Is Color-dispositionalism Nasty and Unecological?

This article is a brief presentation and defense of response-dispositionalist intentionalism against a family of objections. The view claims that for a surface to have an objective stable color is to have a disposition to cause in normal observers a response, namely, intentional phenomenal-color experience. The objections, raised recently by M. Johnston, B. Stroud, and by Byrne and Hilbert, claim that any dispositionalist view is unfair to the naive perceiver-thinker, saddles her with massive error and represents her as maladaptated to her environment. The paper reconstructs the main line of thought in favor of response-intentionalism and argues that it is in fact rather charitable and fair to na?ve cognizers, and also avoids a cluster of related objections.     

Is Capitalism Inevitable? Is Revolution Possible? Deleuze and Guattari between Capitalism and Calculus

In Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari maintain that nature is a process in which there is neither nature nor human being, except as a single reality produced in the processes of production, distribution and consumption, where distributions are immediately consumed and the consumptions immediately reproduced. In its historical realization, this is the process of capitalism, which must be an effect of such processes, processes of nature and human nature. This gives rise to this question: given the rules governing nature, including human nature, how much contingency is there and how much determinism? And ultimately, is capitalism inevitable?     

When Is Perception Top‐Down and When Is It Not? Culture,Narrative, and Attention

Previous findings in cultural psychology indicated that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to be attentive to contextual information (e.g., Nisbett & Masuda, 2003 ). However, to what extent and in which conditions culture influences patterns of attention has not been fully examined. As a result, universal patterns of attention may be obscured, and culturally unique patterns may be wrongly assumed to be constant across situations. By carrying out two cross‐cultural studies, we demonstrated that (a) both European Canadians and Japanese attended to moving objects similarly when the task was to simply observe the visual information; however, (b) there were cultural variations in patterns of attention when participants actively engaged in the task by constructing narratives of their observation (narrative construction). These findings suggest that cultural effects are most pronounced in narrative construction conditions, where the need to act in accordance with a culturally shared meaning system is elicited.     

Spiritual Psychology and Psychotherapy: Is There Theoretical and Empirical Support?

This paper provides a meta-theoretical context for a spiritually oriented psychotherapy, namely Constructivism. It also presents some empirical and theoretical support for this Constructivist position which is consistent with cognitive psychology and concepts from both Western and Eastern traditions. It summarizes the work of Mahoney on Constructivism and integrates it with Personal Construct Psychology. It then provides the perceptual, theoretical, and empirical underpinnings for an integrative, holistically oriented clinical model that focuses on how clients construct their realities. The paper concludes with a discussion of the levels of therapeutic work that clients contract for, placing them in charge of their lives. The goal, for clients who chose the deepest path, is the philosophical understanding that they create the relative realities to which they respond, causing both their suffering and potential liberation. The ultimate choice is theirs, and not the therapist's.     

What Is Conventionalism about Moral Rights and Duties?

A powerful objection against moral conventionalism says that it gives the wrong reasons for individual rights and duties. The reason why I must not break my promise to you, for example, should lie in the damage to you—rather than to the practice of promising or to all other participants in that practice. Common targets of this objection include the theories of Hobbes, Gauthier, Hooker, Binmore, and Rawls. I argue that (1) the conventionalism of these theories is superficial; (2) genuinely conventionalist theories are not vulnerable to the objection; and (3) genuine moral conventionalism is independently plausible.     

What Is a Fact? Eva Rosenfeld and Historiography

Historians have disputed excessive speculative claims made on behalf of psychoanalytic interpretations. As psychoanalytic theory evolved, theorists sought to communicate the higher aspects of ego functioning which adapt our inner world to outer realities. Roazen's article discusses the question of what is a fact within the context of the history of analysis. He does this through the examples of Eva Rosenfeld's correspondences which explore the nature of historiography itself.     

Religion and Science: What Is at Stake?

Abstract : “Religion and Science: What Is at Stake” looks at the latest information available on global warming from the International Panel on Climate Change and puts it in the context of the current culture war between progressives and conservatives. We worry that the science will become captive to ideological concerns that are theological, economic, and therefore political. The ideological domination of science may make a sustainable response to global warming even more difficult. It is vitally important that Christian theologians learn enough about the science to be articulate and support the scientists in their endeavors to promote our care of the creation.     

Is Parent-Offspring Conflict Sex-Linked? Freudian and Darwinian Models

Freud's Oedipal theory sees parent-offspring conflict as a within-gender rivalry, whereas most modern evolutionary models interpret it as a gender-blind disagreement about resource allocation. New analyses of family homicides and a critical review of prior evidence do not support the central Freudian claim of a same-sex contingency in parent-offspring antagonism during the Oedipal phase. Several errors of fact and interpretation in psychoanalytic theorizing about family relations are discussed. We argue that psychoanalysts mistake substantive conflicts between nonrelatives for symbolic manifestations of family conflicts.     

Postpartum depression and attachment: Is anybody here?

Abstract

The paper presents a developmental and dynamic multitheoretical overview of many dimensions of attachment-related processes activated under the conditions of maternal depression. The clinical vignette (from the analytic practice of Eva D. Papiasvili) of reconstructive anaytic work with an adult patient illustrates the profound impact of maternal depression on precocious early differentiation between the attachment styles, of the depressed parent and the substitute caregiver, at the root of early “counterdependent” self-sufficiency. Through reconstructive interpretive work, first with enactments and then dreams, pertaining to not-remembered, represented, or symbolized events of earliest infancy, the patient is able to make a series of developmentally transformative symbolic leaps, restoring the capacity for intimacy, hope, trust, and pleasure. This breaks the intergenerational mother–daughter transmission of postpartum depression and related problematic attachment.     

Personality and Community Involvement: Is churchgoing different?

A random sample of 1033 adults in an Australian community survey completed a form containing the abbreviated Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire together with an index of community involvement in a range of secular groups and church attendance. The data indicate that different personality characteristics are associated with church attendance on the one hand and with secular areas of community involvement on the other hand.     

Who Is the Sufferer and What Is Being Suffered? Subjectivity in Times of Social Malaise

This paper encourages clinicians to consider how patients’ conflicts and symptoms reveal not only familial etiology but the internalization of hegemonic structures and ideology. It explores how the subject evolves within the cultural matrix of neoliberalism, the contemporary hegemonic system that shapes unconscious fantasy, conflicts and defenses. Several clinical case vignettes illustrate the benefits to both analyst and patient of exploring within the transference and countertransference how neoliberal hierarchical arrangements of class, race and gender affect subjective and intersubjective experience.     

Is basic personality related to violent and non-violent video game play and preferences?

Based on the uses and gratifications perspective, personality was expected to relate to violent video game play frequency and game preferences. Participants completed measures of personality and frequency of violent video game play, and identified their most frequently played video games. Results indicate that individuals higher in openness but lower in agreeableness played violent video games more frequently. In addition, more open and extroverted but less agreeable and neurotic individuals generally preferred to play video games that are more violent. Results suggest personality may be more predictive of violent video game use than traditional media use, though the predictive personality dimensions may be consistent across media types.     

Is analytical psychology a religion? Rationalist and romantic approaches to religion and modernity

The relationship between analytical psychology and religion is part of the larger issue of the relationship between modernity and religion. There are three main views on the issue. The fundamentalist position sets religion against modernity and opts for religion over modernity. What I call the 'rationalist' position likewise sets religion against modernity but opts for modernity over religion. By contrast to both views, what I call the 'romantic' position reconciles religion with modernity. Rationalists maintain that religion can exist only in so far as it serves as an explanation of the physical world, which the rise of science now precludes. Romantics maintain that religion, while serving as an explanation of the physical world till dislodge by science, is at heart anything but an explanation. The toppling of the religions explanation by the scientific one, far from dooming religion, prods religion into making explicit what it has in fact been all along. By this categorization, Jung is overwhelmingly a romantic. For him, the function of religion has always been more psychological than explanatory, and the rise of science does not preclude the continuing existence of religious myths as a psychological rather than an explanatory phenomenon. For those for whom science does spell the demise of religion, secular myths can replace religious ones, and those secular myths are more secular versions of religions myths than secular alternatives to religions myths. Yet even if for Jung religion can still exist today because religion is in fact psychology, it does not follow that psychology is therefore a religion.