‘Beyond the oedipal complex’: Freud and lacan revisited

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to explore the position that the mother occupies in both Freud's and Lacan's accounts of oedipalization. Both authors' work will be addressed with reference to contemporary feminist critiques of their accounts. The aim will be to query the belief that the mother must be repudiated in order for the child to move into culture. It will be suggested that both Lacan's and Freud's accounts may ironically perpetuate both the ‘interminable’ nature of analysis and a relationship with the maternal in which the mother will continue to haunt, beckon and terrify until some attempt is made at reparation.     

Cushing’s disease and melancholia

Striking similarities exist in the endocrinology of Cushing's disease and melancholic depression.Laboratory abnormalities, which have been found in both, include raised urinary,plasma and salivary cortisol, non-suppression of cortisol in the dexamethasone suppression test and adrenocorticotrophin (ACTH) hypersecretion. The hypercortisolism can be so severe in melancholic depression that it is difficult to distinguish from Cushing's disease and has been described as a "pseudo-Cushing's" state. Cerebrospinal fluid corticotrophin-releasing hormone (CRH) levels have been found to be lower in patients with Cushing's disease than in depressed subjects. Dynamic endocrine tests may help to distinguish between the two disorders.An exaggerated response to synacthen has been found in both but a reduced ACTH response to CRH occurs in depression, unlike those with Cushing's disease who show ACTH hyper-responsiveness. Other tests, which may help to distinguish between the two disorders,include the dexamethasone-CRH test, the naloxone test, the insulin-induced hypoglycemia test and the desmopressin stimulation test. Similarities in psychiatric symptoms have been recognised for many years. More recently, the physical complications of melancholic depression have been noted. These include osteoporosis, an increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease, hypertension, a redistribution of fat to intra abdominal sites and insulin resistance. Cushing's disease shares these physical complications and we propose that the common underlying factor is excessive plasma glucocorticoids. The increasing recognition of the physical complications and the increased morbidity and mortality in those who suffer from depression underscores the necessity for early detection and treatment of this illness and screening for undetected physical complications.     

Representing diabetes: ‘Brightside’ and ‘chaos’ in autobiography

This paper examines six autobiographical sources written by people with type 1 diabetes. In seeking to improve the understanding of diabetic lifeworlds; some of the autobiographies present heroic stories of ‘overcoming’ diabetes while others present a more ‘chaotic’ narrative. Regardless of their form, all the autobiographies highlight how the everyday problems and concerns associated with diabetes can be hidden and silenced. Therefore, I ask the question of how to use autobiographies as sources of evidence, being aware of the power constructs that may have directed their form. Despite this question, I argue that autobiographies remain crucial sources for exploring the experience of everyday life and much of the silencing in the texts reflects spatial and emotional challenges faced by the authors. I also consider the limitations of representation in the autobiographies calling for an understanding that the experience of diabetes carries with it feelings, emotions and affects that are non-representable and so never entirely knowable. Thus, this paper builds on recent geographical research on emotion and ‘contested’ illnesses, especially those that are not obviously visible or are easily hidden.     

The logic of ‘being informed’ revisited and revised

The logic of ‘being informed’ gives a formal analysis of a cognitive state that does not coincide with either belief, or knowledge. To Floridi, who first proposed the formal analysis, the latter is supported by the fact that unlike knowledge or belief, being informed is a factive, but not a reflective state. This paper takes a closer look at the formal analysis itself, provides a pure and an applied semantics for the logic of being informed, and tries to find out to what extent the formal analysis can contribute to an information-based epistemology.     

Youth Mental Illness and the Family: Parents’ Loss and Grief

Parents and family members whose adult child or relative has a mental illness endure significant losses, to which they respond with grief. Such grief may negatively affect family members’ physical and psychological health and also the relationship with their relative. Yet, research in this field is sparse. Very few studies have examined parents’ loss and grief in the context of the patient being a child or teen. It is not clear the extent to which parents’ loss and grief in response to their child or adolescent’s mental illness is similar or different to the accounts of older parents and family members caring for an adult relative with major psychopathology (e.g., Schizophrenia, Bipolar disorder). Parental loss and grief is not often addressed in child and adolescent mental health services’ provision of care; alarmingly, little is known about how best to support parents who access these services. The present study aimed to bridge this knowledge gap and identify the therapeutic needs of this younger parent population. Comprehensive interviews were conducted with 14 parents and one custodial grandparent of a youth aged 18 years or younger who was currently attending a child and adolescent mental health service. An inductive thematic analysis identified six themes; parents’ narrative of finding out, profound and pervasive loss, complex grief, waning support, the challenges of caregiving and a call for assistance. It can be inferred from these results that youth mental illness can constitute a source of loss and grief for parents. Participants’ loss and grief was largely consistent with the experience of families caring for an adult relative with major psychopathology. Opportunities for mental health practitioners to support families’ loss and grief were identified. Further studies are needed to enhance understanding of this complex and, to a large extent, ignored familial experience. Results do underscore the importance of clinicians acknowledging parents’ loss and grief and working directly with this experience over the course of youths’ treatment, perhaps in conjunction with family psychoeducation approaches.     

‘Now’ and ‘Then’ in Tense Logic

According to Hans Kamp and Frank Vlach, the two-dimensional tense operators “now” and “then” are ineliminable in quantified tense logic. This is often adduced as an argument against tense logic, and in favor of an extensional account that makes use of explicit quantification over times. The aim of this paper is to defend tense logic against this attack. It shows that “now” and “then” are eliminable in quantified tense logic, provided we endow it with enough quantificational structure. The operators might not be redundant in some other systems of tense logic, but this merely indicates a lack of quantificational resources and does not show any deep-seated inability of tense logic to express claims about time. The paper closes with a brief discussion of the modal analogue of this issue, which concerns the role of the actuality operator in quantified modal logic.     

‘Othering’ and ‘selving’ in therapeutic dialogue

In this article we consider therapeutic conversations about suffering and sexual identity through an ethical and practical lens we refer to as ‘othering’ and ‘selving’. The ethical lens is shaped by recent developments in discursive theory and approaches to therapy. Our practical lens draws from research by discourse analysts showing how conversational practices feature in consequential ways in delicate discussions such as those about suffering and sexual identity. After helping readers understand these lenses we then use them in examining actual discussions about identity and suffering. We conclude with some general ideas and reflective questions for therapists wishing to extend these kinds of sensitivities and conversational practices in their work with clients.     

Darwinian ‘blind’ hypothesis formation revisited

Over the last four decades arguments for and against the claim that creative hypothesis formation is based on Darwinian ‘blind’ variation have been put forward. This paper offers a new and systematic route through this long-lasting debate. It distinguishes between undirected, random, and unjustified variation, to prevent widespread confusions regarding the meaning of undirected variation. These misunderstandings concern Lamarckism, equiprobability, developmental constraints, and creative hypothesis formation. The paper then introduces and develops the standard critique that creative hypothesis formation is guided rather than blind, integrating developments from contemporary research on creativity. On that basis, I discuss three compatibility arguments that have been used to answer the critique. These arguments do not deny guided variation but insist that an important analogy exists nonetheless. These compatibility arguments all fail, even though they do so for different reasons: trivialisation, conceptual confusion, and lack of evidence respectively. Revisiting the debate in this manner not only allows us to see where exactly a ‘Darwinian’ account of creative hypothesis formation goes wrong, but also to see that the debate is not about factual issues, but about the interpretation of these factual issues in Darwinian terms.     

Behind Our I’s: Grief and Loss in the Poetry of Li-Young Lee

This article uses Kenneth R. Mitchell and Herbert Anderson’s (1983) six modalities of grieving as presented in Donald Capps’ (1993) The Poet’s Gift to bring a pastoral theological perspective to bear on Li-Young Lee’s Behind My Eyes (2008), a collection of thirty-nine poems. In specifically focusing on Lee’s poem “To Hold,” it makes the case for a seventh grieving modality, that of preemptive loss. Employing Mitchell and Anderson’s distinction between faithful and unfaithful grieving, it argues that preemptive loss is an unfaithful form or expression of grieving, and notes the irony and sadness in this regard, as this unfaithful response to grief is informed by what is widely considered to be a faithful Judeo–Christian perspective, rooted in the inescapable sinfulness of humanity.     

‘Calling’ and ‘Training’: Role Innovation and Religious De-differentiation in Commercialised Indonesian Islam

Abstract

This article explores parallels between emergent Islamic popular culture in the commercial arena in Indonesia and popular religion propagated through the mass media in Europe and North America. Focusing on two emergent types of emicly distinguished but eticly overlapping lay religious roles, that of the da’i (lay preacher) and the ‘trainer’, it shows how borrowing from globally disseminated genres of secular culture by Islamic lay leaders in the commercial arena in Indonesia partially blurs the boundaries between religiously marked and unmarked communications, despite the popularity there of Islamicly marked dress styles and consumables. This is suggestive of a similar, if partial, de-differentiation of the religious and other communication spheres in Indonesia such as Hubert Knoblauch found in Europe. However, as in his reading of European popular religion, it does not further imply Weberian ‘disenchantment’, since leading exemplars of Indonesian Islamic commercialised ‘preaching’ and ‘training’, such as those examined in case material presented here, still focus consumers on the transcendent, while those proselytisers yet work to overcome the compartmentalisation of Indonesian selves in their differentiated modern society.     

Limits on bilingualism revisited: Stress ‘deafness’ in simultaneous French–Spanish bilinguals

We probed simultaneous French–Spanish bilinguals for the perception of Spanish lexical stress using three tasks, two short-term memory encoding tasks and a speeded lexical decision. In all three tasks, the performance of the group of simultaneous bilinguals was intermediate between that of native speakers of Spanish on the one hand and French late learners of Spanish on the other hand. Using a composite stress ‘deafness’ index measure computed over the results of the three tasks, we found that the performance of the simultaneous bilinguals is best fitted by a bimodal distribution that corresponds to a mixture of the performance distributions of the two control groups. Correlation analyses showed that the variables explaining language dominance are linked to early language exposure. These findings are discussed in light of theories of language processing in bilinguals.     

Defining ‘Dead’ in Terms of ‘Lives’ and ‘Dies’

What is it for a thing to be dead? Fred Feldman holds, correctly in my view, that a definition of ‘dead’ should leave open both (1) the possibility of things that go directly from being dead to being alive, and (2) the possibility of things that go directly from being alive to being neither alive nor dead, but merely in suspended animation. But if this is right, then surely such a definition should also leave open the possibility of things that go directly from being dead to being neither alive nor dead, but merely in suspended animation. I show that Feldman’s own definition of ‘dead’ (in terms of ‘lives’ and ‘dies’) does not leave this possibility open. I propose a new definition that does.     

Being ‘Spiritual’ and Being ‘Religious’ in Europe: Diverging Life Orientations

The present study shows that being ‘spiritual’ and being ‘religious’ are becoming different life orientations for a large part of the population. As far as we know, for the first time, a sample from an European country shows that these orientations are reflected in two coherent clusters of beliefs, experiences, and practices of what we call ‘new spirituality’ on the one hand and ‘traditional, church-related religion’ on the other hand. In addition, it appears that ‘only spiritual’ (and not ‘religious’) people and ‘only religious’ (and not ‘spiritual’) people have less ‘intensive’ spiritual/religious lives than people who describe themselves as ‘both spiritual and religious’. The ‘both’ category is not homogenous, probably as a result of the different associations which its members have of the conceptions of ‘spiritual’ and ‘religious’. The people in this category can be sub-divided in two sub-groups which show different profiles.     

‘Place’, ‘space’ and ‘dialogue’: conceptualising dialogic spaciality in English faith-based universities

This article proposes a conceptualisation of dialogic spaciality, and advances our understandings of the dynamic interplay of dialogic space (where meaningful conversations take place) and place (a geographic location) and the influence these have on academic life. The conceptualisation is developed from a qualitative study which focused on the relationship of dialogue, space and intellectual encounters in faith-based higher education settings in England. The article highlights the significance of dialogue in these institutions because of the emphasis traditionally placed on conversation in the Christian university tradition. It concludes that dialogic spaciality may counter elements of non-reflexive and performative ethos as something that is transferable to other universities.     

‘Necessity’ and ‘provability’ in the later wittgenstein

I present a new interpretation of Wittgenstein's later philosophy of logic and mathematics. This interpretation, like others, emphasizes Wittgenstein's attempt to reconcile platonistic and constructivistic approaches. But, unlike other interpretations, mine explains that attempt in terms of Wittgenstein's position about the relations between our concepts of necessity and provability. If what I say here is correct, then we can rescue Wittgenstein from the charge of naive relativism. For his relativism extends only to provability, and not to necessity.     

The ‘I’ and the ‘Me’ in self-referential awareness: a neurocognitive hypothesis

The nature of the ‘self’ and self-referential awareness has been one of the most debated issues in philosophy, psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Understanding the neurocognitive bases of self-related representation and processing is also crucial to research on the neural correlates of consciousness. The distinction between an ‘I’, corresponding to a subjective sense of the self as a thinker and causal agent, and a ‘Me’, as the objective sense of the self with the unique and identifiable features constituting one’s self-image or self-concept, suggested by William James, has been re-elaborated by authors from different theoretical perspectives. In this article, empirical studies and theories about the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’ in cognition and self-related awareness are reviewed, including the relationships between self and perception, self and memory, the development of the self, self-referential stimulus processing, as well as related neuroimaging studies. Subsequently, the relations between self and different aspects of consciousness are considered. On the basis of the reviewed literature and with reference to Block’s distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness, a neurocognitive hypothesis is formulated about ‘I’-related and ‘Me’-related self-referential awareness. This hypothesis is extended to metacognitive awareness and a form of non-transitive consciousness, characteristic of meditation experiences and studies, with particular reference to the notion of mindfulness and other Buddhist constructs.     

Black-white bias in ‘cultural’ and ‘noncultural’ test items

The original data of McGurk's classic study of black-white differences on cultural and noncultural tests is re-analyzed at the item level to investigate the role of possible item biases that would cause the noncultural items to be relatively more difficult than the cultural items for blacks than for whites. The evidence indicates that McGurk's results cannot be explained in terms of item biases, but appear to be the result of the noncultural items requiring more sheer reasoning ability than the cultural items, which depend more on acquired information.