Individual Psyche Research Articles

We Need to Talk About Zines: The Case for Collecting Alternative Publications in the Australian Academic University Library

The paper examines the research potential of zines and the current issues around acquiring these disparate publications for Australian academic libraries. The paper reports a review of the literature and a brief environmental scan in the form of a survey, which suggest that Australian tertiary institutions are undecided or unsure about how and why zines could be a useful research tool in the future. It is argued here that zines are an important component of the cultural fabric of a freethinking, responsive and reflective society. The subversive and at times transgressive nature of zines makes the conscious collecting of these underground texts complex. A review of the current practices of international academic libraries and the survey results undertaken for the purpose of this paper, suggest that Australian academic libraries are behind their overseas colleagues in their consideration of these issues. Zines are important cultural documents that reveal the creativity, values and complexity of unrepresented marginalised youth, among others. The author suggests that, it is imperative that Australian academic libraries actively collect zines to preserve and make available for research, records of hyper-personal, contemporary texts that proffer to the reader an insight into the individual psyche of any given period in time.IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE• Creating partnerships and engaging in conversation with zinesters and library staff can assist in the development and creation of a working collection.• Collecting zines for its research potential can be speculative; identifying the strengths of your current collection can provide a clear collection development policy for acquiring zines.• Educating and demystifying zine culture can assist Australian librarians in determining whether a zine collection is suitable for their institution.

Terminal harmony: rituals of death and social cohesion in colonial Puebla de los Ángeles

Colonial Puebla de los Ángeles's mixed population of Spaniards, creoles, Native Americans, and groups of African descent confronted death frequently. Epidemic disease combined with mundane illnesses and infirmities made dying a quotidian and familiar experience among all social groups. The city's religious and secular officials recognized death as an important rite of passage and sponsored and supported scripted rituals of death designed to guide the soul to its final resting place. As they aided individual souls, priests, city council members, and cathedral representatives in Puebla also used the sacraments, spiritual and practical charity, and elaborate ceremonies including royal exequies (exequias reales), to unite the diverse city of Puebla in a common Catholic faith. This article explores these official attempts to encourage and promote a Catholic unity at death while also demonstrating how repeated bouts of epidemic disease, limited resources, and racial and socioeconomic differences served to nuance and temper the vision of a shared ‘terminal harmony’ promoted and encouraged by the city's officials.

Psyche in historical context: Identity and existence in Captain Ahab and King Lear

IntroductionWhat ties Ahab, the notorious captain of the Pequod in Herman Melville's 1851 novel, Moby-Dick, to King Lear, the desperate old regent from William Shakespeare's eponymous play published in 1608, is not only their overabundant quest for meaning, or their obsession with pursuing their targets, but their idiosyncratic experiencing of themselves in their personal realities.AimsCaptain Ahab is put in relation with King Lear, in order to show in what way issues of identity and of existence emerge in the course of their fictional lives. Lear is considered to have had deep influence on Melville the author in creating the character of Ahab. Since, in terms of present-day psychopathology, both fictional characters present with symptoms, their issues when put in historical context can untangle their personal realities.MethodsThrough a close reading of the characters’ behaviour and experiencing in historical context, issues of identity and of existence are elaborated on in order to advance to the psychodramatic substrate.ResultsWhereas at the beginning of the seventeenth century conflicts are newly transposed to characters’ minds instead of surroundings, the nineteenth century still sees Ahab's monomania on the outside. Identity and existence have increasingly been placed in individual psyche, though.ConclusionsA paradigmatic change in personality concept at the turn of the modern epoch enables psychiatry and psychopathology to conceptualize the individual and to derive identity and existence from. Collective identity gives way to personal identity. With that, choice, interpretation, and failing are individualized.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.

The relationship between figure and background: Towards a new theory of a social prism for analyzing the mechanisms of art in therapy

‘Art helps take down barriers, in that the use of the imagination is the ability to put oneself in another’s place ... in this sense, art is moral, because empathy is the ultimate morality’ (Dewey, 1934. p.10). Social theories are different from the psychological dynamic and humanistic theories much used in art therapy: Compared to psychological theories that assume that the problem is within the individual psyche, social theories assume that the problem is situated within the social systems that surround the individual, such as the ecological circles of family, community and state, or global systems of power. On a broader social level, then marginalized roles or positions create a lack of physical, symbolic, social, or other types of resources for solving problems (Minuchen, 1975; Gladding, 2002). The solution is to shift the roles within the system and to re-distribute resources. Marginalization stems from social and economic policies that create systematic discrimination and deprivation based on race, ethnicity, religion, or gender; and exacerbated by processes of immigration, war, and political instability, as well as general social disorganization and conflicting values within the social system (Foucault, 2000). The theory of empowerment assumes that all relationships are power infused, and that the ecological layers that comprise the socio-cultural context of the client’s reality can include different types of disempowerment and marginalization such as a racial, gendered, or ethnic lack of power (Patterson et al, 2009; Piercy et al, 1996).

The West Bank Apartheid/Separation Wall: Space, Punishment and the Disruption of Social Continuity

ABSTRACTThrough the use of survey data from the West Bank, this paper explores the effects of the Apartheid/Separation Wall in the occupied territory of the West Bank on Palestinian society. How has the Wall separated a population from their loved ones, their orchards and crops, homes, and overall livelihood? How have these relationships transformed? Place and space have special meanings in Palestinian experience and consciousness, and yet Palestinians remain vulnerable to punishment through control of access to spaces and places.The inability to reach one’s home or land has serious ramifications on the psyche of individuals and communities. Not only do physical barriers hinder social interactions, but they also impact society in numerous ways. The effects on Palestinian society are largely invisible and have long-term and far-reaching consequences. These consequences run deeper than the physical barriers that have created them.Social continuity has repeatedly been disrupted due to the geopolitical transformation of land control and roads network, which favours one group (Israeli Jews) over another (Palestinian Arabs—Christian and Muslim). The policies of separation, through the wall, checkpoints, and the permit regime, have actually separated Palestinians from other Palestinians, and not Palestinians from Israelis.

论美国文化的特征及其对美国民众心理的塑造

本文分析美国文化的结构与特征，讨论美国民众心理的特征与表现，并据此揭示文化对于心理进行塑造的功能和机制，最后指出本研究的意义。我们把文化看成一个自在自为的活着的信息系统，它主要以“形而上”的方式外在于全部成员的生老病死过程，由生存、自然、社会三种理念构成“文化三角形”。我们把个人心理看成是与生理相伴而发育、成熟、衰老、死亡的信息系统，由动机、知识与智慧构成“心理三角形”。文化与心理具有相同的结构和类似的功能；文化是全部个体心理的逻辑的“综合”，心理是整体文化的带有个性的“表征”；文化是“群体的大心理”，心理是“个体的小文化”；文化是“酱缸”，心理是“泡菜”；特定的生物遗传，以及自然环境、家庭氛围、社区条件、社会舆论等文化元素，共同塑造了千差万别的个体心理。作者把美国文化的特点以及它对于美国民众心理塑造作为上述理论的“个案分析”，并且指出这种讨论对于理解美式文明的优势与缺陷、理解美国民众与中国民众的心理差距，都有参考作用。 The author analyzes the structure and characteristics of American culture, discusses the characteristics and manifestations of the American psyche, reveals the function and mechanism of the psychological shaping by the culture, and demonstrates the meaning of our research. We take culture as a free and live information system, which mainly in the “metaphysical” way exists outside the process of development, mature, decay and doom of all members, and in which there is a “cultural triangle” that consists of three elements, i.e., the ideas of existence, nature and society. We regard the individual psyche as an information system whose development, maturation, aging and death are accompanied by physiology, and in which there is a “psychological triangle” that composes of drive, knowledge and intelligence. The culture and the psyche have the same structure and the similar function. We suggest that the culture is the logic comprehensiveness of the whole individual psyches and the psyche is an individual “token” of the whole culture; culture is a “big psyche” of a group and psyche is a “small culture” of an individual; culture is a “pickle jar”, and psyche is a “pickled vegetable”; and specific biological genetics, and some cultural elements, as well as the natural environment, family atmosphere, community conditions, public opinion, commonly shape a wide range of individual psyches. The author stipulates the characteristics of American culture and its shaping of American psyche as the “case analysis” of above theory, and points out the reference functions of this discussion for understanding the advantages and disadvantages of American civilization, and the psychological gap between American people and Chinese people.

Parole vraie, parole vide: des Bienveillantes aux exécuteurs par Élise Lamy-Rested

layers of interpretation and influence within works of literature. For his contribution, Houppermans examines networks of meaning in Proust’s novel created by the crosspollination of proper names and by the myriad transformations of the notions of frais and genre. Sandra Cheilan’s enlightening study identifies the episode of the“bonbons inventés par Siraudin” in Huysmans’s À rebours as “l’hypotexte” (85) of the iconic madeleine scene of involuntary memory. She artfully follows the transformation that Des Esseintes’s candies undergo in the Recherche, underscoring their “dimension métapoétique”(94) that links writing and intimacy, narration and the life of the mind, and ultimately, creation and memory. For his part, Bruno Viard analyses the Proustian narrator’s rejection of love and everyday life at the end of the novel and his“saut dans l’Art pur”(98).Viard suggests that the protagonist’s childhood experiences of alternating jealousy and boredom with his mother, together with his gradual forgetting of the “valeurs vitales” (107) embodied by his grandmother, become, in the mind of the mature narrator, characteristics of human existence in general, thereby rendering literature more satisfying and authentic than ordinary life. Edward Bizub outlines a current debate surrounding the Recherche, as to whether it exemplifies principles of neuroscience or those of psychoanalysis, whereas Mauricio R. Narváez focuses on the esthetic and narratological role of l’escalier in the novel. In a fascinating comparison , Sabine van Wesemael deftly presents the works of Michel Houellebecq as a “commentaire méta-discursif” on Proust’s “récit de vie” in the Recherche (144). She accentuates the authors’ shared objectives, such as their exposure of the vanity of human ambitions,their banalization of transgression,and their depiction of the impossibility of communication, especially in matters of love. She throws light as well on their many differences, for instance, their opposing conceptions of the moi social and the moi profond, in addition to the ways in which their language and literary style reflect their respective optimism or pessimism about the human condition. The volume concludes with its customary comptes rendus, this time including issues of the Bulletin Marcel Proust and the Bulletin d’informations proustiennes on the centenary of the publication of Du côté de chez Swann. Brandeis University (MA) Hollie Markland Harder Lamy-Rested, Élise. Parole vraie, parole vide: des Bienveillantes aux exécuteurs. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-2042-9. Pp. 182. 26 a. How can an ordinary person become a genocidal killer? Or, to broaden the perspective ,“comment tout un peuple [...] peut-il en venir à accepter de mettre en œuvre les moyens pour exterminer un second?” (30). These are the fundamental questions Élise Lamy-Rested seeks to answer by considering Jonathan Littell’s Les bienveillantes, a fictional autobiography of a former SS officer. Published in 2006, the novel brought overnight fame for its author and raised a considerable controversy. In this regard, 238 FRENCH REVIEW 90.4 Reviews 239 Lamy-Rested’s essay can be seen as an attempt at bringing the debate to a close. Her purpose is to“signer l’échec du projet théorique de Littell, qui n’est pas pour autant un échec littéraire”(101). The central issue to be considered is to know what exactly does the“je”of the narrator stand for. In this regard, Littell’s fictional account suffers from an unsolvable contradiction: on the one hand, the SS officer is an individual psyche that is an integral, organic part of a specific State apparatus; on the other, according to a second thesis implicit in the novel:“les génocides ont la même cause et les ‘bourreaux ’ parlent d’une seule voix”(105). Consequently, Lamy-Rested seeks to develop a new conceptual model, a third thesis that would reconcile the “anthropo-psychological ” explanatory model with the socio-political and historically contextualized approach. Her study proceeds on the basis of several well-known precedents that include Stanley Milgram’s experiments as well as three studies of genocide: Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (2007), Harald Welzer’s Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (2005), and...

Biologic pre-extraction prosthesis (BPP): A provisional esthetic solution

The successful management of hopeless teeth in the anterior esthetic zone has become more challenging. Furthermore, extraction of anterior teeth has a far-reaching impact on an individual psyche. Immediate dentures and many other approaches have been described as a temporary replacement to give a feel good effect to the patient. This article presents a novel technique for provisionally replacing the anterior teeth with the use of unsalvageable natural teeth which are going to be extracted as biologic preextraction prosthesis. Furthermore, treatment with this technique led to overall improved esthetics, psychological wellbeing, and reduced treatment cost.

К ПРОБЛЕМЕ ФИЛОСОФСКО-МЕТОДОЛОГИЧЕСКИХ АСПЕКТОВ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ ЭКОЛОГИЧЕСКИ ЭКСПЛИЦИРУЕМОГО МИРОВОЗЗРЕНИЯ

<p>The article is devoted to the methodology of formation of the ecologically interpreted outlook, different kinds of which determine the formation and resolution of environmental problems. The author makes an attempt to develop methodological tools to research the ecological components of social outlook and the concept of highly ecological, holistic worldview (the worldview of ecocentrism), as opposed to the atomic technocratic worldview of anthropocentrism, which fundamentally denies nature. As a major methodological tool of constructing this methodology, the principle of ecological holism was selected, where holism is interpreted as complex (in the absence of organization in the system) or systemic, and where ecological holism is interpreted as environmentalism, involving completeness and integrity of views on the relationship between society and nature. The article puts forward the idea that environmentalism is a variant of holism.</p><p>The novelty and the heuristic of the author's approach is in the attempt to explicate the component of the ecological worldview as an environmental outlook represented in the form of varieties of the not-ecological worldview and the worldview of ecocentrism, which is truly holistic. The significance of the results lies in the attempt to identify and explain the origins of environmental problems in the individual psyche, generalized opinions of people on their relationship with nature, in the consciousness of society, and in pointing out the conditions, means, ways of formation and implementation of corresponding to the nature worldview as a guarantor of the settlement of these problems.</p><p>A philosophical representation of the concept of environmental philosophy and methodology of his study is a contribution to the further development of the new ideological paradigm and the subject of the new environmental philosophy. It is highly necessary to develop and introduce the research methodology of the ecologically oriented worldview phenomenon into philosophical issues for the formation of environmental values and for resolving the global ecocrisis.</p>

“Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here”: The Critique of Consumer Society in American Psycho and Fight Club

This article explores the politics of two films, namely American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000) and Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), both of which portray a privileged, white collar protagonist suffering from a personality disorder that leads him to commit violent acts. Set in the late 20th century America characterized by rampant consumerism, stark materialism and fierce competition, both films suggest that it is the debilitating impact of the commodifed, commodity-driven consumer society that leads the protagonists to resort to violence as a way of transcending their depthless, shallow, one-dimensional existence. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that both American Psycho and Fight Club present a critique of American society through the portrayal of protagonists whose pathologically violent behaviour stems from the dehumanizing effects of consumer culture on the individual psyche.

A Story of Urban Farming and the Cultivation of Community and the Human Spirit

First paragraph: In the book Street Farm: Growing Food, Jobs, and Hope on the Urban Frontier, Michael Ableman tells the story of how an urban farm has transformed vacant lots in the Low Tracks neighborhood of Vancouver, British Columbia, into sites where food is produced, community is in part restored, and the human spirit is nurtured. Ableman’s storytelling is raw and transparent. Through this transparency, he reveals a tenuous balance between the promises of urban farming and the harsh realities of the addiction, hunger, homelessness, and violence that often characterize inner-city conditions. This balance illustrates how urban agriculture can help produce the food a city needs in a sustainable way and, perhaps more importantly, feed the souls of disenfranchised individuals and communities.

“The Freak of Nature”: On Erich Fromm’s Vindication of Binomial Sexuality and the Potentials of the “Homosexual Deviation”

ABSTRACTAs a Freudian revisionist and neo-Marxist, Erich Fromm (1900–1980) lessened the import of sexuality in the individual psyche but stressed the role played by the sex differential in the distribution of power throughout history and in the post-patriarchal form of matriarchy he envisioned. Seeking to reinforce the male/female divide and heteronormativity, Fromm outlined a “New Science of Man” that readily ignored not only the challenges posed to binary sexuality by post-Darwinian critical sexologies, but also the same-sex complexities evinced by key figures of his own cultural pantheon. Regardless of his declared pursuits, however, Fromm at times expressed insights suitable to undermine the cogency of his most cherished sexual convictions. As a tool for uncovering “indubitable commonsensical axioms” as sources of alienation, Fromm’s conception of “idology” challenges his own sanction of sexual binarity and heterosexuality, thus facilitating an understanding of the individual’s sexual difference as a unique modulation of male/female intermediariness.

The Female Voice of Myanmar: Khin Myo Chit to Aung San Suu Kyi

The Female Voice of Myanmar seeks to offer a female perspective on the history and political evolution of Myanmar. It delves into the lives and works of four of Myanmar's remarkable women who set aside their lives to answer the call of their country: Khin Myo Chit, who spoke about latent sexual politics in pre-Independent Burma; Ludu Daw Amar, who as the editor of the leftist Ludu Daily, was deemed anti-establishment and was witness to the socialist government's abortive efforts at ethnic reconciliation; Ma Thida, whose writing bears testimony to the impact the authoritative military rule had on the individual psyche; and Aung San Suu Kyi, who has re-articulated Burmese nationalism. This book breaks new ground in exploring their writing, both published and hitherto unexamined, some in English and much in Burmese, while the intimate biographical sketches offer a glimpse into the Burmese home and the shifting feminine image.

De la Vernunft à la Gedächtnis Ou de « l’incertitude de la raison » à « la non-fiabilité de la mémoire »

Avoir une connaissance du monde et de son histoire, soit de soi-même et des autres, vaste programme. « Je voudrais me connaître… savoir quel est le sens de ma vie » peut-on entendre au début d’une demande d’analyse. Les idées religieuses, car Freud précise qu’il n’est pas de son « dessein d’étudier l’évolution de l’idée de Dieu » mais de s’occuper du « trésor tout constitué des idées religieuses » – ces idées donnent « les cadres de temps et de lieu » aux désirs ( L’avenir d’une illusion , 1927). Si la névrose obsessionnelle est marquée du sceau du mécanisme de déplacement , comme l’écrit Freud dans ce texte de 1907 « Actes obsédants et exercices religieux » – il cite des exemples cliniques –, une phrase de lui est également indicative dans le texte de 1927, deux ans avant Le malaise dans la civilisation : « C’est un formidable allègement pour l’âme individuelle que de voir les conflits de l’enfance émanés du complexe paternel […] lui être enlevés et recevoir une solution acceptée de tous. » Il s’agit de réponses aux grandes énigmes de l’humanité, lesquelles sont angoissantes et laissent le petit homme dans une certaine détresse. Deux questions, celle du père et celle de « la » science, sont posées, dans le mouvement de celles de « la » religion. 1927. Et 2016 ? Nous prendrons un exemple clinique, une des « naissances de la psychanalyse » que Freud a rédigée les soirs, ici celle de ladite « association libre », nous dirons également dans le transfert. Lorsque le D r Lehrs vient rencontrer Freud, il veut savoir . Il a feuilleté par hasard, dans ses tourments, chez un ami, la Psychopathologie de la vie quotidienne … Un savoir, notamment sur le sexe. Il pose très vite, avec ses obsessions, les idées concernant son père, une dame « qu’il vénère » et sa religiosité, qu’il lie lui-même à son caractère obsessionnel. Ce que Freud analysera dans ce Journal remarquable.

Three Paradigms of Horror

Starting with the definition of horror as a literary genre the core story of which is based on a meeting with threatening Otherness whose influx into consensual reality and it’s tacit normality creates unrest and awakens fear in the protagonists and the audience, this paper defines the three key paradigms of the horror genre, based on the causes of fear, or rather the “monstrous” Otherness in them. Paradigm 1 concerns the “fear of one’s own self”: the root of the fear is inside, in the individual psyche, in the split, deceived, or in some other way unreliable self which is, consciously or unconsciously, harmful to others, and ultimately to itself. Paradigm 2 deals with the “Fear of others”: the root of fear is outside and is concerned with other people and other creatures which have an urge to occupy a certain human microcosm. Paradigm 3 is concerned with the “Fear of the numinous”: the root of the fear is mostly situated on the outside; however its shape is amorphous, ambivalent and unknowable. The “monster” is faceless; it touches on primary forces of the divine/demonic, and as such is situated on the very border between inside/outside. All three paradigms, with their main approaches and constitutive elements, are modulated through two basic possible treatments: the conservative and the progressive (liberal), which affords a total of six basic variations of horror. Starting from definitions given by John Carpenter, Robin Wood and his own, the author analyzes representative examples from horror literature and film for each paradigm and its variation, with a special accent on the image of Otherness and its connection to the norm, its intrusion into the status quo, anthropocentrism and the presence or absence of a happy ending. The paper demonstrates the richness of connotative potential within the horror genre and provides a basis for its taxonomy.

“What Is This Love That Loves Us?”: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder as a Phenomenology of Love

Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder (2013) considers the relationship of Divine Love with the individual soul, and its corresponding relationships to the other as neighbor. In this article, I analyze the congruency of Malick’s form and content by correlating the relationship of his dynamic, existential filmmaking style with the film’s phenomenologically constructed plotline. Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness and Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love contribute to my analysis, aiding our understanding of love’s sheer gratuity and sacrificial labor, amid inevitable idolatry and despondency, in To the Wonder’s intersecting narratives. While Marion helps us comprehend the affective qualities of “saturated phenomena” in the film’s formal dimensions, Kierkegaard elucidates the film’s many iterations of love. Malick aesthetically demonstrates the reciprocity of love and the experience of wonder as contingent operations, making To the Wonder a cinematic phenomenology of the fractured yet indissoluble dimensions of love.

Max Weber and the Sociology of Islam

Max Weber discussed Islam in various places in his sociology of religion, but there was no sustained or systematic commentary unlike his other work on the religions of China and India. What he did have to say about Islam was, even by the standards of his own analysis of value neutrality, judgmental. Subsequently his sociology of Islam has been criticized as Orientalist. While he provided positive interpretations of Protestant inner-worldly asceticism and Old Testament prophecy as radical and charismatic, his commentaries on Islam were by contrast negative and critical. He regarded Islam as a warrior religion in which the salvation drive was turned away from the individual soul and the energy of the Muslim community was directed towards imperial conquest. His arguments did not for example provide a valid account of how Islam spread peacefully in South and South East Asia through Sufi traders. The article however notes an ironic justification for Weber’s analysis through the growth of urban ascetic piety in so-called post-Islam. Finally the article , turning away from Weber’s focus on economic ethics of the world religions, argues that Weber’s work is better understood as an ethical reflection on the perennial conflict between religion (the ethic of absolute ends) and politics (the ethics of responsibility).

Parallel Stories by Péter Nádas

“The greatest novel written in our time, and one of the great books of the century”—said Susan Sontag about The Book of Memoirs (1986) by Hungarian novelist Peter Nadas. Parallel Stories (2005) promises and delivers even more; at the expense, though, of challenging its readers even further. In this article I concentrate on the novel’s poetic structure; its representation of the individual versus the communal; and one of its deepest organizing principles, human sensuality. One of the characteristics that sets this novel apart from contemporary literature is Nadas’s use of spatiality. What readers of Western narratives are accustomed to is a kind of unity that is anchored in the principle of the causal and the temporal. Both are important for Nadas, too, but they simply structure the novel thematically. On a poetic level, the novel’s characteristic features are the parallels it contains, and those “structural principles” through which the ingredients interact. It is the tension resulting from the metonymic interconnectedness of the (parallel) stories in the book that provides the base of its most fundamental structural coherence. The question and the representation of individuality is another key concern of the novel. Nadas represents the significant dates of 1938, 1960–1961, and 1989 as historical watersheds; at the same time he makes us better understand those aspects of life that are less obviously affected by these historical changes, including the question of individuality. What we find as the core of the individual Nadas calls “the human consistency.” Its vessel is the individual human body, sensuality, psyche and memories. The individual is pitted against the communal very effectively in the novel. Its tragic worldview, however, is not due to its view or philosophy of history: it results from its anthropology. The body is the epicenter of the novel: it is by means of writing the body, or more precisely the human flesh, that Nadas shows what it means to be a human animal. The shift of focus from body to flesh is one of the senses in which Nadas breaks with the European humanist tradition. What he calls to our attention is that there is not even the slightest chance to completely comprehend what we, as sensual beings, are nonetheless capable of perceiving. He does not answer the question of whether the world and life are knowable or not. What he does do—in an idiosyncratic and innovative way—is to represent both and make us realize that they are perceivable. The result is a very peculiar kind of knowledge: it is both rational and irrational, sensual and intellectual, personal and interpersonal, conscious and unconscious, male and female, mythic and scientific, bodily and spiritual, worldly and unworldly.

Socrates’ Debt to Asclepius: Physicians and Philosophers with Asclepian Souls in Late Antiquity

This article examines the development of the aspect of health in late Neoplatonic ontology as originated in Proclus and illustrated in Marinus’Life of Proclusand Damascius’Life of Isidore. In light of the steadily growing Neoplatonic interest in the philosophic value of the body and the widely spreading presence of the new and only Savior, Proclus looks closer at the Demiurge’s cosmological activity in the universe to discern its health-instituting nature based upon which he builds a health register distinguishing between Demiurgic and Asclepian health. The former maintains the orderly balance in the universe; the latter restores the individual’s health. Between the two kinds of health extends a healing ontological “chain” unfolding from the Demiurge through Apollo, Asclepius, and the healing heroes, ending in certain individual souls, which are endowed with special healing powers, i.e., Asclepian souls. Two examples of such souls are Proclus himself, as portrayed in his biography by Marinus, and one Iacobus Psychristus, as documented in Damascius’Life of Isidore. The fact that one is a philosopher and the other is a physician captures the symbiotic relation of philosophy and medicine in late antiquity.

Infantile defences in parent‐infant psychotherapy: The example of gaze avoidance

Translations of summaryFindings from parent‐infant observational research have stimulated the development of intersubjective models of psychotherapeutic action. These models have brought out the infant as an interactive partner with the parent. Conversely, interest in describing the individual psyche of the baby has decreased, especially the unconscious levels of his/her experiences and representations. In parallel, clinicians and researchers have been less prone to apply classical psychoanalytic concepts when describing the internal world of the infant. The author argues that this is inconsistent with the fact that psychoanalytic theory, from its inception, was founded on speculations of the infant's mind. He investigates one such concept from classical theory; the defence. Specifically, he investigates if selective gaze avoidance in young babies may be described as a defence or even a defence mechanism. The investigation links with Selma Fraiberg's discussion of the phenomenon and also with Freud's conception of defence. The author also compares his views on the baby as a subject with those suggested by infant researchers, for example, Stern and Beebe. The discussion is illustrated by vignettes from a psychoanalytic therapy with a 3 month‐old girl and her mother.