Premodern, modern, and postmodern perspectives on sex and gender mixes

Postmodern sensibilities, generally associated with relational psychoanalysis, are applicable also in traditional and contemporary Freudian psychoanalytic contexts. Historically speaking, views of femininity and female sexuality may be ordered according to positions designated as premodern, modern, and postmodern. This temporal continuum provides a basis for incorporating aspects of postmodern feminist approaches to deconstructing gender into a more traditional yet contemporary psychoanalytic framework. The postmodern "crisis of category" is addressed through a critique from a modern psychoanalytic point of view of the gender stereotyping inherent in certain false binaries and either/or thinking of premodern psychoanalytic thinking regarding female (as well as male) sex and gender. The cultural changes brought about by the consciousness-raising of postmodern feminist and contemporary psychoanalytic thinking contribute significantly to evolutionary changes in the understanding of gender that are further internalized and represented intrapsychically. That is, sequential transformations in the internalization of new cultural norms influence the development of still more new cultural norms, so that progression in these identificatory markers of gender can be observed over successive generations.     

The premodern and the postmodern: Some parallels,with special reference to Hinduism

Insofar as the postmodern exists, it is held to represent a break with the modern, a break no less radical than that of the modern with the premodern. In this paper I point to certain similarities between on the one hand what are said to be key aspects of the postmodern and on the other hand the premodern. It may well be fruitful to look for further parallels on either side of modernity.     

Islamic Female Sexuality and Gender in modern feminist interpretation

Sexuality, gender and patriarchy are modern concepts that Western feminist scholars have unquestioningly utilized in their historical inquiry into women in Islam without ample consideration of periodization or problemization. Within the revelation of the Qur'an, the sexes were gendered in relation to each other in a reflection of their physical and biological complementarity. There was not, however, the construction of sexuality and gendering that is evident in the patriarchal society of the modern world. In this essay, I will attempt to trace the historiographical evolution of female sexuality from the time of the Prophet until the Middle Ages, particularly through the development of the female gendered roles of wifehood and motherhood as found in the Qur'an, hadith and fiqh. Additionally, I will argue that until the present these modern constructs have been taken for granted by postmodern scholarship on the topic across many academic disciplines. This has led to scholarship that superimposes modern conceptual frameworks upon earlier time periods. Although these are modern concepts, they may be aptly applied to discourses evident in the period under review, but they must be properly clarified and situated. Furthermore, I myself will work with these concepts, but I will problematize them to show history as a process through which one can find the precursors for modern sexuality and gender construction.     

后现代心理学与现代心理学的对话

当现代心理学正身处众多困境时,后现代心理学者们从新的视角和观点对其展开了攻势,因此在这近十多年里,西方心理学界充满了激烈辩论的声音。文章总结了西方心理学界围绕着后现代心理学这个话题展开的各种对话,包括心理学的认识论、研究性质、研究方法以及后现代心理学的价值等各个方面的讨论。作者在梳理这些对话的同时,对二者的观点进行了论述,其目的是为了更加深入地了解后现代心理学和现代心理学的理论建构,从而推进心理学科的深入研究。     

Postmodern Thought and Christian Education

This article examines the impact of postmodern thought on Christian education. It briefly defines postmodern perspectives and their impact on reasoning in a Christian context and examines specific postmodern positions on the notion of truth and its validity or rationality. Education has been impacted by postmodern thought by an opening of thinking about the ways of knowing which include more than empirical or technical ways of knowing. Postmodernism argues that meaning is negotiated rather than being exact and limiting. As popular trends and popular culture bring postmodern thought to everyone, the impact on the thinking of Christian students and educators is examined to encourage discovery of what fits in Christian thought and what does not. The impact of what postmodern thought means and does in higher education is discussed as a challenge for all educators. A comparison in a Christian context, of modern and postmodern positions, examines what is good from modernism and what is not, as well as what is good about postmodernism in order to know what to keep and what to discard. As postmodernism opens the way for acceptance of multiple perspectives, Christian educators are challenged to examine their own systems of thought and to know how best to deliver instruction in a Christian context.     

后现代语境下医学语言的伦理解读

医学的现代性遗产和后现代世界的冲突在不断加剧,导致了对医学语言理解的困境和伦理意义的丧失。后现代主义极力寻求人类理解的解释性基础,使后现代医学语言的伦理选择成为可能。在后现代语境下,医学语言的伦理应该是摆脱现代性“文化霸权”的一种诠释学的谈话,是一种境遇伦理。     

A POSTMODERN APPROACH TO WOMEN'S USE OF VIOLENCE: DEVELOPING MULTIPLE AND COMPLEX CONCEPTUALIZATIONS

We review the research on intimate partner abuse and, in particular, the articles in this issue, from within a feminist and postmodern framework. Research on women's use of violence is reviewed in terms of how researchers have constructed and measured violence and have conceptualized intimate partner violence (IPV) and gender. What and how we measure determines what we find ( McHugh & Cosgrove, 2005 ). We call for new conceptualizations of intimate violence and for more complex constructions of gender. We offer a postmodern perspective on gender and IPV arguing that interpersonal violence always involves gender, that approach and method influence results, and that men and women use violence in both similar and different ways.     

What are television advertisements really trying to tell us? A postmodern perspective

This paper differentiates between the modern and the postmodern approach to advertising. It provides indicators of the nature of postmodern advertisements and proposes a methodology based on critical discourse analysis for interpreting the meaning and understanding the structure of such advertisements. The paper discusses the purpose of the postmodern approach to advertising and argues that its very imagery may further confuse an already confused postmodern consumer. The credibility of the imagery may also be questioned where it is perceived to be an illusion that is incapable of being substantiated. Copyright © 2002 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Sex Differences and/in the Self: Classic Themes, Feminist Variations, Postmodern Challenges

This article examines perspectives on and intersections between two recurrent themes in the history of American psychology: sex differences and theories of self. These themes and certain connections between them are considered in three eras: early American psychology, feminist psychology coincident with the second wave of feminism, and the recent postmodern turn in psychology. A contextual analysis of parallels and contrasts among theories of sex differences and of the self in these three eras highlights problems with modernist understandings, especially with essentialist construals of gender and individualistic understandings of self. The article presents relationally defined postmodern views of gender and self, and comments on their promise for the present era of globalization and the consequent increasing attention to interconnections among people.     

女性心理学的进化与后现代女性心理学的产生

女性心理学的发展经历了女性经验主义、女性立场论和后现代女性心理学三个发展阶段。女性经验主义强调男女的共性,女性立场论强调女性经验的独特性,而后现代女性心理学认为尽管在女性经验主义和女性立场论之间存在着矛盾和对立,但是两者都认为存在着某种内在的东西决定着社会性别,因而是本质主义的观点,属于现代主义的范畴。后现代女性心理学认为,性别乃是一种文化的社会建构。     

PHILOSOPHIC WARRANTS FOR SCRIPTURAL REASONING

Addressing readers who are already acquainted with the practices of Scriptural Reasoning (SR), this essay offers a logical strategy for warranting and testing such practices as well as all postmodern criticisms of modern inquiry. The strategy is to distinguish the logic of suffering, which is reducible to the binary terms of propositional logic, from the logic of repair, which is not. The essay argues that, if reduced to such binary terms, efforts at repair become inadvertent acts of oppression, or acts that produce suffering. The essay concludes that postmodern and postliberal theorists become inadvertent oppressors when their attempts to repair modern inquiry are presented through propositional logics. The practice of SR should be irreducible to such logics.     

Searching for a better story: harnessing modern and postmodern positions in family therapy

In this paper it is argued that modern and postmodern positions on reality and knowledge should not create a theoretical division in family therapy and that rather, by harnessing the two together, each may restrain the other. This combination creates the potential for drawing widely from the whole field of family therapy as well as challenging the separation of mainstream family therapy models from psychoanalysis. The concept of better story is used to replace both the polarized modern position of an objective discoverable truth and the polarized postmodern position of all stories having equal validity. It is suggested that better stories, which evolve in the meeting of family and therapist, may include those which are more congruent, object-adequate, encompassing, holding, shared, emotional, conscious, just, provisional and hopeful.     

Analyzing Multiplicity: A Postmodern Perspective on Some Current Psychoanalytic Theories of Subjectivity

Tensions between modernism and postmodernism in psychoanalytic theory and practice are evident in the allegedly “postmodern” view of subjectivity as not unified but plural. Suggesting that a thoroughgoing postmodern clinical practice does not exist at present, I distinguish between U. S. and European models of the postmodern multiple subject and between modern and postmodern varieties of pluralism in the current psychoanalytic theorization of subjectivity in this country, proposing that all such pluralist theories are in fact mixed models. I argue that these theories do not reflect objective, essential traits of selfhood but are complexly shaped by the cultural presuppositions and intrapsychic needs of the analyst; hence attempts to theorize subjectivity with reference to science (including developmental schemas) are problematic. Because a thoroughgoing postmodern pluralism cannot accommodate such concepts as agency and authenticity or a coherent narrative of the treatment process, clinical psychoanalysis, at least at present, inevitably includes major elements of the modernist approach, in which subjectivity is seen as unified. At this time of paradigm shift between modernism and postmodernism, therefore, it is important that pluralists decenter from their theories and respect the continuing influence of modernism on psychoanalytic theory and practice.     

Beyond Essentialism and Constructivism: Commentary on Paper by Cynthia Dyess and Tim Dean

The author comments on Dean and Dyess's “Gender: The Impossibility of Meaning.” They provide a valuable critique, based on Lacan's work, of postmodern gender theories. However, Dean and Dyess's argument for the “impossibility of meaning” in regard to gender may erect a new false dichotomy (gender as endless possibility versus gender as total impossibility) in place of the problematic dichotomy (gender essentialism versus gender constructivism) they so usefully deconstruct.     

Towards a New Religious Dialogue: Buddhism and Postmodern Theology

This paper proffers an example of a new form of religious dialogue. It subverts, rather than assumes the philosophical tradition of universal reason, upon which religious dialogue has traditionally proceeded. To this end, I call into question the frequently perceived affinity between Buddhism and radical postmodern a/theology. Whereas the latter works within a framework of oppositions inherited from the modern philosophical tradition, Buddhism is innocent of such a framework, and jettisons its 'either-or' antinomies. In this respect, I argue that there is a striking 'coincidence in outlook' between Buddhism and conservative postmodern theology, which also seeks to subvert the modern philosophical framework which it regards as being essentially secular. I suggest that this 'coincidence in outlook', which contrasts with the modern outlook, opens the way for a religious dialogue based on a mutual affirmation of difference, rather than on the distorting universalist quest for affinity at all costs.     

Living in a Post-Punk Papacy: Religion and education in a modernist world

This article examines the constraints on discourse in a modernist context and the means by which these constraints are imposed. It explores the deconstructive possibilities and opportunities offered in applying a postmodern critique of the same within this context. It primarily advocates a re-reading of the construct of knowledge such that it does not depend on epistemological theorising but performative activity, related to the observations of a number of postmodern and pre-postmodern writers. It suggests a dislocation between what we regard as knowledge and what might be experienced as empowerment through involvement in more democratic political processes. It also takes account of what is understood as the changing of an environment from the modern to postmodern, altering the situation of the subject, and applies this critically to religious and educational ideologies.     

BEYOND THE SUBLIME: THE AESTHETICS OF THE ANALOGY OF BEING (PART ONE)

This essay is concerned with modern and postmodern theories of the sublime and with a possible theological response to them. The essay first discusses the “modern sublime” (as typified in Kant) and the “postmodern sublime” (as typified in Jean‐Luc Nancy), and shows how these versions of the sublime terminate in one or the other form of “pure immanence” and, hence, are not sublime in any standard sense of the term. The essay then argues, in a second part, for an aesthetic of the beautiful and the sublime based upon the theological doctrine of the analogy of being as articulated in the past century by Erich Przywara, S. J.     

后现代心理治疗及其伦理问题思考

文章通过论述后现代对现代认识论和思维模式的质疑与超越,分析了后现代语境下心理治疗与现代心理治疗的差异,并关注在后现代这一新的思维模式下,心理治疗领域可能产生的伦理问题。作者指出,后现代心理治疗的不确定性、价值干预和文化介入,使心理治疗的伦理挑战被进一步复杂化,对治疗师也提出了更高要求。     

Style and responsibility: Medicine in postmodernity

To what extent can postmodern developments be observed in modern medicine and which theories of postmodern philosophy can we draw on with regard to medicine's theoretical problem? This article explores these questions with special emphasis on the epistemological status of medicine, the concept of disease, and the anthropological model. It is examined whether medicine's inherent duty to act can be questioned in the light of the plurality that characterizes postmodernity. It is concluded that, according to postmodern philosophy, medicine should be characterized by a justified variety of paradigms. Cooperation within the variety must continue to be guaranteed, always in favor of the constitutive moral duty of medicine.     

略论后现代心理学思想的孕育与生成

随着后现代文化思潮的涌入与冲击,现代心理学的合法地位产生了动摇,在后现代科学精神与后现代哲学理念的导引和助势下,后现代心理学思想得以孕育与生成。