A Theory of Thinking: A Theory of Desiring

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on aspects of what is broadly known as countertransference in centering on the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s explicit theory of thinking as constituting an implicit theory of desiring. I make a distinction between the discursive terms “thoughts,” “thinking,” “desires,” “desiring,” “wants,” and “craving” and tease out their relationship to one another for clinical practice. I explore how thinking and desiring operate in and around frustration and suggest that the thinking apparatus is not just a mechanism for dealing with thoughts but also is a way of transforming wants into desires. I separate out desires and the desiring apparatus, as Bion does with thoughts and thinking, and argue that thinking is inextricably linked to desiring and thoughts to desires. The interpretative act, moreover, constitutes the analyst’s acting on desire, whereas acts of projective identification are bound up with craving. I demonstrate the potential uses of this theory by discussing it with reference to two published clinical examples.     

Secondary Popular Culture

In the context of “primary process” assumptions concerning mass distributed culture, the idea of “secondary process” assumptions is developed. A secondary popular culture process (1) is focused on the time period after “legitimate” distribution is conventionally considered complete, (2) treats “finished” cultural materials as raw materials, (3) takes for granted the design and actualization features of “legitimate” production and distribution (which is tantamount to “sacredness”), (4) “turns over” nationally (and internationally) produced wants (“markets”) at the local level for local profit, and (5) creates localized occupational, professional, and stylistic identities which are unanticipated consequences of the centralized producer's work. The idea is then illustrated through a brief discussion of the author's research concerning local popular music performers.     

Yellow bodies,black sweat: Yao Ming,Ichiro Suzuki,and global sport

This article focuses on the relationship between Asian and Black athletes, global multiculturalism, and sport internationalism. Ichiro Suzuki and Yao Ming represent in clear ways the figuration of the Asian male body as both cultural phenomena and transnational commodity. This article describes the marked turn from the Asian male body as an unattractive representative for marketing commodity exchanges to an imported spectacle reproducing National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball transnational capital. However, it does not simply offer a conventional study of the political economy involved in the global expansion of popular sports. Rather, it attempts to illustrate how Asian men in US sports presuppose and indeed attempt to produce Asian masculinity through inverting the bodily emasculation of Asian American men. Throughout this article, I detail the ways in which popular sports has been racialized as a “Black” space of colonial fantasy and fears, and how Asian male athletes break down the fixity of this raciological thinking. The Black male body came to dominate celebrity and hero worship, an identificatory process that Norman Mailer once coined as “the white negro” or to use a famous slogan from a popular sports drink: Everyone wants to “Be Like Mike.” This article describes the ‘fetishization” of the Black male body and how representations of Ichiro and Yao subvert the fixity of Afro-Asian racial hierarchy.     

The Classification and Ordering of Responses to the Question “Who am I?”*

The question “Who Am I?” (WAI?) has generated considerable research by social psychologists concerned with self phenomena. “Self theory,” from which the “WAI?” technique was derived, hypothesizes an ordinal pattern among consensual self statements. Our data do not confirm this hypothesis nor do they confirm the widespread assumptions of a direct relationship between the salience and importance of self statements or between salience and positively evaluated self statements. We discuss the implications of these findings for the principles of “self theory” and for the validity and reliability of the “WAI?” question.     

Discernment Counseling for “Mixed‐Agenda” Couples

This article describes discernment counseling, an approach to working with couples where one partner is leaning toward divorce and the other wants to preserve the relationship and work on it in couples therapy. These “mixed‐agenda” couples are common in clinical practice but have been neglected in the literature. The goal of discernment counseling is clarity and confidence regarding the next steps for the relationship, based on a deeper understanding of each partner's contributions. Sessions emphasize individual conversations with each partner. An analysis of 100 consecutive cases found that about half of the couples chose to start couples therapy in order to reconcile, with most of the rest choosing the divorce path. Longer term follow‐up information is also presented.     

DEMOCRACY AND GROWTH: A PERSPECTIVE FROM DEMOCRATIC EXPERIENCE

This article investigates the impact of democracy on growth by simultaneously considering a country's secular‐historical experience of democracy and current political regime. The results obtained show that the effect of democracy on growth exhibits an asymmetrical pattern depending on the country's democracy stock. Only in “democratic countries” with “prolonged experiences of democratic rule” can democracy promote growth. This claim stands in contrast to the earlier literature in which there is either no consistent relationship between growth and democracy or perhaps a nonlinear relationship. This conclusion provides circumstantial support for the claim of the “democracy promotes growth” hypothesis. (JEL O43)     

Etzioni’s new theory: a synthesis of liberal and communitarian views

There has always been a rather strong contrast between liberal and communitarian views. The liberal doctrine of “irreversible plurality of philosophical and moral ideas” for instance does not only mean that consensus about social values is difficult. “A public consensus about the necessary conception of the good cannot be obtained,” says Rawls. On the other hand, communitarians such as MacIntyre, Sandel, and Walzer, are deeply convinced by the idea of an “immanent telos” of societies, which in their opinion have the utmost influence on the development of individuals. A similar strong contrast exists between the liberal universalism of values and the communitarian particularism. Etzioni’s New Theory now tries to overcome these unsatisfactory “tyrannies of dualism” (A. Gutmann) Instead of the traditional and hostile either- or, Etzioni puts a reconciliatory as well as. “As many other dichotomies the dualism between universalism and particularism stands in the way of the development of a social Paradigm,” he regrets. Therefore Etzioni wants to combine instead of dividing. For example, social order (communitarian value) and personal autonomy (liberal value). So he proposes to install more personal autonomy in states with strong social order, as for instance Japan, and he demands more social order in traditional individualistic states like the United States (“Inverse Symbiosis”). Such “combining and balancing solutions” coincide with the theory of a “Flexible System of Private Rights” created and proposed by the famous Austrian Legal Scholar Walter Wilburg. On the level of “value principles” in the sense of Ronald Dworkin (instead of “rules” of law), Wilburg combines the differing “weights and strengths” of values (elements). An example of this is negligence, dangerous behavior, and economic capacity of risk spreading to more or less far reaching compensations of private damages, instead of the traditional either-or. The underlying idea is that of proportion. In terms of Etzioni, “The more social order within a state or society—the more individual autonomy has to be promoted.”     

A note on scaling the general social survey network item response categories

The idea of structural balance is used to suggest quantitative intervals between relationship strength response categories in the GSS network data. In contrast to an assumption of equal intervals between the categories of relationship strength, the intervals appear quite unequal. Relations with discussion partners “less close” to their respondent than other cited discussion partners are about 0.17 the strength of relations with “especially close” discussion partners. The middle category of relations between discussion partners appear to be little more than acquaintance relations; about 0.2 of the distance from people who are “total strangers” to people who are “especially close”.     

Educational Assortative Mating Among Mexican Families: Are Migrants Different?

In this article, we explored the pattern of educational assortative mating among Mexican families. We employed education fixed effects models to analyze the relationship between men’s years of schooling and the within-family gender difference in education. We found that Mexican migrant families had a “numerically” different mating pattern: compared with non-migrant families staying in Mexico, the within-family gender difference in education was relatively larger in a migrant family in which the husband received less than six years of education, but was relatively smaller in a migrant family in which the husband received more than six years of education.     

Fiellin: Keep the prescriber training for buprenorphine

It seems that almost everyone wants to deregulate buprenorphine for opioid use disorder (OUD) — with proposed legislation focused on getting rid of the Drug Addiction Treatment Act of 2000 (DATA 2000) waiver altogether (see ADAW, Oct. 11, “Bill to deregulate buprenorphine raises concerns among OTPs,” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adaw.32510 ).     

Self-interest and the common good: The impact of norms,selfishness and context in social policy opinions

This article revolves around driving forces behind human actions: self-interest or the common good. Opinions on social policy give support to both approaches. Man is a Faust, torn by conflicting desires and wants. Which of these will be chosen depends on various situational factors that “frame” choices. By utilizing an opinion survey (n = 1,117), the study analyzes the impacts of “frames” and how the wording of questions affects opinions on the welfare state. The study displays that: (a) Responses to general level questions show a strong commitment to altruistic values; in more specific questions, this altruism tends to fade away, (b) Frames referring to altruistic norms, self interest, and additional information given in the questionnaire have decisive impacts on answers.     

Anality: News From the Front

“Anality: News From the Front” is a critical commentary on Jeffrey Guss's (this issue) paper, “The Danger of Desire: Anal Sex and the Homo/Masculine Subject” and Stephen Botticelli's “Clinical Example.” In her analysis of Guss's argument, Sedgwick situates the dangerous potential of transgressive anal desire as “a revolutionary flash-point to be sought out and exploited” and highlights what she views as Guss's underlying assumption: that “danger is now altogether a thing to be decried and avoided.” Her response to Botticelli is a lively imagined relationship to Botticelli as a therapist, based on his clinical observations documented in “Clinical Example.”     

In Search of Resiliency in Families

Abstract

This study explores the process of relationship development in marriages that foster personal and relationship growth. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve individuals/six couples in marriages that promote individual and relationship growth. Grounded theory methodology was employed and “Empowering Connections” emerged as the core theme. Empowering connections are characterised by a process of growth captured by the following categories: “Connecting Emotionally,” “Loving Respectfully,” “Expanding One's Self,” and “Experiencing Empowering Connections.” The results of the study contribute to the understanding of marriage and provide insight to premarital couples, people who want to improve their marriage, and to therapists working with couples.     

Family Social Work: The Past and the Present

SUMMARY

It is easy to blame the dysfunction of a family member on his or her behavioral patterns. I use the title, “It's the Relationship, Stupid!” not to talk down to family therapists, but to remind myself that the source of dysfunction is usually family relationships, especially the marriage relationship. This article gives several case studies for practical application of therapy techniques that focus on developing the “WE” of the family unit. One practical technique that I developed is a communication typology. The married couple (and family members) are divided into “Painters” and “Pointers.” This typology explains much of the conflict and mis-communication that leads to the breakdown of the “WE.” This article also presents dysfunction within the individual as a relationship problem and introduces the concept of the “spirit” of the individual as expressing the relationship the person has with self.     

"Deseos y Dolores": mapping desire, suffering, and (dis)loyalty within transnational partnerships

This piece considers the deseos -- wants, desires, needs -- and dolores -- pain or sorrow -- of individuals in US-Mexico transnational partnerships. For transnational Mexicans, “desire” manifests as diverse, even contradictory, expressions of emotion. Migration is intertwined with multiple desires within intimate relationships, but is also tied to suffering across borders. Conflicting articulations of deseos y dolores reveal gender politics as well as the broader socioeconomic inequalities that drive migration and result in the transborder movement that separates couples and family members in a transnational space.     

Decolonizing my hair,unshackling my curls: an autoethnography on what makes my natural hair journey a Black feminist statement

ABSTRACT

There is unquestionably a buzz in US Black women’s communities about a trending “natural” phenomenon. Sales of chemical relaxers (sometimes dubbed “creamy crack” among the US Black community) have dropped 34 percent since 2009, while sales of “natural” hair care products that promise to non-chemically enhance or beautify “natural” curls are up exponentially. Corresponding to the rise in sales of “natural” hair care products are beauty blogs, YouTube instructional videos and supportive social groups—such as “natural hair” meet-ups, which have organically emerged for, and been mostly created by, Black women as a tool to support and nurture women as they take this journey. In this article, I use Black feminist P.H. Collins’s work because her understanding of the relationship between knowledge, consciousness and empowerment provides a framework or point of departure for grasping my own lived experience of going “natural” with regards to modes of oppression and methods of resistance.     

Briefly Noted

The federal Department of Justice (DOJ) is impeding efforts to produce high‐quality marijuana for research purposes, according to a report published on Vox. In particular, California entrepreneur George Hodgin, who wants to grow it, and researchers who want to use what he grows are frustrated. “We only want to provide clean, consistent, compliant cannabis for researchers,” Hodgin, CEO of Biopharmaceutical Research Company, told Vox. “We're sitting on one of the most sophisticated cannabis production facilities in the United States. And it's empty, because the federal government is playing politics with something that is apolitical.” Because marijuana is still illegal under federal law, despite the fact that it is legal for medical and recreational purposes in some states, growing the plant for research purposes is only allowed by the federal government by the University of Mississippi. Critics say that is not of high enough quality. “I feel like the government I fought to protect doesn't understand the urgency of this problem,” said Hodgin, a retired Navy SEAL. “My story should be the American dream: A Navy SEAL uses the GI Bill to get a graduate education and start a company that helps Americans and creates jobs. But sadly, the DOJ and DEA are playing politics with science and lives, and instead big government inertia and red tape are blocking critical research.” He added: “Democrats and Republicans have both argued the need for more marijuana to be produced for research. Why would [the Justice Department] ignore them?” Indeed. It's hypocritical for the federal government to say there's no proof marijuana works as medicine, and no proof that it's safe, and at the same time ban what would make it possible to find out whether those things are true.     

Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Synergism: Notes on “Lanigan’s ‘Encyclopedic Dictionary’”

Richard L. Lanigan, founder of the International Communicology Institute, has formulated a synergistic account of the relationship between sign-systems (semiotics) and lived experience (phenomenology). In this article I overview some of the technical vocabulary found within Lanigan’s “Semiotic Phenomenology” and attempt to clarify the parallel relations between (a) part/whole, (b) variance/invariance, (c) empirical/eidetic, and (d) context-dependence/decontextualization by examining the relationships between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of discourse. I also contextualize the relationship between “information” and “communication” by locating the former mainly within the evolutionary advent of denotation, and I furthermore spell out the role that alphabetic literacy plays in fortifying paradigmatic and syntagmatic resources.     

自反性青年亚文化——青年文化的空间属性与情感转向

“青年文化”具有“亚文化”属性,不仅仅指“青春叛逆”这一特质,在新媒体时代更涉及到“网络媒介”对“青年文化”的形塑。通过当代大学生阅读调查、网络使用习惯调查以及实际社交状况的深描,探讨青年群体在虚拟空间与现实空间中不同的身份表达,可以发现当下“赛博空间”中的青年自我表征与现实身份认同的关系具有“自反性”,一方面“次元壁”的区隔显示出青年身份认同的焦虑,另一方面从“网络—现实”空间的二元对立中又生产出身份认同的路径,即通过“自我对抗”最终生产出青年的主体性。     

Hostile Worlds or Connected Lives? Research on the Interplay Between Intimacy and Economy

Economic sociologists have devoted most of their attention to the activities of individuals and firms in markets. However, recent attempts have pushed for a better understanding of the relationship between intimacy and economy. Such efforts have been inspired, in large part, by Viviana Zelizer (2000, 2005). In her inquiry on the purchase of intimacy, Zelizer proposed seminal differentiations between the “hostile worlds,” “nothing but,” and “connected lives” perspectives, and advanced a cultural relational analysis of the economy. In this essay, we review research that applies Zelizer's framework, and suggest substantive and analytical avenues for future research on economy/intimacy nexus.