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 “undesirables.” In this time of trouble in an increasingly nuclearized world, it is well to turn to Erik Erikson. His related concepts of “negative identity” and “pseudospeciation” 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 “Way of Looking at Things.” 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 “universal Specieshood” and “pseudospeciation”, 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 “officially” 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here that Erikson’s concept of identity was initially formulated more than three decades before in his still unpublished “Manuscript von Erik.” 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 “Manuscript” captured young Erik’s 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 “Manuscript von Erik” essentially represented the beginning of an intellectual process that left us with Childhood and Society. The initial “Manuscript” centered on a tension between one’s inner subconscious drives and the needs of society, and this became the essence of his premier book. It is no service to scholarship that “Manuscript von Erik” has never been published and made readily available to scholars. Each of the eight stages in Erikson’s 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 “initiative” vs. “guilt”, “industry over a sense of inferiority, the all-important quality of “identity” over “role diffusion” during adolescence, “intimacy” rather than “isolation” in young adulthood, “generativity” over “self-absorption” during midlife, and finally a sense of “integrity” over “despair” in old age. [Introduction]info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

How Much Do Immigration and Trade Affect Labor Market Outcomes?

macroeconomics, trade, labor markets, immigration

Quantum Effects in the Mechanical Properties of Suspended Nanomechanical Systems

We explore the quantum aspects of an elastic bar supported at both ends and subject to compression. If strain rather than stress is held fixed, the system remains stable beyond the buckling instability, supporting two potential minima. The classical equilibrium transverse displacement is analogous to a Ginsburg-Landau order parameter, with strain playing the role of temperature. We calculate the quantum fluctuations about the classical value as a function of strain. Excitation energies and quantum fluctuation amplitudes are compared for silicon beams and carbon nanotubes.Comment: RevTeX4. 5 pages, 3 eps figures. Submitted to Physical Review Letter

Single-exterior black holes and the AdS-CFT conjecture

In the context of the conjectured AdS-CFT correspondence of string theory, we consider a class of asymptotically Anti-de Sitter black holes whose conformal boundary consists of a single connected component, identical to the conformal boundary of Anti-de Sitter space. In a simplified model of the boundary theory, we find that the boundary state to which the black hole corresponds is pure, but this state involves correlations that produce thermal expectation values at the usual Hawking temperature for suitably restricted classes of operators. The energy of the state is finite and agrees in the semiclassical limit with the black hole mass. We discuss the relationship between the black hole topology and the correlations in the boundary state, and speculate on generalizations of the results beyond the simplified model theory.Comment: 27 pages, LaTeX, using REVTeX v3.1 with amsfonts and epsf, with two eps figures. (v3: references updated

Accessibility-based reranking in multimedia search engines

Traditional multimedia search engines retrieve results based mostly on the query submitted by the user, or using a log of previous searches to provide personalized results, while not considering the accessibility of the results for users with vision or other types of impairments. In this paper, a novel approach is presented which incorporates the accessibility of images for users with various vision impairments, such as color blindness, cataract and glaucoma, in order to rerank the results of an image search engine. The accessibility of individual images is measured through the use of vision simulation filters. Multi-objective optimization techniques utilizing the image accessibility scores are used to handle users with multiple vision impairments, while the impairment profile of a specific user is used to select one from the Pareto-optimal solutions. The proposed approach has been tested with two image datasets, using both simulated and real impaired users, and the results verify its applicability. Although the proposed method has been used for vision accessibility-based reranking, it can also be extended for other types of personalization context

Radiation-Related Treatment Effects Across the Age Spectrum: Differences and Similarities or What the Old and Young Can Learn from Each Other

Radiation related effects in children and adults limit the delivery of effective radiation doses and result in long-term morbidity affecting function and quality of life. Improvements in our understanding of the etiology and biology of these effects, including the influence of clinical variables, dosimetric factors, and the underlying biologic processes has made treatment safer and more efficacious. However, the approach to studying and understanding these effects differs between children and adults. By using the pulmonary and skeletal organ systems as examples, comparisons are made across the age spectrum for radiation related effects including pneumonitis, pulmonary fibrosis, osteonecrosis and fracture. Methods for dosimetric analysis, incorporation of imaging and biology as well a length of follow-up are compared, contrasted and discussed for both organ systems in children and adults. Better understanding of each age specific approach and how it differs may improve our ability to study late effects of radiation across the age

Host lifestyle affects human microbiota on daily timescales

Background: Disturbance to human microbiota may underlie several pathologies. Yet, we lack a comprehensive understanding of how lifestyle affects the dynamics of human-associated microbial communities. Results: Here, we link over 10,000 longitudinal measurements of human wellness and action to the daily gut and salivary microbiota dynamics of two individuals over the course of one year. These time series show overall microbial communities to be stable for months. However, rare events in each subjects’ life rapidly and broadly impacted microbiota dynamics. Travel from the developed to the developing world in one subject led to a nearly two-fold increase in the Bacteroidetes to Firmicutes ratio, which reversed upon return. Enteric infection in the other subject resulted in the permanent decline of most gut bacterial taxa, which were replaced by genetically similar species. Still, even during periods of overall community stability, the dynamics of select microbial taxa could be associated with specific host behaviors. Most prominently, changes in host fiber intake positively correlated with next-day abundance changes among 15% of gut microbiota members. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that although human-associated microbial communities are generally stable, they can be quickly and profoundly altered by common human actions and experiences.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 0821391

Open string instantons and superpotentials

We study the F-terms in N=1 supersymmetric, d=4 gauge theories arising from D(p+3)-branes wrapping supersymmetric p-cycles in a Calabi-Yau threefold. If p is even the spectrum and superpotential for a single brane are determined by purely classical ($\alpha^\prime \to 0$) considerations. If p=3, superpotentials for massless modes are forbidden to all orders in $\alpha^\prime$ and may only be generated by open string instantons. For this latter case we find that such instanton effects are generically present. Mirror symmetry relates even and odd p and thus perturbative and nonperturbative superpotentials; we provide a preliminary discussion of a class of examples of such mirror pairs.Comment: 22 pages, harvmac big; v2, corrected some typo

Magnetic Quantum Tunneling: Insights from Simple Molecule-Based Magnets

This article takes a broad view of the understanding of magnetic bistability and magnetic quantum tunneling in single-molecule magnets (SMMs), focusing on three families of relatively simple, low-nuclearity transition metal clusters: spin S = 4 Ni4, Mn(III)3 (S = 2 and 6) and Mn(III)6 (S = 4 and 12). The Mn(III) complexes are related by the fact that they contain triangular Mn3 units in which the exchange may be switched from antiferromagnetic to ferromagnetic without significantly altering the coordination around the Mn(III) centers, thereby leaving the single-ion physics more-or-less unaltered. This allows for a detailed and systematic study of the way in which the individual-ion anisotropies project onto the molecular spin ground state in otherwise identical low- and high-spin molecules, thus providing unique insights into the key factors that control the quantum dynamics of SMMs, namely: (i) the height of the kinetic barrier to magnetization relaxation; and (ii) the transverse interactions that cause tunneling through this barrier. Numerical calculations are supported by an unprecedented experimental data set (17 different compounds), including very detailed spectroscopic information obtained from high-frequency electron paramagnetic resonance and low-temperature hysteresis measurements. Diagonalization of the multi-spin Hamiltonian matrix is necessary in order to fully capture the interplay between exchange and local anisotropy, and the resultant spin-state mixing which ultimately gives rise to the tunneling matrix elements in the high symmetry SMMs (ferromagnetic Mn3 and Ni4). The simplicity (low-nuclearity, high-symmetry, weak disorder, etc..) of the molecules highlighted in this study proves to be of crucial importance.Comment: 32 pages, incl. 6 figure