AKRASIA

Aristotle's account of akrasia is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. First, his account of the problem is coloured by a number of unattractive assumptions and preoccupations; second, his central claim, that akrasia involves a temporary displacement of knowledge, deals at best with only a small number of cases; third, he is wrong to suppose that the akrates is typically someone overwhelmed by passion. We need to follow Davidson in recognising that the central problem consists in a failure to convert intention into action. Any solution must involve a recognition that we are dealing with a range of very different kinds of case, which demand different kinds of treatment. For example sometimes agents are overtaken by passion; sometimes they coolly and calmly do the wrong thing; sometimes they are insincere; sometimes they are suffering from a weakness of will; sometimes they are guilty of some kind of self deception; and sometimes they may have difficulty in comparing the goods and evils available.     

Learning Psychoanalysis: A Classification Based on Students' Learning Trajectories

This study was undertaken in an effort to sharpen selection procedures and improve faculty response to the learning needs of students. Eschewing a traditional anticipatory approach in determining suitability for training, the authors undertook a retrospective study to investigate the learning trajectories of candidates. A learning trajectory is defined as the particular way individuals learn, or fail to learn, as they advance through an Institute's training program. The database of this study grew out of the authors' experience with students in classrooms, in supervision, and from discussions about them in Progression, Selection, and The Evaluation of Learning committees. Realizing the reductionism of categorizing a highly complex and diverse group of individuals, the authors, nonetheless, found that candidates tended to group into five rather distinct categories. This paper discusses in detail the characteristics of these five categories and suggests ways in which this grouping may help in both selection and in planning more effective training for candidates. The authors are fully aware that this study has impressionistic qualities and warrants more rigorous research methods, but hope that it will arouse interest in other psychoanalytic centers and stimulate studies to corroborate, refine, or reject the conclusions reached by this group.     

Intrapersonal and Organizational Factors Associated With Burnout Among School Counselors

This study investigated the demographic, intrapersonal, and organizational factors associated with burnout among a population of school counselors in the northeastern United States (n = 78). Three hierarchical regression analyses were completed to determine the amount of variance that each cluster contributed to the 3 subscales on the Maslach Burnout Inventory‐Educators Survey (MBI‐ES; C. M. Maslach, S. E. Jackson, & M. P. Leiter, 1996): Emotional Exhaustion, Depersonalization, and Personal Accomplishment. The final models accounted for 45%, 30%, and 42% of the overall variation on each subscale, respectively.     

An Examination of Burnout Among School Counselors Guided by Stress‐Strain‐Coping Theory

The Maslach Burnout Inventory‐Educators Survey (MBI‐ES; C. Maslach, S. E. Jackson, & M. P. Leiter, 1996) was used to examine burnout among professional school counselors (N = 198). Guided by stress‐srain‐coping theory, final hierarchical regression models accounted for 49% of the variation on the Emotional Exhaustion scale, 27% on the Depersonalization scale, and 36% on the Personal Accomplishment scale. Numerous individual stress and coping variables significantly predicted burnout among school counselors in the multivariate context.     

Negotiating local tradition with Taoism: Female ritual specialists in the Zhuang religion

The introduction of Taoism to many local religions in Southwest China was instrumental to the southern expansion of imperial China. Pivotal to the hierarchy of both the Taoist celestial imperium and traditional Han Chinese society, the ideology of male dominance has likewise prevailed over a large area of this region, although in varying forms and degrees. Meanwhile, indigenous people of the region have continually and creatively negotiated their own respective worldviews with Taoism, importantly including distinct gender ideals and practices. Using religious texts and ethnographic material, this article focuses on the ritual negotiation between opposing concepts of gender: one from the Chinese imperium, the male-privileging Chinese Taoist religion introduced from the north, the other locally situated in the women-empowering religion of the Zhuang people and of many other religions across Southwest China and Southeast Asia. This article focuses on the interactions between local ideals and world religions.     

Psychoanalytic training experience and postgraduate professional development: A survey of six decades of graduate analysts

This exploratory study explored the training and post‐training experience of graduates of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. All living graduates of the past six decades were invited to complete a survey that addressed their training analysis, classroom work, supervision and other training experiences as well as their degree of post‐graduation involvement in teaching, supervising, study groups and other professional endeavors. They were also asked to rate their sense of themselves as psychoanalysts and their satisfaction with their analytic career. Further, they were encouraged to provide spontaneous narrative data. Our findings contribute to the current understanding of the careers of psychoanalysts – including that there is a difference in generational cohorts regarding professional satisfaction, identification as an analyst, and experience of training. We also found that there are no real differences between analysts who do and do not have analytic patients on some important variables: supporting analysis as a treatment method, identifying oneself professionally with psychoanalysis, and disillusionment with psychoanalysis – which is consistent with other studies. Also discovered were differences between male and female analysts' perception of certain aspects of their training.     

I Want to Hold Your Hand: Abstinence Curricula, Bioethics, and the Silencing of Desire

The abstinence approach to sex education remains influential despite its demonstrated ineffectiveness. One bill forbids the “promotion” of “gateway sexual activity,” while requiring outright condemnation of “non-abstinence,” defined so loosely as to plausibly include handholding. Bioethics seldom (if ever) contributes to sex-ed debates, yet exploring the pivotal role of medical discourse reveals the need for bioethical intervention. Sex-ed debates revolve around a theory of human flourishing based on heteronormative temporality, a developmental teleology ensuring the transmission of various supposed social goods through heterosexual marriage (Halberstam, 2005). Heteronormative temporality also constitutes a moralized discourse in which the values of health and presumed certainties of medicine serve to justify conservative religious dictates that otherwise would appear controversial as the basis for public policy. Overall, this analysis explores how moralized medical discourses compound existing injustices, while suggesting bioethics’ potential contributions to moral and political analysis of sex-ed policies.     

Work and Rest Variables in the Acquisition of Psychomotor Tracking Skill

College students (75 men, 75 women) matched in preliminary performance of 100 sec on the rotary pursuit apparatus were randomly assigned to five experimental groups. Their work/rest ratios, measured in seconds, were: 20/20, 30/30, 60/60, 90/90,120/120. All subjects received 30 min of total practice time after the matching trial. There was a significant practice effect and a significant practice x conditions interaction, but no main effect due to the cycles’ length or number. The decay rate of reactive inhibition (lr) is probably independent of its prior growth level; hence postrest residual lr is proportional to prerest accumulation. Partly because they generated lr in hypothetically greater amounts, women were significantly less proficient on the average than men, and sex interacted with practice. Although males had higher initial and final levels of ability than females, the two sexes’ acquisition curves showed the same rate parameters in our mathematical model.