Coming Home/Coming Out

Abstract

This article is a theological reflection on one Queer Asian American woman’s experience of caring for her mother with Alzheimer’s disease. Using Coming Out/Coming Home as a frame and metaphor, the author explores the complexity of “home” for many Koreans/Korean-Americans whose very lives intersect with and are disrupted by major events in Korean and world history. For them, the act of coming home is complex, textured, and layered with experiences of loss, trauma, dislocation, resilience and hope. Through dis-ordered memories of a mother with Alzheimer’s, this article attempts to re-order what it means to come home. Grace Cho’s “ghostly haunting” provides a methodology. Layering theory with personal narratives, stories and a dream, ot is an experiment in performance—phantomogenic words that become “staged words.” In three parts, “coming home”, “ghostly hauntings”, and “tug-of-war”, this article performs coming home/coming out of one queer family’s experience of caring for a mother with Alzheimer’s.     

Ex cathedra : Teaching,transference and knowledge 1

This paper explores the ex cathedra effect in psychoanalysis. It starts with the impact of the analyst's chair (cathedra) on the ‘knowledge’ derived from the analytic exchange–in particular, the structural alignment between the analyst and the client, and the ex cathedra authority transferred to analytic interpretations. It is argued that this authority–and the compulsion to ‘know’ that underlies it–is inevitably subverted by the unconscious processes it attempts to capture (through knowledge), in particular by transference, whose embossed and hollowed out forms, and various contusive elaborations (the bezoaric, caddis, karaoke and medusa effects), vitiate the linearity and closure of a set cognitive system (knowledge). The paper then moves on to examine how this ex cathedra effect has impacted on teaching–the transferral of this knowledge in trainings, notably in universities, where psychoanalysis has become a ‘discipline’, and how transference effects have inevitably and variously subverted (some may say corrupted) the teaching process. In particular, it suggests that the academic validation of clinical trainings hides an ex cathedra dogmatism–a pretence of formal knowledge and critical assessment which forecloses creative engagement with the unconscious.     

Towards a better use of psychoanalytic concepts: A model illustrated using the concept of enactment

It is well known that there is a lack of consensus about how to decide between competing and sometimes mutually contradictory theories, and how to integrate divergent concepts and theories. In view of this situation the IPA Project Committee on Conceptual Integration developed a method that allows comparison between different versions of concepts, their underlying theories and basic assumptions. Only when placed in a frame of reference can similarities and differences be seen in a methodically comprehensible and reproducible way. We used “enactment” to study the problems of comparing concepts systematically. Almost all psychoanalytic schools have developed a conceptualization of it. We made a sort of provisional canon of relevant papers we have chosen from the different schools. The five steps of our method for analyzing the concept of enactment will be presented. The first step is the history of the concept; the second the phenomenology; the third a methodological analysis of the construction of the concept. In order to compare different conceptualizations we must know the main dimensions of the meaning space of the concept, this is the fourth step. Finally, in step five we discuss if and to what extent an integration of the different versions of enactment is possible.     

Making and Unmaking Prejudice: Religious Affiliation Mitigates the Impact of Mortality Salience on Out‐Group Attitudes

Research inspired by terror management theory has established that being reminded of the inevitability of death (i.e., “mortality salience”) leads people to express more negative attitudes toward out‐groups. We examined the hypothesis that being affiliated with a religion may buffer individuals against this negative impact of mortality salience. Two studies, conducted in two cultures that differ in their emphasis on religiosity (the United Kingdom and Italy), supported this hypothesis. Specifically, we found that mortality salience resulted in more negative out‐group attitudes only among participants not affiliated with any religion. Further, this buffering effect of religious affiliation was not moderated by participants’ specific religious orientations or by their levels of social dominance orientation. In addition, the buffering effect did not hold when prejudice against the target out‐group was not proscribed by religious authorities. Implications for research on religion, prejudice, and terror management are discussed.     

An evaluation and comparison of time-out procedures with and without release contingencies

A common recommendation for implementing time‐out procedures is to include a release contingency such that the individual is not allowed to leave time‐out until no problem behavior has occurred for a specific amount of time (e.g, 30 s). We compared a fixed‐duration time‐out procedure to a release contingency time‐out procedure with 4 young children (3‐ and 4‐year‐olds) using a reversal and multielement design. Results demonstrated that both time‐out procedures were effective at reducing problem behavior outside time‐out, problem behavior occurred in time‐out during both procedures, and problem behavior in time‐out was not predictive of problem behavior outside time‐out.     

Dissimilarity cumulation as a procedure correcting for violations of triangle inequality

Dissimilarity on a finite set is a function that assigns to every pair of points (stimuli) a nonnengative number vanishing if and only if the two points are identical. For any two points in a finite set, the minimum of the length of all finite chains connecting these points is a quasimetric (i.e., it satisfies all metric axioms except for symmetry). The computation of the quasimetric from a dissimilarity can be viewed as a data-analytic procedure of “correcting” dissimilarities into (quasi)distances, an alternative to nonmetric Multidimensional Scaling: the procedure simply replaces the dissimilarity between any two points with the shortest length across all chains of points connecting them. It is shown in this paper that this procedure can be equivalently described as a series of recursive corrections for violations of the triangle inequality across all triples of points considered in an arbitrary order.     

USE OF SOUNDING OUT TO IMPROVE SPELLING IN YOUNG CHILDREN

We examined the effects of teaching 5 typically developing elementary students to sound out their spelling words while writing them using the cover‐copy‐compare (CCC) method to practice spelling. Each student's posttest performance following practice with sounding out was compared to that student's posttest performance following practice with no sounding out. For every student, posttest accuracy was higher following practice with sounding out, indicating that it is an effective and easily implemented strategy to improve spelling instruction.     

样例和问题的联结方式对迁移作用的实验研究

研究了样例和问题的联结方式对学习迁移的影响。实验 1探讨了渐减提示法对学习迁移的作用 ;实验 2进一步检验了渐减提示法对诱发学习者进行自我解释的作用 ;实验 3探讨了“渐减提示 +子目标”这种联结样例和问题的方式对迁移的效果。进行重复测量设计的方差分析 ,实验结果表明 :渐减提示法是动态的联结样例和问题解决的有效形式 ,符合认知技能获得的四阶段模型和建构主义学习观的基本要求 ;渐减提示法有助于促进学习者对样例问题进行高质量的自我解释和产生心理预期 ;用“渐减提示 +子目标引导”来联结样例和问题有助于减轻认知负荷 ,有助于产生高质量的自我解释 ,对原理图式的获得有着重要作用     

Le risque de décrochage scolaire chez des collégiens libanais : le rôle spécifique du sentiment d’efficacité, de l’anxiété et du soutien parental et enseignant ?

Dropping out of school is a break that permanently interrupts a pupil's schooling. Mainly psychological factors may contribute to this situation. The study focuses on the role played by some socio-emotional factors in the risk of dropping out of school in Lebanon. A quantitative research has been conducted on 504 teenagers attending middle school in 7th grade about their dropping out risks. Causal track analyses show that school learning experiences, social support provided by family and teachers, as well as some individual characteristics – (school anxiety, feelings of effectiveness related to school domain, expectations versus in school, school project) interact to increase or decrease the risk of dropping out.