Experience Of Disorientation Research Articles

Facebook loves: depression, psychosis and online romance, report of three cases

This paper explores the impacts of the Internet, social networking sites, and online-relationships on self-definition, perspectives of reality, and mental health in contemporary times. The authors explain how computer-mediated communication seems to be the culmination of the time-space continuum endemic to modernity. The dynamic formation of the Internet sites has provided new ways of interpersonal interaction and communication that have created a highly impactful shift on the time-space continuum. This shift appears to transcend time as it creates a new sense of interpersonal connection in the virtual realm of cyberspace. Relationships that were previously established and sustained primarily through face-to-face interaction have come to be complemented by a social technology that is creating a new genre of interpersonal relationships. The article highlights contradictory views about how the use of the Internet affects intimacy, expands to another area, namely, romantic relationships. By use of social network sites, an increasing number of people are found to have online romantic relationships. Among these Facebook is a medium that brings people together who have shared interests. Three cases describe experiences of persons seeking psychiatric assistance who experienced depressive psychosis, hallucinations, insomnia and other stressful and disorienting experiences after Facebook relationships formed in virtual communities. Attempts to resolve discrepancies related to the emotional void resulting from differences between online virtual satisfaction of needs for love and actual offline absence of the so-called loved one are explored. We are providing three cases where psychopathology might be fostered with these new forms of media.

<em>The Morgesons</em>: Elizabeth Stoddard's <em>Ars Erotica</em>

This essay takes up the often noted but seldom analyzed rage at the heart of Elizabeth Stoddard's novel The Morgesons. I argue that the outsized antisocial feeling that pervades the book comes out of Stoddard's profound dissatisfaction with dominant social models for being and belonging in Victorian America. While her counterparts internalized their anger with existing models and opportunities for women, Stoddard externalized hers by staging sadistic scenes that bear no trace of the baroque interiority of the sentimental novel. Yet for all its negativity, her rage is generative, enabling alternatives, however unsustained, to conventional notions of family and romantic love. Drawing on insights from what has been termed the antisocial thesis in queer theory, I read the bad behavior in The Morgesons--frustration, anger, narcissism, stubbornness, sadism, masochism--not as behaviors that need to be domesticated but as alternatives to the dominant life narrative and the institutions that perpetuate it. Informed by a nasty sensibility, this coming-of-age story enacts an anti-pedagogy against the domestic novel's lessons of romantic love, family life, and private property. (1) Stoddard foregrounds the life of her anti-heroine, Cassandra Morgeson, from childhood to adulthood as beset with frustration at the limitations that the prescribed passage to maturity entails. As such, The Morgesons chronicles the rage of a frustrated woman sensing foreclosure, not unlike Harriet Beecher Stowe's broad social vision whittled down in her later novels to the pleasures of shopping, decorating, and bossing one's spouse around. Yet unlike her contemporary, Stoddard lets her heroine's rage and the non-normative intimate possibilities it brings into being stand against the meager pleasures of domestic ownership and privatized sexuality. (2) If the nineteenth-century domestic novel draws the reader into its world as if welcoming one into the comfort of a home, The Morgesons keeps the reader at arm's length in a disinviting gesture: difference is maintained, subjectivity remains opaque, and intimacy is weird. In its coldness, the novel enacts an anti-pedagogy through its bossy sensibility aimed at reorienting the coordinates that make possible intimate interactions. The novel will let you in only if you play by its rules and follow the heroine's instructions. Reading it is a disorienting experience that requires a readjustment of sensibility for readers accustomed to being eased into scenes of sociality and readability. The nineteenth-century angel in the house may exist in that half-life of disembodied grace, but Cassandra Morgeson is all appetite. She comes first, second to none, cruel hungry for experiences inconsistent with her gendered subject position in late-nineteenth-century America (Stoddard 67). Cruelty becomes her own nourishment, an affective modality that functions as a check on the culture's insistence that women identify with the submissive position in the spectrum of power. Unlike her sister and mother, Cassy is not going to starve herself on a diet of abnegation and feminine propriety. She wants to eat her mother and everything she represents; she wants to eat like a man. In fact, Cassy takes her father as a gender model for a good part of the novel as aggression and dominance are traits she cultivates. Yet this is not to say that Cassy wants to be a man, but that her identification with power is not organized along feminized, masochistic lines. She wants to occupy the dominant position in social and intimate contexts, a position usually afforded men. It is as if, lacking the upbringing accorded a young man, Cassy shapes her identity and desires in a do-it-yourself way that makes this Bildungsroman at once compelling and alienating. Her very own special creation, an embodiment of a Nietzschean will to power, Cassandra experiences pleasure when her romantic love interests are symbolically castrated or killed off. …

Bodily Disorientation and Moral Change

Neglect of the moral promise of disorientation is a persistent gap in even the most sophisticated philosophies of embodiment. In this article, I begin to correct this neglect by expanding our sense of the range and nature of disoriented experience and proposing new visions of disorientation as benefiting moral agency. Disorientations are experienced through complex interactions of corporeal, affective, and cognitive processes, and are characterized by feelings of shock, surprise, unease, and discomfort; felt disorientations almost always make us unsure of how to go on. I argue that experiences of disorientation can strengthen the moral agency of individuals. I begin by clarifying experiences of felt ease and orientation. I then characterize disoriented embodiment by investigating select experiences that often involve or accompany disorientation, focusing throughout on how disorientation prompts changes in motivation and action. I conclude by charting how disoriented embodiments can help individuals become better moral agents overall, in part by challenging norms that restrict embodiment and undermining dualistic conceptions of the self.

The Medieval World View: Contemplating the Mappamundi

AbstractLooking at a medieval mappamundi (or world map) is a disorienting experience. Oriented to the east, displaying unfamiliar geographical forms and blanketed with images of strange animals and monstrous humans, it does not correspond to our modern concept of a world map. In the late 19th century scholars of the history of cartography dismissed medieval maps as a sign of ignorance. More recent studies have cast new light on these complex symbolic constructions, and scholars are searching for insights into medieval concepts of time and space, as well as clues to the ways in which knowledge of ancient geography was transmitted to the medieval intellectual world.

Shiloh in Fiction

On the banks of the Tennessee River, on the 6th and 7th of April 1862, roughly 3,500 men from Union and Confederate armies died in battle, on a field that took the name Shiloh from a log church near the settlement of Pittsburg Landing. It was the bloodiest encounter of the Civil War so far. Gone was the romantic innocence of Rebs and Yanks who had marched off to war in 1861, says historian James McPherson (413). Chronicler James McDonough calls the battle colorful, dramatic, blundering, and confused in his book Shiloh, subtitled In Hell before Night (v). For the untried armies, Shiloh was a profoundly disorienting experience, and Americans have been trying to get their bearings ever since. Historical narration, says theorist Jorn Rusen, the general of orienting practical life in time by mobilizing the memory of experience, by developing a concept of continuity and by stabilizing identity (12). But this fundamental practical function (18) of telling stories about the past, Rusen warns, is not always well appreciated by professional academic historians. To the extent that academic historians concern themselves mainly with methodological and intradisciplinary issues, they cede their primary of orientation in history to popular historians-or, just as often, to popular novelists. Rusen's typology of historical narration can be illustrated vividly with examples from fictional narratives of the April 1862 battle of Shiloh. Such an illustration can promote an understanding of what historical novelists do when they set out to write fictions that make a claim to the historian's orienting function. Shiloh is a landmark that writers and readers use to orient themselves to the American Civil War and its continued salience in American temporal experience. In History: Narration-Interpretation - Orientation, Rusen distinguishes four types of historical narration. Traditional narrative, the first, repeats origin stories in order to affirm the permanence of a culture's dispensations. Exemplary narrative, the second, draws on the past to guide future conduct; we learn wise courses and eschew foolish or vicious ones by looking to past events. Critical narrative, the third, identifies problems in traditional or exemplary accounts, revising them to draw contrarian conclusions and to deny given patterns of identity (12). Genetical narrative, the fourth, seeks to understand how the process of forming memories of the past has shaped those memories. In genetical narratives, the past is always a site of negotiation; history is no longer an eternal verity, an object lesson, or even a locus for revision, but a process of formation and reformation. For Rusen, these four types of narration are grounded in anthropological universals and serve the necessary social functions of affirmation, regularity, negation, transformation, respectively (12). Broadly speaking, each of the four types of historical narration gives way to the next in both cultural phylogeny and individual ontogeny. Cultures develop myths, then teaching stories, then critical consciousness, and then critical self-consciousness about the history-making process. Thus, a child first learns traditions, then their application as lessons, then to critically evaluate those traditions and lessons, and then to analyze how those traditions, lessons, and critiques emerge in a dynamic process. Rusen speculates that the individual's acquisition of these narrative types in the process of development may be parallel to the acquisition of cognitive abilities or moral abilities, as formulated by Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg (Rusen 17-18). The interplay of phylogeny and ontogeny means that each of the four types of narration is continuously in practice. Because of the need to teach children or socialize assimilants, cultures never outgrow traditional or exemplary narratives. There were past eras where only traditional narrative was practiced, or only traditional plus exemplary narrative. …

Spiritual Emergency and Occupational Identity: A Transpersonal Perspective

The subject of spirituality has been developing over recent years in occupational therapy journals internationally and this article contributes to the ongoing exploration of spiritual issues in therapeutic practice. People can experience a transformational crisis through engaging in spiritual growth and development, a phenomenon that has been termed a ‘spiritual emergency’. A spiritual emergency manifests itself as a crisis within ego-identity and can include experiences of disorientation and de-adaptation, which affect a person's ability to function in daily life. Consequently, a person may be diagnosed and treated for a mental health problem; however, a spiritual emergency may present a person with opportunities to engage in a process of self-renewal rather than being considered ill. The dichotomy of a spiritual emergency as reflecting human potential or a mental health problem is a complex issue, which underpins many of the discussions concerning health professional involvement. This article argues that there are clear therapeutic needs for people experiencing a transformational crisis, which are well suited to the skills of occupational therapists. Engaging in occupation could play an important role in the process of re-adaptation during a spiritual emergency through enabling occupational identity, which could support the process of self-renewal. A case vignette is provided to illustrate the theoretical position outlined.

Disorienting Reading

Shabanu, Daughter of the Wind (1989) and Haveli (1993) by Suzanne Fisher Staples depict the life of Shabanu, a contemporary Pakistani girl. In this depiction, Staples offers a disorienting experience for her child and adolescent readers by using defamiliarization, the juxtaposition of the pre-industrial and industrial, and contraventions of typical plot resolutions and character development. As a result, readers are prevented from seeing their own experience reflected in Shabanu's experience; consequently readers must rely on the exercise of their own generous imaginations to open the new perspectives and experiences portrayed in the novels.

Late for School

Graduates of Lesley University’s Learning Community Bachelor’s program were interviewed 2 to 5 years following the completion of their degrees. The sample included 3 men and 12 women, with 1 African American, 1 Cuban American, and 3 Saudi national participating. Data gathered from student papers and participant observations together with the students’ narratives highlighted the following themes: the effect of an interrupted life narrative, a disorienting residency experience, the importance of peer support, the power of individually designed studies and writing, the impact on family and personal relationships, a growing concern for social change, increased global understanding, openness to art and creativity, and an interest in lifelong learning. This study’s focus on the residential experiences of adult learners adds participant voices to the knowledge base of transformative learning.

Crossing borders

In this article I examine the construction of time and space as orientation elements in narratives that recount disorienting experiences. I focus on how narrators articulate orientation and on how listeners engage in interactional work to make sense of narrated events. I argue that orientation management in storytelling illustrates how the use of linguistic resources connects narrators and interlocutors to micro and macro social contexts. I also suggest that consideration of the role played by orientation in different types of narratives has two important methodological consequences: it leads analysts to look critically at received notions about narrative structure, and it opens new paths for the analysis of the multiple links between narratives and social contexts. The phenomena analyzed include vagueness in the provision of orientation details, interactional negotiations over orientation, predominance of space over time orientation in certain narratives or narrative sections, and use of shared conventions for narrating the border crossing experience. The data for the article come from 13 chronicles of the border crossing told during sociolinguistic interviews by undocumented Mexican immigrants to the United States. (Narrative, Immigrants, Orientation, Time, Space, Storytelling)

Catholic Greenwich Village: Ethnic Geography and Religious Identity in New York City, 1880 -1930

Introduction Greenwich Village is a neighborhood of diagonal streets and narrow alleys on lower West Side of Manhattan. Tourists find it an unexpected contrast to Manhattan's rigid grid of north-south avenues and cross-town streets. The area is so different from rest of city that even seasoned New Yorkers will admit that a walk through Greenwich Village can be a disorienting experience. Until morning of September 11, 2001, confused visitors would often look up at twin towers of World Trade Center to regain a sense of direction. The population of Village has long been as distinctive as its topography. Until late in nineteenth century Greenwich Village remained stoutly nativist in a city teeming with immigrants. In early twentieth century it became world-famous as Bohemia of America. More recently it has been home of a thriving gay community.1 For a period of about fifty years, from 1880 to 1930, Greenwich Village was also a vibrant Catholic neighborhood. There were a dozen churches and chapels with their attendant institutions located either in Village proper or immediately adjacent to it caring for at least seven different ethnic groups. In many respects Catholic Greenwich Village was a microcosm of big-city American Catholicism of that era. For that reason it is a researcher's delight today. The compact area and well-defined character of Greenwich Village in those years make it possible for historian to trace complicated interplay among different Catholic ethnic groups that lived there, and between each of them and local Irish-American ecclesiastical power structure. Such an analysis yields some fascinating insights into grassroots strengths and weaknesses of largest Catholic archdiocese in United States at a time when ethnic, urban-centered Catholicism was reaching apogee of its influence in America. Greenwich Village was once a real village, a northern suburb of New York City to which residents of city fled during periodic outbreaks of cholera. As early as 1822, however, an English visitor noted that, though once a separate town, [it] now forms part of city. Nonetheless, for many years thereafter Greenwich Village still preserved its distinctive identity. Amid tenement districts of lower Manhattan it remained a middle-class enclave with a predominantly native-born white Protestant population. As late as 1893 a rather dyspeptic observer commented favorably on humanity of a better sort who inhabited Greenwich Village in contrast to inhabitants of lower East Side of Manhattan, where even bad smells have foreign names.2 By that date, however, Greenwich Village was already in process of a major social transformation as influx of Irish and Italian immigrants from adjacent neighborhoods accelerated flight of middleclass Protestant residents. In 1902 a prominent social worker stated without hesitation that most of people were now Catholic. The anonymous writer of WPA's New York City Guide commented condescendingly that by 1910 the American Ward had become Ward 9, a foreign ward . . . its people faithful followers of Roman Catholic Church and of Tammany. By 1920's Greenwich Village was over-whelmingly Catholic and remained such until deterioration of neighborhood, and then its subsequent gentrification initiated still another social transformation that sent many middle-class Catholic families scurrying to outer boroughs of city.3 The Irish Village Fully half of twelve Catholic churches in and around Greenwich Village had predominantly Irish congregations. Far and away most important of them was St. Joseph's Church, located at corner of 6th Avenue and Washington Place in heart of Greenwich Village. Founded in 1829, St. Joseph's was Mother Church of Catholics in Greenwich Village and fifth oldest parish in whole archdiocese. …

Cancer and the Common Woman in Margaret Edson's W;t

This essay is an exercise in the bringing together of apparently disparate roles. I am an assistant professor of Renaissance literature, and I am a patient. These two identities rarely overlap, since has not proved a popular literary subject. As Susan Sontag notes, although nineteenth-century writers glamorized tubercular patients, nobody conceives of ... as a decorative, often lyrical death; she adds that cancer is a rare and still scandalous subject for poetry; and it seems unimaginable to aestheticize the (1) Cancer's resistance to aesthetic rendering poses an additional difficulty for patients like myself, accustomed to turn to imaginative literature in times of need. Hence my attraction to Margaret Edson's highly acclaimed W;t, a play that dramatizes the diagnosis, treatment, and death of Dr. Vivian Bearing, a professor of seventeenth-century literature suffering from advanced ovarian cancer. W;t has achieved to general acclaim what Sontag had deemed unimaginable. I had initially hoped that the play would help me make sense of what had happened to me. The fact that I now approach it in a scholarly mode is itself an indication that the play was a disappointment to me on a more fundamental level. Having is a disorienting experience. All patients expect to suffer physical pain. But few, I imagine, are ready for the social stigma that attaches itself to the disease. A personal anecdote will illustrate the point. Shortly after I returned from my six-month course of treatment, I encountered an acquaintance at the gym. She approached me reluctantly, as if my disease might be infectious. This reaction would become familiar to me; indeed, it is a common response to persons diagnosed with cancer. After nervous assurances about how good I looked, my acquaintance offered the opinion that I must have learned so much about [my]self as a result of having cancer. What, precisely, did she mean? Did she think that all diseases led to enlightenment, or did she imagine that was especially efficacious from a pedagogical point of view? Would she have said the same thing to someone suffering, say, from a potentially fatal case of botulism? The comment, I told myself, might simply reflect this person's new-age tendencies. In any case, had taught me little about what this person referred to as my self. It had ravaged my body but had left my sense of self intact. Had I the capacity for pleasure while in treatment, I suppose I might have found it in this reassuring consistency of my personality in the face of trauma. So why had this person's response shocked me? What lesson was I supposed to have learned? Did she think that, prior to the diagnosis, I had not myself? Was my an indication of this failure, a sort of punishment exacted for the sin of self-delusion, a cure for ignorance about my own deepest impulses? What logic could have accounted for her perception of my disease? Her comment was part of a series of troubling reactions that my elicited in my community. When word of my diagnosis first circulated, for example, several people assumed that I had breast (because I was a woman) or lung (because I was a smoker). Interestingly, men assumed that I had breast and nonsmokers assumed that I had lung cancer. People defined my disease in ways that helped them mark their own distance from it. Their assumptions about my cancer, in other words, were comforting to them. Like my acquaintance at the gym who protected herself from disease by imagining it as part of a program of self-improvement, these people could not tolerate the possibility that strikes arbitrarily. My actual diagnosis gave little enough support to this view: I had parotid cancer--a very rare form, for which there are no known risk factors. Remarkably, however, when I tried to explain to various people that my personal habits had not contributed to my disease, they were disinclined to believe me. …

The Psychology of Hearing Loss

The Psychology of Hearing Loss

An AIDS lexicon

The sudden appearance of a truly new disease is a wake-up call. A new global pandemic of an infectious agent, transmitted through sexual contact and blood, affecting alienated and/or deprived...

Mapping the Terrain of Time—Space Compression: Power Networks in Everyday Life

In this paper I seek a more comprehensive mapping of the experience of time—space in late modernity. I develop Massey's critique of the work of Harvey and Jameson in their reading of time space compression as a socially uniform experience of disorientation. Building on Massey's notion of ‘power geometry’ I integrate discussions of time—space with an application of different understandings of power (from traditional political philosophy, Marxism, and poststructuralism) and their manifestations—in latent-power conditions, socioeconomic networks, actor networks, ‘local’ interpersonal relations, and the network spaces of subjectivity. Rather than being posited as irreconcilable conceptions, these versions of power and their articulations can be seen as initial coordinates in the mapping of the complexities of the experiences of time and space in late modernity.

The British Experience of Decolonization

In reconstructing the metropolitan experience of the ‘end of empire’, one of the key questions might be posed as follows: how much did it really hurt? Was it a mere glancing blow to the head, or some more crushing punishment delivered to the chin or solar plexus? How successful – to pursue the boxing metaphor - was the metropole at improvising a ring-craft to come out on top, or at least avert defeat, in the contest of decolonization? This article will assess the extent to which the loss of empire for the British constituted an agonizing and disorienting experience, or whether it was a ‘rite of passage’ accomplished with relative ease and a soothing sense of inevitability.

The Japanese manager's traumatic entry into the United States: Understanding the American-Japanese Cultural Divide

Executive Overview Japanese executives routinely travel to the United States for business for periods extending up to several years. Their visits typically begin as a jarring experience for them and their families due to the substantial cultural differences they encounter. Despite the success of Japanese business worldwide and the growing presence of Japanese communities in many U.S. cities, Japanese individuals routinely face disorienting experiences in their dealings with Americans, encounters that impede their effectiveness and hamper the business they come here to manage. Such confrontations mirror in microcosm the tensions of contemporary U.S.-Japan relations. They reveal the presence of built-in cultural barriers to Japanese firms in the U.S. that constitute structural impediments every bit as real as the more widely criticized constraints on foreign business in Japan. They also highlight patterns of behavior that Americans must learn to bridle if they are to serve as key players in global instituti...

Staging Post-Colonialism(s)

For a Canadian, a walk through the streets of an Australian city can be a disorienting experience. The memories of empire linger in both countries, and it comes as a shock to find that Melbourne, with its streetcars, Victorian buildings and streets named after empire builders and their battles, is more familiar than Chicago.