Reader and story,viewer and film: On transference and interpretation2

Two sides in Freud's attitude towards literature and art are presented: Freud the sensitive listener, whose interest in art is a potential springboard for a rich interdisciplinary dialogue; and Freud the conquistador, whose wish for power in ‘invaded’ territories is related to troublesome aspects of ‘pathography’ and ‘applied analysis’. The unique contribution of psychoanalysis may not be discovering objectively the true unconscious content of works of art, but rather enriching the exploration of the potential transitional space evolving between artist, work of art and readers or viewers, enhancing our sensitivity to multiple meanings and complex emotional influences of art. This requires exploring our own subjective experiences of art, which may be described as transferences (when art is mostly perceived as a source of insight) or countertransferences (when artists and their work are basically experienced as troubled patients). Transference (broadly defined) and interpretation tend to intermingle, both in the clinical analytic encounter, and in any reading/viewing of art, be it by laymen, analysts or other scholars. Several examples from the psychoanalytic study of literature and film are given, and three pairs of contrasting interpretations are studied, concerning Kafka's The metamorphosis, Minghella's The English Patient and Polanski's Chinatown.     

Religion and Madness

The question I try to answer in this paper is: How should we distinguish mad from sane religious belief? After looking at the clear-cut but opposed answers of Freud and Jung, I then examine the modern psychiatric answer, particularly as presented in the DSM IV. After arguing that each of the three answers is unsatisfactory, I look at what I take to be the more promising approach of Con Drury, Wittgenstein’s friend and biographer, in an essay called “Madness and Religion,” where, drawing on the religious histories of Joan of Arc, George Fox and Tolstoy and three of his own psychiatric patients, Drury suggests that there is no objective yet ethical way to make the distinction. This leads to my own answer, which is that the best we can do is to distinguish mad from neurotic religious belief; and hence that the safest position, although not the most comfortable, is the neurotic one.     

The Effect of Employee Trust of the Supervisor on Enterprising Behavior: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

This study examines the effects of an employee’s affect-based and cognition-based trust of the supervisor on that employee’s enterprising behavior. The extent to which two cultural dimensions, power distance and in-group collectivism, moderate the relationship between the trust measures and enterprising behavior is considered. Trust ratings were provided by 130 U.S. employees, 202 Turkish employees, 101 Polish employees, and 86 Russian employees. Their 519 supervisors then provided ratings of those employees’ enterprising behavior. The results show that both affect-based trust and cognition-based trust have a significant, but modest, effect on the employee’s enterprising behavior. Our findings indicate that both power distance and in-group collectivism do not moderate the proposed trust-behavior relationship although power distance almost reaches the level of significance. We call for further research on other moderating variables to explain the findings.     

The Relation Between Anxiety Sensitivity and Attachment Style in Adolescence and Early Adulthood

Given the accumulating evidence for a role of anxiety sensitivity in the etiology of panic, it is important to understand the developmental origins of anxiety sensitivity. To this end, this study examined the relation between attachment beliefs and anxiety sensitivity in a sample of high school students (n = 203; mean age 15.7 years) and university students (n = 324; mean age 21.7 years). The Experiences in Close Relationships (ECR; K. Brennan, C. Clark, &; P. Shaver, 1998) was used to assess attachment beliefs and to classify participants into attachment groups. The Anxiety Sensitivity Index (ASI; R. A. Peterson &; S. Reiss, 1987) was used to assess participants' levels of anxiety sensitivity. Results supported the hypothesis that individuals with insecure attachment, specifically those classified as preoccupied and fearful (i.e., those with a negative model of self), had significantly higher anxiety sensitivity scores than securely attached individuals in both the high school and college samples.     

Age and Gender Differences in Young People's Perceptions of Sport Participants1

Pre‐ and middle‐adolescent girls’ and boys’ perceptions of sport were examined using the Draw a Sportsperson test. Almost all the boys drew male figures, while the girls drew figures of both sexes. However, older girls drew a majority of male figures, many of whom were sports celebrities, while younger girls drew similar numbers of male and female figures, most of the latter being peers. A substantial number of drawings of sports celebrities were produced. The majority of these were of male, high‐profile soccer players. The possible significance of these results for the increase in the gender gap in sporting interest at adolescence, and the influence of the media on boys’ and girls’ perceptions of sport are discussed.     

Family systems training in psychiatric residencies

Both extensive research and common sense dictate that attention to families is necessary for appropriate care of psychiatric patients. However, training in family skills has often been difficult to integrate into psychiatric residency programs because of conflicting paradigms, turf battles, constraints of time and money, and confusion over whether family-centered care or family therapy should be taught. Current changes in residency accreditation mandate that family skills (not necessarily family therapy in its sophisticated form) be part of all residency programs. This article reviews the history of systems training in residencies, current accreditation requirements, and the GAP proposal for family systems skills, knowledge, and attitudes that that are teachable within the limited time available to residents. The application of these core skills is described using a case example and formulation. Challenges in teaching and ways of overcoming programmatic constraints are outlined.     

Ethics and incentives: an evaluation and development of stakeholder theory in the health care industry

This paper utilizes a qualitative case study of the health care industry and a recent legal case to demonstrate that stakeholder theory's focus on ethics, without recognition of the effects of incentives, severely limits the theory's ability to provide managerial direction and explain managerial behavior. While ethics provide a basis for stakeholder prioritization, incentives influence whether managerial action is consistent with that prioritization. Our health care examples highlight this and other limitations of stakeholder theory and demonstrate the explanatory and directive power added by the inclusion of the interactive effects of ethics and incentives in stakeholder ordering.     

Blameworthiness,desert, and luck

Philosophers disagree about whether outcome luck can affect an agent's “moral responsibility.” Focusing on responsibility's “negative side,” some maintain, and others deny, that an action's results bear constitutively on how “blameworthy” the actor is, and on how much blame or punishment they “deserve.” Crucially, both sides to the debate assume that an actor's blameworthiness and negative desert are equally affected—or unaffected—by an action's results. This article challenges that previously overlooked assumption, arguing that blameworthiness and desert are distinct moral notions that serve distinct normative functions: blameworthiness serves a liability function (removing a bar to otherwise impermissible treatments), whereas desert serves a favoring function (contributing new value to states of affairs, or providing new reasons for responsive treatments). Having distinguished (negative) desert from blameworthiness, the article proposes a novel resolution to the outcome-luck debate: that results do not affect an agent's liability to blame, but do affect the amount and severity of blame to which the agent is justly liable, including by affecting the severity of blame that the agent deserves.     

Factors Affecting Health-Care Allocation Decisions: A Case of Aversive Racism?

A distributive justice framework is used to examine how individuals make judgments about what is fair when making different types of health-care allocation decisions. The effects of 4 patient characteristics are assessed: (a) prognosis, (b) degree of responsibility for illness, (c) employment status, and (d) race. Results reveal that when the patient was defined as being more versus less responsible for his illness, respondents gave him a significantly lower priority score for obtaining health-care services, and they felt that he should be more responsible for paying for or soliciting funds to cover the costs of his health needs. Respondents also reacted with more negative emotion to the responsible patient and described him in more negative trait terms. Although patient's race produced no main effects, race did interact with employment status on several key variables. When the patient was described as being unemployed, the White patient compared to the Black patient was given a higher health-care priority score, he was resented less, and respondents were more willing to contribute money to pay for his health-care costs; but when the patient was described as being employed, the direction of differences between the races on these variables was reversed.