The discourse of oppression in contemporary gay Asian diasporal literature: Liberation or limitation?

In this article I examine contemporary Asian gay literature and argue that the experience of oppression is the central focus of this writing. Although this focus has helped gay Asians understand their experiences as a minority, the privileging of oppression as the primary site of gay identity also has other ramifications. In particular, it works to exclude experiences that are crucial to gay Asian identity but that are not centered around the experience of oppression. Because language not only describes but also determines and creates our reality, the centering of oppression in contemporary Asian gay literature helps to construct a reality for gay Asians in which oppression becomes the primary locus for identity politics. Consequently other kinds of experiences become, unwittingly, excluded as worthwhile areas of study in gay Asian criticism.     

Sexuality and the ‘Non-Intentional’ Implications for Psychotherapy Practice

This article examines how sexuality and desire provide an opportunity to experience the separation between the self and the other, and were developed in association with the experience of working with a particular patient in weekly therapy. The main theme explored in this article is the degree with which a person imposes his or her understanding and experience onto other people around them, and thereby potentially missing the opportunity to enjoy real personal contact with another person. The work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas is examined to highlight the separation between intentionality and nonintentionality. The distinction between the intentional and the nonintentional is also important in illustrating how a person can impose himself or herself on to others. A person's sexuality and desire for intimacy with another person is discussed in terms of how it provides the opportunity to experience the boundary between being for oneself and being in contact with the other; illustrating the separation of the nonintentional from the intentional. Finally, the implications for psychotherapy practice will be examined, particularly acknowledging the importance of a person's sexuality in determining how they relate to other people.     

A sense of Irishness

This paper explores how issues of Irish identity and difference expressed themselves in a range of group analytic settings. This Irish dimension has been largely absent in therapy literature. Work on the impact of cultural difference and racism, while very relevant, has not addressed itself to the specific dynamics of the Irish experience in Britain and how this manifests itself in therapy settings.

Irishness was understood in a number of different ways in the groups described. For the Irish members, their cultural identity was used both to generate a genuine exploration of difference and the interweaving of personal and cultural events, and, in other circumstances, it was used to create division and to deny early painful family experiences.

For the non-Irish members, the Irish experience was simultaneously acknowledged and denied. Acts of apparent inclusion led instead to an experience of exclusion. These experiences reflect the reality of social, political and historical power relations between cultures and how these manifest themselves in groups. A countertransference reaction on the part of the group therapist when identified as Irish, and the impact of this on the group, is also considered.     

Neurotheology and Evolutionary Theology: Reflections on the Mystical Mind

Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew B. Newberg in their book The Mystical Mind suggest that their neurotheology is both a metatheology and a megatheology. In this commentary I question whether neurotheology is comprehensive enough and suggest that it needs to and possibly can take into account the moral and social dimensions of religion. I then propose an alternative metatheology and megatheology: evolutionary theology grounded in the science of biocultural evolution and focusing on ultimate reality as creatively immanent in natural and human history. Neurotheology and evolutionary theology may complement one another. Evolutionary theology accounts for both the neurology of the brain and culturally evolved ideas and practices of particular religions and their theologies. Hence it seems more comprehensive than neurotheology. However, because ultimate reality in evolutionary theology is immanent in the world of space and time, of baseline experience, it cannot account for the mystic experience of absolute unitary being. In accounting for this transcendent experience and its reality, neurotheology is more comprehensive. However, neither theology can account for how transcendent ultimate reality, experienced by the mystic as absolute unitary being, gives rise to the changing world experienced as baseline reality.     

Dreams as a Meta-Conceptual or Existential Experience

The paper argues that dreams (or the recollected experience of dreams) consist partly in an awareness or experience of the conceptual fabric of our existence. Since what we mean by reality is intimately tied to the concepts given in our experience, dreams are therefore also partly an awareness of the fabric of what we mean by being itself and in general, that is, by objective as well as subjective reality. Further, the paper argues that this characteristic of dreams accounts for several other, more specific aspects of dreams and their possible interpretation, and that it allows us to see how these aspects are related to each other. These more specific aspects are the peculiar types of conceptual or logical relations and transitions that occur within dreams, dreams’ distinctive feeling texture, and some dimensions of the grounds and nature of suitable methods of interpreting dreams.     

Identity, narcissism and the emotional core

This paper describes the course of an analysis which demonstrates how borderline and narcissistic functioning can be understood in terms of a struggle with issues of identity. It shows how such functioning can come to exert a profound hold on the individual and why it seems, at times, a matter of life and death to the patient to avoid states of separation from the analyst. The paper suggests that these complex phenomena can be understood, perhaps surprisingly, in the simple terms of the nature of affect itself. The concept of the emotional core is introduced to embody and highlight that which lies beneath both Jungian and Freudian models (offering a potential bridge between the two models)--namely the psyche's essentially affective nature. It is suggested that the emotional core can serve as an organ of perception giving the individual both their primary relation to reality and an emotional attachment to others. This emotional core is understood to function in a narcissistic manner to preference experiences of sameness and in aversion to experiences of difference--a view consonant with Stern's understanding of infant development where the infant is able to distinguish self from other from the beginning of life (as Fordham also held); taking up Stern's terminology, it gives the individual a 'core' sense of being. There is, however, no stable, on-going sense of 'I' associated with this form of functioning as the individual is immersed in the latest affect to enter consciousness (as in the borderline state of mind) and consequently the individual comes to rely intensely on the other to determine their sense of being (the other becomes a self-regulating other in Stern's terms). The development of ego-functioning gives a more stable and on-going sense of 'I' to the individual, giving contact with the broader personality, allowing the individual to be less reliant on the other and orientating them to reality in a way more fitting to their overall needs. The paper describes how consciousness, which is not seen as identical with the ego, moves between the mode of functioning of the ego and that of the emotional core, i.e., shifting in and out of states where projective identification predominates. It elaborates the range of self-experience encompassing spiritual experience and states of disintegration (which are understood to have a similar structure) on one side, to ego-based experience (which can itself be defensive and rigid at times) on the other. It explores the consequences of such a view for analytic technique and relates it to the Jungian view of the self and the Freudian unconscious.     

Mixing realities? An application of augmented reality for the treatment of cockroach phobia.

Augmented reality (AR) refers to the introduction of virtual elements in the real world. That is, the person is seeing an image composed of a visualization of the real world, and a series of virtual elements that, at that same moment, are super-imposed on the real world. The most important aspect of AR is that the virtual elements supply to the person relevant and useful information that is not contained in the real world. AR has notable potential, and has already been used in diverse fields, such as medicine, the army, coaching, engineering, design, and robotics. Until now, AR has never been used in the scope of psychological treatment. Nevertheless, AR presents various advantages. Just like in the classical systems of virtual reality, it is possible to have total control over the virtual elements that are super-imposed on the real world, and how one interacts with those elements. AR could involve additional advantages; on one side it could be less expensive since it also uses the real world (this does not need to be modeled), and it could facilitate the feeling of presence (the sensation of being there), and reality judgment (the fact of judging the experience as real) of the person since the environment he or she is in, and what he or she is seeing is, in fact the "reality." In this paper, we present the data of the first case study in which AR has been used for the treatment of a specific phobia, cockroaches phobia. It addresses a system of AR that permits exposure to virtual cockroaches super-imposed on the real world. In order to carry out the exposure, the guidelines of Ost with respect to "one-session treatment" were followed. The results are promising. The participant demonstrated notable fear and avoidance in the behavioral avoidance test before the treatment, and not only was an important decrease in the scores of fear and avoidance observed after the treatment, but also the participant was capable of approaching, interacting, and killing live cockroaches immediately following the treatment. The results are maintained in a follow-up conducted 1 month after the termination of the treatment.     

The phenomenological-existential comprehension of chronic pain: going beyond the standing healthcare models

A distinguishing characteristic of the biomedical model is its compartmentalized view of man. This way of seeing human beings has its origin in Greek thought; it was stated by Descartes and to this day it still considers humans as beings composed of distinct entities combined into a certain form. Because of this observation, one began to believe that the focus of a health treatment could be exclusively on the affected area of the body, without the need to pay attention to patient’s subjectivity. By seeing pain as a merely sensory response, this model was not capable of encompassing chronic pain, since the latter is a complex process that can occur independently of tissue damage. As of the second half of the twentieth century, when it became impossible to deny the relationship between psyche and soma, the current understanding of chronic pain emerges: that of chronic pain as an individual experience, the result of a sum of physical, psychological, and social factors that, for this reason, cannot be approached separately from the individual who expresses pain. This understanding has allowed a significant improvement in perspective, emphasizing the characteristic of pain as an individual experience. However, the understanding of chronic pain as a sum of factors corresponds to the current way of seeing the process of falling ill, for its conception holds a Cartesian duality and the positivist premise of a single reality. For phenomenology, on the other hand, the individual in his/her unity is more than a simple sum of parts. Phenomenology sees a human being as an intending entity, in which body, mind, and the world are intertwined and constitute each other mutually, thus establishing the human being’s integral functioning. Therefore, a real understanding of the chronic pain process would only be possible from a phenomenological point of view at the experience lived by the individual who expresses and communicates pain.     

Between two intimacies: The formative contexts of individual experience

While it is essential that we live as self-defined individuals, independently negotiating with an independent reality, this experience is not exhaustive of our reality. Such experience is importantly contextualized by two other kinds of experience, each an experience of intimacy. First, independent individuality depends upon a process of childhood development in which identity is formed through a familial intimacy in which the child lives from a non-reflective, bodily sense of a sharedness of identity with another (typically, but not necessarily, the mother). Second, independent individuality finds its healthy development in the establishment of new intimate bonds; these adult intimacies, unlike childhood intimacy, are bonds between persons who themselves have developed the sense of independent individuality and thus have experiential characteristics significantly different from those of childhood intimacy. From a developmental perspective, each of these two forms of intimacy is something good in itself but also something whose good resides in its enabling of something else, childhood intimacy facilitating the transformation into independent individuality and adult intimacy facilitating a transformative engagement with one's own limitations.     

Keepin’ it Real: London Youth Hip Hop as an Authentic Performance of Belief

Abstract

Hip hop is a global cultural phenomenon that encompasses rap music, dance, graffiti art, and fashion as well as particular ways of being. One sub-genre of hip hop is Gospel rap, in which Christian rappers attempt to ‘represent’ the truth of God as a tangible reality, thereby ‘keepin’ it real’. This study investigates how young British Jamaican male adults in the Brixton area of London appropriate hip hop for their own ends. Based on original raps authored and performed by these young people, the research finds that their representations of spiritual reality are influenced by the conventions and boundaries of professional Gospel rap. The study describes how youth incorporate religious hip hop into their everyday lives and argues that in some cases hip hop performance becomes a method for pedagogically reshaping the body, giving religious beliefs an ‘embodied authenticity’.     

Who is a Confucian Today? A Critical Reflection on the Issues Concerning Confucian Identity in Modern Times

Along with the revival of Confucian values among East Asian intellectuals since the 1980s, the question of Confucian identity has been repeatedly raised. The traditional identities of Confucianism and Confucians are being challenged. A new inquiry into Confucian identity is necessary because how to define Confucianism is now taken not only as a question of how to read history, but also as an issue of how to understand current and future reality. The central concern of this paper is with the question of how the modern transformation of the tradition has fundamentally changed the parameters that used to be of importance to defining Confucian identity and with the dilemma which modern Confucians face in searching for a new identity. The paper is intended to promote a critical examination of various directions taken to re-establish Confucian identity in modern times.     

Mental health and mediumship: an interpretative phenomenological analysis

There is a lack of research examining the mental health of practicing mediums, yet the nature of mediumship work inherently presents a number of challenges to the mental health of practitioners. In this study, we aimed to gain an understanding of how mediums experience their mental health in relation to their mediumistic practice and how they recognise and respond to psychological difficulties experienced by their clients. Fourteen mediums from the North West of England took part in one-to-one interviews, which were transcribed and subject to interpretative phenomenological analysis. Four themes were identified: from past traumas to mediumistic identity; spirit makes sense, mental illness is chaos; being resilient but vulnerable; and ethical mediumistic practice. The research highlights the value of not dismissing or attempting to change appraisals of valued aspects of mediums’ anomalous experiences. However, the findings do indicate that support for exposure to clients’ difficulties might be helpful.     

The Development of Representations of Pretend Object Substitutions

Many theories of how pretense is mentally represented have been posited, but none have been effectually empirically tested to date. This research is the first to explore how children and adults mentally process simple pretend actions, specifically pretend object substitutions, and whether this representation changes with age. Preschoolers, older children, and undergraduates heard or read about a variety of pretend object substitutions, and their reaction time to name an image related to the object's real identity, pretend identity, or an unrelated image was measured. To test what is unique to pretense, these reaction times were compared to those from participants who responded to the same images after reading about nonpretend versions of the same actions. Results suggest that preschoolers inhibit reality when representing a pretend action, older children activate an object's real and pretend identities equally, and adults activate the object's real identity more than the pretend one. Implications for current theories of pretense representation are discussed.     

Rupturing Otherness: Becoming Estonian in the Context of Contemporary Britain

While identity construction continues to be a widely discussed and researched area in contemporary social sciences, the existing theories have overlooked the importance of understanding why and how identities as semiotic constructions emerge in individuals’ consciousness in the flow of their everyday functioning. This article seeks to address this limitation in the theorizing by proposing an alternative conceptualization of identity, according to which identity construction is triggered by rupturing life-experience, which surfaces another perspective and makes the person aware of a possibility to be otherwise or of the reality of being different. Theoretical claims put forward in the paper are drawn from data gathered in a recent study, which explored lived-through experiences of young Estonians, who made study-visits to the United Kingdom. The discussed data will also highlight some interesting aspects in Estonians’ self-definition as it is constructed in relation to Eastern-European identity in the context of contemporary Britain.     

The day the earth stood still: The presence of trauma in time experience

The experience of time is commonly perceived as developing within the context of the early relationship between mother and infant. The beginning of life occurs in an adapted environment, aimed to protect the child from internal and external disruptions. Through healthy development, the mind acquires a feeling of continuity that gradually becomes a cohesive sense of personal identity. However, in cases of traumatic interruptions to the primary environment, the defensive shield of the self is penetrated and the individual becomes prematurely aware and adapted to the external reality. This forced acknowledgement of time and reality could be manifested in various types of time disturbances, such as disorientation about time or difficulties in following a schedule. In therapeutic relationships, this drama would be enacted in a struggle against the psychoanalytic setting, which disrupts the continuity of being with the therapist. Importantly, these patients express a deep conscious or unconscious fantasy to live in a timeless world, in which they would not be forced to adapt themselves to others’ expectations or needs. Clinical examples are used to illustrate how traumatic history is evident in the patient’s time experience and in the psychoanalytic dialogue.     

The invasion of reality (or of negotiation): The psychoanalytic ethic and extinction anxiety

Extinction anxiety is the expression used to describe a pervasive and ever more realistic sense of futurelessness. A group emotion characterized by terror of the extinction of the human race, the family, or professional or shared cultural group, it grips the individual with a sense of desperation and impotence through the internal groups present in the mind of every individual. The contribution presented here aims to demonstrate how extinction anxiety has also infected psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic institutions, thereby seriously weakening the ethics of psychoanalysis. The term ethics here should not be confused with morals, but is intended as the happiness that is derived from the capacity to be responsible for one's self and one's own professional identity. The contagion of extinction anxiety has, in fact, accentuated the crisis of psychoanalysts and their faith in psychoanalysis. The author relates a particularly tormented clinical experience in order to show how only the relationship with psychoanalysis and its capacity to interpret the manifestations of the unconscious, enables the recognition of the effects of what he defines as a true invasion of reality, thus restoring to thought the power to establish a deep, transformative, and fecund relationship between internal and external reality.     

Virtual reality as a representative training environment for football referees

Visual experience plays an important role in facilitating referee decision-making. Video training can be used to train these perceptual-cognitive skills in discrete scenarios, for instance in foul situations in football, but is less suitable in other instances such as when seeking to make decisions in open-play scenarios due to a lack of representativeness. Recent technological advances enable the use of virtual reality (VR) to replicate game situations in a controlled and realistic manner. It is however not yet known how representative behaviour in VR would be of behaviour on-field in the natural environment. The aim of the study was therefore to examine the degree to which visual behaviour of football referees in virtual reality would reflect behaviour found when adjudicating matches on-field. Sub-elite football referees completed decision-making tasks in three experimental conditions: on-field (in a real match), in virtual reality and when observing video footage. Across the three environments we compared decision-making performance, visual behaviour (including search rate, fixation duration, and head movements) and the user experience of the referees. Results revealed that behaviour in the VR environment was indistinguishable from that on-field. In contrast, visual-motor behaviour when observing video footage was markedly different to that found on-field (and in VR). The results show that visual-motor behaviour in VR is representative of that found on-field and therefore suggests that VR offers promise as a representative training environment for sports officials to improve on-field performance in the natural environment.