Masculinity and madness

This paper explores the way madness is culturally represented in the West, and the impact of these ideas on the mental health system. The paper offers an alternative liberationist approach to gender, madness and psychotherapeutics. Strange, unexpected or apparently inexplicable behaviour and/or thoughts are usually considered to be abnormal. Invariably such behaviour and/or thoughts are labelled as madness ‐ psychological conditions deemed to be problematic. Common images associated with madness include emotional display, wildness, irrationality, sexuality, and passivity. In Western cultures these traits representing madness seem to be equated with aspects of femininity, thus inducing unsympathetic, condemnatory reactions within societies. Such responses tend to serve the social function of enforcing conformity within oppressive systems. Western cultures broadly polarise masculinity and femininity: masculinity tends to represent sanity. Yet this apparently positive status of masculinity leaves men with innumerable difficulties. The social conception of masculinity does not encompass many capacities that distinguish humanity, such as cognitive and behavioural flexibility, emotional awareness, empathy, compassion, co‐operation, exuberance, creativity, imaginativeness and sensitivity. Indeed, this cultural conception of madness impacts adversely on the operation of social institutions and is oppressive in different ways in the lives of both men and women.     

Cassandra in the Classroom: Teaching and Moral Madness

Moral madness is a symptom of the moral violence experienced by teachers who are expected to exercise responsibility for their students and their work, but whose moral voice is misrecognized as self-interest and whose moral agency is suppressed. I conduct a feminist ethical analysis of the figure of Cassandra to examine the ways in which teachers may be driven to moral madness.     

Commentary on Paper by Françoise Davoine

Françoise Davoine sees madness as a research project involving the uncanny presence of ghosts arising from the realm of the transference as well as the “big” history of wider social catastrophes across the generations, in effect “cut-out” pieces of the unconscious. Madness is a rupture in the social link that needs repairing. The therapist is a coresearcher with the individual whose madness tells a story embedded in the heart of madness itself. Davoine presents her work with a woman who has a history of multiple psychiatric hospitalizations. She invites her patient to link up with and speak of that which formerly resided in the Lacanian Real, that is, the unsymbolized haunting absence of her mother who was tragically murdered by the Nazis. The therapist's dream becomes a bridge to this world of ghosts for both patient and therapist. The dream ushers in an enactment and a transference interpretation by the therapist, which leads to a disappearance of madness from the analytic stage. I attempt to apply the theories of Post Kleinians, as well as Harold Searles and Gaetano Benedetti, to help illuminate the processes of therapeutic action. Contemporary psychoanalytic approaches to dreams and a relational view of madness are also addressed.     

Madness or Mental Illness? Revisiting Historians of Psychiatry

Is madness medical disease, problems in living, or social labeling of deviance? Does the word merely refer to behavior peculiar enough to be disturbing? Are the mad mad because of mental, physical, or environmental vulnerabilities? No one knows the answers to these questions because there is no scientific validation for any theory or specific causes of madness. Nonetheless, a view of madness as medical/bodily disease has been receiving concrete and rhetorical support from the government mental health bureaucracy, Big Pharma, mental health lobby groups, the organized profession of psychiatry, hundreds of thousands of providers of mental health services and countless books and articles. This article explores the role that medicalized language and its use by seven noted historians of psychiatry (Norman Dain, Albert Deutsch, Gerald Grob, Roy Porter, Charles Rosenberg, Andrew Scull, and Edward Shorter) might have played in shaping the contemporary view of madness as mental illness. The evidence we uncover suggests that historical “facts” about madness, much as psychiatric “facts” supporting the disease model, are shaped by belief, bias, error or ambiguous rhetoric rather than the facts of the matter.     

建立儒家人文主义的学术传统:由文化“复建”到文化“复兴”

本文回顾了作者跟随杨国枢教授推动本土心理学的学术历程,并依据自己的切身体会,提出本土心理学运动必须以科学哲学作为基础。作者身体力行,在最近二三十年间,深入学习科学哲学的理论,逐步建立本土心理学的相关理论。其最终目标,是打算以儒家文化作为基底,吸纳西方近代文明的菁华,“中学为体,西学为用”,摆脱西方学术的宰制,建立“儒家人文主义”的自主学术传统。作者认为,唯有大力发展本土社会科学,建立华人“自主的社会科学传统”,华人学术社群才有可能走出“学术自我殖民”的心态。     

Madness in Society

The author discusses briefly ways in which madness has been defined, controlled, appropriated, and treated during the evolution of western civilization. “Grand theories” of the aetiology of madness are considered, including physiological, social, and psycho-social explanations. The work of Michel Foucault is examined for its major impact on the understanding of social factors in the categorization and definition of those deemed to be mad. It is noticeable how the role of the unconscious is omitted from much of contemporary theorizing about madness, including in the work of Foucault, where it is relegated to the status of a cultural artifact. The author argues that by incorporating a genuinely psychoanalytic definition of the unconscious into theories of madness, it becomes possible to identify forms of individuality and constructive resistance that supersede the pessimism of Foucault's assessment of human agency. The paper concludes with a criticism of contemporary psychotherapies, especially in welfare state healthcare systems, that fail to address the objective, maddening circumstances of modern life. The resulting overdetermined location of contradiction and conflict in the human mind promotes illusory strategies of reconciliation and harmony that can betray the lived experience of those seeking help. A further consequence of this political and ethical confusion is to underscore the Cinderella status of psychotherapy in many countries.     

道德领导与员工建言：一个调节-中介模型的构建与检验

近年来, 研究者就如何激发员工公开讲出自己的观点、意见和问题进行了大量的探索。其中, 道德领导对员工建言的效应受到了越来越多研究的关注。在以往研究的基础上, 本研究构建了一个调节-中介模型以探讨道德领导影响员工建言的中介心理机制及其边界条件。根据社会交换理论和社会信息加工理论, 本文分别提出两种不同的中介变量-- 责任知觉和心理安全感-- 来解释道德领导与员工建言之间的关系。在此基础上, 本研究进一步假设权力距离会正向调节变量之间的间接关系。通过对某一零售企业239名员工的两阶段调查, 我们对以上研究假设进行了检验, 结果总体上支持了本研究的理论预期。本研究的发现有利于我们了解道德领导影响建言行为的心理机制, 指导管理者采取有针对性的措施, 以期有效地管理企业中的员工建言行为。     

言语吸引力影响因素探索：物理属性和社会特征

语音吸引力是个体吸引力的重要组成部分。为探索言语吸引力影响因素,以汉语词汇为材料,设计实验分析语音基频、共振峰等物理属性以及词义、声音受喜欢程度和语音性别等社会属性对语音吸引力的影响。结果表明：分析物理属性,基频、共振峰等并未能预测语音吸引力;分析社会属性,较之词语意义,声音本身具有的吸引力水平对言语吸引力评价影响更大;而男性和女性对两种性别言语吸引力评价差异不显著。言语吸引力评价在男性和女性间具有一致性：＂好声音＂比＂会说话＂更加容易被认为具有吸引力。     

Can You Hear Me Now? The Impact of Voice in an Online Gaming Community

This paper reports the results of a controlled field experiment in which voice communication was introduced into an existing online community (online gaming guilds within the popular game “World of Warcraft”), comparing a mix of voice and text with text only. Quantitative results suggest increases in liking and trust due to the addition of voice, as well as insulation from unexpected negative impacts of text‐only play. The findings are discussed with respect to social capital, cyberbalkanization, and the general computer‐mediated communication literature, with special attention paid to social information processing theory.     

Television,madness and community care

This paper describes the forms and contents of television representations of mental illness in the UK in 1992. The theoretical framework is provided by Moscovici's theory of social representations and some modifications are proposed for the case of madness. Quantitative and qualitative methods are used in the empirical analyses. It is shown that madness has multiple meanings on television, while at the same time violence is commonly included. It is also suggested that a partial reconfiguration of the representational field has taken place in recent years. Media stories about the responsibility of the policy of community care for scandals and tragedies are now commonplace. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Madness strikes back

This commentary is concerned with the involvement of mental health service users in research. It will argue that research carried out by service users is one way of giving voice to a previously silenced group—the mad. It is one way in which ‘Madness Strikes Back’. The main theoretical model to be used is that of the early Foucault. I will not be concerned with what has become known as ‘Foucauldian discourse analysis’ since nowhere in Foucault's writing is there reference to conversation or talk. I will, however, be concerned with power as mental health service users are amongst the most disempowered of groups in all societies. I will also be concerned with Foucault's claim that, since the Enlightenment, madness has been positioned as the antithesis of reason, as ‘unreason’. This distinction can be argued to persist in the field of research. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Self-construal moderates age differences in social network characteristics

In this study, the authors examined age differences in social network characteristics (SNC) among Hong Kong Chinese. The sample consisted of 596 Chinese adults, ranging from 18 to 91 years old. Age was positively associated with close social partners and negatively associated with peripheral social partners. For individuals who were more likely to define the self as interconnected with others (i.e., interdependent self-construal), increasing age was associated with a greater number of close social partners. The negative association between age and the number of peripheral social partners, well-documented in the Western literature, was found only among Chinese adults with lower interdependence but not among those with higher interdependence. These findings highlight the importance of examining the underlying mechanism rather than a particular pattern of SNC across cultures.     

Shyness:“害羞”还是“羞怯”？ ——基于概念与词源学的分析

在人际交往中羞怯是一种普遍存在的现象,西方关于羞怯的系统研究始于上世纪70年代。中国从上世纪末开始关注这一问题,但对“shyness”这一基本术语的翻译却较为混乱并存在分歧：有的学者将其译为“羞怯”,有的则译作“害羞”,究竟哪种译法更准确、更切合shyness的本意？这不仅是一个简单的翻译问题,更涉及到对概念的准确把握及跨文化比较研究中文化对等的要求。本文通过对西方“shyness”概念的梳理及对“羞怯”、“害羞”等词语的中文词源学考证发现,“羞怯”这一译法更接近“shyness”的本意,达致概念互译上的对等。     

The Grotesque Female in Malaysian Poems: Shaping the Migrant��s Psyche

The works of Malaysian poet, Wong Phui Nam's Against the Wilderness (vii) China bride and Variations on a Birthday Theme (iv) Kali, illustrate a bride and a mother in terrifying images. Wong's stylistic form of representing the female body through startling images of inversion and degradation evoke feelings of unease. The suspension between the known and the unknown causes a bewildering reality verging on madness. Interpreted through the lens of the carnivalesque, specifically, the grotesque body, festive language and parody, I attempt to reconstruct the psyche of the Chinese migrant which underpins these poems. The migrant who arrived in Malaya during the colonial era in the early nineteenth century faced political and social struggles in adapting to a new land. In the poems, the migrant juxtaposes his position to a female and uses the female body as a site of contention to intensify the torment of the psyche and to reflect the despair of the Chinese in Malaysia.     

Maneuvers in the Depths: The Politics of Identity in Anton Boisen’s Pastoral Care

This article examines Anton Boisen’s political negotiations within the identity categories of ministry and madness in the aftermath of his own repeated episodes of psychosis. In conversation with contemporary queer theorists Judith Butler, José Esteban Muñoz, and Lee Edelman, the article characterizes Boisen’s negotiations between dominant and marginalized identity spheres as a political performance of disidentification in which a subject moves and negotiates between disempowered and hegemonic social spheres, simultaneously displacing but also, as Boisen’s example demonstrates, reifying the norms of the latter. The article illustrates how Boisen sought to change many of the practices of pastoral care for those consigned to madness, while at the same time his actions also reestablished the very boundaries and exclusions he sought to displace.     

CONSCIOUSNESS IN EXTREMITY: DISCOURSE ON MADNESS AMONG THE TABWA OF ZAIRE

The madman makes it possible for us to grasp the radical potential of consciousness at its limits. He contradicts the other person's discursive thinking towards the virtually inarticulable or unthought self. The Lakeside Tabwa of Shaba, Zaire, apprehend madness in three rather different, discursive domains. There is, firstly, wazimu, or its ‘mature’, incurable form, kizenzezia, considered as a fact of social life. It is seen as inverting the norms or functions of personhood and undoing those of mentality. It breaks down reciprocity, it is the negative function of ‘Death’. Secondly, it is in the prodromal illness, mubulibuli, and certain related emotion states, that madness appears as the artefact of another's malicious and intrusive ‘Desire’: the madman is said to have ‘closed anger’ in his heart alienating him from ongoing experience and interaction. Finally, in the diviner, the ‘otherness’ of gaze and speech is transformed into the normative power of clairvoyance bringing about its own logic and historicity. Here, the inversion of personhood becomes an emblem of insight and ‘Law’, but at the risk of insanity. The ethnographic encounter with the very otherness of the thinking of madness and of another culture toward the unthought itself is, in a sense, epistemogenic.     

选择文化心理学研究课题之我见？

笔者经由回顾自己如何走上本土理学研究的道路,介绍了本土心理学的由来,本土心理学中的研究进路的选择,以及如何使用本土进路选择研究课题.进而提出应该将社会心理学,本土心理学及文化心理学三者结合起来开展华人心理的研究,为华人心理学在世界心理学界发声和为人民的社会实践提供切实有效的帮助.     

Rationality and madness: The post‐modern embrace of Dionysus and the neo‐vedānta response of Radhakrishnan

Following the lead of Nietzsche, several post‐modern philosophers challenge the Western notion of rationality and its representational model of thought and embrace the Dionysian element in Nietzsche's philosophy, which can take the form of embracing madness (Foucault), desire (Deleuze and Guattari), or carnival (Kristeva). This paper will place Radhakrishnan into the context of a hermeneutical dialogue with these figures from post‐modern philosophy, and it will attempt to address the issue of the post‐modem attack on rationality by these post‐modern philosophers by comparing their concept of rationality with that espoused by Radhakrishnan. It will also be demonstrated that for Radhakrishnan reason supplies conceptual clarity, is subordinate to intuition, and justifies the validity of intuition which transcends reason. It will be argued that Radhakrishnan agrees with the post‐modernist that reason is not universal, but he does not share their radical scepticism as his philosophy seeks wholeness, unity, order, and rationality in conjunction with intuition in contrast to the choice of these post‐modernist for diversity, difference, and chaos, and madness.     

Life Experience Is Not a Disease or Why Medicalizing Madness Is Counterproductive to Recovery

Abstract

The author draws on her personal experience as the family member of an individual with mental illness, on her anthropological research and on that of others to argue that medicalizing madness can be counterproductive to recovery. The medical model is sometimes used in a way that strips away the meaning of the illness experience. Analogies drawn to diseases do not help the understanding of mental illness. Psychiatry is a social practice embedded in a social milieu and that renders it less than objective. It is useful to recognize that the experiences called symptoms have meaning and may have positive and pleasurable aspects.     

质疑中医但不要否定中医

讨论了目前中西医争论的现状,分析了西医和中医的起源及发展过程,提出当现代医学向生物、心理、社会、医学模式转变时,中医可为这种转变提供思想和方法的借鉴,认为西医与中医是世界性医学与地方性医学的关系,根据医学发展的规律,地方性医学最终将能融入世界性医学之中,但在相当长时间内两者还会独立存在。