Homophobia or sexism? A systematic review of prejudice against nonheterosexual orientation in Brazil

Since it was coined in the 1970s, in the United States, the term “homophobia” has been invoked to define the prejudice against nonheterosexual orientation. Besides the US, the phenomenon has been detected in many contemporary societies, including Brazil. Prejudice against nonheterosexual orientation is strongly associated with the historical and social contexts in which it is embedded, which means that the term should not be used without a clear definition of its local specificities. This applies to the recent debate around homophobia in the Brazilian context. In an attempt to identify existing studies of prejudice against nonheterosexual orientations in Brazil, a systematic review was conducted in SciELO indexes, PubMed, PsycINFO, SCOPUS, and Web of Science. The articles were collected using the keyword “homophobia” and related terms, and “Brazil”, in the languages ??of the databases. The search returned 355 articles. Of these, 247 were removed because they were duplicates. The abstracts of 109 studies published between 1973 and 2011were analyzed. Thirty‐one articles were identified as relevant. The reviewed studies indicate that prejudice against nonheterosexual orientations is an evident and widespread phenomenon that is prevalent in various populations and contexts. Nevertheless, prejudice in Brazil is not homogeneous, and particular attention is necessary to the inequality of gender relations (sexism) and prejudice against gender nonconformity, which seem to explain, if not cause, most of the prejudice against nonheterosexual orientations. Although theoretically there is a clear distinction between sexual orientation and gender expression, from the standpoint of manifestation of prejudice that distinction seems to be more tenuous.     

The phantom limb in dreams

Mulder and colleagues [Mulder, T., Hochstenbach, J., Dijkstra, P. U., Geertzen, J. H. B. (2008). Born to adapt, but not in your dreams. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 1266–1271.] report that a majority of amputees continue to experience a normally-limbed body during their night dreams. They interprete this observation as a failure of the body schema to adapt to the new body shape. The present note does not question this interpretation, but points to the already existing literature on the phenomenology of the phantom limb in dreams. A summary of published investigations is complemented by a note on phantom phenomena in the dreams of paraplegic patients and persons born without a limb. Integration of the available data allows the recommendation for prospective studies to consider dream content in more detail. For instance, “adaptation” to the loss of a limb can also manifest itself by seeing oneself surrounded by amputees. Such projective types of anosognosia (“transitivism”) in nocturnal dreams should also be experimentally induced in normally-limbed individuals, and some relevant techniques are mentioned.     

针灸治疗周围性面瘫随机对照研究的文献分析

遵循循证医学评价文献的原则,在中国生物医学文献数据库、CNKI等数据库全面检索2002—2006年间的相关文献并进行计量学评价分析。共检索出文献1284篇,其中RCT文献共有169篇,按照循证医学评价文献的原则及方法,从研究对象、随机分配方法、对照措施、盲法采用情况等多个方面进行分析评价。2002—2006五年间报道的RCT数量比从建国到2000年报道的RCT数量多,但仍需进一步改善文献质量。     

Authors on the Outskirts: Writing Projects and (Sub)urban Space in Contemporary French Literature

This article analyzes the relationship between contemporary literature and the current development of the city in the French context. It first outlines the main aspects of the crisis of the city, or “la question urbaine,” and focuses then on specific responses by four writers, François Maspéro, Jean Rolin, Georges Perec, and Jacques Jouet, to the challenge the city poses for literary representation. Given that these responses pertain both to the techniques of literary representation and to cultural interpretations of space, the analysis is carried out at the level of both literary semiotics and cultural semiotics. In the end, the article relates the authors and texts discussed to works in other fields of arts, pointing out lines for future investigations.     

Spiritual practices children understand: an analysis of Madeleine L’Engle’s fantasy,A Wind in the Door

The following essay is a close reading of Madeleine L’Engle’s science fantasy novel, A Wind in the Door, in which young Meg Murry travels first to outer space and then into her younger brother’s ailing cells. The novel is a fine example of high fantasy (also known as heroic fantasy) wherein a humble protagonist is called to a quest to fight a cosmic battle between good and evil. The essay analyzes specific expressions of evil in the novel: impersonality, narcissism, despair and blind empiricism. Meg’s quest demonstrates particular spiritual practices that promote spiritual maturation and the ability to overcome evil: ‘kything’, Naming, deepening and holding. L’Engle portrays these practices in a fresh way that can help both children and adults incorporate them into their day‐to‐day lives. Moreover, there are links between kything and holding and the metta and tonglen, two types of Buddhist meditation. L’Engle affirms children’s innate relational consciousness and presents spiritual practices that are relational, non‐sectarian, practical, and eminently hopeful.     

On not being able to dream

In this paper, the author explores the phenomenon of not being able to dream (as opposed to not being able to remember one's dreams) from three different vantage points. First, from the point of view of psychoanalytic theory, he discusses Bion's idea that the work of dreaming creates the conscious and unconscious mind (and not the other way around). A person who cannot dream is unable to generate differentiable conscious and unconscious experience and, consequently, lives in a psychic state in which he is unable to differentiate waking from sleeping, dreaming from perceiving. The author then approaches the problem of the inability to dream from the perspective achieved by a literary work. He discusses a Borges fiction that creates, in a singularly artful way, the experience of not being able to dream. Finally, the author utilises the vantage point of a detailed account of a clinical experience to explore what it means not to be able to dream. He describes an initial state characterised by the patient's proliferation of unutilisable 'psychic noise' which, over a period of years, led to the analyst's experiencing 'reverie-deprivation' and brief periods of countertransference psychosis. Two analytic sessions are presented and discussed in which psychological work was done that contributed to an enhanced capacity on the part of both patient and analyst for genuine dreaming - both in sleep and in analytic reverie states.     

Autistic phenomena in The Adventures of Pinocchio

This paper seeks to demonstrate that the protagonist of Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio illustrates numerous autistic phenomena such as communication difficulties, sensory and perceptual distortions and mindblindness. While Pinocchio is viewed as a literary construct with contraindications of autism, it will be argued that his autistic traits are sufficient to suggest the possibility that Collodi had a partial intuition of the syndrome 60 years before it was identified by Leo Kanner. Approaching Collodi's text in this manner is taken as an opportunity to survey and reflect upon the psychoanalytic literature on autism and to position it in relation to contemporary theories from cognitive neuroscience.     

WILLIAM HAZLITT,OBSESSIVE LOVE,AND LIBER AMORIS

William Hazlitt, a distinguished literary figure of the early nineteenth century and a forerunner of psychoanalytic insights, had a keen awareness of the impact of the imagination on assessing works of art. At forty‐two, he became hopelessly involved in an obsessive love affair with a nineteen‐year‐old woman and could not extricate himself from the relationship. The affair followed the death of his father, a powerful influence on his life. Factors in his obsessive love included finding an object of idealization subject to his imaginative creation and narcissistically reexperiencing himself about to begin a new life.     

从国内有关研究看经济状况对个体幸福感的影响

通过对国内46篇涉及经济状况与幸福感关系的文献进行统计分析, 经c2检验发现, 大多数研究表明经济状况对幸福感有显著影响, 其中幸福感最低的是经济上相对较差或处于贫困状态的群体; 少数研究显示经济状况对幸福感无显著影响, 其样本来自经济发达省市或是收入有保障的群体; 还有研究表明相对经济状况对幸福感的影响大于绝对经济状况。因此, 改善弱势群体的生存质量, 关注民众非物质需要的满足, 缩小人们之间的收入差距, 将有助于提升我国各阶层民众的幸福感, 促进社会和谐。     

Games and Fiction: Partners in the Evolution of Culture

In this essay, I argue that the time is right in the philosophy of sport to follow the lead of systems thinking and emphasize the contextual embeddedness of sport, not its distinctive characteristics, least of all any claims for metaphysical independence. Accordingly, I analyze similarities between two cultural conventions—namely, literature (in particular fiction) and games—through the lens of evolution. I argue that common roots can be observed in games and fiction when looking at them structurally, semantically, and socially. I suggest that both games and fictional storytelling were adaptive in similar ways and that both preceded what is arguably the capstone cultural achievement of formal language.