A Woman's Thought or a Man's Discipline? The Letters of Abelard and Heloise

This paper is part of a larger project of recovering the work of women thinkers. Heloise has traditionally been read as either a foil of Abelard or his intellectual appendage. In this paper, I present her views on love, religious devotion, and language as an alternative to philosophic method as it is conceived by Abelard.     

Client as counselor: self-regulation strategies

Recent research in counseling suggests the efficacy of teaching the clients to be their own counselors through the use of self-regulation procedures. This article explores three primary steps involved in helping clients to control their own behavior change: self-observation, self-monitoring, and self-regulation strategies. Self-regulation provides an affirmative answer to the question: “Is the client a counselor?” by promoting client responsibility and independence in the counseling process.     

Friendship Across Generations

Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, edited by Bonnie Honig, a collection of critical feminist essays on Hannah Arendt, illustrates both the disorientation and the insights that can result when feminist philosophers come to terms with a canonical figure who is a woman.     

The Sisyphean Torture of Housework: Simone de Beauvoir and Inequitable Divisions of Domestic Work in Marriage

This paper examines Simone de Beauvoir's account of marriage in The Second Sex and argues that Beauvoir's dichotomy between transcendence and immanence can provide an illuminating critique of continuing gender inequities in marriage and divisions of domestic work. Beauvoir's existentialist ethics not only establishes a moral wrong in marriages in which wives perform the second shift of household labor but also supports the need to transform existing normative expectations surrounding wives and domestic work.     

Rethinking Relational Autonomy

John Christman has argued that constitutively relational accounts of autonomy, as defended by some feminist theorists, are problematically perfectionist about the human good. I argue that autonomy is constitutively relational, but not in a way that implies perfectionism: autonomy depends on a dialogical disposition to hold oneself answerable to external, critical perspectives on one's action‐guiding commitments. This type of relationality carries no substantive value commitments, yet it does answer to core feminist concerns about autonomy.     

Obtaining results through modeling

This article presents practical applications of the theoretical notion of modeling. Use of live and symbolic models is emphasized, along with the modeling techniques of role reversal and role identification.     

The Merited Response Argument and Artistic Categories

The merited response argument is an argument in favor of artistic ethicism. According to this view, the interaction between art and morality is such that a moral defect in a work of art negatively influences the work's artistic value (and a moral merit, when relevant, is always an artistic merit). I contend that the argument relies on a criterion of aesthetic and artistic relevance that, when properly understood, fails to constitute a premise that either the artistic contextualist or the autonomist would accept. I then offer a version of the merited response argument that supports artistic contextualism and argue that, given certain controversial assumptions, immoral art in the Western tradition is more common than typically acknowledged in the recent literature on the topic.     

Communication patterns during marital conflict: A cross-cultural replication

This study examines the reliability and validity of the Communication Patterns Questionnaire (CPQ) from Christensen and Sullaway (1984). The CPQ is a relatively new questionnaire aimed at assessing marital communication at the dyadic level. It addresses communication patterns involving the behavior of both members of the dyad rather than just one partner. The CPQ permits the evaluation of communication in close relationships on three scales: (a) mutual constructive communication; (b) mutual avoidance of communication; (c) demand/withdrawal. Previous research among American samples has yielded empirical evidence concerning the reliability and validity of this instrument. The current study focuses upon whether the CPQ may also be applied to European subjects. To address this question, a German and a Swiss sample were used. Our results demonstrate that the questionnaire's reliability and validity also prove satisfactory among European samples. In both studies, communication avoidance and withdrawal were negatively correlated with relationship satisfaction.     

Vis‐à‐vis the Couch: Where is Psychoanalysis?

The author discusses ways in which the couch or chair (lying down versus sitting up) may be used to maintain safety and defend against perceived dangers in the analytic process. Several dialectics are relevant as they intersect with that of danger and safety, including engagement/privacy, interiority/exteriority and subject/object. The author discusses these dialectics in terms of the ways in which the analyst is used at different points in time, i.e. as an objectifi ed other, a subjective object or part-object, or as a subject with an internal world. The therapeutic action associated with sitting up (versus lying down on the couch) has been undertheorized, despite the fact that many, if not most, analysands sit up for some portion of their analysis. Through the use of a heuristic visual-spatial metaphor as represented by the use of the couch or chair, the author discusses the signifi cance of lying down and sitting up for therapeutic action.     

The Personality Composition of Teams and Creativity: The Moderating Role of Team Creative Confidence

We examined the possibility that teams composed primarily of individuals with personality characteristics conducive to team creativity (e.g., high extraversion, high openness to experience, low conscientiousness, high neuroticism, low agree‐ableness) would show synergistic increases in creativity when they experienced high levels of “team creative confidence”, a shared understanding that the team is more creative than each team member individually. We tested these hypotheses using a sample of 145 three‐student teams that worked on a set of idea generation tasks at Time 1 (T1) and a second set two weeks later at Time 2 (T2). As expected, results of cross‐lagged regression analysis indicated that when team creative confidence at T1 was high, team creativity at T2 increased quadratically as the number of team members who scored high on extraversion, high on openness, or low on conscientiousness increased. However, the number of individuals composing a team who scored high on neuroticism or low on agree‐ableness had no relation to team creativity under conditions of high or low team creative confidence. Implications of these results for the design of creative teams are discussed.