Out of the Ashes

SUMMARY

From the aftermath of a failed suicide attempt, a consumer describes her painful journey through a long course of psychosocial rehabilitation in a day treatment program, culminating in the cherished goal of emptoyment. As an individual with multiple disabilities, her past experience with occupational therapy in physical rehabilitation only addressed the presenting body part, not the whole person. Her feelings and need to learn emotional coping skills were not acknowledged until her desperate call for help through an overdose. In the process of becoming whole, she deals with the new stigma of an even more disabling label-mental illness.     

Ashes and Flowers: some Hindu approaches to death and dying

Contemporary interest in death and dying in the West has provoked reflection upon other cultural and religious traditions. Many writers assume that just as health and death are predominantly in the West the realm of the clinical so in India they are in the realm of the sacred. This article rejects this oversimplification and explores the complexity of Hindu approaches to death and dying through an examination of the varied attitudes, beliefs and practices of pilgrims, pilgrimage priests and renouncers in the sacred pilgrimage centres of Hardwar and Rishikesh. It argues that the resources offered by the culture for responding to death and dying are used creatively and contextually by many Hindus in ways that depend very much on their personal experience and individual narratives as well as the social pressures and traditions operating around them.     

Beloved Women: Nurturing the Sacred Fire of Leadership From an American Indian Perspective

Counseling professionals are taught to rely heavily on theories and interventions steeped in a Western, masculinized worldview. This article explores a paradigm shift by providing a contrasting cultural view of leadership among women. The “crosswalk” between the American Indian perspective of nurturing leadership in women and the theoretical basis of relational‐cultural theory is explored as a way of adding critical, ancient knowledge about leadership to the counseling profession. Implications for mentoring female leaders are presented.     

Rescuing The Science of Human Behavior from the Ashes of Socialism

The Psychological Record - The discredit into which the socialist ideal has fallen as a consequence of recent political events calls into question, not just the viability of a particular political...     

From interpretation to segmentation

In visual perception, part segmentation of an object is considered to be guided by image-based properties, such as occurrences of deep concavities in the outer contour. However, object-based properties can also provide information regarding segmentation. In this study, outer contours and interpretations of object configurations were manipulated to examine differences between image-based and object-based segmentation in a visual search task. We found that locating a two-dimensional object configuration with deep concavities in the outer contour depends on the type of outer contour of the surrounding distractors. In addition, locating a three-dimensional object configuration was harder when it was surrounded by object-based-disconnected distractors, as compared with object-based-connected distractors, regardless of image-based connections in these distractors. We conclude that segmentation based on the outer contours of a target facilitates its localization. However, when three-dimensional information is available, segmentation strongly depends on object-based properties, rather than on image-based properties.     

From Mortification to Metamorphosis

The psychoanalyst treating primitively organized people has to be primitive and porous enough to carry the projections and enter into a seemingly undifferentiated envelope to establish contact. Like a member of a dysfunctional couple, he or she must evolve a separate skin so that language has the clout of bridge, rather than discharge. In this way, the analyst is trying to provide a distinct outcome to the formerly thwarted separation–individuation journey and in so doing functions simultaneously as a leading out and identificatory other. Language is only trusted when one trusts that living in one's own skin will not result in annihilation of self or other.

Inevitable breakdowns and failure of attunement occur in any treatment. An undiscovered countertransferential conflict can open up creative space, rather than ossify unresolved painful conflicts into stultified reenactments of sadomasochistic exchange. In two cases, feeling mortified, “Why couldn't I have known this sooner; how could I have done this?” the author finds that honest handling of such exposures marked the beginning of opening of creative space rather than a continuation of futile repetition.     

From nihilism to monism

McDowell has argued that external world scepticism is a pressing problem only in so far as we accept, on the basis of the argument from illusion, the claim that perceiving that p and hallucinating that p involve a highest common factor--something which functions, in the manner of the classical 'veil of ideas', as a perceptual intermediary. McDowell traces the power of this argument to disputable Cartesian assumptions about the transparency of subjectivity to itself. I argue, contra McDowell, that the reflections to be found in, paradigmatically, Descartes's First Meditation are better interpreted as offering a causal argument for scepticism that depends upon a naturalistic conception of sense experience. This is more powerful than the argument from illusion, since it requires no commitment to a highest common factor in perception, nor to the transparency of the mental. The availability of this alternative route to scepticism raises serious problems for McDowell's quietism, which aims to earn the right to avoid, rather than answer, the sceptic. Since the appeal to externalism about content cannot settle the matter, I conclude that there is, at present, an unsatisfactory stand-off between the sceptic and McDowell's position.     

从语言到思想:基于指称问题考察分析哲学的范式转移

本文通过追溯当代内容理论的语言哲学和现象学起源,以指称性概念和意向性概念为核心,简要刻画了指称理论和内容理论的发展线索。在此基础上,本文试图借助语言指称问题和心理指称问题的平行关系,为当代分析哲学的主流从语言哲学到心灵哲学的范式转移的动机和方法勾勒出一个考察纲要。