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The Etherized Wife provides a comprehensive examination of the evolution of sex therapy through the prism of gender. The book makes the argument that in sex therapy, like other domains of life in which men set the standard of normality, women have been judged normal to the degree they match men’s expectations. What is particularly striking about this bias is that it contradicts therapists’ overt identification with feminism and the battle against women’s inequality. To support these claims, Leslie Margolin maps a series of case studies drawn from the discipline’s own literature—the articles and books that have been, and continue to be, treated as exemplars of the discipline’s collective consciousness. Through examination of case studies that focus on discrepancies in sexual desire, where the man wants more sex and the woman less, the book shows how therapists have favored the man’s side. The Etherized Wife shows how the sex therapy discipline has unintentionally enshrined male sexuality as the model of normal, healthy sexuality.

Pure monsters do not exist. That is difficult for us to fathom. Terrorists and other serial killers massacre innocent people, yet are perfectly capable of loving their own parents, neighbors, and children. Hitler was a vegetarian. He sent millions to their death while contemptuous of meat eaters and a strong advocate of animal welfare. He loved his pets. High-ranking Nazis were often cultured and had strong moral views. How do we reconcile such moral ambiguities? Could it capture something deep about how we build values? As members of a uniquely symbolic and self-conscious species, aware of its own mortality, we develop uncanny abilities toward lying and self-deception. We harbor deeply categorical and compartmentalized views of the world. We live within multiple, interchangeable moral spheres. We overcome our blatant moral ambiguities by thinking the world in black and white, imagining essence where there is none. We juggle double standards and manage contradictory values, clustering our existence depending on context and situations, whether we deal in relation to close kin, colleagues, strangers, lovers, or enemies. This social-contextual determination of the moral domain is the source of moral ambiguities and blatant contradictions we all need to own up to.

This book explores an eminently human phenomenon: our capacity to engage with the possible, to go beyond what is present, visible, or given in our existence. Possibility studies are an emerging field of research including topics as diverse as creativity, imagination, innovation, anticipation, counterfactual thinking, wondering, serendipity, the future, social change, hope, agency, and utopia, among others. The present contribution to this wide field is represented by a sociocultural and pragmatist account of the possible grounded in the notions of difference, position, perspective, dialogue, action, and culture. Put simply, this theory proposes that our explorations of the possible are enabled by our human capacity to relate to the world from more than one position and perspective and to understand that any perspective we hold is, at all times, one among many. Such an account transcends the long-standing dichotomy between the possible and the real, a sterile separation that ends up portraying possibility as separate from and even opposed to reality. On the contrary, the theory of the possible advanced in this book goes back to this notion’s etymological roots (the Latin possibilis—“that can be done,” from posse—“to be able”) and considers it as both a precondition and outcome of human action and interaction. Exploring the possible doesn’t take place outside of or in addition to our experience of the world; rather, it infiltrates it from the start, infuses it with new meanings, and ends up transforming it altogether. This book aims to offer conceptual, methodological, and practical tools for all those interested in studying human possibility and cultivating it in education, the workplace, everyday life, and society.

Practices of assessment in education are byproducts of a bygone era. When testing and grades become the very goals of education, learning suffers, along with the well-being of students and teachers. In this book, the authors propose a radical alternative to the measurement-based assessment tradition, a vision in which schools are no longer structured as factories but as sites of collective meaning-making. As it is within the process of relating that the world comes to be what it is for us, the authors draw from this process their understanding of what knowledge is and what is good and valuable. Equally, learning and well-being are embedded in relational process, which testing and grades undermine. Thus the authors advocate a relational orientation to evaluation in education, emphasizing co-inquiry and value creation. The aim is to stimulate and enhance learning while simultaneously enriching the vitality of the relational process. A wide range of innovations in evaluative practice bring these ideas to life. The authors include detailed illustrations using cases from pioneering schools around the globe, at both primary and secondary levels, demonstrating how evaluation can foster students’ engagement in learning, feed into teachers’ professional development, support whole school improvement, and further nurture learning communities beyond the school’s walls. A relational shift in evaluation also opens a space for the flourishing of interactive and participatory teaching practices and more flexible and co-created curricula. Such a transformation in education speaks to the demands of a rapidly changing and unpredictable world, in which our capacities to listen, dialogue, and collaborate are imperative.

Personal narratives’ relation to social change is a frequent topic in the narrative-psychological and wider narrative social science literature. It is, indeed, a driving interest for many of those doing and reading narrative social research. This book aims to analyze not only the strong but also qualified significance of personal stories for progressive social change. It pursues this analysis by investigating particular aspects of narratives that narrative psychological research describes and explains and that seem to contribute importantly to narratives’ ability to make or catalyze social change. While narratives’ relation to social change is a common assumption and preoccupation of narrative researchers, fewer publications take this relationship as a central and explicit focus. This book aims to deepen narrative research’s engagement with progressive social change by addressing it consistently and from a number of different narrative-psychological research perspectives. The book acknowledges the strength and the importance of regressive and discriminatory narratives, narratives’ limitations, and research on these. However, it focuses on progressive social change possibilities, which seem especially important to consider at the current time. The book comprises three sections: Personal Stories and Social Change; The Language of Social Change Narratives; and Narrating Histories of the Past, Present, and Future. Throughout, the book foregrounds the multimodalities of narratives; the value of the multiplicity of stories, genres, positions, and intersectionalities; recent work on decolonialities; and the interdisciplinarity, historical reach, and transnationalism of narrative research.

Infants and children are the often-ignored heroes when it comes to understanding human evolution. Evolutionary pressures acted upon the young of our ancestors more powerfully than on adults. Changes over the course of development in our ancestors were primarily responsible for the species and the people we have become. This book takes an evolutionary developmental perspective, emphasizing that developmental plasticity—the ability to change our physical and psychological selves early in life—is the creative force in evolution, with natural selection serving primarily as the Grim Reaper, or a filter, eliminating novel developmental outcomes that did not benefit the survival of those individuals who possessed them, while letting the more successful outcomes through. Over generations as embryos, infants, and children continued to change and to produce slightly different adults, a new species was born—Homo sapiens. This book is about becoming—of becoming human and of becoming mature adults. One theme of this book is about how an understanding of our species’ evolution can help us better understand current development and how to better rear successful and emotionally healthy children. The second theme turns the relation between evolution and development on its head: How can an understanding of human development help us better understand human evolution? The short answer to this second question is that children invented humanity, and that human evolution can be seen as children setting the stage and leading the way to species innovation.

This book studies situations in which individuals threaten each other or feel threatened by society, and often respond in ways that threaten social stability in turn. Animals also engage in all sorts of threats, an understanding of which opens one's eyes to the world of animal behavior otherwise hidden, while also revealing the strange and important question of honest versus dishonest communication. The dynamic of threat-and-response gives insight into such human dilemmas as the fear of death and how this has been manipulated by many organized religions; how fear of strangers and supposed enemies has given rise to an American gun culture that in turn threatens those seeking to avoid such threats; how nativist fears of “the other” has promoted right-wing nationalist populism, which has been making things worse not only for democracy itself, but also for those who feel threatened in the first place; and how capital punishment—intended to contain the threat of murderous criminals—has made this problem worse. Most important and worrisome is how countries convey the ultimate threat against each other: deterrence. Brandishing the threat of mutual annihilation in the expectation that this will keep a country safe is, paradoxically, the ultimate example of a posture that endangers threatener and threatened alike.

This book identifies and names the phenomenon of metagnosis: the experience of newly learning in adulthood of a long-standing condition. It can occur when the condition has remained undetected (e.g., colorblindness) and/or when the diagnostic categories themselves have shifted (e.g., ADHD). More broadly, it can occur with unexpected revelations bearing upon selfhood, such as surprising genetic test results. This phenomenon has received relatively scant attention, yet learning of an unknown condition is frequently a significant and bewildering revelation, subverting narrative expectations and customary categories. In addressing the topic this book deploys an evolution of narrative medicine as a robust research methodology comprising interdisciplinarity, narrative attentiveness, and creating a writerly text. Beginning with the author’s own experience of metagnosis, it explores the issues it raises—from communicability to narrative intelligibility to different ways of seeing. Next, it traces the distinctive metagnostic narrative arc through the stages of recognition, subversion, and renegotiation, discussing this trajectory in light of a range of metagnostic experiences, from Blade Runner to real-world midlife diagnoses. Finally, it situates metagnosis in relation to genetic revelations and the broader discourses concerning identity. Proposing that the figure of blindsight—drawn from the author’s metagnostic experience—offers a productive model for negotiating such revelations, the book suggests that better understanding metagnosis will not simply aid those directly affected but will also serve as a bellwether for how we will all navigate advancing biomedical and genomic knowledge, and how we may fruitfully interrogate the very notion of identity.

A major goal of this volume is to create a forum for the integration of three areas: theory and research on the effects of exposure to political violence (EPV), intervention to aid victims of EPV, and the prevention of EPV. It notes the lack of application of social science research and theory to prevention of EPV. The introductory chapter presents a description of the gap between international law forbidding political violence against children and recent increases in children’s EPV, an overview of social science theory related to research and intervention, and descriptions of the contributions of each chapter. Section I, on research, presents reviews of research, original quantitative and qualitative research reports, and a chapter on methodology and ethics. Section II, on intervention, contains research on intervention with children who have experienced EPV in school, their family, and community contexts, and a chapter on issues related to individual therapy with such children. Section III, on prevention, provides chapters on legal and social issues in the prevention of recruitment of children as child soldiers in armed groups, on the role of the International Criminal Court in deterring children’s EPV, and on the use of transitional justice for preventing recurrence of children’s EPV. The concluding chapter reviews the major findings of the volume and emphasizes the need for prevention of EPV. It describes the legal framework for prevention, social science theory that could explain the prevalence of EPV despite legal and moral sanctions against it, possible means of protecting children in armed conflict, and possible future directions in research.

This book investigates the psychological background of contemporary societal problems such as hate speech, authoritarianism, and divisive forms of identity politics. As a response to these phenomena, the book presents the basic premise that a democratic society needs citizens who do more than just express their preference for free elections, freedom of speech, and respect for constitutional rights. Democracy has vitality only if it is rooted in the hearts and minds of its participants who are willing to plant it in the fertile soil of their own selves. In the milieu of tension created by societal power clashes and absolute-truth pretensions, the book investigates how opposition, cooperation, and participation work as innovative forces in a democratic self. Democracy is understood as a personal learning process and as a dialogical play between thought and counter-thought, between imagination and counter-imagination, and between emotion and reason. The book is written for social scientists, teachers, and journalists.