Kristallnacht: Experiencing Nazi Germany

Lore Zeller, long-time friend and proofreader of Psychological Perspectives, is a first-time contributor to our journal—or any journal. Lore is also something of an icon at the bookstore of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, where she has worked, dispensing books and wisdom, for over twenty years. She is eighty-seven years old. Over the past few years she has translated all of the correspondence from her German-Jewish parents and in-laws after she, her husband, and their two-year-old son fled their hometown of Berlin to seek safety in the United States via England. Within a few years of their escape, both sets of parents had perished in death camps. As survivors in Los Angeles, her husband and she helped found the Jung Institute here.

When she mentioned that she had been working on this paper, it was suggested she send it to us for review. After giving the idea some consideration, she eventually overcame her innate shyness — the results of which can be seen in the riveting story that follows.

Lore Haber Zeller is honoring the memory of her parents by using her maiden name with her married name for this publication. —Gilda Frantz     

Feminist Phenomenology and the Film World of Agnès Varda

Through a discussion of Agnès Varda's career from 1954 to 2008 that focuses particularly on La Pointe Courte (1954), L'Opéra‐Mouffe (1958), The Gleaners and I (2000), and The Beaches of Agnes (2008), this article considers the connections between Varda's filmmaking and her femaleness. It proposes that two aspects of Varda's cinema—her particularly perceptive portrayal of a set of geographical locations, and her visual and verbal emphasis on female embodiment—make a feminist existential‐phenomenological approach to her films particularly fruitful. Drawing both directly on the work of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty and on some recent film‐ and feminist‐theoretical texts that have employed his insights, it explores haptic imagery and feminist strategy in The Gleaners and I, the materialization of space characterizing Varda's blurring of fiction and documentary, and the dialectical relationship of people with their environment often observed in her cinema. It concludes that both Varda's female protagonists and the director herself may be said to perform feminist phenomenology in her films, in their actions, movement, and relationship to space, and in the carnality of voice and vision with which Varda's own subjectivity is registered within her film‐texts.     

Violence and the Sacred in the Fiction of Julia Kristeva

Abstract

This article examines the relatively neglected fiction of Julia Kristeva, especially her ‘gothic roman noir’ The Old Man and the Wolves, in relation to her theories of violence and abjection. It focuses on the various kinds of excitement and anxiety provoked by notions of border-crossing and metamorphosis in her fiction, and explores her critique of the banality of secular modernity and her nostalgic evocations of sacred space. I also discuss the paradox of her problematic use of detective fiction—a direct product of secular modernity—as a vehicle for this critique.     

“Spacious Enough to Receive What Came to Me”: An Interview with Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky tells the story of how synchronicity and a bad dream flung her into a Jungian analysis, how her experiences as a young woman in India opened her to the Jungian Weltanshauung, and how analysis gave her access to her passionate and absorbing inner life. She speaks about her relationship to inner figures—her muse, her ancestors—and how they continue to influence her life and writing.     

Dyke Methods or Principles for the Discovery/Creation of the Withstanding*

Alarmed by the domination inherent in the patriarchal idea of truth, the author sketches principles that allow her to develop accounts of reality—to “do theory”—without implying that others should agree. This epistemological setting supports differences among wimmin that are expressed in different understandings of the world; it also supports agreement.     

The Erotic and the Mystical in Postmodernity

Abstract

There has always been a close connection between divine and erotic love in the Western mystical tradition, from the Pseudo-Dionysius to St John of the Cross, and it is found also in poets such as John Donne and George Herbert. It is a tradition returned to in Ron Hansen's novel Mariette in Ecstasy (1991) in which Mariette, though banished from her convent, remains a stigmatic and Christ's ‘lover’. The essay concludes with a brief review of the postmodernity that entertains both the erotic—dangerous sex—and the love of God in true hospitality.     

Satir's Formula for Therapeutic Endurance

SUMMARY

Of the many factors thai accounted for Virginia Satir's ability to create change in intransigent couples and families, the sine qua nan may have been her therapeutic endurance (ability to “hang in there” with tough clients). Satir's formula for therapeutic endurance was her constant belief in the intrinsic worth of each individual—the wonderful human being myth—and its corollary thai all people arc capable of changing     

ON LOVE AND MELANCHOLIA IN MARGUERITE DURAS'S AUTOFICTION

In the Durassian melancholic atmosphere, past and present, fantasy and reality come together as one. This paper addresses the themes of love and destruction in Marguerite Duras's life that pervade her oeuvre, allowing us to discern a melancholic structure within her autofiction. Writing down her melancholia—the impossible mourning of a loved object—Duras captures nothingness and loss—in order not to die of love. In a constant exchange with her readers, she searches for herself and delivers herself to her readers. This renewable creative process of writing enables her to engage in an ongoing experience of identity reconstruction, in a way similar to the patient in psychoanalysis re‐creating his/her life's fiction.     

Justice in the Family: A Defence of Feminist Contractarianism

ABSTRACT Jean Hampton argues that we can detect exploitation in personal relationships by thinking about what we would agree to were we to set aside the emotional benefits we receive from those relationships. Hampton calls her account “feminist contractarianism,” but it has recently been critiqued as decidedly un‐feminist, on the grounds that it is hostile to women's interests and women's values. Furthermore, Hampton's requirement that we imaginatively distance ourselves from our emotional connections to our loved ones — the key element in her contractarian test — is simply ad hoc. In this essay, I will evaluate these objections and offer a new justification for Hampton's test. I conclude that feminist contractarianism is not only a useful tool for detecting exploitation in the family, it is also deserving of its feminist label.     

Healthcare,Responsibility and Golden Opportunities

When it comes to determining how healthcare resources should be allocated, there are many factors that could—and perhaps should—be taken into account. One such factor is a patient’s responsibility for his or her illness, or for the behavior that caused it. Policies that take responsibility for the unhealthy lifestyle or its outcomes into account—responsibility-sensitive policies—have faced a series of criticisms. One holds that agents often fail to meet either the control or epistemic conditions on responsibility with regard to their unhealthy lifestyles or their outcomes. Another holds that even if patients sometimes are responsible for these items, we cannot know whether a particular patient is responsible for them. In this article, we propose a type of responsibility-sensitive policy that may be able to surmount these difficulties. Under this type of policy, patients are empowered to change to a healthier lifestyle by being given what we call a ‘Golden Opportunity’ to change. Such a policy would not only avoid concerns about patients’ fulfilment of conditions on responsibility for their lifestyles, it would also allow healthcare authorities to be justified in believing that a patient who does not change her lifestyle is responsible for the unhealthy lifestyle. We conclude with a discussion of avenues for further work, and place this policy in the broader context of the debate on responsibility for health.

     

Dignity in Context,and Out: Discussion of Lynne Jacobs’ “On Dignity,a Sense of Dignity,and Inspirational Shame”

ABSTRACT

Dr. Lynne Jacobs’ “On Dignity, a Sense of Dignity, and Inspirational Shame” is an interdisciplinary integration of a priori ethics and a phenomenology of dignity. She contends that the human person’s engagement with other people—writ large in the therapeutic encounter—is inherently ethically situated. Moreover, she avers an inherent content to this ethics, namely, mutual respect for distinctively human value—dignity—between and among people. Her ethics of dignity informs her psychoanalytic exploration of experiences of dignity, indignity, and her notion of inspirational shame, among others. I join in Jacobs’ advocacy for therapeutic facilitation of a person’s sense of inherent worth, as well as her opposition to relational contexts of devaluation and degradation. However, the primordiality Jacobs grants to her ethics of dignity often obscures the constitutively cultural, familial, and personal contextuality of, first, her—and in my view, any—ethical conviction; second, what she describes as the experience of being human; third, the alleged indignity of human vulnerability; and finally, the claim that shame is the natural reaction to one’s failure to live up to personal ideals. In the end, and subject to certain clinical concerns, Jacobs’ article integrates into psychoanalysis primordial ethical duties that she and others claim inhere in us as human beings.     

Testimonial Injustice and a Case for Mindful Epistemology

In her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice Miranda Fricker identifies testimonial injustice as a case where a hearer assigns lower credibility to a speaker due to “identity prejudice.” Fricker considers testimonial injustice as a form of epistemic injustice since it wrongs the speaker “in her capacity as a knower.” Fricker recommends developing the virtue of “testimonial justice” to address testimonial injustice. She takes this virtue to involve training in a “distinctly reflexive critical social awareness.” The main goal of this article is to argue that Fricker's proposed training falls short of the target and that a cultivation of the capacity of being present—the ability to be mindful—would be necessary to develop the critical social awareness that Fricker requires. I want to explore the impact of compassion and open-mindedness—virtues cultivated in mindfulness training—on testimonial justice specifically and virtue epistemology generally. In attempting to develop an epistemic account informed by mindfulness—a mindful epistemology—my primary goal is to bring Buddhist insights on how to anchor the mind by training it to be fully present and attentive into the focus of mainstream Western philosophy. More specifically, I argue that doing so allows us to appreciate the crucial role that a prediscursive level of cultivation plays in the development of testimonial justice.     

Against Propositionalism

‘Propositionalism’ is the widely held view that all intentional mental relations—all intentional attitudes—are relations to propositions or something proposition‐like. Paradigmatically, to think about the mountain is ipso facto to think that it is F, for some predicate ‘F’. It seems, however, many intentional attitudes are not relations to propositions at all: Mary contemplates Jonah, adores New York, misses Athens, mourns her brother. I argue, following Brentano, Husserl, Church and Montague among others, that the way things seem is the way they are, and that propositionalism must be abandoned.     

Contentious Freedom: Sex Work and Social Construction

In this article, Brison extends the analysis of freedom developed in Nancy J Hirschmann's book, The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom, to an area of controversy among feminist theorists: that of sex work, including prostitution and participation in the production of pornography. This topic raises some of the same issues concerning choice and consent as the three topics Hirschmann discusses in her book—domestic violence, the current welfare system in the United States, and Islamic veiling—but it also raises some distinct ones concerning the social construction of sexuality and possible conflicts between the freedom of some women (who may choose to engage in sex work) and the freedom of others (who may be harmed by the contribution of such work to the social construction of categories such as “women” and “sex”).     

The Importance of a Comprehensive Clinical Diagnosis for Group Psychotherapy of Borderline and Narcissistic Patients

This article presents a psychoanalytically oriented model of group treatment for female adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Two key treatment, issues—the survivor's struggle to trust her own mind and her tenacious allegiance to an omnipotent, all-bad self-representation—are used to illustrate ways in which the transference/countertransference matrix of the group permits members to enact, identify, and work through central internalized relational configurations. The group therapist's role is to maintain transitionality, a focus on process, and the capacity for play.     

The Sexual Division of Labor and the Split Paycheck

This essay takes up an apparently minor idea of Susan Moller Okin's Justice, Gender, and the Family—that employers should split the paycheck of wage‐earning husbands between employees and their stay‐at‐home spouses—and suggests that it actually threatens to undermine Okin's entire argument by perpetuating the most central cause of women's inequality by Okin's own account: the sexual division of labor. Recognizing the vital contributions that Okin's seminal work made and the impact that it had on the field of feminist philosophy and political theory, the essay explores the ethical, political, and philosophical problems with this solution to the dire problems of gender inequality and injustice that Okin correctly identifies. The essay suggests that her commitment to liberalism may have resulted in a commitment to an inadequate vision of how to solve the problems of gender inequality, and offers other possibilities that Okin could have pursued instead that sustain her strong commitment to liberalism.     

Humanism and Theoretical Pluralism

Christian Smith's What Is a Person? calls for a normative turn in sociology—the grounding of sociology in a theory of human nature. While offering a systematic account of a thick view of personhood—what it should look like, how it can be applied, and why it is needed—the book proposes a critical realist personalism as the best metatheoretical direction for sociology. The author of this essay agrees with the main questions and direction of Smith's project. However, by historicizing the origins and sociological implications of personalist moral theory, the author problematizes the personalism that is one of the foundations of Smith's project. She contrasts personalism with humanism, suggesting that the latter might possess both the normative robustness and comparative potential needed for contemporary sociological theory and practice. She ends her response to Smith's book by raising questions about the relationship between critical realist personalism and theoretical pluralism.     

Mood and Creativity over Time in a Bipolar Participant

When depression alternates with mania, as in a bipolar affective disorder, creativity might be enhanced. To investigate this, we employed a single‐subject design, looking at both affective space and the spectral covariation of mood and creativity in a participant presenting with bipolar affective disorder. The study was conducted over a period of 54 days, and employed a standard measure of mood (the Brief Mood Introspection Scale) and a standard task of creativity (Alternative Uses Task). Both positive affect and negative affect appear to be somewhat undifferentiated for this participant, and her mood space does not conform to that described by the accepted major dimensions of Arousal and Pleasure. Conceivably, this is because of her rapid mood fluctuations. A 2.7‐day periodicity was found for Tired, Peppy, Nervous, and Calm, on the one hand, and ideational fluency, ideational flexibility, and originality, on the other. In addition, a 9‐day periodicity was common to Happy, Sad, and Gloomy—all three affects clustering in the same affective space—together with both ideational flexibility and originality. This finding brings into question the relationship between creativity and both positive and negative mood.     

Teaching relationship science: Continuity and change in the craft

Relationship science is a dynamic, flourishing enterprise, with numerous discoveries and new lines of inquiry evident in recent changes in its textbooks and the teaching activities invented by its instructors. To survey changes and challenges in the teaching of courses that introduce students to relationship science—and to pursue “news instructors can use”—we surveyed 135 instructors of relationships courses regarding their teaching tactics and experiences. Guided by their responses and suggestions for further inquiry, we also examined the changes in textbooks on which they rely and reviewed teaching activities created to assist them with their teaching over the last 20 years. At present, some topics are nearly universal components of relationships courses but idiosyncrasy exists, particularly with regard to new topics—such as coverage of technology, intersectionality, or consensual nonmonogamy—that instructors plan to include in revisions of their courses. Suggestions for both new and experienced instructors are provided.     

“I am NN”: A Reconstruction of Anscombe's “The First Person”

This paper develops a way of understanding G. E. M. Anscombe's essay “The First Person” at the heart of which are the following two ideas: first, that the point of her essay is to show that it is not possible for anyone to understand what they express with “I” as an Art des Gegebenseins—a way of thinking of an object that constitutes identifying knowledge of which object is being thought of; and second, that the argument through which her essay seeks to show this is itself first personal in character. Understanding Anscombe's essay in this light has the merit of showing much of what it says to be correct. But it sets us the task of saying what it is that we understand ourselves to express with “I” if not an Art des Gegebenseins, and in particular what it is that we understand ourselves to express with sentences with “I” as subject that might seem to express identity judgments, such as “I am NN”, and “I am this body”.