Distancing and Solidarity as Resistance to Sexual Objectification in a Nude Dancing Bar

ABSTRACT

Drawing on observation and interviews in a mid-Atlantic nude dancing bar, I examine front-stage customer-dancer relations as well as dancers' discourse among themselves backstage. I use James Scott's theoretical framework regarding subordinate group resistance strategies to analyze dancers' attempts to resist customers' harassment. On the micro-level dancers exercise agency, reconstructing their identities within the larger context of macro-level oppression. Dancers' front stage tactics include spatial distancing, verbal one-liners, physical aggression, calling on customers, and united action with other dancers. Backstage, dancers reframe the public text, articulating their own identity construction by creating a social site for solidarity and desexualizing the body.     

The creative process and psychoanalytic insight

The paper looks at the prevalence of audio-visual culture and how it is endemic in our everyday lives. It explores how popular culture emerges in the consulting room and some of the dilemmas posed for the therapist. It goes on to consider how popular culture connects to narratives, dreams and the formation of images in the clinical context. Some clinical vignettes explore audio-visual material in relation to their possible therapeutic message. One suggestion is made that the prevalence of popular culture could intensify anxieties associated with watching and looking and at the same time increase our desires to dismiss and submerge these anxieties. Popular culture in the consulting room reflects a world outside. Psychodynamic psychotherapy and the Media Arts can bring each other into ‘mutual illumination’.     

Psychodynamic counsellor training integrating difference

Abstract

Psychodynamic counselling has been criticized for being inflexible, authoritarian, antiquated and unresponsive to the issues of modern-day society. Psychodynamic counsellor training is sometimes seen as a poor relation of ‘proper’ psychotherapy therapy training. This article is written by two psychodynamic counselling course trainers who have wresded with the above criticisms and who have striven to deliver a training course that is coherent in its adherence to a psychodynamic counselling model but which embraces equal opportunities issues and takes account of a diverse society. The article focuses on ways in which sexual identity, race and culture are integrated into the course curriculum and indeed into the course philosophy and community. Traditional psychoanalytic interpretations of homosexuality are challenged and multicultural counselling ideas are merged with psychodynamic counselling theory and skills.     

Reflections on a psychiatric placement

Abstract

During a seminar last year, I was teaching a group of counselling students on the subject of depression. One of the students asked me what I thought of referring a depressed client to a psychiatrist. I replied that in my opinion it was better to keep a person out of the psychiatric services as much as possible. This was an opinion I began to reconsider over the course of a six-month psychiatric placement, undertaken as part of an analytic psychotherapy training.     

美国华人移民的异文化压力:特点、影响因素和中介效应

从美国NLAAS的调查数据中直接抽取美国华人移民样本473份,探讨美国华人移民异文化压力的特点、影响因素及中介效应。结果显示:美国华人移民体验的异文化压力较大,且与多因素存在显著相关,英语熟练度、移民时的年龄、移居美国的年数和种族歧视对压力具有显著预测性;社会地位作为中介变量可以有效缓冲美国华人移民的异文化压力。     

Body part representations in verbal semantics

Embodied theories of language propose that word meaning is inextricably tied to—grounded in—mental representations of perceptual, motor, and affective experiences of the world. The four experiments described in this article demonstrate that accessing the meanings of action verbs like smile, punch, and kick requires language understanders to activate modality-specific cognitive representations responsible for performing and perceiving those same actions. The main task used is a word-image matching task, where participants see an action verb and an image depicting an action. Their task is to decide as quickly as possible whether the verb and the image depict the same action. Of critical interest is participants’ behavior when the verb and image do not match, in which case the two actions can use the same effector or different effectors. In Experiment 1, we found that participants took significantly longer to reject a verb-image pair when the actions depicted by the image and denoted by the verb used the same effector than when they used different effectors. Experiment 2 yielded the same result when the order of presentation was reversed, replicating the effect in Cantonese. Experiment 3 replicated the effect in English with a verb-verb near-synonym task, and in Experiment 4, we once again replicated the effect with learners of English as a second language. This robust interference effect, whereby a shared effector slows discrimination, shows that language understanders activate effector-specific neurocognitive representations during both picture perception and action word understanding.     

Counsellor conflict in managing the frame: Dilemmas and decisions

An essential feature of psychodynamic counselling is a secure frame for the work that holds boundaries as sacrosanct, both to ensure ethical practice and to provide a vehicle through which unconscious processes can be recognized and understood. Conscious or unconscious attacks on the frame are inevitable in any therapeutic relationship, and provide an opportunity for exploration and insight. However such incidents also have an impact on the therapist who must decide how to respond. In order to understand more about the therapist process when there is an attack on the frame, an investigation was carried out into ways in which psychodynamic counsellors manage the difficulties and dilemmas that arise as they try to hold a secure therapeutic frame. Ten counsellors were interviewed using a semi‐ structured interview format during which they were asked about an instance when the frame was challenged and the process by which it was resolved. The resulting dilemmas were categorized using grounded theory. Three categories of dilemmas emerged a) prior to making a decision about how to deal with it, b) after making a decision, and c), as a result of the outcome of the action taken. The nature of the dilemmas and the process of resolving them are reported and discussed.     

Do Lesbians Differ From Heterosexual Men and Women in Levinsonian Phases of Adult Development?

Research conducted on heterosexual women has been generalized to lesbians. However, the question remains whether lesbians differ in their adult development from heterosexual men and women. This article reviews results of 10 one‐on‐one life story interviews conducted with self‐identified lesbians between the ages of 35 and 45. Information from these interviews was analyzed to see if or how they fit into a Levinsonian (D. J. Levinson, 1978) developmental model compared with heterosexual men and women.     

Immediate source-monitoring, self-focused attention and the positive symptoms of schizophrenia

Previous research suggests that tendencies to misattribute one's own thoughts to an external source, as assessed by an immediate source-monitoring test, are associated with auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs). However, recent research suggests that such tendencies are associated instead with symptoms of thought interference. The main aim of the present study was to examine whether such tendencies are differentially associated with different types of thought interference, with AVHs, or with both. It has also been suggested that external misattributions are especially likely to occur with emotionally salient material and if the individual's focus is on the self. These suggestions were also tested. The positive psychotic symptoms of 57 individuals with a diagnosis of schizophrenia were assessed and they then completed the Self-Focus Sentence Completion blank. Immediately after completing each sentence they were asked to indicate to what extent the sentence was their own. The number of sentences that were not rated as completely their own served as their externalisation score. Externalisation scores correlated significantly with the severity of three symptoms: voices commenting, delusions of being controlled, and thought insertion. In a logistic regression analysis, all three of these symptoms were significantly and independently related to externalisation. Externalisation was not associated with either a negative or a neutral self-focus. Thus tendencies to misattribute one's own thoughts to an external source are associated with AVHs and some, but not all, symptoms of thought interference. The importance for externalisation of self-focused attention and of the emotional salience of the elicited thoughts was not supported.