The End of Radicalism

After Utopia ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 218-269
Author(s):  
Judith N. Shklar
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Democratic Government ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
The Social

This chapter explores what answers can be offered to counsels of social despair. It explains why Romanticism refuses to analyze the social world with any degree of thoroughness. It also discusses how Christian fatalism subjects modern history to an excess of simplification in order to satisfy its sense of outrage. The chapter talks about Jean-Paul Sartre, who very characteristically notes that the conformism of Americans is due to their universal rationalism and optimism, although this spirit is no longer encountered among social philosophers in America. It mentions President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points as the last great document to testify of the faith that the advantages of democratic government appeal to all.

‘A Petty Form of Suffering’

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 88-102
Author(s):  
Naomi Segal
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Andre Gide ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Diary Entry ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
The Social ◽  
Skin Ego ◽  
André Gide

‘Itching is a petty form of suffering,’ wrote André Gide in 1931. Itching may be occasional or obsessive; it positions a person inside a body that exists in familial and social contexts; it can be evoked in debates about righteousness and justice. This article begins with discussion of the work of Didier Anzieu, psychoanalyst author of The Skin-ego: among the nine ‘functions’ of the skin-ego that Anzieu describes, the last is ‘toxicity’, the skin turned against itself in a gesture of self-destruction. In my discussion of three other texts, I connect Gide’s diary entry to his sexuality; Lorette Nobécourt’s novel to the social world; the book of Job to the metaphysics of virtue; and to these I append two semi-comic moments from Jean-Paul Sartre and Sarah Winman, and discussions of ‘leprosy’ and psoriasis, two versions of feeling (in both senses) that one has a skin.

The Contribution of Enrique Pichon-Rivière: Comparisons with His European Contemporaries and with Modern Theory

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Scharff
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
George Herbert Mead ◽  
Analytic Thinking ◽  
Family Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Original Family ◽  
Kurt Lewin ◽  
Social Applications

Enrique Pichon-Rivière, a pioneer of psychoanalysis, worked and wrote in Argentina in the mid-twentieth century, but his work has not so far been translated into English. From the beginning, Pichon-Rivière understood the social applications of analytic thinking, centring his ideas on "el vinculo", which is generally translated as "the link", but could equally be translated as "the bond". The concept that each individual is born into human social links, is shaped by them, and simultaneously contributes to them inextricably ties people's inner worlds to the social world of family and society in which they live. Pichon-Rivière believed, therefore, that family analysis and group and institutional applications of analysis were as important as individual psychoanalysis. Many of the original family and couple therapists from whom our field learned trained with him. Because his work was centred in the analytic writings of Fairbairn and Klein, as well as those of the anthropologist George Herbert Mead and the field theory of Kurt Lewin, his original ideas have important things to teach us today. This article summarises some of his central ideas such as the link, spiral process, the single determinate illness, and the process of therapy.

Our Most Troubling Madness

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Defeat ◽  
Social World ◽  
Epidemiological Evidence ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Brain Alteration ◽  
Benign Course ◽  
Cultural Features ◽  
The Way

This book examines the way schizophrenia is shaped by its social context: how life is lived with this madness in different settings, and what it is about those settings that alters the course of the illness, its outcome, and even the structure of its symptoms. Until recently, schizophrenia was perhaps our best example—our poster child—for the “bio-bio-bio” model of psychiatric illness: genetic cause, brain alteration, pharmacologic treatment. We now have direct epidemiological evidence that people are more likely to fall ill with schizophrenia in some social settings than in others, and more likely to recover in some social settings than in others. Something about the social world gets under the skin. This book presents twelve case studies written by psychiatric anthropologists that help to illustrate some of the variability in the social experience of schizophrenia and that illustrate the main hypotheses about the different experience of schizophrenia in the west and outside the west--and in particular, why schizophrenia seems to have a more benign course and outcome in India. We argue that above all it is the experience of “social defeat” that increases the risk and burden of schizophrenia, and that opportunities for social defeat are more abundant in the modern west. There is a new role for anthropology in the science of schizophrenia. Psychiatric science has learned—epidemiologically, empirically, quantitatively—that our social world makes a difference. But the highly structured, specific-variable analytic methods of standard psychiatric science cannot tell us what it is about culture that has that impact. The careful observation enabled by rich ethnography allows us to see in more detail what kinds of social and cultural features may make a difference to a life lived with schizophrenia. And if we understand culture’s impact more deeply, we believe that we may improve the way we reach out to help those who struggle with our most troubling madness.

Experience of Ethnographic Fieldwork in an English Benedictine Monastery

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Irvine
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Fieldwork Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Peripheral Participation

What is the role of imitation in ethnographic fieldwork, and what are its limits? This article explores what it means to participate in a particular fieldsite; a Catholic English Benedictine monastery. A discussion of the importance of hospitality in the life of the monastery shows how the guest becomes a point of contact between the community and the wider society within which that community exists. The peripheral participation of the ethnographer as monastic guest is not about becoming incorporated, but about creating a space within which knowledge can be communicated. By focusing on the process of re-learning in the monastery – in particular, relearning how to experience silence and work – I discuss some of the ways in which the fieldwork experience helped me to reassess the social world to which I would return.

Mental state dynamics explain the origin of mental state concepts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Allen Thornton ◽  
Milena Rmus ◽  
Diana Tamir
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Artificial Neural Network ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Artificial Neural ◽  
Ebb And Flow

People’s thoughts and feelings ebb and flow in predictable ways: surprise arises quickly, anticipation ramps up slowly, regret follows anger, love begets happiness, and so forth. Predicting these transitions between mental states can help people successfully navigate the social world. We hypothesize that the goal of predicting state dynamics shapes people’ mental state concepts. Across seven studies, when people observed more frequent transitions between a pair of novel mental states, they judged those states to be more conceptually similar to each other. In an eighth study, an artificial neural network trained to predict real human mental state dynamics spontaneously learned the same conceptual dimensions that people use to understand these states: the 3d Mind Model. Together these results suggest that mental state dynamics explain the origins of mental state concepts.

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