“I’m Just Who I Am”: Self-Continuity and the Dialogical Self in a Study of Migrants

Drawing on dialogical self theory, this study aimed to develop understanding of the processes of self-continuity in migrants with complex trajectories. Twelve participants of various nationalities and ages took part in qualitative interviews in the United Kingdom and the United States. An iterative, three-step analysis for multivoicedness suggested participants initially adopted stabilizing I-positions that acted as foundations for subsequent development and evolution of new selves. A clear and dynamic progression of positioning, repositioning, and innovation in the dialogical self emerged. Findings suggest that change and rupture may act as catalysts for positive development and innovation, resulting in a robust, enhanced sense of self-continuity.     

‘I am of Popper’, ‘I am of Asante’: The Polemics of Scholarship in South Africa

Studies in Philosophy and Education - In this article, I examine the state of knowledge construction within the South African academe. This, I do by looking at how issues of epistemology and...     

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.     

The ‘Scandal’ of the Lubavitch Rebbe: Messianism as a Response to Failed Prophecy

In June 1994, the Lubavitch Rebbe, believed to be the Mosiach (the Messiah) died. Counter-intuitively, this failure of prophecy gave birth to an extreme messianic movement within the group, dividing it into two antagonistic factions (messianists and anti-messianists). This article examines the Beis Menachem, a messianic group whose members believe that the Rebbe is not dead; some even believe that he is God. We argue that this strong messianic response was predictable, given the influence of four factors that prior analyses suggest are important in determining whether a group will survive the failure of a significant prophecy: (1) the ways in which the prophetic milieu is prepared, (2) the nature and extent of the preparatory activities people engaged in, (3) the nature, speed, and thoroughness of the response of group leaders to a failed prophecy, and (4) the level of social support available for those who remain faithful to a prophecy. Emphasis in this study is given to the first and fourth factor; it is argued that the diachronic study of groups like the Lubavitch provides new insights into the ideological, organisational, and situational conditions that facilitate the successful management of dissonance and thus the persistence of unusual beliefs.     

Weltanschauung as a priori: sociology of knowledge from a ‘romantic’ stance

In this paper I reconstruct the central concept of the young Lukács??s and Mannheim??s sociology of knowledge, as they present it in their writings in the early decades of the twentieth century. I argue that this concept, namely Weltanschauung, is used to refer to some conceptually unstructured totality of feelings, which they take to be a condition of possibility of intellectual production, and this understanding is contrasted to an alternative construal of the term that presents it as logically structured, quasi-theoretical background knowledge. This concept has Kantian reminiscences: it is a condition of possibility of intellectual production in general. The young Mannheim and Lukács rely on ??Weltanschauung?? so understood as a phenomenon mediating between the facts of society and individual intellectual production and reception: it is seen as being conditioned by sociological facts and therefore as a historical and sociological category through which, and therefore indirectly, society enters into intellectual production.     

‘The experiencing of experience’: a Pragmatic reassessment of Rogerian Phenomenology

This paper draws on a study that asked twenty family users about their first session of family therapy. Analyses of the interviews indicated that families entered therapy with a pre-existent knowledge about therapy, which did not always chime with those of professionals and which positioned speakers in ways which governed their expectations and perceptions of therapy. This paper, therefore, is concerned with the acquisition and deployment of knowledge: specifically, the knowledge involved in being a user of family therapy. Three key discourses were identified through this analysis: medical, counselling and consumerist. We aim to illustrate how these discourses served as a resource for members of the family in constructing therapists, therapy and themselves in relation to their experience. The examination of the rhetorical, ideological and practical effects of the positions chosen and the objects constructed, in terms of how speakers wanted to present themselves, with what enhanced or diminished status as patients, shows users actively engaging with the power of therapeutic institutions. Users’ accounts suggest that while most speakers felt anxious about the prospect of therapy, there were clear differences in overall satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the experience according to the synchrony between speakers’ construction of the therapist, and themselves as client/patients. Those who seemed to take a traditional view of therapy within a medical discourse valued therapists who offered diagnosis and a cure; those who sought and experienced a counselling relationship with the therapist found their experience to be constructive in terms of enhanced self-knowledge. We believe that the research findings discussed in this paper have implications for family therapists in accommodating to parental and child positions to maximise the effectiveness of therapy and so minimise drop-out.     

This White ‘I’: The Reciprocal Shame of Oppressor and Oppressed

Abstract

Vice’s answer to the question of this white ‘I’ who must try to live well in South Africa, configures shame, political silence and humble self-reconfiguration. I accept her insightful analysis of ‘whiteness’ in terms of the oppressor’s shame, but find that her specification of identity does not accommodate the multiplicity of privilege/oppression relations in which individuals participate. Since this implies that many South Africans, albeit unevenly, share the oppressor’s shame, her advice concerning ‘whites only’ political withdrawal seems inappropriate and curiously self-subversive. Focussing instead on her reflections concerning moral emotions in ethically-compromised selves, which should motivate self-reconfiguration, and drawing from Kristeva on ‘forgiveness’, I argue that compromised selves in privilege/oppression relations cannot reconfigure themselves independently, and should rather negotiate on-going forgiveness relationships. Further, since privileged and oppressed shoulder different but reciprocal ethical responsibilities, besides considering the privileged self who should appeal for forgiveness,¹ one must address a gap in Vice’s argument concerning the reciprocal shame of the oppressed.     

The construct of the ‘mana personality’ in Jung’s works: a historic-hermeneutic perspective. Part I

According to Jung, the ‘mana personality’ represents an archetypal phase of the individuation process of remarkable interest in psychological, hermeneutic and theoretical terms. This figure is characterized by a high initiatic potential that fosters the approximation of the consciousness of the Self. At the same time, it entails a risk of psychic inflation or of ‘similarity to God’. In this article, divided in two parts, I deal with those aspects through a reconstruction of the development of this notion within Jung’s published works, adopting a primarily chronological and, secondarily, thematic approach moving from a textual analysis of relevant passages. In this first part, I consider some passages which deal mainly with the risks of the assimilation of the unconscious in ‘La structure de l’inconscient’ (1916) that preceded the successive proper treatment of the mana personality’s notion presented, and here examined, in ‘The relations between the ego and the unconscious’ (1928). Successively, I take into consideration some further issues related to it discussed by Jung in ‘The structure of the psyche’ (1928/1931), ‘Archaic man’ (1931), and ‘Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’.     

‘Am I a Ceadas child?’: exploring the nature and experience of shame in the psychotherapy of an adolescent boy

Although shame is a central affect running through all phases of psychosexual and social development, it is usually masked by guilt and therefore it is not readily recognised, explored, and understood within the therapeutic situation. Moreover, there is a tendency to treat all shame manifestations as if they operate at the same level. The author proposes the need to distinguish between two qualitatively discrete manifestations of shame states which, albeit intertwined, operate at different levels and require different understanding and technique: a primary, unconscious kind based on psychobiological survival and triggered by a condition of psychic and physical danger, and a secondary, social shame, mainly conscious, based heavily on vision and evoked in social situations. The natural, primary form of shame becomes pathological after catastrophic chronic exposure of the primitive ego to unthinkable anxieties. Such premature rupture of primary skin containment may result in omnipotence-based pathological organisations impeding or precluding acceptance of guilt and need for reparation. Pathological primary shame predisposes the individual to states of pathological secondary shame. When initial traumatic conditions are re-activated and re-experienced in therapy, they may trigger re-enactments and, possibly, a negative therapeutic reaction. Recognising variations and mixed states of primary and secondary shame states, especially when shame is compounded with guilt, can provide guidance in the assessment of the fragility of the ego, and therefore inform our technique and the therapeutic process. This theoretical position is discussed with the help of clinical material from a twice-weekly psychotherapy of a 16-year-old boy imbued with shame compounded with guilt, related to transgenerational objectification and dehumanising experiences.     

The Incompleteness of ‘Punishment as Fair Play’: A Response to Dagger

Richard Dagger (in this issue) provides perhaps the most persuasive version of a ‘fair play’ theory of criminal punishment, grounded in an attractive liberal republican political theory. But, I argue, his version of the theory still faces serious objections: that its explanation of why some central mala in se are properly criminalised is still distorting, despite his appeal to the burdens of ‘general compliance’; and that it cannot adequately explain (as it should explain) the differential seriousness and wrongfulness of different kinds of crime.

The Vicious Circle Theorem – a Graph-Theoretical Analysis of Dialectical Structures

This article sets up a graph-theoretical framework for argumentation-analysis (dialectical analysis) which expands classical argument-analysis. Within this framework, a main theorem on the existence of inconsistencies in debates is stated and proved: the vicious circle theorem. Subsequently, two corollaries which generalize the main theorem are derived. Finally, a brief outlook is given on further expansions and possible applications of the developed framework.     

The History of Science as a Graveyard of Theories: A Philosophers’ Myth?

According to the antirealist argument known as the pessimistic induction, the history of science is a graveyard of dead scientific theories and abandoned theoretical posits. Support for this pessimistic picture of the history of science usually comes from a few case histories, such as the demise of the phlogiston theory and the abandonment of caloric as the substance of heat. In this article, I wish to take a new approach to examining the ‘history of science as a graveyard of theories’ picture. Using JSTOR Data for Research and Springer Exemplar, I present new lines of evidence that are at odds with this pessimistic picture of the history of science. When rigorously tested against the historical record of science, I submit, the pessimistic picture of the history of science as a graveyard of dead theories and abandoned posits may turn out to be no more than a philosophers’ myth.     

The ‘inseparable bond between cure and research’: clinical case study as a method of psychoanalytic inquiry

Abstract

Since Freud's own time, there has been great deal of debate about the most appropriate research methodology for investigating psychoanalytic psychotherapy [Fonagy, Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 29 (2): 129 – 136, 2003 Fonagy, P. 2003. ‘The research agenda: the vital need for empirical research in child psychotherapy’. Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 29(2): 129–136. [Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]; Rustin, Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 29 (2): 137–145, 2003 Rustin, M. 2003. ‘Research in the consulting room’. Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 29(2): 137–145. [Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]]. The single case study, which has a long tradition both within child psychotherapy and the wider research field, has been widely criticised as an approach to research, even while its contribution to clinical practice, the development of new ideas and teaching have been acknowledged. After reviewing the history of case study as a research method, this paper argues that there are a broad range of approaches to the study of the single case, each of which may be appropriate depending on the particular research question. Each of these approaches, however, must respond to the three perceived weaknesses of the clinical case study as a research method: the ‘data problem’, the ‘data analysis problem’ and the ‘generalisability problem’. This paper outlines the nature of these criticisms and, using many examples of actual research projects, suggests various ways in which the criticisms can be addressed, in order for the single case study to re-gain its place at the heart of psychoanalytic research.