Relationships as dialogues

This article discusses five interrelated conceptions of dialogue in the works of Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin that ground relational dialectics theory: (a) dialogue as constitutive process, (b) dialogue as dialectical flux, (c) dialogue as aesthetic moment, (d) dialogue as utterance, and (e) dialogue as critical sensibility. The author's recent research in relational dialectics is discussed, as are directions for future research. Relational dialectics is positioned as a sensitizing theory different from systems theory and other dialectically oriented approaches.     

Challenges in a Dialectical Conception of Career Evolution

This article seeks to clarify the differences between traditional and dialectical perspectives on career development. The application of a dialectical model to career evolution is based on the assumption that an individual's work experiences and other life experiences exert an ongoing, reciprocal effect on career development.     

Creativity and dialectical phenomena From dialectical edge to dialectical space1

The seeds of creativity have the potential to germinate and flourish within the rich, ambiguous and unsettling tapestry of the core dialectical tensions related to the central organizing dialectic, life and death, generated in the patient‐analyst relating. The author introduces the concept of the ‘dialectical edge’ and describes it as the pivotal point in the dialectical struggle within these core dialectical dilemmas. This is a fluid, emotionally evocative threshold, where there is maximum potential for change, as well as for homeostatic stagnation. Drawing on Winnicott, the author illustrates how the presence of an edge within these dialectical dilemmas has the potential to open up into a creative, reflective space. He suggests that this, however, will depend on the therapist's capacity to contain/hold at this edge the arousing and intense affects‐such as anxiety, dread, excitement and passion‐that are inevitably generated at these pivotal relational moments. This will determine whether the patient will move forwards into the light of a creative, reflective, dialectical space, or backwards into collapsed, non‐reflective darkness, where fluid oscillation is transformed into rigid ossification. The author uses a clinical example to illustrate these dialectical phenomena, with a special focus on two clinically relevant dialectics, i.e. ‘ritual versus spontaneity’ and ‘closeness versus separateness’.     

A life not worth living?

The work of Dan Brock and Helga Kuhse is typical of the current stream of thought rejecting the validity of sanctity of life appeals to instill objective inviolable worth in human life regardless of the quality of life of the patient. The context of a person's life is supremely important. In their systems life can have high value, yet the value of life can be outweighed by the force of other disvalues. The notion of quality of life has increasingly come to signify the measurement of the worth of a person's life itself. Having a life equals a personal life. Any objectivity to life resides in 'personal', 'biographical', or 'creative' life, not mere biological life. Personal life represents the minimal threshold for any objective worth. In responding to this challenge, John Finnis has argued extensively that life is an intrinsic good--a basic human good. Following from our grasp of human life as a basic incommensurable good, it cannot be practically reasonable both to affirm that (a) 'human life is a basic human good', and (b) that 'human life qua human life can be intentionally acted against to its destruction'. Yet, if the good of human life can be considered self-evident, the self-evidence of the basic human good qua good does not mean that dialectical reasoning cannot be engaged in to indirectly support the practical reasonableness of respecting the good of human life in the deliberative choices that persons make concerning their actions. It is to the use of such dialectical reasoning, supportive of the status of human life as such a basic human good, that the article is primarily concerned to draw out and articulate.     

What does the character of medicine as a social practice imply for professional conscientious objection?

The dispute over professional conscientious objection presumes a picture of medicine as a practice governed by rules. This rule-based conception of medical practice is identifiable with John Rawls’s conception of social practices. This conception does not capture the character of medical practice as experienced by practitioners, for whom it is a sensibility or “form of life” rather than rules. Moreover, the sensibility of medical practice as experienced by physicians is at best neutral, and at worst hostile, to the demands of those who would override physician conscientious objection to the provision of currently contested services. That being so, calls for overriding physician conscientious objection are much more demanding of the medical profession than they appear in light of Rawls’s view. As such overriding may entail the forcible transformation of medicine’s form of life, the author contends that it would be more prudent to provide contested services by circumventing the medical profession than by compelling it.     

COMING TO JUDGMENT: METHODOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ECCLESIOLOGY,ETHNOGRAPHY AND POLITICAL THEORY

This essay theoretically frames the inter‐relationship between ecclesial and political life and suggests how the ethnographic study of this intersection might generate theological conceptualisations of both. It argues there is a dialectical relationship between conceptualisations of ecclesial and political life and that their proper study requires attention to practice in order to generate judgments on both. The key issue here is the kind of rationality from which judgments on practice are derived. A case is made for practical reason as having priority over theoretical reason when thinking about politics and the need to move beyond interpretation to judgment.     

Counselling as a culture of healing

While clearly upholding the value of the helping professions, this article presents an analysis of alleged shortcomings of present forms of counselling and therapy. Arguments are presented for a New Look in counselling. Counselling, it is claimed, would benefit from redefinition as a culture of healing. It should be conceptualised as a cultural practice rather than as a scientific undertaking. Drawing on new intellectual resources would help re-align counselling epistemologically and practically in order to achieve sensibility in the face of social and historical transformations which have taken place in the second half of this century and which continue radically to alter both social life and our ways of understanding social life.     

绝经妇女激素替代治疗的回顾与思考

随着人们平均寿命的延长,对生活质量要求的不断提高,绝经后的问题也日益受到全社会的广泛关注,绝经后骨质疏松和冠心病、阿尔茨海默病等的增加引起人们对激素替代治疗(HRT)的兴趣,其旨在改善妇女生活质量。但随着研究的深入,其所引发的问题也不断涌现。HRT对绝经后妇女的生活质量究竟是否有总体益处已成为目前关注的焦点。自从1963年Wilson倡导HRT以来,HRT的发展走过了一段曲折之路,对HRT的认识,经历了几十年反复的过程,体现了辩证唯物主义认识论和矛盾论的观点。     

Poverty, Patriotism, and National Covenant: Jonathan Edwards and Public Life

In this essay I address three ways in which Edwards can inform Christian understanding of public life. First I show how Edwards provides both philosophical and theological rationales for social engagement and thereby resists the separation of religion from public life, and use his consideration of poverty as an illustration. Part II examines Edwards's dialectical treatment of patriotism, demonstrating both its importance to the Christian life and its susceptibility to deceptive accommodation to culture. Finally, in Part III I discuss Edwards's use of "national covenant," which despite its temptation to chauvinism Edwards used to undermine national pride. In the conclusion I assess what we can use from Edwards for contemporary Christian understandings of public life.     

A critical review of postfeminist sensibility

This paper critically reviews how feminist academic psychologists, social scientists, and media scholars have developed Rosalind Gill's generative construct “postfeminist sensibility.” We describe the key themes of postfeminist sensibility, a noncoherent set of ideas about femininity, embodiment, and empowerment circulating across a range of media. Ideas that inform women's sense of self, making postfeminist sensibility an important object for psychological study. We then consider research that drew on postfeminist sensibility, focusing on new sexual subjectivities, which developed analysis of agency, empowerment, and the possibilities and limitations in taking up new subjectivities associated with postfeminism, as well as who could take up these subjectivities. We show how such work identified complexities and contradictions in postfeminist sensibility and offer suggestions for how this work might be further developed, particularly by intersectionality‐informed research. In the final section, we address contemporary debates surrounding postfeminism. We consider challenges and counterarguments to postfeminist sensibility as a useful term for describing contemporary patterns of sense‐making on gender, making the case for continuing research on postfeminist sensibility in the areas of digital cultures, a transformative imperative that includes the mind as well as the body, transnational postfeminism, and new forms of feminist activism. We conclude that such work would benefit from considering the ways that different technologies mediate the ideas and practices associated with postfeminist sensibility.     

Toward a Theoretically Based Measurement Model of the Good Life

A theoretically based conceptualization of the good life should differentiate 4 dimensions—the hedonist good life, the dialectical good life, the humanist good life, and the formalist good life. These 4 dimensions incorporate previous fragmentary measures, such as life satisfaction, depression, work alienation, and marital satisfaction, to produce an integrative view. In the present study, 276 Hong Kong Chinese husbands and wives responded to a survey of 13 indicators for these 4 good life dimensions. Confirmatory hierarchical factor analysis showed that these indicators identified the 4 dimensions of the good life, which in turn converged to identify a second-order factor of the overall good life. The model demonstrates discriminant validity in that the first-order factors had high loadings on the overall good life factor despite being linked by a social desirability factor. Analysis further showed that the second-order factor model applied equally well to husbands and wives. Thus, the conceptualization appears to be theoretically and empirically adequate in incorporating previous conceptualizations of the good life.     

Three Fictional Deaths Compared with the Near-Death Experience

This study looks at three popular works of short fiction, by Leo Tolstoy, Ambrose Bierce, and Katherine Anne Porter, in which the main character dies at the end. Some similarities between these deaths and recent near-death experience (NDE) accounts are that the characters experience various kinds of distancing from their bodies, light and darkness play a role, and two of the stories include a final life review. The principal contrast is that dying in these stories is a lonely and mostly grim business, unsupported by a process that transcends the individual or by progress toward an afterlife or otherworld. The comparison helps define the modern sensibility about dying that is part of the cultural context for interest in NDEs.     

A Priestly Approach to Environmental Theology: Learning to Receive and Give Again the Gifts of Creation

Abstract : A priestly sensibility is here presented as a way to characterize humanity's place in creation. Sacrifice, asceticism, and gratitude are described as three distinct and practical modalities of a priestly life that contribute to the care and celebration of creation. While a priestly understanding is often associated with Orthodox environmental theology, it has the potential to inform environmental theology broadly construed.     

Review Essay: Constructivism with a Human Face

Irwin Hoffman's book Ritual and Spontaneity includes, but goes well beyond, his series of seminal papers—written over the past several decades—developing a psychoanalytic, constructivist perspective. A new, existential framework depicts what Hoffman calls the “psychobiological bedrock” at the core of the human process of constructing meaning—the lifelong effort to create a livable, subjective world in face of our ever present sense of loss, suffering, and, ultimately, mortality.

This review describes Hoffman's encompassing, existential perspective and discusses how, within this framework, he uses his dialectical sensibility to frame our understanding of both parenting and analysis as “semisacred” activities. The “dialectic of ritual and spontaneity”—the vital clash between disciplined adherence to the analytic frame and personally expressive deviations from it—represents the creative tension between the “magical” dimension of analytic authority and the healing influence of a genuinely expressive human relationship. Hoffman's perspective on the self-interested, “dark side” of the analytic relationship is compared with Winnicott's views on the vital, therapeutic role of “hate” and the paradoxical process by which the patient comes to “use” the analyst.

Unlike most postmodernist “constructivists,” Hoffman openly reveals his underlying belief in certain “transcultural, transhistorical universals”—his “psychobiological bedrock.” In acknowledging these “essentials” (assumptions about human nature) that in some form are integral, yet often hidden, elements of any system of thought, Hoffman saves his own dialectical constructivism from falling into dichotomous (constructivist vs. essentialist) thinking.     

Kant on space,time, and respect for the moral law as analogous formal elements of sensibility

To advance a successful reading of Kant's theory of motivation, his interpreter must have a carefully developed position on the relation between our rational and sensible capacities of mind. Unfortunately, many of Kant's commentators hold an untenably dualistic conception, understanding reason and sensibility to be necessarily conflicting aspects of human nature that saddle Kant with a rigoristic and fundamentally divided moral psychology. Against these interpreters, I argue for a reading that maintains a unified conception, claiming that we must think of reason and sensibility as interdependent capacities, which stand to one another as form to matter. Our sensible nature thus does not stand opposed to reason; its fundamental character is determined by reason's activity. I take Kant's account of moral motivation and the feeling of respect to represent the lynchpin of this unified account. Against interpreters who would emphasize either the intellectual or affective nature of respect, I claim that it should be understood as the formal element of moral sensibility, the result of practical reason determining the capacity to feel and fundamentally transforming its character. To make this argument, I draw on Kant's account of sensibility in the Critique of Pure Reason, claiming that space, time, and respect for the moral law are analogous formal elements of sensibility.     

Toward a Psychology of Resistance

Resistance is all around us in contemporary life. It is an everyday phenomenon of personal and cultural life, as the Chaudhary et al. (2017) volume establishes with theoretical analyses and empirical examples from diverse cultural contexts. Resistance functions in the dynamics of person-by-culture encounters when one party takes an opposing position. With the purpose of working towards a unified approach to resistance, the authors in this volume lay down the foundations for a psychology of resistance as an everyday phenomenon. As a basis for analyzing the role of resistance in the dialectical processes of change, the volume presents resistance as: personal and social, oppositional, intentional and future-oriented, transformational and developmental. We see different positions opening up a debate about whether resistance is a particular, intentional and oppositional phenomenon, or is the basic process of all dialectical transformational change. Further resistance to either position is consistent with moving forward in the development of a psychology of resistance.