Intimate partner violence: An application of attachment theory

ABSTRACT

Attachment theory has gained increased prominence over the past several decades in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and social work. Attachment theory, however, has not been systematically applied to intimate partner violence (IPV), a phenomenon that disproportionately affects women in poverty. This article provides an overview of IPV as a social problem, reviews existing literature related to the application of attachment theory to IPV, discusses the theory’s strengths and limitations in understanding and resolving IPV, and considers areas for future knowledge development.     

A qualitative exploration of positive psychology concepts in the film Wadjda and implications for future research

ABSTRACT

Positive psychology has often used both fictional and nonfictional examples to describe positive traits and outcomes. However, a film’s contribution to understanding of experiences has been rather underresearched in positive psychology literature. Although researchers in areas including journalism and film studies have conducted such investigations over the years, positive psychologists are yet to pursue this actively. This article is an attempt to explore positive psychology concepts displayed in the film Wadjda through thematic analysis. The film is about the life of an ordinary girl who displays positive outcomes under circumstances that might have overwhelmed others. This article focuses on the journey of the characters in the film and attempts to identify positive psychology features in the story. Although all characters portrayed in the film are shown to be undergoing some challenge, they are depicted as handling their life circumstances in a healthy manner. The story radiates positivity and fits Niemiec’s criteria of a positive psychology film. The article concludes by highlighting the need to conduct research on positive psychology films and its application in different areas.     

Curative fictions: The ‘narrative cure’ in Judith Herman's trauma and recovery and Chantal Chawaf's Le Manteau noir

Abstract

The possibility of a so‐called ‘narrative cure’, whereby a survivor of traumatic experience can begin to deal with her past through integrating it into narrative, has become central both to psychotherapy and to literary criticism on writings of trauma as a means of ethical, ‘truthful’ testimony and of healing. This article seeks to question the correlation between testimony and ‘cure’ through analysing the function of the ‘narrative cure’ in a psychotherapeutic text and in a literary text. This highlights how any notion of ‘truthful’ testimony is always underwritten by fiction, which raises crucial ethical questions about the relation between fiction and ‘truth’, testimony and ‘cure’ and psychotherapy and literature. I argue that the ‘narrative cure’ is not a privileged space of curative ‘truth’, but a point of tension between memory and amnesia and between ‘truth’ and fiction; it is precisely this tension, I suggest, which should characterize and structure interdisciplinary responses to trauma.     

Hermeneutics and Discourse: Further Reflections on Designer Babies

Abstract

A previous article demonstrated a consensus about denying permission for the cosmetic genetic manipulation of human embryos (Rettig, 2008). The present article raises this very complex issue again but from a more in-depth perspective, both theoretical and discursive. Participants discussed the issue from more diverse views, and did not come to a definitive consensus, thereby raising the question of the social reality or “truth” about the morality of the issue.     

Post-modernism,truth and social work

Abstract

In this article, I suggest that social workers should be servants and seekers of truth and that they should do their utmost to re-legitimise the quest for truth in social life and professional practice. I hold that while post-modernism must be applauded for its incisive critique of the totalising tendency' of the quest for truth, especially when fuelled by passionate ideological conviction, yet its forthright rejection of truth itself has had disastrous social consequences and serious deleterious effects on professional practice in social work. Over the last two decades or so, the baby (truth] has been recklessly thrown out with the bath water (totalistic Ideologies) and the consequences have been sorely felt in society, in the personal lives of individuals, in the human service professions as a whole and in social work, especially of course in the writings and professional practice of those who have enthusiastically embraced post-modernism. I also suggest, however, that social work needs to take full advantage of the insights of post-modernism (and especially of Foucault) in order to avoid falling into a totalistic chasm' as the profession pursues its own quest for truth.     

A Brief History of the Theory of Evolution

Abstract

A brief history of evolutionary theory illustrates its long development and sociopolitical context. Major theoretical concepts in evolutionary theory are introduced that lay the groundwork for more detailed discussion in later texts. Two incarnations of evolutionary theory—sociobiology and evolutionary psychology—are described in some detail. Criticisms of these ideas are reviewed and evaluated. Evolutionary psychology, with its emphasis on sexual selection theory, has proven to be a rich approach, generating many new insights into human sexuality.     

(In)credible Violence: An Analysis of Post-Alvarado Domestic Violence Asylum Cases in the United States

ABSTRACT

Every year, women from around the world apply for asylum in the United States to escape an abusive partner. In this article I find that domestic violence applicants may not be interpreted as viable truth tellers since they are missing specific markers of credibility, including legitimacy of fear, coherence and corroboration, and proof of no culpability. I link these questions of credibility to broader US discourses about gender-based violence and racialized conceptions of victimhood, which show a preference for credentialed knowledge over women’s experiences and employ assumptions about autonomous, linear decision-making. I argue that the deployment of these discourses represents a tactic of exclusion, likely motivated by fears of immigration. Asylum adjudication practices (including credibility determinations) must address these issues in order to secure the health and well-being of women fleeing abusive partners in their countries of origin.     

The Genetic Aspects of Criminality

Abstract

This article considers the recent research carried out to assign responsibility to the importance of genetics as compared with environmental influences and other aspects such as neurological damage to an individual, which makes them susceptible to criminal type behaviour. While there is currently no gene directly linked to criminality, there are genes that are responsible for such functions as aggressiveness and impulsiveness to some degree. The area is currently undergoing considerable influence and investigation with research being carried out in seeking to deal with such diseases as cancer and a variety of mental illnesses.

It is currently impossible to assign major responsibility for criminal behaviour and those traits leading to criminal behaviour through either genetics or the environment since both appear to be involved. Neurological damage, pre-natal and post-natal, as well as accidents which affect the brain tissue and many other factors are likely to predispose certain individuals to criminal behaviour. All these factors interact with one another in a variety of permutations.

We will need to wait and see what other evidence is presented through the research regarding genes being responsible for criminal behaviour by which is generally meant violent and aggressive behaviour rather than white collar crimes. A major effort should currently be directed towards preventing brain damage and other neurological problems as well as dealing with families that are likely to be prone to producing children of anti-social, aggressive, and violent behaviour. In addition to the home setting, schools, society and the mass media can do much to prevent criminal demeanour as well as the preventive aspects through the police and the courts. It is almost certain that currently forensic psychology and psychiatry are unlikely to be able to rely on genetic aspects in defence of clients and their anti-social behaviour. Time and further research into the influence of genes may modify this viewpoint.     

The logic of sacrifice in the book of job: Philosophy and the practice of religion

Abstract

The relation between truth and violence is explored through the logic of sacrifice presented in the Book of Job. Job, as an arbitrary sacrificial victim, learns the truth of the violence perpetrated against him. Such violence is also shown to be constitutive of Western reasoning, including its practices of the truth.     

The Living and the Dead in Education: Commentary on Julian Williams

ABSTRACT

Vygotsky and Ilyenkov were like-minded in their desire to create a materialistic psychology. They were also brought together by the understanding that their dream can be realized only on the basis of Spinozism. However, both theorists understood Spinoza differently. Ilyenkov considered the core of Spinozism to be the principle of object-oriented activity (materialistic monism). By contrast, Vygotsky tried to deduce his theory from the idea of affect, understanding affect not as a subject-oriented activity, but as independent “psychological” entity. Thus, instead of the desired new “Spinozian psychology,” Vygotsky involuntary returned to the classical understanding of life as a mechanical process.     

Jurisdictional Competition and the Psychoanalytic Dominance of American Psychiatry

Despite constituting only a small fraction of all psychiatrists, psychoanalysts rose to a position of dominance within American psychiatry in the post-World War Two era. This article explains their success. A review of the social and institutional context of psychoanalysis and psychiatry reveals that many factors were actually unfavorable to psychoanalysis, and several others were at best equivocal in their support of analysis. Neither income, status, the relationship between institutions and ideology, or other such factors accounts for the success. After describing these factors and showing how they do not work as explanations, I argue that psychoanalysis succeeded largely because of its utility to the psychiatric profession in the growing jurisdictional disputes with non-medical competitors, specifically clinical psychology.     

There is No Place Like Home: The Body as the Scene of the Crime in Sexual Assault Intervention

ABSTRACT

“The body is the scene of the crime,” is an oft-repeated phrase among nurses conducting sexual assault forensic examinations. This instruction reminds nurses that the object under scrutiny, the sexually violated body, is the location and source of establishing legal evidence. The nurses' interest lies in recovering evidentiary materials towards deriving a future juridical truth and providing a means for remedy or restitution. The constitution of truth obscures how the subject comes to be at home and dwell in a world where rape occurs. This article argues that regarding the body as a crime scene is more than a rhetorical or pedagogical move made by forensic practitioners. Rather, forensic examination is constituted through rigorous and meticulous techniques that scrutinize the body of the sexually violated subject in such a way that the harming and healing capacities of the domestic are disarticulated from one another. What is at stake is the state's reliance on a notion of the domestic as a sphere to which one might return and heal, even in instances where the domestic itself is the source or site of injury, such as incest and domestic violence.     

The urban psychology of Stanley Milgram

Abstract

Although his obedience research will always remain Stanley Milgram's most important work, his involvement with the social psychology of the city occupied a much larger portion of his professional career. This article traces the evolution and intensification of Milgram's interest in cities, starting with his pre-professional years, through his early research at Harvard, culminating in his multifaceted engagement with urban psychology at the Graduate Center of CUNY. There, as head of the social psychology program, he was able to infuse it with an urban emphasis. He created and taught a variety of courses on urban psychology and got his students involved in a potpourri of experiments comparing behavior in cities and towns. Those experiments provided much of the substance for Milgram's seminal article in Science, “The experience of living in cities,” in which he also introduced the theoretical concept of stimulus overload to help account for the city-small town differences he and his students found. This article evaluates the overload concept and concludes with Milgram's overarching legacy for the study of city life.     

Human Inquiry Systems: Understanding Everyday Social Life And Its Stresses

Abstract

Ever since the rise of modern psychology questions arose as to how to scientifically study human behavior, whether from a socio-cultural perspective (geisteswissenschftlich) or by means of a more rigorous (positive) approach. However once psychology was defined as the study of behavior, it included animal behavior, and the positive approach became the dominant orientation in academic psychology, which made little differentiation between the methods employed in studying man or animal in the laboratories. This article examines the underlying proposition of these two paradigms, including their critical shortcomings and offers a complementary, more humanistic alternative to the study of human behavior, namely hermeneutics and discursive psychology. It will be argued that these alternatives offer a deeper understanding of human actions in a situated field because they attempts to take into account the motives and aims of people's conduct. Ultimately this approach attempts to assess a person's sense of social reality (in addition to the reality of a physical word) in the hope that a dialectic synthesis of laboratory research and hermeneutic understanding will lead to the manifestation of a greater emancipatory interests.     

Against memory-as-remedy to the traumatic aftermaths of Nigeria-Biafra war past: whither justice?

ABSTRACT

This article examines recent scholarship proposing the use of memory practice to remedy the traumatic aftermaths of Nigeria-Biafra War past. The assumption sustained in this scholarship is that through certain cultural memory practices such as truth commissions and commemorative rituals some form of appeasement might be reached regarding the extent of subsistence of that traumatic past. We fault these scholarly claims proposing memory as panacea to mass injustices and tragedies. In addition to the problematic proposals for using memory to remedy past atrocities in Nigeria, we observe that the question of justice is either absent or construed sometimes vaguely as one and the same with memorialisation. Accordingly, this paper further explores the place of justice in (and its implications for) this recent scholarship on Nigeria-Biafra War past. By inserting and centralising questions of justice in the discourse of that war, we seek to rethink the assumptions of memory practice as a remedy to past atrocities in Nigeria. The underlying argument of our discussion is that not only does the emphasis on memory diminish the political nature of the conflict but also that resort to memory indicates a continued reluctance to address the fundamental questions of political in/justice in Nigeria.     

An Evaluation of Simulations in Developmental Disabilities (SIDD): Instructional Software that Provides Practice in Behavioral Assessment and Treatment Decisions

ABSTRACT

Simulations in Developmental Disabilities (SIDD) is a multimedia computer program designed to provide undergraduate psychology students with practice in making assessment and treatment decisions. Eighteen undergraduate psychology students participated in an experiment to test the instructional effectiveness of SIDD. Post-test scores were significantly higher in the experimental group who received training with SIDD than in a control group who did not receive training. The students also rated the software positively. Future strategies to further evaluate the software are discussed.     

Refashioning a Passionate Manager: Gender at Work

Despite what has been historically recognized as the masculinity of the credentials required for successful business life, contemporary managers now face new challenges. They are required to be caring and relationship‐oriented. The traditional masculine/feminine hierarchy of logic/emotion is being reshaped by the imperative to be ‘passionate’ in the workplace. This article argues that a new gendered truth plays an important part in the ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 131) that shapes current organizational life. This truth, championed by feminists to distinguish women's contribution to social life, forms part of our understanding of what it means to be a successful manager. To achieve success in the current environment managers must be, not just rational, but passionate about their work. The article provides readings of a range of texts to establish the centrality of gender and its relationship to contemporary postmodern discourses about change and difference in management practice. The article articulates both some of the new freedoms and constraints for managers. It also elaborates some of the mechanisms whereby this gendered truth reconfirms the traditional masculine/feminine hierarchy.

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Mimesis,narrative and subjectivity in the work of Girard and Ricoeur

Abstract

While Ricoeur wishes to relate the concept of narrative to identity and ethics, Girard sees the development of ethical conscience in myth. This paper examines this difference, arguing that the implicitly universal human nature that he posits, driven by mimetic desire, compromises subjectivity as narrative identity, as developed in Ricoeur's work. This paper attempts to read Girard alongside Ricoeur, in order to suggest that there is a problematic tension implicit in Guard's work between subjectivity and drive. To do this, I describe Ricoeur's understanding of mimesis and how this is related to truth and narrative identity. Then turning to Girard, I show how his linking of violence to truth repudiates the possibility of the attestation of truth as subjectivity.