Where Ethics and Aesthetics Meet: Titian's Rape of Europa

Titian's Rape of Europa is highly praised for its luminous colors and sensual textures. But the painting has an overlooked dark side, namely that it eroticizes rape. I argue that this is an ethical defect that diminishes the painting aesthetically. This argument—that an artwork can be worse off qua work of art precisely because it is somehow ethically problematic—demonstrates that feminist concerns about art can play a legitimate role in art criticism and aesthetic appreciation.     

The Priest and the Rabbi Meet in a Bar: The Dialectic between Merger and Recoil in Psychoanalysis

The tension between union and separation is a leitmotif in all social relations and cuts a swath across psychoanalytic theories. I am proposing that the interplay, between merger and recoil is an oscillating and enduring rhythm throughout the life cycle and characterizes an ongoing pattern in relatedness. Awareness of this repetitive cadence in the transference/countertransference as a reflection of the human drama can alert the analyst to a pattern that prompts clinical interventions and expands the potential of deepening the dyadic relationship and its mutative effects.     

Where Grammar and Interaction Meet: A Study of Co-Participant Completion in Japanese Conversation

This article examines the practice of "co-participant completion" in Japanese conversation, and explores what kinds of resources are mobilized to provide the opportunity to complete another participant's utterance-in-progress. It suggests the following observations as potential characteristics of Japanese co-participant completion: (i) Syntactically-defined two-part formats (e.g. [If X] + [then Y]) may not play as prominent a role as in English; (ii) The majority of cases of co-participant completion take the form of 'terminal item completion;' (iii) Locally emergent structures like 'contrast' and 'list' as well as 'unprojected' features of turn construction often play an important role in enhancing the opportunity for completing another participant's utterance-in-progress. The article then discusses the implications of these findings for the investigation of the mutual bearing of grammar and social interaction. In particular, the discussion focuses on what we can learn from the practice of co-participant completion about how projection of turn-shapes is accomplished in Japanese conversation.     

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and the Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Where Counseling and Neuroscience Meet

There is increasing evidence to support the biological basis of mental disorders. Subsequently, understanding the neurobiological context from which mental distress arises can help counselors appropriately apply cognitive behavioral therapy and other well‐researched cognitive interventions. The purpose of this article is to describe the neurobiological context underlying the formation and treatment of posttraumatic stress disorders, a mental disorder frequently encountered by counselors, from a cognitive therapy framework.     

Task Decomposition Through Competition in a Modular Connectionist Architecture: The What and Where Vision Tasks

A novel modular connectionist architecture is presented in which the networks composing the architecture compete to learn the training patterns. An outcome of the competition is that different networks learn different training patterns and, thus, learn to compute different functions. The architecture performs task decomposition in the sense that it learns to partition a task into two or more functionally independent tasks and allocates distinct networks to learn each task. In addition, the architecture tends to allocate to each task the network whose topology is most appropriate to that task. The architecture's performance on “what” and “where” vision tasks is presented and compared with the performance of two multilayer networks. Finally, it is noted that function decomposition is an underconstrained problem, and, thus, different modular architectures may decompose a function in different ways. A desirable decomposition can be achieved if the architecture is suitably restricted in the types of functions that it can compute. Finding appropriate restrictions is possible through the application of domain knowledge. A strength of the modular architecture is that its structure is well suited for incorporating domain knowledge.     

Where New Age and African Religion Meet in South Africa: the case of Credo Mutwa

A recent development among New Agers in South Africa and abroad is an interest in African traditional religion. In South Africa these two divergent groupings meet in the work of the traditional healer, Credo Mutwa. This article explores the life and teachings of Mutwa who is renowned as ‘High Sanusi of the Zulu people’ as well as keeper of ancient wisdom, writer, poet, sculptor, painter, and authority in the fields of, among others, Zulu folklore, nature conservation, astrology and extraterrestrial life. Points of convergence and divergence among New Age thought and spirituality, African Traditional Religion and the unique interpretations of Credo Mutwa are examined. It is suggested that New Agers who focus on the glamour of the ecstatic experience of the ‘sangoma’ (isangoma, traditional healer/diviner) in exploring African traditional religion are depriving themselves of much of what African traditional religion and culture have to offer in terms of spiritual development. In this regard, some concluding remarks are offered on the fruitfulness of the concept of ubuntu (‘humanness’).     

Psychoanalysis: The Sacred and the Profane

Colleagues from a variety of perspectives have written about the propensity to enshrine psychoanalytic theory. The meaning of the word “enshrine” is to cherish as sacred an idea or philosophy and protect it from change. In other words, the way we view psychoanalysis, our theories of mind and technique, become holy writ and we have divided the world of theory into the sacred and the profane. This is the kiss of death for theory, which must constantly evolve and change, but comforting for the analyst who believes he is on the side of the right, the sacred. In this paper I will discuss how our propensity to enshrine theory has had a debilitating effect on the development of psychoanalysis and, in particular, as a treatment for the most vulnerable people who seek our help. I also address the idea that movement away from enshrined positions allows us to construct different versions of reality. In this context, the notion of “action at a distance” is presented along with the attendant idea of psychoanalytic entanglement.     

Turn of Fortune in Psychoanalysis: The 1924 Rank Debates and the Origins of Hermeneutic Psychoanalysis

The history of psychoanalysis can be characterized by conflicts that besides their personal content meant a closure and an opening in the development of the theorecial and practical (self )understanding of the discipline. The 1923-24 conflict that resulted in the separation of Rank from the movement and showed the first signs of uneasiness against the mainstream of psychoanalysis in Ferenczi's approach is relatively less known. However, its theoretical, or more general: discoursive impact on psychoanalysis was enormous.The debate took place among the top leaders of the movement, Rank and Ferenczi on one side, Jones, Abraham, Sachs on the other. In the center of the discussion there were two books, The Trauma of Birth by Rank and the The Development of Psychoanalysis by Ferenczi and Rank. With the help of documents I try to show that Freud first supported his Vienna-Budapest friends, later changed over to the other camp. As a general effect, I suggest that this debate resulted in the withdrawal from the earlier more hermeneutic-dialogical, therapy centered psychoanalysis toward a medical, objective, systematic and metapsychology oriented discipline. Besides the general theoretical change the power centers of psychoanalysis shifted toward West, Vienna and Budapest was substituted first by Berlin, later by London and New York.