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.     

Using Methods That Matter: The Impact of Reflection,Dialogue, and Voice

In recent years, the field of community psychology has given considerable attention to how research and evaluation methods should be designed to support our goals of empowerment and social justice. Yet, as a field, we have given much less attention to whether the use of our methods actually achieves or supports our empowerment agenda. With the primary purpose of beginning to establish the norm of reporting on the impacts of our methods, this paper reports on the findings from interviews of 16 youth and adults who had participated in one participatory evaluation method (Photovoice). Two specific questions were examined: (1) What is the impact of participating in a Photovoice effort; and (2) How does the method of Photovoice foster these impacts? Overall, participants noted that they were significantly affected by their experiences as photographers and through their dialogue with neighbors during Photovoice group sessions. Impacts ranged from an increased sense of control over their own lives to the emergence of the kinds of awareness, relationships, and efficacy supportive of participants becoming community change agents. According to participants, Photovoice fostered these changes by (a) empowering them as experts on their lives and community, (b) fostering deep reflection, and (c) creating a context safe for exploring diverse perspectives. The implications of these findings for the science and practice of community psychology are discussed.     

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 I That Buys: Narcissists as Consumers

Which people are most swayed by self‐image motives and hence most likely to make consumer choices in line with those motives? This article contends that the answer is narcissists—individuals who see themselves, and who want others to see them, as special, superior, and entitled and who are prone to exhibitionism and vanity. This work hypothesizes that narcissists will, to validate their excessively positive self‐views, strive to purchase the high‐prestige products (i.e., expensive, exclusive, new, and flashy). In so doing, they will regulate their own esteem by increasing their apparent status and consequently earning others’ admiration and envy. This article also hypothesizes that narcissists will show greater interest in the symbolic than utilitarian value of products and will exhibit, even controlling for self‐esteem, more pronounced self‐enhancement phenomena such as endowment and self‐signaling effects.     

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.