Book reviews

Luba Gurdjieff: A Memoir with Recipes. Luba Gurdjieff Everitt with Marina C. Bear, 1993, Berkeley, California: Ten Speed Press 105 pp., £11.99, US$14.94 ISBN 0–89815–360–3

The Taste For Things That Are True. Henri Tracol, 1994 Longmead, Shaftesbury: Element Books 137 pp., £9.99, US$14.95 ISBN 1–85230–468–5

Religion Defined and Explained. Peter B. Clarke & Peter Byrne, 1993 London: Macmillan/New York: St Martin's Press 214 pp. £42.50, US$55.00 ISBN 0–33353–841–2

Sikhism and Christianity: A Comparative Study. W. Owen Cole & P. S. Sambhi, 1993 Basingstoke: Macmillan xii + 221 pp., £10.99 (pb), £35.00 (hb) ISBN 0–33354–107–3 (pb), 0–33354–106–5 (hb)

Hindu Children in Britain. Robert Jackson & Eleanor Nesbitt, 1993 Stoke‐on‐Trent: Trentham Books 240 pp., £15.95 ISBN 0–948080–73–6

Feminist Theology from the Third World: A Reader. Ursula King, ed., 1994 London: SPCK/Orbis 434 pp., £17.50 ISBN 0–88344–963–3

A Time to Chant: The Soka Gakkai Buddhists in Britain. B. Wilson & K. Dobbeleare, 1994 Oxford: Clarendon Press 267 pp., £25.00 ISBN 0–19–827915–9     

Inferiority and bereavement: Implicit psychological commitments in the cultural history of Scottish psychotherapy

Abstract

The author has argued that psychoanalytic psychotherapy was seen in Scotland as a way to purify Christianity of supernaturalism and moralism, and to propel the faith in a scientifically rational and socially progressive direction. In making this historiographic claim, certain disciplinary protocols are followed, such as the symmetry postulate and a deprecation of reductive psychohistorical explanation. Nonetheless, the contemporary historian of psychotherapy is a psychologized subject whose historical practice rests upon a complex, prereflective background of psychological presuppositions.     

The NSSI Paradox: Discussing and Displaying NSSI in an Online Environment

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is commonly shared online. In the offline world, secrecy is a sign of “real” or authentic self-injury; therefore, openly sharing NSSI in the online context could be considered a paradoxical behavior. We explored how users of an online NSSI site negotiated this apparent paradox. Contrary to our expectations, contributing text and photographs to an online site did not appear to compromise authentic identity. We suggest this was because they were presented in the form of an anonymous public display, which meant that posters could maintain their (secret) identity as individuals who genuinely engage in NSSI.     

Constitutivism and Generics

Philosophia - Constitutivism is a family of theories of normativity, especially in metaethics, that rely on the concept of constitutive norms: norms that are grounded in constitutive features of...