Shared Being,Old Promises,and the Just Necessity of Affirmative Action

Although the residues of official segregation are widespread, affirmative action continues to meet resistance in both official and everyday life, even in such recent Supreme Court decisions as Grutter v Bollinger (539 U.S. 306). This is due in part to a governing ontology that draws the line between individual and collective. But there are other possibilities for conceiving the social, and I offer one here in a theory of affirmative action that is developed through close examination of sharing and promising as elemental qualities of equitable communal life. The nature and value of these actions are demonstrated in narrative formulations of fairness as exemplified in triage and the situation at the end of slavery; of the difference between equality and equity and how justice depends on their conjunction; and finally of theorizing how these may come together in the permutable, opaque, yet resilient interdependence of person and community that represents most deeply the Greek idea of two in one, that is, of one two, not two ones. In these respects the paper is successful insofar as it discloses the kinds of reasoning that underlie both resistance and commitment to affirmative action.     

Politische und soziale Verantwortung von Psychotherapeuten

Psychotherapists should always continuously remind themselves what role they and/or representatives of their discipline played and still play in various political contexts. Under these aspects the following general categories can be suitable for orientation: 1) general political participation, 2) application of specific psychotherapeutic perspectives for understanding of cultural, social and political processes and 3) development of possible activity perspectives from a psychotherapeutic viewpoint. The psychotherapeutic view of social processes and the possible resulting activity perspectives are a consequence of observation of the interplay between exactly these social processes and their deposition in the individual.     

Gesellschaftliche Aspekte narzisstischer Störungen

Since the 1970s psychoanalysts have repeatedly described how the spectrum of mental disorders has shifted from neurotic conflict pathology to structural disorders of the personality. Nobody, however, is born with a narcissistic or antisocial attitude. Based on the works of Lasch and Ottomeyer, in this article an attempt is made to highlight such social aspects in highly developed capitalistic countries, which provide assistance to allow people to remain loyal to the circumstances that impregnate and configurate them. In these circumstances the narcissistic grandiose self of the individual with an ideal blueprint of self-realization becomes a destructive ideal. In the case of failure only the following choice then seems to remain: either the failure is experienced as a personal, self-induced catastrophe and as a self-induced culpable blemish (i.e. as deserved) or the subject resorts to the “opium of collective pride”, e.g. by identification with the national football team, in order not to have to “accept the truth” of the injured self-esteem.