Freud's philosophical inheritance: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in Beyond the Pleasure Principle

This essay explores the possible significance of Freud's references to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It attempts to reveal two sides of Freud's philosophical inheritance and explores the structure of Freud's ambivalence toward his intellectual predecessors.     

Blood, Race, and National Identity: Scientific and Popular Discourses

This essay examines the symbolic significance of blood in the twentieth century and its role in determining the composition of a national community along racial lines. By drawing parallels between Nazi notions of blood and racial purity and historically contemporaneous U.S. policies regarding blood and blood products, Polsky reveals a disturbing proximity in discourse and policy. While the Nazis attempted to locate Jewish racial essence and inferiority in blood and instituted eugenic measures and laws forbidding racial admixture, similar policies existed in the U.S. based on the so-called “one drop rule” that systematically discriminated against African Americans.     

Nietzsche and the tradition 1

Nietzsche and Modern Times: A study of Bacon, Descartes and Nietzsche. Laurence Lampert. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 475. £35.00

Nietzsche and Metaphysics. Peter Poellner. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xi + 320.     

Invidious Comparisons: Imagining a Psychology of Race and Gender Beyond Differences

Within psychology there is a longstanding debate concerning whether large, fundamental differences between races and genders exist. Much of this research involves comparisons that are invidious (offensively discriminating) and supports a political ideology in which members of different groups are held to be fundamentally different, alien, and therefore destined to different spheres. In this paper, specific factors are identified that make research on group differences more likely to produce distorted and partial findings. In addition, studies are cited whose methodological strategies offer insight into the processes that create and maintain group differences. Such research may illuminate not only the differences between groups, but also the very meaning of group categories. The process of scholarly peer review should become sensitive to the features that make comparisons invidious, so as to incorporate them into the criteria used to evaluate research.     

克尔凯郭尔与尼采

当代哲学中两个富有特征的基本概念,“生存”和“存在”,最初是由尼采和克尔凯郭尔创造的。尼采的哲学思考始终围绕着“生存”的现象,克尔凯郭尔的思考活动不断深入“存在”的问题。因此,他们二人的兴趣都首先而且几乎只是指向人,指向人的生存和人的存在的。所以,他们的哲学不是一个以封闭方式包括人类学的形而上学体系,相反,其哲学活动的内在系统的基础完全在于将一切问题都概括为这样一个基本问题：“人是什么?”和人成为了什么。这样,二者的哲学都是在一种实验“心理学”的名义下的哲学人类学。     

The Destructive Nature of the Term Race: Growing Beyond a False Paradigm

Originally based on a system of folk taxonomies, the term race has been used to group people by physical appearance, often with disruptive and harmful social consequences. Given that many national and international scientific groups have diminished their use of the term race in the classification of people, it is time for mental health professionals to seriously discuss the role and assess the usefulness of the term race. We recommend that the profession follow the lead of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1950/1978) in taking steps to question the use of the term, which UNESCO views as implying biological significance. In light of the lack of support to retain the term race as a scientific concept, and given the development of a no race position by anthropologists and geneticists, it is time for mental health professionals to become more active in addressing the use of this term. Specifically, although counselors in training are taught to use the term race to refer to cultural aspects of different groups of people, we believe the term itself is passé. In our opinion, the term, in varying degrees, contributes to the formation of false perceptions about various groups of people. These false perceptions are encountered by counselors when working with clients, professionals, and systems.