Feeling/being ‘out of place’: psychic defence against the hostile environment

What is it like to be an immigrant worker in a ‘hostile environment’ in the UK? How does the form of discursive environment, which sees immigration as a social epidemic, impact on an immigrant worker’s experience of their cultural (dis)localities and subjectivity? In this article, I draw on my personal, psychoanalytically informed voice to explore these questions, by foregrounding the materiality of the hosting environment as the place in which the present relational matrix takes place, in which the internal dynamics of object relations are lived in the present sense, and the idiosyncratic expression of selfhood assumes forms.The materialised reality of the place matters not least because it is drenched in power relations but also as it is where an immigrant worker seeks to live. The hostile host, in this sense, sees immigrants not simply as its guests (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000), but as unwelcome yet persistent guests to be yoked to their place of otherness and inferiority. By presenting vignettes of my encounters with the Home Office, I call into question the existential conditions of the immigrant worker and the potentiality for object-relatedness on relational grounds problematically punctured by hostile rhetoric. Could an immigrant’s sense of locality ever be anything but ‐ evoking Said ([1999] 2013) ‐ ‘out of place’? To address this, I will explore ‘out of place’ not simply as an emotional, lived experience, but also as a state of being that is embodied, psychically worked on and strategically evoked in resisting the power of the hostile host.

Autism-Spectrum Traits Predict the Embodiment of Manipulation Knowledge about Object Concepts: Evidence from Eyetracking

Sensorimotor-based theories of cognition predict that even subtle developmental motor differences, such as those found in individuals on the autism spectrum, affect how we represent the meaning of manipulable objects (e.g., faucet). Here, we test 85 participants, who completed the Adult Autism Spectrum Quotient (to measure autism-spectrum characteristics), on a visual world experiment designed to assess conceptual representations of manipulable objects. Participants heard words referring to manually manipulable objects (e.g., faucet) while we recorded their eye movements to arrays of four objects: the named object, a related object typically manipulated similarly (e.g., jar), and two unrelated objects. Consistent with prior work, we observed more looks to the related object than to the unrelated ones (i.e., a manipulation-relatedness effect). This effect has been taken to reflect overlapping conceptual representations of objects sharing manipulation characteristics (e.g., faucet and jar) due to embodied sensorimotor properties being part of their representations. Critically, we observed that as participant-level autism-spectrum characteristics increased, manipulation-relatedness effects became smaller, whereas in control trials that included a shape (instead of manipulation) related object, relatedness effects increased. The results support the hypothesis that differences in object-concept representations on the autism spectrum emerge at least in part via differences in sensorimotor experience.

A World Of Yesterday

This paper is a straightforward account of the historic figures whom the author met in the post-war psychoanalytic scene in Europe and in the United States of America. The author's views on these figures are presented, and on the events which occurred in those years. They now represent for her ‘A World of Yesterday’, in which she gradually came to assume her role as psychoanalyst. Her reflections show a lifelong concern with defending human rights in the early stages of life, as in her first organization of a Mental Health Unit within the pediatric department of her university (Rome) when she returned from the USA in 1950. They also reflect her more recent role as a psychoanalyst on the National Committee of Bioethics and her clinical and theoretical work concerned with the early development of mental life, growth, child abuse, pre-object relatedness and regression.