Compromise Formation Theory: An Intersubjective Dimension

This paper has two purposes. The first is to elaborate compromise formation theory from an intersubjective perspective. The second is to explore the implications of this vantage point for our understanding of the modes of therapeutic action of psychoanalysis.

I pursue the goals of this paper by outlining the essentials of compromise formation theory and by elaborating what I mean by its intersubjective dimension. Then I present and discuss analytic data to demonstrate the value of the theory for understanding aspects of mode of therapeutic action. Finally, I contrast this perspective with competing theoretical points of view.     

The Unaccountable Subject: Judith Butler and the Social Conditions of Intersubjective Agency

Judith Butler's Kritik der ethischen Gewalt 1 represents a significant refinement of her position on the relationship between the construction of the subject and her social subjection. While Butler's earlier texts reflect a somewhat restricted notion of agency, her Adorno Lectures formulate a notion of agency that extends beyond mere resistance. This essay traces the development of Butler's account of agency and evaluates it in light of feminist projects of social transformation.     

Tender Mercies: Love,Oatmeal, and the Quest for Wholeness

Tender Mercies (1983) is a simple and quiet film that reveals a complexity in its depiction of the many forms love can assume in the soul. Using some of C. G. Jung's and Robert Johnson's observations on the dynamic nature of love, the article tracks the plot of Horton Foote's award-winning screenplay as it unfolds the qualities of love, beginning with romantic love, the most popular form our current culture depicts and promotes, as well as perhaps less glamorous and outwardly exciting forms that nonetheless ground the soul in fuller, more sustainable relations between couples, father and daughter, father and son, as well as the deep passion for what excites and sustains us as creative persons. It also touches on the infernal form of addiction as a kind of fixed and fixated love that harbors no freedom for the individual; an addiction is understood as pornographic to the extent that it continues to promise what it cannot ever deliver, so the individual is always hooked by its fury. By looking closely at various scenes from the film, the author articulates the slow retrieval of one soul from addiction to a life full, whole, and satisfying in its creative and familial love.     

职业妥协：内涵、影响因素与实施效果

职业妥协是职业决策中的一个重要概念,关系着个体职业发展和社会就业的稳定。为了充分了解职业妥协和有效促进就业。首先,介绍了职业妥协的概念、测量;其次,总结了职业妥协的影响因素,并基于差异理论、目标设定理论、社会认知职业理论和人-环境匹配理论解释了职业妥协的实施效果,汇总了实施效果的边界条件;最后从职业妥协对职业行为的影响、个体职业生涯态度、家庭代际支持和上下级匹配与职业妥协的关系几个方面对未来研究进行了展望。     

Truthier Than Thou: Truth,Supertruth and Probability of Truth

Different formal tools are useful for different purposes. For example, when it comes to modelling degrees of belief, probability theory is a better tool than classical logic; when it comes to modelling the truth of mathematical claims, classical logic is a better tool than probability theory. In this paper I focus on a widely used formal tool and argue that it does not provide a good model of a phenomenon of which many think it does provide a good model: I shall argue that while supervaluationism may provide a model of probability of truth, or of assertability, it cannot provide a good model of truth—supertruth cannot be truth. The core of the argument is that an adequate model of truth must render certain connectives truth‐functional (at least in certain circumstances)—and supervaluationism does not do so (in those circumstances).     

Intersubjective Distinctions: Subjects and Persons,Recognitions and Breakdowns: Commentary on Paper by Gerhardt,Sweetnam, and Borton

This paper on Bollas is part 2 of a series presenting the work of three contemporary theorists whose ideas are associated with the intersubjective turn in psychoanalysis. Part 1, on Benjamin, appeared in an earlier issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues (Vol. 10, No. 1); Part 3, on Ehrenberg, will appear in a subsequent issue. The present paper presents the work of Christopher Bollas and attempts to show how his ideas have evolved in a more intersubjective direction over time without losing touch with what is paradigmatically psychoanalytic. Although our own authorial positioning is never quite declared, as our intention was to write a representational text characterizing Bollas's thinking regarding the issue of intersubjectivity, we have come to realize the unannounced selectivity of our interpretive position or biases—biases that never quite speak their name yet, as in all unnamed/disclaimed actions, exert their influence throughout. Not surprising for a paper on the intersubjective turn. Nevertheless, it should be noted that our intent was to foreground Bollas's theorizing as related to the intersubjective turn in its own right—indeed, to get lost in the dense foliage of his rich and generous theoretical-clinical thinking, as he in turn gets lost in the underground maze of his patient's inner world. What should be stated from the outset is that the tradition of cosmopolitan humanistic learning can be heard like the overtones of a gorgeous chord throughout all of Bollas's deeply thoughtful work and illustrates the layerings of self resounding in the conscious-unconscious psyche. Indeed, Bollas serves as one of the most creative interlocutors of unconscious processes, superbly adequate to the task of sleuthing the twists and turns of the unconscious as lived out through the self's idiomatic ways of being in the world.     

Situating Experience: Agency,Perception, and the Given

William Alston has been a long‐time critic of the arguments of Wilfrid Sellars, and he has recently revisited the arguments made by Sellars in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” Alston's work attempts to show how Sellarsian views fail to account for our understanding of perception by making a two‐part attack on Sellars's account: part one of the attack takes up the Sellarsian approach to ‘looks’‐talk, and part two concerns Sellars's thoroughgoing conceptualism with regard to perception. In this article, I argue that there is much in Alston's view that does violence to our understanding of theoretical and practical reason by removing concepts (and thereby constraint by norms) from perception, and I show that Alston's two‐pronged attack fails due to its inadequate reading of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” and its problematic underlying epistemology.     

Epistemic Friction: Reflections on Knowledge, Truth, and Logic

Knowledge requires both freedom and friction. Freedom to set up our epistemic goals, choose the subject matter of our investigations, espouse cognitive norms, design research programs, etc., and friction (constraint) coming from two directions: the object or target of our investigation, i.e., the world in a broad sense, and our mind as the sum total of constraints involving the knower. My goal is to investigate the problem of epistemic friction, the relation between epistemic friction and freedom, the viability of foundationalism as a solution to the problem of friction, an alternative solution in the form of a neo-Quinean model, and the possibility of solving the problem of friction as it applies to logic and the philosophy of logic within that model.