Class, Culture and Principles: Evaluating the Chinese Cultural Revolution on the Basis of its Aims and Strategies

Culture in any society is inherited from the past as a form of tradition. It is an automatic and unconscious process. It is usually taken as supra-class unifying category which binds a community. China during Mao proclaimed that old culture serves the interests of the exploiting class and therefore the proletariat as an emerging class should struggle against it and impose its own culture. On this premise ‘the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ was launched. Its aim was to ‘prevent the restoration of capitalism’ by revolutionizing people’s thinking to realize the communist goal of classless society. It lasted from 1966 to 1976, however, debates still continue regarding its aims, principles and practices and achievements or the damages it caused. This article attempts to explore what it actually wanted to accomplish and what strategies and measures were employed to materialize these aims. For this purpose it uses the documents published by the Communist Party of China during that period as the primary sources and judges them on the basis of Marxist socialist principles. The paper reaches to the conclusion that the Cultural Revolution adopted principles, policies and methods which accord with Marxism.

AGAINST EPISTEMOLOGICAL HIERARCHIES: ON THE VALUE OF FORMING BODILY KNOWLEDGE

The article reveals such concepts as “metis,” “body techniques,” “practical skill,” “kinesthetic intelligence,” and “movement skill.” These concepts are united by the fact that the accumulation of knowledge is presented as a largely unconscious process in which muscles play the same role as the brain. The essence of these concepts can be expressed in the term “bodily knowledge,” which contrasts itself in the epistemological sense with codified practical knowledge, instructions, and rules – techne. Bodily knowledge is based on movements and muscle sensations. Russian physiologist I.M. Sechenov called this sensation “dark,” pointing out that such sensations are almost impossible to comprehend, describe, and analyze. However, such feelings cannot be entirely opposed to thought. This “smart skill,” as poet and writer Varlam Shalamov called it, can be considered a separate type of cognition. This article is an attempt to comprehensively discuss the concept of “body knowledge.”

Analysis of the Visual Perception of the Competences of Project Managers

Based on the appearance of their faces, we attribute to people personality traits, moods, capacities, or competences. This unconscious process plays a central role in our everyday decisions and how we choose partners or our favorite candidate. This work is the first approach to the analysis of the influence of appearance-driven judgments of faces in the project management field. The main objective of this study was to obtain an approximate image of the general mental prototype of the face of a project manager using noise-based reverse correlation. The obtained image shows the features of the faces that drive the perception of a good project manager. The face shows very high average scores for all the competences recognized in the IPMA Individual Competence Baseline when assessed by a sample of project management practitioners. From these results, it can be stated that people have clearly defined prototypes of facial features that convey the perception of being a competent project manager, and this finding may have implications in the project management field.

A history of the struggle against racism in the social unconscious of group analysis

Institutional racism is a social unconscious process. It is the collective operation of shared unconscious assumptions and values that exist in groupings and cultures such as group analytic institutions where individuals may consciously believe they are not racist. In such cultures this conscious belief is protected by unconscious processes of denial, avoidance and negation. Attempts to address the issue within group analysis reveal some of its problematic dynamics.

Como trabajo con los procesos inconscientes: Estudio de un caso

After a brief review of the way I conceptualize clinical process, I present a case example to illustrate it. I begin with a brief theoretical presentation, to orient the reader for the longer clinical case example that follows. The theory, my conceptualization of unconscious process, is the variety of field theory that I have been developing for some years. The theory grows from the idea of unformulated experience, according to which the unconscious is composed of various, shifting potentials, only some of which will be actualized in conscious experience. Which of these potentials is formulated and thereby emerges in consciousness is determined by the nature of the interpersonal field. Constriction in the field reduces the freedom of thought and feeling of the field’s participants. Freeing the field, then, and not understanding via interpretation, becomes the clinical aim.