Through the concept of the Frankenstein complex, the author explores a pathology in the singular bond between a child and his(her) parent. When a symbiotic contract is set up, two attached persons lock themselves into a mortiferous process. Along the lines of Doctor Frankenstein’s creation, formed and then abandoned devoid of bearings in a society destined to reject him, the child lacking guidance in symbolic behavioural representations will seek to alleviate his or her feelings of insecurity through risk-prone behaviour. The dyad formed with his or her parent will inevitably run into a period of extreme disturbance on adolescence. Just like in the novel, a fateful end, made of violence and mutual destruction awaits them.
The children of schizophrenic mothers commonly suffer from stigmatisation, isolation and emotional deprivation. Ranging over discussions pursued on Internet forums, epidemiological studies and presentations of scientific concepts (for example the notion of hypermaturation), the article considers a number of possible outcomes facing such children and addresses a question that since Winnicott has been a constant concern for professionals working in child psychiatry: namely, what are the psychological or psychiatric risks the children of psychotic parents run?
Within the framework of her practice in paediatric psychiatry, the author explores the difficulties relating to parental authority. Working on the basis of clinical interviews within research work on parents encountering difficulties and on some instances from the literature, she shows that what prevents the parent from assuming their authority over the child is above all (though not only) a Narcissistic failure, whether deriving from inadequacy of initial care or a later traumatism. Finally, the article looks at the consequences the modern world with its exacerbation of individualism, infantilism and immediate gratification have on children’s and parents’ subjectivity when the latter seek to fit the former into their own narcissistic scheme of things.
The intercultural situation of young people from North African families having settled in France raises issues of identity and relationships between siblings. The article recounts a case of family psychotherapy accompanied by some results from a study conducted into the identity focused strategies resorted to by young people born to North African parents and goes on to explore the differences in the way boys and girls in North African families manage cultural influences, the importance of the sibling group as a potential space for mediation and the brotherly/sisterly bonds that can be mobilised in family therapy. Adoption of a strategy for care that takes into account both diachronic and synchronic approaches allowed conflicts among siblings faced with the complexity of intercultural situations to be better grasped and resolved.
This article, based on research in the field of child welfare, investigates the experience of the child in a Maison d'Enfants a Caractere Social (MECS) who has often lived through early relational failings and temporary or final separation. Starting out from the traumatic nature of affective and educational deprivation suffered by the child and its consequences on the psyche, the authors consider the process of repetition at work with these raw memories in intersubjective relations. From the clinical case of a nine-year-old girl, Olivia, they study how the institutionalized child, suffering from a fundamental identity crisis, sought to shape a symbolizing response to her traumatic experience onto the institutional environment of foster care, through what might be called an intense “monopolizing” of her object-surroundings.
Until the end of the 20th century, the paternalistic vision of families that prevailed in the French legal system maintained wives in a position of submission to their husbands. In this context, the public authorities did little or nothing to curb or punish conjugal violence, preferring to preserve the social order represented by maintaining the traditional family as an institution. However, since the 1970s, the advent of a view of society based on the individual led the legal system to change the way it intervened. Protection is now afforded more to the individuals making up the couple, be it heterosexual or homosexual and whether though marriage, civil pact of solidarity or common-law marriage, than to the family itself as an institution. Repression of domestic violence has thus increased and there are now more legal ways of preventing it. There is thus a shift from cracking down on vice or behaviour that is perceived to be socially unacceptable towards policing people’s private lives, prompting the author to question to what extent the State can interfere in the intimacy of the couple.
Parole et sexualité sont à la fois modes d’expression et actes, avec des dimensions individuelles et plurielles. Leurs lointaines origines biopsychologiques les enracinent dans les fondements inconscients du psychisme humain, d’où elles émergent en constituant et le Moi individuel de la conscience humaine et la perception moins consciente d’une appartenance groupale, base narcissique d’un Nous, dont la résurgence est sensible au sein de tous les ensembles groupaux, familiaux, sociaux, et bien sûr dans la vie conjugale et sexuelle. Une thérapie approfondie en couple impose à l’analyste cette compréhension psychanalytique double, individuelle et duelle, pour saisir l’intrication des deux dimensions dans tous leurs conflits, notamment à travers l’expression sexuelle.
This article shows how sibling relationships interfere with conjugal relationships. The psychoanalyst of the couple seeks to discover, through the bond, the way in which each invests in the other, being attentive to sibling histories in order to identify and lead couples to work out these sibling complexes. Through rediscovering memories, sensations, and emotions, each partner can resume their place in their history, attempt to symbolize a past experience, and integrate it as part of their history while no longer suffering from it. The couple is situated in a genealogy and filiation. While it may lessen the Oedipus complex, passion for a brother or a sister can affect the imaginary unconscious, infiltrate the choice of a lover, and disturb sexual relations. Those who have not overcome the Oedipus complex, the sibling complex, believe they love the other, whereas in truth they are seeking themselves through that other.
Those interested in sustaining a national narrative of progress and patriotism have been outraged by suggestions that past treatment of Aboriginal people might constitute genocide. The term immediately raises the spectre of the Jewish Holocaust, and to conservative nationalists implies a direct moral comparison between Nazi and British colonial policies. In defence of the national past, Keith Windschuttle has produced a work justifying the actions of the settlers and denying systematic violence and mistreatment of Aboriginal people. Given that no one has seriously suggested that any form of moral equivalence exists between Nazi Germany and colonial Australia, Windschuttle’s defensiveness is counterproductive. It serves to create parallels between the two situations by employing the same methodological template as Holocaust deniers. As A. Dirk Moses has observed, both Windschuttle and Holocaust deniers use a fundamentalist form of documentary positivism, ignore convergences of evidence and repeatedly contrast their own objectivity with the political orthodoxies of their opponents. This article compares the work of Holocaust denier Arthur Butz with Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History to examine the denialist template in more depth. It identifies further techniques including the ‘convergence of doubt’ and the inversion of the perpetrator/victim moral hierarchy (by portraying deniers as victims and the historical victims as politically dominant). More importantly, it traces the link between the political project of deniers and their use of this particular methodology. Dirk Moses implies that the denialist impulse is a product of the repressions, transferences and castration anxieties of individual deniers. It is a ‘syndrome’, a moral disease of the pathological individual. This article argues that denialism is in fact simply a radical form of the political defence of national institutions, and that it employs the methodology most effective in achieving its political ends. Denialist techniques such as documentary positivism privilege the official written sources of the (institutionally powerful) perpetrators, and create an equivalence between silence and absence that erases the presence of (politically marginal) victims. Unlike revisionism, which is employed by writers of all political persuasions, denial is an inescapably conservative political phenomenon.
Abortion has long been a central issue in the arena of applied ethics, but, the distinctive analysis of feminist ethics is generally overlooked in most philosophic discussions. Authors and readers commonly presume a familiarity with the feminist position and equate it with liberal defences of women's right to choose abortion, but, in fact, feminist ethics yields a different analysis of the moral questions surrounding abortion than that usually offered by the more familiar liberal defenders of abortion rights. Most feminists can agree with some of the conclusions that arise from certain non-feminist arguments on abortion, but they often disagree about the way the issues are formulated and the sorts of reasons that are invoked in the mainstream literature.
What would be a genuinely caring approach to the provision of procedures of so-called artificial reproduction such as in vitro fertilization (IVF)? What are appropriate and justified social policies with respect to attempting to enable infertile persons to have offspring? These urgent questions have provoked significant disagreements among theologians, sociologists, healthcare providers, philosophers and even — or especially — among feminists. In the existing literature and in developing social policy, three different kinds of answers can be discerned. (1) Some have suggested that access to IVF should be provided as a matter of right. (2) Some existing social policies and practices imply that access to IVF is a privilege. (3) Some theorists have argued that, because of its alleged violation of family values and marital security, or because of its risks, costs, and low success rate, IVF should not be available at all. After evaluating each of these views, I shall offer a feminist alternative, describing what I think would constitute the caring provision of in vitro fertilization.
In a series of experiments done in wartime Nazi Germany, inmates of the Dachau concentration camp were exposed to cold by being immersed in ice water, or kept outside in freezing temperatures; their responses were measured, and various techniques were used in an attempt to revive them. The immediate application of these hypothermia studies was to the war effort, to try to protect or save soldiers exposed to cold water or air. An account of the procedures and results of these experiments was written by an American officer, Major Leo Alexander, on the basis of his post-war discovery of documents and interviews in Germany. These reports reveal the ghastly and abominable details of the experiments.Recent scientific work in British Columbia has caused some ethical debate when it consulted the Alexander report and used some of the Nazi experimental data. The scientists in the Hypothermia Unit of the University of Victoria, unsurprisingly but reassuringly, have no intention of repeating the Nazi atrocities, and condemn them. The current controversy concerns the morality of their using the Alexander data in their study. This out-of-the-way case has some small intrinsic interest; but its consideration leads to broader concerns.
The weather can be very cold at Dachau concentration camp, but Dachau was apparently not cold enough for some Nazi purposes. A camp doctor named Rascher wrote to Heinrich Himmler in February 1943, asking to be transferred to Auschwitz to continue his experiments—which involved freezing live prisoners. The letter reads: “Auschwitz is more suitable [than Dachau] as it is colder there and the camp itself is much larger, thereby attracting less attention to the test persons, who tend to scream while freezing.”
In Abortion and Moral Theory, L. W. Sumner develops a moderate view of abortion, having dispatched as “indefensible” (ix) “two equally prominent and extreme positions: the liberal view … and the conservative view” (ix). It is a distinctive feature of the book that, having formulated what he regards as the correct intuitive position, the author seeks for it “the needed foundation for a moderate view of abortion” (ix), since “the defense of a moderate position must ultimately be grounded in moral theory” (ix), in which the position acquires “theoretical depth”, and without which it would lack “philosophical justification” (ix). The moral theory in which Professor Sumner seeks to lodge his moderate position is the “classical version of utilitarianism” (x), which “can serve as the deep structure of a moderate view of abortion” (195). Thus, a central task for the appraisal of Abortion and Moral Theory is to ascertain whether classical utilitarianism can be made to accommodate “common-sense morality [which] plainly regards murder as wrong principally because of its central effects …”, that is, because murder causes “its victim some form of harm” (201).
The problem of the person may be described as the crux of Descartes' philosophy in the fairly obvious literal sense that it is the point of intersection of the two chief axes of the system, the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Mind. The actual, if not professed aim of the former is the ousting of the occult powers and faculties of Scholastic-Aristotelian physics by the mechanical concept of force or action-by-contact. The chief tenet of the latter is that mind, whose essence is thinking, is clearly and distinctly conceivable apart from matter, the essence of which is extension. From this, by an illicit inference which need not concern us further, Descartes concludes that the mind is “really distinct” from matter, that is, a substance capable of existing apart from body in its own right. Where these two lines of thought meet, the problem of the person constitutes itself in the following manner.
Few men in Mormon history have exemplified the unity of science and religion better than Henry Eyring. A devout student of science for over sixty years, a brilliant chemist who internationally renowned, and at the same time a faithful believer, he exemplified the crucial possibility of being in the world but not of it for three decades. Despite his towering scientific achievements, he may yet be remembered in Mormon history as a model for LDS scientists — and for the well-educated Mormon generally — who wanted to stay happily and productively in the Church's mainstream. As Edward L. Kimball has noted in his biographical paper, Harvey Fletcher and Henry Eyring: Mormon Scientists (this issue), this ability began with a strong grounding in fundamental beliefs in committed Mormon homes, continued with a personality that accepted these tenets, invested primary energy in service and professionalism, and concluded with the fortunate circumstance that the Church could and did use this combination of personal and professional skills in prominent and well-rewarded places. Where Henry Eyring concerned, however, the ability to keep a foot firmly planted in both the scientific and the religious camps buttressed by a determination to keep both camps equally legitimate, an important attitude at a time when science seen as the enemy of faith in some quarters and when the possibility of withdrawal into primitive fundamentalism at least showed itself on the horizon. In 1946, fresh from his triumphs at Princeton, Eyring came to the University of Utah as dean of the Graduate School. He brought remarkable strength to the university, and as one colleague put it, was the single most important person in transforming Utah into a research institution. x When Eyring moved to Utah in 1946, he virtually unknown among members of the Mormon Church except for family, some friends, and a few Mormon scientists. Within three years of his coming, he had won the respect and admiration of thousands within the Church. Within months, he had been appointed a member of the Sunday School general board, received such honors
Even a casual reading of nineteenth-century diaries and sermons suggests, however, that Smith's perception was not always the accepted view of his predecessors. This article will examine some of these nineteenth-century sources see if this paradox can be resolved. As first published, the actual text of the Word of Wisdom contained no explicit guidance on the question of its application. Originally beginning with what is now the fourth verse, the revelation simply stated that the Church had been warned . . . and [IJ forewarn you, by giving unto you this word of wisdom by revelation. Those who remembered to keep and do these sayings, walking in obedience the commandments, were be blessed with health and great treasures of knowledge. The publication committee which assembled the Doctrine and Covenants in 1835 added an italicized introduction this revelation (as they did a number of others) informing members that this instruction was sent greeting; not by commandment, or constraint, but by revelation and the word of
