The Female Professional: Parenting,Career, Choices and Compromises

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Mask maker, mask maker: The black gay subject in 1970s popular culture

Black gay artists have created a sustained body of literature that has served as a springboard for their creative and intellectual energies. In the 1980s and 1990s, black gay male textuality blossomed. The result is a minor literature establishing a black gay male sensibility and a distinctly Afro-Gay perspective. The political and poetic influence of these works is demonstrated visually in Looking For Langston by Isaac Julien, in Tongues Untied by the late Marlon Riggs, and to a lesser extent, Paris is Burning by Jennie Livingston. These documentaries seek to further a strategy of black gay representation. This essay explores the historical precedents for such outpouring. By situating pre-1980s representations of black gay men, I examine images of the black gay subject in the popular literature and culture of the 1970s, especially in one of the most popular works of the decade, Victor Dodson’s book, Black and Gay. I will also mention the ways in which contemporary writers, poets, film artists, and theater and performance ensembles such as Pomo Afro Homo allow black gay men to perform satirical roles that signify upon those earlier characterizations, images, and depictions, which seek to further marginalize them and, through performance, exhaust those contradictory conditions, silence often misnamed.     

Survivor of That Time, That Place: Clinical Uses of Violence Survivors' Narratives

Narratives by survivors of abuse offer compelling entries into the experiences of abuse and its effects on health. Reading such stories can enlarge the clinician's understanding of the complexities of abuse. Furthermore, attention to narrative can enhance the therapeutic options for abuse victims not only in mental health arenas, but also in other medical contexts. In this article we define the genre of survivor narratives, examine one such narrative in particular (Push by Sapphire, 1996), and explore the clinical implications of narrative in abuse victims' clinical care.     

Sexual Assault: The Female Victim,Her Male Partner,and Their Relationship

Using the Crisis model of Fox and Scherl, treatment issues for the female sexual assault victim and her male partner are proposed.     

The International Student: Female Circumcision Issues

The authors describe the process and practice of female circumcision, the impact it may have on circumcised female international college students, and some counseling strategies for the college counselor.     

German Inflection: The Exception That Proves the Rule

Language is often explained as the product of generative rules and a memorized lexicon. For example, most English verbs take a regular past tense suffix (ask-asked), which is applied to new verbs (faxed, wugged), suggesting the mental rule "add - ed to a Verb." Irregular verbs (break-broke, go-went) would be listed in memory. Alternatively, a pattern associator memory (such as a connectionist network) might record all past tense forms and generalize to new ones by similarity; irregular and regular patterns would differ only because of their different numbers of verbs. We present evidence that mental rules are indispensible. A rule concatenates a suffix to a symbol for verbs, so it does not require access to memorized verbs on their sound patterns, but applies as the "default," whenever memory access fails. We find 21 such circumstances for regular past tense formation, including novel, unusual-sounding, and rootless and headless derived words; in every case, people inflect them regularly (explaining quirks like flied out, sabre-tooths, walk-mans). Contrary to the connectionist account, these effects are not due to regular words constituting a large majority of vocabulary. The German participle -t applies to a much smaller percentage of verbs than its English counterpart, and the German plural -s applies to a small minority of nouns. But the affixes behave in the language like their English counterparts, as defaults. We corroborate this effect in two experiments eliciting ratings of participle and plural forms of novel German words. Thus default suffixation is not due to numerous regular words reinforcing a pattern in associative memory. Because default cases do not occupy a cohesive similarity space, but do correspond to the range of a symbol, they are evidence for a memory-independent, symbol-concatenating mental operation.     

The Enlightenment That Won't Go Away: Modernity's Crux

The Critical Process unleashed by the Enlightenment and endlessly resharpening itself to this day has mortally wounded the God of Deism, maybe also of theism, even of Christianity. A temptation of Christian theology is to retreat in denial into an updated version of Deism, seemingly granting full license to modern science but only so long as it does not impugn God's love. The alternative here proposed is to ride out The Critical Process, in fact to encourage it, all the way into modernity's crux: How can a design that is not benign still be divine? The Christian reply is: through a real death of God and of ourselves as well, and through resurrections beginning now, thus freeing The Critical Process from the illusion of insuring our survival and, instead, for the honest Enlightenment task of merely telling the truth.     

The Correlation Between Depression and Headache: The Role Played by Generational Changes in Female Achievement

The relationship between depression and somatic symptoms such as headache has never been explained. Both depression and headache appear to become more prevalent among women than among men only for cohorts that reach adolescence during periods of great change in opportunities for a female's academic achievement. In Studies 1a and 1b, the same pattern was found to apply to the correlation between depression and headache. In Studies 2a and 2b, self-report measures of depression and headache were found to share significant variance only among female adolescents who reported concerns regarding the limited achievements of their mothers. These females may view the roles of adult women as being limited and may experience stress and low self-esteem associated with depressive and somatic symptomatology.     

To Matrix, Network, or Hierarchy: That Is the Question

The authors present a structural analysis of three spatial diagrams-matrices, networks, and hierarchies-that specifies 10 properties on which these diagrammatic representations are hypothesized to differ: global structure, building block, number of sets, item/link constraints, item distinguishability, link type, absence of a relation, linking relations, path, and traversal. Each property has a "value" for each diagram, and these property values constitute the applicability conditions for the representations. Twenty-three college students (computer science majors and math educators) selected the type of diagram they thought would be most efficient for organizing the information in each of 18 short scenarios and verbally justified the reasons for their selections. The verbal protocols were coded with respect to the structural analysis. Both the representation selection and verbal justification data provided strong support for the structural analysis. Additionally, a factor analysis of students' justifications indicated that the organization of their knowledge is consistent with the structural analysis. Students' use of the structural properties to select appropriate representations and to justify those selections indicates that the structural analysis has psychological force.     

That All Children Should Be Free: Beauvoir,Rousseau, and Childhood

Simone de Beauvoir offers one of the most interesting philosophical accounts of childhood, and, as numerous scholars have argued, it is one of the most important contributions that she made to existentialism. Beauvoir stressed the importance of childhood on one's ability to assume one's freedom. This radically changed how freedom was construed for existentialism. Rather than positing an adult subjectivity that tries to flee freedom through bad faith, Beauvoir's account forces a recognition of a situated freedom that itself is also developmentally achieved. In this article, I explore the influence of Jean‐Jacques Rousseau on Beauvoir's discussion of childhood. By reading Beauvoir through Rousseau—who was one of her favorite authors—we see not just one but two accounts of childhood in Beauvoir's philosophical work. On the one hand is the idealistic childhood wherein the child is an apprentice to freedom. On the other is the constrained childhood whose product is apprenticed to the serious. I begin with a brief summary of Rousseau's Emile. Next, I offer some justification for reading Beauvoir alongside Rousseau before offering an account of Beauvoir's discussion of childhood. I end by exploring some of the implications of my reading for freedom.