Winnicott,Tomkins, and the Psychology of Affect

Donald Winnicott’s work is rather well-known to most clinicians, and many of his concepts––e.g., facilitating environment, spontaneous gesture, going-on-being, impingement, annihilation, True and False Self––are utilized clinically and theoretically. Silvan Tomkins and his colleagues provide a profound understanding of the psychology of affect, and their work furnishes a lens through which Winnicott’s ideas can be further appreciated. The author suggests such an integration is crucial not only to deepening our understanding of Winnicott’s concepts, but also to enhancing the clinical dimension of affect theory. This discussion also has important implications for social work with respect to both treatment issues as well as prevention and early intervention programs.

The Monster Within: Countertransference Reflections on a Gay Adolescent’s Struggle with Sexual Identity

This paper concerns the author’s countertransference reflections on her work with a gay adolescent who identifies with powerfully destructive internal objects, including Hitler and the Monster. The author describes her countertransference inquiry through which she experiences her own potential destructiveness in order to help accommodate her adolescent patient’s rejected and disowned self states.

Chinese Property Law (Rights in rem) in the Civilian Tradition

The legal transitions of private ownership from being admitted limitedly to being protected equally with public ownership, and of the peasants’ right on rural lands from a contractual right to the right in rem, are almost the same process of social reform. And in the interaction of social development and legislation, the law has taken on an increasing role in social transition.

Pathways to the Clinician’s Experience of Empathy in Engaging Single Mothers at Risk for Physical Abuse of their Children

Based upon an analysis of interviews from a qualitative study with twelve agency-based clinical social workers, this paper recounts three “situational pathways” through which these workers were able to experience empathy in the process of engaging low-income single mothers whose presenting picture involved physical aggression toward their symptomatic children who the workers were also seeing for therapy. The paper describes and utilizes self-psychological and intersubjective concepts to understand the therapeutic contexts that may enhance the worker’s potential for experientially understanding the client’s viewpoint. The relevance of the findings for practice and training is discussed.

Reduced prizes and increased effort in contests

We study the general class of two-player public-policy contests and specify the asymmetry condition under which a more restrained government intervention that reduces the contestants’ prizes has the “perverse” effect of increasing their aggregate lobbying efforts.

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The Impact of American Media Exposure and Self-Esteem on Chinese Urban Adolescent Purchasing Involvement

This study based on a sample of 429 Beijing high school students shows that Chinese urban adolescents’ purchasing involvement can be predicted by the adolescents’ self-esteem. Individuals’ self-evaluation motivates them to get involved in family purchasing activities. This study suggests that Chinese consumer involvement is potentially shaped by both cognitive factors (e.g., self-esteem) and social factors (e.g., media use). However, the study indicates that exposure to American mass media does not have significant impact on adolescents’ family purchasing involvement. This finding raises possibilities for further investigation in the area. Limitations and suggestions for future studies are provided.

Efficient nonanthropocentric nature protection

This paper analyzes nature protection by a social planner under different ‘utilitarian’ social welfare functions. For that purpose we construct an integrated model of the economy and the ecosystem with explicit consideration of nonhuman species and with competition between human and nonhuman species for land and prey biomass. We characterize and compare the efficient allocations when social welfare is anthropocentric (only consumers have positive welfare weights), when social welfare is biocentric (only nonhuman species have positive welfare weights) and when social welfare is nonanthropocentric (all species have positive welfare weights). Not surprisingly, biocentric social welfare calls for suspending all economic activities. It is more important, however, that both anthropocentrism and nonanthropocentrism make the case for nature protection through different channels, though. Our analysis suggests that one may dispense with the concept of nonanthropocentric social welfare provided that in the anthropocentric framework the consumers' intrinsic valuation of nature is properly accounted for.

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Chinese Contract Law and the Economic Reform

China’s previous contract laws had many contradictions and failed to meet the needs of China’s developing market economy. Although some problems still need to be dealt with, the unified contract law is more advanced, systematic and plays an important role in fostering and encouraging transactions.

Transference Enactments in Clinical Supervision

Transference enactments play a central role in clinical supervision regardless of whether supervisors or supervisees consciously recognize or acknowledge their presence. Supervisors who do recognize enactments better understand the core issues that interfere with supervisees’ capacity to relate therapeutically to patients. Supervisory process is markedly enhanced when supervisors consciously study manifestations of transference within the supervisory relationship and respond to them correctively. Corrective interventions, whether purposeful or unintentional, expand supervisees’ relational and self-reflective capacities.

Households’ precautionary behaviors—the effects of the introduction of National Health Insurance in Taiwan

By reducing risk of large out-of-pocket medical expenses, comprehensive social health insurance may reduce households’ motivation to engage in precautionary behaviors such as saving, procurement of private insurance, and spousal labor-force participation. We use the natural experiment provided by the 1995 introduction of National Health Insurance in Taiwan to examine these effects, using pre-existing differences in access to health insurance (tied to the household head’s and spouse’s joint employment status) to identify the effects of increasing insurance coverage. We find that comprehensive health insurance has a statistically significant and large effect on household savings, but no significant effects on purchase of private accident insurance and spousal employment.

The Politics of Space and Culture in Santiago, Chile’s Street Markets

Recent discussions of contentious politics have focused on struggles in and over space and place. This article builds upon these concerns by using ethnographic, interview, and documentary data to analyze the spatial politics of street market vendors in Santiago, Chile. Drawing upon Lefebvre’s concepts of perceived, conceived, and lived space as well as ideas drawn from research on space and protest, I show how street market vendors build upon spatial routines, a sense of place, political alliances, and scale jumping in their self-defense strategies at the local, national, and international scales. The findings illustrate Lefebvre’s argument that the advance of abstract space (constructed by dominant economic and political elites) provokes resistance by groups who defend and seek to reconstruct lived space.

Use of Self in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has not traditionally utilized “use of self” to describe the clinician’s role in counseling but much attention has been given to the importance of the therapeutic relationship and the components necessary and appropriate for a strong working alliance. The CBT approach is discussed within the framework of previously articulated five uses of selves. A case example is presented.

Cutting Porter’s Last Diamond: Competitive and Comparative (Dis)advantages in the Dutch Flower Cluster

The Dutch are the world’s leaders in the flower business even though they seem to lack comparative advantage in the traditional sense. Comparative advantages played a role in the history of the Dutch flower cluster and they still have a role today. Based on a critic of Porter’s theories, the investigation suggests that the exploitation of comparative advantages is allowed only to those firms and clusters that already possess a competitive advantage, based on technology, logistics infrastructure, innovation and human skills. So that comparative advantages and competitive advantages join in a sort of helix process based on social innovation and collective learning.

Constructing Gay and Lesbian Parent Families “Beyond the Closet”

This paper provides a multilayered analysis of how lesbian mothers and gay fathers construct their families in a social context that has been described by Steven Seidman (2004) as “beyond the closet.” We stress how our participants’ family-building experiences are comparable to other non-biologically related families, but distinct due to heterosexual dominance. Using in-depth qualitative interviews with 18 lesbian birth mothers and 22 gay fathers, the authors discuss how participants navigate heterosexual dominance in institutions and in personal interactions.

Organizations in Movement: An Ethnographer in the Spanish Campaign <Emphasis Type="Italic">Poverty Zero</Emphasis>

During the year 2005 many organizations took part in Poverty Zero, a campaign that aims to reach the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals for 2015. Based on participant observation and open ended interviews, this paper describes the origins, development, and evaluation of Poverty Zero in Andalusia (Spain). It examines, by means of ethnography, how DNGOs (Development Nongovernmental Organizations) create social movement networks, and explores the limits and possibilities of their advocacy activities. The paper concludes that DNGOs tend to generate centralized social movements with reduced questioning of the global system. Nevertheless, as shown in the case of the Andalusian Alliance against Poverty, the more decentralized a movement, the deeper its transformational potential.

Rebound effects of progress in information technology

Information technology (IT) is continuously making astounding progress in technical efficiency. The time, space, material and energy needed to provide a unit of IT service have decreased by three orders of magnitude since the first personal computer (PC) was sold. However, it seems difficult for society to translate IT’s efficiency progress into progress in terms of individual, organizational or socio-economic goals. In particular it seems to be difficult for individuals to work more efficiently, for organizations to be more productive and for the socio-economic system to be more sustainable by using increasingly efficient IT. This article provides empirical evidence and potential explanations for this problem. Many counterproductive effects of IT can be explained economically by rebound effects. Beyond that, we conclude that the technological determinism adopted by decision-makers is the main obstacle in translating IT’s progress into non-technical goals.

The Relationship Between Social Work and Psychoanalysis: The Future Impact of Social Workers

Because social workers are likely to have a more expanded role within organized psychoanalysis than previously, it seems timely to consider the numerous challenges and opportunities ahead with respect to social workers’ impact on the practice of psychoanalysis. For those who become social work psychoanalysts, in particular, a pivotal issue is the degree to which they retain their core identity as clinical social workers. It is important for them to integrate and balance the diverse aspects of their dual identity, to participate in our social work organizations, to contribute to developing psychoanalysis, and to work to keep the teaching of contemporary psychoanalytic theories alive in social work education.

Appropriating the city: space,theory, and bike messengers

Over the last 30 years, social theorists have increasingly emphasized the importance of space. However, in empirical research, the dialectical relationship between social interaction and the physical environment is still a largely neglected issue. Using the theory of structuration, I provide a concrete example of why and how space matters in the cultural analysis of an urban social world. I argue that bike messengers—individuals who deliver time-sensitive materials in downtown cores of major cities—cannot be understood outside an analysis of space. Specifically, I connect the cultural significance of messenger practices to the emplacement of those practices inside the urban environment.

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The connection between maternal employment and childhood obesity: inspecting the mechanisms

This paper investigates the channels through which maternal employment affects childhood obesity. We use time diaries and interview responses from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics which combines information on children’s time allocation, children’s BMI, and mother’s labor force participation. We find some evidence that supervision and nutrition play significant but small roles in the relationship between maternal employment and childhood obesity. Although the difference in the effect of maternal employment varies by mother’s education, we find few differences in the mechanisms by mother’s education.

Married Couples’ Time Allocation Decisions and Marital Stability

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), 1985–1992, are the data used to simultaneously examine the role of family stability to both market and household time allocation for both spouses and the role of couples’ time allocation in their probability of divorce. The study found that increases in the probabilities of divorce were only significantly correlated with decreases in wife’s housework time. It was also found by the study that increases in the husband’s market work hours and increases in the wife’s household work hours had negative effects on the probability of divorce.