A nutritionist and an educator in professional horseracing: using reflection to create ‘My process’

The present paper provides the reflective accounts of a practitioner as both a lecturer in further and higher education, and as a performance nutritionist within professional horseracing. Adopting a first-person writing style and through the use of creative non-fictional anecdotes, I share critical accounts ‘in-action’ that shaped my initial teaching philosophy and my introduction to horseracing. These shared events culminate in me questioning my initial approach to performance nutrition within the harsh and challenging sport of horseracing, and despite being contrasting vocations, how ideologies from education can be adopted into the practice of nutrition. I close by reflecting upon my reflections and my initial trepidations, however, go on to conclude that engaging in these processes acted as a tool to think critically, self-assess and develop my own practices.     

Redeeming the lost voice of the ancestors

The Holocaust of the Jews in World War II involved not only the murder of 6 million Jews but also the traumatic destruction and wipe-out of whole communities, with their rich culture and tradition which had existed for centuries. In places where no one survived, it was almost impossible to reconstruct the collective memory of those communities. The voice of the ancestors was lost. As a daughter of Holocaust survivors, I have always felt the strong presence of the loss, not only of the murdered family members but also of the ancient colourful world of Eastern European Jews. I have always felt compelled to link back to that lost world. In the past three years, my journey to the pre-war past has become more intense. This article describes the double role of my journey: it is both an attempt to reconstruct, redeem and preserve the memory of the lost ancestors, and a personal journey to the echoes of my ancestors' voices within my soul.     

From canon to context

This article traces the development of my own scholarly work on Paul from the individualism of “justification by faith” as the theological canon during my student period, to studies of Paul within his historical context and his efforts to unite Jews and non-Jews. The changes in my own studies took place within the larger shift in New Testament studies from a German, Protestant hegemony to an American, non-confessional scene. The historical-critical method was supplemented with other methods, illustrated here by studies of honour and shame societies. In conclusion, I outline how these changes have influenced my own teaching of Paul, as a contextual theologian.     

What's Possible? What Matters? Reply to Commentaries

The three discussants agree that a definition of psychoanalysis tied to session frequency is problematic and needs to change. Yet none supports my recommendation to redefine the practice of psychoanalysis in terms of the practitioner's training. This prompted me to look more closely at my proposal and push my thinking further. I argue that psychoanalysis, like many other professions, needs to define its practice as the application of its complex and evolving knowledge and skill base, grounded in its unique field of inquiry. Although there are individual exceptions, the inculcation of this knowledge and skill base is generally best accomplished through psychoanalytic training. This assertion, however, rests on the premise that our training curricula keep pace with our rapidly evolving field of inquiry and knowledge. To further clarify my vision I examine the nature of psychoanalytic expertise. I suggest that such expertise amounts to the inculcation and integration of a large number of psychoanalytic frames of reference. I contend further that the nature of contemporary psychoanalytic theories is such that important psychoanalytic frames of reference are proliferating more rapidly than in the past, that the relationships among them are becoming more complex, and that consequently the application of psychoanalytic theory to practice is also becoming more complex. Psychoanalytic training programs need to recognize this expanding complexity and revise curricula and pedagogic methods on an ongoing basis to reflect this evolution within our field.     

Post Christian pastoral care: the wisdom of not knowing

Emergent religious pluralism leads many of us to reflect on pastoral care practices that have evolved mostly within the Judeo Christian tradition. This article makes public my reflections and offers ideas for a ministry of curiosity that is more conversant with an increasingly Post Christian society.     

Reflections on stimulus control

The topic of stimulus control is too broad and complex to be traceable here. It would probably take a two-semester course to cover just the highlights of that field's evolution. The more restricted topic of equivalence relations has itself become so broad that even an introductory summary requires more time than we have available. An examination of relations between equivalence and the more general topic of stimulus control, however, may reveal characteristics of both the larger and the more limited field that have not been generally discussed. Consideration of these features may in turn foster future developments within each area. I speak, of course, about aspects of stimulus control that my own experiences have made salient to me; others would surely emphasize different characteristics of the field. It is my hope that cooperative interactions among researchers and theorists who approach stimulus control from different directions will become more common than is currently typical.     

The essence of being stuck: It takes one to think you know one or work on the therapist's own family

Abstract

I would like to tell you about certain strategies I used to change my relationship with my family of origin, particularly my mother and dad. I did this in order to become more me, more differentiated from them. In doing so, paradoxically, I established a closer, more rewarding relationship with each of them and with my own children, especially my second child, Mark, and a more effective relationship with families in treatment.     

Making Space for a Dialogical Notion of Religious Subjects: A Critical Discussion From the Perspective of Postsecularity and Religious Change in the West

In this article I address some topical themes from the ongoing discussion on contemporary religious change in the West and how it poses conceptual challenges to the study of religion. The academic discussion on religious change is vast and my observations are, of course, by necessity limited to my particular interest and argument in this article. On the one hand, I draw on some of the literature that has evolved within and around the concept of postsecularity and, on the other, on more general literature on contemporary religious change. Based on some selected observations, I underline the need to critically rethink how we conceptualize both religion and religious subjects. In my view, current research fosters a greater attentiveness of complexity with regard to religion, but simultaneously it requires us to take seriously a dialogical notion of religious subjects that provides a conceptual account of a subject constituted by being located within and emerging through ongoing social process. This dialogical notion provides a better tool for how current social and cultural reconfigurations of religion are simultaneously played out as a diversity of identities that challenge received categories, such as the religious and the secular.     

Getting in Tune: Songs of My Experience in Psychoanalytic Training

I use the metaphor of music and dance to explore cognitive, affective, and liminal elements of my training experiences in the New York University Post doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. I highlight experiences with supervisors and patients, which shaped the development of my identity as an analyst, and the emergence of my analytic voice within a relational paradigm.     

A report on myself: the science and/or art of assessment

Disregarding my empirically documented warnings to generations of students, I am ultimately succumbing to my own eisegesis. In this article, I proffer a personal exemplar of low- and high-inference interpretation of significant persons, events, and products during my professional lifetime. These selected bits of data are contained in childhood and educational experiences, three chronological periods, three 1949 Thematic Apperception Test (Murray, 1943) stories, and bits of several poems. These data coalesce in an interpretive statement, analogous to an assessment report but ultimately something more and something less than an optimal report. As an interpretive schema, a hierarchal model of clinical inference illustrates and exemplifies employment of distinct levels to increase the reliability of high-inference interpretation. While inadequately equipped as a psychologist assessor for such self-scrutiny, this narrative may provide a case history exemplar of a process that has relevance for myself, for the Society of Personality Assessment, and for understanding personality within a human science aegis.     

Enigmatic Masculinities: A Reply to Swartz and Grossmark

In reply to Swartz and Grossmark’s commentaries on my paper about encounters with the masculine, I elaborate from a reflexive stance on the notions of context, positionality, and warrants to speak in my writing and the responses. My account is part of an unfolding exploration of how I stand as a gendered being within psychotherapeutic praxis, and in line with that, how what was intimated in my original paper points to Laplanche’s theorizing on the sexual and to his notion of enigmatic seduction in ongoing gendering processes. The reply finds itself haunted by the abject and its position within the postcolony, and with a desire for what is an illusory transcendence.     

RESPONSE TO MY CRITICS: THE LIFE OF CHRISTIAN RACIAL FORMS IN MODERN SCIENCE

In what follows, I first deal with some of the major philosophical objections raised against my claim that Christian thought has given us racial science. Then, I take on points of dispute surrounding my use of Hans Blumenberg's notion of reoccupation to explain the recurrence of Christian forms within modern scientific thinking. Finally, I address some historiographic issues surrounding my assessment of Johann Blumenbach and the origins of racial science.     

‘The friend of my enemy is my enemy’: Modeling triadic internation relationships

The evolution of internation relationships is studied by means of a mathematical model based on a popular rule of triadic interaction: the friend of my friend is my friend, the friend of my enemy is my enemy, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the enemy of my friend is my enemy. The rule is shown to lead to the formation and preservation of unipolar and bipolar configurations of nations, with the strengths of relationships, both friendly and conflictual, intensifying through time. These results confirm speculations originally made in static, graph theoretic studies of the balancing of relationships within individuals, small groups and systems of nations.This research was funded by a grant from the World Society Foundation, Zurich, Switzerland.     

Freudian Intersubjectivity: Commentary on Paper by Julie Gerhardt and Annie Sweetnam

In response to Gerhardt and Sweetnam's interesting critique of aspects of my work, I focus on what we may think of as the intersubjective within the Freudian frame of reference, which in my view is the particular contribution of psychoanalysis to the problematic of the intersubjective.     

COMPARATIVE ETHICS,IDEOLOGIES, AND CRITICAL THOUGHT1

After the publication of my book and various articles about comparative religious ethics, obstacles in the field's further development seemed to mount as swiftly as practical issues seemed to trumpet the need for global ethics more loudly. Driven by impatience, I wondered if I were fiddling in unending discussion while the planet burned. As others persevered and evolved productively in addressing developmental issues in the field directly, I began to work through the lens of a less direct, but complementary, perspective: ideologies and critical thought. The following essay seeks to connect my parallel approach to ongoing obstacles and solutions within the prolific development of comparative religious ethics, especially its urgent pursuit of common moral grounds sufficient to support peaceful coexistence and living.     

How do my students think about ME as an English-language teacher?

The concepts of student-centered classrooms, empowering students with communicative competences to be able to voice their ideas in the surrounding community, powerless and marginalized strata, are conspicuous and prevalent in recent research articles. Teachers are well-acquainted with pertinent underpinnings and theories of teaching methodologies; and some research is also conducted to see how those learned theories in pre-service and in-service programs are implemented in their real-life classrooms. But, the teachers’ reflection on implementation of their teaching practices in classrooms is still a venue which needs further investigation within an international scope. Here, my own teaching practice within a period of two semesters is reflected through the 61 male and female students’ sharp and meticulous eyes, which is reflected in their written responses to the posed question at the end of their final exams, and some of my notes from their comments in each of their classes. The Constant Comparative method was then used to unearth students’ comments and feedback on both my personality as an English-language teacher, and my teaching practice respectively.     

Person and consciousness.

My interlocuter is Locke with his reduction of person to personal consciousness. This reduction is a main reason preventing people from acknowledging the personhood of the earliest human embryo, which lacks all personal consciousness. I show that Catholic Christians who live the sacramental life of the Church have reason to think that they are, as persons, vastly more than what they experience themselves to be, for they believe that the sacraments work effects in them as persons that can only be believed but that cannot be experienced within themselves in this life. I also show that Christians and non-Christians alike have an experience of moral good and evil in themselves that implies that they are, as moral persons, far more than they find in their conscious self-presence. It is, therefore, natural to think that if my being a person so far exceeds my consciousness, I may well have once existed as person even before the awakening of consciousness.     

Ongoing Cross-National Identity Transformation: Living on the Queer Japan-U.S. Transnational Borderland

In this essay, I analyze my border performances of becoming and being as an embodied text to explicate, elucidate, and elaborate culturally hybrid practices of intercultural transition. I pay close attention to unpack the material realities of my hybridity as I continue to live within and beyond queer (or non-heteronormative) Japan–US transnational borderland. In so doing, I aim to illustrate (dis)connections between my identity negotiation processes and the multiple significances of queer Asian/American male identity construction to disrupt the heteronormative modes of thinking about intercultural transitions.