Contemporary Categories Research Articles

Freud's early clinical work.

Freud became a medical practitioner because it was impossible for him to pursue the desired career of a microscopic researcher. His education and training had not prepared him for the task of being a practicing physician. In his private practice he began treating some very intelligent, chaotic, demanding, volatile and disturbed patients. Anna von Lieben was one of these patients whom Freud treated very intensively for a long period of time. Elise Gomperz was another talented and severely pained early patient of Freud. Over a number of years, Freud was her psychiatrist and provided her with attentive care using a variety of treatment methods that were available to him at that time. Emmy von N.'s condition was also fluctuating and very demanding. The dramatic sense and chronic clinical course of these patients is compatible with the contemporary diagnostic category of Borderline Personality Disorder. Freud provided these patients with long-term supportive care while he attempted to cure them. At the same time, Freud committed himself to the theory of radical cure and downplayed the supportive, draining and difficult clinical work that he was doing.

The withering away of the nation? An Afterword

The article examines the argument that the nation, and national sentiments, are now in decline. It identifies contemporary social categories whose ties to individual national settings may become tenuous or ambiguous, and it suggests that in some instances they may be engaged in shaping transnational cultures which cannot be labeled “superficial.” While print language may have supported the delineation of nations as imagined communities, the symbolic modes involved in other media technologies may draw cultural boundaries differently.

National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees

In this new theoretical crossroads, examining the place of refugees in the national order of things becomes a clarifying exercise. On the one hand, trying to understand the circumstances of particular groups of refugees illuminates the complexity of the ways in which people construct, remember, and lay claim to particular places as “homelands” or “nations.” On the other, examining how refugees become an object of knowledge and management suggests that the displacement of refugees is constituted differently from other kinds of deterritorialization by those states, organizations, and scholars who are concerned with refugees. Here, the contemporary category of refugees is a particularly informative one in the study of the sociopolitical construction of space and place.

Ritual Hoarding in Migration-Period Scandinavia: A Review of Recent Interpretations

Non-funerary deposits of an apparently ritual character are a persistent, often very prominent aspect of all periods of Scandinavian prehistory from the Neolithic to the later Iron Age (post 600 AD). The hoards of the nearer end of this series have recently been brought within theoretical and analytical studies from a variety of modern perspectives differing in ideology and specialism. This paper offers a critical review of those studies in the light of a detailed case-study from the nearer end. Harmonies can be found between the shaping force of economic and social factors posited by Richard Bradley's model and the evidence of this case, although, perhaps inevitably, the effects of these may appear more complex and even quite different from what a description of the general model can encompass. More cautionary conclusions reached which have important implications within the construction of general theory are that greater care ought to be exercised in identifying the establishment of polities and socio-economic crises from this and other contemporary categories of material, and that the specific content of ideology, particularly religious concepts, which affects the fact and the form of ritual hoards, while probably incapable of being built into a general model like Bradley's on the same implicative basis as specific types of economic and social structures, merits a more prominent place in studies of the topic.

Death, dying, and immortality: Some contemporary categories

(1964). Death, dying, and immortality: Some contemporary categories. Pacific Philosophy Forum: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 3-45.