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In this paper I shall try to explain the term reflexive project of the self, as seen by Anthony Giddens. What is reflexive project of the self? How and why does it happen? What is its definition? How does it manifest itself in everyday life and in human relationships? These are some of the questions I shall try to answer in the paper. We live in a posttraditional society. Norms, values and systems which were valid in traditional societies aren’t important in lives of individuals any longer. The disappearance of clear models and principles of behaviour on both personal and broader social level, forces an individual to look for answers elsewhere and to create their identity in a different way than before. On personal level, this manifests itself in increased and transformed reflexivity, directed towards the creation of personality through close personal monitoring. The process going on in thus modified reflexivity Giddens calls reflexive project of the self. It happens through constant monitoring and results in the trajectory of the self.
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Between the littoral slopes of Velebit, south of Senj, stretches Podgorje, which in global dimensions could freely be described as the foothill of the Croatian Tibet. Moreover, our prematurely departed ethnologist and anthropologist, Tomo Vinšćak, who visited both heaven touchingpoints, claimed that Kailash and Velebit were mountain relatives – the Himalayan and Croatian Olympus (1991). In this paper the need of a coherent familiarisation of the specificity of this region and its people will be brought up and also argued for with the same persistence from ground level insights (with experience). So if it is seemingly possible to define the foothill of the Croatian Olympus (with a lack of empirical comparison) as a pretentious idealisation, it remains the factography of many disciplines, which synergistically rearranged allow a less depressing interpretation of the region by its people.In this paper such a scientific association is sought to be reached with the intertwining of the use of anthropological perspectives (emic-etic) and a Jungian analysis of an empirical archetypal sequence that links the author with this region.This is a region of the frequent collective forgetfulness of all the historiographic facts, which confirm that despite the harshness of nature which has poured the 'bura' and drought down here over the centuries, and the description that from this region people just escaped and disappeared because of the difficulty of life, it has remained a junction of numerous peoples and populations.The anchor point of many cultural, sacral and imaginative dimensions for Croats, just like one of the final destinations of the largest Croatian migratory flows. In today’s literal and trite postmodernistic interpretations – a region of multicultural encounters despite the in loco of the difficult narratives of life. Following the same superficiality, it also becomes a region for a brief drop by in the manner of an altogether ritual form of an expedition at the challenge of the wilderness – from the touristic branding of wandering through Velebit, under the motto of the preservation of untameable nature, to the altogether planned experience of being beaten by the 'bura' on the quayside of Senj. In order that everything mentioned is not left to just an eco(nomic)historical search of symbolism,metaphors and bricolages of myths, it would be good here to widen the interpretation of the specificity of the locality and to add the reality of bio-cultural history. Thus, the contributions of the research of many kinds of disciplines in the area of medicine have for decades already pointed to a kind of, let’s say, paradox of the Podgorje specificity,which is reflected in the contrast of a place of hard living compared to a desired place to live out old age or if wanted cosmologically and less anthropocentrically, an old age of open-ended enjoyment and comfort. The final aim of the analysis of this paper is the (re)direction of the possible interests for Podgorje with the touristic-exotic-profitable colonial matrices onto a cosmological-ethical understanding in which the interconnection of man, nature and history deserves a much wider perception of its 'endurance'instead of 'sustainability' or 'revitalisation'. With the cosmological approach said, each equation of neoliberal comfort here is inapplicable, quite the opposite, it is reversely proportionate to the historical and biocultural evidence. To conclude – nothing surprising in relation to the possibility of the interpretation of this region as the foothill of the Croatian Olympus.
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Over time, continuous efforts have been made to clarify and circumscribe diagnoses of autism, schizophrenia, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The diagnostic split between the 3 disorders dominated psychiatry after the 80s, being still used and recognized as such by the diagnostic manuals. Recently a shift and flexibility of the psychiatric paradigm has been noticed. The categorical perspective on mental illness is gradually complemented by the dimensional one. In the last decade, research in the field of neuroscience and psychology has brought evidence in favor of a partial overlap between ADHD, autism and schizophrenia. The hypothesis of a partial overlap can also be supported by non-medical or psychological theorizations, related to common deficits of symbolic structuring of the psyche in achieving a coherent representation of the world and of one's own person.
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This article is about punctum – the Latin term that the French literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980) resurrected to describe a phenomenon that haunted him in photography – and the confusion that has surrounded it. Barthes’s initial interest was: what does in fact draw us to photographs? What is it in a photograph that captures our attention, fires up our desire and fuels our interest in a way that other pictures do not? What addresses us, aims at us and strikes us in a photograph? Does it say anything particular about a photograph as such, about our unconditional and uncomplicated relation to it? The article has four main focal points: (1) the genealogy of Barthes’s ideas on photography and the misinterpretation of his book Camera Lucida (where the term punctum is utilised) as solely a reaction to his mother’s death, (2) the confusion regarding the meaning of punctum and the sources of that confusion, (3) the polemic between Michael Fried and James Elkins on Barthes’s theory of photography, especially regarding punctum, and (4) the sense of punctum as something that exposes the parallactic nature of photography – the co-existence of ‘documentary’ and ‘artistic’ perspectives that shifts the object – and its meaning to picture theory.
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Background: Child sexual abuse (CSA) is one of the most serious socio-pathological phenomena. However, its identification is challenging and linked to the risk of false positive and false negative conclusions, with far-reaching consequences for the lives of those affected. Incorrect assessments of suspected CSA cases can be made not only by lay people, but also by helping professionals who gather and evaluate information, consider further procedures and make decisions. Aim: The aim of the presented review study is to summarize current scientific knowledge that answers two key questions. (1) what contributes to errors in the assessment of relevant cases; and (2) how these errors can be prevented. Method: Previous research has shown that personal beliefs significantly influence the processes by which individuals search for, store, and interpret relevant information (Kahneman et al., 1982). For the purposes of this study, databases of scientific publications were primarily searched for research papers that mapped the beliefs of helping professionals in relation to CSA, as well as papers on strategies to reduce errors in the assessment processes of relevant cases. Results: We identified three significant groups of beliefs that could lead to misjudgments of suspected CSA cases: (1) Misconceptions about CSA – especially about: (a) the prevalence and nature of CSA (including the assumption that CSA usually involves the use of physical force and sexual intercourse); (b) the CSA perpetrators (e.g., that they are mentally disturbed or sick; that CSA committed by a woman has a less harmful effect on victims than CSA with a male perpetrator; that the victim's peer cannot be the perpetrator); (c) the victims' responses to sexual abuse (including the dynamics of disclosure about CSA experiences; the dynamics of behavior in further contact with the perpetrator); (d) the memory performance of child victims during forensic interview (especially regarding the expected amount of details and consistency of testimony); (e) the way of conducting interrogations with suspected CSA victims (including the sensitivity of professionals to suggestive techniques); (f) the CSA diagnosis method (including the assumption that spontaneous game observation is a good method for assessing suspected CSA); (g) the frequency of false accusations. (2) Beliefs related to the implications of the case assessment – especially: (a) excessive trust in the testimony of children versus skepticism (some professionals may tend to rule out false accusations and thus disregard the rights of the accused person, while others may approach suspected CSA cases with the a priori belief that a high percentage of CSA cases are untrue and therefore do not take great account of the rights and interests of the suspected victim); (b) beliefs about the functioning of the child welfare system (where distrust in this system may encourage professionals to fail to fulfill mandatory reporting regarding suspected CSA cases); (c) an emphasis on sensitivity versus specificity (i.e. either focusing on minimizing the occurrence of false negative conclusions to prevent the actual victim of the CSA from being identified and cared for, or concentrating on minimizing false positive conclusions to prevent the innocent person from being convicted); (d) beliefs regarding the removal of the child from the family. (3) Beliefs about one's own objectivity and expertise – especially the frequent false beliefs of professionals that with the increasing length of practice and the amount of experience with CSA cases, the level of expertise automatically increases. Experienced professionals can be simultaneously prejudiced and convinced of the correctness of their own erroneous beliefs. At the same time, more experienced professionals tend to have a more intuitive approach to assessing CSA cases. In this respect, various cognitive biases (especially patternicity, confirmatory bias, availability bias, anchoring, representativness heuristic, bias blind spot and the Dunning- Kruger) effect play a negative role. In the conclusion, the review study recommends several strategies in order to improve the practice and reduce errors in the assessment of the cases in question. It emphasizes the important role of the continuing education of relevant professionals in confronting participants with current scientific knowledge on CSA issues; encourages helping professionals to reflect on their own beliefs, which may influence the assessment of the cases in question, and recommends mastering the so-called Bayesian reasoning and effective methods to eliminate cognitive bias. At the same time, the study considers precise work with hypotheses, weighting evidence, supervision, the submission of expert opinions to independent review and slowing down of work strategies as an effective strategy of eliminating various prejudices. In addition, it proposes a multidisciplinary team approach to CSA case assessment – although the study does note that the impact of the group approach on the final outcomes of the case assessment process has not been sufficiently scientifically examined yet. Conclusion and implications: The study emphasizes that the beliefs of helping professionals and decision-making skills play an important role in the CSA case assessment process, and that without the targeted application of effective strategies to eliminate cognitive biases and prejudices, the quality of case assessments is endangered. The members of various helping professions (especially educators, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, police officers, prosecutors and judges) who come into contact with suspected CSA cases may find the review study useful. Although the content of the study is based on the results of foreign research, it has application potential in Slovakia, especially in relation to the preparation of content in the continuous education of professionals, the focus of supervision in helping professions, or the designing of Slovak research projects focusing on these issues.
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The article analyses Bernardo Bertolucci’s screen adaptation (1970) of Alberto Moravia’s novel “The Conformist” in comparison with the censored version of the film released in the Soviet Union in 1976. Attention is paid foremost to the dubbed Russian version’s visual cuts and translation shifts, which amount to the creation of a new, castrated version that is approximately 30 minutes shorter than the original film and that ideologically corresponds to the then-dominant Soviet discourse of representing fascism. The article demonstrates how in this new, censored version where Bertolucci’s complex narrative is transformed into a linear narrative (that surprisingly makes it closer to the original novel by Moravia), the characters’ psychological inner worlds and Bertolucci’s storyworld conveyed through images, sounds and language have become lost in translation.
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The article scrutinizes how autobiographism, fiction and autoanalysis crisscross in the psychoanalytical study Elmebetegségek psychikus mechanizmusa (On the psychic mechanisms of mental illnesses) by the Hungarian writer and psychiatrist Géza Csáth (1887–1919) in the light of his diary and Carl Gustav Jung’s doctoral thesis.
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In this paper entitled BULLYING in schools - Activities through which teachers can prevent Bullying at school, we propose to present a worrying reality of our day by proposing some preventive ways that could come in support of a worrying phenomenon, which has increased in size in schools in Romania. We consider that the teaching staff also plays an important role in trying to stop this phenomenon, by implementing some active-participatory activities in the classroom, activities that we intend to highlight in this paper.
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According to the German sociologist Norbert Elias it was Max Weber who labeled a social phenomenon that had no name at that time. In his seminal study Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Weber devised a theory of charismatic leadership, where charisma stands for out of the ordinary (Ausseralltäglich) qualities attributed to a person. Charisma exists as long as there are people to acknowledge it and believe in its magical power. The world we live in is in no way short of charismatic or would-be charismatic persons. And history has taught us that charisma has also a dark side to it. But what is it that makes us more inclined to surrender to someone`s personal magnetism? Is it because we are social creatures who have evolved a prosocial behavior for our own good? Or maybe the answer lies in the nature of our “disenchanted” world? My paper attempts to show that there is no contradiction between the two while tackling both Max Weber`s theory of charismatic leadership and the newest research in the field of social and evolutionary psychology.
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The relations linking cultural anthropology of Claude Lévi- -Strauss to psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan have not yet been properly criticized in the anthropological literature. Whereas published in 1949 works of psychoanalytically informed Lévi-Strauss played a key part in Lacanʼs “return to Freud” in the spirit of structural linguistics. A closer examination of these texts as well as central concepts of structural anthropology and Lacanian psychoanalysis, taking into account not only the historical development of the latter, but also their ethnographic and clinical sources, raises fundamental questions about falsifiability, consistency, explanatory power and plausibility of structuralist hypotheses. The direction of inspiration was defined and always led from anthropological to psychoanalytic structuralism, although the former was often built on the basis of unjustified analogies, factual inaccuracies and excessive generalizations, and the latter additionally on the basis of manipulations present in both Freud’s and Lacanʼs writings.
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Conference report of the 9th International Conference „InPACT 2021“, April 24 – 26, 2021, online
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This paper is actually a review of the status of psychoanalysis versus science. The lack of articles in contemporary discussions, and the absence of the topic of psychoanalysis suggests that there is less interest in the given topic. The impression is that the therapist who has the function of a patient does not have the time for other means of research and work. This supports the contemporary views that a therapist is, figuratively speaking, married to therapy and, therefore, cannot do anything for its sake. Strong criticism persisting even today is that addressed to Freud (in reference to relational psychoanalysis), arguing that he could not even bear to be seen as a warm and gentle figure by his patients. He is even known to have sat in a chair behind the headrest of the sofa used by the patient, in order to avoid looking the patients in the eyes, claiming it to be bothersome. The third century of the existence of psychoanalysis seems to be the time of questioning of whether the interest in this topic is disappearing. The corpus of psychoanalysis has been implemented throughout the 20th century. The general attitudes are that the analytical method has to change. Contemporary society wants quick results because the contemporary individual has little time. Psychoanalysis has always preferred the quiet, which now is a bad strategy, because very little has been done about its visibility and promotion.
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The aim of the analysis is to present selected non-biblical intertextual references appearing in the novel Franz et François by the Belgian writer François Weyergans. They create a polylogue of voices coming from various areas of culture, e.g. literature (Gide), philosophy (Sartre, Camus) or psychoanalysis (Freud, Karl Abraham), and often taking issue with the world of traditional biblical values. As such these references illustrate well the process of individuation of the hero of the novel who, full of guilt, moves away from the Bible and from his father.
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Black Lymph/Green Heart: The Alternative Lexicon of Soul is a glossary of terms which the author deemed significant for today's collective and individual psychic condition. The selected entries have their definitions as in ordinary lexicons. However, the alternative lexicon selects the terms differently, and uses a different methodology of their treatment. In this lexicon, you will find apparently arbitrarily selected entries with inconsistently written definitions. But it is precisely with that subjective and ironic approach that the author reveals the characteristics of the listed concepts, which are important in some not-so-rare situations. The ones that concern our psychological welfare. This unscientific book, that parodies the scientific structure of a lexicon as such, reveals the functioning of narcissists, egomaniacs, psychopaths and sociopaths who have become a norm, instead of an exception. If you want to know what melancholy and femmes fatales have in common, or what is the nature of a relationship between pathocracy and a tram, The Alternative Lexicon of Soul will give you the answers and make you laugh at the same time. Željka Matijašević was born in 1968, in Zagreb. She graduated in Comparative Literature, and French Language and Literature at the Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. She obtained her doctor's degree at the Trinity College of the Cambridge University. She is a full-professor at the Department of the Comparative Literature at the Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her main interests are psychoanalytic theory and applied psychoanalysis. She is an author of six scientific books: Lacan: ustrajnost dijalektike (2005), Strukturiranje nesvjesnog: Freud i Lacan (2006), Uvod u psihoanalizu: Edip, Hamlet, Jekyll/Hyde (2011), Stoljeće krhkog sebstva: psihoanaliza, društvo, kultura (2016), Drama, drama (2020), and The Borderline Culture (2021). She also authored one novel, Defences with the Taste of Death (2019), and a lexicon Black Lymph/Green Heart: The Alternative Lexicon of Soul (2017). She is a member of La Fondation Européenne pour la Psychanalyse and the Croatian Writers Society.
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This paper focuses on a specific type of archival material from the first psychiatric institution in Croatia, the Stenjevec Royal National Institute for the Insane in Zagreb, today the Vrapče University Psychiatric Hospital, dating from the period from its foundation in 1879 until 1900. More specifically, it focuses on patient narratives featuring fantastical beings, i.e., narrations about their life relying on the genre of belief legends. Based on this material, which is considered to be an important albeit atypical folkloristic corpus, the paper analyzes and interprets the status and functions of the genre of belief legends (more specifically, the memorate) in daily life narratives, personal stories and in coding affects (primarily fear). The role of belief legends is examined not only from the perspective of oral tradition and literature, but also in terms of their social and psychological position, and through the lens of psychiatric discourse of the time, which recognizes such narratives merely as symptoms of madness, translating and coding them as the language of abnormality and psychopathology.
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This paper proposes to provide a point of view on the impact of two major scientific theories – evolution theory and psychoanalytic theory – in the history of human thought, and, implicitly, to show the strong connections between science and philosophy. The discovery of the natural selection, by Charles Darwin, and of the unconscious, by Sigmund Freud, were the real revolutions in the field of science. Through their degree of universality these theories have irreversibly transformed the perception of “truths” about human being. The relation between the two theories is no less important, the most solid argument is the direct and indirect influence of Darwin’s work on Freud’s, so that the theory of evolution was considered a kind of “prehistory” of psychoanalytic theory. A crucial point of evolutionism and psychoanalysis is the concept of instinct, which crosses as a “red thread” the researches of these two scientists.
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An original authenticity of the human being is to be found even in the inauthenticity of everyday life. Freud was the first to determine the purely pleasurable essence of every symptom, including the psychotic one. This fact represents a real challenge for the analytical clinic, since it is often the case for the subjects to even love their symptom more than themselves. Consequently, it is not the pleasure representing the place of the subject’s own inscription, but its complementary symptom. From this point of view, there can be no real desire without a painful symptom. “Pain-lust” (Schmerzlust) is the expression we find appropriate for this proviso. For more clarity, it is important to emphasize: not pleasure in itself causes pain, but that what it is carried on its behalf, namely the symptom along with its peculiar pain. The conclusion drawn by Lacan from all these genuinely Freudian developments is one potentially “scandalous” for some Freudians: the symptom - be it a painful one - is the only place where some kind of “revelation” takes place. The symptom is nothing else than a form of “remnant radiation”, like in quantum mechanics. According to Freud, the whole idea of psychoanalysis is an attempt to prove that “the transcendental” (i.e. the primary psychic energy which is asexual and sublimated, as far as Freud understands it) cannot “show” itself under any form, not even as “failure” or symptom. This raises the important question with regard to the possibility of finding the original enjoyment (jouissance) as a self-chosen and adopted experience of astonishment not only as a necessary transition caused by the “fall” in the native language. Our answer to such question is affirmative, provided that both phenomenology and psychoanalysis insist on the fact that the subject is guided by sublimation towards the experience of the sublime itself. This means also the restoration of one’s own unique Self. From a psychoanalytic (Lacanian) perspective, such implication is linked to the therapeutic function of art.
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The apartments, a symbol of urban life in the Apartment Trilogy by Roman Polanski, have been elaborated as uncanny structures that allow the abusive and the infringing structuring of the outside to infiltrate and shape the psychic apparatus. In The Apartment Trilogy, National Socialist regime that had caused the murder of millions of Poles and the totalitarian Soviet regime that had used the country as a satellite state for 44 years after the war are associated through the distinction of “inside” and “outside”. The first movie of the trilogy, Repulsion (1965) differs from the other two by putting emphasize on the psychical mechanism of disgust. The protagonist Carol feels an uncontrollable sense of disgust towards men and objects associated with masculinity. In this context, Carol’s endeavor of isolating herself from the outside by associating men and masculinity codes with the “outside” is addressed with concepts that scrutinize the effect of the body’s perception of inside and outside. The movie is evaluated through the perspectives of Sigmund Freud’s “uncanny” concept that he uses within the context of a sense that is both strange and familiar, Julia Kristeva’s “abject” concept that gives prominence to the identity and order of what is disgusting and the threat it poses to the system, and Didier Anzieu’s “skin-ego” concept which stipulates that the limit between the inside and outside of the skin is determined by the relations the subject has with the object and with the others.
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The aim of this paper is to bear out the similarity between the model of subjectivity that emerges from Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity and the one implied in some of the psychoanalytic conceptions of narcissism. Presented are Ricoeur’s views on a dialectic relation between the narrative forming an individual’s identity and lived reality. In Ricoeur’s theory stories are entangled in pre-narrative life yet at the same time they do transform it by imbuing it with a meaning. The narrative so perceived turns into a defence mechanism protecting singularity against overwhelming reality, which development draws it to the psychoanalytical notion of narcissism. Selected conceptions of narcissism (Freud, Klein, Winnicott) are reviewed to indicate that narcissism, similarly as the narrative, is based on a dialectical relation between reflection and transformation, dependence and autonomy, incoherence and coherence. Presented are also Julia Kristeva’s views attributing an inherently narrative character to narcissism.
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