A commentary on "The cannibalistic impulses in parents" by George Devereux

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-163
Author(s):  
Francesco Spadaro

In this paper Devereux, a Hungarian ethno-psychoanalyst, naturalised French, reports some of his studies made among various populations among which he worked. These included Hawaiians, Indigenous American Indians, and some ethnic groups of the Aleutian Islands, Canada, and countries in Africa. It shows how among mothers and fathers there exists a diffuse cannibalistic instinct to which the baby may respond with a counter cannibalistic position. These impulses assume a universality and can be considered the unconscious universal origin of aggressiveness towards the other. Cannibalistic impulses represent a primitive matrix of parental aggressiveness, in which other causes of aggressiveness towards newborns and children may fit: jealousy, envy, perversions, and oedipal elements. Forensic psychotherapy may benefit from this knowledge indicating the psychic levels and capacities of the patients and evaluating the strength of these impulses in their psychopathology which may correlate to their inner time and their search for narcissistic power.

2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (Suppl 1) ◽  
pp. 53.1-53
Author(s):  
L. K. Tan ◽  
C. L. Too ◽  
A. F. Nurul-Aain ◽  
A. A. Siti-Aisyah ◽  
S. Wahinuddin ◽  
...  

Background:Dengue infection is associated with joints pain mimicking disease onset symptom of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). However, there is lack of epidemiological studies on exposure to dengue infection and risk of future RA.Objectives:We investigated the relationship between exposure to dengue infection and risk of developing different subsets of RA, defined by the presence of anti-citrullinated peptide antibody (ACPA) in the multi-ethnic Malaysian population.Methods:Serum samples from 1,235 RA cases (i.e. 516 Malay, 254 Chinese, 405 Indians and 60 others/mixed-ethnicity) and 1,624 epidemiological matched population-based controls (i.e. 1,023 Malay, 208 Chinese, 297 Indians and 96 others/mixed-ethnicity) were assayed for presence of dengue IgG antibody using World Health Organization recommended ELISA kits. Positive results of dengue IgG antibodies indicates previous exposure to dengue infection(s). We performed chi-square and Mann-Whitney U analysis to determine the association of ever-exposed dengue infection with ACPA-positive/ACPA-negative RA and to investigate the antibody frequency and levels among the studied populations.Results:We observed high occurrence of dengue IgG antibody in the overall RA cases (79.7%) and matched controls (77.3%), with no significant differences detected between the ACPA subsets of RA. Ethnicity stratification analysis revealed a decrease risk of developing ACPA-positive RA in the Indian patients with positive dengue IgG antibody (OR=0.59, 95% CI=0.37-0.94, p=0.03), and in particular patients with elevated level of dengue IgG antibody (OR=0.44, 95% CI=0.25-0.78, p<0.05). On the other hand, the significant decrease mean levels of dengue IgG antibody were observed in the ACPA-positive RA subset for all three major ethnic groups (i.e. Malay, p<0.0001, Chinese, p<0.01 and Indian<0.05) (Figure 1). No association was observed between presence of dengue IgG antibody and ACPA-negative RA subset.Figure 1.Comparison of mean dengue IgG antibody level between ever-exposed dengue infection RA cases, stratified by ACPA status. Comparison of median dengue IgG antibody level between the ever-exposed dengue infection ACPA-positive RA and normal controls in the four ethnic groups. The red line indicates the mean level of dengue IgG antibody levelConclusion:Our findings demonstrated that exposure to dengue infection do not increase the risk of developing future RA in the multi-ethnic Malaysian population. The inverse associations observed in the Indian ethnic group are in line with the other studies investigating exposure to viral infection and risk of RA.References:[1]Sherina et al (2017) Low levels of antibodies against common viruses associate with anti-citrullinated protein antibody-positive rheumatoid arthritis; implications for disease aetiology. Arthritis Research & Therapy 2017, 19:2169[2]Gissel García et. al. (2011) Long-term persistence of clinical symptoms in dengue-infected persons and its association with immunological disorders. International Journal of Infectious Diseases 15 (2011) e38–e43Acknowledgements:The authors would like to thank the Director General of Health, Ministry of Health Malaysia for supporting this study. The authors are also indebted to participants for their kind participation. This study was financially supported by the Ministry of Health, Malaysia (JPP-IMR 17-025) and the short-term research grant by UniKL RCMP (str16037).Disclosure of Interests:None declared


PMLA ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 233-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monroe Z. Hafter

A recent article of Leon Livingstone rightly calls attention to the importance of Pérez Galdós' assimilation of Cervantine irony as a forerunner of the concern of modern Spanish novelists about the autonomy of their characters. The unreality of rationalism, which Livingstone holds to be the germ of El amigo Manso, the imagination's capacity to create reality at the heart of Misericordia, lead to the even bolder experiments in the artistic representation of reality undertaken by Unamuno, Azorín, Valle-Inclán, and Pérez de Ayala. Anomalous for his time yet so pervasive in his work is Galdós' employment of “interior duplication” that a separate study would contribute to our fuller understanding of his art as well as to our measure of the advances in the Spanish novel of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The present essay focuses on Galdós' developing skill with internal repetitions from La Fontana de Oro (publ. 1870), through the rich complexities of the novels written between 1886–89, to their almost stylized simplicity in El abuelo (1897). Always related to Cervantine irony, the variety of verbal echoes, the mirroring of one character in another, the unconscious illumination each may offer the other, underscore the increasingly intimate wedding of form and matter with which Galdós came to unfold his narratives.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 310-349
Author(s):  
Ana Pires do Prado ◽  
Giselle Carino Lage

Abstract This paper aims to demonstrate the existence of two different types of school management culture. Data was collected during fieldwork over the academic years 2008 and 2009 in two public high schools in Rio de Janeiro where we observed administrative and pedagogical meetings, classrooms and the everyday life of the schools. From an analysis of the practices and conceptions of management staff, we describe the unconscious grammatical principles that govern the running of the two schools. These becomes particularly clear in the different selection procedures in the two schools, one of them conducting severe criteria for entrance and the other allowing all to enter but few to reach the end of the course. These two recruitment selection practices reveal distinct expectations and beliefs on students' ability (or inability) to learn.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonya Rastogi ◽  
CAROLYN LIEBLER ◽  
James Noon

Outsiders’ views of a person’s race or Hispanic origin can impact how she sees herself, how she reports her race and Hispanic origins, and her social and economic experiences. The way outsiders describe non-strangers in terms of their race and Hispanic origin may reveal popular assumptions about which race/Hispanic categories are salient for Americans, which kinds of people are seen as multiracial, and the types of cues people use when identifying another person’s race. We study patterns of observer identification using a unique, large, linked data source with two measures of a person’s race and Hispanic origin. One measure (from Census 2000 or the 2010 Census) was provided by a household respondent and the other (from the other census year) was provided by a census proxy reporter (e.g., a neighbor) who responded on behalf of a non-responsive household. We ask: Does an outsider’s report of a person’s race and Hispanic origin match a household report? We find that in about 90% of our 3.7 million (nonrepresentative) cases, proxy reports of a person’s race and Hispanic origin match responses given by the household in a different census year. Match rates are high for the largest groups: non-Hispanic whites, blacks, and Asians and for Hispanics, though proxies are not very able to replicate the race responses of Hispanics. Matches are much less common for people in smaller groups (American Indian/Alaska Native, Pacific Islander, Some Other Race, and multiracial). We also ask: What predicts a matched response and what predicts a particular unmatched response? We find evidence of the persistence of hypodescent for blacks and hyperdescent for American Indians. Biracial Asian-whites and Pacific Islander-whites are more often seen by others as non-Hispanic white than as people of color. Proxy reporters tend to identify children as multiple race and elders as single race, whether they are or not. The race/Hispanic composition of the tract is more powerfully predictive of a particular unmatched response than are tract-level measures of socioeconomic status; unmatched responses are often consistent with the race/Hispanic characteristics of the neighborhood.


Author(s):  
Pininta Veronika Silalahi

Marriage is one of the culture universals being that it is contracted in every society of the world, but its mode of contract varies from one society to the other. Marriage is one of life’s major passages, one of the most profound rites of passage that a person or a couple can experience. In many cultures, marriage is generally made known to the public through marriage ceremony. This paper unravels the semiotics of a marriage tradition in Batak Toba Society. Batak Toba is one of the ethnic groups of Batak society, which is still doing wedding tradition as one of its cultural activities. The theoretical framework applied is the conception of signs by Charles Sanders Peirce. According to Peirce, ‘meaning’ is a triadic relation between a sign, an object, and an interpretant. There are three types of signs: icon, index and symbol. This work will reveal the meaning of icons, indexes and symbols in the marriage tradition.


Author(s):  
Paul Weindling

This article discusses German eugenics as being incorporated of two strands, one racially oriented and the other welfare oriented. Eugenics in Germany was also characterized by its intention to reach out to a wider world of German colonies and German ethnic groups beyond the frontiers of the state. Key issues such as rapid industrialization and urban growth and associated changes in morbidity, family size and structure, and sexuality are addressed. The article outlines a system of public health in which eugenically-trained physicians served the race and nation rather than merely the individual. It provides an understanding of racial hygiene within the context of German imperialism, but the postwar loss of colonies, of territories to the new Polish state, creates a shift of focus within the new welfare state.


Janus Head ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Bert Olivier ◽  

Is there a significant difference between Plato's texts and what is known as 'Platonism', that is, the philosophical tradition that claims Plato as its progenitor? Focusing on the Symposium, an attempt is made here to show that, far from merely fitting neatly into the categories of Platonism—with its neat distinction between the super-sensible and the sensible—Plato's own text is a complex, tension-filled terrain of countervailing forces. In the Symposium this tension obtains between the perceptive insights, on the one hand, into the nature of love and beauty, as well as the bond between them, and the metaphysical leap, on the other hand, from the experiential world to a supposedly accessible, but by definition super-sensible, experience-transcending realm. It is argued that, instead of being content with the philosophical illumination of the ambivalent human condition—something consummately achieved by mytho-poetic and quasi-phenomenohgical means—Plato turns to a putatively attainable, transcendent source of metaphysical reassurance which, moreover, displays all the trappings of an ideological construct. This is demonstrated by mapping Plato's lover's vision of 'absolute beauty' on to what Jacques Lacan has characterized as the unconscious structural quasi-condition of all religious and ideological illusion.


PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (3) ◽  
pp. 579-593
Author(s):  
Jay Prosser

Psoriasis is the structuring principle of John Updike's Self-Consciousness. The condition is also a metaphor for Updike's writings, in their concern with surface and their proliferation. Updike seeks to avoid self-revelation by making Self-Consciousness a memoir about the other. Displacing his psoriasis into a consideration of black and mixed-race skin. Updike reflects, in the mirror of the autobiography, his self with a letter to his half-black, half-white grandsons. In a series of pronominal substitutions, in which Updike's grandsons are transformed from addressees to narratees. Self-Consciousness discloses a racial unconscious. This racial unconscious is also that of American history. As slavery was founded on a Manichaeanism of black-white skin, desires for crossing the skin border were repressed. The unconscious dimension of racism survives in the stigmatization of differently marked skins. Reading the surface of Self-Consciousness as profound, this essay assigns Updike a novel place in a racially conscious American canon.


Author(s):  
Giulia Battilotti

The author discusses the problem of symmetry, namely of the orientation of the logical consequence. The author shows that the problem is surprisingly entangled with the problem of “being infinite”. The author presents a model based on quantum states and shows that it features satisfy the requirements of the symmetric mode of Bi-logic, a logic introduced in the '70s by the psychoanalyst I. Matte Blanco to describe the logic of the unconscious. The author discusess symmetry, in the model, to include correlations, in order to obtain a possible approach to displacement. In this setting, the author finds a possible reading of the structural rules of sequent calculus, whose role in computation, on one side, and in the representation of human reasoning, on the other, has been debated for a long time.


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