The arrogant physician--a Judaic perspective

Arrogance among physicians is all too common. This is in sharp contrast with medicine's sacred religious origins. The author presents a concise historical review of the Judaic perspective on the role of the physician, his position in the community, and the attitudes/values that should characterize his healing pursuit.     

‘If I only had a little humility,I would be perfect’: Children’s and adults’ perceptions of intellectually arrogant,humble, and diffident people

Abstract

Intellectual humility is usually regarded as a virtue. In this paper, we conceptualized intellectual humility along two dimensions: (1) placing an adequate level of confidence in one’s own beliefs; (2) being willing to consider other people’s beliefs. We tested whether children (ages 4 to 11 years) and adults perceived intellectual humility as positive and how these perceptions changed across development. To do so, we asked participants to evaluate an intellectually humble person as compared to an intellectually arrogant person, who readily dismissed other people’s beliefs, or to an intellectually diffident person, who was unsure of a well-supported belief. Young children did not favor the intellectually humble person over the others, but older children and adults liked this person better and tended to consider her nicer than the arrogant one and smarter than the diffident one. These findings suggest that the virtuousness of intellectual humility in others is recognized from mid-childhood on.     

Stupidity in the analytic field: Vicissitudes of the detachment process in adolescence

This paper has the objective of broadening the understanding of technical aspects in working with adolescents who defend themselves against detachment from infantile aspects through defensive organizations. These organizations numb the adolescent toward both triangular reality and narcissistic defenses. The families of such young people may be part of the organization and the analyst can also be recruited to participate in it. But the analyst's perception can become blurry and this fact makes him appear stupid. Aspects of the myths of Narcissus and Oedipus are used here as models for studying stupidity. The analysis of a psychotic teenage girl who is symbiotic in relation to her family shows how the analytical field can be invaded by defensive configurations. Collusions of idealization and domination/submission involve the young person, her family and the analyst but the defensive organizations are only identified after their traumatic breakdown. The expansion of the symbolic network allows symbiotic transgenerational organizations to be identified, while models related to enactments prove helpful for understanding technical ups and downs. The paper ends with imaginative conjectures where Oedipus, as ‘patient’, is compared to the patient discussed here. These conjectures lead to reinterpretations of aspects of the Oedipus myth. The reinterpretations, together with the theoretical and clinical study, may serve as models for understanding the technical ups and downs in working with troubled teens.     

Genocidalism

This is an attempt to develop a more complete understanding of ``genocidalism of commission,' or the genocidal use of ``genocide,' defined stipulatively as ``the energetic attributions of ``genocide' in less than clear cases without considering available and convincing opposing evidence and argumentation.' Genocidalism is a widespread phenomenon regarding the discourse on international affairs in the advanced, liberal societies of the West, embedding a ``normative divide' between the ways of attending to domestic (national) concerns and ways of attending to international issues. I argue that genocidalism is morally wrong, explore its likely causes, and suggest possible ways of getting rid of this hateful practice. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Tell me who you are and I tell you how you feel: expected emotional reactions to success and failure are influenced by knowledge about a person's personality

The present research investigated the influence of knowledge about a person's modesty or arrogance on people's expectations regarding that person's emotional reactions to success and failure. Arrogance and modesty reflect the extent to which someone is likely to publicize their ability. Accordingly, we predicted that observers' expectations regarding a person's tendency to publicize their ability should inform expectations about the person's emotional reactions to success and failure. In two vignette studies, observers predicted the emotional state of a protagonist, as well as the probability that s/he will actually express that emotion and share the experience with others. For success, participants predicted a protagonist's pride, happiness, schadenfreude, and embarrassment if praised for a positive outcome. For failure, participants predicted anger, shame, guilt, sadness, and fear reactions. Across studies, personality information explained more variance than did gender or status. Results showed that the expectations for an arrogant person matched modal expectations for success, whereas for failure the expectations for the modest individual were closest to the modal expectations. Specifically, both modest and arrogant individuals were expected to suppress emotions that do not fit their self-presentational styles rather than to exaggerate expressions that do. This paper adds to our understanding of the information that people use to predict others' emotional reactions.     

The construct of the ‘mana personality’ in Jung’s works: a historic-hermeneutic perspective. Part I

According to Jung, the ‘mana personality’ represents an archetypal phase of the individuation process of remarkable interest in psychological, hermeneutic and theoretical terms. This figure is characterized by a high initiatic potential that fosters the approximation of the consciousness of the Self. At the same time, it entails a risk of psychic inflation or of ‘similarity to God’. In this article, divided in two parts, I deal with those aspects through a reconstruction of the development of this notion within Jung’s published works, adopting a primarily chronological and, secondarily, thematic approach moving from a textual analysis of relevant passages. In this first part, I consider some passages which deal mainly with the risks of the assimilation of the unconscious in ‘La structure de l’inconscient’ (1916) that preceded the successive proper treatment of the mana personality’s notion presented, and here examined, in ‘The relations between the ego and the unconscious’ (1928). Successively, I take into consideration some further issues related to it discussed by Jung in ‘The structure of the psyche’ (1928/1931), ‘Archaic man’ (1931), and ‘Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’.     

The construct of the ‘mana personality’ in Jung’s works: a historic-hermeneutic perspective. Part II

This is the second part of an article that tries to provide a framework of understanding of, and a seminal reflection on, a highly interesting yet little explored psychological construct of Jung’s analytical psychology, namely the ‘mana personality’. Here I take into consideration some issues around the ‘saviour complex’, discussed in Jung’s seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, concerning both the psychological analysis of the individual and the socio-political level related to the collective horizon of the 1930s. Moreover, I consider the continuity of Jung’s analysis of such issues in other works such as ‘Psychology and national problems’ (1936), Symbols of Transformation (1952), and Aion (1950). I finally make some suggestions concerning Jung’s apparent hermeneutic tendency to apply the construct of the mana personality to collective historical phenomena.