THE CRY FOR THE OTHER: THE BIOCULTURAL WOMB OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Abstract. The human experience of meaning-making lies at the roots of consciousness, creativity, and religious faith. It arises from the basic experience of separation from a loved object, suffered by all mammals, and, in general terms, from the experienced gap between ourselves and our environment. We fill the gap with transitional objects and symbols that reassure us of basic continuity in ourselves and in the world. These objects and symbols also serve the neurognostic function of demonstrating what the world is like. Thus, humanity lives by faith, as manifested in its pattern-making capacity, and not by literal sight.     

THE OTHER SIKHS

In the last 100 years, Sikhs have travelled to different countries in the West and beyond. There is a significant amount of scholarly writing about the presence of Sikhs across the globe. However, their experience in migration and settlement in different parts of India beyond Punjab remains a comparatively neglected area of Sikh studies. Its history goes back to the medieval days and includes a larger numbers of Sikhs than that exist in the Western diaspora. These Sikh sites are numerous and scattered across India. They communicate the message of home in poly-vocalic voices and point to the surfacing of another Sikh diaspora within India beyond Punjab. This article seeks to outline a small part of it with reference to the Sikh past in Manipur. Manipur is located along the Indo-Myanmar border and seeks to emphasize the local Sikh community's distinctiveness and plurality.     

THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE: RACHEL CARSON'S VIEWS OF ANIMALS

Abstract The publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a compelling blend of stories, natural history, human values, and biological facts, in 1962 was instrumental in launching the modern environmental movement. We consider Carson's attitude toward animals in Silent Spring and in her other writings. Carson favored responsible stewardship and was more of an animal welfarist and environmentalist/conservation biologist who privileged ecosystems and species than an animal activist who privileged individuals, and she did not advocate an animal‐rights agenda. There is clear tension in Carson's writings. Often she seems troubled by attempting to come across as a moderate and practical scientist, and some of her words, when considered out of context, could lead one to label her as an animal‐rightist. While some of Carson's writing favors human‐centered interests, she did not believe that only humans counted. Her warnings about silent springs must be taken seriously, perhaps even more seriously than when they were penned more than four decades ago. Carson was a passionate and extremely influential activist and if a world of persons like her were in charge of our global environmental policies, we and our fellow animals would be in much better shape than we currently are.     

ON SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST AND OTHER CORPORATE MYTHS

Although the doctrine of “survival of the fittest” is central to the Modern paradigm, it is not, as most Modernists would claim, the unvarnished truth. Indeed if we begin to think of the marketplace as a model of dynamic complexity then the logic of cooperation is inescapable. The point is that if business leaders refuse to accept that cooperation is a defining principle, not merely an abstract altruistic ideal but an essential strategy for the sustainable, long-term success of the businesses they are building, then they will continue to undermine their own best interests in the name of competitive dominance.     

THE HOLY & WHOLLY OTHER: KIERKEGAARD ON THE ALTERITY OF GOD

In response to prevailing perceptions, I contend that Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) conceives of the wholly otherness of God via his dialectical category of the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between the human and the divine, initially through the self's consciousness of sin and ultimately through the self's acceptance of the gift of forgiveness. Therefore, I claim that while the common designation of Kierkegaard's God as ‘Wholly Other’ may initially evoke the alterity of sin; it is not ultimately sufficient to describe the divine alterity which Kierkegaard regards as more faithfully manifest in the ‘impossible possibility’ of forgiveness. Through this reading, I finally suggest that the ‘Wholly Other’ is not ultimately representative of God in Kierkegaard's writings and might be more faithfully supplemented by the appellation of the Holy Other.     

OBJECT-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY AND THE OTHER OF WE IN ANTHROPOCENTRIC POSTHUMANISM

The object-oriented ontology group of philosophies, and certain strands of posthumanism, overlook important ethical and biological differences, which make a difference. These allied intellectual movements, which have at times found broad popular appeal, attempt to weird life as a rebellion to the forced melting of lifeforms through the artefacts of capitalist realism. They truck, however, in a recursive solipsism resulting in ontological flattening, overlooking that things only show up to us according to our attunement to them. Ecology and biology tend to get lost in the celebration of “thingness,” which puts on par artifacts, trash, and living beings. Such abstractions fail to understand the political, ethical, and ontological implications of eliding the animate/nonanimate distinction, which from the opposite direction (of flattening) reproduce the same violences of historical colonialism (hierarchical humanism). I argue that ontological flattening entails epistemological narcissism, fails to take into account plural (interspecies) perspectives, and propose biosemiotics can address these shortcomings through becoming-with nonhuman knowledge.     

THE LINK AND THE OTHER1

The author begins by drawing attention to the current crisis in psychoanalysis, in which, following the great initial discoveries, he considers a certain solipsistic trend inimical to the role of the other and of the acceptance of innovation this entails has come to hold sway. This situation can in his view be overcome by the introduction of new applications and practices, as in the past with the acceptance of Klein's ideas in the field of child analysis. Theory is in the author's opinion always the product of clinical practice in our field, a thesis he illustrates by an account of his own work with couples and families, where the patient is deemed to be not any one individual in the group but the group itself considered as a nexus of links. The implications and theoretical repercussions of this link‐based conception are discussed at length and some novel terms are introduced ‐ for example, the link between subjects, imposition, the social subject, the subject relationship and the multiple subject. Alienness and the ‘other’, and presence and absence, are shown to be important concepts and are distinguished from object relations. The author concludes with a reference to a new resistance, namely to linking, and its implications in relation both to personality and to phenomena such as ethnic and religious conflict.     

行为与脑的关系及其与机体其它属性间的相互作用的研究──心理学研究展望

“二十一世纪的心理学”的论题是当今许多科学家感兴趣的．这种预测是一种想象与现实相结合的尝试。审视过去和现在．心理学未来的雏形的基础可能是行为与脑的关系及其与生命其它属性之间的相互作用。     

SCIENCE AND THE STUDY OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION: AN INQUIRY FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TWO CULTURES

The name “science” may have been wrongly applied to what experts do when they study human communication. Assumptions and methods of the hard sciences do not seem to fit human communication behavior. The result is subversion of human dignity through the production of findings that are method oriented but not productive of generalizations useful either in advancing understanding or in generating a useful technology. The need is to discover a way to anthropomorphize the study of human communication behavior.     

A COMPARISON OF TWO PROCEDURES FOR PROGRAMMING THE DIFFERENTIAL REINFORCEMENT OF OTHER BEHAVIORS

The relative effectiveness of two methods of programming DRO schedules of reinforcement was examined in two experiments. In these two methods, reinforcement is delivered if inappropriate responding is not occurring (a) at the end of an interval (momentary DRO), or (b) throughout the entire interval (whole-interval DRO). In Experiment 1, the effects of these schedules on disruptive responding of three retarded students were assessed in a multiple-baseline design. For two students, the momentary schedule occurred first and was ineffective, whereas the whole interval that followed was effective; for the third student, the whole-interval schedule occurred first and was effective, and reduced responding was maintained under the momentary schedule. In Experiment 2, baseline and the two DRO schedules were each presented in random order each day to one student in an alternating treatments design. The momentary DRO schedule reduced responding, but the whole-interval schedule was more effective.     

THE UNIVERSE AMONG OTHER THINGS

Peter Simons has argued that the expression ‘the universe’ is not a genuine singular term: it can name neither a single, completely encompassing individual, nor a collection of individuals. (It is, rather, a semantically plural term standing equally for every existing object.) I offer reasons for resisting Simons's arguments on both scores.     

COLLABORATING WITH THE UNCONSCIOUS OTHER

The analysand's capacity for making use of psychoanalytic treatment has been a subject of importance since the beginning of psychoanalysis. The author addresses an aspect of the difficulty encountered by analysands in achieving a psychic state that allows the creative use of free association, dreams, parapraxes and other spontaneous phenomena occurring during the course of treatment. He suggests that a very specific state of mind is essential to both the psychoanalytic process and the creative process. Using theoretical concepts derived from Freud, Klein and Bion, he develops the idea of an internal object relationship, 'the collaboration with the unconscious other', which forms the basis for both creative thinking and the psychoanalytic function of the personality. Creative thinking is distinguished from artistic endeavour and discussed as a universal potential, on which growth in psychoanalysis depends. The term 'unconscious other' is meant to signify the subjective experience of a foreign presence within oneself from which both spontaneous creative inspiration and involuntary psychic phenomena are felt to emanate. The author presents clinical material to suggest that paranoid-schizoid and depressive anxieties form obstacles to collaborating with the unconscious other, and must be worked through in order to achieve an analytic process.     

THE ROLE OF ATTENTION IN THE TREATMENT OF ATTENTION-MAINTAINED SELF-INJURIOUS BEHAVIOR: NONCONTINGENT REINFORCEMENT AND DIFFERENTIAL REINFORCEMENT OF OTHER BEHAVIOR

Because there are potentially serious limitations to differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO) (which is probably the most widely used treatment procedure for behavior problems), we examined an alternative procedure—noncontingent reinforcement (NCR). Three females with developmental disabilities, all of whom engaged in severe self-injurious behavior, participated. During a pretreatment functional analysis, each subject's self-injury was shown to be differentially sensitive to social attention as a maintaining consequence. Next, each subject was exposed to a DRO treatment and an NCR treatment. During DRO, attention was delivered contingent on the absence of self-injury for prespecified intervals. During NCR, attention was delivered on a fixed-time schedule that was not influenced by the subject's behavior. Results showed that both procedures were highly effective in reducing self-injury, probably because the functional reinforcer for self-injury was used during treatment. Furthermore, there was evidence that NCR attenuated several of the limitations of DRO. These results are particularly interesting in light of the long experimental history of NCR as a control rather than as a therapeutic procedure.