Rescue Fantasies in Child Therapy: Countertransference/Transference Enactments

When the focus of the child treatment is on the therapist being a good object, this can accentuate a possible countertransference difficulty of the therapist becoming the protector of the child from the bad object. This countertransference can often resonate with rescue fantasies in the child. This paper will explore the topic of rescue fantasies in child treatment, while addressing the issue of coinciding fantasies existing unconsciously in both the therapist and child, leading to their enactment. A case of a nine-year old boy is presented which demonstrates how interpretation and resolution of rescue fantasies can lead to a deepening of the treatment.     

Social factors in facial display and communication: A reply to Chovil and others

This paper discusses the Chovil (1991) study, questioning the assumption that the notion of facial display as communication is incompatible with that of facial display as readout of motivational/emotional response. It is argued that (a) the Chovil paper oversimplifies the view of the competition; (b) social factors can facilitateor inhibit expression depending upon the nature of the emotion being expressed and the expressor's personal relationship with the other; and (c) social factors produce strong social emotions, so that any manipulation of sociality must also manipulate emotion.Preparation of this paper was supported in part by NIMH grant MH-40753 to Ross Buck, and by the University of Connecticut Research Foundation.     

Predatory,developmental, and other apparatuses: A comparative political economy perspective on the Third World state

Disappointment over the contributions of Third World state apparatuses to industrial transformation and the increasing intellectual dominance of neoutiliarian paradigms in the social science has made if fashionable to castigate the Third World state as predatory and rent seeking. This paper argues for a more differentiated view, one that connects differences in performance to differences in state structure. The incoherent absolutist domination of the klepto-patrimonial Zairian state are contrasted to the embedded autonomy of the East Asian developmental state. Then the internal structure and external ties of an intermediate state — Brazil — are analyzed in relation to both polar types. The comparative evidence suggests that the efficacy of the developmental state depends on a meritocratic bureaucracy with a strong sense of corporate identity and a dense set of institutionalized links to private elites.     

Community-based management of psychotic clients: The contributions of D. W. and Clare Winnicott

While the term management connotes images of impersonal care, D. W. Winnicott repeatedly used this term to describe the responsive environmental holding that is central to all human development. Influenced by observations of how normal mothers and families address the physical and psychic needs of children, he and his wife, Clare, a distinguished British social worker, operationalized this concept in finding and supporting facilitating environments with a wide range of disturbed children and adults. Using case material from a contemporary community program for the mentally ill, this paper will review the Winnicotts' important, but often neglected, perspectives on the environmental management of psychotic adults.Presented at the Washington School of Psychiatry, January 14, 1989. I would like to thank Janice Quiter and the Archives of Psychiatry of The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center for their assistance in researching the D. W. Winnicott collection.     

Muddying the Waters Does Not Have to Entail Erosion: Ecological Feminist Concerns with Purity

Ecofeminists call attention to the associations that have been made between woman and nature, which can operate as a source of both subjugation and resistance, exploitation, and inspiration. This paper expands upon feminist critiques of purity by phrasing these concerns in an ecological feminist perspective. This theoretical exercise of problematizing the ideal of purity sheds light upon the intersections of human and nonhuman oppression. Preservationist work has tended to employ the logic of purity by focusing on protection of the purity of the wild regions of the earth from the polluting forces of humanity. However, such approaches retain the troublesome nature/culture dualism. The author illustrates how attempts to fragment and radically separate people from the environment can prove to be highly dangerous. She connects the theoretical resistance to purity to the important activist work that is being done to expose environmental racism. Finally, she discusses how muddying the waters and resisting the logic of purity can offer a promising approach to pressing problems revolving around the intersections of human and nonhuman oppression.     

Intensive child case management: Work roles and activities

This paper presents findings from a project undertaken to explore the implementation of one rural state's intensive child case management program for families with children with severe emotional and behavioral disabilities. Interviews with 20 child case management staff were conducted for the purpose of describing perceived work roles and activities. Thematic and content analysis of staff interviews revealed differences in staff perceptions regarding the role of the case manager, the ideal work activities of the case manager, and the barriers to achieving the ideal work activities. The discussion focuses on social work practice and policy implications for the provision of intensive child case management programs, and provides recommendations for areas of further inquiry.     

Seeding Science,Courting Conclusions: Reexamining the Intersection of Science,Corporate Cash,and the Law

Social scientists have expressed strong views on corporate influences over science, but most attention has been devoted to broad, Black/White arguments, rather than to actual mechanisms of influence. This paper summarizes an experience where involvement in a lawsuit led to the discovery of an unexpected mechanism: A large corporation facing a multibillion-dollar court judgment quietly provided generous funding to well-known scientists (including at least one Nobel prize winner) who would submit articles to open, peer-reviewed journals, so that their unbiased science could be cited in an appeal to the Supreme Court. On balance, the corporations most effective techniques of influence may have been provided not by overt pressure, but by encouraging scientists to continue thinking of themselves as independent and impartial.This is a revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Atlanta, GA, August 2003.     

Disagreement point monotonicity,transfer responsiveness,and the egalitarian bargaining solution

This paper provides an axiomatization of the egalitarian bargaining solution. The central axiom used (together with some standard properties of bargaining solutions) in this characterization is a transfer responsiveness condition. First, it ensures that no transfer paradox can occur if bargaining power is transferred from one agent to another by decreasing one agent's and increasing the other agent's component of the disagreement point. Second, the extent of external effects of such a transfer is limited by requiring that agents not involved in the transfer neither gain more than the winner nor lose more than the loser of the transfer. Journal of Economic Literature Classification No.: C78.I thank William Thomson whose comments on an earlier version led to substantial improvements.     

Beyond the nature/society divide: Learning to think about a mountain

Sociological efforts to understand environment-society relationships fall primarily into four conceptual categories. The first three, involving analytical separation, analytical primacy, and balanced dualism, all draw distinctions between biophysical and social aspects of human experience, with subsequent analyses being based on thesea priori distinctions. The fourth or constructivist approach questions this naturalized dichotomy, calling attention instead to mutual contingency or conjoint constitution: What we take to be physical facts are likely to be strongly shaped by social construction processes, and at the same time, what we take to be strictly social will often have been shaped in part by taken-for-granted realities of the physical world. Technology offers important opportunities for tracing these interconnections, being an embodiment of both the physical and the social. The point is illustrated with a long-term historical analysis of a specific physiographic feature—a mountain—that has undergone little overtphysical change over the centuries, but has undergone repeated changes in its social meanings and uses. Few of the changes would have been possible in the absence of the mountain's physiographic characteristics; similarly, few would have occurred in the absence of changing sociocultural definitions and possibilities. The challenge for sociology is not just to recognize the importance of both the physical and the social factors, and certainly not to argue over the relative importance of the two, but to recognize the extent to which what we take to be physical and social factors can be conjointly constituted.The paper's subtitle is intended as a tribute to Aldo Leopold and to one of his most famous essays (1949).     

The paradox of Durkheim's manifesto: Reconsidering The Rules of Sociological Method

Conclusion In summary, my three formulations of Durkheim's The Rules of Sociological Method as a manifesto have progressively found it to be epistemologically and pedagogically embedded in its object of scientific interest. In the first and most limited formulation, Durkheim's text was a violent and strategic preparation for his vision of sociology, that laid its grounds, but was ultimately inessential to sociological practice itself. It marked what he hoped was a historical rupture in western thought, after which true sociological reason could get underway. In my second formulation his text was the creation of a precise sociological object and moral reality. And while constituting sociology's first action, the manifesto could then be superseded as this morality began to sustain itself. Nevertheless, more than in the first formulation, it actively produced a new social fact in European culture. Finally, in the third formulation, Durkheim's manifesto is an ongoing moment of sociology itself (in the sense of a Hegelian moment, which is fully visible only in its first conflict-ridden appearance, but subsequently constitutes an essential part of the phenomenon's makeup). This manifesto is sociology's first clear attempt to understand representation as the fundamental element of social life. As such, sociological images and language are more than new social facts, they are also collective representations themselves, that reveal how the collective both imagines itself and interprets its own images. In this last formulation, sociology is deeply intertwined with the phenomena it seeks to explain, and becomes increasingly so as it proceeds historically.The implications of understanding sociology as a collective representation are manifold. But among the most important is that sociology develops by way of a dialectical relation to its object. Not surprisingly, a century after the appearance of Durkheim's manifesto, popular mass culture is permeated with reified sociological language, while cultural and mass-media studies have become a central interest of contemporary social theory. One could even speculate what Durkheim might say about late twentieth-century North American or European culture, and the place of sociological images therein. Would he, like one might imagine Freud, despair at the popular tropes and metaphors that he helped produce? Would he see only a monster of his own creation? Unlike Freud, who might be able to condemn popular psychoanalytic language as itself an indication of an immature culture looking for therapeutic fathers, Durkheim formulated the inevitability of the reification and deification of sociological language. For example, he explains that his own time was dominated by the language of the French Revolution: ...society also consecrates things, especially ideas. If a belief is unanimously shared by a people, then ... it is forbidden to touch it, that is to say, to deny it or to contest it. Now the prohibition of criticism is an interdiction like the others and proves the presence of something sacred. Even today, howsoever great may be the liberty which we accord to others, a man who should totally deny progress or ridicule the human ideal to which modern societies are attached, would produce the effect of a sacrilege. He gives Fatherland, Liberty, and Reason as examples of the sacred language inherited from the Revolution. And although he understands that these ideas are historically contingent, he nevertheless defends their value, especially the value of Reason. Evidently, Durkheim is not troubled by the knowledge that thoughts are shaped by the sacred ideas of their time.Noting the popularity of his own texts in the undergraduate classroom, Durkheim might ask how they function now. He might ask how The Rules of Sociological Method is an academic collective representation. He might also ask more generally how the word society has come to be used as a moral reality, or a social fact. How do speakers gain a moral stronghold on conversation by invoking society as the overarching totem (signifying everything from tradition and order to constraint and oppression)? Durkheim would probably conclude that in its current usage society means many things, and perhaps is even reducible to a dada utterance. Society is the punishing god and the forgiving god; it is used to authorize the judge and justify the deviant. It is, most generally, the way our culture signals its attempt to formulate itself by way of its sacred images.And yet, to avoid concluding that sociology, as it proceeds, ultimately becomes another instance of the object it studies, one must see Durkheim as providing the opportunity within his images and tropes to make them more than religion or ideology. In other words, although social reality has traditionally been represented as the Judaeo-Christian god in western cultures, that does not mean that Society will in turn become the new god of the organically solidary collective. As Durkheim provided sociology with a basic manifesto orientation (in all three of my formulations of sociology as strategic, moral, and interpretive), he also provided the opportunity for sociology continually to change its object by studying it. While normally for scientists their influence on their object constitutes a disastrous error, because the data have been contaminated by the act of observation, Durkheim makes clear that sociology inevitably has this effect (indeed it has this moral obligation and responsibility). Sociology encourages a culture where the openness of human identities and practices is generally known, and where this openness does not lead to anomic despair. This was Durkheim's promise to his time - i.e., that looking at ourselves as agents of our collective condition provides an opportunity to produce sacred objects that are sacred by the very fact that they are patently produced collectively. While all collectives produce representations of themselves, what is peculiar to the sociological culture is that it is supposed to be able to identify these as such - it is supposed to see its own totem building. This requires a certain ironic orientation grounded in an insight that the collective could be drastically otherwise, without provoking a crisis of meaning. In this way, sociology is a system of beliefs without being an ideology or religion.And, of course, within a sociological culture change does occur. Once these sociological tropes are established, they undergo interpretation and reinterpretation as they are disseminated, circulated, and used in popular discourse. As the dialogue between academic language and popular language continues through time, sociologists are required to imagine sociological interventions that keep these images dynamic rather than ideological. Hence, as sociology contributes to the sacred language used by opinion (or doxa), it is neither reducible to opinion, nor fully distinguishable from it. Sociology seeks to influence the way opinion recollects its basis (i.e., social life), and in so doing must change its own language to continue to induce para-doxa.It is possible therefore that the tropes and images introduced by Durkheim have served many rhetorical purposes and need to be reinterpreted by each new generation of sociologists as they consider the particular sociological rules of method of their own time. But what is inexhaustible about the Durkheimian legacy is his insight that sociology must look for its effects at a general discursive level, remaining cognizant that it is a part of modernity's particular collective representations. Thus formulated, the grounds of sociological thought are necessarily present even in the most specialized of contemporary research, as each topic covertly speaks about collective representational desire. Sociology also meets its own limits (even the possibility of its own death) at the very point where it becomes self-conscious as a cultural practice - i.e., its various inevitable crises as to its relevance point to its entanglement in the representational anxieties characteristic of modernity in general. It seems to me crucial that sociological practitioners acknowledge and orient to this condition so that sociology remains vital to itself and to the collective life it studies. Or in stronger, more polemical words: sociology is a significant cultural force to the extent that it understands itself already to be one.

---

     

A quantitative theory of preferences: Some results on transition functions

We investigate a general theory of combining individual preferences into collective choice. The preferences are treated quantitatively, by means of preference functions (a,b), where 0(a,b) expresses the degree of preference of a to b. A transition function is a function (x,y) which computes (a,c) from (a,b) and (b,c), namely (a,c)=((a,b),(b,c)). We prove that given certain (reasonable) conditions on how individual preferences are aggregated, there is only one transition function that satisfies these conditions, namely the function (x,y)=x·y (multiplication of odds). We also formulate a property of transition functions called invariance, and prove that there is no invariant transition function; this impossibility theorem shows limitations of the quantitative method.Research supported in part by the National Science Foundation.     

Differences in the Donor Behavior Characteristics of Young Affluent Males and Females: Empirical Evidence from Britain

The objectives of this study were to obtain a deeper understanding of the donor behavior characteristics of young affluent individuals; and to ascertain whether young affluent women differed significantly from young affluent males in their approaches to philanthropy. Two hundred and seventeen investment bankers, accountants, and corporate lawyers, aged under 40 years, earning more than £50,000 annually and working in the City of London were questioned about their attitudes and behavior in relation to charitable giving. Significant differences emerged between the donor behavior characteristics of males and females. A conjoint analysis revealed that whereas men were more interested in donating to the arts sector in return for social rewards (invitations to gala events and black-tie dinners, for example), women had strong predilections to give to people charities and sought personal recognition from the charity to which they donated.     

Lying about running: The functions of talk in a scene

The running scene rests upon a system of beliefs (a code) about the qualities of running performances. Membership in the scene entails the interrelated use of conversational forms and the presentation of a team identity. The forms consist of nomic talk, ritualized lying and code truth telling. Within each form, the runner may lie about or manage information regarding running performances in order to construct, maintain or attack the system of beliefs. The lie, then, plays a major role in the scene as a device of social interaction.     

Queering Identities: The Roles of Integrity and Belonging in Becoming Ourselves

This article presents a picture of the complexities and contradictions in the daily lives of people in the Seacoast area of New Hampshire who identify as, or are identified as, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender queer, questioning, and allied people (LGBTQQA). In this study, the author uses a grounded theory approach to focus on the Create Our Destiny conference. Clear patterns emerged, such as the importance of coming out, labels, and gender identity. A common theme underlying these areas was the tension people experienced between seeking a sense of belonging and maintaining their personal sense of integrity. This study shows that people in the Seacoast want to be fully and wholly themselves, or as the author represents their interests, to strive toward singularity. The author argues that striving towards singularity requires people to grapple with their unexamined codes and principles, such as those pertaining to compulsory heterosexuality and gender duality, by increasing and valuing self-awareness and reflexivity.     

Structure and process in interpersonal “distancing”

The present paper focuses on awho-why-where-when-how-what-whom structural model of interpersonal distancing. The term distancing denotes either approach or avoidance movement along an intimacy-immediacy dimension. This dimension itself is defined as an integration across proxemic, kinesic, paralinguistic, and linguistic interpersonal modalities. Parallels are drawn between the concepts of intimacy disequilibrium and cognitive dissonance; the latter deals with attitude-behavior discrepancies and the former with attraction-approach discrepancies. A compensatory model is expanded acrosswho's partners as well as across his sensory modalities, and the concept of intimacy overload is offered as a clarifying tool for the social refractoriness and information overload explanations appearing in various aspects of the literature.Paper presented at the Symposium on Some New Approaches for Studying and Measuring Interpersonal Communication, 82d Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, New Orleans, September 1974.The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Department 1229, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, in the writing of this paper. Much of the work was supported by NSF Grant 2852A at Wayne State University.     

The Newhalf Net: Japan's “Intermediate Sex” On-Line

After English, Japanese is the most widely represented language on the Internet; yet, because Japanese is not widely spoken outside Japan, very little information exists in English about the ways in which the Internet is being used by queer communities in Japan. This essay looks at how one group within Japan's transgender community is deploying Internet technology. Japan's newhalf (nyuuhaafu) are transgendered men who consider themselves to be a third or intermediate sex, and they work in clearly-defined roles as hostesses, companions, and sex workers within Japan's extensive sex and entertainment industry. The contents of several newhalf Websites are analyzed, and their different applications are discussed. It is suggested that the Internet is being used to disseminate information about sexual services and identities that have a long history in Japan, rather than to encourage the development of more politicized sexual identities.     

Why and how East Germans rebelled

Conclusion Attempts to explain the East German uprising are particularly significant because it was probably the most important event in the collapse of European communism. The building of the Berlin Wall was the symbol of the Cold War division between Eastern and Western Europe and its fall led to the reunification of Germany and marked the end of this European partition. Elizabeth Pond has written: When the Berlin Wall fell, the crash obliterated a country, an empire, and an era. There are several obstacles to adequate explanation, however. The reasons why East Germans rebelled cannot be separated from the end of communism in Europe. The GDR was imprisoned within the socialist bloc (similar to the way the SED locked up its own people). Rebellion could only (successfully) occur when Soviet domination had eased. The popular rebellion in East Germany was precipitated by a wave of exit unleashed by reform communists in Hungary who had eliminated border controls. The Wall was opened from outside before it was pulled down from within.Even when confined to the protests within the GDR, that is to the second stage of the revolt, the main causes of the uprising have often been misunderstood. The would-be exiters were an important part of voice and often prompted the activities of the pro-GDR opposition. Loyal voice did play a significant role in calling for and speaking at anti-regime rallies. But these oppositionists did not mobilize the population themselves. Mass exodus, and political reform elsewhere in Eastern Europe, had set off the revolt by giving many East Germans a new found sense of political efficacy that led them to act spontaneously. Without private advantages and aware of the personal risks, millions of ordinary citizens went onto the streets because they felt a collective sense of obligation to do so.The key to understanding how East Germans rebelled, that is, to explaining the distinctiveness of the revolt, is the ex-GDR's lack of national identity. While the Polish and Hungarian leaderships could initiate democratization and hope to protect some of their interests under postcommunist rule, the SED risked losing its state as well. Hirschman underestimates the GDR leadership's dilemma when he argues that the extinction of the German Democratic Republic can be seen as the ultimate penalty for the long suppression of exit and voice (p. 200). The GDR could only survive by preventing its citizens from leaving for the bigger, richer, and more democratic state in a divided nation. East Germany was inconceivable as a liberal state. Reform efforts always literally ran into the Wall.Not only does the lack of national identity explain the hardline nature of the regime, it also illuminates the revisionism of the opposition. It is only an apparent paradox that in a state without legitimacy the loyalty among the GDR intellegentsia was particularly intense. The same matter-of-fact nationalism that made many East Germans feel a part of the Federal Republic (of which they were, by nature of the West German Grundgesetz, virtual citizens), tied artists, writers, and oppositionists alike to the ideal of the better German state. They felt that the evils of German nationalism could best be preempted by socialism, which offered a clear anti-fascist position and justified the continued existence of the GDR. East Germans had to rebel against an unrelenting SED and then abandoned the pro-GDR opposition's hope for a rejuvenation of East Germany. Continued emigration and mounting protest doomed efforts to reform the regime and rescue the state. Elections had to be moved up from May to March 1990 to head off pending economic and political disaster. West German parties, which supported GDR affiliates, and Western politicians, who were well known and often better liked than their East German counterparts, played a dominant role in the campaign. The vote brought a conservative coalition to power that had promised the fastest and marginalized the two major opponents of immediate unity: the reformed communists (PDS) and the opposition alliance (Bündnis 90). Democratic transition had become part of German unification.

---

     

Do Actions Speak Louder Than Words? Preschool Children's Use of the Verbal-Nonverbal Consistency Principle During Inconsistent Communications

The present study investigated whether preschool children could use the conventional actions speak louder than words principle (or the verbal-nonverbal consistency principle) to process information in situations where verbal cues contradict nonverbal cues. Three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were shown a video in which an actor drank a beverage and made a verbal statement (e.g., I like it) that was inconsistent with her emotional expression (e.g., frowning), and were asked whether the actor liked or disliked the beverage. If children used the verbal-nonverbal consistency principle, they should respond according to the information conveyed by the actor's emotional expression. Results showed that when the message was more naturalistic, the majority of children tended to respond based on the actor's verbal message. However, when the inconsistency between the verbal and nonverbal messages was made salient, more children appeared to rely on the nonverbal cue. Younger children's reliance on verbal cues reported in previous research may be partly explained by the salience of the verbal message.     

Love and Sex in Constructing Identity Among Men Who Have Sex with Men

Interviews were conducted with 102 Ontario men who have sex with men who identify themselves as gay, bisexual, and not gay, concerning the meanings and satisfactions associated with their sexuality. Sexual discourses of men who identify themselves in different ways reveal some common criteria for placing self and others into the gay category. Gay, in the everyday speech of these men, appears to refer to an elaborated discourse around the potential for emotional involvement and relationships rather than a reference to an essentialized sexuality. Comparison of men who place themselves inside and outside sexual identity categories shows that many find gay identity to be a horizon of increased possibilities, rather than the limitation critiqued by queer theory. These findings are contextualized in recent debates in identity theory.     

No Place Called Home: Life Quality and Purpose of Homeless Youths

Subjective quality of life (SQOL) has been reported to display remarkable resilience to objective circumstances. This is thought to derive from the capacity to interpret experience in positive ways, but is defeated by very adverse circumstances. This raises the question of whether such positive mental devices are able to adequately protect the SQOL of homeless youths, who typically face substantial objective trials. This study compares youths who are homeless or at risk of homelessness with youths living consistently with their families (control group). It was found that both the homeless and at risk youths reported significantly lower SQOL. These youths also reported lower levels of personal meaning than the control group, and higher existential vacuum. Of the variables measured, personal meaning provided the strongest prediction of SQOL, challenging theories that would predict choice/responsibleness to provide the predominant contribution. Lack of differences in response between homeless and at risk youths suggests that subjective difficulties may precede homelessness rather than stem from it. A model is proposed to describe the possible factors involved in the maintenance and erosion of SQOL.