Replies to Deng,Lee, and Skow

This paper is a contribution to a book symposium on my book Experiencing Time. I reply to comments on the book by Natalja Deng, Geoffrey Lee and Bradford Skow. Although several chapters of the book are discussed, the main focus of my reply is on Chapters 2 and 6. In Chapter 2 I argue that the putative mind-independent passage of time could not be experienced, and from this I develop an argument against the A-theory of time. In Chapter 6 I offer one part of an explanation of why we are disposed to think that time passes, relating to the supposedly ‘dynamic’ quality of experienced change. Deng, Lee, and Skow’s comments help me to clarify several issues, add some new thoughts, and make a new distinction that was needed, and I acknowledge, as I did in the book, that certain arguments in Chapter 6 are not conclusive; but I otherwise concede very little regarding the main claims and arguments defended in the book.     

The Effect of Group Polarization on Opposition to Donald Trump

Using focus groups, we examined support and opposition for Donald Trump prior to the 2016 presidential election. When ingroup members participate in discussion, this conversation alone typically strengthens and intensifies members’ initial attitudes. We used a pre‐ to post‐focus‐group questionnaire to assess attitudes toward Trump, his campaign, and policies. We argue that group polarization influenced people’s opinions about Trump such that attitudes became more extreme after discussion with like‐minded individuals. We report changes for Trump nonsupporters for which group polarization occurred on attitudes toward illegal immigration, political correctness, the military, women, and veterans after the group discussion. For each, level of support for Trump’s views decreased. To further explore potential psychological mechanisms associated with group polarization, we employed network science methods to examine the structure of the language associated with these issues and identify potential drivers of attitude change. Results provide some support for a common mechanism for group polarization, which may be driven by language dynamics specific to individual attitudes.     

Playing the Woman Card: Ambivalent Sexism in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Race

Late in the 2016 U.S. Presidential primary, Donald Trump attacked Hillary Clinton for playing the “woman’s card.” Theories of system justification suggest that attitudes about gender, particularly endorsement of hostile and benevolent sexism, likely shaped reactions to this campaign attack. Using a set of two studies, we find that hostile sexists exposed to the attack showed increased support for Trump and decreased support for Clinton. Benevolent sexists, however, reacted to Trump’s statements with increased support for Clinton, consistent with benevolent sexism’s focus on protecting women (Study 1). We further found that the woman card attack produced distinct emotional reactions among those with low and high levels of hostile and benevolent sexism. The attack also increased political participation among hostile sexists (Study 2). Our results offer new insights into the role of sexism in the 2016 presidential contest and further the discipline’s understanding of the gendered dimension of negative campaigning.     

The deliverance of the administrative state: deep state conspiracism,charismatic demonology,and the post-truth politics of American Christian nationalism

ABSTRACT

This article uses discourse analysis to explore the intersection of spiritual warfare demonology and Christian nationalism among Trump-supporting neo-charismatic evangelicals. Analysing public materials produced during and after the 2016 US presidential campaign, it demonstrates how demonologies operate discursively to categorise, comprehend, and contest understandings of American identity and destiny. Situating spiritual warfare demonology in relation to narratives of ‘post-truth politics’ as the destabilisation of neoliberal consensus reality, the article explores how charismatic evangelicals position Trump’s election as a divine assault on a demoniac status quo, epitomised in the conspiratorial figure of the ‘Deep State.’ Examining demonologies of the ‘state’ and ‘border’ as joint arenas of epistemic and societal contestation, the article shows how spiritual warfare discourses seek to (re)define sociocultural notions of truth and falsity and thereby (de)legitimise specific gendered, sexualised, and racialised forms of being and belonging.     

Playing Chamber Music at a Rock Festival? <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Social Construction of Reality</Emphasis> in US Sociology

Starting from the metaphor of “playing chamber music at a rock festival” used by Peter L. Berger in 1992 to describe the impact of The Social Construction of Reality on US sociology, this article works out how the book’s somewhat puzzling legacy as a bestseller and a classic with remarkably rare direct follow-ups in the US discourse can indeed be conceived. I argue that one needs to take into account the theoretical-historical context in which Berger and Luckmann developed their ideas, including the specific forms of knowledge production in US sociology at the time, the institutional background of the book’s emergence at the New School for Social Research and the author’s biographical trajectories. On this basis, on can explain why Berger and Luckmann’s reformulation of the sociology of knowledge both perfectly met the 1960s Zeitgeist (which made it a bestseller) and at the same time remained theoretically marginal.     

Did Donald Trump’s presidency reshape Americans’ prejudices?

Did the presidency of Donald Trump affect Americans’ intergroup attitudes? Converging evidence from recent experimental and longitudinal studies suggests that Trump’s political rise led his supporters to increase their reported prejudice toward traditionally minoritized racial and religious groups in the USA.     

Maneuvers in the Depths: The Politics of Identity in Anton Boisen’s Pastoral Care

This article examines Anton Boisen’s political negotiations within the identity categories of ministry and madness in the aftermath of his own repeated episodes of psychosis. In conversation with contemporary queer theorists Judith Butler, José Esteban Muñoz, and Lee Edelman, the article characterizes Boisen’s negotiations between dominant and marginalized identity spheres as a political performance of disidentification in which a subject moves and negotiates between disempowered and hegemonic social spheres, simultaneously displacing but also, as Boisen’s example demonstrates, reifying the norms of the latter. The article illustrates how Boisen sought to change many of the practices of pastoral care for those consigned to madness, while at the same time his actions also reestablished the very boundaries and exclusions he sought to displace.     

What Is It Like to Be an Alien?

This brief article is concerned with an aspect of Jonathan Glover's book, Alien Landscapes?. After reflecting a little on the book as a whole, the question that is taken up is, ‘Why might a book that seeks to help those without mental disorders understand what they are like “from the inside” be of interest to laymen and practitioners in the criminal law?’. One answer lies in part in the way that ‘what it is like from the inside’ might interact with judgements of criminal responsibility. Taking its cue from examples used by Glover the article considers, and puts pressure on, the ‘dual view’ he proposes: that when dealing with those with mental disorders we should treat them as responsible agents in the sense of not withholding from them Strawson's ‘reactive attitudes’, while nevertheless accepting that their personalities and behaviours are the results of large doses of ‘bad luck’.     

A political economy of the Poor People’s Campaign: From MLK and Polanyi to Trump

ABSTRACT

A stalemate has emerged in mainstream liberal/left responses to Trump. Many commentators prefer to see our predicament in terms of either class-based or identity politics. Vis-à-vis the influence of the Chicago school of economics and its structural adjustment schemes, we crosshatch MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign and Polanyi’s Great Transformation to envision overcoming this stalemate. King’s effort to radicalize the welfare state from below by linking struggles against poverty, racism, and imperialism shares Polanyi’s focus on the economy’s embeddedness in society. We underscore the importance of King’s and Polanyi’s visions for building a leftist coalition that does not divorce social from economic justice.     

Freud,Bion and Kant: Epistemology and anthropology in The Interpretation of Dreams

This interdisciplinary article takes a philosophical approach to The Interpretation of Dreams, connecting Freud to one of the few philosophers with whom he sometimes identified – Immanuel Kant. It aims to show that Freud's theory of dreams has more in common with Bion's later thoughts on dreaming than is usually recognized. Distinguishing, via a discussion of Kant, between the conflicting ‘epistemological’ and ‘anthropological’ aspects of The Interpretation of Dreams, it shows that one specific contradiction in the book – concerning the relation between dream‐work and waking thought – can be understood in terms of the tension between these conflicting aspects. Freud reaches the explicit conclusion that the dream‐work and waking thought differ from each other absolutely; but the implicit conclusion of The Interpretation of Dreams is quite the opposite. This article argues that the explicit conclusion is the result of the epistemological aspects of the book; the implicit conclusion, which brings Freud much closer to Bion, the result of the anthropological approach. Bringing philosophy and psychoanalysis together this paper thus argues for an interpretation of The Interpretation of Dreams that is in some ways at odds with the standard view of the book, while also suggesting that aspects of Kant's ‘anthropological’ works might legitimately be seen as a precursor of psychoanalysis.     

Mapping the Decision to Quit: A Refinement and Test of the Unfolding Model of Voluntary Turnover

We report a test of an influential theory of employee turnover: the unfolding model ( Lee & Mitchell, 1994 ; Lee, Mitchell, Holtom, McDaniel, & Hill, 1999 ). We describe and critique this classificatory model, and propose both theory‐based and empirical refinements. The two extant tests of the current version of the model have both been with accountants in the United States, so the generalisability of the model is as yet unproven. We present results of an attempt to classify 352 nurse leavers from the United Kingdom's National Health Service using the unfolding model. In contrast to the findings of Lee et al. (1999 ), the model failed to classify a substantial number of nurse leavers, and specific hypotheses derived from the model received only partial support. Classification failures were investigated using both quantitative and qualitative data. Leavers were more likely to be classified if they had no dependants and described their quit as avoidable. Although the unfolding model incorporates more kinds of turnover than traditional turnover models, such systematic classification failure casts doubt on claims that it offers a comprehensive account of turnover. We explain failures with reference to: (i) shortcomings in a key measure; (ii) the characteristics of the occupational group studied; and (iii) the extremely tight labor market for this group of leavers. Nous testons la théorie influente concernant le turnover des salariés: the unfolding model ( Lee & Mitchell, 1994 ; Lee, Mitchell, Holtom, McDaniel & Hill, 1999 ). Après avoir décrit et critiqué ce modèle de classification, nous proposons des améliorations tant au niveau théorique qu’empirique. La version actuelle du modèle a été testée à deux reprises auprès de comptables des Etats‐Unis, aussi ce modèle n’a pas pu être généralisé. Nous présentons les résultats obtenus en utilisant le “unfolding model” auprès de 352 infirmières du service de santé national du Royaume‐Uni qui sont sur le départ. Contrairement aux résultats obtenus par Lee et al. (1999 ), le modèle n’a pas permis de classer un nombre substantiel d’infirmières sur le départ et certaines hypothèses découlant de ce modèle ne reçoivent qu’une validation partielle. Ces échecs de classification ont été analysés tant quantitativement que qualitativement. Il ressort que les sujets étaient plus facilement classés si ils n’avaient aucune personne à charge et si ils décrivaient leur départ comme évitable. Bien que le “unfolding model” incorpore plus de formes de turnover que les modèles traditionnels, un échec de classification aussi systématique questionne quant à sa revendication à offrir une approche complète du turnover. Nous expliquons ces échecs par: (i) des imperfections dans la mesure principale (ii) les caractéristiques du groupe de salariés étudiés (iii) un marché du travail extrêmement difficile pour ce groupe de personnes sur le départ.     

Jung’s Axioms: An Introduction to Jung’s “Note on Number”

This article is an introduction to C. G. Jung’s handwritten note on natural numbers (in this issue), which became the basis of Marie-Louise von Franz’s book Number and Time. I present the historical background of Jung’s note and discuss part of its content using mostly Jung’s own words.     

Shame and Pastoral Care: Implications from an Asian Theological Perspective

Using the story of a Korean woman as a case study for pastoral caregivers, this article attempts to address some appropriate pastoral responses toward the “human impasse” from an Asian theological perspective. This article highlights the significance of remembrance and connection rather than repression and forgetfulness in order to bring justice to shamed persons, like this Korean woman. This article builds on Jacoby’s “social amnesia,” calls for redefining the meaning of community, and attempts to address the human predicaments such as shame experiences from an Asian perspective. In order to address pastoral responses, this article also builds upon Martin Luther King, Jr.’s concept of interrelatedness and shared destiny. It critically examines Jung Young Lee’s theology of marginality and draws the pastoral implications of this theology of marginality with respect to shame experiences. This article concludes with an Asian model of pastoral care and counseling.     

Redating Narrative Theology: A Challenge to The Conventional Chronology

This essay considers the work of G.K. Chesterton, and in particular The Everlasting Man, in relation to narrative theology. It discusses the apparent contradiction between Aidan Nichols’ judgement that this book develops a ‘Christocentric theology of history’ and Chesterton’s own assertion that its approach is ‘historical rather than theological’. It argues that Chesterton employs both natural and narrative theology in The Everlasting Man, and these two forms of theology frame a reading of the book which resolves the seeming contradiction between Nichols’ and Chesterton’s views, while also challenging the conventional chronology used in discussions of narrative theology.     

Exploring Cultural Psychology: Introduction to a Book Forum on <Emphasis Type="Italic">Towards Cultural Psychology of Religion: Principles,Approaches, Applications</Emphasis> by Jacob A. Belzen

This article introduces a book forum on Jacob A. Belzen’s book Towards Cultural Psychology of Religion: Principles, Approaches, Applications. The introduction discusses the relatively recent “turn to culture” and how it has affected the field of psychology of religion and the variety of concerns examined by the journal Pastoral Psychology.     

Subaltern agency and the problems in the project of decolonization in the study of religion and liberal secularism

ABSTRACT

Decolonization has become an important process in the present-day academia. Reviewing Jakob De Roover’s new book, this article critically analyses the problems in the methodologies of the decolonization project. The article strongly argues for the need to avoid decontexualisation of historical and contemporary developments, and to take an intersectional approach that would ensure the recognition of subaltern agency.     

Psychometric Properties of the Book Readings for An Affective Classroom Education (BRACE) Coding System

Abstract

In the present study, the relation between children’s emotion knowledge and preschool teachers’ book reading behaviors during shared book reading in the classroom was examined. A new coding system, the Book Readings for an Affective Classroom Education (BRACE), was developed to capture teachers’ macro-level book reading behaviors (i.e., dialogic reading) and micro-level use of emotion language (i.e., emotion coaching) during shared book reading. Results showed good reliability and validity of the BRACE. Further, teachers’ dialogic reading and emotion coaching behaviors during shared book reading positively predicted child emotion knowledge in Spring (T2), after controlling for children’s initial level of emotion knowledge in Fall (T1). In addition, a significant interaction between teachers’ book reading style and child emotion knowledge at T1 on emotion knowledge at T2 indicated that teachers’ effective book reading style was especially beneficial to children who had lower emotion knowledge at the beginning of the school year.     

Margaret Miles and the Platonist’s Daughter

Margaret Miles’ academic memoir Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter uses Augustine as both a guide and an interlocutor as she recounts her own odyssey of the soul. Miles, using a similar framework to that in the Confessions, makes a public account of her own private reflections on herself, her academic life, and her journey in faith. Taking up the implicit invitation to self-reflection and dialogue that this book provides, this review attempts to bring out key philosophical issues inherent in the book, including Miles’ views on education, love, the body, and God’s grace.     

Emotional Communication in the Case of Antonio

ABSTRACT

In describing her work with her traumatized patient Antonio, Dr. Jane Lewis focuses on Barthes’s (1981) notion of a photograph as having the symbolic linking function of an umbilical cord, and emphasizes the notion of the punctum, the specific personal wounding detail in an image that connects to the viewer’s experience. This article discusses these ideas, which appear mystical to Lewis, in the contexts of the theory of multiple coding and the referential process, as well as recent advances in the fields of social neuroscience and embodied communication. In the early Arousal phase of the referential process, emotion schemas associated with painful events of the past are activated for both participants, in subsymbolic, embodied form. Antonio is largely mute and frozen; Lewis also feels herself freezing and disappearing. In the Symbolizing phase, Antonio begins to connect to dreaded experience of his past, and to tell memories, fantasies and dreams. Memories and images of her past, related emotionally to Antonio’s experience, are awakened for Lewis as well. Through their embodied communication and shared imagery, the therapist’s ability to find emotional meaning for her own painful experience appears to support the patient’s beginning to provide some meaning for his pain and dread. Related observations by Bollas and Arlow, and parallels to a case reported by Ogden are discussed.