All Ages and None: Commentary on Helene Moglen's Ageing and Transageing

Helene Moglen's article is especially welcome, given the paucity of psychoanalytic reflection on ageing. She usefully describes possible ways of managing the losses of ageing through accessing the multiple, decentered self-states embedded in our personal histories. However, I have some queries on her use of contrasting psychic topologies. In particular I wonder whether she is sometimes in danger of seeing images of former selves as being associatively “recovered” in the work of mourning that might be better seen as the more illusive “production” of presumptively anterior contexts and states of mind in the present. I also question how successfully Moglen's positioning of her notion of “transaging” somewhere between “transgender” and “transsexuality” serves to loosen up the vicious binary between “young” and “old. I would appreciate closer attention to the dreaded “feminization” of old age, noting the toxic sexism permeating cultures of ageing. Nevertheless, Moglen offers an excellent opening into this troubling topic.     

“I screamed but then realized nobody was listening”: Exploration of the presence of others during intrafamilial child sexual abuse through survivors' testimonies from the Israeli Independent Public Inquiry

Intrafamilial child sexual abuse (IFCSA) is perceived as a crime perpetrated without witnesses. Nevertheless, researchers have explored two main aspects of the others present during abusive incidents: bystanders in extra-familial child sexual abuse and bystanders' decisions of whether to become involved. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding how children and survivors perceive and experience the presence of others during abusive incidents. The current study examined survivors' experiences and perceptions concerning the presence of others during IFCSA based on their written testimonies for an independent inquiry. Of the more than 500 written testimonies sent to an independent Israeli inquiry, 16 addressed IFCSA and the others present. Inductive thematic analysis was conducted, and four main themes were identified: survivors' perceptions of others, others' responses to the abuse, familial dynamics with others during abuse, and acceptance. The discussion addresses the phenomenon of the presence of others during IFCSA and related theories of trauma and family dynamics. The findings challenge the social perception of IFCSA as a secret, highlighting the awareness that characterizes it in reality, as illustrated in the survivors' testimonies. This emphasizes the urgent need for policy-makers and professionals to promote the publicness of IFCSA instead of maintaining its secrecy.     

Lost in Translation? Embracing the Challenges of Working With Families From a Refugee Background

This article describes the difficulties a mainstream family therapy service experienced in working with families from a refugee background. The experience of six therapists and five bicultural workers, who are also the referring agents, was captured in focus groups, and the reflections that emerged shaped a four‐part approach for working with families from a refugee background. Live consultation, either by the family therapist or bicultural worker, is suggested as a way to marry the expertise of family therapists who are not cultural ‘insiders’ with the ‘lived experience’ and cultural expertise of bicultural support workers. The process of reflecting on therapeutic failure resulted in several principles for working therapeu‐tically with families with a history of refugee trauma, unmet resettlement needs and family relationship challenges. These include maintaining a flexible approach to therapy, ascertaining a clear understanding of the referral context, defining an explicit therapeutic contract from the first session, being mindful of the important role that language plays and terminating therapy if it is contra‐indicated.     

Non-expected utility risk premiums: The cases of probability ambiguity and outcome uncertainty

This paper discusses two problems. (a) What happens to the conditional risk premium that a decision maker is willing to pay out of the middle prize in a lottery to avoid uncertainty concerning the middle prize outcome, when the probabilities of other prizes change? (b) What happens to the increase that a decision maker is willing to accept in the probability of an unpleasant outcome in order to avoid ambiguity concerning this probability, when this probability increases? We discuss both problems by using anticipated utility theory, and show that the same conditions on this functional predict behavioral patterns that are consistent both with a natural extension of the concept of diminishing risk aversion and with some experimental findings.     

PROPERTY RIGHTS AND THE EFFICIENCY OF BARGAINING

We show that efficient bargaining is impossible for a wide class of economic settings and property rights. These settings are characterized by (i) the existence of “adverse efficient opt‐out types”, whose participation does not change the efficient allocation and who, when they opt out, are the worst type other agents can face, and (ii) non‐existence of the “marginal core”, and its multivaluedness with a positive probability. We also examine the optimal allocation of property rights within a given class that satisfies (i), such as simple property rights, liability rules, and dual‐chooser rules. We characterize property rights that minimize the expected subsidy required to implement efficiency. With two agents, simple property rights that are optimal in this way maximize the expected surplus at the status quo allocation, but this no longer holds with more agents. We also study “second‐best” budget‐balanced bargaining under a liability rule. The optimal “second‐best” liability rule may differ from, but is often close to, the expectation of the victim's harm, which would be optimal if there were no bargaining. However, liability rules that are close to a simple property right result in a lower expected surplus than the simple property right they are near.