Balancing Justice and Mercy

The concept of forgiveness is analyzed as a moral gesture toward the offender designed to help restore that individual's moral standing. Jewish sources on the conditions under which forgiveness is obligatory are explored and two contrasting positions are presented: one in which the obligation to forgive is conditional on the repentance of the offender and another in which people are required to forgive unconditionally. These two positions are shown to represent different ways of framing the offending behavior that rest, in turn, on different ways of balancing the need for justice and for mercy respectively. In the final analysis, Judaism's two contrasting attitudes toward forgiveness are rooted in different theological assumptions and different ways of construing the very goals of the moral life. The author points out the merits and shortcomings of both positions and concludes with the suggestion that the two complement each other in important ways.     

More Than Mazel? Luck and Agency in Surviving the Holocaust

The canonical explanation for how Jews survived during the Holocaust involves some form of luck. To explore and deepen an understanding of episodic moments of luck, this article presents and discusses survivor Jerry Rawicki's close calls with death during the Holocaust. The first author examines Jerry's perspective as a survivor and her own perspective as a collaborative witness to his stories, as well as how these stories fit together within the broader literature about luck and survival. She suggests possible consequences of regarding luck as the sole explanation of survival and contends that agency and luck can go hand in hand even under oppressive structural conditions, such as the Holocaust. She concludes by reflecting on why Jerry and she might understand survival differently and on the importance of considering both positions in compassionate collaborative research.     

Women Creating Public Art and Community, 2000–2014

This narrative describes a series of 15 short‐term public art projects that were part of a program for women and girls in Lowell, Massachusetts, a mid‐size city in the United States. The projects were designed to give public space to women’s stories and perspectives by exhibiting their creative art in response to suggested themes. A few thousand women and girls representing diverse age and cultural groups created art based on their lived experiences. The organizers of the program met people in comfortable settings, tailored their art‐making approaches to particular groups, and used inclusive processes in developing and executing the program. Program successes and challenges were related to the organizational structure of the art projects, the annual themes and art media, the extent of outreach and support, the process of creation, and the impact of art exhibits. Using community psychology and feminist frameworks, authors reflect on the projects and their relevance across contexts, highlight key organizing strategies, and identify ways the project represents community psychology in action.     

Quiet beauty: problems of agency and appearance in evangelical Christianity

How does the cultivation of beauty interact with agency? In this article the author discusses the religious value of beauty for conservative evangelical Christians in the English town of Brighton. Building on the anthropological approach to art and agency developed by Alfred Gell, the author considers the manner in which the everyday of bodies, relationships and personal testimonies become implicated in a deferential semiotics in which meaning resides in the self but is not owned by it. Through this work, women engage with an on-going project of visibility and objectification that is often tenuous and difficult but is nevertheless compelling, as they seek to mediate the agency of God.     

Psychological and autonomic effects of art making in college-aged students

Background and objectives: Anxiety disorders comprise the most common category of mental illness among US young adults. Art making might be one method to help reduce anxiety, but the few studies investigating this have used only subjective measures of anxiety. Design: This study employed both subjective (self-reported state anxiety from the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory) and objective (heart rate variability) measures to assess whether 30-minute periods of art making reduced anxiety in 47 first-year college students prior to their final examinations. Methods: Students participated in free-form painting, mandala coloring, clay modeling, and control sessions. Results: Repeated-measures ANOVA with post hoc analysis revealed significantly greater pre- to post-session reductions in anxiety for all three types of art-making sessions than for the control session, as measured objectively. Measured subjectively, only free-form painting yielded a significant decrease in anxiety compared to the control session. Conclusions: Given the health benefits of anxiety reduction, further study is warranted to determine the duration of art making's anxiety-reducing effect.     

Voluntary work with sporting activities for Jewish children and teenagers: commitment to inclusiveness,Jewish identity,and a future Jewish life – an interview study

Membership in Jewish congregations seems to be declining and modern society has been described as a challenge to Jewishness and to the future for Jews as a people with shared characteristics and traditions. Activities for children and teenagers have gained increasing attention, since such activities might be a reassurance of a future Jewish life. To arrange such activities is, however, demanding and individuals who commit themselves to voluntary work are essential. In this study, six members of a Swedish Conservative congregation, who were committed to voluntary work with sporting activities for children and teenagers, were interviewed about the way in which they perceived their voluntary work. A thematic analysis was conducted. The volunteers concluded that everyone should feel included in the activities. They had a nuanced view of Jewish identity and also welcomed those who were not considered halakhically Jewish. Moreover, they wanted to support a positive Jewish identity in the new generation. Their work was perceived as meaningful even though they said that congregants who felt that the activities should adhere to Halakhah had criticized them. It is proposed that congregations should support voluntary workers and facilitate their efforts, otherwise experiences of misrecognition might evolve, experiences that are counterproductive for a vital congregational life.     

The two Bernard Berenson cousins: The interplay among immigration,culture, and narcissism

The lives of two 19th century cousins, both of whom changed their names to Bernard Berenson, are considered from historical and psychodynamic perspectives, using a psychobiographical method. The Jewish cousins immigrated separately to Boston from Lithuania in 1875 and 1882. One cousin, later calling himself simply B.B., became a world‐renowned art historian. The other Bernard became a misanthrope after feeling deeply humiliated by his cousin's family in Boston. Many biographies were written about the famous B.B. The only histories of his cousin Bernard were family stories, as he was the author's great‐grandfather. The intersecting lives of these cousins are discussed. Both men faced the challenges of immigration as well as intense anti‐Semitism and prejudice in each country in which they lived. These cultural and historical conditions interacted with the cousins’ narcissistic vulnerabilities. Their lives demonstrate different manifestations of narcissistic suffering, with B.B's being more consistent with the construct of a “grandiose narcissist” and Bernard's being more consistent with that of a “closet narcissist.” The life stories of these two cousins with the same name offers an intriguing instance of a complicated relationship among immigration, prejudice, and narcissism and case examples of the manifestation of how narcissistic suffering can influence lives.     

Exploring the mental health of circus artists: Circus factors,psychological resilience,and demographics predict disordered eating and exercise addictions

There are similarities in the performance demands of circus and other performance domains such as leanness sports and dance, yet little is known about the mental health of circus artists. We explored self-reported disordered eating and exercise addictions in a sample of 500 circus artists. The sample consisted of aerial acrobats (71%), floor acrobats (13%), object manipulators (9%), and equilibrists (6%) who participate in circus at a range of performance levels (amateur 50%, part/full-time professional 41%, student 6%, retired 3%). Similar to elite athletes in leanness sports, approximately 36% of the circus artists in our sample were classified as ‘at risk’ of an eating disorder. A binomial logistic regression model suggested that being ‘at risk’ of an eating disorder was negatively related to participants’ age and trait resilience, positively related to exercise addictions, and differences among circus categories were found (i.e., higher among equilibrium and aerial acrobatics). Using a Bayesian estimation procedure, a linear regression model suggested that exercise addiction scores were positively related to participants’ weekly training time and being ‘at risk’ for an eating disorder, negatively associated with their years of experience in circus, and differences between circus categories (high levels in equilibrium) and modality of engagement in circus (higher levels among amateurs) were identified. Consequently, these exploratory study findings indicate that a complex interaction of factors might impact the development of disordered eating and exercise addictions among circus artists. Implications for discipline-specific and experience-specific interventions to address these maladaptive behaviours are discussed.     

Psychic skin: psychotic defences, borderline process and delusions

In this paper, I apply the concept of psychic skin to analytic work with people suffering from personality disorders and psychoses. When psychoses emerge, the defensive skin which protects the ego is breached and violent unconscious forces rip through the personality. Some of the patients diagnosed as schizophrenic with whom I work have identified with archetypal characters such as Christ, Satan, John Lennon and the Queen. I attempt to show how the adoption of these inflated personas can serve as secondary psychic skins. Such delusional identifications can provide a protective shield to hide the denuded self and prevent intrusion from the external world. Through clinical example, I try to demonstrate how these archetypal 'second skins' can preserve life until internal and external conditions make it possible for the self to emerge. I contrast such psychotic identifications with 'thin-skinned' and 'thick-skinned' narcissism as well as 'defences of the self' in borderline states where the psychic skin may be damaged but does not disintegrate. I also look at the ways in which Jung's own personal experience was different from this and how he managed to avert psychotic breakdown.