The duty to care and the need to split

This paper arises out of psychoanalytically oriented consultancy to teams of staff in the helping professions where there is a statutory 'duty to care'. It takes as its premise the seemingly paradoxical hypothesis that workers may need to split off part of their emotional experience in order to preserve their own mental health and provide reliable services to their clients. I argue that while a professional 'duty to care' requires us to be emotionally 'in touch', the demands of our clients together with the demands of the institutional response to the 'duty to care' cause us to split off parts of our awareness. I also argue that provided the splitting does not become extreme we are doing no more or less than the rest of society. In other words, there is a degree of 'normal splitting' which numbs our awareness of danger and destructiveness and seeks to protect us from too much anxiety and pain. Yet if professional workers are charged with the responsibility of assessing risk and acting accordingly for the protection of all concerned they need ways of being 'in touch' (re-integrating the splits) for some or enough of the time. Finally, I will describe ways of being 'in touch', illustrating the difficulty and the pain of re-integrating the splits and some of the insights that can arise out of this work with examples from my consultancy work.     

Power and Shame: Reply to Mark Blechner and to Ruth Stein

I touch briefly on my own experience of shame as triggered by what my discussants have written. I look at how shame and power interact in psychoanalytic discourse, examine their play in relation to questions of aggression and activity, and refer as well to what I am calling “an ethics of relativism.” Cautioning against uncritical binary thinking, I conclude that, if we forget the intimacy of good and bad, we are going to write jouissance, that site of extremity and transcendence where pain and pleasure are indistinguishable, right out of our sexual lives. And, if we do that, we are once again going to write sexuality out of psychoanalysis.     

Using Photovoice to Empower Youth and Adults to Prevent Crime

Photovoice empowers residents to use photographs to identify neighborhood concerns. Although Photovoice has been used to facilitate dialogue and action among residents to address a variety of issues, including neighborhood crime, it has not been used as part of an intervention to promote collective efficacy. This project integrated Photovoice into a crime-prevention program the goal of which was to facilitate collective efficacy, which. in turn, has been associated with lower levels of neighborhood crime and violence. Twenty-four racially diverse youth and adults participated in a crime-prevention training where Photovoice was used first to identify neighborhood characteristics that participants believed contributed to and alleviated crime, and then to develop a community project. Participants worked together to reuse a highly visible vacant lot to create an inviting neighborhood art and garden space that was open to the whole community. This process facilitated stronger social ties among neighborhood residents, as well as strategies for intervening in neighborhood problems, both of which are important components of collective efficacy.     

A note on willingness to pay and willingness to accept

In a recent paper Loehman (1991) derives some relationships between measures of benefit for nonmarket goods. This note presents some remarks on Loehman's methodology, several results, if the good considered is normal, and an extension to the case of pollution, i.e. public bads.I would like to thank an unknown referee for helpful comments.     

Organizational Capital and Joining-up: Linking the Individual to the Organization and to Society

Do employees ever make efforts on behalf oftheir employing organization's interests or fellowemployees' interests when it is not in their directself-interest to do so? By drawing on organizationalbehavior literature relating to the joining-up process,organizational commitment, and organizationalcitizenship behavior, and integrating these insightswith economic theory, this article provides a newexplanation of why employees' efforts are typicallysuboptimal and what organizational activities canresolve this problem. The key variable explainingwhether organization members behave responsibly or notis the presence of organizational capital formedeither during the joining-up process or in preparationfor it.     

借亚运"东风":艺术与竞技相结合发扬平民运动

端午节赛龙舟是我国的民间传统习俗,在珠三角一带,这一传统文化不仅源远流长,更需不断推陈出新,例如"龙舟说唱"等艺术都是这一带特有的.推广龙舟,目前要做的就是将艺术与竞技相结合,大力发展这项平民运动.     

Reply to Tomlinson and Bisschop

The notion of the devolution of power from central to regional and local levels is gaining popularity across a wide front as a point of departure ‐ a rudimentary strategy ‐ to conceptualise ways in which South African society can be transformed. The South African government has contributed to this exercise by launching a process of establishing Regional Services Councils, new multi‐racial metropolitan and ‘areawide’ bodies outside South African ‘homelands’. This article identifies and analyses the stances of the most important opposition political actors operating legally on the South African stage to the establishment of these new bodies. These actors range from the right‐wing white parties ‐ the CP and the HNP‐to AZAPO and the UDF. Three general stances to this government‐initiated process are identified, and its chances for success are assessed.     

Goodbye to sex and gender

The sociological distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ has been paradigmatic for twenty years and is still taken for granted within the discipline. However it is a distinction that will no longer serve. Doubts about its continued usefulness surfaced as a result of a variety of influences. This paper refers specifically to the history of sex and to recent work in genetics in order to demonstrate that sex, like gender is a discursive construction. I argue that the sex/gender problematic is wrong to assume biological differences are naturally given and that sex cannot operate as a natural base in a theory of difference.