front cover of Sacred Desire
Sacred Desire
Growing in Compassionate Living
Nancy K. Morrison
Templeton Press, 2009

Is the call to spirituality embedded in human biology? Authors Nancy K. Morrison and Sally K. Severino draw on cutting-edge research, including the recent discovery of brain "mirror neurons" and the elucidation of the physiology of social affiliation and attachment, to make a bold case that we are, in fact, biologically wired to seek oneness with the divine. They have termed this innate urge "sacred Desire."

In their new book on the subject, ,em>Sacred Desire: Growing in Compassionate Living, Morrison and Severino, both highly esteemed academic psychiatrists, draw on neurophysiology, relationship studies, research on spiritual development, and psychotherapy to show how spirituality is intimately connected with our physical being. The authors offer several clinical examples of how recognizing sacred Desire can advance a person's healing and they provide an action plan for using Desire to move from fear to love of self, others, and all creation.

In addition to psychiatrists and neurophysiologists, who will undoubtedly welcome this significant contribution to their fields of study, Sacred Desire is sure to appeal as well to the much wider audience of spiritual seekers looking for intellectually and scientifically credible ways to understand spirituality in today's world.

 

[more]

front cover of Sacrifice Your Love
Sacrifice Your Love
Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer
L.O. Aranye Fradenburg
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
A long-awaited reevaluation of Chaucer through the lens of sacrifice by a major figure in medieval studies. Historicism and its discontents have long been central to the work of Louise Fradenburg, one of the world's most original and provocative literary medievalists. Sacrifice Your Love brings this interest to bear on Chaucer's writing and his world, rethought in light of a theory of sacrifice and its part in cultural production. Fradenburg writes the "history of the signifier"--a way of reading change in the symbolic order--and its role in making sacrifice enjoyable. Sacrifice Your Love develops the idea that sacrifice is a mode of enjoyment-that our willingness to sacrifice our desire is actually a way of pursuing it. Fradenburg considers the implications of this idea for various problems important in medieval studies today-how to understand the religiosity of cultural forms, particularly chivalry, in the later Middle Ages and how to understand the ethics of Chaucer's famously nondidactic poetry-as well as in other fields of inquiry. A major rethinking of Chaucer, Sacrifice Your Love works in depth as well as across a broad range of topics from medievalism to psychoanalysis, advancing both the theory and practice of a new kind of historicist approach. L. O. Aranye Fradenburg is professor of English, women's studies, and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
[more]

front cover of Sadomasochism in Everyday Life
Sadomasochism in Everyday Life
The Dynamics of Power and Powerlessness
Chancer, Lynn S.
Rutgers University Press, 1992

Lynn Chancer advances the provocative thesis that sadomasochism is far more prevalent in contemporary societies like the United States than we realize. According to Chancer, sexual sadomasochism is only the best-known manifestation of what is actually a much more broadly based social phenomenon. Moving from personal relationships to school, the workplace, and other interactions, Chancer uses a variety of examples that are linked by a recurrent pattern of behavior. She goes beyond the predominantly individualistic and psychological explanations generally associated with sadomasochism (including those popularized in the "how to" literature of the recent Women Who Love Too Much genre) toward a more sociological interpretation. Chancer suggests that the structure of societies organized along male-dominated and capitalistic lines reflects and perpetuates a sadomasochistic social psychology, creating a culture steeped in everyday experiences of dominance and subordination.

In the first part of the book, Chancer discusses the prevalence of sadomasochistic cultural imagery in contemporary America and examines sadomasochism through several perspectives. She develops a set of definitional traits both through existential analysis of an instance of S/M sex and by incorporating a number of Hegelian and psychoanalytic concepts. In the second part of the book, she places sadomasochism in a broader context by exploring whether and how it appears in the workplace and how it relates to gender and race.

[more]

front cover of A Safe Place
A Safe Place
Laying the Groundwork of Psychotherapy
Leston Havens
Harvard University Press, 1987
Drawing on his rich experience within psychiatry, Leston Havens takes the reader on an extraordinary journey through the vast and changing landscape of psychotherapy and psychiatry today. Closely examining the dynamics of the doctor–patient exchange, he seeks to locate and describe the elusive therapeutic environment within which psychological healing most effectively takes place.
[more]

front cover of The Sanctity of Social Life
The Sanctity of Social Life
Physician's Treatment of Critically Ill Patients
Diana Crane
Russell Sage Foundation, 1975
Reexamines the nature of death and dying as seen from the physician's point of view. Unlike other treatments of the subject, this study is concerned not with what physician's should do for the critically ill, but with their actual behavior. Based on extensive interviews with physicians in several medical specialties, more than 3000 questionnaires completed by physicians in four specialties, and studies of the records of actual hospital patients, the book shows that while withdrawal of treatment in certain types of cases is widespread, euthanasia is rare.
[more]

front cover of Sanity Plea
Sanity Plea
Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut
Lawrence R. Broer
University of Alabama Press, 1994
    In this revised edition of a volume originally published in 1989, Lawrence Broer extends his comprehensive critique of the body of writing by Kurt Vonnegut. Broer offers a broad psychoanalytic study of Vonnegut’s works from Player Piano to Hocus Pocus, taking a decisively new approach to the work of one of America’s most important, yet often misinterpreted writers. A compelling and original analysis, Sanity Plea, explores how Vonnegut incorporates his personal experiences into an art that is not defeatist, but rather creatively therapeutic and life-affirming.
[more]

front cover of Sardonic Smile
Sardonic Smile
Nonverbal Behavior in Homeric Epic
Donald Lateiner
University of Michigan Press, 1998
In Sardonic Smile, Donald Lateiner examines every major variety of Homeric nonverbal behavior, especially those found in the Odyssey. Noting differences from modern gestures and attending to variation that results from gender, age, and status, Lateiner explores the "silent language" and "what goes without saying" among the heroes Odysseus, Telemakhos, and Penelope--but also the savage Kyklops, the suitors, and the servants. No previous work has thoroughly analyzed nonverbal behavior in Homeric epic. Gesture and posture, conscious and unconscious manipulation of space and time, and involuntary "leakage," such as twitching and shivering, can intensify and underline--or contradict and ironize--the speech of characters and hexameter narrative.
 
A Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 1995.
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
Savage Theory
Cinema as Modern Magic
Rachel O. Moore
Duke University Press, 2000
Savage Theory articulates the powerful mythology of cinema as the premier medium for magic in modern times. Envisioning the cinema as a form of magical ritual that possesses the power to enliven, heal, and enchant, Rachel O. Moore explores modernity’s relationship to the primitive by analyzing understandings of primitive belief and ritual in early film theory alongside illustrative scenes from popular as well as avant-garde film.
Moore mines the theories of language, spectatorship, and cinematic expression in the writings of Vachel Lindsay, Sergei Eisenstein, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin, among others. Illuminating the links between these theorists’ preoccupations with cinema as a form of primal communication and the numbing effects of modernity, she demonstrates how movies are uniquely able to negotiate the fragmentary and isolating nature of a modern world. In constructing an alternative to cognitive, psychoanalytic, and ideological approaches to film analysis, Moore provides eye-opening discussions of films such as Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia, and Robert Bresson’s l’Argent. Drawing from Marx’s theory of the commodity and Lukács’s work on second nature, she outlines the fetish character of the film image and reveals the emergence of the camera as a magical tool replete with animistic powers otherwise lost in the storm of progress.
Bound to influence the way future scholars think about the connection between modernism and primitivism, as well as the role of cinema therein during the early twentieth century, Savage Theory will be welcomed by scholars of film theory and anthropology and will also appeal to a wider cultural studies audience.
[more]

front cover of Saving Face
Saving Face
The Emotional Costs of the Asian Immigrant Family Myth
Angie Y. Chung
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Tiger Mom. Asian patriarchy. Model minority children. Generation gap. The many images used to describe the prototypical Asian family have given rise to two versions of the Asian immigrant family myth. The first celebrates Asian families for upholding the traditional heteronormative ideal of the “normal (white) American family” based on a hard-working male breadwinner and a devoted wife and mother who raises obedient children. The other demonizes Asian families around these very same cultural values by highlighting the dangers of excessive parenting, oppressive hierarchies, and emotionless pragmatism in Asian cultures.
 
Saving Face cuts through these myths, offering a more nuanced portrait of Asian immigrant families in a changing world as recalled by the people who lived them first-hand: the grown children of Chinese and Korean immigrants. Drawing on extensive interviews, sociologist Angie Y. Chung examines how these second-generation children negotiate the complex and conflicted feelings they have toward their family responsibilities and upbringing. Although they know little about their parents’ lives, she reveals how Korean and Chinese Americans assemble fragments of their childhood memories, kinship narratives, and racial myths to make sense of their family experiences. However, Chung also finds that these adaptive strategies come at a considerable social and psychological cost and do less to reconcile the social stresses that minority immigrant families endure today.
 
Saving Face not only gives readers a new appreciation for the often painful generation gap between immigrants and their children, it also reveals the love, empathy, and communication strategies families use to help bridge those rifts. 
 
[more]

front cover of Saying What We Mean
Saying What We Mean
Implicit Precision and the Responsive Order
Selected Works by Eugene T. Gendlin, Edited by Edward S. Casey and Donata M. Schoeller; Foreword by Edward S. Casey
Northwestern University Press, 2018

The first collection of Eugene T. Gendlin’s groundbreaking essays in philosophical psychology, Saying What We Mean casts familiar areas of human experience, such as language and feeling, in a radically different light. Instead of the familiar scientific emphasis on what is conceptually explicit, Gendlin shows that the implicit also comprises a structure that can be made available for recognition and analysis.

Developing the traditions of phenomenology, existentialism, and pragmatism, Gendlin forges a new path that synthesizes contemporary evolutionary theory, cognitive psychology, and philosophical linguistics.
[more]

front cover of Scapegoat
Scapegoat
The Impact of Death-Fear on an American Family
Eric Bermann
University of Michigan Press, 1973
Roscoe A. was eight years old when psychologist Eric Bermann first met him and his family. In kindergarten Roscoe was considered highly creative, but he was also evaluated by his teachers as a potentially dangerous and destructive child capable of uncontrolled aggression toward other children. His parents denied the report. To them, Roscoe was a quiet, well-behaved boy. In the second grade, over the objections and confusions of his parents, Roscoe was finally removed from public school and admitted to a day treatment facility where he could receive psychotherapy. Progress was minimal. After a year of effort there still was no agreement about "Roscoe's problems." Mental health professionals despaired. They deemed his parents "unworkable," and labelled them "deniers" of their son's destructive behaviors. In turn the parents blamed the professionals for therapeutic incompetencies and failure to help Roscoe, who, after all, "was never a problem at home." The one alternative to terminating the therapeutic effort was the possibility of obtaining new data and fresh insights into the dilemma. It was at this point that Dr. Bermann, a clinical researcher embarked on the study of family interaction, was consulted. He immediately negotiated with the family to visit them in their home where he might observe their interactions in situ. He hoped, with them, that in so doing he might shed some light on the discrepancy in reports about Roscoe's behavior. Dr. Bermann visited the family and recorded his observations regularly and in detail throughout the next year. His analysis of these observations has resulted in this startling book--a research account that is both stunning in the originality of its method and searing in its documentation of an American family in crisis. In the course of his visits Dr. Bermann discovered the family's central and well-concealed "secret": Roscoe's father had been for years in precarious health and now was on the brink of death. Although the family nev
[more]

front cover of The Scar of Visibility
The Scar of Visibility
Medical Performances and Contemporary Art
Petra Kuppers
University of Minnesota Press, 2007
Contemporary visual and performance artists have adopted modern medical technologies such as MRIs and computer imaging—and the bodily access they imply—to reveal their limitations. In doing so they emphasize the unknowability of another’s bodily experience and the effects—physical, emotional, and social—of medical procedures.In The Scar of Visibility, Petra Kuppers examines the use of medical imagery practices in contemporary art, as well as different arts of everyday life (self-help groups, community events, Internet sites), focusing on fantasies and “knowledge projects” surrounding the human body. Among the works she investigates are the controversial Body Worlds exhibition of plastinized corpses; video projects by Shimon Attie on diabetes and Douglas Gordon on mental health and war trauma; performance pieces by Angela Ellsworth, Bob Flanagan, and Kira O’Reilly; films like David Cronenberg’s Crash and Marina de Van’s In My Skin that fetishize body wounds; representations of the AIDS virus in the National Museum of Health and on CSI: Crime Scene Investigations; and the paintings of outsider artist Martin Ramírez.At the heart of this work is the scar—a place of production, of repetition and difference, of multiple nerve sensations, fragile skin, outer sign, and bodily depth. Through the embodied sign of the scar, Kuppers articulates connections between subjective experience, history, and personal politics. Illustrated throughout, The Scar of Invisibility broadens our understanding of the significance of medical images in visual culture.Petra Kuppers is associate professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the author of Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge.
[more]

front cover of Scenes from Bourgeois Life
Scenes from Bourgeois Life
Nicholas Ridout
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Scenes from Bourgeois Life proposes that theatre spectatorship has made a significant contribution to the historical development of a distinctive bourgeois sensibility, characterized by the cultivation of distance. In Nicholas Ridout’s formulation, this distance is produced and maintained at two different scales. First is the distance of the colonial relation, not just in miles between Jamaica and London, but also the social, economic, and psychological distances involved in that relation. The second is the distance of spectatorship, not only of the modern theatregoer as consumer, but the larger and pervasive disposition to observe, comment, and sit in judgment, which becomes characteristic of the bourgeois relation to the rest of the world. This engagingly written study of history, class, and spectatorship offers compelling proof of “why theater matters,” and demonstrates the importance of examining the question historically.  
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Schizophrenia
Science and Practice
John C. Shershow
Harvard University Press, 1978

Schizophrenia: Science and Practice brings together the work of many of today's most distinguished authorities in psychiatry. From diverse perspectives, these specialists review what is presently known—and unknown—about schizophrenia. The conceptual underpinnings of the diagnosis of schizophrenic illness, recent elaborations of psychosocial and developmental theories, current genetic and biochemical research, and traditional as well as newer treatment approaches are among the topics discussed in this unusually clear and lively account.

How effective are contemporary psychotherapeutic approaches to schizophrenia? What drug therapies are being used or proposed, and why? What about the treatment milieu and the difficult strategic questions surrounding the recent movement toward the “deinstitutionalization” of schizophrenic patients? Ultimately, should schizophrenia be defined as a toxic illness or as a way of life? In attempting to answer these and other questions, Dr. Shershow is joined by contributors Irwin Savodnik, Seymour Kety, Theodore Udz, Gerald Klerman, Ian Creese, Solomon Snyder, Leo Hollister, Jonathan Borus, Daniel Schwartz, and Loren Mosher, among others.

All the issues confronting psychiatry as a self-conscious discipline within contemporary medicine converge on the problem of schizophrenia. The important hope Schizophrenia: Science and Practice raises is that a fruitful pluralism among the variety of approaches to schizophrehia, and to psychiatric problems in general, can be sustained.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Schooling
Sylvia Farnham-Diggory
Harvard University Press, 1990

How should we educate the children of tomorrow to solve the problems of today?

A new educational model is generating widespread interest and excitement among educators, parents, and community leaders. Known as "cognitive apprenticeship", the model draws upon contemporary cognitive and developmental science and specifies techniques for capitalizing on children's inborn ability to learn in complex natural settings. Sylvia Farnham-Diggory reports on a wide range of school programs that illustrate this innovative approach to schooling.

The new approach contrasts sharply with much current school practice, which is based on early twentieth-century theories of learning. These early theories, in misguided attempts to be "scientific", defined the acquisition of knowledge in terms of simple, quantifiable test behaviors. School practice derived from such outdated theory continues to revolve around fragmented lessons that can be easily counted and graded.

New research in cognition and human development shows that the acquisition of knowledge must be defined in terms of complex interactive networks. It cannot be acquired from workbooks or ditto sheets, nor can it be assessed through paper-and-pencil tests. Mastery of basic skills, a delight in history, literature, and science, and a creative approach to problem solving are best encouraged when children have opportunities to work alongside experts in meaningful and important contexts, thus participating in cognitive apprenticeships.

While never losing sight of her theoretical framework, Farnham-Diggory offers many practical suggestions for transforming classrooms into places of genuine intellectual growth. Schooling sets out a creative and realistic agenda for parents, teachers, school administrators, business leaders, and other concerned citizens who are looking for ways to replace traditional 1930s-style classrooms with rigorous and exciting educational environments.

[more]

front cover of Schools That Heal
Schools That Heal
Design with Mental Health in Mind
Claire Latané
Island Press, 2021
What would a school look like if it was designed with mental health in mind? Too many public schools look and feel like prisons, designed out of fear of vandalism and truancy. But we know that nurturing environments are better for learning. Research consistently shows that access to nature, big classroom windows, and open campuses reduce stress, anxiety, disorderly conduct, and crime, and improve academic performance. But too few school designers and decision-makers apply this research to create healthy schools. Schools That Heal details the myriad opportunities—from furniture to classroom improvements to whole campus renovations—to make supportive learning environments for our children and teenagers.

Schools around the world have been designed to support students’ health. A Japanese community decimated by a tsunami has incorporated water elements into the school campus to reconnect students to nature in a supportive way and promote environmental stewardship. Sandy Hook Elementary, creating a completely redesigned campus in the wake of a school shooting, began with an inclusive design process to ensure the new school could be a place of healing and learning. And while the larger mental and physical impacts of how COVID-19 has changed schooling aren’t known yet, Latané discusses how building elements like large windows—that can open to circulate fresh air—were once common in schools and could once again be useful as a cost-effective tactic for reducing virus exposure.

Backed by decades of research, Schools That Heal showcases clear and compelling ways to create schools that support students’ mental health and feelings of safety. Written in an accessible tone, this book reviews the evidence connecting design to mental health and makes design and advocacy recommendations to support students’ well-being and sense of safety.

With invaluable advice for school administrators, public health experts, teachers, and parents, Schools That Heal is a call to action and a practical resource to envision and implement nurturing and inspiring school environments. Healthy, healing campuses will better prepare students to take care of themselves, their communities, their cities, and their planet.
[more]

front cover of Schoolteacher
Schoolteacher
A Sociological Study
Dan C. Lortie
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Upon its initial publication, many reviewers dubbed Dan C. Lortie's Schoolteacher the best social portrait of the profession since Willard Waller's classic The Sociology of Teaching. This new printing of Lortie's classic—including a new preface bringing the author's observations up to date—is an essential view into the world and culture of a vitally important profession.
[more]

front cover of Science and Emotions after 1945
Science and Emotions after 1945
A Transatlantic Perspective
Edited by Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Through the first half of the twentieth century, emotions were a legitimate object of scientific study across a variety of disciplines. After 1945, however, in the wake of Nazi irrationalism, emotions became increasingly marginalized and postwar rationalism took central stage. Emotion remained on the scene of scientific and popular study but largely at the fringes as a behavioral reflex, or as a concern of the private sphere. So why, by the 1960s, had the study of emotions returned to the forefront of academic investigation?

In Science and Emotions after 1945, Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross chronicle the curious resurgence of emotion studies and show that it was fueled by two very different sources: social movements of the 1960s and brain science. A central claim of the book is that the relatively recent neuroscientific study of emotion did not initiate – but instead consolidated – the emotional turn by clearing the ground for multidisciplinary work on the emotions. Science and Emotions after 1945 tells the story of this shift by looking closely at scientific disciplines in which the study of emotions has featured prominently, including medicine, psychiatry, neuroscience, and the social sciences, viewed in each case from a humanities perspective.
[more]

front cover of The Science and Fiction of Autism
The Science and Fiction of Autism
Laura Schreibman
Harvard University Press, 2007

Autism is a complex and incurable constellation of bizarre behaviors, impaired cognition, limited language, and most distressingly, a lack of responsiveness to other people, and it has been the center of impassioned debates for decades. What is it? What causes it? How can it be treated?

In The Science and Fiction of Autism, one of the country's leading experts in behavioral treatments approaches autism through the context of its controversies, showing where extraordinary and unfounded claims have falsely raised hopes, stirred fears, and ruined lives. Arguing that autism is an entirely biological disorder, however complex its neurological origins, Laura Schreibman lays waste to the beliefs that it is caused by "refrigerator mothers" or the MMR vaccine, as well as to the simplistic claims that it can be cured by a variety of unsubstantiated treatments.

Drawing from her own long clinical experience with autistic children and their parents, Schreibman arms her readers--students, educators, psychologists, and parents alike--with information and arguments to deal with the onslaught of good, bad, deficient, and irrelevant ideas about autism.

[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
The Science and Politics of Racial Research
William H. Tucker
University of Illinois Press, 1994

front cover of The Science of Character
The Science of Character
Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism
S. Pearl Brilmyer
University of Chicago Press, 2021
The Science of Character makes a bold new claim for the power of the literary by showing how Victorian novelists used fiction to theorize how character forms.
 
In 1843, the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill called for the establishment of a new science, “the science of the formation of character.” Although Mill’s proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer maintains that it found its true home in realist fiction of the period, which employed the literary figure of character to investigate the nature of embodied experience. Bringing to life Mill’s unrealized dream of a science of character, novelists such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner turned to narrative to explore how traits and behaviors in organisms emerge and develop, and how aesthetic features—shapes, colors, and gestures—come to take on cultural meaning through certain categories, such as race and sex. Engaged with materialist science and philosophy, these authors transformed character from the liberal notion of the inner truth of an individual into a materially determined figuration produced through shifts in the boundaries between the body’s inside and outside. In their hands, Brilmyer argues, literature became a science, not in the sense that its claims were falsifiable or even systematically articulated, but in its commitment to uncovering, through a fictional staging of realistic events, the laws governing physical and affective life. The Science of Character redraws late Victorian literary history to show how women and feminist novelists pushed realism to its aesthetic and philosophical limits in the crucial span between 1870 and 1920.
[more]

front cover of The Science of Deception
The Science of Deception
Psychology and Commerce in America
Michael Pettit
University of Chicago Press, 2012
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans were fascinated with fraud. P. T. Barnum artfully exploited the American yen for deception, and even Mark Twain championed it, arguing that lying was virtuous insofar as it provided the glue for all interpersonal intercourse. But deception was not used solely to delight, and many fell prey to the schemes of con men and the wiles of spirit mediums. As a result, a number of experimental psychologists set themselves the task of identifying and eliminating the illusions engendered by modern, commercial life. By the 1920s, however, many of these same psychologists had come to depend on deliberate misdirection and deceitful stimuli to support their own experiments.
 
The Science of Deception explores this paradox, weaving together the story of deception in American commercial culture with its growing use in the discipline of psychology. Michael Pettit reveals how deception came to be something that psychologists not only studied but also employed to establish their authority. They developed a host of tools—the lie detector, psychotherapy, an array of personality tests, and more—for making deception more transparent in the courts and elsewhere. Pettit’s study illuminates the intimate connections between the scientific discipline and the marketplace during a crucial period in the development of market culture. With its broad research and engaging tales of treachery, The Science of Deception will appeal to scholars and general readers alike.
[more]

front cover of The Science of Play
The Science of Play
How to Build Playgrounds That Enhance Children's Development
Susan G. Solomon
University Press of New England, 2014
Poor design and wasted funding characterize today’s American playgrounds. A range of factors—including a litigious culture, overzealous safety guidelines, and an ethos of risk aversion—have created uniform and unimaginative playgrounds. These spaces fail to nurture the development of children or promote playgrounds as an active component in enlivening community space. Solomon’s book demonstrates how to alter the status quo by allying data with design. Recent information from the behavioral sciences indicates that kids need to take risks; experience failure but also have a chance to succeed and master difficult tasks; learn to plan and solve problems; exercise self-control; and develop friendships. Solomon illustrates how architects and landscape architects (most of whom work in Europe and Japan) have already addressed these needs with strong, successful playground designs. These innovative spaces, many of which are more multifunctional and cost effective than traditional playgrounds, are both sustainable and welcoming. Having become vibrant hubs within their neighborhoods, these play sites are models for anyone designing or commissioning an urban area for children and their families. The Science of Play, a clarion call to use playground design to deepen the American commitment to public space, will interest architects, landscape architects, urban policy makers, city managers, local politicians, and parents.
[more]

front cover of The Science of Self-Control
The Science of Self-Control
Howard Rachlin
Harvard University Press, 2004

This book proposes a new science of self-control based on the principles of behavioral psychology and economics. Claiming that insight and self-knowledge are insufficient for controlling one's behavior, Howard Rachlin argues that the only way to achieve such control--and ultimately happiness--is through the development of harmonious patterns of behavior.

Most personal problems with self-control arise because people have difficulty delaying immediate gratification for a better future reward. The alcoholic prefers to drink now. If she is feeling good, a drink will make her feel better. If she is feeling bad, a drink will make her feel better. The problem is that drinking will eventually make her feel worse. This sequence--the consistent choice of a highly valued particular act (such as having a drink or a smoke) that leads to a low-valued pattern of acts--is called "the primrose path."

To avoid it, the author presents a strategy of "soft commitment," consisting of the development of valuable patterns of behavior that bridge over individual temptations. He also proposes, from economics, the concept of the substitutability of "positive addictions," such as social activity or exercise, for "negative addictions," such as drug abuse or overeating.

Self-control may be seen as the interaction with one's own future self. Howard Rachlin shows that indeed the value of the whole--of one's whole life--is far greater than the sum of the values of its individual parts.

[more]

front cover of The Science of Shame and Its Treatment
The Science of Shame and Its Treatment
Gerald Loren Fishkin, Ph.D.
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2016
Shame is the ghost in the machine of the human mind.  It can implant itself in the psyche before the first word is spoken, even before the first thought has formed.  In his groundbreaking book, The Science of Shame and Its Treatment, psychotherapist and author Gerald Loren Fishkin, Ph.D., addresses the genesis of shame and self-talk from an empirical analysis of their core elements, its insidious ingress into conscious thought, and the havoc it inflicts on a person’s self-worth and behavior.

Through his empirical analysis and understanding of toxic shame, Dr. Fishkin has identified multiple effective clinical approaches for its treatment and addressing shame-based behaviors.  He clearly outlines why contemporary treatment approaches, including cognitive behavioral therapy, do not treat core shame wounds and most often cause individuals to terminate the therapeutic process prematurely.
This book is a must-read for clinicians, addiction specialists, teachers, students of human behavior, counselors, social workers, patients in treatment.
[more]

front cover of The Science of Sleep
The Science of Sleep
What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters
Wallace B. Mendelson
University of Chicago Press, 2017
We often hear that humans spend one third of their lives sleeping—and most of us would up that fraction if we could. Whether we’re curling up for a brief lunchtime catnap, catching a doze on a sunny afternoon, or clocking our solid eight hours at night, sleeping is normally a reliable way to rest our heads and recharge our minds. And our bodies demand it: without sufficient sleep, we experience changes in mood, memory loss, and difficulty concentrating. Symptoms of sleep deprivation can be severe, and we know that sleep is essential for restoring and rejuvenating muscles, tissue, and energy. And yet, although science is making remarkable inroads into the workings and functions of sleep, many aspects still remain a mystery.
 
In The Science of Sleep, sleep expert Wallace B. Mendelson explains the elements of human sleep states and explores the variety of sleep disorders afflicting thousands of people worldwide. Mendelson lays out the various treatments that are available today and provides a helpful guide for one of life’s most important activities. By offering the first scientific yet accessible account of sleep science, Mendelson allows readers to assess their personal relationships with sleep and craft their own individual approaches to a comfortable and effective night’s rest.
 
Addressing one of the major public health issues of the day with cutting-edge research and empathetic understanding, The Science of Sleep is the definitive illustrated reference guide to sleep science. 
[more]

front cover of The Science of Stress
The Science of Stress
Living Under Pressure
Edited by Gregory L. Fricchione, Ana Ivkovic, and Albert S. Yeung
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Our jobs and families; the deluge of e-mails, texts, and calls; the constant pinch on our time and money; the screaming match of politics and the threat of terrorism and war—there is no doubt about it, we are completely stressed out. Most of the time, we just shrug it off, but as neuropsychiatrists Gregory L. Fricchione, Ana Ivkovic, and Albert Yeung gently remind us in this book: stress can be  really, really bad for our health. In fact, persistent stress is directly linked to chronic ailments like heart disease, diabetes, and depression, contributing to one of the biggest health challenges facing the world in the twenty-first century. Expertly but sensitively guiding readers through the latest research in the science of stress, they offer an illuminating and therapeutic look at our own worst enemy.
           
As Fricchione and his colleagues show, alleviating stress is a task that no one physician  can alleviate for us on his own. It is not the sort of problem that a surgeon can excise with a scalpel or an internist can eradicate with antibiotics. It requires everyone’s efforts—the healthy, the sick, doctors, nurses, psychologists, clergy, community leaders, and everyone else—to pull together to address the stress-induced drivers in our community that undermine our health. Clearly and accessibly exploring the latest in modern neuroscience and immunology, the authors examine what those drivers are and how they reduce the body’s metabolic reserve, making us more vulnerable to illness. They then look at the antidote: enhanced resilience, something we can achieve by smartly adjusting how we face the significant adversities that can spring up in so many facets of our lives.
           
Offering innumerable insights on the personal and social causes of stress and the physiological effects they have, this book serves as an essential guide to show us how to alleviate stress and properly take care of ourselves. In doing so, it offers a crucial first step toward meeting the biggest health challenge of this century.
 
[more]

front cover of The Sciences of the Soul
The Sciences of the Soul
The Early Modern Origins of Psychology
Fernando Vidal
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Fernando Vidal’s trailblazing text on the origins of psychology traces the development of the discipline from its appearance in the late sixteenth century to its redefinition at the end of the seventeenth and its emergence as an institutionalized field in the eighteenth. Originally published in 2011, The Sciences of the Soul continues to be of wide importance in the history and philosophy of psychology, the history of the human sciences more generally, and in the social and intellectual history of eighteenth-century Europe.

[more]

front cover of Scientific Knowledge
Scientific Knowledge
A Sociological Analysis
Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and John Henry
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Although science was once seen as the product of individual great men working in isolation, we now realize that, like any other creative activity, science is a highly social enterprise, influenced in subtle as well as obvious ways by the wider culture and values of its time. Scientific Knowledge is the first introduction to social studies of scientific knowledge.

The authors, all noted for their contributions to science studies, have organized this book so that each chapter examines a key step in the process of doing science. Using case studies from cognitive science, physics, and biology to illustrate their descriptions and applications of the social study of science, they show how this approach provides a crucial perspective on how science is actually done.

Scientific Knowledge will be of interest not only to those engaged in science studies, but also to anyone interested in the practice of science.
[more]

front cover of The Scientific Method
The Scientific Method
An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey
Henry M. Cowles
Harvard University Press, 2020

The surprising history of the scientific method—from an evolutionary account of thinking to a simple set of steps—and the rise of psychology in the nineteenth century.

The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made from facts gathered through direct observation or deduced from first principles. But during the nineteenth century, science came to mean something else: a way of thinking.

The Scientific Method tells the story of how this approach took hold in laboratories, the field, and eventually classrooms, where science was once taught as a natural process. Henry M. Cowles reveals the intertwined histories of evolution and experiment, from Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to John Dewey’s vision for science education. Darwin portrayed nature as akin to a man of science, experimenting through evolution, while his followers turned his theory onto the mind itself. Psychologists reimagined the scientific method as a problem-solving adaptation, a basic feature of cognition that had helped humans prosper. This was how Dewey and other educators taught science at the turn of the twentieth century—but their organic account was not to last. Soon, the scientific method was reimagined as a means of controlling nature, not a product of it. By shedding its roots in evolutionary theory, the scientific method came to seem far less natural, but far more powerful.

This book reveals the origin of a fundamental modern concept. Once seen as a natural adaptation, the method soon became a symbol of science’s power over nature, a power that, until recently, has rarely been called into question.

[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
The Script of Life in Modern Society
Entry into Adulthood in a Changing World
Marlis Buchmann
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Social scientists generally agree that relations between the different life stages in advanced industrial societies are changing. Far less agreement exists over how to interpret these changes. Using an innovative approach to the study of life course, Marlis Buchmann explores the changes in educational, occupational, and family careers that threaten an end to familiar life patterns characteristic of the mid-twentieth century.
[more]

front cover of Sculpting the Self
Sculpting the Self
Islam, Selfhood, and Human Flourishing
Muhammad U. Faruque
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Sculpting the Self addresses “what it means to be human” in a secular, post-Enlightenment world by exploring notions of self and subjectivity in Islamic and non-Islamic philosophical and mystical thought. Alongside detailed analyses of three major Islamic thinkers (Mullā Ṣadrā, Shāh Walī Allāh, and Muhammad Iqbal), this study also situates their writings on selfhood within the wider constellation of related discussions in late modern and contemporary thought, engaging the seminal theoretical insights on the self by William James, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault. This allows the book to develop its inquiry within a spectrum theory of selfhood, incorporating bio-physiological, socio-cultural, and ethico-spiritual modes of discourse and meaning-construction. Weaving together insights from several disciplines such as religious studies, philosophy, anthropology, critical theory, and neuroscience, and arguing against views that narrowly restrict the self to a set of cognitive functions and abilities, this study proposes a multidimensional account of the self that offers new options for addressing central issues in the contemporary world, including spirituality, human flourishing, and meaning in life.

This is the first book-length treatment of selfhood in Islamic thought that draws on a wealth of primary source texts in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Greek, and others. Muhammad U. Faruque’s interdisciplinary approach makes a significant contribution in the growing field of cross-cultural dialogue, as it opens up the way for engaging premodern and modern Islamic sources from a contemporary perspective by going beyond the exegesis of historical materials. He initiates a critical conversation between new insights into human nature as developed in neuroscience and modern philosophical literature and millennia-old Islamic perspectives on the self, consciousness, and human flourishing as developed in Islamic philosophical, mystical, and literary traditions.

[more]

front cover of The Search for Ability
The Search for Ability
Standardized Testing in Social Perspective
David A. Goslin
Russell Sage Foundation, 1963
A significant and eye-opening examination of the current state of the testing movement in the United States, where more than 150 million standardized intelligence, aptitude, and achievement tests are administered annually by schools, colleges, business and industrial firms, government agencies, and the military services. Despite widespread acceptance of these ability tests, there is surprisingly little systematic information about their use or effect. This book examines, raises questions about, and points the way to needed research on ability testing. It considers the possible social, legal, and emotional impact on society, the groups and organizations that make use of the tests, and the individuals who are directly affected by the results.
[more]

front cover of A Search for Clarity
A Search for Clarity
Science and Philosophy in Lacan's Oeuvre
Jean-Claude Milner; Translated from the French by Ed Pluth
Northwestern University Press, 2021

In A Search for Clarity, Jean‑Claude Milner argues that although Jacques Lacan’s writing is notoriously obscure his oeuvre is entirely clear. In a discussion that considers the difference between the esoteric and exoteric works of Plato and Aristotle, Milner argues that Lacan’s oeuvre is to be found in his published writings alone, not his transcribed seminars, and that these published writings contain his official doctrine. Thus, Lacan’s oeuvre is already complete, even though many of his seminars remain unpublished.

According to Milner, Lacan’s fundamental idea is that the subject psychoanalysis works on is the subject of science. Milner suggests that this is a supplement to Alexandre Koyré’s and Alexandre Kojève’s accounts of modern science, for which mathematization and a break from the ancient episteme were key.

A Search for Clarity is the definitive statement on how Lacan viewed the relationship between psychoanalysis and science, and on how Lacan’s thinking evolved as he struggled to draw out the consequences of the equation he posited between psychoanalysis and science. Milner’s work on Lacan has been essential reading in French for decades. This English translation will make his illuminating work accessible to a broader audience.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Second Year
The Emergence of Self-Awareness
Jerome Kagan
Harvard University Press, 1981

The second year is that daunting time when the previously docile and adorable infant inevitably develops a mind of her own. In this book, Jerome Kagan takes a provocative look at the mental developments underlying the startling transitions in the child’s second year.

It is Kagan’s premise that the roots of self-awareness emerge in the second half of the second year of life. He also suggests that the underlying cause may be more biological than social. His book develops these ideas through a series of brilliant observations on the behavior of two-year-olds.

Kagan charts, for example, the emerging sense of standards (the possibility of right and wrong) that reveals itself positively when the child suddenly begins to smile after a successful action, and negatively when the child starts to become concerned about flaws in objects and mistakes in her own behavior. When this concern with standards spreads to the child’s irresistible impulse to imitate adults, Kagan observes a remarkable phenomenon: the twenty-month-old child suddenly begins to show signs of distress before she even tries to imitate an action that is beyond her ability. Kagan argues that this distress could arise only from the child’s growing sense of what she can and can’t do—her awareness of herself.

[more]

front cover of The Secret History of Emotion
The Secret History of Emotion
From Aristotle's Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science
Daniel M. Gross
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Princess Diana’s death was a tragedy that provoked mourning across the globe; the death of a homeless person, more often than not, is met with apathy. How can we account for this uneven distribution of emotion? Can it simply be explained by the prevailing scientific understanding? Uncovering a rich tradition beginning with Aristotle, The Secret History of Emotion offers a counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today.
 
Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah Fielding, and Judith Butler, among others, Daniel M. Gross reveals a persistent intellectual current that considers emotions as psychosocial phenomena. In Gross’s historical analysis of emotion, Aristotle and Hobbes’s rhetoric show that our passions do not stem from some inherent, universal nature of men and women, but rather are conditioned by power relations and social hierarchies. He follows up with consideration of how political passions are distributed to some people but not to others using the Roman Stoics as a guide. Hume and contemporary theorists like Judith Butler, meanwhile, explain to us how psyches are shaped by power. To supplement his argument, Gross also provides a history and critique of the dominant modern view of emotions, expressed in Darwinism and neurobiology, in which they are considered organic, personal feelings independent of social circumstances.
 
The result is a convincing work that rescues the study of the passions from science and returns it to the humanities and the art of rhetoric.

[more]

front cover of The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days
The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days
Narcotic Addiction and Cultural Crisis in the United States, 1870-1920
Timothy A. Hickman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007
Although the topic of habitual narcotic use first surfaced in the United States during the 1820s, it was not until after the Civil War that it became a subject of widespread public attention. Beginning in the 1870s, an increasingly urgent discussion of what some described as a national epidemic of "drug addiction" could be found in both medical journals and the popular press. Today, nearly a century and a half later, the term is so commonplace we speak of people being "addicted" to just about anything. Yet as Timothy A. Hickman argues in this revealing interdisciplinary study, the meaning of addiction has always been as much cultural as scientific and never fixed. In The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days, Hickman resituates the idea of addiction within its original late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century context. Through close readings of a broad range of literary, medical, and legal texts, he shows how Americans of that era conceptualized the dangers of drug addiction in terms of other preoccupations and fears. Anxieties about the accelerating pace of technological change, the loss of personal autonomy, and the degeneration of society attributed to both foreign influences and a decline of manliness all fed into a widespread sense of cultural crisis—a crisis of which the spiraling "drug problem" was seen as both contributing cause and consequence. Not surprisingly, Hickman points out, deeply held assumptions of class, race, and gender also figured into the popular understanding of addiction. While white middle-class addicts were often depicted as helpless victims of the social and economic pressures of modern life, their less privileged and nonwhite counterparts were regarded as morally weak. Over time the distinction between "addict as patient" and "addict as criminal" came to be accepted by the emerging medical establishment and codified into law, eventually finding expression in the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, the first national anti-narcotic legislation in the history of the United States—and the basis for much thinking about addiction and drug policy ever since.
[more]

front cover of Seduction of the Minotaur
Seduction of the Minotaur
Anaïs Nin
Ohio University Press, 2014
“Some voyages have their inception in the blueprint of a dream, some in the urgency of contradicting a dream. Lillian’s recurrent dream of a ship that could not reach the water, that sailed laboriously, pushed by her with great effort, through city streets, had determined her course toward the sea, as if she would give this ship, once and for all, its proper sea bed…. With her first swallow of air she inhaled a drug of forgetfulness well known to adventurers.”

Seduction of the Minotaur is the fifth and final volume of Anaïs Nin’s continuous novel known as Cities of the Interior. First published by Swallow Press in 1961, the story follows the travels of the protagonist Lillian through the tropics to a Mexican city loosely based on Acapulco, which Nin herself visited in 1947 and described in the fifth volume of her Diary. As Lillian seeks the warmth and sensuality of this lush and intriguing city, she travels inward as well, learning that to free herself she must free the “monster” that has been confined in a labyrinth of her subconscious.

This new Swallow Press edition includes an introduction by Anita Jarczok, author of Inventing Anaïs Nin: Celebrity Authorship and the Creation of an Icon.

Swallow Press publishes all five volumes that make up Cities of the Interior: Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur.
[more]

front cover of See It Feelingly
See It Feelingly
Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor
Ralph James Savarese
Duke University Press, 2018
“We each have Skype accounts and use them to discuss [Moby-Dick] face to face. Once a week, we spread the worded whale out in front of us; we dissect its head, eyes, and bones, careful not to hurt or kill it. The Professor and I are not whale hunters. We are not letting the whale die. We are shaping it, letting it swim through the Web with a new and polished look.”—Tito Mukhopadhyay

Since the 1940s researchers have been repeating claims about autistic people's limited ability to understand language, to partake in imaginative play, and to generate the complex theory of mind necessary to appreciate literature. In See It Feelingly Ralph James Savarese, an English professor whose son is one of the first nonspeaking autistics to graduate from college, challenges this view.

Discussing fictional works over a period of years with readers from across the autism spectrum, Savarese was stunned by the readers' ability to expand his understanding of texts he knew intimately. Their startling insights emerged not only from the way their different bodies and brains lined up with a story but also from their experiences of stigma and exclusion.

For Mukhopadhyay Moby-Dick is an allegory of revenge against autism, the frantic quest for a cure. The white whale represents the autist's baffling, because wordless, immersion in the sensory. Computer programmer and cyberpunk author Dora Raymaker skewers the empathetic failings of the bounty hunters in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Autistics, some studies suggest, offer instruction in embracing the nonhuman. Encountering a short story about a lonely marine biologist in Antarctica, Temple Grandin remembers her past with an uncharacteristic emotional intensity, and she reminds the reader of the myriad ways in which people can relate to fiction. Why must there be a norm?

Mixing memoir with current research in autism and cognitive literary studies, Savarese celebrates how literature springs to life through the contrasting responses of unique individuals, while helping people both on and off the spectrum to engage more richly with the world.
[more]

front cover of See Me Naked
See Me Naked
Black Women Defining Pleasure in the Interwar Era
Tara T. Green
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Pleasure refers to the freedom to pursue a desire, deliberately sought in order to satisfy the self. Putting pleasure first is liberating. During their extraordinary lives, Lena Horne, Moms Mabley, Yolande DuBois, and Memphis Minnie enjoyed pleasure as they gave pleasure to both those in their lives and to the public at large. They were Black women who, despite their public profiles, whether through Black society or through the world of entertainment, discovered ways to enjoy pleasure.They left home, undertook careers they loved, and did what they wanted, despite perhaps not meeting the standards for respectability in the interwar era. See Me Naked looks at these women as representative of other Black women of the time, who were watched, criticized, and judged by their families, peers, and, in some cases, the government, yet still managed to enjoy themselves. Among the voyeurs of Black women was Langston Hughes, whose novel Not Without Laughter was clearly a work of fiction inspired by women he observed in public and knew personally, including Black clubwomen, blues performers, and his mother. How did these complicated women wrest loose from the voyeurs to define their own sense of themselves? At very young ages, they found and celebrated aspects of themselves. Using examples from these women’s lives, Green explores their challenges and achievements.
[more]

front cover of Seeing Red
Seeing Red
A Study in Consciousness
Nicholas Humphrey
Harvard University Press, 2006

"Consciousness matters. Arguably it matters more than anything. The purpose of this book is to build towards an explanation of just what the matter is."

Nicholas Humphrey begins this compelling exploration of the biggest of big questions with a challenge to the reader, and himself. What's involved in "seeing red"? What is it like for us to see someone else seeing something red?

Seeing a red screen tells us a fact about something in the world. But it also creates a new fact--a sensation in each of our minds, the feeling of redness. And that's the mystery. Conventional science so far hasn't told us what conscious sensations are made of, or how we get access to them, or why we have them at all. From an evolutionary perspective, what's the point of consciousness?

Humphrey offers a daring and novel solution, arguing that sensationsare not things that happen to us, they are things we do--originating in our primordial ancestors' expressions of liking or disgust. Tracing the evolutionary trajectory through to human beings, he shows how this has led to sensations playing the key role in the human sense of Self.

The Self, as we now know it from within, seems to have fascinating other-worldly properties. It leads us to believe in mind-body duality and the existence of a soul. And such beliefs--even if mistaken--can be highly adaptive, because they increase the value we place on our own and others' lives.

"Consciousness matters," Humphrey concludes with striking paradox, "because it is its function to matter. It has been designed to create in human beings a Self whose life is worth pursuing."

[more]

front cover of Seeing Through the Eighties
Seeing Through the Eighties
Television and Reaganism
Jane Feuer
Duke University Press, 1995
The 1980s saw the rise of Ronald Reagan and the New Right in American politics, the popularity of programs such as thirtysomething and Dynasty on network television, and the increasingly widespread use of VCRs, cable TV, and remote control in American living rooms. In Seeing Through the Eighties, Jane Feuer critically examines this most aesthetically complex and politically significant period in the history of American television in the context of the prevailing conservative ideological climate. With wit, humor, and an undisguised appreciation of TV, she demonstrates the richness of this often-slighted medium as a source of significance for cultural criticism and delivers a compelling decade-defining analysis of our most recent past.
With a cast of characters including Michael, Hope, Elliot, Nancy, Melissa, and Gary; Alexis, Krystle, Blake, and all the other Carringtons; not to mention Maddie and David; even Crockett and Tubbs, Feuer smoothly blends close readings of well-known programs and analysis of television’s commercial apparatus with a thorough-going theoretical perspective engaged with the work of Baudrillard, Fiske, and others. Her comparative look at Yuppie TV, Prime Time Soaps, and made-for-TV-movie Trauma Dramas reveals the contradictions and tensions at work in much prime-time programming and in the frustrations of the American popular consciousness. Seeing Through the Eighties also addresses the increased commodification of both the producers and consumers of television as a result of technological innovations and the introduction of new marketing techniques. Claiming a close relationship between television and the cultures that create and view it, Jane Feuer sees the eighties through televison while seeing through television in every sense of the word.
[more]

front cover of Selected Writings of Selma Fraiberg
Selected Writings of Selma Fraiberg
Louis Fraiberg
The Ohio State University Press, 1987
Social worker, psychoanalyst, and child-development expert Selma Fraiberg’s iconic book, The Magic Years, has influenced generations of caregivers, therapists, and clinicians since its publication in 1959. No less rich are the essays that make up this new, accessibly priced reissue of her Selected Writings.
 
Like The Magic Years, these essays (including her hugely influential “Ghosts in the Nursery”) glean their insights from years of clinical study and contain Fraiberg’s synthesis of and groundbreaking contributions to attachment theory, child psychology, social work, and, through her work with blind children, the experience of disability in infancy and childhood. Clinical rigor paired with attunement to the emotional lives of her subjects was Fraiberg’s hallmark: as her husband Louis writes in his preface to this volume, “Once, when asked how she knew what babies were thinking, she replied, ‘They tell me.’” Lucid and elegantly written, her Selected Writings will remain a valuable resource for new generations of social workers, mental-health professionals, educators, and others who work with young children.
 
[more]

front cover of Self, Identity, and Social Movements
Self, Identity, and Social Movements
Sheldon Stryker
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

front cover of The Self in Transition
The Self in Transition
Infancy to Childhood
Edited by Dante Cicchetti and Marjorie Beeghly
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Twenty-four distinguished behavioral scientists present recent research on the self during the pivotal period of transition from infancy to childhood and place it in historical perspective, citing earlier work of such figures as William James, George Herbert Mead, Sigmund Freud, and Heinz Kohut.

Contributors are Elizabeth Bates, Marjorie Beeghly, Barbara Belmont, Leslie Bottomly, Helen K. Buchsbaum, George Butterworth, Vicki Carlson, Dante Cicchetti, James P. Connell, Robert N. Emde, Jerome Kagan, Robert A. LeVine, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Editha Nottelmann, Sandra Pipp, Marian Radke-Yarrow, Catherine E. Snow, L. Alan Sroufe, Gerald Stechler, Sheree L. Toth, Malcolm Watson, and Dennie Palmer Wolf.
[more]

front cover of Self-Alteration
Self-Alteration
How People Change Themselves across Cultures
Jean-Paul Baldacchino
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Many of us feel a pressing desire to be different—to be other than who we are. Self-conscious, we anxiously perceive our shortcomings or insufficiencies, wondering why we are how we are and whether we might be different. Often, we wish to alter ourselves, to change our relationships, and to transform the person we are in those relationships. Not only a philosophical question about how other people change, self-alteration is also a practical care—can I change, and how? Self-Alteration: How People Change Themselves across Cultures explores and analyzes these apparently universal hopes and their related existential dilemmas. The essays here come at the subject of the self and its becoming through case studies of modes of transformation of the self. They do this with social processes and projects that reveal how the self acquires a non-trivial new meaning in and through its very process of alteration. By focusing on ways we are allowed to change ourselves, including through religious and spiritual traditions and innovations, embodied participation in therapeutic programs like psychoanalysis and gendered care services, and political activism or relationships with animals, the authors in this volume create a model for cross-cultural or global analysis of social-self change that leads to fresh ways of addressing the 'self' itself. 
[more]

logo for Amsterdam University Press
Self-Development Ethics and Politics in China Today
A Keyword Approach
Gil Hizi
Amsterdam University Press

logo for Harvard University Press
Semantic and Conceptual Development
An Ontological Perspective
Frank C. Keil
Harvard University Press, 1979

In Semantic and Conceptual Development, Frank Keil presents the firstpsychological investigation of thedeveloping child's ontological knowledge. Building on previous philosophical work, Keil shows that ontologicalcategories develop in a highly predictable progression. Moreover, Keil demonstrates that ontological development obeys a strong formal constrainton the relations among categories.Although there are many possibleontological systems, children appearto be inherently targeted to consider asystem of only one sort.

Keil's results represent exactly the sortof interdisciplinary study of thehuman mind which is graduallyemerging as the new field of cognitivescience. We are proud to publish hiswork as the first book in the CognitiveScience Series, which is designed tofoster major empirical and theoreticalcontributions to this new field.

[more]

front cover of The Senses Still
The Senses Still
C. Nadia Seremetakis
University of Chicago Press, 1996
What has happened to regional experiences that identify and shape culture? Regional foods are disappearing, cultures are dissolving, and homogeneity is spreading. Anthropologist and award-winning author of The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani, C. Nadia Seremetakis brings together essays by five scholars concerned with the senses and the anthropology of everyday life. Covering a wide range of topics—from film to food, from nationalism to the evening news—the authors describe ways in which sensory memories have preserved cultures otherwise threatened by urbanism and modernity.

The contributors are Susan Buck-Morss, Allen Feldman, Jonas Frykman, C. Nadia Seremetakis, and Paul Stoller.

C. Nadia Seremetakis is Advisor to the Minister of Public Health in Greece and visiting professor at the National School of Public Heath in Athens. She is the author of The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani, available from the University of Chicago Press.
[more]

front cover of Sensible Ecstasy
Sensible Ecstasy
Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History
Amy Hollywood
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Sensible Ecstasy investigates the attraction to excessive forms of mysticism among twentieth-century French intellectuals and demonstrates the work that the figure of the mystic does for these thinkers. With special attention to Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray, Amy Hollywood asks why resolutely secular, even anti-Christian intellectuals are drawn to affective, bodily, and widely denigrated forms of mysticism.

What is particular to these thinkers, Hollywood reveals, is their attention to forms of mysticism associated with women. They regard mystics such as Angela of Foligno, Hadewijch, and Teresa of Avila not as emotionally excessive or escapist, but as unique in their ability to think outside of the restrictive oppositions that continue to afflict our understanding of subjectivity, the body, and sexual difference. Mystics such as these, like their twentieth-century descendants, bridge the gaps between action and contemplation, emotion and reason, and body and soul, offering new ways of thinking about language and the limits of representation.
[more]

front cover of Sensing the Self
Sensing the Self
Women's Recovery from Bulimia
Sheila M. Reindl
Harvard University Press, 2001

Hearing about the destructive compulsion of bulimia nervosa, outsiders may wonder, "How could you ever start?" Those suffering from the eating disorder ask themselves in despair, "How can I ever stop?" How do you break the cycle of bingeing, vomiting, laxative abuse, and shame? While many books describe the descent into eating disorders and the resulting emotional and physical damage, this book describes recovery.

Psychologist Sheila Reindl has listened intently to women's accounts of recovering. Reindl argues compellingly that people with bulimia nervosa avoid turning their attention inward to consult their needs, desires, feelings, and aggressive strivings because to do so is to encounter an annihilating sense of shame. Disconnected from internal, sensed experience, bulimic women rely upon external gauges to guide their choices. To recover, bulimic women need to develop a sense of self--to attune to their physical, psychic, and social self-experience. They also need to learn that one's neediness, desire, pain, and aggression are not sources of shame to be kept hidden but essential aspects of humanity necessary for zestful life. The young women with whom Reindl speaks describe, with great feeling, their efforts to know and trust their own experience.

Perceptive, lucid, and above all humane, this book will be welcomed not only by professionals but by people who struggle with an eating disorder and by those who love them.

[more]

front cover of The Sensory Order
The Sensory Order
An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology
F. A. Hayek
University of Chicago Press, 1952
The Sensory Order, first published in 1952, sets forth F. A. Hayek's classic theory of mind in which he describes the mental mechanism that classifies perceptions that cannot be accounted for by physical laws. Hayek's substantial contribution to theoretical psychology has been addressed in the work of Thomas Szasz, Gerald Edelman, and Joaquin Fuster.

"A most encouraging example of a sustained attempt to bring together information, inference, and hypothesis in the several fields of biology, psychology, and philosophy."—Quarterly Review of Biology

F. A. Hayek (1899-1992), recipient of the Medal of Freedom in 1991 and co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, taught at the University of London, the University of Chicago, and the University of Freiburg.
[more]

front cover of The Sensory Order and Other Writings on the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology
The Sensory Order and Other Writings on the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology
F. A. Hayek
University of Chicago Press, 2017
F. A. Hayek (1899–1992) was one of the leading voices in economic and social theory, but he also wrote on theoretical psychology, including in the landmark book The Sensory Order. Although The Sensory Order was not widely engaged with by either psychologists or social scientists at the time of publication, it is seen today as essential for fully understanding Hayek’s more well-known work.

The latest addition to the University of Chicago Press’s Collected Works of F. A. Hayek series, The Sensory Order and Other Writings on the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology pairs the book, originally published in 1952, with additional essays related to The Sensory Order’s key themes, including a student paper from 1920 in which Hayek outlined the basic ideas he fully developed in the 1952 book. Rounding out the volume is an insightful introduction by editor Viktor Vanberg that sketches out the central problems Hayek was grappling with when he wrote The Sensory Order and the influential role this early thinking on theoretical psychology would play over the next six decades of his career. The book also features ample footnotes and citations for further reading, making this an essential contribution to the series.
 
[more]

front cover of Seriously Mad
Seriously Mad
Mental Distress and the Broadway Musical
Aleksei Grinenko
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Theatermakers in the United States have long been drawn to madness as a source of dramatic spectacle. During the Broadway musical’s golden age in the mid-twentieth century, creative teams used the currently in-vogue psychoanalytic ideas about mental life to construct troubled characters at odds with themselves and their worlds. As the clinical and cultural profile of madness transformed over the twentieth century, musicals continued to delve into the experience of those living with mental pain, trauma, and unhappiness.

Seriously Mad offers a dynamic account of stage musicals’ engagement with historically significant theories about mental distress, illness, disability, and human variance in the United States. By exploring who is considered mad and what constitutes madness at different moments in U.S. history, Aleksei Grinenko shows how, in attempts to bring the musicals closer to highbrow sophistication, theater dramatized serious medical conditions and social problems. Among the many Broadway productions discussed are Next to Normal, A Strange Loop, Sweeney Todd, Man of La Mancha, Gypsy, Oklahoma!, and Lady in the Dark.

[more]

front cover of Sex between Body and Mind
Sex between Body and Mind
Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-speaking World, 1890s-1930s
Katie Sutton
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Ideas about human sexuality and sexual development changed dramatically across the first half of the 20th century. As scholars such as Magnus Hirschfeld, Iwan Bloch, Albert Moll, and Karen Horney in Berlin and Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Stekel, and Helene Deutsch in Vienna were recognized as leaders in their fields, the German-speaking world quickly became the international center of medical-scientific sex research—and the birthplace of two new and distinct professional disciplines, sexology and psychoanalysis.
 
This is the first book to closely examine vital encounters among this era’s German-speaking researchers across their emerging professional and disciplinary boundaries. Although psychoanalysis was often considered part of a broader “sexual science,” sexologists increasingly distanced themselves from its mysterious concepts and clinical methods. Instead, they turned to more pragmatic, interventionist therapies—in particular, to the burgeoning field of hormone research, which they saw as crucial to establishing their own professional relevance. As sexology and psychoanalysis diverged, heated debates arose around concerns such as the sexual life of the child, the origins and treatment of homosexuality and transgender phenomena, and female frigidity. This new story of the emergence of two separate approaches to the study of sex demonstrates that the distinctions between them were always part of a dialogic and competitive process. It fundamentally revises our understanding of the production of modern sexual subjects.
 
[more]

front cover of Sex in Development
Sex in Development
Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective
Vincanne Adams and Stacy Leigh Pigg, eds.
Duke University Press, 2005
Sex in Development examines how development projects around the world intended to promote population management, disease prevention, and maternal and child health intentionally and unintentionally shape ideas about what constitutes “normal” sexual practices and identities. From sex education in Uganda to aids prevention in India to family planning in Greece, various sites of development work related to sex, sexuality, and reproduction are examined in the rich, ethnographically grounded essays in this volume. These essays demonstrate that ideas related to morality are repeatedly enacted in ostensibly value-neutral efforts to put into practice a “global” agenda reflecting the latest medical science.

Sex in Development combines the cultural analysis of sexuality, critiques of global development, and science and technology studies. Whether considering the resistance encountered by representatives of an American pharmaceutical company attempting to teach Russian doctors a “value free” way to offer patients birth control or the tension between Tibetan Buddhist ideas of fertility and the modernization schemes of the Chinese government, these essays show that attempts to make sex a universal moral object to be managed and controlled leave a host of moral ambiguities in their wake as they are engaged, resisted, and reinvented in different ways throughout the world.

Contributors. Vincanne Adams, Leslie Butt, Lawrence Cohen, Heather Dell, Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Shanti Parikh, Heather Paxson, Stacy Leigh Pigg, Michele Rivkin-Fish

[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Sex, Love, and Health in America
Private Choices and Public Policies
Edited by Edward O. Laumann and Robert T. Michael
University of Chicago Press, 2000
In 1994, the University of Chicago Press published the landmark study The Social Organization of Sexuality, "the most important survey since the Kinsey report," according to Time magazine. Based on data collected from the National Health and Social Life Survey, this heralded book answered hundreds of questions about the state of sex in America: how widespread is extramarital sex? how do women's sexual lives differ from men's? how do social factors such as education, race, and religion affect sexual conduct? While amazingly comprehensive, this earlier volume was devoted primarily to establishing baseline statistics and information. Two authors of that study, Edward O. Laumann and Robert T. Michael, now bring together the result of deeper research into and analysis of the information presented in the 1994 volume. The result, Sex, Love, and Health in America, is a companion to The Social Organization of Sexuality and furthers our understanding of Americans' sexual practices.

Sixteen researchers have contributed essays to this collection that explore controversial topics, including teenage sexuality, sexual contact between children and adults, abortion, the role of cohabitation in the sexual satisfaction of couples, and how sexual behavior has changed in response to AIDS, as well as a widely heralded examination of circumcision, reported in the New York Times, which discusses the effects of the procedure on disease transmission and the preference for certain sexual practices. In its analysis, policy recommendations, and revelations about private practices, Sex, Love, and Health in America will, like the earlier volume, have a major role in shaping the discussion about American sexual behavior.
[more]

front cover of Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control
Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control
Rickard, Diana
Rutgers University Press, 2016
The 1990s witnessed a flurry of legislative initiatives—most notably, “Megan’s Law”—designed to control a population of sex offenders (child abusers) widely reviled as sick, evil, and incurable. In Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control, Diana Rickard provides the reader with an in-depth view of six such men, exploring how they manage to cope with their highly stigmatized role as social outcasts. 
 
The six men discussed in the book are typical convicted sex offenders—neither serial pedophiles nor individuals convicted of the type of brutal act that looms large in public perceptions about sex crimes. Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control explores how these individuals, who have been cast as social pariahs, construct their sense of self. How does being labeled in this way and controlled by measures such as Megan’s Law affect one’s identity and sense of social being?  Unlike traditional criminological and psychological studies of this population, this book frames their experiences in concepts of both deviance and identity, asking how men so highly stigmatized cope with the most extreme form of social marginality. Placing their stories within the context of the current culture of mass incarceration and zero-tolerance, Rickard provides a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between public policy and lived experience, as well as an understanding of the social challenges faced by this population, whose re-integration into society is far from simple or assured.  
 
Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control makes a significant contribution to our understanding of sex offenders, offering a unique window into how individuals make meaning out of their experiences and present a viable—not monstrous—social self to themselves and others. 
 
[more]

front cover of Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography
Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography
The Pornographic Object of Knowledge
Jeffrey Escoffier
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Hardcore pornographic films combine fantasy and real sex to create a unique genre of entertainment. Pornographic films are also historical documents that give us access to the sexual behavior and eroticism of different historical periods. This book shows how the making of pornographic films is a social process that draws on the fantasies, sexual scripts, and sexual identities of performers, writers, directors, and editors to produce sexually exciting videos and movies. Yet hardcore pornographic films have also created a body of knowledge that constitutes, in this digital age, an enormous archive of sexual fantasies that serve as both a form of sex education and self-help guides. Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography focuses on sex and what can be learned about it from pornographic representations.
[more]

front cover of Sexology Uncensored
Sexology Uncensored
The Documents of Sexual Science
Edited by Lucy Bland and Laura Doan
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Sexology Uncensored brings together, for the first time, many of the key documents of the modern science of sexuality that emerged in the late nineteenth century. The early pioneers of the new field of sexology examined and classified sexual behaviors, identities, and relations. For years much of the material here has been "censored" in the sense that it is difficult to obtain, subject to restrictive circulation, or available only in medical archives. The extracts (which date from the 1880s to the 1940s) cover a variety of topics including gender and sexual difference; homosexuality; transsexuality and bisexuality; heterosexuality; marriage and sex manuals; reproductive control; eugenics; race; and various sexual proclivities.

Offering readers access to the primary materials on which contemporary sexology is founded, Sexology Uncensored is an invaluable record for all those interested in how we have come to think about sex and sexuality over the last hundred years.

Sexology in Culture and its companion Sexology Uncensored will interest all those concerned with understanding modern sexual discourse in its historical context.

[more]

front cover of Sexual Fluidity
Sexual Fluidity
Understanding Women’s Love and Desire
Lisa M. Diamond
Harvard University Press, 2008
Is love “blind” when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa M. Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked one hundred women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: “I fall in love with the person, not the gender,” say some respondents.Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women’s sexuality—and of the central importance of love.
[more]

front cover of Sexual Identity and Faith
Sexual Identity and Faith
Helping Clients Find Congruence
Mark A. Yarhouse
Templeton Press, 2019

Christians who struggle with a conflict between their sexual and religious identities have few therapeutic options available to them. ‘Sexual orientation change efforts’ (SOCE) have rightly fallen out of favor and are no longer practiced by most clinicians. At the same time, the common approach of gay affirmative therapy (GAT) can at times present challenges and may not be a good fit when clients hold to conventional religious beliefs and values.

An alternative to these methods is Sexual Identity Therapy (SIT)—an approach that aims to provide individuals with a safe therapeutic space to explore the tension between their sexuality and their faith. Working within the SIT framework, clients are able to resolve their inner conflict to their personal satisfaction and to freely choose a coherent identity that enables them to move forward in life.

SIT has several stages, each designed to enable the client to make meaning out of his or her same-sex sexuality. At no point in the process is the client encouraged to choose one sexual identity over another. The ultimate goal of SIT is congruence. Congruence is achieved when a person freely adopts an identity and lives it out in ways that are in keeping with his or her beliefs and values. The SIT model is brought to life throughout the book with the help of case studies drawn from the author’s 20 years of experience.

Written for both Christian and non-religious clinicians, Sexual Identity and Faith is an informed, respectful, and nuanced guide to help people navigate the difficult conflict between who they are sexually and what they believe religiously.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Sexual Metaphor
Helen Haste
Harvard University Press, 1994

Give the little boy a gun; offer the little girl a doll—how many years of feminism would it take to uncover the meaning behind such assumptions? After decades of attacks on intractable sexual stereotypes, the time is right to ask what makes them so compelling and resistant to change. In The Sexual Metaphor, Helen Haste does just that, exposing the deep cultural roots of our insistent distinctions between masculine and feminine.

To understand changing sex roles, Haste suggests that we recognize the role that gender plays in how we make sense of the world, particularly through the use of metaphor. As she demonstrates, the assault on traditional conceptions of gender is in fact a confrontation with the metaphor of dualism, or polarity, that underlies Western culture, informing our models of rationality and control. Here our anxieties about our own masculinity or femininity encounter a cultural tangle of opposites—public and private, order and chaos, thinking and feeling, active and passive, hard and soft, positive and negative. Drawing on research in the fields of sociology, anthropology, the history of science, paleontology, and philosophy, as well as her own field of psychology, Haste demonstrates the pervasiveness of the metaphor of dualism in large areas of our lives and our thinking, and of metaphor itself as a mode of thought expressing theories about the world in science and popular culture. Her work, accessible to social scientists and general readers alike, is a stimulating tour of the dark, divided territory that is the backdrop for our organization of everyday experience, society, and sexual identity.

[more]

front cover of Sexual Nature/Sexual Culture
Sexual Nature/Sexual Culture
Edited by Paul R. Abramson and Steven D. Pinkerton
University of Chicago Press, 1995
In this multidisciplinary study of human sexuality, an international team of scholars looks at the influences of nature and nurture, biology and culture, and sex and gender in the sexual experiences of humans and other primates.

Using as its center the idea that sexual pleasure is the primary motivational force behind human sexuality and that reproduction is simply a byproduct of the pleasurability of sex, this book examines sexuality at the individual, societal, and cultural levels. Beginning with a look at the evolution of sexuality in humans and other primates, the essays in the first section examine the sexual ingenuity of primates, the dominant theories of sexual behavior, the differences in male and female sexual interest and behavior, and the role of physical attractiveness in mate selection. The focus then shifts to biological approaches to sexuality, especially the genetic and hormonal origins of sexual orientation, gender, and pleasure.

The essays go on to look at the role of pleasure in different cultures. Included are essays on love among the tribespeople of the Brazilian rain forest and the regulation of adolescent sexuality in India. Finally, several contributors look at the methodological issues in the study of human sexuality, paying particular attention to the problems with research that relies on people's memories of their sexual experiences.

The contributors are Angela Pattatucci, Dean Hamer, David Greenberg, Frans de Waal, Mary McDonald Pavelka, Kim Wallen, Donald Symons, Heino Meyer-Bahlburg, Jean D. Wilson, Donald Tuzin, Lawrence Cohen, Thomas Gregor, Lenore Manderson, Robert C. Bailey, Alice Schlegel, Edward H. Kaplan, Richard Berk, Paul R. Abramson, Paul Okami, and Stephen D. Pinkerton.

Spanning the chasm of the nature versus nurture debate, Sexual Nature/Sexual Culture is a look at human sexuality as a complex interaction of genetic potentials and cultural influences. This book will be of interest to a wide range of readers—from scholars and students in psychology, anthropology, sociology, and history to clinicians, researchers, and others seeking to understand the many dimensions of sexuality.

"If we ever expect to solve the sexually based problems that modern societies face, we must encourage investigations of human sexual behavior. Moreover, those investigations should employ a broad range of disciplines—looking at sex from all angles, which is precisely what Sexual Nature, Sexual Culture does."—Mike May, American Scientist

"...This timely and relevant book reminds us that we cannot rely on simple solutions to complex problems. It represents a transdiciplinary approach integrating knowledge from diverse fields and provides the reader with a challenging and rewarding experience. Especially for those who are involved in teaching human sexuality to medical students and other health care professionals, this book is highly recommended."—Gerald Wiviortt, M.D., Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

"In short, this volume contains much to stimulate, inform, and amuse, in varying proportions. What more can one ask?"—Pierre L. van den Berghe, Journal of the History of Sexuality

"...the book succeeds in bring together some of the sharpest thinkers in the field of human sexuality, and goes a long way toward clarifying the diverse perspectives that currently exist."—David M. Buss and Todd K. Shackelford, Quarterly Review of Biology
[more]

front cover of The Sexual Organization of the City
The Sexual Organization of the City
Edited by Edward O. Laumann, Stephen Ellingson, Jenna Mahay, Anthony Paik, and Y
University of Chicago Press, 2004
We think of the city as a place where anything goes. Take the sensational fantasies and lurid antics of single women on Sex in the City or young men on Queer as Folk, and you might imagine the city as some kind of sexual playground—a place where you can have any kind of sex you want, with whomever you like, anytime or anywhere you choose.

But in The Sexual Organization of the City, Edward Laumann and company argue that this idea is a myth. Drawing on extensive surveys and interviews with Chicago adults, they show that the city is—to the contrary—a place where sexual choices and options are constrained. From Wicker Park and Boys Town to the South Side and Pilsen, they observe that sexual behavior and partnering are significantly limited by such factors as which neighborhood you live in, your ethnicity, what your sexual preference might be, or the circle of friends to which you belong. In other words, the social and institutional networks that city dwellers occupy potentially limit their sexual options by making different types of sexual activities, relationships, or meeting places less accessible.

To explain this idea of sex in the city, the editors of this work develop a theory of sexual marketplaces—the places where people look for sexual partners. They then use this theory to consider a variety of questions about sexuality: Why do sexual partnerships rarely cross racial and ethnic lines, even in neighborhoods where relatively few same-ethnicity partners are available? Why do gay men and lesbians have few public meeting spots in some neighborhoods, but a wide variety in others? Why are African Americans less likely to marry than whites? Does having a lot of friends make you less likely to get a sexually transmitted disease? And why do public health campaigns promoting safe sex seem to change the behaviors of some, but not others?

Considering vital questions such as these, and shedding new light on the city of Chicago, this work will profoundly recast our ideas about human sexual behavior.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Sexual Science and the Law
Richard Green
Harvard University Press, 1992

A rape victim charges that pornography caused her attacker to become a sex offender. A lesbian mother fights for custody of her child. A transsexual pilot is fired by a commercial airline after undergoing sex change and sues for sex discrimination. A homosexual is denied employment because of sexual orientation. A woman argues that her criminal behavior should be excused because she suffers from premenstrual syndrome. The law has much to say about sexual behavior, but what it says is rarely influenced by the findings of social science research over recent decades. This book focuses for the first time on the dynamic interplay between sexual science and legal decisionmaking.

Reflecting the author's wide experience as a respected sex researcher, expert witness, and lawyer, Sexual Science and the Law provides valuable insights into some of the most controversial social and sexual topics of our time. Drawing on an exhaustive knowledge of the relevant research and citing extensively from case law and court transcripts, Richard Green demonstrates how the work of sexual science could bring about a transformation in jurisprudence, informing the courts in their deliberations on issues such as sexual privacy, homosexuality, prostitution, abortion, pornography, and sexual abuse.

In each case he considers, Green shows how the law has been shaped by social science or impoverished by reliance on conjecture and received wisdom. He examines the role of sexual science in legal controversy, its analysis of human motivation and behavior, and its use by the courts in determining the relative weight to be given the desires of the individual, the standards of society, and the power of the state in limiting sexual autonomy. Unprecedented in its portrayal of sexuality in a legal context, this scholarly but readable book will interest and educate professional and layperson alike—those lawyers, judges, sex educators, therapists, patients, and citizens who find themselves standing nonplussed at the meeting place of morality and behavior.

[more]

front cover of Sexual Violence and American Manhood
Sexual Violence and American Manhood
T. Walter Herbert
Harvard University Press, 2002

Taking up topics as diverse and timely as the work of FBI profilers, the pornography debates, feminist analyses of male supremacy as sexual abuse, the ritual meanings of fraternity gang rape, and the interplay of racial and sexual injustice, T. Walter Herbert illuminates the chronic masculine anxieties that seek compensation in fantasies of sexual coercion and in sexual offenses against women. His work offers an unusually clear view of this prevailing convention of insecure and destructive masculinity, which Herbert connects with contemporary analyses of male identity formation, sexuality, and violence and with cultural, political, and ideological developments reaching back to the nation's democratic beginnings.

Reading iconic nineteenth-century texts by Whitman, Hawthorne, and Stowe, and pursuing the articulation of their gender logic in Richard Wright's Native Son, Herbert traces a gender ideology of dominance and submission, its persistence in masculine subcultures like the military and big-time football, and its debilitating effects on imaginations and lives in our own day. In materials as diverse as Hannah Foster's post-Revolutionary War novel The Coquette and the Coen brothers' 1996 movie Fargo, this book taps into popular culture and high art alike to outline the logic of American manhood's violent streak--and its dire consequences for a culture with truly democratic and egalitarian ambitions.

[more]

front cover of Sexuality across the Life Course
Sexuality across the Life Course
Edited by Alice S. Rossi
University of Chicago Press, 1994
How does sexual behavior change over one's life-span? How does sexual satisfaction affect the quality and stability of marriage? How has the AIDS epidemic affected sexual attitudes in America over the past three decades?

In this wide-reaching volume, distinguished sociologist Alice S. Rossi addresses these questions and others through fourteen diverse essays on sexual behavior, covering adolescence through old age and studying such groups as singles, married couples, and homosexuals. This extensive study also explores the effects of chronic disease and medication on sexual functioning, recent developments in psychotherapy for sexual problems, and sexual abuse of children, incest, and rape.

"The interdisciplinary nature of the project has resulted in a text that is accessible to anyone with a behavioral science background. Well written, well edited, and well received by this reviewer."—Joan C. Chrisler, Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy

"This is a book that needs to be on the bookshelf of any AIDS researcher."—AIDS Book Review Journal
[more]

front cover of Sexuality and Form
Sexuality and Form
Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon
Graham Hammill
University of Chicago Press, 2000
This ambitious, wide-ranging study of sexuality, aesthetics, and epistemology covers everything from the aesthetics of war to the works of Caravaggio, Michaelangelo, Christopher Marlowe, and Francis Bacon, synthesizing queer theory and psychoanalysis and demonstrating the role of the body and the flesh as both a problem and a promise within the narrative arts.
[more]

front cover of Sexuation
Sexuation
SIC 3
Renata Salecl, ed.
Duke University Press, 2000
Contemporary discourse seems to provide a choice in the way sexual identities and sexual difference are described and analyzed. On the one hand, much current thinking suggests that sexual identity is fluid—socially constructed and/or performatively enacted. This discourse is often invoked in the act of overcoming an earlier patriarchal era of fixed and naturalized identities. On the other hand, some modern discourses of sexual identity seem to offer a New Age Jungian re-sexualization of the universe—"Men are from Mars, and women are from Venus"—according to which there is an underlying, deeply anchored archetypal identity that provides a kind of safe haven in the contemporary confusion of roles and identities.

In this volume, contributors discuss a third way of thinking about sexual identity and sexual difference—a direction opened by Jacques Lacan. For Lacan, what we all recognize as sexual difference is first and foremost representative of a certain fundamental deadlock inherent in the symbolic order, that is, in language and in the entire realm of culture conceived as a symbol system structured on the model of language. For him, the logical matrix of this deadlock is provided by his own formulas of sexuation. The essays collected here elaborate on different aspects of this deadlock of sexual difference. While some examine the role of semblances in the relation between the sexes or consider sexual identity not as anatomy but still involving an impasse of the real, others discuss the difference between sexuation and identification, the role of symbolic prohibition in the process of the subject’s sexual formation, or the changed role of the father in contemporary society and the impact of this change on sexual difference. Other essays address such topics as the role of beating in sexual fantasies and jouissance in feminine jealousy.

Contributors. Alain Badiou, Elizabeth Bronfen, Darian Leader, Jacques Alain Miller, Genevieve Morel, Renata Salecl, Eric L. Santner, Colette Soler, Paul Verhaeghe, Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupancic

[more]

logo for Temple University Press
Shades of Black
Diversity in African American Identity
William Cross
Temple University Press, 1991

front cover of Shadows of Doubt
Shadows of Doubt
Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice
Brendan O'Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi
Harvard University Press, 2019

Shadows of Doubt reveals how deeply stereotypes distort our interactions, shape crime, and deform the criminal justice system.

If you’re a robber, how do you choose your victims? As a police officer, how afraid are you of the young man you’re about to arrest? As a judge, do you think the suspect in front of you will show up in court if released from pretrial detention? As a juror, does the defendant seem guilty to you? Your answers may depend on the stereotypes you hold, and the stereotypes you believe others hold. In this provocative, pioneering book, economists Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi explore how stereotypes can shape the ways crimes unfold and how they contaminate the justice system through far more insidious, pervasive, and surprising paths than we have previously imagined.

Crime and punishment occur under extreme uncertainty. Offenders, victims, police officers, judges, and jurors make high-stakes decisions with limited information, under severe time pressure. With compelling stories and extensive data on how people act as they try to commit, prevent, or punish crimes, O’Flaherty and Sethi reveal the extent to which we rely on stereotypes as shortcuts in our decision making. Sometimes it’s simple: Robbers tend to target those they stereotype as being more compliant. Other interactions display a complex and sometimes tragic interplay of assumptions: “If he thinks I’m dangerous, he might shoot. I’ll shoot first.”

Shadows of Doubt shows how deeply stereotypes are implicated in the most controversial criminal justice issues of our time, and how a clearer understanding of their effects can guide us toward a more just society.

[more]

front cover of Shamans, Mystics and Doctors
Shamans, Mystics and Doctors
A Psychological Inquiry into India and its Healing Traditions
Sudhir Kakar
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst and scholar, brilliantly illuminates the ancient healing traditions of India embodied in the rituals of shamans, the teachings of gurus, and the precepts of the school of medicine known as Ayurveda.

"With extraordinary sympathy, open-mindedness, and insight Sudhir Kakar has drawn from both his Eastern and Western backgrounds to show how the gulf that divides native healer from Western psychiatrist can be spanned."—Rosemary Dinnage, New York Review of Books

"Each chapter describes the geographical and cultural context within which the healers work, their unique approach to healing mental illness, and . . . the philosophical and religious underpinnings of their theories compared with psychoanalytical theory."—Choice
[more]

front cover of Shame and Its Sisters
Shame and Its Sisters
A Silvan Tomkins Reader
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds.
Duke University Press, 1995
The question of affect is central to critical theory, psychology, politics, and the entire range of the humanities; but no discipline, including psychoanalysis, has offered a theory of affect that would be rich enough to account for the delicacy and power, the evanescence and durability, the bodily rootedness and the cultural variability of human emotion.

Silvan Tomkins (1911–1991) was one of the most radical and imaginative psychologists of the twentieth century. In Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, a four-volume work published over the last thirty years of his life, Tomkins developed an ambitious theory of affect steeped in cybernetics and systems theory as well as in psychoanalysis, ethology, and neuroscience. The implications of his conceptually daring and phenomenologically suggestive theory are only now—in the context of postmodernism—beginning to be understood. With Shame and Its Sisters, editors Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank make available for the first time an engaging and accessible selection of Tomkins’s work.
Featuring intensive examination of several key affects, particularly shame and anger, this volume contains many of Tomkins’s most haunting, diagnostically incisive, and theoretically challenging discussions. An introductory essay by the editors places Tomkins’s work in the context of postwar information technologies and will prompt a reexamination of some of the underlying assumptions of recent critical work in cultural studies and other areas of the humanities. The text is also accompanied by a biographical sketch of Tomkins by noted psychologist Irving E. Alexander, Tomkins’s longtime friend and collaborator.

[more]

front cover of Shaming the Constitution
Shaming the Constitution
The Detrimental Results of Sexual Violent Predator Legislation
Michael L. Perlin
Temple University Press, 2017

Convicted sexually violent predators are more vilified, more subject to media misrepresentation, and more likely to be denied basic human rights than any other population. Shaming the Constitution authors Michael Perlin and Heather Cucolo question the intentions of sex offender laws, offering new approaches to this most complex (and controversial) area of law and social policy.

The authors assert that sex offender laws and policies are unconstitutional and counter-productive. The legislation largely fails to add to public safety—even ruining lives for what are, in some cases, trivial infractions. Shaming the Constitution draws on law, behavioral sciences, and other disciplines to show that many of the “solutions” to penalizing sexually violent predators are “wrong,” as they create the most repressive and useless laws.

In addition to tracing the history of sex offender laws, the authors address the case of Jesse Timmendequas, whose crime begat “Megan’s Law;” the media’s role in creating a “moral panic;” recidivism statistics and treatments, as well as international human rights laws. Ultimately, they call attention to the flaws in the system so we can find solutions that contribute to public safety in ways that do not mock Constitutional principles.

[more]

front cover of Shattered
Shattered
Fragments of a Black Life
Matthieu Chapman
West Virginia University Press, 2023

A heartrending and engrossing memoir that challenges narratives of racial progress and postracial America.
“Every so often, a book comes along that changes the way we see, speak, and think about the world. Shattered is one of those books.” —Frank B. Wilderson III, author of Afropessimism and Incognegro


From a distance, Matthieu Chapman’s life and accomplishments serve as an example of racial progress in America: the first in his family to go to college, he earns two master’s degrees and a doctorate and then becomes a professor of theater. Despite his personal and academic success, however, the specter of antiblackness continues to haunt his every moment and interaction.

Told through fragments, facets, shards, slivers, splinters, and absences, Shattered places Chapman’s own story in dialogue with US history and structural analysis of race to relay the experience of being very alive in a demonstrably antiblack society—laying bare the impact of the American way on black bodies, black psyches, and black lives. From the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the offices of higher education, from a Loyal White Knights flyer on his windshield to a play with black students written by a black playwright, Chapman’s life story embodies the resistance that occurs, the shattering, collapsing, and reconfiguring of being that happens in the collisions between conceptions of blackness. Shattered is a heartrending and thought-provoking challenge to narratives of racial progress and postracial America—an important reminder that systemic antiblack racism affects every black person regardless of what they achieve in spite of it.

[more]

front cover of Shattered Justice
Shattered Justice
Crime Victims' Experiences with Wrongful Convictions and Exonerations
Kimberly J. Cook
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Shattered Justice presents original crime victims' experiences with violent crime, investigations and trials, and later exonerations in their cases. Using in-depth interviews with 21 crime victims across the United States, Cook reveals how homicide victims’ family members and rape survivors describe the painful impact of the primary trauma, the secondary trauma of the investigations and trials, and then the tertiary trauma associated with wrongful convictions and exonerations. Important lessons and analyses are shared related to grief and loss, and healing and repair. Using restorative justice practices to develop and deliver healing retreats for survivors also expands the practice of restorative justice. Finally, policy reforms aimed at preventing, mitigating, and repairing the harms of wrongful convictions is covered.
[more]

front cover of The Shell and the Kernel
The Shell and the Kernel
Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Volume 1
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok
University of Chicago Press, 1994
This volume is a superb introduction to the richness and originality of Abraham and Torok's approach to psychoanalysis and their psychoanalytic approach to literature. Abraham and Torok advocate a form of psychoanalysis that insists on the particularity of any individual's life story, the specificity of texts, and the singularity of historical situations. In what is both a critique and an extension of Freud, they develop interpretive strategies with powerful implications for clinicians, literary theorists, feminists, philosophers, and all others interested in the uses and limits of psychoanalysis.

Central to their approach is a general theory of psychic concealment, a poetics of hiding. Whether in a clinical setting or a literary text, they search out the unspeakable secret as a symptom of devastating trauma revealed only in linguistic or behavioral encodings. Their view of trauma provides the linchpin for new psychic and linguistic structures such as the "transgenerational phantom," an undisclosed family secret handed down to an unwitting descendant, and the intra-psychic secret or "crypt," which entombs an unspeakable but consummated desire. Throughout, Abraham and Torok seek to restore communication with those intimate recesses of the mind which are, for one reason or another, denied expression.

Classics of French theory and practice, the essays in volume one include four previously uncollected works by Maria Torok. Nicholas Rand supplies a substantial introductory essay and commentary throughout. Abraham and Torok's theories of fractured meaning and their search for coherence in the face of discontinuity and disruption have the potential to reshape not only psychoanalysis but all disciplines concerned with issues of textual, oral, or visual interpretation.
[more]

front cover of Shifting The Blame
Shifting The Blame
How Victimization Became a Criminal Defense
Westervelt, Saundra D
Rutgers University Press, 1998

More than just a study of legal history, Shifting the Blame looks at the "abuse excuse" defense as an indicator of broad social change in cultural understandings of victimization, responsibility, and womanhood. The introduction of victimization as an exculpatory condition within the context of a criminal defense tells the story of a society that has accepted victimization as a new way of explaining and excusing misbehavior.

Through case law analysis, the book documents the initial development of the strategy in three different types of cases in the 1970s - "rotten social background", brainwashing, and battered women's self-defense cases. Since its initial acceptance in battered women's cases in the early 1980s, the use of the strategy has expanded to a variety of offenders in different types of relationships arguing different defenses. In lively, readable prose, Westervelt examines each form of expansion, revealing that while the expansion of the strategy has been fairly extensive, it has also been limited in some important ways. Her research shows readers that only certain types of "victims," particularly victims of physical abuse, have successfully used this defense. Shifting the Blame exposes the ways in which the acceptance of this new defense strategy illuminates a cultural shift in understandings of individual responsibility and shows how the law plays a role in defining who can be an acceptable victim.

Saundra D. Westervelt is an assistant professor in the Sociology Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

[more]

front cover of Shifting The Blame
Shifting The Blame
How Victimization Became a Criminal Defense
Westervelt, Saundra D
Rutgers University Press, 1996

More than just a study of legal history, Shifting the Blame looks at the "abuse excuse" defense as an indicator of broad social change in cultural understandings of victimization, responsibility, and womanhood. The introduction of victimization as an exculpatory condition within the context of a criminal defense tells the story of a society that has accepted victimization as a new way of explaining and excusing misbehavior.

Through case law analysis, the book documents the initial development of the strategy in three different types of cases in the 1970s - "rotten social background", brainwashing, and battered women's self-defense cases. Since its initial acceptance in battered women's cases in the early 1980s, the use of the strategy has expanded to a variety of offenders in different types of relationships arguing different defenses. In lively, readable prose, Westervelt examines each form of expansion, revealing that while the expansion of the strategy has been fairly extensive, it has also been limited in some important ways. Her research shows readers that only certain types of "victims," particularly victims of physical abuse, have successfully used this defense. Shifting the Blame exposes the ways in which the acceptance of this new defense strategy illuminates a cultural shift in understandings of individual responsibility and shows how the law plays a role in defining who can be an acceptable victim.

Saundra D. Westervelt is an assistant professor in the Sociology Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

[more]

front cover of Shock Therapy
Shock Therapy
Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia
Tomas Matza
Duke University Press, 2018
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia witnessed a dramatic increase in psychotherapeutic options, which promoted social connection while advancing new forms of capitalist subjectivity amid often-wrenching social and economic transformations. In Shock Therapy Tomas Matza provides an ethnography of post-Soviet Saint Petersburg, following psychotherapists, psychologists, and their clients as they navigate the challenges of post-Soviet life. Juxtaposing personal growth and success seminars for elites with crisis counseling and remedial interventions for those on public assistance, Matza shows how profound inequalities are emerging in contemporary Russia in increasingly intimate ways as matters of selfhood. Extending anthropologies of neoliberalism and care in new directions, Matza offers a profound meditation on the interplay between ethics, therapy, and biopolitics, as well as a sensitive portrait of everyday caring practices in the face of the confounding promise of postsocialist democracy.
[more]

front cover of A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis
A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Michigan State University Press, 2015
In 1755 the city of Lisbon was destroyed by a terrible earthquake. Almost 250 years later, an earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean unleashed a tsunami whose devastating effects were felt over a vast area. In each case, a natural catastrophe came to be interpreted as a consequence of human evil. Between these two events, two indisputably moral catastrophes occurred: Auschwitz and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And yet the nuclear holocaust survivors likened the horror they had suffered to a natural disaster—a tsunami.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy asks whether, from Lisbon to Sumatra, mankind has really learned nothing about evil. When moral crimes are unbearably great, he argues, our ability to judge evil is gravely impaired, and the temptation to regard human atrocity as an attack on the natural order of the world becomes irresistible. This impulse also suggests a kind of metaphysical ruse that makes it possible to convert evil into fate, only a fate that human beings may choose to avoid. Postponing an apocalyptic future will depend on embracing this paradox and regarding the future itself in a radically new way.
The American edition of Dupuy’s classic essay, first published in 2005, also includes a postscript on the 2011 nuclear accident that occurred in Japan, again as the result of a tsunami.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Short-Term Psychotherapy and Emotional Crisis
Peter Sifneos
Harvard University Press, 1972
Peter Sifneos describes a type of active and brief psychotherapeutic intervention which he believes is tremendously useful for selected patients with circumscribed emotional difficulties. The therapist assists the patient in defining the conflict underlying his dilemma and helps him learn to solve his emotional problems. As a result of this novel educational experience, the patient is able to use these newly acquired techniques to deal with other hazardous situations after the end of treatment. Indeed, the author maintains, the treatment is similar to an immunization procedure that enables certain individuals to prevent the development of emotional difficulties in the future. Dr. Sifneos describes two forms of this short-term therapy, “crisis-intervention” and anxiety-provoking—with emphasis on the latter—and presents in detail the theoretical background, criteria for selection of appropriate patients, technique, and illustrative case material.
[more]

front cover of Shows of Force
Shows of Force
Power, Politics, and Ideology in Art Exhibitions
Timothy W. Luke
Duke University Press, 1992
It has long been considered a mark of naïveté to ask of a work of art: What does it say? But as Timothy W. Luke demonstrates in Shows of Force, artwork is capable of saying plenty, and much of the message resides in the way it is exhibited. By critically examining the exhibition of art in contemporary American museums, Luke identifies how art showings are elaborate works of theater that reveal underlying political, social, and economic agendas.
The first section, “Envisioning a Past, Imagining the West,” looks at art exhibitions devoted to artworks about or from the American West. Luke shows how these exhibitions—displaying nineteenth- and early-twentieth century works by artists such as George Caleb Bingham, Frederic Remington, Frederic Edwin Church, and Georgia O’Keefe—express contemporary political agendas in the way the portray “the past” and shape new visions of “the West.”
In “Developing the Present, Defining a World,” Luke considers artists from the post-1945 era, including Ilya Kabokov, Hans Haacke, Sue Coe, Roger Brown, and Robert Longo. Recent art exhibits, his analysis reveals, attempt to develop politically charged conceptions of the present, which in turn struggle to define the changing contemporary world and art’s various roles within it.
Luke brings to light the contradictions encoded in the exhibition of art and, in doing so, illuminates the political realities and cultural ideologies of the present. Shows of Force offers a timely and surely controversial contribution to current discussions of the politics of exhibiting art.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Siblings
Love, Envy, and Understanding
Judy Dunn and Carol Kendrick
Harvard University Press, 1982

The birth of a younger sibling can be a traumatic event for the older child. Unquestionably it places increased demands on parents and causes important changes in the inner balance of the family. Childrearing manuals are full of advice about how to get through this difficult time. But until now such advice has been based more on clinical guesswork than on direct observation of what really happens to families when a sibling is born.

With the arrival of Siblings, this gap in our knowledge is admirably filled. Judy Dunn and Carol Kendrick studied forty families for a period of approximately one year starting shortly before the birth of a second child. Some families, they found, weather the storm much better than others, and their book examines the full catalog of factors that can make the difference. There are, for instance, parenting styles that ease the impact on the older child, improve relations between siblings, and generally make life easier for the entire family. But there are also differences among children in such characteristics as sex, age, and temperament, all of which have a major influence totally beyond parental control.

Despite the undeniable stress involved, Dunn and Kendrick demonstrate that the advent of a sibling can be a stimulus for real cognitive and emotional growth on the part of the older child. No longer "the baby," the child must try to deal with a newcomer whose attempts to communicate are necessarily rudimentary. Siblings shows how the elder child's efforts to understand the baby can form the basis for a loving bond of extraordinary durability.

A sensitive and informative book, Siblings takes psychology into an area of family life and child development that has long received too little attention.

[more]

front cover of Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Matt ffytche
Reaktion Books, 2022
Drawing on the latest research, an engaging and nuanced biography of Freud that argues for his continuing relevance.
 
However much his work has been reviled or contested, Sigmund Freud remains one of the most significant thinkers of the last one hundred and fifty years. He founded psychoanalysis, and his vision of human behavior and the unconscious mind provided a compelling paradigm for the understanding of society for much of the twentieth century.
 
In this gripping new account, Matt ffytche draws on the latest research into Freud’s impact and historical context, making the case for his continuing relevance in analyzing the vagaries, resistances, and desires of the human mind. Engaging and accessible, Sigmund Freud appeals to both students and the general reader, as well as anyone fascinated with mental health, dreams, and the hidden depths of human experience.
[more]

front cover of Sign Language Interpreting
Sign Language Interpreting
Deconstructing the Myth of Neutrality
Melanie Metzger
Gallaudet University Press, 1998
As with all professional interpreters, sign language interpreters strive to achieve the proper protocol of complete objectivity and accuracy in their translation without influencing the interaction in any way. Yet, Melanie Metzger's significant work Sign Language Interpreting: Deconstructing the Myth of Neutrality demonstrates clearly that the ideal of an interpreter as a neutral language conduit does not exist. Metzger offers evidence of this disparity by analyzing two videotaped ASL-English interpreted medical interviews, one an interpreter-trainee mock interview session, and the other an actual encounter between a deaf client and a medical professional.

          Sign Language Interpreting relies upon an interactional sociolinguistic approach to ask fundamental questions regarding interpreter neutrality. First, do interpreters influence discourse, and if so, how? Also, what kind of expectations do the participants bring to the event, and what do the interpreters bring to discussions? Finally, how do their remarks affect their alignment with participants in the interaction? Using careful assessments of how these interviews were framed, and also re-interviewing the participants for their perspectives, this penetrating book discloses the ways in which interpreters influence these situations. It also addresses the potential implications of these findings regarding sign language interpretation in medical, educational, and all other general interactions. Interpreter trainers and their students will join certified interpreters and Deaf studies scholars in applauding and benefiting from the fresh ground broken by this provocative study.
[more]

front cover of Signs and Voices
Signs and Voices
Deaf Culture, Identity, Language, and Arts
Kristin A. Lindgren
Gallaudet University Press, 2008

Cochlear implants, mainstreaming, genetic engineering, and other ethical dilemmas  confronting deaf people mandated a new, wide-ranging examination of these issues, fulfilled by Signs and Voices: Deaf Culture, Identity, Language, and Arts. This collection, carefully chosen from the 2004 Signs and Voices Conference, the Presidential Forum on American Sign Language at the Modern Language Association Convention, and other sources, addresses all of the factors now changing the cultural landscape for deaf people. To ensure quality and breadth of knowledge, editors Kristin A. Lingren, Doreen DeLuca, and Donna Jo Napoli selected the work of renowned scholars and performers Shannon Allen, H-Dirksen L. Bauman, Adrian Blue, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, Peter Cook, David P. Corina, Michael Davidson, Kristen Harmon, Tom Humphries, Sotaro Kita,  Heather Knapp, Robert G. Lee, Irene W. Leigh, Kenny Lerner, Carole Neidle, Peter Novak, AslI Özyürek, David M. Perlmutter, Anne Senghas, and Ronnie Wilbur.

Signs and Voices is divided into three sections—Culture and Identity, Language and Literacy, and American Sign Language in the Arts—each of which focuses on a particular set of theoretical and practical concerns. Also, the included DVD presents many of the performances from the Arts section. Taken together, these essays and DVD point to new directions in a broad range of fields, including cognitive science, deaf studies, disability studies, education, linguistics, literary criticism, philosophy, and psychology. This extraordinary showcase of innovative and rigorous cross-disciplinary study will prove invaluable to everyone interested in the current state of the Deaf community.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Silencing the Self
Women and Depression
Dana Crowley Jack
Harvard University Press, 1991

Dana Crowley Jack offers startling new insights into the roots of female depression as she illuminates why women are far more likely than men to suffer major depression in adulthood. Silencing the Self is the first sweeping overview of depression in women that draws on new understandings of the importance of relationships in women’s lives. Attending closely to what depressed women have to say about their lives, Jack reframes major concepts of depression, freeing them from traditional models that have restricted our ability to listen to women’s perspectives on depression.

Jack weaves these voices of depressed women directly into her discussion, providing new meanings to familiar themes: dependence, pleasing, anger, goodness, low self-esteem. These women clearly articulate a no-win, either/or tension in their lives, a tension between sacrificing their own needs in order to preserve a relationship and acting on their needs and feelings at the risk of losing the relationship. Their stories bring to light the “activity required to be passive”—the way women actively silence themselves in order to cultivate and maintain intimate relationships. To accommodate, they learn to censor themselves, to devalue their experience, to repress anger, to be silent. Examining moral themes in depressed women’s narratives, Jack demonstrates how internalized cultural expectations of feminine goodness affect women’s behavior in relationships and precipitate the plunge into depression. In a brilliant synthesis, Jack draws on myth and fairy tale for metaphors to further the understanding of depressed women.

Silencing the Self makes a major contribution to the psychology of women by drawing from the recent literature on women’s relational self and detailing its relevance to female depression. This insightful approach to the dynamic of female depression forges new pathways to self-change, therapy, and research.

[more]

front cover of A Silvan Tomkins Handbook
A Silvan Tomkins Handbook
Foundations for Affect Theory
Adam J. Frank
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

An accessible guide to the work of American psychologist and affect theorist Silvan Tomkins

 

The brilliant and complex theories of psychologist Silvan Tomkins (1911–1991) have inspired the turn to affect in the humanities, social sciences, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, these theories are not well understood. A Silvan Tomkins Handbook makes his theories portable across a range of interdisciplinary contexts and accessible to a wide variety of contemporary scholars and students of affect. 

A Silvan Tomkins Handbook provides readers with a clear outline of Tomkins’s affect theory as he developed it in his four-volume masterwork Affect Imagery Consciousness. It shows how his key terms and conceptual innovations can be used to build robust frameworks for theorizing affect and emotion. In addition to clarifying his affect theory, the Handbook emphasizes Tomkins’s other significant contributions, from his broad theories of imagery and consciousness to more focused concepts of scenes and scripts. With their extensive experience engaging and teaching Tomkins’s work, Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson provide a user-friendly guide for readers who want to know more about the foundations of affect studies.

[more]

front cover of The Simian Tongue
The Simian Tongue
The Long Debate about Animal Language
Gregory Radick
University of Chicago Press, 2007
In the early 1890s the theory of evolution gained an unexpected ally: the Edison phonograph. An amateur scientist used the new machine—one of the technological wonders of the age—to record monkey calls, play them back to the monkeys, and watch their reactions. From these soon-famous experiments he judged that he had discovered “the simian tongue,” made up of words he was beginning to translate, and containing the rudiments from which human language evolved. Yet for most of the next century, the simian tongue and the means for its study existed at the scientific periphery. Both returned to great acclaim only in the early 1980s, after a team of ethologists announced that experimental playback showed certain African monkeys to have rudimentarily meaningful calls.

Drawing on newly discovered archival sources and interviews with key scientists, Gregory Radick here reconstructs the remarkable trajectory of a technique invented and reinvented to listen in on primate communication. Richly documented and powerfully argued, The Simian Tongue charts the scientific controversies over the evolution of language from Darwin’s day to our own, resurrecting the forgotten debts of psychology, anthropology, and other behavioral sciences to the Victorian debate about the animal roots of human language.
[more]

front cover of Simulating Good and Evil
Simulating Good and Evil
The Morality and Politics of Videogames
Marcus Schulzke
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Simulating Good and Evil shows that the moral panic surrounding violent videogames is deeply misguided, and often politically motivated, but that games are nevertheless morally important. Simulated actions are morally defensible because they take place outside the real world and do not inflict real harms. Decades of research purporting to show that videogames are immoral has failed to produce convincing evidence of this. However, games are morally important because they simulate decisions that would have moral weight if they were set in the real world. Videogames should be seen as spaces in which players may experiment with moral reasoning strategies without taking any actions that would themselves be subject to moral evaluation. Some videogame content may be upsetting or offensive, but mere offense does not necessarily indicate a moral problem. Upsetting content is best understood by applying existing theories for evaluating political ideologies and offensive speech.
 
[more]

front cover of Sinners and Citizens
Sinners and Citizens
Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880-1950
Jens Rydström
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Sinners and Citizens explores how sexual habits changed in Sweden during its development from an agrarian society into a modern welfare state. Jens Rydström examines the history of homosexuality and bestiality in that country to consider why these sexual practices have been so closely linked in virtually all Western societies. He limns sharply the distinctive experience of rural life, showing that to regularly witness farm animals stirred passions and sparked ideas, especially among young farmhands.

Based on medical journals, psychiatric reports, and court records from the period, as well as testimonies from men in diaries, letters, and interviews, Sinners and Citizens reveals that bestiality was once a dreaded crime in Sweden. But in time, mention of the practice disappeared completely from legal and medical debates. This, Rydström contends, is because models of penetrative sodomy shifted from bestiality to homosexuality as Sweden transformed from a rural society into a more urban one. As the nation's economy and culture became less identified with the countryside, so too did its idea of deviant sexual behavior.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Sisters and Brothers
Judy Dunn
Harvard University Press, 1985

The sibling relationship, as any parent with two or more children knows, is an extraordinarily intense one: young brothers and sisters love and hate, play and fight, tease and mock each other with a devastating lack of inhibition.

Why do some siblings get along harmoniously and affectionately, while others constantly squabble? To what extent are parents responsible for differences in siblings' personalities, and how can they ease the tensions?

In this timely and unusual glimpse into the world of the child, Judy Dunn argues that in fighting, bullying, or comforting, very young sisters and brothers possess a far deeper understanding of others than psychologists have supposed. She challenges the usual assumptions that birth order, age gap, and gender are the most crucial factors in explaining dramatic differences between siblings within a family, and suggests that siblings themselves have an important influence on each other's development. She shows that by studying children with their brothers and sisters, rather than in unfamiliar situations, we gain a new and illuminating picture of how growing up with siblings affects children's personalities, their intelligence, their ways of thinking and talking, and their perceptions of themselves, their families, and their friends.

Full of practical advice for coping with the daily trials of parenting two or more children, this warm and accessible book, based on new research, gives a fresh perception of a relationship which for many people lasts longer than any other in life.

[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Sites of Desire/Economies of Pleasure
Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific
Edited by Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Discussions of sexuality in Asia and the Pacific have long been tinged with conceptions of the exotic Orient. Examining a world of erotic encounter between European, Asian, and Pacific people, these essays explore how sexual practices and sexual meanings have been constructed across cultural borders in Thailand, the Philippines, Burma/Myanmar, Japan, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and the Polynesian islands. Considering sexuality as embedded in a complex social and political world structured and saturated by gender, race, and class relations, these scholars challenge the categories with which sex and gender have been named and studied. They examine these sites of desire through specific historic and cultural circumstances, from the first explorations of Europeans, through colonial power, to the contemporary issues of sexual tourism, prostitution, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

A unique and important contribution to the study of sexuality, this book also suggests that the history of sexuality in the West was shaped by myths of the legendary Orient and the exotic "Other."
[more]

front cover of Sites of the Unconscious
Sites of the Unconscious
Hypnosis and the Emergence of the Psychoanalytic Setting
Andreas Mayer
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In the late nineteenth century, scientists, psychiatrists, and medical practitioners began employing a new experimental technique for the study of neuroses: hypnotism. Though the efforts of the famous French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot to transform hypnosis into a laboratory science failed, his Viennese translator and disciple Sigmund Freud took up the challenge and invented psychoanalysis. Previous scholarship has viewed hypnosis and psychoanalysis in sharp opposition or claimed that both were ultimately grounded in the phenomenon of suggestion and thus equally flawed. In this groundbreaking study, Andreas Mayer reexamines the relationship between hypnosis and psychoanalysis, revealing that the emergence of the familiar Freudian psychoanalytic setting cannot be understood without a detailed analysis of the sites, material and social practices, and controversies within the checkered scientific and medical landscape of hypnotism.
          
Sites of the Unconscious analyzes the major controversies between competing French schools of hypnotism that emerged at this time, stressing their different views on the production of viable evidence and their different ways of deploying hypnosis. Mayer then reconstructs in detail the reception of French hypnotism in German-speaking countries, arguing that the distinctive features of Freud’s psychoanalytic setting of the couch emerged out of the clinical laboratories and private consulting rooms of the practitioners of hypnosis.

[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Slave of Allah
Zacarias Moussaoui Vs the USA
Katherine C. Donahue
Pluto Press, 2007
In 2006, Zacarias Moussaoui became the first person to stand trial for the events of September 11, 2001. This timely book provides a close insight into the Moussaoui trial from an anthropological perspective. Katherine C. Donahue was present at the trial. Based on first-hand evidence, this book provides a unique picture of an al Quaeda convert in the process of forming his identity just when he is calling the death sentence upon himself. It is the story of an extra-national opposition to western democracy, seen through the experience of a man who calls himself a "slave of Allah."



The book begins with his arrest and moves to the courtroom, telling the tale of Moussaoui's struggle with his defense lawyers and raising questions about his ability to be "represented" given his national and personal identity. Donahue explores his background in France as the son of Moroccan immigrants and follows him to London, Afghanistan, and Malaysia as he joins the growing fraternity of an Islam without borders. He acquires an extra-national identity in which his loyalty is no longer constituted by his national identity, but by his allegiance to fundamental Islam.

[more]

front cover of Slavery and Social Death
Slavery and Social Death
A Comparative Study
Orlando Patterson
Harvard University Press, 1985

This is the first full-scale comparative study of the nature of slavery. In a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the tribal, ancient, premodern, and modern worlds, Orlando Patterson discusses the internal dynamics of slavery in sixty-six societies over time. These include Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, China, Korea, the Islamic kingdoms, Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the American South. Slavery is shown to be a parasitic relationship between master and slave, invariably entailing the violent domination of a natally alienated, or socially dead, person. The phenomenon of slavery as an institution, the author argues, is a single process of recruitment, incorporation on the margin of society, and eventual manumission or death.

Distinctions abound in this work. Beyond the reconceptualization of the basic master–slave relationship and the redefinition of slavery as an institution with universal attributes, Patterson rejects the legalistic Roman concept that places the “slave as property” at the core of the system. Rather, he emphasizes the centrality of sociological, symbolic, and ideological factors interwoven within the slavery system. Along the whole continuum of slavery, the cultural milieu is stressed, as well as political and psychological elements. Materialistic and racial factors are deemphasized. The author is thus able, for example, to deal with “elite” slaves, or even eunuchs, in the same framework of understanding as fieldhands; to uncover previously hidden principles of inheritance of slave and free status; and to show the tight relationship between slavery and freedom.

Interdisciplinary in its methods, this study employs qualitative and quantitative techniques from all the social sciences to demonstrate the universality of structures and processes in slave systems and to reveal cross-cultural variations in the slave trade and in slavery, in rates of manumission, and in the status of freedmen. Slavery and Social Death lays out a vast new corpus of research that underpins an original and provocative thesis.

[more]

front cover of Slavery and Social Death
Slavery and Social Death
A Comparative Study, With a New Preface
Orlando Patterson
Harvard University Press, 2018

Winner of the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, American Sociological Association
Co-Winner of the Ralph J. Bunche Award, American Political Science Association

In a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the tribal, ancient, premodern, and modern worlds, Orlando Patterson discusses the internal dynamics of slavery in sixty-six societies over time. These include Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, China, Korea, the Islamic kingdoms, Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the American South.

Praise for the previous edition:

“Densely packed, closely argued, and highly controversial in its dissent from much of the scholarly conventional wisdom about the function and structure of slavery worldwide.”
Boston Globe

“There can be no doubt that this rich and learned book will reinvigorate debates that have tended to become too empirical and specialized. Patterson has helped to set out the direction for the next decades of interdisciplinary scholarship.”
—David Brion Davis, New York Review of Books

“This is clearly a major and important work, one which will be widely discussed, cited, and used. I anticipate that it will be considered among the landmarks in the study of slavery, and will be read by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists—as well as many other scholars and students.”
—Stanley Engerman

[more]

front cover of The Sleep of Reason
The Sleep of Reason
Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome
Edited by Martha C. Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Sex is beyond reason, and yet we constantly reason about it. So, too, did the peoples of ancient Greece and Rome. But until recently there has been little discussion of their views on erotic experience and sexual ethics.

The Sleep of Reason brings together an international group of philosophers, philologists, literary critics, and historians to consider two questions normally kept separate: how is erotic experience understood in classical texts of various kinds, and what ethical judgments and philosophical arguments are made about sex? From same-sex desire to conjugal love, and from Plato and Aristotle to the Roman Stoic Musonius Rufus, the contributors demonstrate the complexity and diversity of classical sexuality. They also show that the ethics of eros, in both Greece and Rome, shared a number of commonalities: a focus not only on self-mastery, but also on reciprocity; a concern among men not just for penetration and display of their power, but also for being gentle and kind, and for being loved for themselves; and that women and even younger men felt not only gratitude and acceptance, but also joy and sexual desire.

Contributors:
* Eva Cantarella
* Kenneth Dover
* Chris Faraone
* Simon Goldhill
* Stephen Halliwell
* David M. Halperin
* J. Samuel Houser
* Maarit Kaimio
* David Konstan
* David Leitao
* Martha C. Nussbaum
* A. W. Price
* Juha Sihvola
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter