The Orsino complex: Men who love themselves as love objects

Abstract

The Duke Orsino, in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, is cited as the archetypal embodiment of a psychological complex which, it is argued, may affect many men in modern patriarchal societies. This condition named the ‘Orsino complex’ is characterized by the subject's experience of being in love with himself as a love object. It is the consequence of the subject's very early experience of his mother's dual psychological reactions to him as a male child. The first of these, and the more significant, I have called maternal phallic projection, while the second I term maternal withdrawal. I also consider the influence of the father upon this complex.

While this paper remains speculative in its present form—that is, its central thesis is based on fictional and not on clinical material—it might, I hope, assist all of us working psychodynamically in understanding further some of the severe problems that male clients present in their relationships with women, as well as directing further research into the complexities of gender identity in contemporary society.     

The enemy within An exploration of the concept of boundaries in a GP's surgery

Abstract

This paper looks at two GPs' surgeries and the way that they deal with the anxieties aroused when trying to meet patients' needs in primary health care. The practice counsellor is both an observer and a participant in this. The physical surroundings seem to influence the way these anxieties are acted out. Each surgery has to create an enemy in order to live with their anxiety.     

Rotation to simple loadings using component loss functions: The orthogonal case

Component loss functions (CLFs) are used to generalize the quartimax criterion for orthogonal rotation in factor analysis. These replace the fourth powers of the factor loadings by an arbitrary function of the second powers. Criteria of this form were introduced by a number of authors, primarily Katz and Rohlf (1974) and Rozeboom (1991), but there has been essentially no follow-up to this work. A method so simple, natural, and general deserves to be investigated more completely. A number of theoretical results are derived including the fact that any method using a concave CLF will recover perfect simple structure whenever it exists, and there are methods that will recover Thurstone simple structure whenever it exists. Specific CLFs are identified and it is shown how to compare these using standardized plots. Numerical examples are used to illustrate and compare CLF and other methods. Sorted absolute loading plots are introduced to aid in comparing results and setting parameters for methods that require them.The author is very indebted to a reviewer for pointing him to the generalized hyperplane count literature and to all the reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions.     

THE MAGICIAN IN THE WORLD: BECOMING, CREATIVITY, AND TRANSVERSAL COMMUNICATION

This essay interprets the meaning of one of the cards in aTarot deck, "The Magician," in the context of process philosophy in the tradition of Alfred North Whitehead. It brings into the conversation the philosophical legacy of American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce as well as French poststructuralist Gilles Deleuze. Some of their conceptualizations are explored herein for the purpose of explaining the symbolic function of the Magician in the world. From the perspective of the logic of explanation, the sign of the Magician is an index of nonmechanistic, mutualist or circular, causality that enables self-organization embedded in coordination dynamics. Its action is such as to establish an unorthodox connection crossing over the dualistic gap between mind and matter, science and magic, process and structure, the world without and the world within, subject and object, and human experience and the natural world, thereby overcoming what Whitehead called the paradox of the connectedness of things. The Magician represents a certain quality that acts as a catalytic agent capable of eliciting transmutations, that is, the emergence of novelty. I present a model for process∼structure that uses mathematics on the complex plane and the rules of projective geometry. The corollary is such that the presence of the Magician in the world enables a particular organization of thought that makes pre-cognition possible.     

Principal component analysis with external information on both subjects and variables

A method for structural analysis of multivariate data is proposed that combines features of regression analysis and principal component analysis. In this method, the original data are first decomposed into several components according to external information. The components are then subjected to principal component analysis to explore structures within the components. It is shown that this requires the generalized singular value decomposition of a matrix with certain metric matrices. The numerical method based on the QR decomposition is described, which simplifies the computation considerably. The proposed method includes a number of interesting special cases, whose relations to existing methods are discussed. Examples are given to demonstrate practical uses of the method.The work reported in this paper was supported by grant A6394 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to the first author. Thanks are due to Jim Ramsay, Haruo Yanai, Henk Kiers, and Shizuhiko Nishisato for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Jim Ramsay, in particular, suggested the use of the QR decomposition, which simplified the presentation of the paper considerably.     

客体投影方式对空间问题解决和再认的影响

通过设置四种实验条件,旨在阐明空间问题解决和再认的水平是如何受到客体不同投影方式的影响。除进一步支持了正投影问题的解决是以一个具有三维结构特性的心理表征为基础而并非是对二维正投影信息进行了充分识别的观点外,研究结果还表明：（１）这个具有客体三维结构特性的心理表征是建构于对正投影问题解决而非轴测投影图的再认过程中;（２）正投影问题解决的复杂性显著地高于轴测投影图问题解决而且一个建构于正投影问题解决中     

Presence: The Touch Of The Puppet

Using the ideal of the puppet as model and foil, this article looks at ideas about presence, play, animation, and belief. Puppetry’s role as a vital, theatrical form has deep roots in universal, cultural experience, and the notion of an inhering spirit that acts for and through image, idol, toy, or fetish is perhaps the central thread running through all attempts to represent and simulate animate life. Through a discussion of the phenomenology of the puppet—the source of its sensory, aesthetic, and metaphysical power—questions are raised about the projection of desire and purpose onto other transitional things, real and imagined.     

Unconsciously Poisoning the Roots: Psychological Dynamics of the Bible in Jewish/Christian Conflict

The persistence of antisemitism in Christian cultures despite the irrationality and destructiveness of its myths and attitudes has led more than one writer to consider that it may be deeply rooted in psychological dynamics, both individual and social. Likewise, much has been written about how the New Testament writings, especially certain passages in the Gospels, reflect a bitter split between the emerging Christian community and other Jewish groups. Seldom, however, are these two avenues of exploration brought together, asking how psychological mechanisms of defense and the formation of the biblical texts interact. In a recent book, The Jew and Deicide: The Origin of an Archetype (Davis, 2003), psychologist Frederick B. Davis attempted to do just that. Unfortunately, his presentation is deeply flawed by his lack of familiarity with basic New Testament studies and methods. His fundamental premise is sound—that the interplay of the texts, the communities that created them, and their subsequent interpreters evidence psychological dynamics that fuel an ongoing conflict. In this paper, I will suggest how those dynamics were active within the first century Christian community and were expressed in New Testament writings, and how those same dynamics are stimulated in later readers.Paper originally presented March 22, 2004. In D. MacDonald (Chair), New Testament Texts and Traditions. Session conducted at the Western regional meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Whittier, CA