Once More With My Sistren: Black Feminism and the Challenge of Object Use

Recent years have seen an increased interest in black feminism. Whether thinking of the explosion of activism, the reprinting of classics such as Heart of the Race (Bryan, Dadzie and Scafe, 2018 [1985]) and Finding a Voice (Wilson, 1978) or the numerous journalistic or scholarly inquiries into black feminist formations in Britain in the 1970s–1990s, black feminism is a topic of interest once again. Sometimes it goes under other names: POC feminism, Womanism, Fugitive Feminism—each of which offers a specific inflection of this thing I am calling black feminism. Given this context, my aim in this article is to consider how black feminism might be conceived—what kind of an object it is, but more importantly how it might be ‘used’ and utilised as a vibrant and well-honed tool in the armory with which we attempt to craft a politics of ethical freedom. I attempt to draw together work from the theoretical archive of black women’s writing with that of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and his theorisation of ‘object use’ and ‘play’, as foundation stones in the development of a capacity for ethical relating based on the detoxification of racism’s effects on ‘self’, ‘other’ and the intersubjective field that the space between these constitutes. In my mind, the piece is a ‘call’ hoping for a ‘response’, the chorus is ‘black feminism’.

The Rorschach As a Window Into Past Traumas During Therapeutic Assessment

In this article, the authors discuss how the Rorschach can be useful in certain Therapeutic Assessments (TAs) by creating an opening for clients to report and discuss past traumatic events that have not previously been resolved. Two case examples are presented. In the first, a 31-year-old woman sought psychological help to understand why she was so afraid all the time, why she did not know what was best for her, and why she was so influenced by others’ opinions. The client saw many disturbing percepts in the Rorschach and was very unsettled afterward. During an extended inquiry she revealed an extensive history of physical and sexual abuse that she had put out of her mind and never told anyone about previously. Talking about her trauma with the assessor helped her understand why she was struggling. In the second case, a 35-year-old woman experienced a flashback when presented with Card X to finding her father after his suicide when she was 8 years old. The client had not previously recalled the details of this event, which were verified by family members. Retrieving this memory helped the client understand her family better and resolve problems she had in her adult romantic relationships. We believe there are essential elements that permit such therapeutic events to occur: (1) the power of the Rorschach to access split-off affects and memories, (2) the secure relationship created in TA that allows for traumatic material to emerge safely, (3) the technique of scaffolding in TA that helps locate clients’ growing edge, and (4) how client–assessor collaboration creates an intersubjective field in which nonlinear healing events may occur.

7 Babykillers czy ofiary systemu?

7 Babykillers or System Victims? Fight for the Shape of Social Memory on the Example of American Involvement in the Vietnam War Social trauma is a result of a collusion between the individual experience of trauma and the culture-mediated process of communal creation, negotiation and structuring of meaning. It emerges from the process of communalisation of individual trauma: when individual trauma becomes an experience shared originally by a ‘carrier group’ and later on spreads throughout whole societies. As a communal experience trauma alienates from their carriers by means of cultural media and their products. In the form of cultural artifacts, such as movies or books, it transforms into a Durkheimian social fact. The inability to negate it ultimately forces the society to engage in negotiations of meaning, resulting in either a refutation or an inclusion of the carrier group’s trauma into the wider social identity. The act of emergence of social trauma can be defined as a complex, multilayered process of continuous expansion of the intersubjective field. The history of American engagement in the Vietnam war and the society’s reaction to it serves as an informative example of this process.

Polycultural Phenomenology

The paper deals with the issue of the phenomenological foundations of polyculturalism on the basis of the categories of the following concepts: multi-layer being, concretization, intentionality, life world, and epoché. A comparison of phenomenology with eastern psychotechnics allows us to stress the importance of Husserl’s break with the tradition of speculative philosophy. Phenomenology is a pure experience of selfobservation. Such a radical intellectual position is similar to that of yoga and Buddhism which is also built after breaking with past traditions. They all reformat the cultural shell in order to reset and justify the experience of transcendental meditation. The achievement of the phenomenology lies not only in its reformist direction in philosophy, but also in that it solves the problem of overcoming the crisis of social sciences in Europe due to breaking the deadlock of speculative philosophy and positivism. Its universal value is in the development of cross-cultural research methodology, with the help of which such systems as Vedanta, yoga, Buddhism and phenomenology itself can be in a single intersubjective field. Keywords: phenomenology of culture, phenomenology of education, multiculturalism, Husserl, life world.

Playing in the Darkness: Use of the Object and Use of the Subject

Play in the context of the patient’s sense of absence, loss, and compromised capacities for symbolization can be a link between unsymbolized experience and greater capacities for representation. Winnicott’s concepts of play evolved as one of the ways that analysts translate unconscious and unrepresented experience. For many patients who have experienced absence, the analyst and the analytic setting are subjected to the patient’s unconscious efforts to destroy and negate meaning and relatedness. For the analyst to be “used” as an object to be destroyed and to survive destruction, he must become a subject in the mind of the patient and in his own mind as analyst within the intersubjective field. The analyst’s work with his own resistance is vital to becoming a changing subject and an object available for play in the psychoanalytic process.

Introduction

Moral outrage has until now been conceptualized as a call to action, a reaction to injustice and transgressions, and a forceful motor for democratic participation, acts of civil disobedience, and violent and illicit action. This introduction goes beyond linear causality between trigger events, political emotions, and actions to explore moral outrage as it is experienced and expressed in contexts of political violence, providing a better understanding of that emotion’s generic power. Moral outrage is here understood as a multidimensional emotion that may occur momentarily and instantly, and exist as an enduring process and being-in-the-world, based on intergenerational experiences of violence, state histories, or local contexts of fear and anxiety. Because it appears in the intersubjective field, moral outrage is central for identity politics and social positioning, so we show how moral outrage may be a prism to investigate and understand social processes such as mobilization, collectivities, moral positioning and responsiveness, and political violence.