The center of gravity

In As far as possible: discovering our limits and finding ourselves (Barish and Vida, 1998), we struggled with the constraints of being two nice girls in the context of our individual professional identities as traditionally trained psychoanalysts. We were surprised to discover, through sharing with one another some painful, confusing, and even terrifying clinical experiences, how wedded we were to certain psychoanalytic conventions. It was not a pleasant discovery. What we had to face was the extent of our submissiveness to psychoanalytic theory, and of the cost to our authentic selves of that submissiveness. This daughter-paper is about our learning not to do what we were supposed to do. Its gestation has taken a form that we could not have anticipated, for, as we pursued the writing of this sequel, we seemed to get lost along the way. After working with this over a very long time, we can see now that the paper that was ultimately born, this paper, has functioned as a vehicle for us to experience ourselves in relation in an uncertain, mingling way, conscious and unconscious, trying not to be self-conscious and not defensive. This, we can also see, is how we approach the center of gravity, where our irreducible and irreconcilable tendencies are struggling to maintain a balance. And even more to the point, this paper is also a demonstration, a look at what developmental transformation is really like, the process to which we all give lip service, but hardly any of us ever pays attention to it in our real lives, and if we do, we never, never talk about it.     

How I became a Jungian analyst

This paper is a reflection on the significance of 80 years of my life and the 40 years of it I have spent working as a Jungian analyst in Europe and in Israel. If my Jewish identity and my experience of the tragic events of the Holocaust have profoundly influenced the course of my life, it has been my training as a Jungian analyst in Zürich that permitted me to establish a new relationship with the traditional Jewish symbols and created the possibility of a new way of experiencing what it means to be a Jew. This new understanding has in turn helped me both in my work with Holocaust survivors and victims of Israel's various wars and in my theoretical reflections on this subject.     

Lost and Found: Reinvention of the Self Following Migration

Migration can impact on a person's identity and this assault can require reworking or establishing aspects of the self. The study involved a cross sectional design, using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to establish the impact of migration on women from the United Kingdom (UK) and Eire (N = 154) now living in Australia. A major aim was to determine whether the impact of multiple loss (loss of home, major attachment figure, family, community, culture, and social networks) can cause a grief reaction and threatened a person's identity, and, if so, what strategies might be used to buffer this impact and assist reinvention of the self. Bowlby's grieving process was used as a theoretical framework. Women who successfully reached the final stage were able to reinvent themselves using social strategies, whereas those less able used solitary strategies. Women, unable to reach the final stage of grieving, suffered psychological distress. The study has implications for future migrants. Migrants who use appropriate strategies to enable settlement and reinvention are also likely to achieve a sense of belonging to the new place.     

Group Identity and Conflicting Expectations of the Future in Northern Ireland

Much of the conflict in Northern Ireland is based on investments in one of three opposing political futures possible for the region: remaining part of Britain, joining Ireland, or becoming independent. Speculative scenarios describing each of these futures were randomly assigned to equal numbers of Protestant and Catholic undergraduates in Northern Ireland, and their expectations regarding material and civic improvement for their ingroup and peace and reconciliation between the groups were assessed. Two dimensions of religious identity, measured by the Identity and Public subscales of Luhtanen and Crocker's (1992) Collective Self-Esteem Scale (CSES), moderated the differences between groups, but only for their expectations of peace and reconciliation. Stronger expectations of improvement for the ingroup were related to higher scores on the Public subscale, regardless of religion or the political future presented. Thus, group identity had a complex, context-dependent relationship to intergroup conflict.     

Differences in Parental Investment Contribute to Important Differences Between Men and Women

Parental investment theory addresses sex differences that result from the trade-off between parenting effort and mating effort. For example, relative to men, women spend more time caring for offspring, are more selective in assenting to sexual intercourse, are more upset by a partner's emotional infidelity than by a partner's sexual infidelity, and are better able to inhibit their behaviors in certain situations. These and other sex differences are attributable to evolved mechanisms that work in interaction with the physical and social environments.     

A Story of Her Own: Hester Lynch Piozzi's Autobiography

This essay examines the autobiography of Hester Lynch Piozzi and contextualizes her story within eighteenth-century ideologies of gender and aging. From a narrative understanding of identity, autobiographical writing serves as one of the many stories that constitute an individual's identity. This reading of Piozzi's account finds that it functions both as an act of reminiscing and as an effort to give meaning to life that was often misunderstood. Considering Piozzi as a woman who lived most of her life outside of the social and cultural expectations for a middle class female of her era, this essay suggests the importance of listening to and retelling the stories of others as well as our own.     

Classification of vowels and consonants by individuals with moderate mental retardation: development of arbitrary relations via match-to-sample training with compound stimuli.

This study explored whether an identity-matching-based stimulus equivalence procedure could be used to teach vowel and consonant stimulus classes to 2 adolescent females with moderate mental retardation. Delayed match-to-sample trials presented a compound sample stimulus consisting of printed letters and a spoken word (“vowel” or “consonant”). The correct comparison stimulus matched only one of the letters in the compound sample. Subsequently, test trials assessed whether arbitrary relations had formed among the individual stimuli from each compound sample and whether stimuli from different compound samples had merged into larger stimulus classes. Both participants acquired five-member classes of vowel and consonant stimuli, which subsequently generalized to vocal classification and to identification in the context of four-letter words. Follow-up tests showed that the generalized performances remained intact after 6 weeks. These procedures suggest an economical approach to stimulus class development.     

Collective Identities of Class and Gender: Working-Class Women in the Pittston Coal Strike

This article investigates the intersections and tensions between two collective identities, those of class and gender, for working-class women involved in supporting the 1989–1990 strike against Pittston Coal Group in southwestern Virginia. In the case of this year-long (and ultimately successful) strike, women were organized by United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) staff in strike support activities, but they also sought to organize themselves as women. The tensions between their identity as members of the working class and their identity as women are revealed by examining their forms of activism, their relationship with the UMWA, the divisions between groups of activist women, and the articulation of women's involvement in the strike. The experiences of these women are briefly compared with women's activism in the 1984–1985 British Coal strike. The article concludes by arguing that collective identity is best understood as it emerges in response to specific contexts.     

Book Reviews

Dalton, Dennis, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action
Goodman, David G. and Miyazawa, Masanori, Jews in the Japanese Mind: The History and Uses of a Cultural Stereotype
Rejai, Mostafa and Phillips, Kay, World Military Leaders: A Collective and Comparative Analysis     

Sustainable Pressure for "Women-Friendliness" in Sweden

This paper describes how Swedish women argue and act in order to improve their quality of life. It is based on a citizen survey and on interviews with leaders of a broadly defined women's movement. The thesis is that women are in the process of developing their own democratic practice. They thereby challenge the assumption that general suffrage and numerical equality of representation are sufficient conditions for transforming the contemporary gender power order into one characterized by equality of power between women and men. The empirical data show that there is a great deal of variation in perceptions of problems and ways of accomplishing change. The existence of somewhat different priorities and plural feminist strategies for change—state feminist, interest group–based, civil, and segregated—are interpreted as speaking in favor of the sustainability of such pressure for "women-friendliness" in Sweden.