Changing While Remaining the Same

2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-168
Author(s):  
Benoît Verdon
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Rorschach Test ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Bodily Integrity ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Random Group ◽  
External Reality ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Demographic Group ◽  
Internal Reality

Aging is a clearly evolutionary process that first discreetly and then more starkly modifies social references, cognitive potentialities, and above all bodily integrity and appearance. External reality cannot avoid encountering the internal reality of each one of us. Women and men, with their variable and singular narcissistic and identificatory weaknesses and resources, are invited or even compelled to deal, in a way that is both new and constantly being modified, with loss and incompleteness, with the inevitable nature of our finite destiny, the disenchantment of things left unfinished. This research, based on a qualitative analysis of 110 Rorschach protocols gathered from a random group of men and women – ordinary people between 50 and 90 years of age – allows us to appreciate the quality and perhaps the particularity of the expressions of these mental problem configurations in which the question of nonintegrity proves to be crucial. The results demonstrate how the Rorschach Test can be useful in understanding the diversity of self-representation, by avoiding turning a demographic group into a clinical entity. They show that, contrary to what the first research works in psychoanalysis and projective psychology suggested, aging in itself does not lead to a decrease of the mental processes.

The Case of Thematic Tests Adapted to Older Adults

2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benoît Verdon
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Older Persons ◽  
Older Men ◽  
Elderly Persons ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Projective Tests ◽  
New Material ◽  
Older Men And Women ◽  
Latent Content

Since the 1950s, the growing interest of clinicians in using projective tests to study normal or pathological aging processes has led to the creation of several thematic tests for older adults. This development reflects their authors’ belief that the TAT is not suitable to the concerns and anxieties of elderly persons. The new material thus refers explicitly to situations related to age; it aims to enable older persons to express needs they cannot verbalize during consultations. The psychodynamic approach to thematic testing is based on the differentiation between the pictures’ manifest and latent content, eliciting responses linked to mental processes and issues the respondent is unaware of. The cards do not necessarily have to show aging characters to elicit identification: The situations shown in the pictures are linked to loss, rivalry, helplessness, and renunciation, all issues elderly respondents can identify with and that lead them to express their mental fragilities and resources. The article first explains the principles underlying four of these thematic tests, then develops several examples of stories told for card 3BM of the TAT, thus showing the effectiveness of this tool for the understanding and differentiation of loss-related issues facing older men and women.

The Thirty-Second Maudsley Lecture: Sensory Experience and Brain Structure

1958 ◽  
Vol 104 (434) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilfred Le Gros Clark
Keyword(s):  
Brain Structure ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
External Reality ◽  
Creative Evolution ◽  
Partial View ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Insight Into

It was in my early youth that I first read Bergson's Creative Evolution. At that time, as I recollect, it particularly captured my interest and attention because it seemed to embody certain essential principles which I had not found to be expressed quite so forcibly elsewhere. It is true that the validity of many of Bergson's speculations and ideas have since been seriously controverted and so find little or no support today, but his philosophy also propounds certain conceptions which are perhaps worthy of renewed attention. I refer more especially to Bergson's contrast of those two aspects of conscious experience which he terms intellect and intuition. Intellect, he argues, is the product of a gradual evolutionary process which enables the individual with increasing efficiency to select and abstract just those several features of surrounding objects which are directly relevant to the problem of evolutionary survival. In so far as it selects and abstracts, the intellect by itself can provide only a partial view of external reality. “To conquer matter,” Bergson says, “consciousness has had to exhaust the best part of its power”—it has had to “adapt itself to the habits of matter and concentrate all its attention on them, in fact, determine itself more especially as intellect.” But there remains “around our conceptual and logical thought a vague nebulosity, made of the very substance out of which has been formed the luminous nucleus which we call the intellect”. Therein reside certain powers that are complementary to the understanding—powers of intuitive recognition. Intellect is essentially based on a sort of derived symbolism gradually elaborated in the course of evolution, which serves its immediate purpose as a convenient, useful, and indeed essential device for gaining control over the material world; on the other hand intuition, according to Bergson, is capable of giving scintillating flashes of insight “into the very inwardness of life”.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Michèle Lamont ◽  
Graziella Moraes Silva ◽  
Jessica S. Welburn ◽  
Joshua Guetzkow ◽  
Nissim Mizrachi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Group Boundaries ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Ethiopian Jews ◽  
Depth Interviews

This book explores the stigmatizing or discriminatory experiences of ordinary people and how they respond to such experiences, along with the factors that affected their courses of action. Drawing on more than 400 in-depth interviews with African Americans in New York suburbs, Black Brazilians in and around Rio de Janeiro, and Arab Palestinians, Ethiopian Jews, and Mizrahi Jews in Israel, the book investigates how national configurations of cultural repertoires and group boundaries influence experiences of and responses to stigmatization and discrimination. To this end, the book describes the incidents where respondents—middle- and working-class men and women—were treated unfairly and the interactions where they felt underestimated, overscrutinized, misunderstood, feared, overlooked, shunned, or discriminated against. This introduction explains the book's approach for analyzing how groupness is organized around race, ethnicity, phenotype, nationality, or religion, as well as the challenges and questions it addresses, and how the study was undertaken.

scholarly journals Between Rigidity and Chaos

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 427-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Enosh ◽  
Zvi Eisikovits ◽  
Chen Gross
Keyword(s):  
Intimate Partner Violence ◽  
Partner Violence ◽  
Deep Structure ◽  
Intimate Partner ◽  
Future Research ◽  
External Reality ◽  
Major Life ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

The goal of this article was to examine the worldviews of cohabiting or married men and women who experienced domestic violence in their relationships. The study was based on content analysis of in-depth interviews with 48 men and women (24 couples), who were living together after experiencing at least one violent event in their relationships over the previous 12 months. Using constructivist grounded theory, the authors examined the deep structure of the ways by which partners living with intimate partner violence constructed their world. The men and women under study constructed heuristic models in two major life domains—psychological processes and how the world works overall. The analysis has revealed two axes resulting in four worldviews. The two axes were the construction of the world and the construction of the mind. Constructions of the mind ranged from chaotic to deterministic. Constructions of external reality ranged from static to fluid and uncontrollable. The theoretical model developed suggested four different types of basic worldviews. The suggested typology was examined in relation to existing typologies in the field of intimate partner violence and in relation to future research and interventions.

Preliminary Study of Relations between Physical Characteristics and Psychological Impressions of Natural Voices

1997 ◽  
Vol 85 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1483-1491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ichiro Hieda ◽  
Yasuo Kuchinomachi
Keyword(s):  
Principal Component Analysis ◽  
Principal Components ◽  
Principal Component ◽  
Physical Characteristics ◽  
Psychological Effects ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Significant Relation ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Preliminary Study ◽  
Component Scores

To improve the naturalness of synthesized voices, the relations between the physical characteristics of the synthesized voices and the psychological effects should be established. The authors performed a psychological evaluation using natural voices of men and women as stimuli. The method of principal component analysis was applied to intercorrelations, the numerical racings of the evaluation, and principal components were extracted which represented aspects ordinary people use to evaluate natural voices. Pitches of the voices used in the evaluation were analyzed as samples of physical voice parameters, and the relations between the pitches and the principal components were examined. Four principal components were extracted, representing aspects to which most people were observed to pay most attention when listening to voices. A significant relation was also found between physical pitches which were standardized by sex and the perceived pitches which were introduced from the principal component scores. This finding suggests that different criteria are used for perceptions of pitches of men and women.

Women in Rural Ireland in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries – How the Daughters, Wives and Sisters of Small Farmers and Landless Labourers Fared

Rural History ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne O'Dowd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Small Farmers ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Full Understanding ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Is Research ◽  
Highly Efficient ◽  
Folk Tradition

The surge in writing by and about women in recent decades in Ireland is contributing to a good understanding of the place of women in Irish society. It is research which shows that women often had to be exceptionally good at their chosen or allotted role in life in order to be recognised and noted, or had to be capable and highly efficient at tasks ordinarily and traditionally done by men. This is especially true of the women who were the wives, sisters and mothers of the labourers and small farmers of nineteenth-century Ireland, with which this article is concerned. It is freely noted at this point that writing about the lives of so-called ordinary people – both men and women – in all centuries is difficult because of a lack of source material. Writing about women, without reference to male siblings, spouses and fathers is extremely problematic and one must seek out information by a very close examination of available facts and by a full understanding and awareness of the usefulness of the collected folk tradition.

scholarly journals "LAS NIÑAS TAMBIÉN JUEGAN CON CARRITOS" La Mujer en la Gerencia: el caso del Perú

1993 ◽  
pp. 47-67
Author(s):  
Ana Rosa Adaniya ◽  
◽  
Rosa P. de Pérez-Costa ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Gender Role ◽  
Analysis Of Variance ◽  
Group Analysis ◽  
Correlation Coefficients ◽  
Random Group ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Level Of Education ◽  
Interclass Correlation ◽  
Schein Descriptive Index ◽  
Successful Manager

The purpose of this research is to determine whether there are differences between managers’ perceptions about the characteristics of a successful manager. It is based on Schein’s studies of gender role stereotypes and the characteristics required to be considered a successful manager. The hypotheses, one for men and one for women, are that managers will perceive that successful ones have attitudes, characteristics and temperaments that are more commonly attributed to men in general than to women in general. The slightly modified Schein Descriptive Index questionnaire to a sample of 268 managers working in Lima. Interclass correlation coefficients (r’) were calculated from two random group analysis of variance of the 92 descriptive items. In conclusion, it is found that while the hypothesis in confirmed in male managers, the same is not true in female managers, who perceive thar both men and women have characteristics of successful managers. Another finding is that age and years of experience moderate the perceptions of women, while the level of education moderates those of men.

scholarly journals Bierce, Bioy Casares, and Borges: The Mirrors and Labyrinths of Intertextuality

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 16-26
Author(s):  
William Deaver
Keyword(s):  
Jorge Luis Borges ◽  
External Reality ◽  
Internal Reality ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
Adolfo Bioy Casares ◽  
Ambrose Bierce ◽  
The Mind

This article analyzes the intersection of works by Ambrose Bierce, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Jorge Luis Borges as mirror images of themes and descriptions in describing a miraculous occurrence, albeit only in the labyrinthine mind of the protagonist, often categorized within the genre of the fantastic. The article’s intertextual approach focuses on sensorial perceptions that only grant validity to an internal reality (what the mind interprets) rather than to an external reality (what the eyes see). All three works in this study are concerned with a criminal condemned to death who seeks to prolong his life. The protagonists have similar responses, although their motivations are different.

Creativity and Its Origins

2016 ◽  
pp. 299-318
Author(s):  
Donald W. Winnicott
Keyword(s):  
Case Material ◽  
Worth Living ◽  
External Reality ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

In this paper, Winnicott discusses the origins of creativity, stating that creative apperception more than anything else is what makes the individual feel that life is worth living. He contrasts this with a relationship to external reality that is one of compliance, where the world and its details are recognized only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation. He also approaches creativity from the position of male and female elements, using case material involving dissociation of male and female elements in men and women and discussing pure male and female elements.

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