Politics on the Couch? Psychotherapy and Society—Some Possibilities and Some Limitations

The ideas and practices of psychotherapy, together with fresh thinking from many other sources, can help to revitalize Western politics which seem broken and moribund. The author describes various professional experiences of his own at the interface of politics and psychotherapy. These include consulting with mainstream and activist politicians and groupings. He discusses how politics in the West is changing in the general direction of what he calls “transformative politics.” He also asks if psychotherapists can make a difference in the political world today, explaining that, though enthusiastic about the prospect, he is also skeptical about it because the record of psychotherapists' involvement in politics is not very good. The paper includes an experiential and personally oriented section (“The Inner Politician”) that looks at how the political self is formed in culture, family, and the inner world. The notion of differing political styles as a source of conflict is explained and explored. The author concludes with some reflections on the relations between psychotherapy, politics, and spirituality.     

A lost horizon: the experience of an other and school bullying

To date, research on bullying has largely employed empirical methodologies, including quantitative and qualitative approaches. Through this research we have come to understand bullying as both a dyadic and peer group phenomenon, primarily situated in the heads (thinking) of those involved, or in a lack of skill or expertise, or in the delinquency of a bully who needs to be reformed. This research has largely directed its strategies toward problem students using individual and peer group approaches. And yet school bullying continues to be a crucial educational issue affecting millions of students each year. In this project I introduce a missing philosophical perspective. Analyzing the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer I am led to conclude that typical anti-bullying strategies at times simply train bullies to be better at bullying (i.e., learning to bully more covertly, more expertly so as to inflict the same devastation without adult detection). Gadamer invites us to think about bullying in new ways. While certainly involving the thinking and skills of the bully and the victim, Gadamer contends that bullying does not fundamentally result from a problem within the participants, but is fostered by certain spaces between them; terrains that cultivate specific experiences of an "other". Generally, this project stems from an interest in the ways that domination develops in this "space between". Specifically in this paper I ask: What is the nature of "hermeneutic" experience as conceptualized by Gadamer? What kinds of experiences of an other does bullying exemplify? What kinds of experience of an other do non-bullying relations exemplify and what kinds of relational spaces foster such experience? This paper opens up significant new territory for anti-bullying work, expanding our focus to include the space between students which fosters certain inter-personal experiences - experiences situated in domination and stymied growth or, alternatively, experiences of reciprocity which open the possibility of human growth and transformation.     

A Feminist Ethic and the New Romanticism Mothering as a Model of Moral Relations

This paper claims that recent attempts to draw on the maternal experiences of women in order to articulate an ethic of care and compassion is a new romanticism. Like earlier romantic views, it is both attractive and potentially dangerous. The paper examines the basic claims of this new romanticism in order to identify both its strengths and weaknesses. I conclude that there are at least two versions of this new romanticism, one that relies primarily on the experiences of child-bearing in grounding” an ethic of care and compassion, and a second that relies primarily on child-rearing. I suggest that the former version of the new romanticism is deeply flawed be-cause such a view ought to be unacceptable to women and will be inaccessible to men.     

A politics of affect: Re/assembling relations of class and race at the museum

This article takes as its focus a politics of affect and its potentially transformative effects. Drawing on feminist new materialism and the process philosophy of Deleuze, I map moments in which this politics is enacted as school children encounter museum exhibits designed to address issues of class and race. Taking affect to be a matter of the capacity of bodies to affect and be affected, I attend to how the body's power of acting is increased or diminished through these encounters. Affect emerges as central to negotiations around issues relating to class and race, with some assemblages produced being particularly able to effect changes in capacities. Politics presents as a process of affective encounter through which dominant cultural norms of class and race can be contested and their exclusions ‘undone’. The argument is made that a politics of affect has the potential to unsettle normative power relations and address issues of social inequality and do so in an affirmative way. And, that attending to affect extends identity-based framings of class and race by bringing the constitutive role and contribution of the material, the micropolitical and the radically relational into view.     

The traumatic roots of containment: the evolution of Bion's metapsychology

W. R. Bion wrote repeatedly about his World War I experiences as a tank officer, thus engaging in historicizing a traumatic emotional experience. A close reading of the many layers in these writings suggests that the war experiences influenced the metapsychology he created. The author argues that haunting questions regarding the ability of the mind to survive trauma led Bion to elaborate on the process of containing emotional experience, and hence to address the lack of an intricate theory of thinking in psychoanalytic metapsychology and to offer a vision of a mind struggling to survive, culminating in the growth of a postmodern consciousness.     

Cocreated Idealization in the Winnicott/Khan Analysis: Commentary on Paper by Joyce Slochower

Joyce Slochower's paper applies relational thinking in a new conceptualization of idealization and denigration, which she sees as cocreated. Building on a thorough review of the analytic literature on the clinical experience of idealization, she suggests that idealization, helpful at first, often leads to therapeutic failure. She utilizes historical material about Donald Winnicott and his analyses of Masud Khan and Harry Guntrip to open a space for discussion of a previously unexplored topic, the idealization of the patient by the analyst. Slochower suggests that Winnicott's personal vulnerability to experiences of idealization contributed to failure in his analysis of Khan and to less severe problems in the Guntrip analysis. I focus on the Khan analysis and suggest that the problem was not the idealization, which may have been inevitable, but Winnicott's apparent failure to understand and make use of it. I also suggest that, with the very same understanding, the analytic community in general would benefit from thinking about the community's idealization of Winnicott.     

Bion’s discovery of alpha function: Thinking under fire on the battlefield and in the consulting room

This paper has traced Bion’s discovery of alpha function and its subsequent elaboration. His traumatic experiences as a young tank commander in World War I (overlaid on, and intertwined with, childhood conflicts) gave him firsthand exposure to very painful emotions that tested his capacity to manage. Later, in the 1950s, after his analysis with Melanie Klein and marriage to Francesca Bion, he undertook the analysis of psychotic patients and learned how they disassembled their ability to know reality as a defense against unbearable emotional truths in their lives. This led Bion to identify an aspect of dreaming that was necessary in order for reality experience to be given personal meaning so that one may learn from experience. Simultaneous with working out this new theory of dreaming, Bion also revisited his World War I experiences that had remained undigested and all these elements coalesced into a selected fact – his discovery of alpha function. In subsequent writings, Bion explored the constituent factors of alpha function, including the container/contained relationship, the PS?D balance, reverie, tolerated doubt and other factors which I have termed the ‘Constellation for Thinking’.     

Unity,Objectivity, and the Passivity of Experience

In the section ‘Unity and Objectivity’ of The Bounds of Sense, P. F. Strawson argues for the thesis that unity of consciousness requires experience of an objective world. My aim in this essay is to evaluate this claim. In the first and second parts of the essay, I explicate Strawson's thesis, reconstruct his argument, and identify the point at which the argument fails. Strawson's discussion nevertheless raises an important question: are there ways in which we must think of our experiences if we are to self‐ascribe them? In the third part of the essay, I use Kant's remarks concerning the passivity of experience to suggest one answer to this question: in self‐ascribing experiences, we must be capable of thinking of them as passive to their objects. This can be used to provide an alternative route from unity to objectivity.     

Ideology, Social Ethos, and the Financial Crisis

The crisis of 2008?C2009 has been viewed primarily as a financial one, which has spilled over into the economy more generally. I want to argue that there is a much deeper crisis, of which the present one is a result. The deeper crisis is political: more specifically, it is a crisis in the ideology and social ethos of the American people. I refer to what has happened to the thinking of United States citizens since the Second World War, and the dangers that that transformation entails for world peace and cooperation??let alone the creation of an economic regime in which deep financial crises do not occur. Short of a change in the ideology of a many of its citizens, I do not believe the United States can succeed in preventing a repeat performance, perhaps many encores, which become increasingly severe.     

COGNITIVE PENETRATION,THE DOWNGRADE PRINCIPLE,AND EXTENDED COGNITION

It has been argued that just as, say, prejudice or wishful thinking can generate ill‐founded beliefs, the same is true of experiences. The idea is that the etiology of cognitively penetrated experiences can downgrade their justificatory force. This view, known as the Downgrade Principle, seems to be compatible with both internalist and externalist conceptions of epistemic justification. An assessment of the credentials of the Downgrade Principle is particularly important in view of the fact that not all cases of cognitive penetration are epistemically malignant. There are good and bad cases of cognitive penetration. I argue that a proper assessment of the Downgrade Principle will have to address two fundamental questions. I identify two general ways of responding to these questions and show why they fail. It will be maintained that an explanationist conception of justification has a better chance of accounting for the distinction between good and bad cases of cognitive penetration. The Downgrade Principle is then discussed in the context of the extended cognition thesis (ECT). In particular, I look at the sensorimotor theory of perception, as a way of broadening the scope of (ECT) to include conscious perceptual experience, that sees senses as ways of exploring the environment mediated by different patterns of sensorimotor contingency. I suggest possible ways in which one could distinguish between good and bad cases of cognitive penetration on such a view compatible with the explanationist view of epistemic justification.     

Coyote Politics: Trickster Tales and Feminist Futures

This essay is a first attempt at thinking through the ways in which Native American Coyote stories can illuminate options for lesbian and feminist politics. I follow the metaphors of trickery and shape-shifting common to the stories and recommend the laughter they evoke as we engage in feminist politics and philosophy.     

Belonging,desire, and queer Iranian diasporic politics

Recent approaches to the study of queer migration politics and diaspora hold significant potential in advancing the study of the geographies of migration. Most notably, they can help illuminate the impossible positions that migrants often occupy; challenge diasporic norms governing cultural authenticity; destabilize conventional understandings of gender, nation, and home; and situate diasporic experiences within present and future possibilities for new ways of expressing intimacy and kinship beyond the limited scope of nationality and citizenship. In this paper, I will argue for a queer intervention on migration studies that critically expands geographic approaches to migration by denaturalizing and complicating approaches to understanding the emotional diasporic experiences of belonging and home. I will think through the usefulness of such approaches in my own ongoing research on debates concerning Iranian diasporic identities and communities in Iranian diasporic cinema. In analyzing two recent films, I argue for the tremendous creative potential of diasporic filmmaking in imagining complex spaces of home and belonging that otherwise seem impossible. Ultimately, I see queer approaches to migration politics and diaspora as having significant creative, critical, and positive potential to understanding how migrants placed in impossible situations create new lives for themselves.     

The Role of Virtue in Xunzi’s 荀子 Political Philosophy

Although there has been a resurgence of interest in virtue ethics, there has been little work done on how this translates into the political sphere. This essay demonstrates that the Confucian thinker Xunzi offers a model of virtue politics that is both interesting in its own right and potentially useful for scholars attempting to develop virtue ethics into virtue politics more generally. I present Xunzi’s version of virtue politics and discuss challenges to this version of virtue politics that are raised by the Legalist thinker Han Fei. I show that not only is Xunzi’s virtue politics capable of surviving the challenges raised by his contemporary, he offers an account that is in many ways both attractive and plausible, one that may usefully be brought into conversation with contemporary visions of virtue politics.     

Representationalism,perceptual distortion and the limits of phenomenal concepts

This paper replies to objections from perceptual distortion (blur, perspective, double vision, etc.) against the representationalist thesis that the phenomenal characters of experiences supervene on their intentional contents. It has been argued that some pairs of distorted and undistorted experiences share contents without sharing phenomenal characters, which is incompatible with the supervenience thesis. In reply, I suggest that such cases are not counterexamples to the representationalist thesis because the contents of distorted experiences are always impoverished in some way compared to those of normal experiences. This can be shown by considering limit cases of perceptual distortion, for example, maximally blurry experiences, which manifestly lack details present in clear experiences. I argue that since there is no reasonable way to draw the line between distorted experiences that have degraded content and distorted experiences that do not, we should allow that an increase in distortion is always accompanied by a degradation in content. I also discuss the prospects for a positive account of the contents specific to distorted experiences. I argue that the prospects for such an account are dim, but that this is due to limitations of our phenomenal concepts, not to the falsity of the representationalist thesis.     

Pentecostals: The Power of the Powerless

Many researchers interpret Pentecostalism in terms of external factors such as European and North American history or economics. In this article Pentecostalism is examined from below, through qualitative interviews with women living in poverty in Santiago, Chile. The analysis shows how Pentecostalism led to a new theology where the believer became the subject of her own life. Social ascent was made through ecstatic experiences of the spirit in a caring community which directed the individual towards “a female ethos.” This subjective change affected social changes in Chile under dictatorship but not in state politics because parts of the Pentecostal hierarchy collaborated with Pinochet.     

Pentecostals: The Power of the Powerless

Many researchers interpret Pentecostalism in terms of external factors such as European and North American history or economics. In this article Pentecostalism is examined from below, through qualitative interviews with women living in poverty in Santiago, Chile. The analysis shows how Pentecostalism led to a new theology where the believer became the subject of her own life. Social ascent was made through ecstatic experiences of the spirit in a caring community which directed the individual towards "a female ethos." This subjective change affected social changes in Chile under dictatorship but not in state politics because parts of the Pentecostal hierarchy collaborated with Pinochet.     

Synapses,Schizophrenia, and Civilization: What Made Homo Sapient?

Progress in technology has allowed dynamic research on the development of the human brain that has revolutionized concepts. Particularly, the notions of plasticity, neuronal selection, and the effects of afferent stimuli have entered into thinking about brain development. Here I focus on development from the age of four years to early adulthood, during which a 30 percent reduction in some brain synapses occurs that is out of proportion to changes in neuronal numbers. This corresponds temporally with changes in normal child behavior from the loose‐associative, almost schizoid, thinking and art of the four‐year‐old to the more trained, or disciplined, or acculturated—and restrained—personality of the young adult. I propose that the synaptic changes can best be thought of as a winnowing process likely subject to environmental influences. Acquisition of language and the ability to link linguistic cognition to the plastic development of the brain provide a potentially powerful means of explaining the evolutionally explosive development of human cognition and culture. Schizophrenia, a disease that can be envisioned as representing a derangement of synaptic maturation, may provide an entry into the search for genes controlling the processes mediating the unprecedented development of Homo sapiens over the past 40,000 to 70,000 years. The recently completed mapping of the genome of the chimpanzee provides a new frame of reference that may speed the search.     

Reflections on intersections between cognitive and social psychology: A personal exploration

I appreciate the opportunity offered by the editor to reflect on the relationship between cognitive and social psychology. This topic has interested me my entire professional life, because I was admitted to graduate school to study social psychology and then eventually migrated to cognitive psychology. The organization of this paper is as follows: I first relate my (somewhat puzzling) personal experiences that led me to wonder about relations between cognitive and social psychology. I suggest that, for many topics, the placement of a topic of study in one field or the other is arbitrary. Next I selectively review some common historical influences on the development of both fields, ones that have made them similar. Both grew from common seeds, which include Gestalt psychology as it became applied to a wider array of topics, experimental psychologists becoming interested in attitude change during and after World War II, and Bartlett's famous book on Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Next I review some research from my lab that picked up themes from Bartlett's work and that, in some aspects, combines cognitive and social approaches. I also discuss the issue of memory conformity or the social contagion of memory, and conclude with thoughts about how social and cognitive psychologists might collaborate on an exciting new arena, creating empirical studies of collective memory. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A critical analysis of recent work on empowerment: implications for gender

A flurry of publications on empowerment by institutions such as the World Bank that emerged from about 2000–2005 was followed by critiques and then a seeming lull in the popularity of and work on empowerment. However, the concept has reappeared recently in what I take to be an important new development that highlights the relational feature of empowerment. In this paper, I begin with the capabilities approach as delineated by Amartya Sen and, specifically, his application of it to gender. This shapes the background against which I highlight how recent work on empowerment by Jay Drydyk, the World Development Report 2012, Gender Equality and Development, and Patti Petesch utilizes but also departs from Sen. I then argue that insights from this recent research can be developed further through a feminist relational framework. With its focus on relationships, relational theory can better capture possibilities for empowering women in and through an analysis of the relationships they are in.     

The emotions least relevant to politics? Queering autonomous activism

Studies of emotion and activism have often attempted to uncover ‘the emotions most relevant to politics’ (Goodwin et al., 2001). This suggests that only certain feelings are productive for activism, while other emotions have less relevance for activist theory and practice. In this paper I ask if the notion of politically ‘relevant’ emotions helps perpetuate a distinction between what is considered political and what is not. This paper builds upon a case study in which I interviewed self-identified queer-activists about their experiences of autonomous activism. These interviews reveal how the everyday emotions surrounding the ‘personal’ politics of sexuality/intimacy are often seen as either less important, a distraction from, or entirely irrelevant to ‘real’ political issues. Ultimately, I want to challenge attempts to neatly separate our intimate lives from the public sphere of activism. I argue that it can never just be a matter of politics and emotion, but also the politics of emotion (Ahmed, 2004). Therefore we should not just assume that emotions matter for resistance - without first realizing the importance of resisting these hierarchies of emotion.