Stellenbosch University: SUNJournals
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People and development: Dovey, K & de Jong, T (1990) Developing people: A guide for educational, business and community organizations. Grahamstown: Institute for social and individual development in Africa.
No full textThe development imperative facing South African society make this book, Developing people welcome for a range of people and organizations engaged 1n or contemplating development projects. It is written in an easy and accessible style and is designed to be a practical guide or development manual
Men: Still getting it wrong: Hearn, J & Morgan, D (Eds) (1990) Men, masculinities and social theory. London: Unwin Hyman. ISBN: 0 04 445657 3 pbk.
No full textThis edited volume provides an overview of the newly developing "critical study of men and masculinities" (also referred to as "the new men's studies" or "men's studies"), a field that is mushrooming in Britain and the United States. The book arises out of the 1988 Bradford conference entitled "Men, masculinity and Social Theory" and held under the auspices of the British Sociological Association. Hearn and Morgan's worthwhile but problematic book charts the shakey beginnings of this fledgling academic field, its proponents often rumbling blindly into a minefield of contradictions, against the background of scathing critique from onlooking feminists
Racism: Projective Identification and Cultural Processes
No full textIt is surely appropriate that since the date of this conference falls so close to the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus Day we should look at the racism of the New World. It is a sombre story, so distressing that it has attracted the attention of Ridley Scott, the director most able to plumb the dark side of human nature. The creator of "Blade Runner", an analysis of the boundaries of humanity and "Alien", the embodiment of Thanatos, now bring Gerard Depardieu to us as Columbus and promote Sigourney Weaver from Warrant Officer Ripley to Queen Isabella in his new film, "1492", appropriately subtitled "Conquest of Paradise"
Psychology On the Internet 1: Electronic Journals and Discussion Lists
No full textThe internet has been described as an anthropologist's paradise, as the symbol of the new world order, as a form of intellectual AIDS, as a super-panopticon and as the last undiscovered continent. Like it or not, if you are into the knowledge and power business in the post-apartheid, post-cold war, postmodern era, you will be caught up in the internet as surely as you would have ended up in a behaviourist's clutches if these were the 60s. To hasten this in any case inevitable process, PINS may or may not be publishing an increasing number of papers on topics related to cyber-culture. In the first of this possible series we here bring you an entirely factual introduction to sources of academic information on psychology available to you by e-mail. Thus we have chosen both the most banal motive (information) and the most easily-mastered apparatus (e-mail) for our first demonstration. In future editions it is possible that we shall be exploring more deeply repressed motives and more complex state apparatuses
Mental Health Policy and Planning: Continuing the Debates
No full textThis paper will outline progress in developing a new mental health policy for South Africa. Up to this point there has been no coherent mental health policy, rather mental health interventions have been largely determined by the provisions of the Mental Health Act, 1973, as amended. This Act deals with various aspects of the treatment of mentally ill persons, inter alia, conditions under which people may be detained in psychiatric institutions, State patients, the licensing of institutions for the mentally ill and the establishment of hospital boards. It does not, for example, mandate the State to provide adequate and appropriate mental health care for the country's citizens. Without a holistic policy the provisions of the Act functioned as the de facto mental health policy for the country! This legacy is compounded by racially discriminatory practices and fragmentation that resulted from the influence of apartheid ideology on the provision of mental health care
A Parallel Distributed Model of the Psychological Disciplines and Professions
No full textMost psychologists in South Africa would admit that a non-reductive model of the relations between individual psychologists and the psychological professions (the individual interaction versus structure relationship - a central problem of sociology [see Giddens, 1984]) combined with a non-reductive model of the relations between the psychological sub-disciplines and professions would be something well worth having at a time of transformation and reconstruction. A search of the sociological and social psychological literatures will yield few promising candidates for such a model. One exception is the newly developed model of scientific disciplines as (to use Minsky's (1986) phrase literally) societies of minds, based upon the model of parallel distributed processing. (Minsky's phrase societies of minds is being used literally here because Minsky is actually referring to "agents• internal to the individual that carry out cognitive tasks rather than to individuals who exist in a real society.) Gigerenzer, a cognitive psychologist and an historian of psychology, has suggested that psychologists regularly make use of the "tools to theories heuristic" in which scientists tend to use their tools, which they have come to understand well, as metaphors for the subject they are trying to understand - in the case of psychologists, the mind (Gigerenzer & Murray, 1987)
Adolescents and HIV in Developing Countries: New Research Directions
No full textAdolescents are of interest in HIV/STD studies as they are a group whose behaviour places them at increased risk of HIV infection (Hein, 1992). Adolescence is a period characterised by the development and formation of sexuality, a process which frequently involves a high turn-over of sexual partners (Krahe and Reiss, 1995; Lear, 1995). Teenage experimentation with drugs and alcohol frequently leads to the adoption of high risk behaviours or engagement in unplanned episodes of casual sex (Weatherburn and Project SIGMA, 1992). In addition, adolescents are particularly vulnerable to the normative social influences of their peers (DiClemente, 1990). These influences among adolescents tend to discourage the adoption of safe sexual behaviour by encouraging negative associations to be attached to condoms and their use. While the intense influence of nonnative social values on adolescents makes them increasingly vulnerable to HIV infection, if HIV-preventive behaviour can be made to seem the norm, teenagers may also be readily influenced by this (Fisher, Misovich & Fisher, 1992). Finally, aspects of teenagers' lives are dominated by feelings of invulnerability which allow them to take the chances they see as developmentally important (Memon, 1991; Ingham, Woodcock and Stenner, 1992). While adolescents know about HIV, most have not personalised the threat of AIDS (Edgar et al, 1992). The factors which place adolescents at risk of HIV tend to stereotype adolescence as a period of traumatic social behaviour. While much of the literature has encouraged this stereotype, adolescence should not be viewed as a completely negative developmental stage (Aggleton, 1991)
Developing feminist analyses: Burman, E, Alldred, P, Bewtey, C, Goldberg, B, Heenan, C, Marks, D, Marshall, J, Taylor, K, Ullah, R & Warner, S (1996) Challenging women: Psychology's exclusions, feminist possibilities. Buckingham: Open University Press. ISBN 0-335-19510-5. 210 pages.
No full textAs is demanded by the genre within which Challenging women is written, I will position myself as a reviewer and in this regard, it would seem that being a South African psychologist is more important than the usual markers of being white, middle class and female.
As a South African psychologist, like many of my colleagues, I embrace social constructionism and discourse analysis and therefore do not need to be convinced of its insights. Why it should be so that psychologists in particular contexts embrace or fail to embrace constructionism, is one of the themes of Challenging women which locates psychology in its macro-context. In this regard it is of note that in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s the turbulent political macro-context was such that psychology was forced to either question its relevance and its power relations or to take refuge in an ever deepening fundamentalism concerning its truth claims, based on theoretical notions of essentialism in regard to race and gender and on methodologies aspiring to remain faithful to the "scientific" method Given this choice many South African psychologists at this time took the risk of questioning the discipline and found in discourse analysis a very helpful tool, although how successful we have been in generating alternatives to mainstream psychology is a moot point
Reading the (not so) loose ends of multifarious stories: Burman, E, Aitken, G, Alldred, P, Allwood, R, Billington, T, Goldberg, 8, Gordo Lopez, A J, Heenan, C, Marks, D & Warner, S (1996) Psychology discourse practice: From regulation to resistance. London. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 0-7484-0504-6 pbk. 232 pages.
No full textPsychology discourse practice is about the role of psychology as social practices which shape and govern our lives, and deploys a (mostly) Foucauldian analysis of "the psy complex" in contemporary western societies, where a proliferation of psychological discourses construct "individuals" with enduring personalities, rights, responsibilities, sexualities, etc. (cf. Rose, 1985). In a critical frame, this is a reading of how psychology functions within current institutionalized structures of inequality (eg. gender, "race", class, age, sexuality, disability), to produce experienced conditions of oppression, exclusion, pathologization and normalization. While psychological professionals labour as gatekeepers who police ab/normality, more implicit regulation operates through seepage of psychological ideas into popular cultural forms, enabling us to experience our lives in these terms
The meeting of a psychoanalyst and an indigenous healer: Sachs, W (1996) Black Hamlet. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. 340 pages. ISBN 1-86814-299-X
No full textBlack Hamlet is an intriguing biography of a Zimbabwean immigrant who moved to South Africa in the 1920s. When it was published in 1937, Black Hamlet was hailed as a pioneering work in the genre of psychoanalytic biographies, more especially because a person of African descent was its subject of study. In 1947 the book was republished in a revised edition called Black anger. In this revised edition, Sachs subtly tried to rewrite the history of his own investigation to reflect a more politically sensitive attitude towards the African people. In the 1996 reprint of the 1937 edition, Sachs's original opinionated and rough style to describe the life of a black man from the perspective of a white man in South Africa is evident