Young Friends Research Articles

Notes from the Editors, April 2001

» Notes from the EditorsIt was just over a year ago that we asked John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney to serve as acting co-editors of Monthly Review, with a view to having four co-editors. Although Foster and McChesney were naturals for undertaking this responsibility—they are longtime MR contributors and MR Press authors—the type of collegiality necessary to make a publication like MR tick is delicate and difficult to predict. We therefore thought it desirable that they be “acting” co-editors, to provide for a trial period. In the past year we have worked together in a truly collective way, published some of our best issues, and circulation has grown at a rapid pace. In addition to political economy and socialist education, John and Bob have opened MR up to new areas where we are now on the cutting edge. John is among the three or four leading environmental sociologists, and Bob holds similar distinction as a media and communications scholar. Moreover, both John and Bob have been active in radical movements for much of the past two decades. There is a lot of ballyhoo nowadays about public intellectuals. In John and Bob we have two of the very best of the breed. To top it off, they are genuinely warm and loving individuals with whom everyone enjoys working. MR’s morale has not been this high in a very long time. We are thus happy to announce that these two younger friends and colleagues are joining us as permanent—no longer “acting”—co-editors of Monthly ReviewThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

BOOK REVIEW: Tayob, Abdulkader. ISLAM IN SOUTH AFRICA: MOSQUES, IMAMS, AND SERMONS. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1999.

Adam Ashforth has presented a fascinating study of the role of witchcraft in postapartheid South Africa. His work is an interesting combination of reflexive ethnography and analytic ethnology. The blend works exceedingly well, far better than in most "personalized" field accounts, providing a model for future blends of humanistic and scientific field studies. It is also a cracking good story, worth reading for its own sake. Madumo, the pseudonym for Ashforth's young friend, believes that he is bewitched. Ashforth accompanies him on his trek to find a cure for witchcraft. Along the way, Ashforth discovers a great deal about the meaning of witchcraft to Madumo and its place within the changing South African scene. Madumo, while never losing his individuality in Ashforth's tale, becomes representative of the search for security, spiritual as well as material, that is part of postapartheid life in South Africa. The plague of witchcraft that has struck Soweto, the black township of Johannesburg, is more than just superstition, and has deeper implications for Soweto and its people. Ashforth knows that there are many ways to view witchcraft and he presents each in turn. He is skeptical; perhaps, witchcraft is another mode of discourse; perhaps, it is superstition--like belief in God; perhaps it is a response to disruption; it could be misunderstood tradition, changed by capitalism, apartheid, and modernization. Other than stating that he does not believe in witchcraft but knows that its force is real, Ashforth comes to no conclusions. This very openness to the Other is a major strength of the work. There are no easy solutions or resolutions. What Ashforth has presented in his gender-blurring presentation is a very human story of cross-cultural [End Page 147] friendship and attempts to reach understanding between two friends. Along the way, he has managed to examine the meaning of South African history and recent changes from the perspective of some of its participants. Their dilemmas, the tug between westernization and a reconstructed tradition, are clearly present. The characters come alive. Madumo is not the everyman we anthropologists too often construct. Neither is he a "Noble Savage." Rather, he is a real person complete with flaws. Similarly, various religious practitioners, fellow townspeople, family, and others have their own virtues, weaknesses, and peculiarities. There is, alas, the now required soul-searching of the western character, who hates to leave the field--but, of course, does. But even here, Ashforth manages to avoid most of the clichés and brings his reflections to life. All in all, this book is a fine example of blurred genres and the way in which such an account can illuminate important cultural issues. I recommend the book highly as an enjoyable and enlightening experience.

L'Ange Heurtebise / The Angel Heurtebise

I The angel Heurtebise, on the stairs Silken in his wings Singes me, refreshes my memory The fool, alone, inept Here with me, in chalcedony That is shattered, idiot, by your Supernatural symmetry. II The angel Heurtebise, incredibly Brutal, sacked me. For grace, Don't spring so high Bestial Boy, flower of great Stature. I'm in the sack. That's the way it is. I've had it; take note. Have you? III The angel Heurtebise knocks me down And you, King Jesus, mercy Raise me, draw me to the angle Right of your pointy knees Pleasure without variety. Fast! Unknot The chord, I'm dying. IV The angel Heurtebise and the angel Cegeste killed in the war-such an extraordinary name-playing the part Of scarecrows Whose gesture No! scares Beneath the portals of the church The cherries of the celestial cherry tree Accustomed to the jester, Yes. V Angel Heurtebise, my guardian angel I guard you, I hurt you I shatter you, I change you Be careful, the hour. On guard, Spring! I challenge you If you are a man. Admit my cerated angel, your beauty. Pose for a photograph by a Chemical explosion. VI Angel Heurtebise, in robes of water My loved angel, grace Has hurt me badly. I am bad To God, He impales me. In me the demon is a imp, animal Once melodious. Arrive Depart from agate Pale smoke, oh life that kills. Beneath your blades diamonds scratch The mirror of maladies. The walls The walls Have ears And the mirrors Are eyes of a lover. VII Angel Heurtebise, abound, marrow Of elderberry airplanes and alabaster linen. It is time. We must descend Again with my help, head First, cross the glass Without lowering your eyes, the void, the isle Where the hearth sings. Leave your sword, Come to me slowly, crazy star. And if I do not have your body? Ah! If only we had your hips Draped with stone, evil Beast of our God. VIII The angel Heurtebise has come With the feet of an animal, blue as the sky. I am alone All naked without Eve, without mustaches Without maps. Solomon's bees fly away, yet I can't eat my honey My bitter thyme, my Andes honey. Below, the sea this morning writes The verb to love one hundred times. On the grass, cotton angels The indecent, the filthy ones, Milk the udders Of huge geographical cows. IX Angel Heurtebise, I triumph The color, the number 13, Stroke your white silk Against the nap Inflate your wings In a brand new way. Never mind about a lesson; I'll learn by guessing, the affluence Of the bird, the name Of every branch on every tree, the bush Of the month of May. Bird man, you lost your maize, tamed Too many statues. Birds are our friends... Marble is very influential. X Angel Heurtebise, recite the Hail Mary. One foot upon the imp, the other on The aisle, it's the juggler with Plume and cannon ball. I have had faults, I admit them: ruin the runes We are on plumes. Angel Heurtebise, the earth Half-sun, half-shadow is like A panther in the jungle. NO? Okay, but I am sure of it and I ordain You to shut-up. You have blood in your beak, my young friend. …

"I'd Rather Be Dancing": Wisconsin Women Moving On

Some years ago, while sitting with my aunt drinking coffee, I asked her why she left her Wisconsin farm for the city of Milwaukee. What was there to do, she asked in return. Meet a boy down at the bridge? What did she do in the city, I asked. She said she had first worked in a candy factory and roomed with the family of a young friend. The year was 1916. What did you do after work, I persisted. We went dancing, she replied, every night except Monday. Why never on Monday, I asked. Because, she responded with a smile, the dance hall was closed on Monday.

How to make and keep young friends

Friendships are an important and pleasurable part of life. Jillian Rodd explains how young children can be encouraged to form fulfilling relationships.

Mortuary Feasts at the Tomb with the Dead, Performed by Young Friends of the Dead in Okinawa, Japan

Mortuary Feasts at the Tomb with the Dead, Performed by Young Friends of the Dead in Okinawa, Japan

The Struggle Against the Bomb: One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement through 1953 and Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement 1954-1970 (review)

52Quaker History tieth century events. The book is also an intellectual history, showing the theological changes in Quakerism in the twentieth century. This raises the question ofhow much the experience ofCanada Young Friends, orFriends generally in Canada, part ofa small yearly meeting, is similar or dissimilar to that ofFriends in New England orNorth Carolina or Great Britain. Much of the work in Quaker history focuses on the 17th, 18th and early 19th century story ofthe Society ofFriends. We now need more studies, such as this one, which canexplain the majorchange in the organizationandbeliefs ofQuakers from the controversies ofthe mid 19th centuryto thepresentday. Christopher DensmoreUniversity Archives State University ofNew York at Buffalo. The Struggle Against the Bomb: One World or None: A History ofthe World Nuclear Disarmament Movement through 1953 and Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement 19541970 . By Lawrence S. Wittner. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993, 1997. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index, vol. I, xiii, 456 pp. $55.00, pb. $16.95; vol. II, xiv, 641 pp. $65.00, $24.95. In the twentieth century, Quakers' collective and individual actions to work out the political implications of the peace testimony have been the most important point ofcontact ofFriends and the wider society. Unfortunately , we still lack a comprehensive history ofQuakerpeace work, perhaps because scholars have been unwilling to attempt such a complicated story. Lawrence Wittner should make Quaker historians blanch at our timidity. His topic is a history ofopposition to the atomic bomb, beginning with the reservations about nuclear power by scientists which, after Hiroshima, became a world-wide phenomenon. In the two volumes now published (a third isprojected) he carries the storyfrom 1945 until the creation ofan arms control regime with the Test Ban Treaty and Salt I. In an era in which professional historians concentrate upon the microcosm, Wittner's scope reminds one of the ambitions ofgreat earlier historians like Henry Adams and Lawrence Henry Gibson, and I am happy to report that his erudition, organization, and writing skills are up to the task. When volume three is completed, Wittner's work should be a contender for a Pulitzer orNational Book Award. The research base for these two volumes is enormous—one hundred sixty pages offootnotes, with most citations based on manuscripts coming fromnumerous libraries inmanycountries. Wittnerhas consultedpresidential papers, the archives of peace organizations, records from the Soviet Book Reviews53 Union, Japan, and Western Europe, and utilized Freedom ofInformation access to find out activities ofthe FBI, CIA, and AEC. In addition he has interviewed notable figures in the peace movement. Appearing in these volumes as significant actors are Quaker organizations like theBritishandAmerican Service Committees and Yearly Meeting Peace Committees and individuals including Clarence Pickett, A. J. Muste, Kathleen Lonsdale, Earle and Barbara Reynolds, and Albert Bigelow as well as two more famous but less reputable birth-right Friends, atomic spy Klaus Fuchs and Richard Nixon. In addition, Friends participated in the activities ofmany groups like War Resisters League, Fellowship ofReconciliation , Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Women Strike for Peace and Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. The British National Council for the Abolition ofNuclear Weapons assured Bertrand Russell that it was not "a left wing organization. The only bias on the Executive Committee is in favor ofthe Society ofFriends" which had three ofthe seven positions (II, 96). The influence of Friends and pacifists, while disproportionate to their numbers, should not be overstated, for successes came because the antiatomicbombmovementattractedsupportintheWest , theCommunistblock and non-aligned nations. Wittner argues that agitation against having, using, and testing the bomb became a world-wide phenomenon, the most wide-spread reform movement in history. This generalization is difficult to prove because the post-1945 period also saw mass movements against colonialism, racism, and for women's rights. Like ban-the-bomb activities, these movements had successes, butthe underlying causes prompting moral outrage are still present. The emphasis in these volumes is less upon the internal history ofpeace organizations and their leaders than with their interactions and influence upon politics. Because the U.S., U.S.S.R., United Kingdom, France, and China created nuclear stockpiles and espoused deterrence, it is easy to conclude that the ban...

Seeking the Blessed Community: A History of Canadian Young Friends, 1875-1996 (review)

Seeking the Blessed Community: A History of Canadian Young Friends, 1875-1996 (review)

Three Cases of Delirium After “Ecstasy” Ingestion

Three cases of delirium experienced by three young friends after recreational use of “ecstasy” are reported-a syndrome which, to the best of the authors' knowledge, has not been previously observed in MDMA abusers. Special attention is given to the etiological factors and clinical features of the adverse reaction.

The land of green plums: a novel

Muller takes an unflinching look at the alienation and complexity of a rapidly changing Eastern Europe, focusing on a group of young friends in Ceaucescu's Romania.

Do Children's Maps Differ for Younger and Older Friends?

Children can communicate spatial information with maps. This study investigated whether children alter their maps to fit user characteristics. Sixty children from kindergarten, 2nd, and 4th grades used street maps to direct an older or younger friend to their house. When they chose a route from pairs of alternatives, children from all grades were more likely to select more complicated, though shorter, routes for the older friend than for the younger one. When task conditions required children to draw their own maps, only 4th graders produced maps that varied in ways that appeared to complement the age of the intended user.

Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation)

Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation) Jeffrey T. Schnapp (bio) Today we live affirmatively in our automotive moments, moments in which the driver looms as king, as sovereign, as tyrant. João do Rio, “A era do auotmovel,” Vida vertiginosa (Paris, Rio de Janeiro: H. Garnier, 1911), 4. At the wheel, many an American tends to transform himself into a god. William Phelps Eno,, The Motor-Vehicle Driver: His Nature and Improvement (Saugatuck, CT: The Eno Foundation for Highway Trafic Patrol, 1949), 4. 1 Every culture has its founding myths, and a culture like our own, built upon the worship of technics and science, is no exception to the rule. 1 If many of its inaugural texts and artifacts proudly proclaim their resistance to the blandishments of mythology in the name of a brave new post-mythological world, others (perhaps with greater honesty and lucidity) identify this very stance as modernity’s founding myth. For them, the dream of overcoming all prior mythologies constitutes a revolutionary myth. It promises access to a technicist Olympus through not only an overcoming of history, but also the advent of a heroic new humankind emancipated from the shackles of temporality. Such a text is the 1909 “Foundation and Manifesto of [End Page 1] Futurism”: a document which, for all its bombast and bathos, rightly deserves the key place that it was long ago assigned in accounts of the birth of cultural modernism. The manifesto opens with a clash between objects that is also an intergenerational clash. It pits copper mosque lamps perforated with stars against their own “electric hearts”: light bulbs whose brilliance they constrain; light bulbs fighting to break out. The copper mosque lamps stand in for a larger inventory of objects—plates, cabinets, oriental carpets—inherited by the manifesto’s author, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, from his father. Objects that bear witness to the poet’s upbringing in Alexandria, Egypt, but that, in so doing, crystallize everything that the manifesto subsequently identifies with the term passéism: ancestral indolence; the celebration of dead or moribund things; world-weariness; a taste for the precious, the arcane, and the exotic; repugnance for the present. This past-centered, contemplative paternal world, responsible for the decor of the poet’s apartment on Milan’s Via Senato, is about to be left behind by the manifesto’s second paragraph. The catalyst for its abandonment is the flow of traffic. A passing trolley and a roaring automobile drive Marinetti and his young friends out into the streets, where, bathing in the stark, artificial glare of the new public sphere, they can proclaim the overcoming of “mythology” thanks to the appearance of two new modes of transportation: automobiles (“we are on the verge of experiencing the birth of the Centaur”) and airplanes (“soon we will see the first Angels fly!”). 2 Mythology is overcome inasmuch as, in Marinetti’s view and in that of his era, technology actualizes what was once only a poetic dream or a theological fiction. It gives rise to “living” machines that are also machines for living: machines that, because endowed with powers of agency, intuition, and moral autonomy, are capable of serving as prosthetic enhancements of human bodies and psyches. Two body/ machine complexes are mentioned in the passages just cited: the driver/automobile complex figured by the Centaur and the pilot/airplane complex figured by the Angel. The first structures the central episode of the 1909 manifesto: the automotive flight into the outskirts of the city culminating with a crash cast as the actual scene of Futurism’s birth. 3 It is this drive and accident, and the transformative impact ascribed to it that constitute my springboard for the following reflections. Before the accident, Marinetti appears bound to a shadowy fin-de-siècle world of mosque lamps and oriental carpets; after his rebirth in the “good factory muck [with its] impasto of metallic shavings, useless sweats, and celestial shards,” he emerges as the new metallic man with a pulsing light-bulb heart: the prophet of a gospel addressed to all the living men on the earth whose points include “singing the love of danger,” “exalting aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the sprint, the mortal...

The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi

ERNST FALZEDER AND EVA BRABANT WITH THE COLLABORATION OF PATRIZIA GIAMPIERI-DEUTSCH (EDS.): The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi. Volume 2, pp. 1914-1919. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996, 395 pp., $46.95, ISBN 0-674-17419-4. This sad, poignant, and gripping collection of the correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi during World War is as fascinating and revealing a publication as one can imagine. Freud is often criticized for having blundered badly into a boundary crossing, demanding that Ferenczi choose between the two women he loved (a mother and her daughter, both of whom were his analysands!) by marrying the mother, who was eight years older than Ferenczi. This occurred at the same time Ferenczi was putatively an analysand of Freud's, having experienced some short periods on the couch representing this that Freud considered finished, not terminated, but rather broken off because of unfavorable circumstances (p. 153). The personalities of the two correspondents emerge dramatically in their letters. Ferenczi is mercurial, unstable, passionate and neurotic. He addresses Freud as Dear Professor; Freud in turn writes to him as Dear Friend. Freud is solid, stable and somewhat gloomy, as well as consistent, mature, and dedicated. His intense internal struggle to maintain a certain analytic distance from Ferenczi is quite manifest, while at the same time his need for the friendship and his appreciation for Ferenczi's warmth and devotion to him is apparent. All this occurs against the background of being on the losing side in World War I, with the miseries and frustrations that obviously entailed. Freud at one point had three sons in uniform and was very much worried about each of them; Ferenczi's career was continually disrupted by calls to serve as a military physician, a disruption that made it almost impossible for him to dedicate himself to psychoanalysis. He was so determined to continue this dedication that he even attempted to analyze his commanding officer while they were both on horseback, the first instance, as he puts it, of hippic psychoanalysis (p. 50). Given the background of this terrible war it is easier to empathize with the struggles of both Freud and Ferenczi to maintain some kind of stability and to continue a very human relationship that was sometimes one of an analyst and patient and sometimes one of an older with a younger friend. Freud has been much criticized for this vacillation, but without it am certain that both parties would have suffered greatly, and Ferenczi, the patient, most of all. Probably Freud's most glaring mistake was to write directly to Ferenczi's intended betrothed, conveying an offer of marriage at Ferenczi's request. In the outstanding introduction to this book by Axel Hoffer, it is suggested that Freud had, at least, an unconscious attraction to Ferenczi's betrothed himself, which might account for Freud's continual pressure on Ferenczi to marry her. This may or may not be so, but it does raise the issue of the status of Martha, Freud's wife. She is rarely referred to in this almost 400 page volume of correspondence, and when she is mentioned, it is in a rather disparaging manner by Freud, characterizing her as essentially a fuss-budget who has little tolerance of discomfort. For example, Freud writes, I don't dare bring my wife to an unknown second- or third-rate Hungarian spa. …

Tadeus Reichstein. 20 July 1897 — 1 August 1996

Tadeus Reichstein was born on 20 July 1897 in Wloclawek (in Russian Poland), the eldest of five sons of Jewish parents, Isidor Reichstein and Gustava Brochman (7)*. In Russia, in those days, only a small number of Jews were allowed to study at the technical high school in St Petersburg, and Tadeus's father, Isidor, considered himself extremely fortunate to have been selected. He received virtually no financial support, and in order to survive embarked on an austere self-disciplined routine, limiting his daily meal to one herring, black bread and water. After a while, he managed to earn a meagre pittance giving lessons in physics and mathematics to children of wealthy citizens. Despite hard times, he won a medal for his brilliant examination papers. After leaving school, Isidor moved to Kiev in the Ukraine, where he succeeded in founding his own business as a sugar-processing engineer and was able to marry. In 1904 the youngest brother, Paul, was born and the flat in Kiev proved too small to accommodate five boys, so Tadeus, as the eldest, was sent to live temporarily with his aunt, who was married to a Lublin pharmacist. Although only eight years old, Tadeus took a lively interest in the chemist shop, and his uncle encouraged him to assist in making pills, by rolling them by hand. On rejoining his family he turned his sleeping quarters into a ‘laboratory’ and he and a young friend spent all their spare time attempting to create silver from iron filings. It was his first attempt at alchemy. In 1905, violent pogroms occurred in Russia and the little boy heard the screams of the victims outside in the street and saw the wounded and dying, streaming with blood, dragged into their shop, while the mounted cossacks galloped past heedlessly. Tadeus recalled the atmosphere of terror, but he had never seen blood before and he remembered he found that very interesting.

Understanding mind and emotion: Longitudinal associations with mental-state talk between young friends.

Understanding mind and emotion: Longitudinal associations with mental-state talk between young friends.

Understanding mind and emotion: longitudinal associations with mental-state talk between young friends.

Developmental changes in children's understanding of mind and emotion and their mental-state talk in conversations with friends were examined in a longitudinal study of 50 children (M age at each time point = 3 years 11 months, 4 years 6 months, 5 years 0 months). Significant and related improvements over time were found for both theory-of-mind task performance and affective perspective taking. Associated with these cognitive developments were quantitative and qualitative changes in children's references to mental states in their conversations with friends. Individual differences in theory of mind, emotion understanding, and mental-state talk were strikingly stable over the 13-month period. Although there were no gender differences in children's task performances, girls showed more frequent and more developed mental-state talk than boys.

Descartes : An Intellectual Biography by Stephen Gaukroger

BOOK REVIEWS 157 that grace is a tertium quid that God uses to cause supernatural acts in human potencies, rather than the acts themselves. But if this is the case, then one can no longer appeal to divine transcendence, as Thomas did, to explain why graced human acts are free; for transcendence can be predicated only of God, not of any created reality. This is a technical issue, but a crucial one for maintaining the integrity of Thomas's synthesis. These complaints notwithstanding, the most important point to be made is that there is much to be learned from this very intelligent book. The author's insistence on the evidence for development in Thomas's understanding, his broad reading, his alertness to the interconnectedness of Thomas's ideas, and his willingness to grapple with the details of a text all combine to yield a wealth of insights. Wawrykow has gone a long way toward recovering the "essential spirit" (32) of Thomas's notion of merit, and any serious discussion of the doctrine of merit or of Thomas's theology of grace will have to come to terms with his achievement. Woodstock Theological Center Washington, D.C. J. MICHAEL STEBBINS Descartes : An Intellectual Biography. By STEPHEN GAUKROGER. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xx+ 499. $39.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper). ISBN 0-19-823994-7 (cloth), 0-19-823724-3 (paper). Those interested in the life of Descartes (1596-1650) are indebted to Adrien Baillet, his first major biographer, whose La vie de monsieur Descartes, 2 vols. (Paris, 1691) provided the details of Descartes's work, travels, friends, correspondents, and so on. We are fortunate too that despite trying circumstances so many of Descartes's letters and replies were preserved by devoted followers in the decades after his death. The French, obviously, celebrated their intellectual hero with regular editions of his writings across the centuries and we are also especially indebted to the editorship of Charles Adam and Paul Tannery for their monumental edition published as Oeuvres de Descartes, 13 vols. (Paris, 1897-1913; 2d ed., 11 vols., Paris, 1974-86). English biographies, as distinct from biographical introductions to a selection of his writings, have been infrequent this century. Elizabeth S. Haldane did a four-hundred-page study (London, 1905) which is most readable and is rich in personal details, though marred somewhat by a tendency to criticize the Catholic Church for insufficient intellectual freedom; Jack Rochford Vrooman published Rene Descartes: A Biography (New York, 1970) which made use of the enormous material French scholars had been 158 BOOK REVIEWS producing from the beginning of the century, and his study is balanced and readable, giving special attention to the relationship Descartes developed with his young friend and disciple, Princess Elizabeth of Palatine, who was living in exile in Holland in the 1640s. Vrooman's study is balanced in the sense that it contains the personal details of where Descartes lived and to whom he wrote, and yet these do not overwhelm the features of his philosophy. Now a different biography has appeared in time to celebrate the fourth centenary of his birth. Unlike previous studies it focuses on his scientific work in contrast to his metaphysics and epistemology. Stephen Gaukroger, a professor at the University of Sydney, and author of several other Cartesian studies, entitles his book Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. The title is appropriate but a more informative subtitle might have been "A Study of Descartes's Contribution to a New Version of Mechanistic Philosophy of Nature." The stages of Descartes's life and travels are not ignored, but the thrust of the work is to spend hundreds of pages working through works such as the Regulae and Le monde, works not published in Descartes's lifetime, analyzing and explaining everything Descartes was attempting as he developed an approach to natural phenomena that was both an alternative to Aristotelianism and a new and original version of the mechanism of the time. Where classical atomism proposed impenetrable particles of matter, Descartes proposed different-shaped corpuscles that mix and slide by each other in such a way they form the basis of everything from light to all the subtleties of the organic...

The Politics of Translation and Gender in the Countess of Pembroke's Antonie

The relationship of women writers to the art of translation is often acknowledged to be paradoxical, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the differing values attributed to women's and men's translation activities during the so-called 'golden age' of translation, the English Renaissance.1 In this period, translation was seen as a suitable activity for women on the basis of the assumed submission of the practitioner to the superior authority of the master-text. But, given the complex understanding of the cultural, political, and linguistic significance of translation current in the period's theory and practice of rhetoric and pedagogy, this is by no means the full picture. Formulations such as Nicholas Breton's in An Olde Mans Lesson (1605), where Chremes advises his young friend Pamphilius to set his restless wife to translation because 'it will keepe her from Idlenes, & it is a cunning kinde task',2 need to be placed in the context of Renaissance theories of translation, rather than taken as unproblematic evidence of how translations by women were read and understood. Such representations of the act of translation do not necessarily tell us very much about the meanings of translated texts undertaken by women; rather, they indicate that the assessment of translations, like that of other texts, is predicated on specific assumptions of value attached to the writer's gender. In the scene set up by Breton, translation is an agent of control, allied to the occupation of hands and minds by technical accomplishments such as needlework, spinning, and embroidery. The linkage of translation to repetitive craft, rather than to the rhetorically and politically motivated encounter between translator and text, is clearly indebted to an a priori assumption about the inability of women to take on the mantle of authorship: copious speech and public action were reckoned beyond them. In this scenario, women's translation activity is private and domestic, connected with the maintenance of household piety and virtue, in stark contrast to its status as the cornerstone of an entire pedagogic system of humanistic and linguistic training for men. Modern critics of Early Modern women's writing have been curiously reluctant to challenge the representations of women as translators found

Children's Comforting of Frightened Coviewers

Children in first to sixth grade recalled a time they had watched television with someone who became scared, described how (if at all) they comforted the coviewer, and rated other aspects of the viewing situation. Children also described how they would comfort a hypothetical friend, whose age (younger, peer) and sex (same, opposite) were varied. Finally, they completed a self-report measure of empathy. Comforting messages were coded for their level of sensitivity using a nine-level hierarchy employed by Burleson. As expected, empathy was positively related to comforting level in both situations. Comforting level also increased with grade level, but only for the hypothetical situation. Higher level comforting messages were suggested for same-sex peers, but comforting was unaffected by the younger friend's sex. Emotions played a significant role in the real situation, with higher level messages used by less frightened children and offered to more frightened coviewers.

Physician to the Gene Pool By James V. Neel (review)

not even with stuffed-up nostrils" (601). Finally, he told Ferenczi, "It seems to me that you are now using your analysis as a means of confusing your affairs, as you earlier used it to delay" (631). Overall Freud comes across in this correspondence as a worldly, settled, and sensible man with a deep and humane concern for his younger friend despite his clear awareness of the latter's foibles. In reply to Ferenczi 's idealization of him as Goethe-like, Freud confessed, "I have found in myself only one quality of the first rank, a kind of courage, which is unshaken by convention " (542). Ferenczi underwent three brief periods of analysis with Freud, and much of the correspondence underscores the very different boundary between analytic communication and personal relationships that existed in the early days of psychoanalysis and that exist now. When Ferenczi begged Freud to arrange analytic hours for him during a vacation which Ferenczi planned to spend in Vienna visiting Freud, the latter agreed to reserve two analytic hours daily. He went on, "I also hope to see much of you otherwise, and you should at least have one meal with us daily. Technique at least will require that nothing personal will be discussed outside the sessions " (611). The point is especially important because Ferenczi was to go on to interest himself in experiments with mutual analysis between patient and analyst and in the role of traumatic experience, notably childhood sexual abuse, in the formation of neurosis. In current psychoanalytic thinking, childhood trauma in the analysand isjudged an important factor in bringing about violations of proper therapeutic boundaries. From today's vantage, Ferenczi's analytic arrangement with Freud, his affair with Elma Palos, Freud's analysis of his own daughter Anna, and other such matters alluded to in the letters seem to range from errors of technique to reprehensible ethical lapses. Reading the correspondence provides a perspective on our current views and standards in statu nascendi. Ferenczi's importance to Freud is shown clearly in these letters: "I am swimming in satisfaction, I am lighthearted, knowing that my problem child, my life's work, is protected and preserved for the future by your participation and that of others" (759). For the specialist reader, the correspondence provides essential glimpses of the development of psychoanalysis and of the personalities of its founder and one of his most important early adherents. Fred Ovsiew Chief, Clinical Neuropsychiatry Medical Director, Adult Inpatient Psychiatry Department ofPsychiatry MC 3077 University of Chicago Hospitals 5841 S. Maryland Chicago, IL 60637 Physician to the GenePool. ByJames V. Neel. New York: John Wiley, 1994. Pp. 457. $24.95. I have long believed that almost all of the experiments in the biological sciences have already been done by Nature. Scientists find or stumble their way to these experiments. Just as we believe that we have answers, Nature presents more ques456 Book Reviews tions. James Neel unknowingly prepared for an event that was not supposed to happen: atomic bombs exploding over two major cities. The possible effects oflongterm radiation on a large human population in or near Chernobyl's fallout will draw on his team's contributions to the effect of radiation on future generations. Voles occupying the same area have shown an obvious increase in mitochondrial (and presumably nuclear) DNA damage. Neel had a charmed career. From the coincidence of moving to Wooster, Ohio, where he could walk to Wooster College and an independent research project mentored by an outstanding Drosophila geneticist, Warren Spencer, Neel went to the University of Rochester for a doctoral degree in genetics with Curt Stern. After a postdoctoral experience at Columbia University and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory , he decided a doctor would be more useful than a geneticist in an anticipated war. After thorough training in genetics and a medical degree, Neel was probably the most qualified geneticist to evaluate the effects of A-bomb radiation on the progeny of the exposed inhabitants of the two cities. Although the expected surge ofmutants has not yet appeared, the procedures and record keeping by the commission will have value in the future and certainly in monitoring the population exposed to Chernobyl's radiation. After...