Child As Metaphor: Colonialism,Psy-Governance,and Epistemicide

This paper mobilizes transdisciplinary inquiry to explore and deconstruct the often-used comparison of racialized/colonized people, intellectually disabled people and mad people as being like children. To be childlike is a metaphor that is used to denigrate, to classify as irrational and incompetent, to dismiss as not being knowledge holders, to justify governance and action on others’ behalf, to deem as being animistic, as undeveloped, underdeveloped or wrongly developed, and, hence, to subjugate. We explore the political work done by the metaphorical appeal to childhood, and particularly the centrality of the metaphor of childhood to legitimizing colonialism and white supremacy. The article attends to the ways in which this metaphor contributes to the shaping of the material and discursive realities of racialized and colonized others, as well as those who have been psychiatrized and deemed “intellectually disabled”. Further, we explore specific metaphors of child-colony, and child-mad-“crip”. We then detail the developmental logic underlying the historical and continued use of the metaphorics of childhood, and explore how this makes possible an infantilization of colonized peoples and the global South more widely. The material and discursive impact of this metaphor on children’s lives, and particularly children who are racialized, colonized, and/or deemed mad or “crip”, is then considered. We argue that complex adult-child relations, sane-mad relations and Western-majority world relations within global psychiatry, are situated firmly within pejorative notions of what it means to be childlike, and reproduce multi-systemic forms of oppression that, ostensibly in their “best interests”, govern children and all those deemed childlike.     

Situational group counseling with disadvantaged youth

Male adolescents in a job training program for culturally disadvantaged youngsters were provided with 14 weeks of on-the-job situational group counseling (SGC) to supplement more conventional casework approaches. Interdisciplinary teams of group leaders met with work-training crews for discussions designed to facilitate exploration of issues relevant to the present life situations of the trainees. Trainees who met twice weekly showed greater improvement in job performance and in overall adjustment than did those meeting once per week, while control subjects who did not receive counseling showed less gain than either of the counseled groups.     

Williamson on Vagueness and Context-Dependence

Several philosophers offer explanations of linguistic vagueness by appealing to the referential context-dependence of vague terms. Timothy Williamson argues pre-emptively that any such approach must fail, on the grounds that context-dependence is neither necessary nor sufficient for vagueness. He supports this claim, in turn, by example. This paper argues that his examples fail to show that context-dependence is either unnecessary or insufficient for vagueness, and hence that he has failed by his own lights to show that it cannot explain vagueness.     

Counseling in the culture cycle: feeling or reason?

Recent changes in the student subculture are seen as manifestations of a more general phenomenon, that of cultures cyclically changing from affective predominance to cognitive predominance. The article examines the implications these changes have for counseling and counseling techniques, i.e., that the counselor is a translator of one cultural style to the other, and that his predominant tools are different in an affectively based culture from what they would be in a cognitively based one.     

Artistic Integrity

This article explores the philosophically neglected topic of artistic integrity, situated within the literature on personal or moral integrity more generally. It argues that artists lack artistic integrity if, in the process of creation, they place some other—competing, distracting, or corrupting—value over the value of the artwork itself, in a way that violates their own artistic standards. It also argues, however, that artistic integrity does not require adamant refusal to acknowledge or act upon commitments to values other than single‐minded devotion to one's art. Artists of integrity need not be inflexible fanatics. They can seek to earn a living through their art, alter their vision of a work to reach an audience, evolve their artistic standards as they grow as artists, and balance the energy devoted to their art against energy devoted to family, friends, and self‐care; they can honor the demands of morality.