The Trauma of Poverty as Social Identity

Poverty is more than an income level; it is a socially constructed identity that leaves scars of psychological impoverishment. Using autoethnography, I tell my story about growing up poor, climbing out of poverty as an adult, and falling back into poverty during marriage. I explore the unforgettable traumas of poverty, including empty cupboards, social rejection, humiliation, homelessness, and loneliness. Through the lens of Goffman’s frame analysis theory, I cope with my memories of hardship and stigmatized identity.     

Employment as a Poverty Trap

Using an experiment conducted with 384 young Israelis, the authors find that if young people are actually working as unskilled workers, the status quo bias increases the premium that they require for giving up their jobs and seeking more education. This excess premium may make some individuals choose to remain employed as unskilled workers rather than pursue higher education. Such a decision may trap them in a life of poverty. The authors maintain that their results prompt a reexamination of the widely held belief that early employment is an advantage for young people.     

The Poverty of Analysis

I argue that philosophy is like science in three interesting and non-obvious ways. First, the claims made by philosophy are synthetic, not analytic: philosophical claims, just like scientific claims, are not guaranteed by the structure of the concepts they involve. Second, philosophical knowledge is a posteriori, not a priori: the claims established by philosophers depend on the same kind of empirical support as scientific theories. And finally, the central questions of philosophy concern actuality rather than necessity: philosophy is primarily aimed at understanding the actual world studied by science, not some further realm of metaphysical modality.     

The Poverty of Privilege:

Despite the seeming freedom from many of the economic and other pressures encumbering women in more palpably disadvantaged subgroups, women of the upper classes are faced with considerable numbers of psychological problems. Prevalent among the presenting problems include depression and other disorders related to powerlessness, relationship problems, alcohol and substance abuse, and eating disorders. While increasing numbers of women in lower socioeconomic groups work outside the home, the upper class wife represents the last vestige of the classic patriarchal family: her raison d'etre is to assist her husband and children in perpetuating the power and privilege of her family and class, often leaving her with nothing that is truly her own. She is most likely to present in therapy when widowed or confronted with "losing it all," finding herself with few marketable skills or even basic life competencies. Therapy issues include how to help her develop greater self-acceptance and begin to identify and pursue some of her own dreams; countertranferential issues, such as envy or impatience, may also need to be addressed. The conclusion is reached that ultimately gender transcends class as the major determinant of the quality of upper class women's lives, and that it is crucial that any therapy geared toward helping them become happier and more effective be informed by a strong feminist awareness.     

Memory as a Property of Nature

Prerequisite to memory is a past distinct from present. Because wave evolution is both continuous and time-reversible, the undisturbed quantum system lacks a distinct past and therefore the possibility of memory. With the quantum transition, a reversibly evolving superposition of values yields to an irreversible emergence of definite values in a distinct and transient moment of time. The succession of such moments generates an irretrievable past and thus the possibility of memory. Bohm’s notion of implicate and explicate order provides a conceptual basis for memory as a general feature of nature akin to gravity and electromagnetism. I propose that natural memory is an outcome of the continuity of implicate time in the context of discontinuous explicate time. Among the ramifications of natural memory are that laws of nature can propagate through time much like habits and that personal memory does not require neural information storage.     

The Psychiatrization of Poverty: Rethinking the Mental Health–Poverty Nexus

The positive association between ‘mental illness’ and poverty is one of the most well established in psychiatric epidemiology. Yet, there is little conclusive evidence about the nature of this relationship. Generally, explanations revolve around the idea of a vicious cycle, where poverty may cause mental ill health, and mental ill health may lead to poverty. Problematically, much of the literature overlooks the historical, social, political, and cultural trajectories of constructions of both poverty and ‘mental illness’. Laudable attempts to explore the social determinants of mental health sometimes take recourse to using and reifying psychiatric diagnostic categories that individualize distress and work to psychiatrically reconfigure ‘symptoms’ of oppression, poverty, and inequality as ‘symptoms’ of ‘mental illness’. This raises the paradoxical issue that the very tools that are used to research the relationship between poverty and mental health may prevent recognition of the complexity of that relationship. Looking at the mental health–poverty nexus through a lens of psychiatrization (intersecting with medicalization, pathologization, and psychologization), this paper recognizes the need for radically different tools to trace the messiness of the multiple relationships between poverty and distress. It also implies radically different interventions into mental health and poverty that recognize the landscapes in which lived realities of poverty are embedded, the political economy of psychiatric diagnostic and prescribing practices, and ultimately to address the systemic causes of poverty and inequality.     

Narrative Unity as a Condition of Personhood

Abstract: In this article I critically discuss a claim made by several writers in philosophy and the social sciences that for an individual to count as a person, a single personality, or the subject of a life, the experiences of the subject in question must take a narrative form. I argue that narrativity is a misleading and, in some ways of understanding it, implausible condition of what it is that adds unity to personhood and personality. I pursue this critique by considering canonical accounts of narrativity in philosophy and literary studies. I consider those connections between events that must hold for the sequence to be considered a narrative: causal, teleological, and thematic connections. I argue that for each of these, the condition that experiential sequences (for a given subject) must have this structure is empty: any life sequence that is reflected upon in an interpretive spirit can meet it. What the condition of narrativity amounts to, then, is the more basic requirement that the person must be able to look upon the factors and events of her life with a certain interpretive reflection, whether or not those factors and events have any particular narrative unity in a traditional sense.     

《哲学的贫困》中的价值形式问题

马克思对价值形式的初步系统阐释可以追溯到《哲学的贫困》,虽然只是论战性的概述。作为观念论哲学的推崇者,蒲鲁东醉心发明各种科学公式,用建议意见自由意志等观念间的推演来解释价值形式的二重性与矛盾性,诉诸虚构的历史来描述所谓构成价值的基本内涵、决定因素、形成过程及现实应用。马克思从批判这些变戏法出发,揭示了构成价值的实质与矛盾,指出它无非是相对价值的另类表达且漠视建立在阶级对抗基础上的经济事实,故而不能适用于解释金银成为货币的经济原因、证实凡劳动必有剩余的定理。马克思此时的价值形式理论看似尚未超过李嘉图价值理论,实则在方法上尤其是尝试解决剩余价值问题方面实现了飞跃。相形之下,蒲鲁东的构成价值论虽由于旨在解决工人的贫困状况而具有部分进步意义,却终究无法摆脱沦为工人遭受现代奴役之公式从而被历史遗弃的命运。     

贫困对个体执行功能的影响

已有研究发现,贫困会对个体的执行功能产生消极的影响,这种影响贯穿于个体婴儿期、童年期以及成年期。贫困会影响与执行功能相关的前额叶的结构（如较小的灰质体积）。贫困个体与非贫困个体对额叶区域资源的调用方式不同,贫困个体需要使用额外的补偿资源来监测和抑制对干扰物的反应。贫困会通过压力、认知剥夺以及父母养育等因素直接或间接的影响个体的执行功能。今后该领域的研究应关注贫困影响执行功能的调节变量（如自我肯定、自我调节）,建立贫困影响执行功能的综合模型（如考虑贫困经历时间等）,立足执行功能的可塑性,通过认知干预提高贫困个体的执行功能。     

The Nature of Motivation

Summary

Studies of physical proximity as an index of attraction frequently report sex differences, and data concerning proximity to the opposite sex are somewhat ambiguous. In the present study it was hypothesized that both males and females place themselves in closer proximity to a liked than to a disliked member of the opposite sex and that the arousal of negative affect is inversely related to physical proximity. Attraction to an opposite sex stranger was manipulated by means of false attitude information. A chisquare analysis indicated a highly significant relationship between attitude similarity and seating distance for both sexes. Analysis of variance supported the proposed relationship between seating distance and self-reported feelings of anxiety, hostility, and depression.