The relationship between 16 fear factors and psychiatric status

Although originally designed as a guide to therapy, the Wolpe-Lang Fear Survey Schedule (FSS) has been the subject of increasing study of its psychometric characteristics. A recent factor analysis of the records of psychiatric patients yielded 16 fear factors. The present study attempted to evaluate the clinical relevance of these factors by comparing the factor scores of adult psychiatric outpatients (AOP) with those of parents of child psychiatry patients (CPC). On 13 of the 16 factors the AOP group scored higher (with 3 of these 13 differences modulated by sex), indicating a strikingly consistent relationship between clinical status and the fear factors. These results suggest that future research of the patterns of fear factor scores as they relate to clinically relevant variables might well be fruitful. In the present study, females scored higher than males on all 16 fear factors (with 3 of these 16 differences appearing only in the AOP group). These results suggest the importance of treating sex as a moderator variable in future research on the FSS and its factors.     

Glued to the Image: A Critical Phenomenology of Racialization through Works of Art

I develop a phenomenological account of racialized encounters with works of art and film, wherein the racialized viewer feels cast as perpetually past, coming “too late” to intervene in the meaning of her own representation. This points to the distinctive role that the colonial past plays in mediating and constructing our self‐images. I draw on my experience of three exhibitions that take Muslims and/or Arabs as their subject matter and that ostensibly try to interrupt or subvert racialization while reproducing some of its tropes. My examples are the Jean‐Joseph Benjamin‐Constant exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2015), the exposition Welten der Muslime at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin (2011–2017), and a sculpture by Bob and Roberta Smith at the Leeds City Art Gallery, created in response to the imperial power painting, General Gordon's Last Stand, that is housed there. My interest is in how artworks contribute to the experience of being racialized in ways that not only amplify the circulation of images but also constitute difficult temporal relations to images. Drawing on Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, I argue that such racialized images are temporally gluey, or stuck, so that we are weighted and bogged down by them.     

Reflections on A Contagion of Assassination*

ABSTRACT: Intrapsychic factors and events in close interpersonal relationships are supplemented by events in the political climate which can affect a potential assassin so as to lower his defenses against homicidal assassination impulses and facilitate or precipitate an overt act. Such events can include another assassination, a natural death, or an abdication of a president or leader. The “contagious” nature of killing is discussed with respect to previous and recent assassinations. The paper explores the potential effects upon James Earl Ray of President Johnson's “abdication” speech, upon Lee Harvey Oswald of the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, and upon Arthur Bremer of President Nixon's Vietnam escalation speech.     

Children: Yes or No,A Decision-Making Program for Women

This article describes how a workshop for career women who were experiencing difficulty in deciding whether or not to have a child was designed, conducted, and evaluated.