God’s Faithfulness and Dementia: Christian Theology in Context

Christian theology concerns the practical, contextual realities of life in the church and the world. What does this mean for a person with dementia? While much dementia care focuses on deficits, this article promotes a different starting point: God’s faithfulness rather than our forgetfulness. Using case studies from residential aged care, opportunities for meaningful pastoral care are explored, inviting us to see in the person with dementia a deep connection with ourselves. Drawn from a theological understanding of God as three persons—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—“person-centered care” invites us into relationships of mutuality and reciprocity not dependent on words. Pastoral care of families is manifest through personal relationships where all aspects of dementia, including death and dying, can be discussed openly. Grounded in God’s faithfulness, the first and final word is love. Hope lies in the belief that we have already been found. We are blessed by the grace of God, called into community where the insightful and the forgetful flourish together.     

Sexuality and Intimacy in Couples Therapy

SUMMARY

In ages past, spiritual seekers left their close relationships for the seclusion of a monastery or a solitary journey, facing their dragons essentially alone. Today, however, many of us face the dragons within us as we undertake the tasks of differentiation and individuation. Thus, our relationships, if we allow them, can become the loci of our deepest self-exploration, leading to deepening intimacy with our partners.     

Intimacies: An Integrative Multicultural Framework for Couple Therapy

Implicitly or explicitly, our ideas about intimacy are the most fundamental notions giving direction to the process of couple therapy. Yet, as a field, we have spent little time conceptualizing intimacy and even less time considering the diversity of priorities and meanings couples bring to our offices. In Part One, Varieties of Intimacy, I describe a kaleidoscope of contexts—socio‐historical, cultural, gender, life cycle, and developmental—that inform our ideas and expectations for intimacy in couples’ relationships. I highlight different spheres in which intimacy may take place such as the emotional, sexual, intellectual, or familial. I propose a starting point in which the therapist, in a collaborative manner, helps the partners articulate their yearnings and priorities in order to negotiate a shared vision. In Part Two, Conceptualizing Intimacy, I suggest an experiential definition that gives room for each partner's subjective meanings, yet consider diverse relational processes that may need to be addressed for a resilient ebb and flow of intimate experiences. In Part Three , Sexual Intimacy, I outline conditions in which sex is more likely to be experienced as intimate rather than nonintimate. Finally, in Part Four, I describe Therapeutic Principles to guide the therapist in taking couples from reactivity to dialogue to negotiations of intimacy. The integrative framework proposed here discourages monolithic a priori notions of intimacy and highlights instead: nuanced meanings, relational processes to be considered differentially, present and past emotional blocks, and a flexible clinical approach to foster conditions for the creation and resilience of intimate experiences.     

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.     

Ethical alterity and asymmetrical reciprocity: A Levinasian reading of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Works of Love</Emphasis>

Following and extending the recent tradition of Kierkegaard–Levinas comparativists, this essay offers a Levinasian commentary on salient aspects of Kierkegaard’s ethico-religious deliberations in Works of Love, a text that we are unsure whether or not Levinas actually read. Against some post/modern interpreters, I argue that one should adopt both a Jewish and a Christian perspective (rather than an oversimplified either/or point of view) in exploring the sometimes “seamless passages” between Kierkegaard and Levinas’s thought. The first argument of this essay is that interhuman ethical relationships, as seen by Kierkegaard and Levinas, are premised upon an original asymmetry or inequality. Ethical alterity requires more on the part of the responsible I for the destitute Other. However, this original ethical alterity is not at all the last word in loving and healthy human relationships. In the second section of this study, a dual asymmetry on the part of each participating human yields an “asymmetrical reciprocity,” or in Kierkegaard’s words, “infinity on both sides.” While they are of no concern␣to me, your ethical duties to me are revealed to you upon our face-to-face encounter. Here I offer a Kierkegaardian–Levinasian response to Hegel’s and Buber’s thoughts that humans essentially desire recognition, mutuality, and reciprocity from one another in intersubjective relationships. Hegel and Buber are more or less correct, but when seen from a Kierkegaardian and Levinasian perspective, we are offered resources for understanding more precisely how and why their accounts are accurate. Hegel and Buber offer us the second phase of the argument, whereas Kierkegaard and Levinas show us the first and primary phase of interhuman relationships – the revealed and infinite ethical responsibility to the Other person.     

Sharing Responsibility and Holding Responsible

Who, in particular, may hold us responsible for our moral failings? Most discussions of moral responsibility bracket this question, despite its obvious practical importance. In this article, I investigate the moral authority involved and how it arises in the context of personal relationships, such as friendship or family relations. My account is based on the idea that parties to a personal relationship not only share responsibility for their relationship, but also — to some degree that is negotiated between them — for one another's lives. In sharing these responsibilities, we grant people a particular authority to respond to us. By highlighting the responsibility that we assume when we hold someone responsible, I also suggest that this analysis contains important lessons for thinking about responsibility in other contexts.     

Beneficence and procreation

Consider a duty of beneficence towards a particular individual, S, and call a reason that is grounded in that duty a “beneficence reason towards S.” Call a person who will be brought into existence by an act of procreation the “resultant person.” Is there ever a beneficence reason towards the resultant person for an agent to procreate? In this paper, I argue for such a reason by appealing to two main premises. First, we owe a pro tanto duty of beneficence to future persons; and second, some of us can benefit some of those persons by procreating. In support of the first premise I reject the presentist account of time in favor of the view that future persons are just as real as presently existing persons. I then argue that future persons are like us in all the morally relevant ways, and since we owe duties of beneficence to each other, we also owe duties of beneficence to future persons. In support of the second premise I offer an account of benefiting according to which an individual can be benefited by an action even if it makes her no better off than she would have been, had the action not been performed. This account of benefiting solves what I call the “non-identity benefit problem.” Finally, I argue that having a life worth living is a benefit, and some of us can cause some persons that benefit by causing them to exist.     

How Other-Oriented Perfectionism Differs from Self-Oriented and Socially Prescribed Perfectionism

Over the past 20 years we have gained a comprehensive understanding of self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism, but our understanding of other-oriented perfectionism (OOP)—and how it differs from the other two forms of perfectionism—is still underdeveloped. Two studies with university students are presented examining OOP’s relationships with social goals, the dark triad, the HEXACO personality dimensions, and altruism. OOP showed unique positive relationships with narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy and unique negative relationships with nurturance, intimacy, and social development goals. Furthermore it showed unique relationships with social dominance goals (positive) and emotionality, agreeableness, and altruism (negative) dependent on the OOP measure used. The findings suggest that OOP is a “dark” form of perfectionism associated with antisocial and narcissistic personality characteristics.     

Response to Irene Cairo,Rogelio A. Sosnik,and Eyal Rozmarin

I have based my response on several central points put forward by my discussants. This has provided the opportunity to explore different frames of reference. I focus on the validity of some notions such as identity or belonging to a stable institution. Also I discuss the different viewpoints concerning how we construct our sense of belonging, proposing that in order to belong to a relationship, it is necessary to continually work at this relationship. I also state that representation is distinct from presentation and that each of them has a different logic. This is also true for identification and the relationship between two or more others. My view is that the concept of otherness and presentation cannot be included in the hypothesis of transference–countertransference. It needs another one name, Interference. As these are unfamiliar concepts, it is clear that sometimes they are likened to more established ones. Using Eyal Rozmarin's remarks about how a feeling of intimacy was created at a dinner party with friends, I challenged the validity of this concept of intimacy in the construction of relationships. I also emphasized the importance of tolerance of others as Irene Cairo suggested. I feel strongly that our work with patients is not difficult but rather challenging and stimulating.     

Glass Panels and Peepholes: Nonhuman Animals and the Right to Privacy

In this paper, I defend the claim that many sentient nonhuman animals have a right to privacy. I begin by outlining the view that the human right to privacy protects our interest in shaping different kinds of relationships with one another by giving us control over how we present ourselves to others. I then draw on empirical research to show that nonhuman animals also have this interest, which grounds a right to privacy against us. I further argue that we can violate this right even when other animals are unaware that we are watching them.     

Alter(ING) Potential Space: Personalization and Community in Psychoanalytic Therapy

In this paper, I use the notion of alterity to amend Winnicott's view of potential space. I suggest that the parent's potential space—omnipotent recognition and treatment of the baby as person—makes possible the baby's belief in and experience of omnipotence, which is manifested in his/her omnipotent recognition and treatment of objects in terms of utility, pleasure, and function. This early manifestation of potential space gives way to recognition of objects as proto-persons, which accompanies the child's illusion that the (transitional) object recognizes him/her as a person. Here the child learns to surrender to the object's omnipotent constructions and, in these moments, there is a proto-communion—an illusory experience of mutual joining together as persons. This eventually gives way to a potential space wherein two or more people mutually and omnipotently construct and surrender to each other as persons, subordinating pleasure, function, and utility to the recognition of the Other as person. This depiction of potential space can serve as a framework for understanding the process of therapy as a struggle not simply of reality and illusion, but one of recognition and treatment of Others as persons and the possibility of communion and community.     

Derrida's Worldly Responsibility: The Opening between “Faith” and the “Sacred”

This article will theorize how Derrida's deconstruction signifies a fundamental ontological alterity. We will examine the use of both the tropes of “sacred” and “faith” as tropes to express this possibility. We will articulate how deconstruction, as a development of phenomenology, provides a theoretical nexus where the alterity of things and persons may be thought. We will arrive at the paradoxical formulation of “ontological alterity” as a key moment in deconstructive thinking. Essentially we will argue that deconstruction offers the resources to think the relation between other person and things in the world as motivated by a firm radicalization of Heideggerean worldliness and Levinasian alterity.     

Giving the Benefit of the Doubt

Abstract

Faced with evidence that what a person said is false, we can nevertheless trust them and so believe what they say – choosing to give them the benefit of the doubt. This is particularly notable when the person is a friend, or someone we are close to. Towards such persons, we demonstrate a remarkable epistemic partiality. We can trust, and so believe, our friends even when the balance of the evidence suggests that what they tell us is false. And insofar as belief is possible, it is also possible to acquire testimonial knowledge on those occasions when the friends know what they tell us. This paper seeks to explain these psychological and epistemological possibilities.     

Cyberpsychology, Human Relationships, and Our Virtual Interiors

Recent research suggests an "Internet paradox"—that a communications technology might reduce social involvement and psychological well–being. In this article I examine some of the limitations of current Internet communication, including those of access, medium, presentation , and choice , that bear on the formation and maintenance of social relationships. I also explore issues central to human meaning in a technological culture—those of the history of the self, of individuality, and of human relationships—and suggest that social forces, technological and otherwise, have increasingly eroded our social interconnectedness and even produced psychological fragmentation. Finally, by considering the psychology of privacy, subjectivity, and intimacy, I look at the historical and developmental processes of internalization by which we construct the "virtual interior" of mind. Understanding this link between human meaning and technological culture, in the form and pattern of our virtual interiors, may help us to see opportunities as well as dangers for the growth of our humanity, our ethics, and our spirituality.     

Narcissism and Dependency in the Obsessional-Hysteric Marriage

Marriages in which one partner is an obsessional neurotic and the other an hysteric lead to certain patterns of difficulty and conflict that are functions both of the character structure of each and of their interaction. The central dynamic task of marriage is the development and integration of constructive and viable patterns of intimacy. Both the obsessional and the hysteric have serious problems with intimacy and introduce into the marriage distortions and limitations of experience which restrict or even bar intimacy. This paper will examine some of the interpersonal and transactional dynamics considered especially important in such relationships.     

Adult attachment and perceptions of closeness

An online sample of more than 150,000 participants was used to examine whether—in addition to predicting how much intimacy people want—attachment styles also predict how people define and perceive intimacy. Results indicated that, as compared with relatively secure individuals, people with high levels of attachment anxiety required more time, affection, and self‐disclosure to construe a relationship as “close.” Additionally, anxious individuals perceived less intimacy in relationship vignettes than did their less anxious peers. In contrast, highly avoidant individuals required less time, affection, and self‐disclosure to define a relationship as “close,” and they perceived more intimacy in vignettes than did their more secure peers. These findings indicate that people who are relatively anxious not only want more intimacy in their relationships, but they are also less likely to perceive intimacy, as compared with their less anxious peers. Conversely, people high in avoidance not only want less intimacy, but they are also more sensitive to its presence, as compared with their less avoidant peers.     

The Metabolic Core of Environmental Education

I consider the case of the “simplest” living beings—bacteria—and examine how their embodied activity constitutes an organism/environment interaction, out of which emerges the possibility of learning from an environment. I suggest that this mutual co-emergence of organism and environment implies a panbiotic educational interaction that is at once the condition for, and achievement of, all living beings. Learning and being learned from are entangled in varied ways throughout the biosphere. Education is not an exclusively human project, it is part of the ancient evolutionary process of elaborating and diversifying the relational possibilities inherent in metabolism that has brought forth our diverse and flourishing world. Abstracted from context, “education” appears as a set of ways in which humans actively engage and take responsibility for the learning outcomes of relationships with each other. Insofar as we consider this distinction absolute rather than a performed construct to be assessed by its consequences, we blind ourselves to the educative dimension of other species as well as our many miseducative engagements with them. If learning processes are inherent and constitutive of ecological communities, education theorists should devote their pedagogical sensitivities and insights to the crucial challenge of developing educative sustainable human–nature relations.     

Food sharing and perceptions of the status of a relationship

This study examined how individuals may form an impression of the closeness of the relationship between two individuals based on an observation of them sharing food. An opportunity sample of 72 participants watched a video clip of young adults in same-sex or mixed-sex dyads eating a meal together. In the experimental conditions, each member of the dyad also offered or fed a morsel of food to the other person. Analysis showed that food sharing was seen as indicative of familiarity between the members of a dyad. Actually feeding the other person a morsel of food was seen as an indicator of intimacy in male dyads but not in mixed-sex or female dyads. Results are discussed in terms of expectations of intimacy in male and female relationships.     

A friend is a present you give to your “Self”: Avoidance of intimacy moderates the effects of friends on self-liking

The current research proposes that thinking about friends improves feelings about the self and does so differentially depending on avoidance of intimacy. Based on previous findings that individuals who avoid intimacy in relationships (avoidant individuals) contrast their self-concepts with primed friends whereas those who pursue intimacy in relationships (non-avoidant individuals) assimilate their self-concepts to primed friends [Gabriel, S., Carvallo, M., Dean, K., Tippin, B. D., & Renaud, J. (2005). How I see “Me” depends on how I see “We”: The role of avoidance of intimacy in social comparison. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 156-157], we predicted that friends who embody negative aspects of self would lead avoidant individuals to like themselves more, whereas friends who embody positive aspects of self would lead non-avoidant individuals to like themselves more. A pretest determined that good friends were seen as more similar to positive and ideal aspects of the self, whereas friends about whom participants had more mixed feelings (ambivalent friends) were seen as more similar to disliked and feared aspects of the self. Four experiments supported the main hypotheses. In Experiment 1, non-avoidant individuals like themselves more when good friends were primed. In Experiment 2, avoidant individuals like themselves more when ambivalent friends were primed. In Experiment 3, non-avoidant individuals liked themselves better after thinking about a friend’s positive traits, whereas avoidant individuals liked themselves better after thinking about a friend’s negative traits. In Experiment 4, all individuals under self-esteem threat strategically brought friends to mind who would help them like themselves more.