Do We Find or Lose Ourselves in the Negative?

This paper pools the language of psychoanalysis with other disciplines to illuminate the very real and ephemeral experience of working with patients who experience states of nonbeing. Using the powerful imagery of Francesca Woodman’s photographs, my patient and I enter the breach in her mind that trauma creates. Barthes, Benjamin, and art criticism enable me to relate to my patient’s condition of trying to exist suspended between life and death.     

Is the History of our Universe Finite?

Modern cosmology indicates that our universe has a finite age. However, it is not understood whether the initial state before the Big Bang is finite in history or not. In this article, I show by simple arguments that the initial state must be finite in history if it is real. If the initial state is not real, a special transition is needed to specify the beginning of the real time. Moreover, if our universe is just one of the many universes, it can be shown that the history of the universe generator must also be finite.     

Hannah Arendt,Feminism, and the Politics of Alterity: “What Will We Lose If We Win?”

Hannah Arendt's early biography of Rahel Varnhagen, an eighteenth-century German-Jew, provides a revolutionary feminist component to her political theory. In it, Arendt grapples with the theoretical constitution of a female subject and relates Jewish alterity, identity, and history to feminist politics. Because she understood the “female condition” of difference as belonging to the political subject rather than an autonomous self, her theory entails a “politics of alterity” with applications for feminist practice.     

Couple Therapy Research and the Practice of Couple Therapy: Can We Talk?

As has been true in every other realm of psychotherapy, couple therapy research generally has had very little impact on the day-to-day practice of couple therapists. To a significant degree, this unfortunate disconnection may be attributable to an overemphasis by researchers in the field on treatment packages and therapeutic methods/techniques. Insufficient attention has been paid to other important sources of influence on treatment outcomes, especially the couple therapist herself/himself. It is argued that effective couple therapy requires a good "fit" between the person of the therapist and her primary theoretical orientation, and that couple therapists may be more influenced by research that addresses process aspects of the therapeutic approaches to which they have their primary theoretical allegiances.     

Body–Mind Integrality: Remarks on the Nature and Origin of Universe and Life

This article summarizes scientific knowledge in the fields of quantum physics and medical science regarding the origin and the nature of the universe and life. The recent discoveries in the fields of biophysics, genetics, epigenetics, neuroscience, and psychosomatics describe the universe and life as highly coherent systems where information is a key factor. In this concept living systems are cognitive networks in a dynamic relationship with their environment. Health in this context is a dynamic balance in a subject in which the information flows functionally. Disease is identified as a pathology of information that can be classified in a new way, considering two different codes of meaning—the semiotic and the symbolic.     

Which Time for Eschatology? Relativity Theory,Local and Cosmic Times,and the End of the Universe

The aim of this article is to formulate the theological notions of the end and fulfilment of the universe before the background of relativity theory and cosmology, in particular the lack of a global passage of time. It argues that the “arrow” of time is a local phenomenon, linked essentially to recording objects. On this basis, it makes the case that the notions of a common end of all local times and of a final, timeless state of the universe are viable independently of a global direction of time.     

Do We Feel the Same Way If We Think the Same Way? Shared Attitudes and the Social Induction of Affect

Drawing on the literature on emotional mimicry, we argue that attitude similarity between a sender and a receiver influences the social induction of affect. Studies 1, 2, and 3 supported this reasoning by showing that similarity fostered, whereas dissimilarity blocked concordant reactions to a happy sender (but not to a sad sender). We also examined the mechanism behind these effects and found that similarity influenced liking of the happy sender but did not affect liking of the sad sender. Study 4 provided causal evidence for this idea by showing that similarity influenced the induction of positive affect through liking.     

Response: How Do We Know What We Know About the Amish and Other Minorities?

The appraisal by Cory Anderson, Joseph Donnermeyer, Jeffrey Longhofer, and Steven Reschly (hereafter, appraisers) highlights a methodological divide that is important to the study of the Amish and other ethnic or religious minorities. In my reply, I discuss how my work is rooted in a cultural analytic paradigm that differs from the appraisers’ methodological orientation. My reply includes a deconstruction of the appraisal and a discussion of its “shortcomings.” I conclude by showing how the discourse surrounding this appraisal raises important epistemological questions of how we understand human societies.     

What Must Pro-Lifers Believe About the Moral Status of Embryos?

Embryo rescue cases and minimal miscarriage prevention research have been interpreted as showing that even pro-lifers are not really committed to the unborn having the same moral status as the born. I will suggest instead that judgments about embryo rescues are often distorted by triage considerations that reveal nothing about differences in moral status between those saved and those not. I will present metaphysical and ethical considerations – none assuming a difference in moral status – why preventing millions of miscarriages does not warrant the massive redistribution of research funds that would occur to prevent the deaths of equal numbers of humans already born.     

Sons and Mothers: New Insight into the End of Active Motherhood in the ‘Age of Austerity’

True independence is difficult for young adults to achieve by leaving home due to economic austerity and contemporary expectation. Such extended dependence has, however, been little studied. Midlife mothers were interviewed to explore their experience of having their adult sons live at home. The interviews were analysed using Grounded Theory (Strauss and Corbin in Basics of qualitative research: grounded theory procedures and techniques. Sage, Newbury Park, CA, 1990). The essence of the mothers’ (n = 5) experience was captured in the core category, Coming to Terms and Entering a New Phase. This category integrates the three-stage model of process that occurred as mothers accepted that their maternal role was changing and they needed to prepare for the next stage of their lives. The three stages were represented by the subcategories, Shifting Role, Anticipating Loss and Letting Go. The women believed that their sons would not be able to leave home until they could purchase a property, a distant prospect for many. The findings extend the work of previous lifespan models, including that of Apter (Secret paths: women in the new midlife. W. W. Norton, New York, 1995) but with greater depth and clarity, in a vital and changed contemporary context that is likely to be relevant for a large population of women.     

Equality in Education – Why We Must Go All the Way

In this paper I present and defend a highly demanding principle of justice in education that has not been seriously discussed thus far. According to the suggested approach, “all the way equality”, justice in education requires nothing short of equal educational outcome between all individual students. This means not merely between equally able children, or between children from different groups and classes, but rather between all children, regardless of social background, race, sex and ability. This approach may seem implausible at first, due to the far-reaching implications it entails, primarily its requirement to deny better-off children their advantage for the sake of equality. However the paper argues that all-the-way-equality, in fact, does a better job realizing the goals of justice in education than alternative conceptions of justice. It is further argued that at least some of the principle’s most radical consequences, those that make it seem counterintuitive, can be mitigated by balancing all-the-way-equality with competing interests.     

The Problem of Free Mass: Must Properties Cluster?

Properties come in clusters. It seems impossible, for instance, that a mass could float free, unattached to any other property. David Armstrong takes this as a reductio of the bundle theory and an argument for substrata, while Peter Simons and Arda Denkel reply by supplementing the bundle theory with accounts of property interdependencies. I argue against both views. Virtually all plausible ontologies turn out to be committed to the existence of free masses. I develop and defend the view that the clustering of properties is a mere contingent truth, on grounds that properties can be subtracted one-by-one. This opens the door not just to the (unsupplemented) bundle theory, but also to any plausible account of the relation between objects and properties.     

Perception of occlusion by young infants: Must the occlusion event be congruent with the occluder?

Four-month-old infants perceive continuity of an object’s trajectory through occlusion, even when the occluder is illusory, and several cues are apparently needed for young infants to perceive a veridical occlusion event. In this paper we investigated the effects of dislocating the spatial relation between the occlusion events and the visible edges of the occluder. In two experiments testing 60 participants, we demonstrated that 4-month-olds do not perceive continuity of an object’s trajectory across an occlusion if the deletion and accretion events are spatially displaced relative to the occluder edges (Experiment 1) or if deletion and accretion occur along a linear boundary that is incorrectly oriented relative to the occluder’s edges (Experiment 2). Thus congruence of these cues is apparently important for perception of veridical occlusion. These results are discussed in relation to an account of the development of perception of occlusion and object persistence.