Self-other Relations Research Articles

Maze of Resistance: Crowd, Space and the Politics of Resisting Subjectivity

In 1968 the streets around the world saw a rise of a mass political movements. Nowadays, 46 years later, a nostalgic revolutionary aura surrounds that time; as since, such is the impression, the street is yet to emerge as a strong political actor or an effective practice of resistance is yet to take form. It seems as if the old ways of resistance have met their end, and new ways have not quite come in place. However, the most recent protests, as this paper aims to show, might have started a new path of resistance at the centre of which is a particular political subjectivity gaining its power from a space of resistance and appearing in a form of a ‘crowd’. By looking at the power of the crowd as a particular embodiment or a cross between a political subject and a multitude this paper explores the constituent power of political gatherings by rejecting race, ethnicity, religion, class or gender as their mobilizing force and instead focusing on the power of coming-together (common) in a particular space. The political capacity of such ‘common’ mobilising force was fully exposed in the recent protests across Europe and the Arab world (the two examples on which this paper draws). The paper opens with a discussion of the distinct relationship between the sovereign (or state) and political subjectivity. The constitutive moment of subjectivity (the self-other relation) is placed in a political context and by drawing on the examples of sans papiers and Bouazizi's act of self-immolation the difficulties of the act of resistance and their inherent and unavoidable violence are highlighted. These two recent acts of resistance expose the need to think political subjectivity otherwise, and point to vistas (the crowd), which can facilitate such a different thinking. By drawing on the constitutive idea of the common as logic of subjectivation the intricate relationship between the body and the political space as manifested in the most recent against austerity and oppressive political regimes protests is interrogated. In the hope of placing the political subject closer to the driving seat of politics a case is made for a rather distinct relationship between political subjectivity of the crowd and the emerging space of resistance. This is a relationship that amounts to a new ‘resisting political subjectivity’ and that can bring about a new way of engaging with the politics of oppression and begins to think political contestations otherwise.

Empathy Training from a Phenomenological Perspective

AbstractThe purpose of this article is to outline a phenomenological approach to empathy training developed over the past ten years in the context of higher education. The theoretical justification for this empathy training is founded in the phenomenological philosophical interpretation of the phenomenon of empathy, whereas the application of empathy as a skill is theoretically based upon entering the phenomenological attitude. The phenomenon of empathy is described as a unique intentionality as part of the self-other relation and contrasted to mainstreams views such as simulation theory. It is argued that the phenomenological attitude can open up for the possibility of empathy and interpersonal understanding to occur. The consecutive steps of the phenomenologically based empathy training are described as relating to theoretical and pedagogical issues as well as to student’s experiences.

Re-reading Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images: The Global Politics of (Not) Eating

The many meals and food metaphors of Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images have hitherto (and only incidentally) been discussed as implicitly critical representations of various forms of 1960s bourgeois bad faith including unquestioning consumption, swallowing of media myths and flight from responsibility. However, this article shows how the novel can be re-read through images of (not) eating as a strikingly prescient reflection of how today's global marketplace is predicated on exploitative cycles of consumption. Demonstrating the untapped interpretive potential of eating, food is shown to link advertising, conflict in self-Other relations and domestic political wrangling with French co-implication in the slave trade, colonialism and neo-colonialism. Considering how the unanswered questions revolving around (not) eating which punctuate Les Belles Images intersect with Lacan's figuring of lack and the return of the repressed, this re-reading of the text shows how food-related trauma at once fuels the novel and, enduringly, the inequities of global food supply.

What Child Analysis Can Teach Us about Psychoanalytic Technique

Child analysis has much to teach us about analytic technique. Children have an innate, developmentally driven sense of analytic process. Children in analysis underscore the importance of an understanding and belief in the therapeutic action of play, the provisional aspects of play, and that not all play will be understood. Each analysis requires learning a new play signature that is constantly reorganized. Child analysis emphasizes the emergence and integration of dissociated states, the negotiation of self-other relationships, the importance of co-creation, and the child's awareness of the analyst's sensibility. Child analysis highlights the robust nature of transference and how working through and repairing is related to the initiation of coordinated patterns of high predictability in the context of deep attachments. I will illustrate these and other ideas in the description of the analysis of a nine-year-old boy.

Relational trauma: Using play therapy to treat a disrupted attachment

Caregiver-child attachment results in a cognitive-emotional schema of self, other, and self-other relationships. Significantly disrupted attachments may lead to pathogenic internal working models, which may have deleterious consequences; this indicates the need for early attachment intervention. The authors consider the therapy of a 3-year-old boy with aggressive behaviors who had lacked consistent caregiving. Attachment theory can account for the child's psychotherapeutic gains, despite his insecure attachment style. The authors discuss discrepancies between treatment and current research trends.

“Facing the Fact: Word and Image in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘Worlds Alongside’”

“Facing the Fact: Word and Image in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘Worlds Alongside’”1 Catherine Gander (bio) In 1939, the small format picture magazine Coronet featured two photo-textual experiments. These were arranged as a “portfolio of photographs” supported by a poetic prose “narrative” by Muriel Rukeyser. They were published in the September and October issues, and were titled, respectively, “Adventures of Children” and “Worlds Alongside.” The photo-narratives were experimental not least in the fact that they did not adhere to established contemporary formulae regarding the presentation of word-image pairings in magazine reports, such as those featured in Life or Time since the height of the Great Depression, as well as those featured previously in the more arts-orientated Coronet. Hailed by the editors of Coronet as “infinitely superior to the usual picture-gallery treatment” of photographs and descriptive captions in the publication (120), Rukeyser’s photo-narratives nevertheless puzzled several readers, offended some, and remain an intriguing and, I argue, vital part of her oeuvre. For the purposes of this essay, which will attempt to unravel the complexity of Rukeyser’s use of word and image, tracing the aesthetic, ideological, and poetic implications of her photo-narrative work, I will dedicate my analysis to the second of the pieces, “Worlds Alongside.” Although both photo-narratives utilize the format of the picture magazine to explore dual aspects of modern life—the separate yet parallel social spheres of wealth and poverty, of civilized sophistication and primitive simplicity, for example—“Worlds [End Page 288] Alongside,” as its title would indicate, provides a richer text through which to interrogate these themes, as well as Rukeyser’s management of them. Sixteen pages in length, the photo-narratives each contain six image pairings, in which two photographs are arranged to face each other on the verso and recto of the double-page spread: one combination of four images, organized in double pairings on the same format, and two single images, one beginning and one ending the photo-narrative, the text of which runs beneath each photograph in neat, centered font. The theme of duality in “Worlds Alongside,” then, begins in its formal presentation. “Worlds living now!” opens the narrative (Figure 1), an exclamatory sentence that seems at odds with the silent tranquility of the image of verdant landscape above it. The prosperous fecundity of this portion of American existence2 is highlighted by Rukeyser’s choice of descriptors—“rich” and “fertility” (83)—which further enhance the effect of the image directly overleaf: a larger documentary photograph by Dorothea Lange of dustbowl desolation, in which the twin rudimentary and disused post-boxes indicate that this part of “the same country’s” (84) landscape cannot sustain life of any kind (Figure 2). The ornate city “tower” (85) to the right of the dustbowl image, doubled through the windowpane of the tower in which the photographer obviously stands, serves to cement the established theme of duality and difference visible in the “same” world. Exploiting what Edwin Rosskam in the same year had termed the “new unit” of communication, “the double-paged spread in which word and image complemented each other” (7), Rukeyser stages encounters between representative images of ostensibly social, cultural, or ethnic opposites. The potential for communication between these worlds resides in the ocular dialectic that Rukeyser highlights as symptomatic of the Depression era’s dependency on visuality: a self-other relation bound up in the introspection and objectification generated by the documentary gaze. For example, appearing two thirds of the way through “Worlds Alongside,” Figure 3 demonstrates the layers of meaning constructed in Rukeyser’s use of image, text, and format; more precisely, Depression-era documentary photographs (Farm Security Administration [FSA] images by Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein respectively), a textual narrative [End Page 289] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. “Worlds Alongside,” Coronet Oct. 1939, page 83, FSA photograph, photographer unknown. Reprinted courtesy of the Library of Congress. [End Page 290] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. “Worlds Alongside,” Coronet Oct. 1939, pages 84–85. FSA photograph by Dorothea Lange (left) reprinted courtesy of the Library of Congress. that both reflects and complicates the images to which it...

Prologue: Value as theory

In the introduction to part one of this special issue we addressed the thorny question of whether an anthropological theory of value is needed or indeed possible at all. By way of a Socratic debate, we argued respectively for one of two opposite positions. Ton Otto suggested that anthropology can make a major and quite coherent contribution to the issue of value in social theory and he was in favor of bringing the papers together from a “history of ideas” perspective, thereby tracing how the authors’ varied perspectives and approaches to questions of value advanced particular—and easily specified—trends in social theory. Rane Willerslev, to the contrary, proposed that anthropology is an ethnographically driven discipline, which can only produce idiosyncratic “antitheories” of value. In Willerslev’s view, anthropologists are and should be, primarily, warriors of the periphery—that is, “guerrilla warriors,” using indigenous conceptual productions as tactics to fight dominant theoretical traditions. The debate reflects an underlying disagreement, which runs through the collection of articles themselves, about the place of anthropology in relation to other disciplines and, in particular, whether anthropology is primarily theory-driven or ethnography-driven, and whether or not these two abstractions (“theory” and “ethnography”) can be reconciled. This debate continues in part two of this special issue, but with new fields of inquiry and objects of analysis. The contributions of part one were largely concerned with aspects of value in exchange theory and with the radical comparison of diverse cultural structures. Part two addresses the relationship between value and action, including actions deemed to occur outside the sphere of reciprocal exchanges. Additionally, part two raises questions about what value means for anthropological practice by considering how anthropologists engage with their field sites and projects via critique and collaboration.

Skin as a Container Mediating Primary Self-Other Relationships

The author explores the containing function of skin disorders, with particular reference to psoriasis, as both a literal and a psychological container. Links are made between the concepts of secondary skin formation (Bick, 1968, 1986), the script system (Erskine & Moursund, 1988), and script identity crisis (Mazzetti, 1996). The author uses a case study to illustrate and expand on the theories discussed.

Narcissism and Relational Representations Among Psychiatric Outpatients

Pathological narcissism is associated with maladaptive interpersonal behavior, although less is known regarding the internal relational representations of narcissistic patients. The authors examined the relationship between pathological narcissism and two constructs that reflect internal representations of relational patterns: quality of object relations and attachment style. Patients attending a psychiatric day treatment program (N = 218) completed measures of narcissism, general psychiatric distress, and attachment style in terms of attachment avoidance and anxiety. A semistructured interview was used to assess quality of object relations. Multiple regression analysis was conducted, controlling for general psychiatric distress. Pathological narcissism was associated with anxious attachment, but not with avoidant attachment. Narcissism was also associated with lower levels of quality of object relations. The implications of these results are discussed in terms of internal representations of self-other relations.

The Writing Subject: Makiguchi Tsunesaburo and the Teaching of Composition

Literacy education is always a potentially problematic undertaking, one that shifts people's relationships among themselves, with bodies of transmitted knowledge and with structures of political control (Collins & Blot, 2003; Lee, 2004; Mazrui, 1990). The teaching of writing and composition in early 20th-century Japan presented a number of unique challenges, centered on the complexity of the writing system and the historical diglossia that had separated the spoken and written forms of the language for centuries. In this article, the author compares the responses of Makiguchi Tsunesaburo (1871–1944) and Ashida Enosuke (1873–1951) to these challenges. Where Ashida promoted the idea of writing as a spontaneous expression of the “self,” Makiguchi encouraged a more deliberate, conscious and “scientific” approach to the teaching of writing, one that encouraged more interactive and socialized understanding of language and the self-other relations it embodies. These approaches are compared against the background of the role assigned to language learning and teaching in defining the contours of an emerging national “self.”

Gambian-American College Writers Flip the Script on Aid-to-Africa Discourse

This article analyzes a group of Gambian-American college writers creating an alternative public to challenge the patronizing norms operating in prevailing “aidto-Africa” rhetorics. These young rhetors evoked performative genres and hybrid discourses so that members of their local public (the African nationals, African American professionals, white educators, fellow students, Muslim elders, conservative Christian community leaders) might themselves embody more productive self-other relations as they considered together the issue that drew them together publicly: the often hidden and insidious ways that cultural gender norms limit young African women’s ability to thrive, whether in the U.S. or in the Gambia.

Gambian-American College Writers Flip the Script on Aid-to-Africa Discourse

This article analyzes a group of Gambian-American college writers creating an alternative public to challenge the patronizing norms operating in prevailing “aidto-Africa” rhetorics. These young rhetors evoked performative genres and hybrid discourses so that members of their local public (the African nationals, African American professionals, white educators, fellow students, Muslim elders, conservative Christian community leaders) might themselves embody more productive self-other relations as they considered together the issue that drew them together publicly: the often hidden and insidious ways that cultural gender norms limit young African women’s ability to thrive, whether in the U.S. or in the Gambia.

The Concentric Circle Revisited: Allocentrism and Self in a Contemporary Chinese Community

Contemporary literature has extensively documented the connection between allocentrism and interdependence in self-construals. The present report comprises two studies that aimed to extend this literature by investigating the traditional Chinese concentric circle model of self-representation in a modern Asian community. Study 1 comprised a series of focus group discussions (N = 35, 4 males and 31 females, average age 20) to determine the qualitative content of self-construal. Participants reported a construct called the “true self”, with a content similar to the private self, and a number of social-selves varying along the perceived intimacy of the self-other relationship. In Study 2, 120 participants (all females, average age 19) were tested on their level of allocentrism and then allocated to an allocentric (top 25%, N = 30) and an idiocentric (bottom 25%; N = 30) group. Participants responded to the Twenty-Self Statement-Test (TST) on seven relationship scenarios with various levels of intimacy. Their responses were coded into collective/private/public self categories. Allocentrism and scenarios were found to have main and interactive effects on the proportions of self categories. The results were interpreted as supporting the graded nature of Chinese self-other relationships and a modified concentric circle self-representation in modern Asia.

Dissociation, trauma, and the role of lived experience: Toward a new conceptualization of voice hearing.

Voice hearing (VH) is often regarded as pathognomic for schizophrenia. The purpose of this article is to review and integrate historical, clinical, epidemiological, and phenomenological evidence in order to suggest that VH may be more appropriately understood as a dissociative rather than a psychotic phenomenon. First, we discuss the lifetime prevalence of VH in the general population, which is estimated to range between 1% and 16% for adult nonclinical populations and 2% and 41% in healthy adolescent samples. Second, we demonstrate how the ubiquity of VH phenomenology, including variables like voice location, content, and frequency, limits its diagnostic and prognostic utility for differentiating psychotic from trauma-spectrum and nonclinical populations. Finally, we report on the empirical associations between VH, measures of dissociation, and trauma particularly (though not exclusively) childhood sexual abuse. There are 2 main conclusions from this review. First, we argue that available evidence suggests that VH experiences, including those in the context of psychotic disorders, can be most appropriately understood as dissociated or disowned components of the self (or self-other relationships) that result from trauma, loss, or other interpersonal stressors. Second, we provide a rationale for clinicians to use psychotherapeutic methods for integrating life events as precipitating and/or maintaining factors for distressing voices. Potential mechanisms for the relationship between trauma, dissociation, VH, and clinical diagnosis are described, including the relevance of literature from the field of attachment in providing a diathesis for dissociation. Suggestions for future research are also discussed.

The Reckoning of Possibles: Asylum Seekers, Justice and the Indigenisation of the Levinasian Third

In this essay, I focus on the death of an asylum seeker, Josefa Rauluni, at Villawood immigration detention centre, in order to address a series of critical questions concerning ethics, justice and non-negotiable responsibility. I contextualise this constellation of questions within a Levinasian framework of ethics as a first philosophy in order to suggest what needs to be done. I conclude the essay by transposing Levinas’ concept of the third, as the arbiter of justice that transcends the limitations of the self-other relation, to an Australian context preoccupied with the topics of refugees, hospitality, justice, ongoing colonial relations of power and Aboriginal sovereignty

‘Modern’ cinematic encounters: Border crossing and environmental transformation in some recent Australian films

ABSTRACTIn Australia (and globally), refugees and ‘the environment’ are major sources of anxiety that define the experience of living in modern times. Contemporary social policy is then a representational technology that speaks to environmental and cross-cultural transactions within ‘modern’ Australian cinematic texts. This article tracks the conversational contours between policy on climate change and border control in Australia and representations of self-other and self-environment relations in Australian film produced in the latter period of the Howard era (1996–2007). Films have frequently sought to mobilize a range of visions and understandings of both security and sustainability, and of the associated productions of policy, identity and space. Such exchanges necessitate critical scrutiny of the politicized cultural contexts that produce them—and an awareness of the normative reassertions that accompany these cinematic mediations of modern Australian experience.

Levinas in Japan: the ethics of alterity and the philosophy of no-self

Does the Buddhist doctrine of no-self imply, simply put, no-other? Does this doctrine necessarily come into conflict with an ethics premised on the alterity of the other? This article explores these questions by situating Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics in the context of contemporary Japanese philosophy. The work of twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō provides a starting point from which to consider the ethics of the self-other relation in light of the Buddhist notion of emptiness. The philosophy of thirteenth-century Zen Master Dōgen casts doubt on Watsuji’s commitment to reciprocal self-other relationality, showing that the idea of self-emptiness disrupts any conventional understanding of reciprocity and promotes instead other-oriented compassion. Despite interesting similarities between the ethics of alterity and Buddhist compassion, a Buddhist-influenced understanding of alterity differs from Levinas on important points, by making possible the claim that all others—human, animal, plant, and mineral—are ethical others.

On the Initiation of World Neurosurgery

This article discusses the Distributed Language Approach (DLA) vis-à-vis Dialogism, as it is presented by Per Linell (2009, 2013, etc.). DLA is a naturalistic and anti-representational approach to language that builds on recent developments in the cognitive sciences. Dialogism (or dialogical metatheory in Linell's version), in contrast, is a meta-theoretical, “ecumenical” framework that draws on phenomenology, sociocultural theory, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. After an introduction to the two positions (Section 2), the article aims to clarify three aspects of a distributed view of language vis-à-vis the tradition of Dialogism. This clarification takes a starting point in Per Linell's (2013) review article on the book Distributed Language (Cowley, 2011a) and other contributions to DLA, including Cowleyet al. (2010) and Hodges et al. (2012b). First, the article discusses a central principle in DLA, “the principle of non-locality,” and Linell's interpretation of it; more generally, this is a discussion of contrasting views on “the locus of language” and derived methodological issues (Section 3). Second, the article addresses Linell's critique of DLA as rooted in biosemiotics and in theories of organism-environment systems. It is argued that Linell's emphasis on sense-making in social interaction entails a dubious distinction between human sociality and human biology and human ecology. This distinction relates to the question of how conspecific Others acquire their status as prominent parts of the sense-maker's environment (Section 4). Third, and in continuation of the previous point, the article discusses the two frameworks' different ways of developing a non-individualist approach to human interaction. It is argued that the two frameworks differ in how they account for the constitution of the Self-Other relation (Section 5). In the conclusion (Section 6), it is discussed how the relation between the two approaches is most adequately conceptualised. It is considered what it implies to see the relation as complementary, competitive, or antagonistic.

The changing configurations of self-(m)other dialogue in North Cyprus

This paper deals with issues of identity, nationalism, postcolonialism, and self-other relations with a focus on a period of transformative events in North Cyprus. It notes how nationalism has been the dominant means of identification for Cypriots in their modern history, and argues that unless weakened and supplanted by a radically pluralist democracy, nationalism imagines one's identity as an indivisible unity and has no place for different others within the nation. However, a pressing relationship with others and otherness is no stranger to Cypriots either, which makes it clear that the border that defines the ‘we’ of such nationalism is, at the same time, the line that divides the self intrinsically, indicating the otherness of the self or its alterity. Subjectivity involves subjection to the other.

Reflections on Janine Puget's Paper

In my discussion of Janine Puget's deeply thought-provoking paper, I focus on her central argument that the subject's interior world and the world of intersubjective relationships answer to different logics and evolve along separate developmental paths. Puget's argument hinges on a notion of the other, and of otherness as disruptive and traumatic to the subject. My discussion aims to problematize this notion on two fronts. First, I suggest that otherness is not only external to the subject. I point to some ways in which psychoanalysis conceives of otherness and of the other as integral to the constitution and development of the subject. Further, I argue that individuals sometimes desire and actively seek otherness. I engage in this context the question of social displacement and immigration, Puget's other main concern in her paper. Life tourists, as Puget calls them, are a paradox of will and necessity, where the prospect of confronting otherness and being othered is both a threat and a life-affirming recourse. Yet there seems to be more involved in immigration than the psychology of individuals or their relationships. Drawing on my personal and clinical experience as an immigrant working with other immigrants, I suggest that beyond the self-other relation, we can recognize otherness on a third dimension, that of collective, socio-political, normative discourse. Looking at the psychoanalytic notion of Oedipus, I suggest the possibility that Puget's view of the subjective and intersubjective as disparate captures the effect this third, social dimension of human life on the construction of subjectivity and of human relating. I argue that the fault line Puget recognizes may be understood as the effect, within subjectivity, of social power.