Janet V. Sayers

Biological Politics: Feminist and Anti-Feminist Perspectives

Presents biological arguments against and in support of the claims of feminis and discusses the importance of biological factors in the current position o women in society.

Children's Strategies in Producing Three-Dimensional Relationships on a Two-Dimensional Surface

Abstract It is a common task to give children a picture containing implicit depth cues and to require them to extract depth information from it. The cues are always selected from the adult repertoire; little is known about childrens production of their own cues. In this experiment, 5- to 10-year-old children were required to draw one object behind another in a situation in which adults invariably produce the further object partially occluded by the nearer. The results were an age-related decline in the tendency to segregate the objects and an increase in the tendency to group the objects using partial occlusion, with a cross-over at 8 years. At all ages some children drew one object inside the boundary of the other. It is argued that the results are composed of two tendencies, a gradual mastery of discrete scaling phenomena (e.g., “up” on the page means “further”) within a given style, and a set of decisions to be made between incompatible styles.

Engels revisited : new feminist essays

Examines the problematic and divisive attitudes which bourgeois and socialist feminists take to the question of the links between patriarchy and capitalism and the importance of class conflict as a major cause of womens subordination.

Violence and Social Work

Violence is central to much social work practice. Yet social workers and their clients are not well versed in effectively tackling it. As a result they often take inadequate steps to avoid it — including those of denial, rationalisation, and reaction formation. Illustrating these defences by reference to recent work with battered women, more realistic approaches to dealing with violence — both with victims and their assailants — are then outlined. It is concluded that these approaches should be given greater attention in social work training.

Anorexia, psychoanalysis, and feminism: fantasy and reality.

Two distinct trends inform current psychoanalytic and feminist approaches to anorexia: one focuses on its roots in the fantasy, the other in the reality of childhood and adolescent deprivation and abuse. In outlining these two approaches, this article shows how both increasingly attend to the place of the mother to the neglect of the father in the genesis of anorexia--a shift of perspective somewhat redressed by systemic family therapy.

Freud revisited: On gender, moral development, and androgyny

Abstract In gender development, an important issue is the fate of those behaviours and impulses socially associated with the opposite sex. Social learning, cognitive-developmental and Freudian accounts of this issue are compared. Of these three accounts, it is argued, Freuds is the most adequate as a basis for interpreting and explaining certain data now being reported on gender and moral development, and on androgyny and mental health.

Healing Aesthetics Kristeva through Stokes

The visual arts are arguably psychologically healing in giving outward shape and form to what can otherwise be disquietingly shapeless and formless in our inner psyche or spirit. Psychologists, however, often overlook this. So too do psychoanalysts, so much do they focus on art’s inner, unconscious or fantasy meaning. To counter this prevalent neglect of art’s healing outwardness, this article focuses on a marked exception, namely Adrian Stokes. It compares and contrasts his outwardly oriented aesthetics with that of Ruskin, Pater, Nietzsche, Bradley and Pound; with the inward orientation of the writing about art of Freud, Jung, Klein, Segal and Rivière; and with the attention to the inter-relation of inner and outer reality in the post-Freudian writing about literature and the visual arts of Kristeva, Milner, Ehrenzweig and Bion.

Feminism and science—Reason and passion

Abstract Starting with the common roots of feminism and science in the Enlightenment and its distinction of reason and passion, this article briefly summarises the ways this distinction has been used both to defend and oppose womens rights. Current philosophies of science that variously reiterate or question this distinction are then surveyed, it being argued that science involves both reason and passion, particularly the passions and interests of men in male-dominated society such that nothing short of the overthrow of male dominance and the achievement of full equality between the sexes in society generally will suffice to bring about a science that meets the passions and interests of women alike with those of men.

Informal care and dementia: Lessons for psychoanalysis and feminism

Summary The following case studies, based on in-depth interviews of those looking after a demented spouse at home, are used to highlight (a) defences (surprisingly often overlooked by psychoanalysis) mobilised in analysts as well as in informal carers by those who (as in psychosis or neurosis) are emotionally or cognitively cut off, regressed, anxious, disinhibited, or depressed; (b) similarities and differences between the sexes in their capacity to take in and process the experience of their dependents as both similar to, and different from their own; and (c) implications for community care regarding the need to take account of, assess, and tailor its provision to the defensive strategies adopted by carers in looking after those who are losing their minds.

Anatomy is destiny: Variations on a theme

Synopsis A major issue for feminist theory concerns the place of biology in shaping womens lives. In dealing with this issue feminist writers have often addressed themselves to Freuds work, and to his contention that, in the matter of female psychology ‘Anatomy is Destiny’ ( Freud, 1924:274 ). In this paper I shall outline Freuds account of the way biology influences early female psychological development, and some of the feminist critiques of this account. I shall argue that these critiques reflect quite divergent positions within the womens movement regarding the influence of biology, and of society, on womens lives; and that, in the interests of serving one or other of these positions, these critiques have each, in varying ways, neglected some of Freuds important discoveries and observations regarding the influence of these two factors on female psychology.