Ueber den Salzgehalt des Kelps

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`In pursuit of the Nazi mind?' the deployment of psychoanalysis in the allied struggle against Germany

This paper discusses how psychoanalytic ideas were brought to bear in the Allied struggle against the Third Reich and explores some of the claims that were made about this endeavour. It shows how a variety of studies of Fascist psychopathology, centred on the concept of superego, were mobilized in military intelligence, post-war planning and policy recommendations for ‘denazification’. Freud's ideas were sometimes championed by particular army doctors and government planners; at other times they were combined with, or displaced by, competing, psychiatric and psychological forms of treatment and diverse studies of the Fascist ‘personality’. This is illustrated through a discussion of the treatment and interpretation of the deputy leader of the Nazi Party, Rudolf Hess, after his arrival in Britain in 1941

Psychoanalytic sociology and the traumas of history: Alexander Mitscherlich between the disciplines

This article examines the way aspects of recent history were excluded in key studies emerging from psychoanalytic social psychology of the mid-twentieth century. It draws on work by Erikson, Marcuse and Fromm, but focuses in particular on Alexander Mitscherlich. Mitscherlich, a social psychologist associated with the later Frankfurt school, was also the most important psychoanalytic figure in postwar Germany. This makes his work significant for tracing ways in which historical experience of the war and Nazism was filtered out of psychosocial narratives in this period, in favour of more structural analyses of the dynamics of social authority. Mitscherlich?s 1967 work The Inability to Mourn, co-authored with Margarete Mitscherlich, is often cited as the point at which the ?missing? historical experience flooded back into psychoanalytic accounts of society. I argue that this landmark publication doesn?t hail the shift towards the psychoanalysis of historical experience with which it is often associated. These more sociological writers of the mid-century were writing before the impact of several trends occurring in the 1980s-90s which decisively shifted psychoanalytic attention away from the investigation of social authority and towards a focus on historical trauma. Ultimately this is also a narrative about the transformations which occur when psychoanalysis moves across disciplines

Detection and identification by PCR of Clostridium chauvoei in clinical isolates, bovine faeces and substrates from biogas plant

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p><it>Clostridium chauvoei </it>causes blackleg, an acute disease associated with high mortality in ruminants. The apparent primary port of entry is oral, during grazing on pasture contaminated by spores. Cases of blackleg can occur year after year on contaminated pastures. A method to determine the prevalence of <it>C. chauvoei </it>spores on pasture would be useful.</p> <p>The standard method for <it>C. chauvoei </it>detection is culture and biochemical identification, which requires a pure culture. In most muscle samples from cattle dead from blackleg the amount of <it>C. chauvoei </it>in samples is high and the bacterium can easily be cultured, although some samples may be contaminated. Detection by PCR would be faster and independent of contaminating flora.</p> <p>Digested residues from biogas plants provide an excellent fertiliser, but it is known that spore-forming baeria such as <it>Clostridium </it>spp. are not reduced by pasteurisation. The use of digested residues as fertiliser may contribute to the spread of <it>C. chauvoei</it>. Soil, manure and substrate from biogas plants are contaminated with other anaerobic bacteria which outgrow <it>C. chauvoei</it>. Therefore, detection by PCR is would be useful. This study applied a PCR-based method to detect of <it>C. chauvoei </it>in 25 muscle and blood samples, 114 manure samples, 84 soil samples and 33 samples from the biogas process.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Muscle tissues from suspected cases of blackleg were analysed both by the standard culture method followed by biochemical identification and by PCR, with and without preculture. To investigate whether muscle tissue samples are necessary, samples taken by swabs were also investigated. Samples from a biogas plant and manure and soil from farms were analysed by culture followed by PCR. The farms had proven cases of blackleg. For detection of <it>C. chauvoei </it>in the samples, a specific PCR primer pair complementary to the spacer region of the 16S-23S rRNA gene was used.</p> <p>Results</p> <p><it>Clostridium chauvoei </it>was detected in 32% of muscle samples analysed by culture with identification by biochemical methods and in 56% of cases by culture in combination with PCR. <it>Clostridium chauvoei </it>was detected in 3 (out of 11) samples from the biogas plants collected before pasteurisation, but samples taken after pasteurisation and after digestion all tested negative. <it>Clostridium chauvoei </it>was not detected in any soil or silage samples and only one manure samples tested positive.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The diagnostic method used for <it>C. chauvoei </it>was not applicable in estimating the risk of blackleg on particular pastures from manure or soil samples, but found to be highly useful for clinical samples.</p

Gewalt in der Schule

Vortrag auf der Tagung Bindung, Trauma und soziale Gewalt , 3.-5.12.2004 in Frankfurt am Main

Introduction : narcissism, melancholia and the subject of community.

Sigmund Freud’s twin papers, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914) and ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917 [1915]), take as their formative concern the difficulty of setting apart the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ worlds, and of preserving a stable image of a boundaried self. Whilst it is true that the term narcissism especially has come to be deployed in ways that seem foreign to the complexities of Freud’s 1914 paper (by its reduction to a personality disorder or its use as a broad-brush cultural diagnosis), we suggest in this introductory chapter that neither narcissism nor melancholia can be thought about today without expressing some debt to Freudian metapsychology. However, whereas Freud was most evidently concerned to describe the structure of ego-formation, subsequent commentators have preferred to emphasize the cultural and normative dimensions of these terms. Accordingly, we consider the respective discursive histories of narcissism and melancholia and find that although they have been put to work in very different ways they remain grounded by a shared concern with mechanisms of relation and identification. Indeed, this shared concern is the basis upon which they’ve been most productively reanimated in recent years: the rise of melancholia as a critical aid to the study of cultural displacement and dispossession, and the determined redemption of narcissism from its pejorative characterization as fundamentally anti-social. We argue that what is most noteworthy in this post-Freudian literature is the increasing relevance of metapsychology to social and political theory. The language of psychoanalysis, extrapolated from the clinic, permits a detailed examination of the boundaries which construct and challenge the terms of social solidarity. Specifically, this takes place though careful reading of the complex practices of (dis)identification at the heart of ego-formation (at both individual and group levels), and the associated mechanisms of defence, for example: introjection, incorporation, projective-identification, and splitting. By recognising the complexity of how communities get made, and connecting this with recent literature on counter publics and the commons, we demonstrate that Freud’s frameworks of narcissism and melancholia remain essential for any contemporary understanding of political association

Prioritizing Risks and Uncertainties from Intentional Release of Selected Category A Pathogens

This paper synthesizes available information on five Category A pathogens (Bacillus anthracis, Yersinia pestis, Francisella tularensis, Variola major and Lassa) to develop quantitative guidelines for how environmental pathogen concentrations may be related to human health risk in an indoor environment. An integrated model of environmental transport and human health exposure to biological pathogens is constructed which 1) includes the effects of environmental attenuation, 2) considers fomite contact exposure as well as inhalational exposure, and 3) includes an uncertainty analysis to identify key input uncertainties, which may inform future research directions. The findings provide a framework for developing the many different environmental standards that are needed for making risk-informed response decisions, such as when prophylactic antibiotics should be distributed, and whether or not a contaminated area should be cleaned up. The approach is based on the assumption of uniform mixing in environmental compartments and is thus applicable to areas sufficiently removed in time and space from the initial release that mixing has produced relatively uniform concentrations. Results indicate that when pathogens are released into the air, risk from inhalation is the main component of the overall risk, while risk from ingestion (dermal contact for B. anthracis) is the main component of the overall risk when pathogens are present on surfaces. Concentrations sampled from untracked floor, walls and the filter of heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system are proposed as indicators of previous exposure risk, while samples taken from touched surfaces are proposed as indicators of future risk if the building is reoccupied. A Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis is conducted and input-output correlations used to identify important parameter uncertainties. An approach is proposed for integrating these quantitative assessments of parameter uncertainty with broader, qualitative considerations to identify future research priorities