Stellenbosch University: SUNJournals
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ZIZEK: AMBIVALENCE AND OSCILLATION
No full textWriting by the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalytic researcher Slavoj Z1zek has assumed immense importance in cultural and political theory in the last ten years, and his combination of ideas from Hegelian phenomenology, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist politics has provided new ways of thinking about the relationship between ideology, subjectivity and revolutionary change. This article reviews the way that Zizek juggles different theoretical elements in his work, and serves as a brief introduction to a body of writing that is confusing and contradictory. Two points are highlighted. First, that the theoretical elements (Hegel, Lacan and Marx) are used by Zizek in a quite idiosyncratic manner, and we need to notice how he moulds them for his own purposes. Second, that there is an intimate connection between the "political" project that Zizek is elaborating and radical (perhaps even more radical) artistic practices in Slovenia
"BLACK HAMLET": A PSYCHOANALYST DESTRANGERS A STRANGER
No full textFirst published in 1937, Wulf Sachs' Black Hamlet remains topical and controversial. It is an unconventional case-history of nearly 300 pages and a social document. A European psychoanalyst and an uneducated African healer-diviner met and strived to understand one another emotionally and socially. To a remarkable extent they succeeded. In Black Hamlet Sachs probed how individuals came to experience one another as individuals despite personal, social and cultural obstacles. Sachs was both a psychoanalyst and a socialist activist and he asked such questions as: How do individuals come to trust one another? How do they reach one another emotionally despite their personal narcissisms and those of their cultures? Black Hamlet is a book of frankly expressed impressions that suggests that strangers may be less strange than one expected, feared or was led by one's society to believe. The strangeness or otherness of other individuals is not beyond our personal or professional awareness. Winnicott in his Playing and reality has shown how "cultural experience has not found its true place in the theory used by analysts in their work and in their thinking• (Winnicott, 2002:xi). Consequently the complex relationships between psychic reality (the internal or personal) and the socio-cultural setting has been neglected Sachs did not neglect these relationships. He boldly applied Freudian insights to a specific socio cultural setting at a particular historical time. For Sachs, as for Winnicott, the intricate stresses of breaking out of personal and socio-cultural narcissisms to appreciate the individuality of "others• were a central problem for psychoanalysts
WHOSE PSYCHOLOGY IS THIS? Daudi Ajani ya Azibo (ed) (1996) African psychology in historical perspective and related commentary. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, Inc.
No full textPARADOXES OF THE OTHER: (POST)COLONIAL RACISM, RACIAL DIFFERENCE, STEREOTYPE-AS-FETISH
No full textThis paper draws on the work of Homi Bhabha to mount an explanation for a facet of (post)colonial racism, the "paradox of otherness" as exemplified in the racial stereotype The paradox in question operates at the levels of discourse and identification alike As a mode of discourse the stereotype functions to exaggerate difference of the other, whilst nevertheless attempting to produce them as a stable, fully knowable object. As mode of identification, the stereotype operates a series of mutually exclusive categories differentiating self and other which unintentionally nevertheless relies upon a grid of samenesses. These two paradoxes follow a similar movement: an oscillation, at the level of discourse, between attempts to generate and contain anxiety, a wavering, at the level of identification, between radical difference and prospective likeness. Bhabha provides a structural and functional analogue with which to account for this double movement of otherness: Freud's model of fetishism. This is an analogue that both enables us to foreground the operations of displacement and condensation in racist stereotyping, and to draw a series of conclusions about the effective functioning of discursive and affective economies of racism
REAPING THE WHIRLWIND OF CHANGE: EASTERN CAPE WHITE COMMERCIAL FARMERS' DISCOURSES OF DEMOCRACY
No full textThis paper deals with the accounts of Eastern Cape white commercial farmers on the subject of Democracy. Drawing on the methodology of Discourse Analysis, the paper seeks to provide an analysis of the rhetorical strategies and ideological positions within the participants' accounts. Such accounts of the social, historical and political circumstances in which farmers find themselves are thought to provide insight into the manner in which the process of democratic change has been received by members of the agricultural sector. Data collection was conducted via brief, audio taped, semi structured interviews. Participants were white men and women, Jiving in a commercial farming region of the Eastern Cape Province. Responses to the interviews were analysed according to the discursive approaches advanced by both Ian Parker and Jonathan Potter & Margaret Wetherell. Analyses reveal that participants tend towards criticism of the notion of democracy from a particularly liberal ideological standpoint and make use of notions and techniques of "Othering" to construct a defensive subject positioning. These findings illustrate what is in many ways still an ongoing political and ideological struggle in the rural regions of the country
Myocardial fibrosis and sudden cardiac death (SCD) risk factors in mitral valve prolapse patients deemed to be at low SCD risk
No full textIntroduction: Mitral valve prolapse (MVP) is associated with risk for sudden cardiac death (SCD); however, there is no consensus regarding risk stratification. Myocardial fibrosis is a substrate for SCD in these patients. Risk markers described for SCD are T wave inversion in the inferior leads and complex ventricular ectopy (ventricular couplets, non-sustained ventricular tachycardia [NSVT], and polymorphic ventricular ectopy), spiked configuration of the lateral annular velocities (Pickelhaube sign), and mitral annular disjunction (MAD).
Purpose: We aimed to investigate the prevalence of these risk factors in our population of MVP patients, a cohort clinically assessed as low risk for SCD. Furthermore, we aimed to investigate the association between these risk factors and myocardial fibrosis and to describe its pattern.
Methods: Our echocardiography database was reviewed from 1 October 2020 to 31 December 2021 for patients with MVP. Patients newly diagnosed from 1 July 2021 to 31 March 2023 were also enrolled. Investigations included a clinical evaluation, assessment for SCD risk markers with electrocardiography (ECG), a 48-hour Holter ECG, a transthoracic echocardiogram, and an assessment for myocardial fibrosis with cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging.
Results: A total of 39 patients, deemed to be at low SCD risk, without prior severe mitral regurgitation, malignant arrhythmias, cardiogenic syncope, or survived SCD, were included for analysis. Of the patients, 66% had areas of replacement fibrosis detected by late gadolinium enhancement (LGE). Segments commonly involved included the basal posterior (39%), basal inferior (39%), and basal lateral (25%). Areas involved were focal, with an average of 1.3 segments involved (± 1.3). No patient had diffuse fibrosis as assessed by extracellular volume (ECV) expansion. Known risk factors in our cohort included inferior T wave inversion (10%), polymorphic ventricular ectopy (18%), NSVT (16%), MAD (49%), and Pickelhaube sign (15%). No correlation was found between replacement fibrosis and any SCD risk marker.
Conclusion: Replacement fibrosis and SCD risk markers were common in this cohort, which was considered low SCD risk. No association was found between fibrosis and risk markers, suggesting poor predictive power for fibrosis. Risk markers for SCD are described in preselected, high-risk MVP populations. The extent to which these risk markers reflect SCD risk in low-risk patients is unclear. Using these risk markers in clinically low-risk patients may over-assess the risk, potentially resulting in medicalising patients and inappropriate therapy
PPR - The Founding Conference (July 1994)
No full textPsychology Politics Resistance (PPR) held its founding conference in Manchester on 2 July 1994. This event, which brought together around 150 activists working in and against professional and academic psychology, is the culmination of national workshops and meetings over the last decade. Over three hundred people involved in psychology had already written in over the previous year supporting a founding statement for the new organization which declared its opposition to the many abuses of power in psychology, and support for initiatives to build a network of individuals and groups prepared to challenge these abuses. The five morning workshops on 2 July were designed to bridge the gap between the inside and the outside of the discipline and brought together psychologists and users of psychology services. Discussion in these workshops focussed on Institutional Abuse, the Law and Prisons, Eurocentrism and Racism, Sexuality, and Women and Psychology. This attention to different domains of abuse encouraged people to think of ways that the various existing resources could be connected in a network. The afternoon workshops looked at practical initiatives and future activities of PPR
Training In Psychotherapy: A Response to Kottler
No full textIn addressing herself to a topic referred to as the ''widespread exclusion of homosexuals from psychoanalytic training" Amanda Kottler (PINS 22, 1997) mentions the Letter of Concern (LOC) sent by a group of UK psychoanalysts and psychotherapists to prominent British journals about a forthcoming public lecture by Charles Socarides, whose views on homosexuality are well known for being controversial. In a footnote Ms Kottler finds it noteworthy to state that "people working at the Tavistock Institute are conspicuous by their absence from the list of signatories". Ms Kottler must mean the Tavistock Clinic not the Tavistock Institute - the only Tavistock Institute is an independent organisation which runs group relations conferences in the UK and Internationally, while the Tavistock Clinic is the largest national training school for psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the UK. Yet several of the signatories to the LOC clearly mention their association, either as present or past staff members, with the Tavistock Clinic -while many others are well known graduates of the Clinic. I wish this misrepresentation to be noted by your readers
Between Life and Work: A review of Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester's Freud's women and Janet Sayers' Mothering psychoanalysis.
No full textWriting a combined review of Liza Appignanesi and John Forrester's Freud's women and Janet Sayers' Mothering psychoanalysis, two books which seem appropriately united by a common project, has turned out to be a task of a demanding and somewhat disconcerting kind. What is disconcerting about this task stems from the fact that despite their common ground - and the promise of an interesting comparison this brings - even on a first reading the two works turn out to be of such different levels and qualities that one is left wondering whether they are, in fact, comparable at all. Is Mothering psychoanalysis put at an unfair disadvantage from the start by being compared with a work of the sheer size, let alone stature, of Freud's women? After all, double reviews are inevitably competitive in some sense and it is only in fairy stories that David stands anything like a real chance against Goliath
Unbuttoning, appropriation, reconstruction histories of the past and present: Nuttall, S & Coetzee, C (eds) (1998) Negotiating the past: The making of memory in South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-571503-9pbk 300 pages.
No full textNegotiating the past is a deconstruction of the complex ways in which South Africans understand who they were; and who they are. This identity-quest through memory, as editors, Nuttall and Coetzee argue, defeats an agenda motivated by a simple unbuttoning of "historical truth". Historical unbuttoning, pervasive in early discourse about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for example, asserts a linear relationship between "truth", a past which is uncoverable, and "healing·, which is to be somehow liberated by / from this truth/past. Rather, within the diversity of tactics and strategies of subjectificat1on that are available to us, this book suggests that we "find ourselves' in the past-present-future through the work of invention, as public memories are mobilised, contested and negotiated. The "interiority" of memories and selves are fashioned through the reflexive folding in / back of these discontinuous, exterior surfaces of truths/pasts (cf Rose, 1998)