Intersubjective Relations Research Articles

Recuperação Psicológica após Adoecimento Grave e Internação em UTI

Abstract The effects of critical illness and hospitalization in intensive care units (ICU) have been associated with the presence of negative psychological consequences. This study explores the experiences of sick people who were admitted to an ICU, seeking to know its repercussions on the self. In-depth qualitative interviews and participant observations were carried out with two people since their ICU admission until at least six months after discharge from the unit. Data was analyzed following an adaptation of the clinical qualitative method within a longitudinal frame and interpreted with Winnicott’s psychoanalytic perspective. This research managed to describe participants’ lived experiences and the ways they affected their psychic organization. To the interviewed, these experiences configured threshold situations which promoted a process of psychic disintegration. Psychological recovery, then, depends on the articulation of lived experiences, and is supported by facilitating intersubjective relationships that promote the expression of personal potentialities.

Social Science editors in Public Health: practices and limits in the creation of a scientific habitus

Scientific publishing is a socially valued practice, modulating academic trajectories. Scientific journals operate between two distinct social fields, the editorial and the scientific, having as axis the objective and intersubjective relationships of the scientific field. This article analyzes the performance of Social Science editors in the field of Public Health, as well as their conceptions about the process of evaluating scientific articles, their perspective and relationship with other agents of editorial practice, and their role in shaping a scientific habitus. The methodological option was the thematic analysis of 13 semi-structured interviews with editors-in-chief and associates of the Social Science area of prominent journals in Public Health. Editors are agents who operate with the contradictions and pressures derived from productivism in a relative autonomy of the editorial practice. They gradually create an editorial habitus coined by empirical practice, self-taught training, and voluntary dedication. They also establish a dialogue between authors and the peer-competitor community in the field. They delimit objects and themes of interest in the area from the legitimacy based on the "disinterested" action demanded by the scientific field. They will impose barriers to articles considered of low quality, defined especially by theoretical-methodological gaps and lack of originality. However, their didactic work of inculcation in a way considered appropriate in the management of theories and methodologies of Social Science is limited to the refusal of texts, which suggests the importance of greater articulation between editors, editors' forums, graduate programs, and other agents of training of researchers in the field.

L’espressione dell’incommensurabile. Una lettura dell’ontologia di Merleau-Ponty alla luce del problema dell’incommensurabilità

This essay aims to shed new light on Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology through the analysis of the problem of incommensurable, by taking into consideration Gaetano Chiurazzi’s work, Dynamis. Ontologia dell’incommensurabile. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of expression is assumed as the reading key of this comparison: it allows to connect the theme of incommensurability (considered in the first part) both to the problem of history and of intersubjective relationship (analyzed in the second part), and to the fundamental problem of perception (third part). In particular, the analysis of the concept of expression will stress the ontological value of the phenomenological description of perception, pointing out a particular affinity between the ontology of incommensurable and the phenomenological approach. Therefore, the discovery of incommensurability and the phenomenological method will be interpreted as two different starting points for one and the same path, which leads to a non-substantialist and relational conception of Being. Rather than providing a new interpretation of this definition of Being, this comparison aims to make it clearer and better understandable, by underlining some of its essential aspects. In particular, I will consider the possibility to interpret consciousness and the subject as expressive events, analyzing the philosophical consequences of this definition.

O grupo operativo com mulheres em vulnerabilidade social

Abstract The research studied the results obtained from an operative group with women under vulnerability conditions, considered from the perspective of psychoanalysis. We configured it as qualitative, adopting participant observation as a technique for data collection. A group with women who requested psychological care in a social institution in the state of São Paulo was attended for a period of one year, weekly, with an average of six to eight patients and duration of one hour, aiming at personal and group emotional development. There have been changes in the perception of intersubjective relationships with external range to the group and promotion of mental health. The operative group has shown to be a positive tool for its participants, where subjective issues of the subjects and the group could be elaborated.

Regional Dissensions and the Construction of Locality in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

This paper analyzes the way in which Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria recreates the space of Indigenous country. Looking at the environment and the focus on locality from a regional perspective, I argue that geographic space is used as a subversive place of reality and history so that Indigeneity is a matter of intersubjective relations (M. Langton) and is constantly conceptualized in a process of dialogue, representation, and imagination. I thus examine the focal positioning of the natural environment to show how the manifestation of place and Dreaming tracks annihilate an imagined colonial reality and tend to reconfigure the postcolonial present.

A New Normality Illuminated by Past and Present! A Qualitative Study: Experiences and Challenges of Everyday Life in Patients With Advanced Heart or Lung Failure

The aim of this study was to gain insight into the phenomena of everyday life as experienced and coped with by patients living with advanced heart or lung failure. We employed a qualitative design using a phenomenological hermeneutic approach. Data derived from 10 nursing consultations in a holistic setting. Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation inspired the text analysis. The study emphasizes time (past, present, and future) as an overall everyday life theme, playing an essential role associated with improvements or poor outcomes related to physical, mental, and intersubjective challenges. Patients accepted and lived with the challenges, experiencing changes, as transition, but also coped with their new normal, which involved improvements or poor outcomes, some invisible to the community. Assumptions about everyday life changed significantly, the changes possibly essential for intersubjective relations. A reflective approach, can help patients to evolve, using knowledge from the past and present to cope with the future.

Língua e Poder: Código Símbolo-cultural, encapsulado nas Relações Intersubjetivas no Interior do Continente Africano

The current manuscript aims to reverberate the ordinary past: intersubjective relations in the interior of African continent through commercial and diplomatic charters. The cultural symbol-code is reframed, owing to interrelationship with geographical, political and institutional circumstances and historical conditions that foster re-interpretation of code, focused on unveiling the subjectivation and individuation’s process of the African black during 16th and 17th centuries. The object of this study is commercial and diplomatic charters circulate during 16th and 17th centuries and three Ambaquistas’ charters or their disciples circulate during 19th century. In methodological terms, it has adopted a qualitative research, by review of literature, anchored on historical and anthropological perspective, to discuss, through bibliographical research, based on authors: Vansina (2000); Heintz (2005); Margarido (2000) e Santos (2004), the organization, social and political structure of the different temporalities of the event in a diachronic way. To describe the architecture of the epistolary genre of the Ambaquistas’ charters or their disciples was used the following categories: the textual elements and the paratextual elements subdivide into pre-text and post-text. To analysis the constitutive elements of textual materiality of the charters, it has used theoretical framework from Anthropology, Psychoanalysis and French Discourse Analysis for the purpose of indicating the subjectivation and individuation’s marks of the socio-historical subject, Angolan citizen. The author concludes that the charters’ discursive formation values hermetic cosmos in the subjectivation and individuation’s process of African black, makes him impossible not only for experiencing and living the symbolic interactionism, the cultural imaginary in the identity formulation, but also value his respective diacritic signals, because of tensions, identitary clashes and relations of power that profile the different temporalities of social, political and economic structure in the interior of African continent.

Marapu Resisting the Corporation to Protect the Land

The establishment of a sugar cane plantation in East Sumba has evoked conflicts and resistance from the local people. The damage to the katoda (sites to perform rituals) portrays one of the other violations causing environmental, cultural, and social damages related to the manipulation of customary land and criminalization of local people. This paper aims to discuss this conflict by accentuating, and also promoting, the paradigm of indigenous religion as a tool to understand the resistance of the Marapu community to protect their land. Indigenous Religion Paradigm implies the inter-subjective relationship between human person and non-human person (nature) in the non-hierarchical cosmology, which carries the commitments of responsibility, ethics, and reciprocity. By using this perspective, this work shows the opposite perspectives of the partnership between the corporation and the local government concerning the economic considerations and Marapu community who maintains their inter-subjective cosmology as opposed to the modern economic view. The land is understood differently by each of them. While the former only grasps the monetary side of the land, the latter religiously perceives the land as sources of life for both human and non-human person and, therefore, protects their land as the commitment to be responsible, ethical, and reciprocal.

Modelling of communicants' strategic plans in personal German-language interview

This article describes and tests the author's methodology for analyzing the specifics of interaction and the implementation of communicants' strategic plans in personal German-language interview. The author's understanding of the personal interview as a communicative event, in which the interaction of communicative processes of varying degrees of complexity and structure is implemented, implies a detailed study of the conditions and nature of each of them. In order to study communicative activity and features of interaction in the personal German-speaking interview, which has such characteristics as goal-setting and spontaneity, ritualization and self-organization, the presence of subject-logical and psycho-social plans of interaction development, the author undertakes to develop a comprehensive method of analysis. The material for the study in this article was an interview with the renowned German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki Hasste Marcel Reich-Ranicki wirklich die Frauen?. The linguistic material was examined in detail using a transcript of the video interview created with the FOLKER / Exmaralda programme (Institut fr Deutsche Sprache) in accordance with the GAT2 transcription system. The complex method of analysis described in this article is based on the theoretical postulates and practical methods of the current trends in modern linguistics and communication research. It enables the study of the peculiarities of communicative interaction and the analysis of verbal realization of communicants' strategic programs. As a result of the application of the described complex method of analysis the author identified structural and discursive units of analysis and made a conclusion that the core of the interviewer's strategic program forms the strategy of information request with the dominance of tactics of argumentation and establishing and maintaining intersubjective relations. The interviewee's strategic program is constituted by the strategy of self-presentation, the core of which in this interview are the tactics of enhancing one's own image and the tactics of informing.

Educar al «animal enfermo». Nietzsche y el problema de la grandeza y la reconfiguración de la intersubjetividad en la experiencia histórica

In this article I am focusing on the problem of greatness and on the social destiny of strong individuals in some moments of Nietzsche’s reflection, investigating the ethical-pedagogical implications of this assumption, without neglecting the importance of the historical experience. On this basis, I value Nietzsche’s attempt to reconfigure subjectivity and intersubjective relations through new models of coexistence (even in democratic contexts marked by decadence), by appealing to the human capacity for self-overcoming, in accordance with the demands of a “concrete reason” which makes explicit the multiple ways of being in the world.

A re-consideration of interpretation. A relational approach.

This paper is a discussion paper and it seeks to re-consider the Freudian psychoanalytic concept of interpretation within the relational approach to psychoanalysis. As such, it aims to argue the Freudian approach to interpretation is rejected because it is not relational but involves only the analyst as interpreter of the patient’s experience. Instead, within the relational approach, it is suggested that if interpretation, as a process of making meaning of experiences, is re-considered as the outcome of the intersubjective relationship in which the process of making-meaning is essentially a co-creational process of the patient’s experience of the analyst in the here-and-now, interpretation can potentially be an agent of change. The clinical implication is that interpretation must be the construction of the patient’s meaning of his experience but within the relational context. A clinical verbatim transcript is documented as it illustrates this relational process in interpretation.

LUTA POR RECONHECIMENTO, COMISSÃO NACIONAL DA VERDADE E MEMÓRIA COLETIVA

The main objective of our research is to analyze the correlation between the struggle for recognition, the National Truth Commission – CNV (2012 - 2014) and collective memory. To achieve our goal, we propose to analyze memory from collective and social struggles evoking collective memory within an intersubjective relationship that involves disputes, negotiations, manipulations and forgetting. It is important to emphasize that the theoretical framework of our work is supported by the debate around the struggles for recognition. Therefore, we will verify, from Axel Honneth, the moral grammar of the struggles around this reciprocal recognition and how this dynamic happens in current social practices and, ipso facto, we intend to articulate the discussion of the communication paradigm with collective memory.

Bushcraft education as radical pedagogy

ABSTRACT Bushcraft emerged from indigenous knowledge with a skill-base used for military, commercial and recreational purposes. We identify it as embodied contextual learning,for and with the environment, arising from a deep inter-subjective relationship with the natural world. This focus suggests a ‘conscientisation’ developing a critical awareness, transformative of society’s relationship with ecosystems and providing autonomous, individual learning. Bushcraft education has gained in popularity in recent years and we seek to problematise and define its educational identity as it appears rarely in mainstream or outdoor education. Accordingly, we suggest that bushcraft education shares some of the aims of radical education, signalled by the transformative purpose in which radical pedagogies are positioned, normally situated outside mainstream formal education. We conclude that bushcraft education may have global significance as radical pedagogy, progressing deeper understandings of the relationship between self and nature, and in transdisciplinary thinking supporting our response to current environmental crises.

Between an Object and a Person: an Inverted Image / Icon

Relations between persons in the contemporary world often resemble those of the same persons towards objects. We are accustomed to ‘use’ – and even see – others as if they are, to put it in Kantian terms, merely a means to an end, and not as if they are an end in themselves. Such blurring of lines between objects and persons surely has significant moral and political consequences. However, in this paper I reach instead for a very traditional example and suggest it as a possible model for understanding these contemporary issues. I’d like to offer an analysis of icons, with regard to the concepts of latreia (worship) and proskynesis (devotion), developed and discussed in the Byzantine empire during the era of iconoclasm. By revisiting this old quarrel, I wish to invert the issue of persons becoming (like) objects, since in the case of the icons the question is whether an object can and should be treated as a person. Such an inverted image could, in my opinion, offer us a new perspective on contemporary intersubjective relations and present us with a double optic, which can teach us to distinguish between esteem for objects and respect for persons.

“In the First Place, We Don’t Like to Be Called ‘Refugees’”: Dilemmas of Representation and Transversal Politics in the Participatory Art Project 100% FOREIGN?

100% FOREIGN? (100% FREMMED?) is an art project consisting of 250 life stories of individuals who were granted asylum in Denmark between 1956 and 2019. Thus, it can be said to form a collective portrait that inserts citizens of refugee backgrounds into the narrative of the nation, thereby expanding the idea of national identity and culture. 100% FOREIGN? allows us to think of participatory art as a privileged site for the exploration of intersubjective relations and the question of how to “represent” citizens with refugee experience as well as the history and practice of asylum. The conflicting aims and perceptions involved in such representations are many, as suggested by the opening sentence of Hannah Arendt’s 1943 essay “We, Refugees”: “In the first place, we don’t like to be called ‘refugees’”. Using 100% FOREIGN? as an analytical reference point, this article discusses some of the ethical and political implications of representing former refugees. It briefly considers recent Danish immigration and asylum policies to situate the project in its regional European context and argues that, similarly to its neighbouring countries, Denmark can be described as a “postmigrant society” (Foroutan). To frame 100% FOREIGN? theoretically, this article draws on Arendt’s essay, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of speaking nearby, as well as the feminist concept of transversal politics (Meskimmon, Yuval-Davis). It is hoped that this approach will lead to a deeper understanding of what participatory art can bring to the ethical politics of representing refugee experience.

ЭКОЛОГИЧЕСКАЯ СРЕДА В КОНТЕКСТЕ РАЗВИТИЯ СОЦИАЛЬНО ИНВЕСТИЦИОННОЙ МОДЕЛИ УПРАВЛЕНИЯ РОССИЙСКИМИ РЕГИОНАМИ: ПОТЕНЦИАЛЬНЫЕ ВОЗМОЖНОСТИ И РИСКИ

Objective of the study is the examination of external and internal factors, social and practical demands in Russian society for the development of an optimal ecological environment as a necessary condition for the consolidation of the regional space. The methodology of the research is based on interdisciplinary research procedures integrating advances in philosophy, sociology, ecology and management theory. Research results. The presented article actualizes the issues of social and investment development of Russian regions in the context of the ecological environment. Based on modern ecosophical ideas about the ecological environment as a constituent factor in the development of human capital, the main vector and ways of developing social investments are determined. Defining the ecological environment as the integration of conditions for comfortable living, health, recreation, the authors of the article are guided by intersubjective relations in the region associated with the formation of ecological culture and ecological discourse. The resulting moment is the proposal of a resource concentration strategy for social and environmental projects in regions with sufficient launch sites. Prospects of the study are in the development of a conceptual and methodological framework for social and investment management of regions.

Body, Self and Others: Harding, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Intersubjectivity

Douglas Harding developed a unique first-person experimental approach for investigating consciousness that is still relatively unknown in academia. In this paper, I present a critical dialogue between Harding, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on the phenomenology of the body and intersubjectivity. Like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Harding observes that from the first-person perspective, I cannot see my own head. He points out that visually speaking nothing gets in the way of others. I am radically open to others and the world. Neither does my somatic experience establish a boundary between me and the world. Rather to experience these sensations as part of a bounded, shaped thing (a body), already involves bringing in the perspectives of others. The reader is guided through a series of Harding’s first-person experiments to test these phenomenological claims for themselves. For Sartre, the other’s subjectivity is known through The Look, which makes me into a mere object for them. Merleau-Ponty criticised Sartre for making intersubjective relations primarily ones of conflict. Rather he held that the intentionality of my body is primordially interconnected with that of others’ bodies. We are already situated in a shared social world. For Harding, like Sartre, my consciousness is a form of nothingness; however, in contrast to Sartre, it does not negate the world, but is absolutely united with it. Confrontation is a delusion that comes from imagining that I am behind a face. Rather in lived personal relationships, I become the other. I conclude by arguing that for Harding all self-awareness is a form of other-awareness, and vice versa.

Three Ways of Looking at a Tiger: Animal Minds in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi

Engagement with animals is a central theme in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi, reflected and shaped by the character-narrator Pi’s reading of animal minds. The article examines attributions of minds to animals in three types of encounters with them: observation, interaction, and narration. While in childhood Pi tends to project human temperaments and emotions onto animals, he is forced to recognize animals’ species-specific experiences as the shipwreck foregrounds his embodiment. As such, the novel introduces the logic of nonhuman psychology into narrative development, formulating an intersubjective and interspecies relationship. Furthermore, at the end of the novel, it alerts us to intellectual and therapeutic functions of animals as narrative elements through comparison between representations of human and animal minds. The text not only identifies different presences of animals in the human world, but generates insights into how narrative in general conveys and responds to complex human-animal entanglements in our reality.

Public health as a social science: reflections on the possibilities of a comprehensive public health

Close historic relationships between medicine and public health have implied, as a consequence for the latter, the in-heritance of epistemological traits traditionally characteristic of a positivistic conception of science on which a major part of the theoretical development of modern medicine has been sup-ported. From the point of view of this ontological, epistemo-logical and methodological reference of positivism, health has been reduced to deterministic, linear and causalistic explana-tions that systematically cancel any reference to the lifeworld (Lebenswelt), both for the researcher and for the “objects” of re-search. The scientific pretensions of public health have become protruding over its political and ethical commitment, even widening the gap between scientific knowledge and the specific con-ditions of existence of social actors and their relation to health. This paper presents some reflections around the conditions of possibility for a comprehensive approach of public health prob-lems. These reflections are based on a conception of health as a social phenomenon, that is to say, as an emergent element from the complex web of intersubjective relationships among social actors, in a specific social and historic horizon. Epistemological, ethical and political implications of this perspective for research in public health are also discussed .

Whistleblowing advocacy: Solidarity and fascinance

What role does difference play in relationships between partners in solidarity? In this article we add to debates on difference-in-solidarity by proposing fascinance as a critical aspect of intersubjective relations in solidarity networks. We build upon extant feminist and affect theory scholarship in doing so. Our novel approach is informed by our analysis of in-depth empirical data from a special case of solidarity – whistleblowing advocacy groups – and by Bracha Ettinger’s concept of the matrixial borderspace. Whistleblower support is a critical factor in enabling disclosures about organisational wrongdoing to come to light. Examining the experiences of workers in advocacy groups, we find that difference-in-solidarity is multi-faceted, compelling compassion while simultaneously generating ambivalence and tendencies towards exclusion. Where such contrary affects are enabled to co-exist, and where boundaries between self and other begin to be troubled, the impetus for people to work towards a common cause is enhanced. Our specific contribution is to add a matrixial perspective to debates on difference-in-solidarity: the concept of fascinance represents a powerful aspect of connection between self and other that is at once elusive, affectively felt, and invokes earlier experiences of interdependency between infant and mother. Our study also provides a unique examination of the difficulties and affordances that can accompany whistleblowing advocacy work.