeland and roots the population to a new area. By examining the importance of graveyards to Russians, to the ethnic Komi of Northern Russia, and other Eastern Europeans, I demonstrate that a sense of place is maintained in these rituals of daily life.     

Nothingness and the Human Umwelt

In the paper I argue that the great impact of empiricism on psychology and the enclosed dualist agenda traps psychological phenomena into subjectivism. By discussing the phenomena of nothingness in biological and cultural life it is argued that meaning must be considered as a phenomenon that represents both a fit and a misfit of the individual with the environment. By stressing the overall presence of nothingness phenomena it is argued how the reduced ontology of empiricism—and its blindness to relations and transformations out of which meaning grows—should be overcome. In human cultural life, transformations are constitutive and ongoing changes are being produced to make sure that continuity as well as discontinuity will happen. The analysis of especially one case—the removal of an Amish school after a shooting episode—serves to prove how meaning grows out of cultural processes as people produce their own conditions of life. From a cultural-ecological point of view, analyzing meaning at the level of individual phenomenology, hence, means analyzing the ‘total psychological situation’ (legacy of Kurt Lewin). This may for instance include analyzing how people live, what they consider important and worth preserving, what must be changed, what are their core values and how do institutional arrangements contribute to keeping up that which is valued or to changing that which is not, etc. Meaning may be viewed the lived-out experience—the domain of self-generativity in human life.     

WHAT IT TAKES TO LIVE PHILOSOPHICALLY: OR,HOW TO PROGRESS IN THE ART OF LIVING

This essay presents an account of what it takes to live a philosophical way of life: practitioners must be committed to a worldview, structure their lives around it, and engage in truth-directed practices. Contra John Cooper, it does not require that one’s life be solely guided by reason. Religious or tradition-based ways of life count as truth directed as long as their practices are reasons responsive and would be truth directed if the claims made by their way of life are correct. The essay argues that these three conditions can be met by progressors as well as sages. Making progress in how one acts in the world, and improving one’s understanding and direction through being part of a community is living a philosophical way of life. The offered view acknowledges more ways to develop the art of living and enables a broader range of people to count as living philosophically.     

Surviving the Transformation: Social Quality in Central Asia and the Caucuses

This paper develops a sociologically informed understanding of what influences the lives and life-choices of people living in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan (Central Asian Republics) and Armenia and Georgia (the Caucasus), four of the successor states of the Soviet Union that suffered significant social and economic changes following the collapse of the Union in 1991. The focus is on the nature of these societies for their citizens; ultimately we are concerned to understand what makes a society liveable for all, what type of society enables people to be generally satisfied with their lives. To do this we use the Social Quality model to derive indicators from which to model what makes for a liveable or at least tolerable society. The model is validated by reference to subjective satisfaction—how people feel about life in general—as the ultimate outcome indicator of individual well-being. The data we use were collected as part of a broader study of living conditions, lifestyles and health in eight of the successor states of the Soviet Union, the Confederation of Independent States (CIS).     

Meaning without fulfilment

Some philosophers argue that a necessary component of a meaningful life is positive affect. The implication of this type of view is that a meaningful life necessarily feels good. I respond primarily to Susan Wolf's version of this type of view; for Wolf, meaningful lives are necessarily fulfilling lives. In contrast to Wolf, I argue that people do sometimes find parts of their lives to be meaningful when the feeling of fulfilment is absent. I propose an alternative subjective condition that does not involve positive affect. I argue that meaningful parts of our lives obtain their value through their relationship to our practical identities.     

PSYCHOLOGY, IDEA TECHNOLOGY, AND IDEOLOGY

Abstract— Scientific development leads to a technology of ideas—idea technology—no less than it leads to a technology of objects But idea technology can hove insidious effects that the technology of objects does not First, ideas can suffuse through a culture before people notice they are there And second, ideas can have profound effects even when they are false—when they are nothing more than ideology These effects can arise because sometimes when people act on the basis of ideology, they inadvertently arrange the very conditions that bring reality into correspondence with the ideology. This potential effect of ideology is discussed in connection with the behavioral psychology of Skinner and the claim by Herrnstein and Murray that intelligence is, far all practical purposes, unmodifiable I suggest that, in general, psychologists must be on the lookout for positive feedback loops between theory and practice that contribute to theory confirmation and thus mislead psychologists into interpreting historically and culturally contingent truths as universal ones     

The systems approach — A. Bogdanov and L. von Bertalanffy

We undertake the comparison between Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory and Alexandr Bodganov's Tektology as two theories proposing a holistic interpretation of reality and claiming to solve problems which are unsolvable via conventional philosophic and scientific theories and methodologies. Basic misunderstandings by some Soviet authors regarding the nature of these theories — especially in the case of Tektology — are pointed out. The comparison is made in what concerns the general origins and purposes of the theories, their approaches to the problem of organization, their treatment of mathematics and their understanding of the cybernetic concept of regulation.We contend that Tektologycontains — some 15 years earlier — all the basic concepts which will be later developed by the General Theory of Systems. As we shall see, Tektology is the ultimate expansion of any theory of systems. This fact is widely ignored in contemporary specialized literature.We finally contend that both Tektology and the General Systems Theory are a sign of the times. A holistic secular monism is a respectable alternative to the failure of contemporary science and philosophy in guiding the life of men, in providing araison d'être for human existence. However, we do not explore the soundness of this alternative.     

The Anomalous Wellbeing of Disabled People: A Response

Disabled people frequently find themselves in situations where their quality of life and wellbeing is being measured or judged by others, whether in decisions about health care provision or assessments for social supports. Recent debates about wellbeing and how it might be assessed (through subjective and/or objective measures) have prompted a renewed focus on disabled people’s wellbeing because of its seemingly ‘anomalous’ nature; that is, whilst to external (objective) observers the wellbeing of disabled people appears poor, based on subjective assessments, people with disabilities report a good quality of life. In this paper, I examine an article by the philosopher Dan Moller in which he seeks to explain this ‘disability paradox’. Despite agreeing with his analysis that there is more to what people value than happiness, his explanation reflects some of the difficulties presented in philosophical accounts which seek to understand the lives of disabled people: this includes an analysis which fails to problematise definitions of wellbeing and who has the ‘voice’ to do the defining; which negates the multiple identities and subject positions that disabled people occupy; and which lacks recognition of the social contexts which mediate disabled people’s lives. I suggest that there is a need to incorporate disabled people’s voices into research which deepens our empirical knowledge about the relationship between impairment and wellbeing, including the social circumstances that shape disabled people’s agency.     

Relationships Between Dimensions of Depressive Experience and Perceptions of the Lives of People in General

This study examines relationships between depression and perceptions of the lives of people in general. One hundred fourteen college students completed the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (Radloff, 1977), the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire (Blatt, D'Afflitti, & Quinlan, 1976), and two instruments that asked subjects to make judgments about the frequency of various positive and negative outcomes in other people's lives. Highly Dependent and highly Self-Critical women perceived people's lives as characterized by much misfortune, failure, and unhappiness. Unexpectedly, Efficacy scores, which are negatively related to depression, were also associated with negative perceptions of people's lives in women. Among the men, overall depression was not related to perceptions of how frequently people succeed at specific, concrete life tasks, but depressed subjects perceived others as experiencing a tow level of subjective well-being. Implications for the notion of a depressive negative bias toward the self are discussed.     

Do They Know How Happy They Are? On the Value of Self-Rated Happiness of People With a Mental Disorder

Quality of life is often measured using questions about happiness. This method presumes that respondents are able to judge their life. Research suggest that this is typically the case, but this is not to say that everybody can. In that context one may doubt whether people with a mental disorder can judge their life adequately. Happiness can be rejected as a indicator for quality of life for people with mental disorders, because of affective and cognitive distortions. We therefore checked the validity of happiness and satisfaction measures in the context of mental disorders. Psychiatric diagnoses were determined at baseline and at 12 and 36 months follow-up in a representative sample (N = 7,076) of the Dutch population, using a full Composite International Diagnostic Interview. Respondents indicated how often they had felt happy during the past month and how satisfied they were with their lives in general. The measurements have a satisfactory concurrent, ecological and predictive validity for people with mental disorders. Though the level of happiness is lower among the people with mental disorders, conditions for happiness and contentment appear to be similar.     

A constructive approach to frustration in the practice of ministry

Conclusion The original frustration-aggression hypothesis was stated in very strong terms—every frustration produces an aggressive tendency and every aggression can be traced to a frustration. We know now that there can be other responses to frustration—aregression to childish behavior, apathetic withdrawal, or, even, quietly effectiveproblem-solving behavior. A person who learns how to use his frustration in problem-solving will not only be effective in his work, but will enjoy it.By organizing our time and planning our activities we eliminate those oppressing feelings of guilt, failure, and frustration. We are free to enjoy our work and play. Someone has said that the problem most people have is that they think about playing while working and think about working while playing, and do not do either one well. The minister who is thinking about a pastoral call while preparing his sermon or thinking about his sermon while visiting a parishioner does not do either one very well.A frustrated person cannot accomplish much because frustration blocks creativity, wastes time and energy as it divides the individual. To accept the challenge of dealing with frustration creatively is to make life a much more exciting and productive venture. It makes a minister an effective leader of people as he displays self-discipline, expresses concern, and shares the Gospel through the many activities of his life and church.     

Relationships between dimensions of depressive experience and perceptions of the lives of people in general

This study examines relationships between depression and perceptions of the lives of people in general. One hundred fourteen college students completed the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (Radloff, 1977), the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire (Blatt, D'Afflitti, & Quinlan, 1976), and two instruments that asked subjects to make judgments about the frequency of various positive and negative outcomes in other people's lives. Highly Dependent and highly Self-Critical women perceived people's lives as characterized by much misfortune, failure, and unhappiness. Unexpectedly, Efficacy scores, which are negatively related to depression, were also associated with negative perceptions of people's lives in women. Among the men, overall depression was not related to perceptions of how frequently people succeed at specific, concrete life tasks, but depressed subjects perceived others as experiencing a low level of subjective well-being. Implications for the notion of a depressive negative bias toward the self are discussed.     

Hegemonic Masculinity and the Experience of Prostate Cancer: A Narrative Approach

Prostate cancer is a major health problem—one that inevitably challenges men's notions about themselves and their expressions of masculinity. As part of a larger study investigating linkages between masculinity and prostate cancer, this article focuses on the narratives of three men with prostate cancer—all of whom shed light on contemporary forms of hegemonic masculinity. Multiple interviews were conducted with study participants, capturing experiencesboth prior to and following cancer diagnosis. Analysis of individual narratives showed how social factors such as work and family influenced (and were influenced by) men's experiences with illness. All three men were forced to renegotiate their performances of masculinity—with this renegotiation mostly occurring within the parameters of performance consistent with hegemonic masculinity. However, there was also some evidence of shifts into new socialterritory and new expressions of masculinity. In contrast to more traditional, trait-based approaches to studying men's experiences, a narrative approach allows social scientists to do justice to the temporal realities and contextual complexities of men's lives. Men will be better understood as more attention is paid to the actual shape of individual lives.     

Daniel levinson and his theory of adult development: A reminiscence and some clarifications

I offer some reminiscences occasioned by the death of Daniel Levinson, a modern pioneer in the study of the human life cycle. I clarify three controversial aspects of Levinson's theory—its universality, the role of critical life events, and the place of relationships—as well as briefly foreshadow findings from his forthcoming book on women. I show that relationships to people, enterprises, and social institutions are the stuff out of which the individual life structure—Levinson's central concept—is formed. Levinson's dream was of a society in which the developmental needs of adults were better understood and met so that they could more generatively fill their roles in the institutions upon which the young depend. He thought this essential to the evolution of a society that would be both more competent and more humane. In this dream, which was a product of his own difficult mid-life transition and a measure of the success he achieved in integrating its polarities, Levinson united a warm, scientific interest in others with an affectionate curiosity about nature.     

The folk psychology of souls

The present article examines how people's belief in an afterlife, as well as closely related supernatural beliefs, may open an empirical backdoor to our understanding of the evolution of human social cognition. Recent findings and logic from the cognitive sciences contribute to a novel theory of existential psychology, one that is grounded in the tenets of Darwinian natural selection. Many of the predominant questions of existential psychology strike at the heart of cognitive science. They involve: causal attribution (why is mortal behavior represented as being causally related to one's afterlife? how are dead agents envisaged as communicating messages to the living?), moral judgment (why are certain social behaviors, i.e., transgressions, believed to have ultimate repercussions after death or to reap the punishment of disgruntled ancestors?), theory of mind (how can we know what it is "like" to be dead? what social-cognitive strategies do people use to reason about the minds of the dead?), concept acquisition (how does a common-sense dualism interact with a formalized socio-religious indoctrination in childhood? how are supernatural properties of the dead conceptualized by young minds?), and teleological reasoning (why do people so often see their lives as being designed for a purpose that must be accomplished before they perish? how do various life events affect people's interpretation of this purpose?), among others. The central thesis of the present article is that an organized cognitive "system" dedicated to forming illusory representations of (1) psychological immortality, (2) the intelligent design of the self, and (3) the symbolic meaning of natural events evolved in response to the unique selective pressures of the human social environment.