Comment on Björn Sahlberg’s paper

This paper is a comment on Björn Sahlberg’s paper on the function of training analysis in the Swedish psychoanalytic association and discusses some aspects of the candidates’ personal analysis and supervision. The paper further suggests some possible sources for inspiration and perspective on organizational and educational issues, for example taking an interest in the epistemology of professions, in what the concept of ‘reflection-in-action’ could mean in the training situation, or in empirical research about the educational models and the practice of psychoanalysis.     

Parental Emotional Response to Children’s Traumas

To better understand how parents react to their child’s trauma exposure and evaluate whether different reactions are related to different types of traumas, 120 parents (79.2% mothers, 18.3% fathers, 2.5% other caregivers) were asked about their emotional reactions related to their child’s self-reported worst trauma. Emotional reactions were assessed with the Parental Emotional Reactions Questionnaire (PERQ). Parents reported high levels of distress and guilt. Furthermore, there was a significant relationship between type of trauma and parents’ overall emotional reactions. Parental distress was equally endorsed among the different trauma groups. Parents of children who experienced intrafamilial violence and extrafamilial sexual abuse reported the highest levels of guilt, and child exposure to intrafamilial violence was associated with higher levels of parental shame.     

Author’s Response

This essay aims to reply to the three essays devoted to Systematic Theology, volume 2. Common to all three essays is the conviction that my Trinitarian theology exhibits a kind of unicity that gives rise to inconsistencies of method and worries in matters of doctrine. My reply lays out several forms of unity and details how I hope to present proper uniformity in form and matter of dogmatics. A precis of my underlying Doctrine of Scripture and my forthcoming Christology is appended as well, as these prove central to the essayists' queries about the volume.     

Response to Lynne Segal: Thatcher’s legacy

In response to Lynne Segal’s paper on the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, I briefly examine how Thatcher redefined the ‘social’ away from being an expression of care and mutuality. Playing on images of the dangers of infection and enfeeblement, she mobilised fears about dependency to create a discourse of strength and self-aggrandising invulnerability, a discourse that is destructive of sociality and an ethic of care.     

Response to ‘Somatic Intentionality Bifurcated: A Sellarisan Response to Sachs’s Merleau-Pontyan Account of Intentionality’

ABSTRACT

This article advances a new analysis of stupidity as a distinctive form of cognitive failing. Section 1 outlines some problems in explicating this notion and suggests some desiderata. Section 2 sketches an existing model of stupidity, found in Kant and Flaubert, which serves as a foil for my own view. In Section 3, I introduce my theory: I analyse stupidity as form of conceptual self-hampering, characterised by a specific aetiology and with a range of deleterious effects. In Section 4, I show how this proposal meets the desiderata and I clarify how it diverges from existing accounts. My position is close to a ‘public health approach’, in contrast to the virtue/vice framework employed by Engel or Mulligan.     

Dead Babies: Response to Orna Guralnik’s Paper

The author’s response to Orna Guralnik’s paper focuses on the patient’s dreams as potent carriers of disavowed histories, carrying within themselves the potential of symbolizing for the first time the unspeakable truths that are repressed and see their first shimmer of light in nocturnal dreams. In her discussion, the author links Freud’s concept of hypermnesic dreams to Lacan’s concept of the Real as an initial attempt to give words to the traumatic.