Existential Difficulties Research Articles

Boyhood Melancholia and the Vocal Projection of Masculinity

This article explores the existential status of ten to fourteen year old boys through a full time, research council funded study of young masculinity and voice. Drawing on the ideas of writers who have suggested this period can be a melancholic one, the article interprets qualitative data derived from boy singers and “peer audience” groups in schools. It is found that the voice does contribute to existential difficulties for boys concerned as much about being “not child” as “not girl” but unable to attain adult masculinity. The period is one of great cultural difficulty for young males and many avoid the issues. Yet the boys who enjoyed using their voices were the less prone to melancholia.

Global Movements, Internal Migration, and the Importance of Institutions

In May 1928 The Watling Resident, a local newspaper directed at a readership among the inhabitants of a working-class estate created by the London County Council on the north-western outskirts of the city, published its first issue. It took the opportunity to represent what it saw as its readers' urgent and existential difficulties: “We have been torn up by the roots and rudely transplanted to foreign soil.” According to the newspaper, these painful feelings of displacement were voiced “over and over again” by people living on the new estate. These migrants and their mouthpiece spoke and wrote in terms that prefigure the pioneering historical work of Oscar Handlin or suggest they were of one mind with the Chicago School of sociology. In this light it is remarkable that these migrants were not recent arrivals from Poland, or even from Ireland or Scotland; rather they had moved to the estate from inner London, and more than half had previously lived a few miles away in the north London boroughs of St Pancras, Islington, Finsbury, and Paddington.

FAMILY PLANNING: A HALAKHIC-GENDER PERSPECTIVE

The halakhah binds observant Jews to fulfill the biblical commandment to fruitful and multiply. The rabbis in the Talmud expanded this biblical obligation into two injunctions: lashevet—to populate the world, and la'erev—to father more children, interpreted as meaning that each man ought to father as many children as he is able. This commandment is characterized by a dialectic tension. On the one hand, emphasis is placed on the importance of the commandment and of fulfilling it punctiliously. On the other, there is recognition of the need to qualify it, because of the existential difficulties it presents. This tension is emphasized in the literature of the Sages and the medieval rabbinic decisors, but it is absent from most contemporary halakhic rulings, whose rhetoric is usually that contraception or is a necessary evil, a product of invidious modernism. Halakhic decisors encourage young couples to start having children immediately after marriage (at least until, health permitting, they have fulfilled the biblical commandment of procreation) and to raise as large a family as possible. This trend, I shall argue, caters to male rather than female interests, and is fueled by a covert gender perspective that assumes that woman's main purpose is to bear and raise children. This article investigates the existence of a halakhic basis for family planning, and the extent to which that basis has been and could be invoked to take women's interests into account in family planning by observant young couples today.

De l'adolescent déficient mental qui pose des actes sexuels transgressifs

Although they are not very frequent, cases of sexual transgressions of mentally handicapped teenagers, which today are recognized and taken into account, are nonetheless preoccupying due to the question they pose as to the relation between cognitive limitation and the transgression of limits. Teenagers are sometimes allowed to transgress the natural laws as well as the rules that any society makes for the best possible socialization of all. Sexual transgressions of mentally handicapped teenagers are still far from our mental perceptions and representations. Certain young people express an alarming sexuality that leads to abuses or perversions; among these we will examine the mentally handicapped. Their situation is to be taken seriously without stigmatisation or predictions of a heavy “psychopathological career”. This article proposes to examine the general considerations related to the sexuality and psychoemotional development of mentally handicapped teenagers. In the light of these aspects we will then question what brings handicapped teenagers to commit sexual transgressions. We will examine responsibilities and, in some situations, the search for a “sexualised mothering” echoing a massive anguish. The article will then elaborate on a clinical case examining the “supporting factors” and the subjective position of the young person. The last part of the article is devoted to the groundwork of assumptions related to diagnostic and therapeutic responsibility. How do we evaluate? With which criteria? Who do we meet? Can we establish a forecast? The evaluation then leads to the treatment based on two poles, the first, psychoeducational, the second, psychotherapeutic. The treatment, in its first pole will accompany the individual in his life and his relations, particularly in the field of sexuality. It will then approach, among others, the questions about the legitimate needs and desires of persons, the desired, realistic and realizable applications that can be possible. The treatment's intention consists in leading the young person, within the limits of his or her potentialities, to choose the right object, to manage his/her phantasms from the point of view of respect of the other. The second pole's psychotherapeutic object is to meet the young person in his existential difficulties; the idea is to offer him/her his/her own place of development adapted in function of the handicap and centred on the “environment and associations” caused by the transgression of a sexual nature. Finally, the aim of this article is to bring the clinical cases of mentally handicapped teenagers in our field of perceptions, our representations, and our developments in terms of accompaniment.

"A Disgrace to the Map of Israel": The Wilderness Journey of the Citizen-Soldier in Amos Oz's A Perfect Peace

A Disgrace to the Map of Israel":The Wilderness Journey of the Citizen-Soldier in Amos Oz's A Perfect Peace Ranen Omer-Sherman (bio) The act of departure is the bravest and most beautiful of all. A selfish happiness perhaps, but it is happiness—for him who knows how to appreciate it. To be alone, to have no needs, to be unknown, a stranger and at home everywhere and to march, solitary and great, to the conquest of the world. —Isabelle Eberhardt When it comes to Israeli literature, even before the advent of "post-Zionist" discourse, the writer's encounter with the timeless desert disrupts certain polarities and essentializing gestures of mainstream Zionist conventions. The desert, with its sands and stark visual display of erosion, is the site that a surprising number of Israeli writers use to explore the difference between national loyalty and diasporic dreaming. In the novels of Amos Oz (b. 1939), who calls the small Negev town of Arad home, the desert serves potentially as a transformative space that lays bare the cracks in the individual's commitment to national identity. In the Hebraic imagination, long before the collective journey of the people under Moses, Abraham's self-exile from Ur into boundless desert space embodies the brave individuation of one [End Page 97] who transcends the concept of the tribal norms into which he was born. It is as if almost in spite of itself, by privileging anecdotal narratives of protest and spiritual restlessness alongside the law and ritual, the Bible credits the desert as the site of a supreme skepticism that unsettles all nationalist complacency. Given the powerful residual traces of this counter-narrative in the Jewish literary tradition, it seems worth addressing its role as a catalyst for the literary imagination of Oz.1 Relevant to this is critic Joseph Cohen's astute argument about Oz's delicate relation to serving both art and politics in the context of contemporary Israeli reality. Cohen notes Oz's powerful capacity for "bypassing polemicism to move upward to a substantially higher plateau of metapolitical writing. ... Oz is nothing less than a modern mythmaker who has been highly successful in taking the exoticism of Israel's location in the desert and Mediterranean Sea, a country already saturated with a biblical, mystical, apocalyptic and miraculous history, and combining it with the myriad realities of contemporary life" (179). In short, the desert is unrivalled as a formidable influence in the mythopoetic dimensions of Oz's imagination. Yet rather than being seduced by an escapist mystical vision, the novelist is drawn to the desert as a source for clarity in framing complex national realities. Oz, who has for many years lived close to the desert, embraces the biblical sense of the wilderness as a site of "translation" rather than a consolatory haven of inner mystical retreat. His characters often flee homogenous and complacent insularity—they question the classic kibbutz ideology that Zionism touted as one of its proudest achievements and hedonistically long for a distinct sense of independent selfhood. Thus Oz offers a highly complex response to Israel's existential difficulties. Consciously, he distances himself from an earlier generation's collectively sanctioned ideas.2 Nowhere is this more evident than in the novel A Perfect Peace,3 which bears witness to a significant cultural rupture. The solidarity with the collective that had characterized the Palmach generation of the late forties and early fifties is no longer a sacrosanct assumption of Israel's artists and intellectuals. In this novel, a young man, raised in the shadow of his father's deep faith in the socialist Zionist revolution, fully wakens to the reality that his comfort is centered on a community of dispossessed Arabs, and suffers a violent existential crisis. In Oz's apparent challenge to the colonialist dimension of the Zionist enterprise, he seems to anticipate boldly what has been identified as the post-Zionist spirit of Israel's youngest writers. Yet ultimately, the reader cannot be certain whether Oz is prepared to fully sanction the political implications of his character's angry questioning. [End Page 98] Perhaps the most widely read novelist among his generation, a formidable influence among the...

No-thing is left to tell: Zen/Chaos theory in the dramatic art of Samuel Beckett

Zen Buddhism and the Chaos theory are used in this work as binocular lenses to examine the existential difficulties in Samuel Beckett's plays in terms that circumvent traditional Western schools of thought. No-Thing Is Left to Tell examines Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, Footfalls, and Ohio Impromptu, discovering both within them and throughout the larger scale of Beckett's plays as a whole, a movement toward revisioning our world in terms of a nonclosed, unself-conscious state. Illustrated.

Psychotherapy for delinquents?

The results of a psychotherapy consultation service for delinquents are presented. Based on the clinical material obtained from this programme, and a review of relevant delinquency and psychotherapy literature, a working model of individual psychotherapy related to attachment theory as it applies to this population is discussed. Developmental and existential difficulties that warrant resolution are included, as are issues with resistance and counter transference.

Confluenţe literare: Studii de literatură comparată româno-maghiară , and: Ego, Alter, Alter Ego (review)

BOOK NOTES reaUy two constantly interacting texts: the original (the source text or "father") and "the interpretative layers which, over the years have been and continue to be grafted onto [it]" (124). Vittoz, mindful of both past and present, uses pseudo seventeenth-century vocabulary and syntax alongside modern slang, borrowings from earUer translators, quotations from modern authors, and Lacanian word-play. He thus offers "both an imaginary French version of Shakespearian language and, simultaneously , our own perception ofit" (127). Vittoz is "aware of the absence of the father" but wants "to expose the father as a cultural object"; and his translation does "not attempt to define Shakespeare's meaning but to multiply it" (131). Despite a tendency toward the restatement of already weUestabUshed points, Heylen's book is carefuUy researched, rich in detaUed analyses, well-written, and eminently readable. It amply demonstrates and Ulustrates its socio-cultural thesis and worthüy takes its place as the third volume in a new series, "Translation Studies," edited by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere. This new field assumes that translation is "rewriting and manipulation" in the service ofpower, with results potentiaUy either positive or negative in the evolution ofa Uterature or society. Philip Cranston University of North Carolina, Asheville KÁROLY KOLLÓ. Confluenfe literare: Studii de literatura comparatä romäno-maghiarä. Bucharest: Kriterion, 1993. ANDREI CORBEA. Ego, Alter, Alter Ego. Iasi: Omnia, 1993. Despite the enormous economic and existential difficulties of a transitional period that turns out to have been much tougher than anticipated, comparative Uterature is thriving in Romania. Placed at the margins of the European realm, ever uncertain of its identity, the country has generated, by way of response (one among many, to be sure) a spate of inteUectuals versed in many languages, literatures, and cultures. An older generation, including Paul Cornea, Adrian Marino, Alexandru Du{u, or Dan Grigorescu is still active. Somewhat younger scholars, including Mihai Zamfir, Mircea Martin, Monica Spiridon, or Liviu Petrescu are quickly overcoming the handicaps of several decades' isolation. The two books here reviewed Alústrate the potential of comparatism in Romania. Andrei Corbea, chair ofthe German department at the University of Iasi and pubUsher of the Iasi University Press, is a speciaUst in the multi-ethnic culture ofthe Bucovina, the province at the confines ofthe Ukraine and ofRomania where Romanians, Jews, Germans, Ruthenians, and stiU other groups had managed to create during two hundred years or more a flourishing and (given the mixture) a surprisingly harmonious cosmopoUtan culture under benign Hapsburg administrative auspices. Vol. 19 (1995): 160 THE COMPAKATIST Károly Köllö, a Transylvanian researcher of Hungarian ethnic background writing in Romanian, concentrates his book on an area that is still outrageously under-researched—the interactions of Romanian and of Magyar cultures over the centuries. Both books are collections of separate essays; they are solid and manage to bring a wealth of new information and new suggestions. KoUo covers a wide historical range. He begins with some fascinating information about Transylvanian students (Hungarian and Romanian alike) at the universities of Leyden and Oxford in the late seventeenth centuries: numbers, courses taken, and so forth. He continues with materials about the surprisingly strong attraction exerted by theories of Jansenist source on the Catholics of Transylvania. He discusses in some detaü how the apocryphal (or pseudo-Homeric) comic epic Batrachomyomachia was provided a late eighteenth-century imitative variant by Csokonay Vitez Mihály and promptly enjoyed a further imitation by a Romanian author. Short, but interesting pieces deal with the concerts ofFranz Liszt in Bucharest in 1847, the favorable response to I. L. Caragiale (Romania's leading comic dramatist in the late nineteenth century) among Hungarian intellectuals, the impact of Machiavelli 's theories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the interfacing of Hungarian-Romanian avant-garde poets in 1922-23. Corbea deals (in a more theoretical vein) with Adorno, Lukács, and Habermas; he relates a personal meeting with Ernst Jünger; he includes in his volume good short reviews on recent Romanian poets and German novelists. Longer essays are devoted to the leading figures of the critical school of Konstanz, as well as to some issues of the "Goethezeit." Still, as noted earlier...

Raisonnement, argumentation et rationalité chez le psychotique

A series of papers published in the 50's claimed that schizophrenics suffer from altered reasoning capacities and current psychiatric classifications still emphasise logical and argumentative difficulties in the delusional subject. Such approaches tend to ignore the mediocre results obtained by subjects in many reasoning tasks, and to side-step the deviant and highly salient sensory experiences characteristic of acute psychotic episodes. Despite the variety of these experiences, they seem to follow certain regular patterns, although some features of reasoning and argumentation in psychotic or deluded subjects appear to resist a continuistic approach (the madman has not lost his reason, he has existential difficulties). This is the case for an argumentative weakness known as jumping to conclusions, the tendency to make contradictory assertions, an inability to take contradictory evidence into account, and retroactive self-attribution of delusional beliefs. The author tries to understand their possible causes and suggests that they need not involve any genuine divergence from the epistemic dynamics of a normal subject when he finds himself in a situation of cognitive dissonance. The specific relation between salient perceptions and relevance judgement in psychotic subjects may be a purely accidental factor of irrational assessment; where probabilistic reasoning is concerned, evaluations can be much more accurate than those of normal subjects.

Abord psychothérapique des mères célibataires dans le cadre des hotels maternels

Multidisciplinary research on a number of unmarried mothers who, since the delivery, chose to live with their child in homes called ‘Hotels Maternels’, where great attention is given to a good psychological environment and best care to the baby. The clinical observation (medical, psychological tests etc.) has been devoted to the somatic and psychoaffective development of the offspring from birth to school age; the investigation on the mother concerns her personality, emotional state and psychiatric pathology. Special consideration is given to mother-child relationship. The aim is to appreciate the chances of a good social integration for the mother and the baby as well as the effect of good care for both. The first results of the research show no gross maternal psychiatric pathology, but clearly indicate that a lonely motherhood represents a transitional state with ambivalence and feelings of incompleteness very much like those experienced by a married woman living existential or personal difficulties.