Symbolic Relationships Research Articles

Missing what was true: Problems of seeing and knowing in Henry James's The wings of the dove

The author examines a central theme in this late novel by Henry James in relation to current psychoanalytic ideas that link the Oedipus complex with the child's developing perception of reality (both psychic and external), specifi cally through the experience of seeing and being seen. Britton visualises the oedipal triangle as a psychic structure through which the child may achieve recognition not only of its parents' sexual relationship, from which it is excluded, but also of itself being observed by one parent while the child is with the other. Thus, it both observes and is observed. The differing perspectives achieved‐of subjectivity and objectivity‐ promote the perception of objective reality, as the world of relationships grows and becomes more complex. James captures with great subtlety and penetration the experience of three characters living out a symbolic oedipal relationship in which the truth is evaded or perverted. A young couple in love exploit the situation of a dying heiress whose vulnerability is intensifi ed by her reluctance to acknowledge the truth about their relationship. At the same time, she shrinks from the gaze of others and consigns herself to isolation and ultimate despair. The author presents three signifi cant scenes in which seeing and being seen are central to the development. In each, the dying woman is forced to face, if momentarily, her exclusion from the sexual relationship. Increasingly this connects with her approaching death‐but also with the anguished recognition that the couple have cruelly befriended her only to betray her. It is suggested that James's late style and novelistic technique require the reader to tolerate confusion and uncertainty. As the perspective shifts from one protagonist to another, we ourselves are in danger of ‘missing what is true’ in this characteristic Jamesian scenario, where relationships are gradually perverted by manipulation, evasion and lies. In psychoanalytic theory, this would represent a failure to work through the oedipal situation, where the struggle of the child to face reality is met by a parental relationship that is too weak or too perverse to contain the pain and confl ict.

Missing what was true: Problems of seeing and knowing in Henry James’s The wings of the dove

The author examines a central theme in this late novel by Henry James in relation to current psychoanalytic ideas that link the Oedipus complex with the child's developing perception of reality (both psychic and external), specifically through the experience of seeing and being seen. Britton visualises the oedipal triangle as a psychic structure through which the child may achieve recognition not only of its parents' sexual relationship, from which it is excluded, but also of itself being observed by one parent while the child is with the other. Thus, it both observes and is observed. The differing perspectives achieved--of subjectivity and objectivity--promote the perception of objective reality, as the world of relationships grows and becomes more complex. James captures with great subtlety and penetration the experience of three characters living out a symbolic oedipal relationship in which the truth is evaded or perverted. A young couple in love exploit the situation of a dying heiress whose vulnerability is intensified by her reluctance to acknowledge the truth about their relationship. At the same time, she shrinks from the gaze of others and consigns herself to isolation and ultimate despair. The author presents three significant scenes in which seeing and being seen are central to the development. In each, the dying woman is forced to face, if momentarily, her exclusion from the sexual relationship. Increasingly this connects with her approaching death--but also with the anguished recognition that the couple have cruelly befriended her only to betray her. It is suggested that James's late style and novelistic technique require the reader to tolerate confusion and uncertainty. As the perspective shifts from one protagonist to another, we ourselves are in danger of 'missing what is true' in this characteristic Jamesian scenario, where relationships are gradually perverted by manipulation, evasion and lies. In psychoanalytic theory, this would represent a failure to work through the oedipal situation, where the struggle of the child to face reality is met by a parental relationship that is too weak or too perverse to contain the pain and conflict.

The symbolosphere, conceptualization, language, and neo-dualism

It is shown that Schumann’s notion of the Symbolosphere, the non-physical world of symbolic relationships and Logan’s (2000a) Extended Mind model in which the mind is defined as the brain plus language entail a form of dualism. A distinction is made between the symbolosphere, which includes the human mind and all its thoughts and communication processes such as language and the physiosphere, which is simply the physical world and includes the human brain. No distinction is made between substance and property dualism, hence the use of the term neo-dualism. The neo-dualistic approach is justified on the basis that at our current understanding of neuroscience is unable to connect the functions of the mind with the actions of the brain and hence it makes sense from a practical point of view to distinguish between these two levels of phenomena. The neo-dualism formulated here is also used to critique strong AI and deconstructionism.

El Mar kuna. Representación y uso de los recursos marinos en Kuna Yala (Panamá)

En las últimas décadas, la etnografía americanista se ha nutrido de extensas monografías sobre las relaciones entre los humanos y los ecosistemas forestales. Con el tiempo, la noción de "indígena" ha pasado a ser sinónima de "habitante de la selva", relegando al olvido numerosas sociedades indígenas de pescadores. En general se ha mostrado poco interés por los ecosistemas marinos de América Latina.

Dark and Light: The Strange Case of the Decline of Illustration

In the field of illustration, we are beginning to feel we've been struck in the head and have fallen into a coma and are waiting to wake up at a more generous time. I'm not sure that better times are coming within my lifetime, and I have little practical career advice for others in the field.

The Evil of Banality: Moby Dick vs. the Extreme Machine

In this article I am suggesting that Feidelson’s approach be appropriated for the contemplation and understanding of extra-literary phenomena like the extreme machine. As Russell Reising points out, Feidelson’s “historical premise—that symbolism arose at a particular historical moment —could generate semiotic analyses of the relationships between cultural texts (literature, advertising, political discourses and so on) and social contexts, even though the texts themselves purport to transcend social determination” (180). One might extrapolate from this passage to ask the following questions: How do popular mass-produced objects and trends take on symbolic weight in American culture? What connections might we make between these commodities and American literary texts that represent historical events, debates, and individual psychology? And more specifically, if also more whimsically, is there a secret symbolic relationship between Melville’s Moby-Dick and the extreme machine?

Studying identity in social psychology

The present paper discusses the concept of identity in social psychology. It is suggested that identity is a particular form of social representation that mediates the relationship between the individual and the social world. Identity makes the link between social regulations and psychological organizations (i.e. identifications/self-categories) and constitutes the organizing principle of symbolic relationships. Its functions are to inscribe the person in the social environment, to communicate peoples’ positions and to establish relationships with others (social recognition). Thus identity is a cyclical process constituted by three actions: knowing, claiming and recognizing. Social psychologists have started their investigations of identity by emphasizing different aspects of this process: self-knowledge, claims and recognition and have focused on processes of socialization, communication and social influence. Finally, it is argued that through their active participation in the social world (by knowing, recognizing and claiming), individuals construct a set of knowledge about the world and themselves: their identity. To protect from, provoke or respond to changes to this knowledge people act in the name of identity. Thus, identity constitutes the social psychological context within which worldviews are constructed, through which these worldviews are communicated and for which battles are fought.

The breakdown of meaning and adolescent problem behavior.

This paper attempts to account for the upsurge of adolescents' problem behavior in high-income countries in terms of Lifton's paradigm of symbolic immortality. Whilst most of the works dealing with this subject focus on the level of the individual adolescent and his or her surrounding, Lifton shows that societal processes can affect the individual. Drawing upon his approach, it was argued that desymbolization,--the collapse of society's symbols system--produces "divided selves," individuals who harbor an 'aggressor-victim double' in their psyche, wherein an internal conflict between the aggressor and the victim engenders self-destructive impulses. In this study it is hypothesized that problem behaviors are external manifestations of underlying self-destructiveness. Thirty-four Jewish-Israeli adolescents involved in sexual promiscuity, drug abuse, anorexia nervosa, and violence were interviewed. It was found that despite individual and social dissimilarities, and the different problem behaviors, the participants were marked by inner-directed destructiveness as well as a sense of meaninglessness of life and lack of symbolic relationship to what transcends their here-and-now selves. Significantly, violent adolescents whose aggression is other-directed were found to be marked by underlying self-directed aggression as well. If the findings of this study are representative of Israeli society at large or of other affluent societies, then the epidemic proportions of youth problem behavior may indicate that these societies are undergoing desymbolization, a psychocultural breakdown.

Images of African Americans in Southern Painting, 1840-1940

The paintings featured here are from the private collections of A. Everette James and Nancy Farmer and are frequently on view at the University of North Carolina and other locations throughout the Southeast, From the 1840s through World War II, paintings by artists working in the South for the most part mirrored images fashioned throughout America. These paintings were different from those created in other parts of the country, however, in that they reflected the southern sense of place and the intimacy of black and white relationships in the region. From the mid-nineteenth century through Reconstruction, southern paintings by white artists showed African Americans as largely dehumanized caricatures, black stereotypes rather than distinct individuals. Skin color appeared coal black; lips were thick and red, supported by protruding, overly large teeth. The contrived and exaggerated physical features, poor quality of clothing, and subservient activities of the African American subjects clearly cast them as outside or beneath the dominant, white social order. Sambo, Top Hat, Zip Coon, and other stock figures, often from the minstrel tradition and imposed upon African Americans by whites, were popular subjects for white artists working in the South during this time period. These restrictive, demeaning stereotypes relegated African Americans to inferior roles and served to justify white denial of their humanity. In the early years following the Civil War, changes in depictions of African Americans in paintings by white artists working in the South reflected to some extent the massive social upheaval that followed in the war's wake. By the mid 1870s, however, as Reconstruction drew to a close, an idealized nostalgia for the prewar relationship between the races, as whites chose to remember it, began to appear more frequently. Perhaps this was in response to the hardships and frustrations brought about by the unanticipated complexity of Reconstruction. The images from this period selectively depicted the era before the Civil War as a time of harmony and tranquility between whites and blacks. Although this characterization is, to say the least, not entirely accurate, in some memories it rang true and became a popular myth in the South as well as to a lesser extent in the rest of the country. Memory is unintentionally selective, and white southern artists gave certain symbolic relationships--Mammy and her white charges, for example--more prominence than they deserved in representing the social relationships between the races. Artists painting in the South presented a meticulous but one-sided image of African American life after the Civil War. Despite the postwar nostalgia for the good ole days, Charleston-born William Aiken Walker's numerous portrayals of black carpetbaggers were much sought after, and his rare larger nostalgic images were equally as popular among whites in both the North and South. (His larger depictions of plantation life still fetch vast sums from museums and collectors despite their simplistic and inaccurate portrayal of African American life.) Portrayals of African Americans in southern art remained nostalgic, rural, and frequently demeaning from Reconstruction until the rapid sweep of urbanization and migration of African Americans to the North in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The changes to the U.S. social structure wrought by this shift from an agrarian base to an industrial, urban life improved the status of African Americans. Images of African Americans in paintings gradually evolved to reflect these changes and came to affect their portrayal in areas of the deep South as well. White artists sometimes dignified African Americans in southern paintings with a clear individuality, and their physical characteristics were not nearly as exaggerated and demeaning as they had been in the middle-to-late nineteenth century. These images far more accurately represented African American culture and society than the paintings executed during the period immediately following the Civil War and during Reconstruction. …

Public relations orientation: Development, empirical testing and implications for managers

This study proposes a new construct and a measure for understanding the embeddedness of public relations capability at the organisation level. The public relations orientation measure assesses the degree to which organisations (1) pursue both behavioural and symbolic relationships with publics, (2) set public relations goals to support organisational goals and facilitate effective use of public relations information within the organisation, (3) provide adequate resources for public relations, and (4) engage in dialogue with the publics on whom their success or failure depends. Suggestions are given for how public relations orientation (PRO) can be used as a diagnostic and benchmarking tool in organisations.

Candidates for liver transplantation for cancer: physical, psychological, and social conditions.

There is little knowledge of the psychological and social conditions of candidates for liver transplantation and the meaning that these patients attribute to those conditions. The research has been conducted with quantitative and qualitative methods. For the quantitative study, 80 patients were assessed with four evaluation instruments: the Interdisciplinary Group for Cancer Care Evaluation in Italy (GIVIO) questionnaire for quality of life, the Needs Evaluation Questionnaire (NEQ) for psychosocial needs, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) personality test, and a questionnaire for the family's reactions to the illness. The qualitative evaluation was conducted to better understand the meaning of the transplantation as expressed by the patients, the integration of the new organ, and the symbolic relationship with the donor with particular attention to the different levels of patients' awareness. The quantitative evaluation showed a good level of quality of life assessed by GIVIO and a low prevalence in the personality disorder scales detected by the MMPI. The patients' needs assessed by NEQ showed a high need of information about the future conditions (77%) followed by the need for more explanation of examinations (49%) and treatments (50%). The qualitative study identified and analyzed two opposite groups of five patients each: those who did not recognize and did not express any emotional experience and those who recognized and expressed a particularly intense emotional experience. The psychosocial condition of transplant candidates with liver cancer is characterized by an impact that is more psychological than physical. The qualitative analysis performed allows the hypothesis that the patient's level of awareness is an important indicator to predict the type of adaptation after transplantation.

Hearth and cloth: dwelling practice and production in Eastern Tibet

In the context of rapid contemporary shifts of migration, modernisation, urbanisation and Sinification in Eastern Tibet, a significant impact on the inhabited environment of the 'everyday' is evident, manifest in the use of new materials, new work and building practices, the impact of new neighbours, and the appropriation of new media. Within a critique of attitudes to the primitive (vernacular) and modern, practices related to dwelling in terms of the material realisation of the house and tents are shown to be related. A sophistication of sBra-gur, the black tent of the nomadic pastoralist, is revealed, with symbolic ordering and spatial relationships related to Tibetan dwelling houses. Through examining the spatial role and production of the Semperian archetypes of 'hearth' and 'cloth' in the tent in particular, it is shown that settlement and fabrication are interdependent. It is argued that understanding patterns of 'everyday' dwelling practice should be the basis for potential judgements concerning continuity and future adaptation and change. The origin of this work was architectural consultation on the adaptation of traditional Tibetan houses, an approach in which inherent dilemmas soon become evident - the potential to participate in shifting balances of making, inhabiting, developing, communicating.

Center and Diaspora: Jews in late‐twentieth‐century Morocco

Contemporary Jews in Casablanca are facing a slow and constant process of diminution—a consequence of death and emigration (mostly to France). This process deeply influences the Jews' self‐perception of their very existence in Morocco in various aspects of life. Their small number, along with the diminw tion process underline their marginality to Morocco's life. Yet, emigration also colors in a new light their feeling as a diaspora, and contradicts the "solar system model" that assumes unidirectional symbolic relationships between a singular "homeland" with its "diasporic communities. Although Jews have seen the Land of Israel as the cradle of their history, they also conceive of Morocco as a symbolic center; a homeland for those who remained behind as well as for those who migrated. [Diasporas, homelands, immigration, Israel, Moroccan Jews]

Feelings in context: countertransference and the real world in feminist therapy.

The concept of countertransference has been seen as problematic by feminist therapists. However, feminist therapy theory is intensely interested in the symbolic levels of the relationships between therapists and clients, with an emphasis on how the here and now social context informs and transforms those symbols. This article describes a feminist perspective on the therapist's symbolic relationships to clients, and the positive and challenging ramifications of those symbolic encounters.

Etatism and Diplomacy in Turkey: Economic and Foreign Policy Strategies in an Uncertain World, 1929-1939

This volume deals with Turkey's etatist policy and foreign relations in the early years after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It elucidates the symbolic relationship between Turkey's internal developments and its international strategies, filling a gap in modern Turkish history by systematically researching the era. The first part of the book examines the theory and politics of etatism, while the second part, on Turkish diplomacy during the interwar period, is important for diplomatic historians.

Temporal stimulus-response compatibility.

The study of element-level stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) has predominantly focused on spatial and symbolic relationships and has involved measures of response time and (dichotomous) error rate. This article explores a new form of SRC that is observed when duration is the relevant feature of both the stimulus and the response, using a more extensive analysis of performance accuracy and variability. The results indicate that element-level SRC generalizes to situations involving time as the relevant dimension of stimuli and responses. Evidence of this was found in all of the extracted measures of performance; however, temporal SRC was shown to have independent effects on when and how accurately a response was made. Implications for SRC research are discussed.

Lincoln's Men: How President Lincoln Became Father to an Army and a Nation.

LINCOLN'S MEN offers a fascinating account of the emotional bonds forged between the average Union soldier and 'Father Abraham' Lincoln. William C. Davis bases his study on the correspondence and diaries of Union soldiers to argue that Lincoln was revered by his troops as a kind-hearted father figure. Although few ever met, or even saw Lincoln, he left an enduring impression on them as his mesmerising eloquence, combined with his melancholy face, convinced them he was just like them. In return for this loyalty, Lincoln looked after them, provided for their families with the nations' first veterans' benefits system, and offered the exemplary leadership that molded and sustained their resolve to bring the Union to victory. Davis tracks the war chronologically, highlighting events that inspired ordinary soldiers to comment upon their commander and chief, including his spats with General McClellan, calls for more recruits and his decision to free the slaves. William C. Davis offers a captivating study of the powerful and symbolic relationship between Lincoln and his men as he sustained them though the most brutal war in American history.

To All the Girls I've Loved Before: Academic Love Letters on Mentoring, Power, and Desire

This epistolary essay features 6 letters portraying mentoring relationships among 4 women in the academy. Interrogating both genderless and gendered models of mentoring, this essay argues for “entrustment,” a symbolic mother-daughter relationship between women is a better account of women's power and desire than traditional frameworks of male power and female mutuality. Second, these letters put academic labor in the background to foreground the multiple contexts-career, family, heterosexual relationship-from which women of different ages, races, and status approach work and relationship in the academy. Third, these letters pay debts to specific women, as well as paint portraits of past and future generations of women, in the creation and inheritance of legacies of cultural work. This project takes the risk of strategic separatism to create and to enact women-centered spaces in the academy where academic and relational labor thrives.

The "Paradoxical Displacement": Beauvoir and Irigaray on Hegel's Antigone

Near the beginning of The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir writes, tells us in the last part of the Phenomenology of that moral consciousness can exist only to the extent that there is dis- agreement between nature and morality. It (moral consciousness) would disappear if the ethical became the natural law (Beauvoir 1948, 10). 1 In this passage and in a few brief remarks in The Second Sex, Beauvoir refers to the section Spirit of the Phenomenology of in which Hegel discusses Sophocles' tragedy Antigone (Hegel 1977, 267-68). This section of the Phenomenology of Spirit, entitled Hu- man and Divine Law: Man and Woman, affords Hegel's only explicit description of the relationship between masculine and feminine within the course of the world-historical dialectic that he describes in this work. Beauvoir here engages with the passage, not to comment on the his- torical and symbolic relationship between men and women that aligns man with culture and woman with nature, an alignment she will make much of in The Second Sex, but rather to illustrate a particular ethical stance. As many commentators have already remarked, 2 when Beauvoir later uses Hegel to discuss the philosophical conceptualization of the historical relationship between men and women, particularly in The Second Sex, she emphasizes Hegel's famous master/slave dialectic, which occurs much earlier in the Phenomenology of as part of the dialectic of Consciousness. The use of the master/slave dialectic, and its eventual sublation into a stoic agent characterized primarily by self-control and self-determination, both parallels the later movement from ethical life into legal status and seems to imply that an end to a master/slave prototype of struggle between humans would be accom-

Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (review)

Reviewed by: Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy Willard Greenwood Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Rev. Ed. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. vi + 256 pp. The introduction, by editors Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, who also contributed two essays apiece, explains why one of America’s greatest living novelists went undiscovered for almost twenty-five years. Of the eleven essays in this collection, three are devoted to the novel that distinguished McCarthy as a rare and astounding novelist, Blood Meridian. These diverse and remarkable essays examine historical sources, Gnosticism, and nihilism as elements crucial to understanding the work itself. The criticism also analyzes McCarthy’s imaginative critique of Manifest Destiny in the Southwest and Mexico, which also seems, somehow, a history of the world. Joseph Sepich’s essay, already well-known to McCarthy scholars, impeccably traces the historical sources of Blood Meridian and is indispensable to an understanding of the novel as historical fiction. Steven Shaviro’s philosophical reading of the novel helps to explain the sublime forces that will continue to horrify and to attract readers. Leo Daugherty’s essay, “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy,” might cause those familiar with the rest of McCarthy’s work to consider Gnosticism as one way of understanding the theosophy that guides so much of it. There was a more local yet still universal element to McCarthy’s fiction before the watershed event of Blood Meridian. His four southern novels are treated more thoroughly here simply because they are better known to scholars than the Border trilogy. They are written in a more dense, Faulknerian style than the Border trilogy. Luce’s essay on The Crossing, one of McCarthy’s most difficult works, offers the compelling analysis that the figurative and literal wandering undertaken by Billy Parham is “a matrix of intersecting stories, partial or complete, often competing, with varying relationships to the truth, cutting across and interwoven with the apparently simple linearity of the road narrative of Billy’s life.” Some of McCarthy’s readers and critics were a bit disappointed by his works following The Crossing. Arnold’s essay, “The Last of the Trilogy: First Thoughts on Cities of the Plain,” seems to have this collective puzzlement in mind. He argues for a contextual reading of the novel, [End Page 1026] suggesting that we must read it in concert with the first two novels. Regarding the end of the trilogy, Arnold is right to assert that “we have come to the end of something magnificent.” Arnold’s call to scholarly patience is sound advice for measuring the full worth of this novel in relation to McCarthy’s body of work. Readers may be most eager to get to the essays of the better-known works first, but the essays on the southern novels provide important insights into the novels that existed before McCarthy’s mass exposure. David Paul Ragan and Thomas D. Young, respectively, provide clear and astute interpretations of The Orchard Keeper and Suttree. Ragan’s essay clarifies the obscurity of the characters’ familial and symbolic relationships while also emphasizing the larger social context. He shows how the lives of the characters of rural Tennessee are subtly yet permanently altered by modern bureaucracy. Young’s essay on Suttree examines the familial and social fallout of a community’s cultural and economic shift from a collapsing agrarian mode to a depressed modern industrial mode. At the center of this change is the eponymous Suttree, who unconsciously resists and negotiates this massive social change by repeatedly drinking himself into oblivion. The essays on the southern novels may seem a bit dated since they themselves precede the entire Border trilogy. However, some of their value lies in their being uninfluenced by interpretations of McCarthy’s later work, a state of scholarly innocence that is irretrievable. John Grammer’s and Edwin Arnold’s essays on pastoralism and morality, respectively, identify recurring themes throughout the southern novels. Such an approach is necessary in order to begin the massive task of thinking about the novels as a group. For all of the attention given to the connection between McCarthy and the South and Faulkner, Grammer’s...