APPROACHES TO SYMBOL AND SYMPTOM IN BODILY SPACE-TIME

The subject signifies in and through his/her body. He/she does it through culturally patterned bodily symbol and symptom. Symptom is evidence of a crack or break in the integral symbolic interweave, i.e., a break in the relationships that simultaneously mediate and differentiate between the subject's body and his/her being in the social, cultural, and natural world. The study of this symbolic interweave requires a multidisciplinary approach. First, approaches to the body considered as product stress the social and the cultural. Second, experience- and subject-related research in Gestalt and psychoanalytic theories and in phenomenology shift the stress to the experience of the body, i.e., to the lived body. Third, divergent semiotic-generative approaches (language-derived nominalistic and hermeneutic investigations, metaphoric-constructivist and praxiological approaches) consider aspects of the body drama, i.e., of the body's creative, signifying and symbolizing capacity seen in its own right. These approaches and their recent interdisciplinary developments hold the key to the elucidation of fundamental aspects of time and space that inform the socio-cultural body symbolism and symptom formation. They also make possible innovative cross-cultural investigations of the ways in which a culture may stimulate its bearers to choose a particular form of somatization, or abreaction.     

CONSCIOUSNESS IN EXTREMITY: DISCOURSE ON MADNESS AMONG THE TABWA OF ZAIRE

The madman makes it possible for us to grasp the radical potential of consciousness at its limits. He contradicts the other person's discursive thinking towards the virtually inarticulable or unthought self. The Lakeside Tabwa of Shaba, Zaire, apprehend madness in three rather different, discursive domains. There is, firstly, wazimu, or its ‘mature’, incurable form, kizenzezia, considered as a fact of social life. It is seen as inverting the norms or functions of personhood and undoing those of mentality. It breaks down reciprocity, it is the negative function of ‘Death’. Secondly, it is in the prodromal illness, mubulibuli, and certain related emotion states, that madness appears as the artefact of another's malicious and intrusive ‘Desire’: the madman is said to have ‘closed anger’ in his heart alienating him from ongoing experience and interaction. Finally, in the diviner, the ‘otherness’ of gaze and speech is transformed into the normative power of clairvoyance bringing about its own logic and historicity. Here, the inversion of personhood becomes an emblem of insight and ‘Law’, but at the risk of insanity. The ethnographic encounter with the very otherness of the thinking of madness and of another culture toward the unthought itself is, in a sense, epistemogenic.     

MOTILITY,AGGRESSION, AND THE BODILY I: AN INTERPRETATION OF WINNICOTT

Among the central ideas associated with the name of Winnicott, scant mention is made of motility. This is largely attributable to Winnicott himself, who never thematized motility and never wrote a paper specifically devoted to the topic. This paper suggests both that the idea of motility is nonetheless of central significance in Winnicott's thought, and that motility is of central importance in the development and constitution of the bodily I. In elaborating both these suggestions, the paper gives particular attention to the connections between motility, continuity, aggression, and creativity in Winnicott's work.     

言语理解中的知觉符号表征与命题符号表征

采用移动窗口技术探讨言语理解中信息表征的方式。被试为华南师范大学本科生96名。实验材料按照探测图画中物体的形状跟先前阅读的句子中描述的物体的隐含形状的关系总体上分为两类,一类是匹配版本,一类是不匹配版本。采用相关样本t检验分别对两种条件下图画再认的反应时间和正确率进行统计分析。实验1中被试读完句子以后马上进行图画探测任务,结果表明这时被试头脑中进行的是知觉符号表征。实验2中被试的阅读任务难度增大,结果表明这时被试头脑中进行的是命题符号表征。实验3中被试阅读的关键信息进入长时记忆以后再进行图画探测任务,结果表明这时被试头脑中进行的也是命题符号表征。总的实验结果表明言语理解中既存在知觉符号表征,也存在命题符号表征,知觉符号表征是信息表征的一种早期状态,人类头脑中最终的信息表征形式主要是命题符号表征。     

THE SYMBOLIC BODY AND THE SYMBOLIC SYMPTOM

The differential analysis of the symbolic expression and of the symbolic symptom enlightens the relation between body, language and symbol. The displacement and condensation, which explain the symptom, involve a bodily perception of a symbolic nature. Consequently, Freud tends to interpret the symbol according to the symptom formation, as opposed to J. Lacan, who equates displacement with metonymy, and condensation with metaphor. The author, in analyzing the similarities and differences, interprets the symptom as a desymbolization, which presupposes a presymbolic perception, which phenomenology has thematized. However, it is language which structures this perception as symbolic, and which introduces the symbolic finality; which the psychological dynamisms do not have by their own selves.     

BODILY REFORM AS HISTORICAL PRACTICE: THE SEMANTICS OF RESISTANCE IN MODERN SOUTH AFRICA

This paper seeks to explore why rituals of bodily reform play so prominent a role in movements of social reconstruction, particularly in collective action which never attains the level of explicit historical discourse. I argue that the crucial signifying role of the body here derives from its position as primary mediator between the self and the sociocultural context. In the case of a protest movement in modern South Africa, I show how the semantics of bodily affliction and reform permit participants to address and redress the historical roots of their conflict-laden experience. Here, sociocultural contradiction takes tangible shape in the ‘natural’ contradictions of the human body, and reconstitution proceeds by alike drawing upon media from the body's seemingly inexhaustible stock. But in this, the body is more than mere ‘natural alibi’ or set of unmotivated signs; it provides implements determined by an inherent, natural logic which engages in what is a reciprocally determining relationship with the semantic logic of specific sociohistorical projects.     

SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE: THE CASE OF CREATIONISM

Abstract. The paper reviews criteria which have been used to distinguish science from nonscience and from pseudo–science, and it examines the extent to which they can usefully be applied to "creation science." These criteria do not force a clear decision, especially as creation science resembles important eighteenth–century forms of orthodox science. Nevertheless, the proponents of creation science may be accused of pious fraud in failing to concede in their political battles that their "science" is tentative and tendentious and will continue to be so while it remains archaic and poorly integrated into the rest of science.     

A PHILOSOPHY OF RISK ASSESSMENT AND THE LAW: A CASE STUDY OF THE ROLE OF PHILOSOPHY IN PUBLIC POLICY

Philosophical Studies -     

SCIENCE AND SEMANTICS: THE CASE OF VAGUENESS AND SUPERVALUATION*

Abstract: It is widely assumed that the methods and results of science have no place among the data to which our semantics of vague predicates must answer. This despite the fact that it is well known that such prototypical vague predicates as ‘is bald’ play a central role in scientific research (e.g. the research that established Rogaine as a treatment for baldness). I argue here that the assumption is false and costly: in particular, I argue one cannot accept either supervaluationist semantics, or the criticism of that semantics offered by Fodor and Lepore, without having to abandon accepted, and unexceptionable, scientific methodology.     

EFFECTS OF EXPECTATIONS AND BODILY SENSATIONS ON SELF-REPORTS OF PREMENSTRUAL SYMPTOMS

Two experiments examined expectations and bodily sensations in premenstrual symptom reports. Women took a fictitious test that indicated they were either premenstrual or intermenstrual. In Experiment 1, 48 women were studied during their premenstrual phase. In Experiment 2, 82 women were studied during either their premenstrual or intermenstrual phase. Individual differences in retrospective premenstrual distess were assessed prior to the experiments. Both experiments revealed that the higher the woman's retrospective reports of premenstrual distress, the more symptoms she reported in the lab during her premenstrual phase, regardless of what the test indicated. However, women who were told they were premenstrual reported greater symptoms than women who were told they were intermenstrual. In summary, although expectations affect women's symptom reports regardless of their actual phase and history of reported symptoms, premenstrual symptom reports cannot be dismissed as simply expectations, because some women do experience greater symptoms as they approach menstruation.     

THE CASE OF THE BULIMIC MAFIA AND THE TOOLS OF THEIR TRADE

Following a discussion of some psychoanalytic approaches to bulimia nervosa (and in particular its multi‐impulsive sub‐type), the place of pathological organizations of the personality within such pathologies and aspects of their NHS treatment, the paper focuses on the omnipotent management of separation difficulties in such eating‐disordered women. The role of shame and the ego‐ideal is discussed, as are their by‐products: secrecy and a preoccupation with the gaze and iconic figures, as seen in the general body‐ego pathology and over‐valuation of thinness in these patients. Illustrating these ideas with material drawn from the early stages of a woman seen in twice‐weekly NHS psychotherapy, the author discusses the literal and metaphorical roles of a box or case and its manic contents, which the patient employed to support her retreat. These secreted items (the box and its magazines, razors, laxatives and paracetamol tablets) constituted the concrete tools of the trade of her Mafia‐like pathological organization. The need to give appropriate clinical attention to such details is stressed and aspects of technique are discussed, especially the importance of creating and sustaining an appropriate therapeutic ‘play‐space’.