2,668 research outputs found
Erik Erikson on Negative Identity & Pseudospeciation : Extended and Particularized by Ta-Nehisi Coates
One can feel challenged in this chilling time when sundry variations of ultra-nationalism have become quite discernable in the USA, Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Africa. They have often taken the form of a rhetoric of fear and hatred toward âundesirables.â In this time of trouble in an increasingly nuclearized world, it is well to turn to Erik Erikson. His related concepts of ânegative identityâ and âpseudospeciationâ need to be addressed more fully than they have in recent decades. Much is to be gained by both academic discussion and public debate over these two Erikson concepts. They signal elements in his âWay of Looking at Things.â More immediately, they help us address the crude and dangerous ultra-nationalisms of our time. Sensitive to the intimate relationship between the inner self and the outer social circumstances, Erikson, began in the mid and late 1940s to shape his most central concept - identity formation. It is well to refresh ourselves on the qualities he assigned to identity, for without that recall, one can hardly come to grips with his concepts of âuniversal Specieshoodâ and âpseudospeciationâ, both of which emerged from it. In Childhood and Society [1], perhaps his most innovative book, Erikson displayed a marked cross-cultural perspective, comparing psychological development in several countries and cultures. While âofficiallyâ pledging fealty to Freudian psychoanalysis, Erikson was more attentive than Freud had been to ways the social circumstances of a society impacted the inner psyches of its members.
Most importantly, Childhood and Society introduced the concept of an eight-stage human life cycle that was anchored in a struggle to garner and sustain personal identity. There is profit in recognizing here that Eriksonâs concept of identity was initially formulated more than three decades before in his still unpublished âManuscript von Erik.â It is the story of his Wanderschaft amidst a troubled adolescence. Identity was characterized in this narrative as a personal sense of sameness and historical continuity through which life seemed to cohere1. The âManuscriptâ captured young Erikâs thoughts and tensions at the time. Identity was cast within what later came to be called the stages of the human life cycle. Indeed, it became central to these stages. The life cycle involved a person moving toward and sustaining a viable sense of identity. Long before he had even heard of Freud, the âManuscript von Erikâ essentially represented the beginning of an intellectual process that left us with Childhood and Society. The initial âManuscriptâ centered on a tension between oneâs inner subconscious drives and the needs of society, and this became the essence of his premier book. It is no service to scholarship that âManuscript von Erikâ has never been published and made readily available to scholars. Each of the eight stages in Eriksonâs delineation of the human life cycle is to be construed as a polarity-a positive and hopeful disposition counterpointed by a pole that reduced the vibrancy of everyday existence. The first stage underscored the pole of trust that (hopefully) overshadowed the opposite pole mistrust [2]. The next stage, infancy, featured the polarity of autonomy on the one hand and shame on the other. There followed âinitiativeâ vs. âguiltâ, âindustry over a sense of inferiority, the all-important quality of âidentityâ over ârole diffusionâ during adolescence, âintimacyâ rather than âisolationâ in young adulthood, âgenerativityâ over âself-absorptionâ during midlife, and finally a sense of âintegrityâ over âdespairâ in old age. [Introduction]info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Gravitational Wave Emission and Mass Extraction from a Perturbed Schwarzschild Black Hole (continue)
A relativistic model for the emission of gravitational waves from an
initially unperturbed Schwarzschild black hole, or spherical collapsing
configuration, is completely integrated. The model consists basically of
gravitational perturbations of the Robinson-Trautman type on the Schwarzschild
spacetime. In our scheme of perturbation, gravitational waves may extract mass
from the collapsing configuration. Robinson-Trautmann perturbations also
include another mode of emission of mass, which we denote shell emission mode:
in the equatorial plane of the configuration, a timelike shell of
matter may be present, whose stress-energy tensor is modelled by neutrinos and
strings emitted radially on the shell; no gravitational waves are present in
this mode. The invariant characterization of gravitational wave perturbations
and of the gravitational wave zone is made through the analysis of the
structure of the curvature tensor and the use of the Peeling Theorem.Comment: 26 pages, LaTex, no figure
Human Rights as a Tool for Sustainable Development
In poor as much as in rich countries there is a fear that environmentally sustainable development might be contradictory to development in general and equitable development in particular. There could be indeed a contradiction between environmental and social sustainability, too much care for the environment eventually leading to forgetting about the people. The purpose of this paper is to explore institutional principles and tools that allow the conciliation between environmental and social sustainability. In this respect we will present human rights based political economy as an institutional tool of this sort. We will show how a human-rights based political economy could at the same time respect ecological sustainability and social equity. One of the reasons for that consists in the fact that within a human-rights based political economy, welfare is not the result of economic growth, as within traditional political economy, but of justice. The main objectives of development will be attained, therefore, not through growth but through redistribution of resources or of access to resources. In this paper more specific aspects will be presented by examining the human right to work and the human right to water. Regarding the human right to work the main aspect which will be stressed is that within a human rights frame full employment becomes disconnected from both growth and labour market deregulation. It will be shown that traditional policies not only do not solve unemployment but are also not environmentally and socially sustainable. The only policy that is not contradictory with either human rights and de-growth is work sharing by decreasing the length of the work day. When properly enforced this policy has, indeed, historically shown to be the only one that has created jobs. Regarding the right to water, the point is that democratic and human rights oriented exploitation and distribution policies of water are both more sustainable and more equitable than those that intend to transform water into a private good as any other and, thus, promote commodification and privatisation of resources. This way of controlling water exploitation and distribution not only may relieve pressure from the resource but also alleviate deprivation of poorer families, conciliating, therefore, environmental and social sustainability.
- âŠ