The House of Difference,or White Silence

In this article I track three ways of confronting the question of whiteness and its attendant problematic of racism. I look at two personal episodes one involving inheritances from white explorer forebearers and the place of racism in fetishized objects and second in the institutional difficulties within psychoanalysis in finding ways to speak about race and the dilemma of being a beneficiary of racism. Finally I look at the hidden racism in a much lauded psychoanalytic article, Joan Riviere's (1929 Riviere , J. ( 1929 ). Womanliness as a masquerade . International Journal of Psychoanalysis , 9 , 303 – 313 . [Google Scholar]) “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” and in the light of these three problems speculate on “whiteness.” I argue that the intergenerational transmissions of guilt and disavowal together leave a blank psychic space that makes an authentic expression of racial consciousness and genuine reparation currently difficult and certainly, even if well intentioned, partially compromised.     

Cybernetic Hasidism: An Essay on Social and Religious Change*

This paper employs a cybernetic model of a religious symbol system to explain the competition among Rabbinists, Hasidim, and Messianists in the Jewish communities of eighteenth-century Poland. Hasidism's ability to attract adherents is explained by the great flexibility of its constitutive belief, “communion with God”when compared with Rabbinic Torah or the Messianic belief in the “lifting of sparks.” This flexibility is traced through all levels of the cybernetic hierarchy.     

Cybernetic appropriateness review: Does it change physician hospital utilization patterns?

All hospital care can be characterized as either appropriate (i.e., efficatious and necessary) or inappropriate (i.e., services without benefit or services that could be provided in a less costly setting). A demonstration project combining an appropriateness determination methodology with a cybernetic control system was implemented in a study area that included six hospitals and approximately 400 practicing physicians. Project results to date indicate substantial improvements in the ratio of appropriate to inappropriate care for both hospitals and individual physicians. Evaluation research design problems and areas of future research are also discussed.     

Difference and Diversity:

Some therapists believe that they should treat gay and lesbian couples ôjust like heterosexual couples.ö Others hold the view that same-sex couples are completely different from heterosexual couples and that only specially trained therapist can work with them. This paper is an attempt to over come the lack of information about gay and lesbian couple by describing the differences between heterosexual couples and homosexual couples; differences between gay couples and lesbian couples; diversity within both lesbian couples and gay couples; and the therapeutic implications of these differences. The discussion of differences has powerful political implications and is embedded within a larger context of belief systems about gender and sexual orientation. Therapist needs to protect against categorizing, essentializing, or over generalizing about gay and lesbian couples. Although heterosexism, homophobia, and sexism affect the dynamics of all gay and lesbian relationships, it is important to recognize that age, class, race, ethnicity, and physical ability, as well as the dynamics of each individual couple, make each relationship unique. The therapist, whether lesbian, gay, bisexual, or heterosexual, should be familiar with issues specific to lesbian and gay experience within the dominant society, and, at the same time, be attuned to the idiosyncratic nature of individual couples.     

The Kids Are All White: Examining Race and Representation in News Media Coverage of Opioid Overdose Deaths in Canada

Problematic opioid use in Canada is on the rise, and opioid overdose deaths now number in the thousands each year. While opioids have long been responsible for overdoses among certain demographics of Canadians, such as drug users on Vancouver's notoriously impoverished downtown Eastside, it is only recently that fatal overdoses have also claimed the lives of White, middle-class young people. This critical discourse analysis of Canadian news media examines the differences in racial representation in recent coverage of opioid deaths. I pay particular attention to the ways in which White opioid users are portrayed as innocent victims while other users, such as those from Indigenous communities, are often ignored or stigmatized as “addicts.” I draw on the work of Hall (1978; 2000) and Reinarman and Levine (1989; 2004) on the role of media in representing race and constructing drug scares, to frame the media narratives. I then discuss the Canadian government's current harm-reduction approach to the opioid crisis, as well as calls from Indigenous leaders for “culture as treatment.”     

Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Models: Blending Gestalt and Family Therapies

Family therapy is primarily focused upon interpersonal or transactional issues. Its major contributions have been in the development of communication analysis, communication opening techniques, and in illuminating group responsibility in the creation of an identified patient. Work with individual or subsystem boundaries has received far less attention. Gestalt therapy is particularly well suited for short term work on intrapersonal and boundary issues (Hatcher and Himelstein, 1976). The focus of this paper is to show how the selective integration of the two approaches provides a significant, new dimension in the development of family therapy.     

Decentering and Family Process: A Marriage of Cognitive Therapies*

Using the concept of decentering, as formulated by Piaget, to describe how the child comes to understand his impersonal world, the author has extended the concept to understand family patterns. After describing decentering, he shows how it can be used with Rational Emotive Therapy and Transactional Analysis, both cognitively oriented therapies. These theoretical ideas have served as the basis for a cognitive model of therapy which the author calls TARET Systems, a major goal of which is the increasing of awareness through shifting perspective on oneself and others.     

Dilemmas of Difference:

This paper examines the contemporary intersection of postmodernism and feminist theories of gender difference. Three strategic forms for posing the relationship between western feminism and the Enlightenment legacy of humanistic rationalism are examined: feminist rationalism, feminine antirationalism, and feminist postrationalism, and feminist postrationalism. It is argued that the theoretical rigor of postrationalism. It is argued that the theoretical rigor of postrationalism is obtained at the cost of a deracinated politics, while themore tangible political appeals of rationalism and antirationalism reproduce mirrored naive accounts of the relationship between women and modern western culture. The aim of this paper isto open up, rather than to resolve, questions concerning the relationship between feminism, modernity, and postmodern theory.     

“Being Raised by White People”: Navigating Racial Difference Among Adopted Multiracial Adults

There are increasing numbers of multiracial families created through marriage, adoption, birth, and a growing population of multiracial persons. Multiracials are a hidden but dominant group of transracially adopted children in both the United Kingdom and the United States. This paper introduces findings from an interpretive study of 25 transracially adopted multiracials regarding a set of experiences participants called “being raised by White people.” Three aspects of this experience are explored: (1) the centrality yet absence of racial resemblance, (2) navigating discordant parent‐child racial experiences, and (3) managing societal perceptions of transracial adoption. Whereas research suggests some parents believe race is less salient for multiracial children than for Black children, this study finds participants experienced highly racialized worlds into adulthood.     

African American and White Managers:

Research points to differences in the experiences and response of African Americans and whites to organizational situations. This paper presents the results of a study which investigated differences in the management styles in eight local social service agency offices managed by African Americans and eight managed by whites. When the environment was turbulent, white managers responded by becoming more supportive of staff, while African American managers increased problem-solving communications. Staff in African American offices in turbulent environments had higher levels of job satisfation than either white offices of African Americans in nonturbulent environments.     

Race Lessons in Black and White: How White Adoptive Parents Socialize Black Adoptees in Predominately White Communities

This article examines the approaches, strategies, and perspectives that White adoptive parents use to teach their adopted Black children about coping with race-based discrimination and the development of a positive racial identity. Using qualitative methods and the theoretical construct of White racial framing, the authors identify and critically analyze themes in the parents' race lessons. The central aim of this article is to uncover how these race lessons position family members to either challenge or perpetuate historical, racial inequities and mistreatment faced by African Americans and other communities of color within US society.     

The Art of the State: Difference and other Abstractions

Abstract This article explores the role of othering and the social sciences in Italian State formation through a historical sociology of the state. The mapping of particular forms of others in popular imagination including 'vagrants','beggars', and 'gypsies', in the nineteenth century resonates with contemporary state projects which seek to document and identify new "alien" newcomer groups. The official document, an integral part of a technology of state power constitutes a kind of "cosmology", with whole social orders, classes and others codified in each line entry. The state designates absolute definitions of places, bodies and things. In 1885 the first medical survey of Italy sought to map out the "medical geography" of the nation, such practices laid the ground work for conceptions of normalcy and difference. The definition of the 'average citizen' is an integral part of the construction of State as Cosmos. Difference and its mapping in its interplay with "normalcy" defines in many ways, the State. yet there can be no taken-for-granted submission of the subaltern classes to this state cosmos, nor to the practices of the social sciences complicit in its construction.