Can the “internal couple” be our faithful lifelong partner?

For over fifty years the concept of the “internal couple”, as a composite internal object co-constructed in intimate relationships, has been fundamental to a psycho-analytic understanding of couple relationships and their contribution to family dynamics. Considerable societal change, however, necessitates review of how effectively and ethically the concept meets practitioners’ and couples’ current needs. Does the concept of an internal couple help psychotherapists to describe and consider all contemporary adult couples, whether same-sex or heterosexual, monogamous, or polyamorous? How does it accommodate online dating, relating via avatars, and use of pornography? Is it sufficiently inclusive of those experimenting in terms of sexual and gender identity, or in partnerships that challenge family arrangement norms? Can it usefully support thinking about families in which parents choose to parent alone, or are absent at their children’s conception thanks to surrogacy, adoption, and IVF? These and other questions prompt re-examination of this central concept’s nature and value.

Warner, Sylvia Townsend (1893–1978)

Sylvia Townsend Warner was the author of novels, short stories, poetry, journalistic non-fiction, and literary criticism. Her works often inhabit settings at opposite ends of the modernist-era spectrum: on one hand, fantasy and fable worlds, and on the other, detailed contemporary domestic and historical settings incorporating themes of war, revolution, and class struggle. Warner is regarded as a pioneer of anti-colonial, LGBT, Marxist, and anti-fascist narrative, particularly in her novels of the 1920s and 1930s. Warner was born and raised in Harrow, Middlesex, England, where her father was schoolmaster at the boys’ public school. She resided in London between 1917 and 1927 to work as a musicologist and editor on the Carnegie UK Trust’s Tudor Church Music Research Project. In 1926, she met her lifelong partner, Valentine Ackland, a poet and writer in her own right, and in 1930 they moved in with each other in Dorset. Both women were committed leftist activists who joined the Communist Party in 1935. In the year, Warner joined the Executive Committee of the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture (IAWDC), and in 1936, she served as Secretary of the Association of Writers for Intellectual Liberty (AWIL); both were anti-fascist organisations. During the war, Warner wrote anti-fascist and Marxist articles for leftist newspapers and magazines, including Time and Tide, the Left Review, the Daily Worker, and Our Time.

Lifelong commitment to the wrong partner: hybridization in ants

The extraordinary lifelong partner commitment in social insects is expected to increase choosiness in both sexes and therefore to be associated with particularly low hybridization frequencies. Yet, more and more studies reveal that in many ant taxa hybrids are surprisingly common, with up to half of all female sexuals receiving sperm from allospecific males in extreme cases. In a few ant species, hybridization has led to the evolution of reproductively isolated new lineages with a bizarre system of genetic caste differentiation: colonies produce hybrid workers and pure-lineage female sexuals. This requires that colonies either contain multiple queens or that queens mate multiple times. In most other cases, hybridization appears to be an evolutionary dead end and fertile hybrid queens are rarely found. In such cases, haplodiploid sex determination appears to decrease the costs of mating with an allospecific male. As long as hybrid workers are viable, a cross-mated queen can partially rescue its fitness by producing males from unfertilized eggs. Mating with an allospecific partner may thus be an option for queens when conspecific mates are not available. The morphological similarity of most ant males, perhaps resulting from the lack of sexual conflict, may similarly contribute to the commonness of hybridization.

Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater. By Milly S. Barranger. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004; pp. 388; 18 illus. $39.50 cloth.

Margaret Webster's struggles and triumphs as a professional director in New York and London are not cited by theatre historians—especially feminist theatre historians—as often as they should be. Before her death in 1972, she had become the first woman director ever to work on Broadway, founded the American Repertory Theatre with her lifelong partner and colleague Eva Le Gallienne, directed a groundbreaking production of Othello with Paul Robeson in 1942, faced Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, and she had published several wonderful books about theatre (the best known are Shakespeare Without Tears, The Same Only Different, and Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage).

Zbigniew Stanislaw Basinski, O.C. 28 April 1928 – 12 August 1999

Zbigniew Basinski, widely known as Bas, was exposed early in life to turbulent events in Poland, Russia and Palestine. He studied chemistry at Oxford, then performed research in metal physics with Jack Christian (F.R.S. 1975). There he met Sylvia Pugh, his wife and lifelong partner, in an enduring and passionate study of crystal plasticity pursued largely in Canada. Over most of the period since the dislocation concept transformed the problem of explaining crystal weakness into one of explaining crystal strength, Basinski's experimental investigations of the obstacles to dislocation motion surpassed in quality and variety those of any other worker.

Y a-t-il restructuration des stratégies adaptatives suite au veuvage? Une étude longitudinale

The purpose of this study was to investigate the changes in the coping strategies of older persons and the relationship between coping and mental health following widowhood. A subsample of a longitudinal study, composed of 32 subjects aged 65 years and over, was interviewed at home three times within a 24 month interval. These subjects had been widowed for 18 to 23 months at the third data collection period. Standardized questionnaires and ethnographic open-ended interviews were used as data collection methods. Non parametric statistics revealed no significant difference between the use of coping strategies by women before and after widowhood. The only change found for men was a significant increase in the use of formal social support from services after the loss of their partner. Content analysis of qualitative data suggests a pattern in the use of coping strategies following widowhood. Refraining, a cognitive strategy, was the only coping strategy positively associated with the mental health of spouses and widows. There was no significant difference in the strength of this relationship before and after widowhood. Refraining, a cognitive strategy, was the only coping strategy positively associated with the mental health of spouses and widows. There was no significant difference in the strength of this relationship before and after widowhood. These results suggest a stability in the repertoire of coping strategies in spite of the stressfulness of the situation of losing a lifelong partner and give credence, in part, to the notion of trait or style of coping. Results of this study also provide guidance for gerontological intervention.