Paradoxical Experience Research Articles

Meanings, Functions, and Experiences of Living at Home: for Individuals with Dementia at the Critical Point of Relocation

The sociophysical home environment is an integral component of everyday coping, self-identity, and well-being for individuals with dementia; however, residential discontinuity is a common experience for many of these individuals. This article examined the meanings, functions, and experiences associated with living at home for individuals with dementia at the critical point of relocation to a residential care facility. Qualitative research methods were used to analyze in-depth interviews with 16 individuals with dementia at their homes within 2 months prior to relocation. At the time of relocation, living at home had become a paradoxical experience for most participants. The findings inform practice and policy interventions at both individual and societal levels to help individuals with dementia age in place for as long as possible and to maximize their efforts to "place" themselves in their new living environments after relocation.

Paradoxes of Sexuality, Gay Identity, and the Closet

In this project, I illustrate how eight premises of sexuality, gay identity, and the closet contribute to the existence of paradox, an interactional situation constituted by contradiction. I first outline the following premises: gay identity is (1) inextricably tied to the metaphor of the closet; coming out is necessary when gay identity (2) is invisible; the closet draws meaning (3) only in relation to heteronormative contexts; gay identity, as a (4) stigmatized identity, makes coming out a (5) potentially dangerous act; coming out is conceived of as a (6) necessary and important, (7) discrete and linear, (8) inescapable and ever-present process. I then use autoethnography to describe and analyze the lived experience of paradox in terms of these premises. I conclude by formulating ways a gay person can negotiate paradox in, and by way of, interaction.

Dostoyevsky and epilepsy: between science and mystique

This article, the result of a research project presented as a Master's degree dissertation in the graduate program of 'Teaching of Health Education' at UNIFESP, seeks to highlight the pertinence of analyzing epilepsy and especially, the paradoxical experience of the epileptic individual through literary narrative. Using as its object the novel, The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, it seeks to discuss the relationship between epilepsy and the mystic experience, bearing in mind the context of the scientific and humanistic perspectives of the 19th century and today.

Understanding the Milieu Experiences of Patients on an Acute Inpatient Psychiatric Unit

The role of inpatient mental health units is changing. Increasingly, people with acute and severe mental illness are admitted for short periods of intense treatment and are discharged quickly to community-based care. Reduction in average lengths of stay for psychiatric inpatients has been accompanied by a marginalization of the concept of therapeutic milieu in the mental health discourse. This phenomenological inquiry focuses on understanding the life-world of six people with acute psychiatric illness who were hospitalized on an acute inpatient psychiatric unit. Working together, a team of four, including mental health clinicians and consumers, developed and implemented this interpretive study using the phenomenology of Heidegger and Taylor. The principle investigator conducted the interviews, and the research team engaged in a complex interpretive process, reviewing narrative accounts, exploring personal meanings and key themes, and reconstructing shared meaning as lived and shared by participants. In this report, the authors describe patient experiences of a rule-bound, controlling, and sometimes oppressive milieu while highlighting patient experiences of healing and health as lived within that same milieu. The authors describe patients' embodied, dialectical, and often paradoxical experiences of fear and affirmation, alienation and connection, and abandonment and healing. The authors share selected narrative accounts to generate new understanding of patient experiences and suggest that the inpatient psychiatric milieu remains an important but often neglected component of psychiatric treatment.

After Dark and Out in the Cold: Part‐time Law Students and the Myth of ‘Equivalency’

This paper presents the findings of the first major research study of part‐time law students. It argues that many face multiple disadvantages, largely unrecognized by universities, whose emphasis on the formal equivalency of part‐time and full‐time law degrees ignores the distinctive backgrounds and needs of part‐time students. As a result, many are marginalized, impacting on their retention, overall performance, and work prospects. It is also argued that the context within which part‐time law students experience legal education contributes to a collective habitus which may structure what is ‘thinkable’ for their futures. Such concerns are of particular importance given the strong vocational drive amongst part‐time law students. An effective response requires action by both universities and the legal profession. Without this, part‐time legal education will remain a fundamentally paradoxical experience, offering broader access to legal practice for non‐traditional entrants, while continuing to inhibit their chances of success by entrenching their difference in the eyes of the profession.

Death Row Correctional Officers

Capital punishment has received much scholarly attention; however, very little is known about correctional officers who work on death row. This research attempts to fill this gap in our knowledge by exploring the experiences, perspectives, and attitudes of correctional officers who have worked on death row. The findings reveal that working on death row is a paradoxical experience. The results suggest that correctional officers who work on death row experience both strain and pressure while at the same time, they find death row work is easier and has fewer problems than other assignments in the prison. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed.

Understanding how technology paradoxes affect customer satisfaction with self‐service technology: The role of performance ambiguity and trust in technology

AbstractThis study examines the role of consumer technology paradoxes within the context of self‐service technology and the routes by which these paradoxes influence customer satisfaction evaluation. Analysis of survey data from online banking customers indicates that three paradoxes operate in this context: control/chaos, fulfill needs/create needs, and freedom/enslavement. The study reveals further that the effects of these paradoxes on customer satisfaction are mediated by consumer performance ambiguity and consumer trust in technology. Theoretical and managerial implications of consumer paradoxical experiences for technology‐based services are discussed. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The Logic of Populist Discourse and its Cultural Frame in Korea: An Analysis of the Former President Roh Moo-Hyun’s Reformist Rhetoric

This study was conducted to explain the discursive logic of populist politics and its cultural background in the former president Roh's Korean Government. It was divided into two parts of research results. In the first part, I articulated a reading of former Korean president Roh's discourses focusing on the populist dimensions of his rhetoric. His discourse was organized according to the binary opposition of antagonism. It distinguished between us (the People as represented by his Government) and them (the Conservatives the majority party in the National Assembly), constructing thus two chains of equivalences at war. In the second part, I explored the socio-historical conditions of emergence of populist discourses by trying to situate the outbreak of current populism within the long history of past social movement in Korea. I confirmed manic dualism as a cultural frame of Korean populism in relation to the crucial cleavage between the conservatives and the progressives that have seemed to dominate contemporary Korean political culture. And coming to a conclusion, I discussed the connection between Korean populism and democracy as a clinical diagnosis of populist discourses. Populism could be conceived as paradoxical experience in which the successive democratization in Korea might have become its underside.

Retentissement clinique des nouvelles technologies d’imagerie médicale : l’exemple de la stratégie de dépistage du cancer du sein

In the frame of cancer screening, we present a new psychological concept elaborated from our clinical practice of women affected by a breast cancer. The experience of these women is different depending on whether the cancer is discovered in an asymptomatic context or not. We introduce the concept of "anticipatrice medicine" in order to define the implication of diagnosis precocity on the therapeutic strategy, because of a modification of some main parameters which make up the ordinary personal concept. These parameters are : the time in which disease anticipates the symptom and the space where the treatment anticipates the disease. We discuss the paradoxical experience of screening which imposes a medical intervention before any symptom that is for the patient to be treated before any feeling of the disease, and to experience the disease through the experience of a treatment. The different elements of this paradoxical experience are successively identified and analysed. Finally we propose four directions of research in the field of interaction between human and medical technologies.

Adília e Baudelaire: leituras do fim

Esse ensaio se propõe a avaliar o uso profanador feito pela poeta portuguesa Adília Lopes da herança baudelairiana, focalizando os procedimentos de ironia, figuração, fragmentação e transitividade com que em ambos se encena a subjetividade lírica e associando-os a um modo impróprio de relação com a modernidade e a contemporaneidade, compreendidas como experiências paradoxais de fim e recomeço.

Common Variables Associated with the Development of Stockholm Syndrome: Some Case Examples

Stockholm Syndrome is a paradoxical psychological experience which both intrigues and often frustrates law enforcement and mental health professionals alike. Much attention has been directed toward understanding and defining the contextual variables associated with the development of Stockholm Syndrome. Since it appears that the formation of Stockholm Syndrome may increase the likelihood of hostage survival, discerning the factors that may encourage its occurrence is a priority for crisis negotiators. The purpose of this paper is to (1) analyze crisis situations using actual case examples in which evidence of Stockholm Syndrome has been reported and (2) examine the variables associated with the development of this phenomenon. Case information was obtained from the Hostage Barricade Database System (HOBAS) of the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit. Results of this analysis conclude that some, but not all, factors previously hypothesized as requisite to the development of Stockholm Syndrome find additional support from this case analysis.

Mutual Moral Caring Actions

A community practice framework is presented as the synthesis of research findings from the analysis of a critical ethnonursing study of women in recovery from chemical dependence. Critical Social Theory is used to examine the paradoxical experiences of women from their lifeworld and system within the community. The framework focuses on the mutual moral caring actions of the community nurse and the women in the recovery. It is supported by the concepts of transcultural nursing ethics. The utility of the framework is to promote clarity of speech and parity of community membership for women in recovery from chemical dependence and their return to the community.

CHARTING THE “TRANSITIONAL PERIOD”: THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN TIME IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to chart a concept of historical experience that French Romantic writers first developed to describe their own relationship to historical time: the notion of the “transitional period.” At first, the term related strictly to the evolving periodic conception of history, one that required breaks, spaces, or zones of indeterminacy to bracket off periods imagined as organic wholes. These transitions, necessary devices in the new grammar of history, also began to attract interest on their own, conceived either as chaotic but creative times of transformation, or, more often, as slack periods of decadence that possessed no proper style but exhibited hybrid traits. Their real interest, however, lies in their reflexive application to the nineteenth century itself, by writers and historians such as Alfred de Musset, Chateaubriand, Michelet, and Renan, who in their effort to define their own period envisioned the “transitional period” as a passage between more coherent and stable historical formations. This prospective self‐definition of the “age of history” from a future standpoint is very revealing; it shows not just the tension between its organic way of apprehending the past and its own self‐perception, but it also opens a window on a new and paradoxical experience of time, one in which change is ceaseless and an end in itself. The paper also presents a critique of the way the term “modernity” has functioned, from Baudelaire's initial use to the present, to occlude the experience of transition that the Romantics highlighted. By imposing on the nineteenth‐century sense of the transitory a heroic period designation, the term “modernity” denies precisely the reality it describes, and sublimates a widespread temporal malaise into its contrary. The paper concludes that the peculiarly “modern” mania for naming one's period is a function of transitional time, and that the concept coined by the Romantics still governs our contemporary experience.

Human Agency Revisited: The Paradoxical Experiences of Victims of Crime

Victims of violent crime often complain of feeling powerless. In some respects this represents a psychological aftereffect of the crime — an experience in which something was done to them against their will that they were powerless either to prevent or to stop. However, focusing attention on the psychological aftereffects of such experiences often overshadows other important considerations. For example, there is the possibility that an accumulation of subsequent social and institutional interactions may serve to minimize their ability actively to cope with their experiences. This paper seeks to address these issues head on by reframing victimization in terms of the interplay between victims' social and institutional interactions, on the one hand, and their agency to cope on the other.1 Following a brief review of the critical literature on victims' problematic institutional positions and a discussion of agency, data will be presented from a qualitative study of individuals who have suffered the murder of a loved one.2 As will be seen, the differing experiences of these individuals in a variety of social contexts have much to teach us about institutional influences, therapeutic ideologies, and human agency.

Secrets of European Reponsibility

In his 1995 collection of essays entitled The Gift of Death,1 Jacques Derrida deconstructs the concept of responsibility-a characteristically Derridean undertaking. His purpose, however, is not to discount but to reinforce it, to demarcate an grounded in an irreducible and undeconstructable experience: a paradoxical experience of faith that is secret and thereby something other than the in any universal sense. Derrida explores in this text his vision of an infinite responsibility that has its roots in a a priori that is messianic without being religious, and ethical without being metaphysical.2 This is a task that runs through much of Derrida's recent work, and it represents an attempt to reestablish contact with the moral, the political, and even the religious, without reverting to the metaphysical foundationalism that the Derridean practice of deconstruction has long aimed to subvert and decenter.3 It provides Derrida a means to take up ethics, a topic inherently bound up with the metaphysical heritage of the West, while remaining essentially true to his postmodern outlook. Responsibility, in this perspective, becomes something aporetic; like Derrida's notion of justice, it is absolute and yet ever undecidable.4 What makes The Gift of Death an unusual text, and somewhat difficult to approach for many Western readers, is that it takes up via an engagement with the work of a philosopher largely unknown outside of Central Europe-the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka (Pa-toch-ka). The choice of Patocka is, however, a particularly appropriate one for Derrida's purposes.5 Not only does this Czech thinker deal thematically with the notion of in a postmetaphysical world,6 he is also explicitly engaged in the same broader quest that occupies Derrida's more recent work. Both Patocka and Derrida seek a formulation of metaphysical themes-themes concerned with religious ethics and political morality, for instance-that avoids the flaws of traditional metaphysics and the intrinsic nihilism of the postmodern pragmatist who declares all ethics to be utterly relative. Fully half of The Gift of Death is dedicated to a reading of one of Patocka's Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History; this essay, titled Is Technological Civilization Decadent, and Why? deals with the historical (or genealogical) roots of the irresponsibility (decadence, decline; upadek in Czech) of contemporary, technological civilization. It is in Patocka genealogy of and religion, Derrida claims, that a sense of the responsible emerges that is post-metaphysical it results in a heterodoxical and messianic form of that comes as a gift, in mystery and secrecy, from a sacred Other. Adding to this analysis a consideration of the paradox of responsible ethics in Kierkegaard's story of Isaac and Abraham in Fear and Trembling, Derrida ultimately develops a (non-grounding) groundwork for a version of he can call his own, and a portrait of God as the ultimate foundation for this absolute component of humanity. The Gift of Death is thus a significant text in what has been called the most recent in Derrida's thought-the phase which makes clearer the political, ethical, and religious dimensions of his thinking.7 Yet much in the text remains unexplored because, as even a cursory glance at the recent literature on The Gift of Death will show, while analysts are eager to take up the conclusions of Derrida himself, or his engagement with Kierkegaard, few if any are able (or willing) to effectively take up the work of Patocka, or question Derrida's characterization of him.8 This is regrettable, given that the entire edifice built up in this text is grounded in foundations that Derrida purports to find in Patocka's treatment of responsibility. While it is clearly the case that a genuine appreciation of Derrida's intent in The Gift of Death demands greater attention to Patocka, this is not the only, indeed even the primary, reason for the present essay. …

The Corporeal Sublime

The author articulates his theory in the corporeal sublime which is based on the strange and paradoxical experience of looking in the Middle Ages. The feeling of the sublime occurs between self and other, subject and object, human and non-human. In the later Middle Ages the threshold between human and divine was negotiated through rituals of corporeal identification and communion.

The therapeutic relationship as a paradoxical experience

The therapeutic relationship exists within multiple levels of reality—including that of ordinary life and that of the therapeutic frame. This interplay between these two levels of reality gives rise to paradoxical experiences for both participants. Certain “principles”; or “rules”; of technique can be understood as a means of enabling the therapist to cope with what is usually referred to as “boundary”; issues. It is essential that the analyst or therapist demonstrate capacity to shift playfully from one level of reality to another. The “rule”; of abstinence and the asymmetry of desire that exists between the two participants are discussed. Gratification within the therapeutic frame is paradoxical in that gratification at one level of reality leads to privation at another level of reality. These paradoxical experiences for both patient and analyst are examined in relation to projective identification and to the analyst's countertransference.

Vértigo y éxtasis. La dialéctica entre mística e historia en el judaísmo medieval español

Una marcada singularidad se halla asociada al judaísmo desde sus orígenes. Pueblo configurado por lo histórico, sin embargo, la propia historia judía acoge en su seno unas fuerzas que desdibujan la continuidad y restan substancia a la mecánica sucesión temporal de la cronología. Junto a la historia, el tiempo y la cronología, encontramos la irrupción y el desbordamiento de estados temporales alternativos, vivencias paradójicas de la propia existencia colectiva en el tiempo. La Edad Media y la península Ibérica verán manifestarse todas ellas en una asombrosa ceremonia del desbordamiento del espíritu humano.

The Place of Christ in Modern Theology

ADISCUSSION of this subject evidently depends both on the intrinsic meanings which we find in Christ and also upon the general nature of our theology. Accordingly, by way of introduction to our thought upon the meaning of Christ, let us take note of certain characteristics which are, or should be, outstanding in theology today. There are three characteristics which I suspect we all want in any theology which undertakes to be modern and liberal. The first of these is that theology should be concerned for depth and richness in religious experience and for its fruitfulness in all of life. The religious experiences of reverence, of faith, of the mystery of human life, of the wonder of the universe, of kinship with God, of a Divine Spirit indwelling in the lives of men-it is these experiences that theology exists to interpret. Theology has to do with what inspires man, with his sense and taste of the infinite, with his awed response to the starry heavens above and the moral law within. It has to do with man's paradoxical experiences of freedom through dependence, of humility which exalts, of greatness only through service, of the blessedness which springs from hunger and thirst after righteousness. Theology envisages men in their experiences of tragedy, of frustration, of sinfulness, of adventure and suffering for ideals, and seeks to trace the ways in which they may discover, through and beyond these experiences, a higher peace, a more abundant life, and an unfailing courage and love. The first postulate of modern theology