Restoring the Past, Forging the Present: Scapegoating and Redemption in Calvaire and These Are The Names

This article is a comparison of two works of fiction, a film and a novel, that both address the question of how people deal with intense memories of tragic events from their past. Both works are characterized by crucial references to religious phenomena. In the Belgian cult horror film Calvaire and the bestselling Dutch novel These Are The Names, stories are told about the desire to restore what was lost. In order to deal with past realities, the characters in these works of fiction impose the past, in an imaginative form, upon the present, which inevitably seems to create violence and conflict. The introduction of violence, and the way this violence destroys identities as a means to restore a lost world, calls the possibility and credibility of restoration into question. In order to explore the phenomenon of restoration, we introduce a concept of substitution (inspired by René Girard) to investigate the power of violence in these two narratives. In Calvaire, violence leads to the perversion of identity, ultimately leading to the latter’s destruction, yet at the same time it can be understood to result in love and absolution. In These Are The Names, sacrificing acts first seem to bring a new beginning but in the end redemption is substituted by accusations of severe crimes. However, in this novel the past is also present in such a way that lost identities could be restored. How both stories look at the relation between past and present and in which way they present the possibility of restoring painful events, will be our main questions.

The Socialization of Young Children’s Empathy for Pain: The Role of Mother– and Father–Child Reminiscing

Objective Empathy for pain allows one to recognize, understand, and respond to another person’s pain in a prosocial manner. Young children develop empathy for pain later than empathy for other negative emotions (e.g., sadness), which may be due to social learning. How parents reminisce with children about past painful events has been linked to children’s pain cognitions (e.g., memory) and broader socioemotional development. The present study examined how parent–child reminiscing about pain may be linked to children’s empathic behaviors toward another person’s pain. Methods One hundred and fourteen 4-year-old children (55% girls) and for each, one parent (51% fathers) completed a structured narrative elicitation task wherein they reminisced about a past painful autobiographical event for the child. Children were then observed responding in a lab-based empathy task wherein they witnessed a confederate pretending to hurt themselves. Children’s empathic behaviors and parent–child narratives about past painful events were coded using established coding schemes. Results Findings revealed that parents who used more neutral emotion language (e.g., How did you feel?) when discussing past painful events had children who exhibited more empathic concern in response to another’s pain. Similarly, children who used more explanations when reminiscing about past painful events displayed more empathic concern about another’s pain. Conclusions Findings highlight a key role of parent–child reminiscing about the past pain in the behavioral expression of empathy for pain in young children.

Relationship between painful manifestations and the use of hydroxyurea in children and adolescents with sickle cell disease

To analyze the profile of pain, its triggering factors, and the relationship with the use of hydroxyurea in children and adolescents with sickle cell disease. This was an analytical cross-sectional study of 80 patients with sickle cell disease, both male and female, aged 6 to 18 years, seen at the Center for Hematology and Hemotherapy of Pernambuco, Brazil. To assess the pain profile, forms with the adapted visual scale from the “Fear of Dental Pain Questionnaire – Short Form” were used. Fisher's exact test was used to evaluate the association between pain manifestations and the use of hydroxyurea. Pain was reported by 68.7% of the patients and 52.7% of them reported severe pain, which eventually affected their daily routines. Physical triggers presented the highest rate (78.2%). The most frequent sites of pain were the trunk (80%) and lower extremities (54.5%), and constricting (40%) and deep (40%) pain were the most frequent types. Thirty percent of the patients reported being treated with hydroxyurea for prevention of painful events. It is concluded that the patients with sickle cell disease showed a high rate of painful events and physical factors, such as cold temperature, trauma and physical effort, were considered to be the most prevalent. There was no association between the use of hydroxyurea and pain improvement.

Dramatherapy and Fairytale: Entering the fantastic reality

A magical, transitional space connects Dramatherapy and Fairytale. A space isolated, consecrated and forbidden, within which special rules occur. The description of this space talks about “temporary worlds,” as Johan Huizinga describes for Play, “within the usual world, dedicated in doing an act independent from our everyday practical lives.” It is there, that the dramatherapeutic stage allows us to enter this magic, transitional space that transforms itself from a wooden floor into a space where important and serious acts happen—even if they make us cry out with laughter. Therefore, within the context of Play, Fairytale, and Dramatherapy, the dramatherapeutic stage allows the person to exit, for a while, its real life and routine, and enter a magic world, a world that allows the unconscious to be expressed and relieved in a safe way. In this article, the author will explore the way Dramatherapy and Fairytale interconnect through the mediation of aesthetic distance which in both disciplines allows the clients and the dramatherapist to enter the liminal space of fantastic and/or dramatic reality and explore traumatic and painful events and issues of the clients’ life.

Epilogue

The epilogue addresses the unfolding aftermath of the crisis of Hurricane Maria. Returning to the poetry of Lebrón and the philosophy of Fanon, the epilogue reinforces the book’s argument that aesthetic interventions provide an escape hatch from linear time. Without this option of time travel, Ricans remain transfixed by a constant and immediate dread, precluded from processing existence itself. Although Ricans are terrorized by a steady state of emergency, the aesthetic offers the possibility of slowing down, or doing time in life differently, within varying velocities and kinetic and somatic overtures. Artists who recycle painful events and feelings frequently create openings through which to imagine a better future—one not impervious to suffering, but pushing against its stagnant saturation. The epilogue redirects the readers’ time, landing them in a futural. For Ricanness is not an insular construction; it productively extends outward, and as a theorization may be used to understand other sites under siege. The author contends that Ricanness supplies a relational way to imagine, dream, and construct alternate forms of existence under colonialism and across bodies of water.

Rethinking pain threshold as a zone of uncertainty

BackgroundThe pain threshold is traditionally conceptualised as a boundary that lies between painful and non-painful events, suggesting a reasonably stable relationship between stimulus and response. In two previous experiments, participants received laser stimuli of various intensities and rated each stimulus on the Sensation and Pain Rating Scale (SPARS), which includes ranges for rating painful and non-painful events and clearly defines the presumed boundary between them. In the second experiment, participants also provided ratings on the conventional 0-100 Numerical Rating Scale for pain (NRS) and a new rating scale for non-painful events. Those data showed the SPARS to have a curvilinear stimulus-response relationship, reflecting that several different intensities may be rated as painful and non-painful in different trials. This suggests that participants were uncertain about painfulness over a range of intensities and calls into question the idea of a boundary between non-painful and painful events. The current study aimed to determine the number of different stimulus intensities across which each participant provided ‘painful’ and ‘non-painful’ reports in different trials.MethodsWe undertook novel exploratory analyses on data from the aforementioned two experiments (n = 19, 11 female, 18-31 years old; n = 7, 5 female, 21-30 years old). We used the binomial test to formally determine the width of this ‘zone of uncertainty’ about painfulness, using ratings on the SPARS and the comparator scales, and data visualisation to assess whether trial-to-trial change in stimulus intensity influences ratings.ResultsWe found that the width of the zone of uncertainty varied notably between individuals and that the zone was non-continuous for most participants. Plots of group-level data concealed the inter-individual variability apparent in the individual plots, but still showed a wide zone of uncertainty on both the SPARS and the NRS, but a narrow zone on the scale for non-painful events. There was no evidence that trial-to-trial change in stimulus intensity influenced ratings.ConclusionsThe variability revealed by this study has important design implications for experiments that include initial calibration of repeatedly delivered stimuli. The variability also stands to inflate the size of sample that is required for adequate statistical powering of experiments, and provides rationale for the use of statistical approaches that account for individual variability in studies of pain. Finally, the high variability implies that, if experimental stimuli are to be used in clinical phenotyping, many trials may be required to obtain results that represent a single patient’s actual response profile.

Nell’attesa del Giorno. Il contesto storico-culturale del Carmen de resurrectione

The aim of this study is to determine the historical and cultural context of the pseudoepigraphic Carmen de resurrectione. The Carmen treats poetically many subjects of Christian eschatology: the second coming of Christ, the final judgement, heaven and hell, the universal conflagration. The author believes that the end time is imminent. This perception is common to all the Christians who experienced tribulations: persecutions, natural calamities, barbarian invasions. These painful events urged the Christians to undertake a path of true conversion, in the religious and moral sense. Unlike other poets (Commodianus, Verecundus), the Anonymous author emphasises the virtuous value of the hope of divine reward rather than the fear of divine punishment. The same perspective can be found in the poets and in the monks of early fifth-century Gaul, who suffered the barbarian invasion of 406.