Helen Flanders Dunbar,John Dewey,and clinical pragmatism: reflections on method in psychosomatic medicine and bioethics

This article outlines the method utilized by physicians and major figures in the founding of Clinical Pastoral Education, Helen Flanders Dunbar, in her work of 1943, Psychosomatic Diagnosis, and relates it to the currently evolving approach in bioethics known as clinical pragmatism. It assesses Dewey's influence on both Dunbar in psychosomatic medicine and clinical pragmatism in bioethics, and illustrates the breadth of influence of the school of philosophical thought known as pragmatism with which Dewey's name and those of William James and Charles Sanders Pierce are most often identified.     

Pastoral Care and Medical Education

This essay describes how contemporary medical education and pastoral care share historical roots, confront similar pressures and objectives in the formation of future professionals, and address common concerns in the area of bioethics. The essay concludes with a summary of ideas regarding the present and future relationship between medical education and pastoral care. The essay is dedicated to the memory of David P. Rogers, M.D., whose vision of medical education and medical practice embodied a rare passion for justice.     

No Right to Resist? Elise Reimarus's Freedom as a Kantian Response to the Problem of Violent Revolt

One of the greatest woman intellectuals of eighteenth‐century Germany is Elise Reimarus, whose contribution to Enlightenment political theory is rarely acknowledged today. Unlike other social contract theorists, Reimarus rejects a people's right to violent resistance or revolution in her philosophical dialogue Freedom (1791). Exploring the arguments in Freedom, this paper observes a number of similarities in the political thought of Elise Reimarus and Immanuel Kant. Both, I suggest, reject violence as an illegitimate response to perceived political injustice in a way that opposes Locke's strong voluntarism and the absolutism of Hobbes. First, they emphasize the need to maintain the legal state as a precondition for the possibility of external right. Second, they share an optimistic view of the inherently “just” nature of the tripartite republican state. And finally, Reimarus and Kant both outline an alternative, nonviolent response to political injustice that consists in the freedom of public expression and a discourse on the moral enlightenment of man.     

In perfect harmony: synchronizing the self to activated social categories

The self-concept is one of the main organizing constructs in the behavioral sciences because it influences how people interpret their environment, the choices they make, whether and how they initiate action, and the pursuit of specific goals. Because belonging to social groups and feeling interconnected is critical to human survival, the authors propose that people spontaneously change their working self-concept so that they are more similar to salient social categories. Specifically, 4 studies investigated whether activating a variety of social categories (i.e., jocks, hippies, the overweight, Blacks, and Asians) increased associations between the self and the target category. Whereas Studies 1 and 2 focused on associations between stereotypic traits and the self, Studies 3 and 4 examined self-perceptions and self-categorizations, respectively. The results provide consistent evidence that following social category priming, people synchronized the self to the activated category. Furthermore, the findings indicate that factors that influence category activation, such as social goals, and factors that induce a focus on the interconnectedness of the self, such as an interdependent vs. independent self-construal, can impact this process. The implications of changes to the working self-concept for intergroup relations are discussed.