Elephants show a rich social organization and display a number of unusual traits. In this paper, we analyse reports collected over a thirty-five year period, describing behaviour that has the potential to reveal signs of empathic understanding. These include coalition formation, the offering of protection and comfort to others, retrieving and 'babysitting' calves, aiding individuals that would otherwise have difficulty in moving, and removing foreign objects attached to others. These records demonstrate that an elephant is capable of diagnosing animacy and (...) goal directedness, and is able to understand the physical competence, emotional state and intentions of others, when they differ from its own. We argue that an empathic understanding of others is the simplest explanation of these abilities, and discuss reasons why elephants appear to show empathy more than other non-primate species. (shrink)

Much has been written over the last decade on the urgency of expanding the canon, although the imperialist overtones of such a movement have not always been registered. A great deal of attention has pooled at the borders of the canon, as we aim to erode or extend those borders, but crucial assumptions about the privileged status of the subject matter that we as critics choose, whatever that subject matter may be, canonical or extracanonical, have not been questioned with comparable (...) intensity. Although the hegemony of the subject and the concomitant transformation of the “other” into an object have been attacked theoretically from several different directions , we nevertheless lack a widespread practical, professional awareness of the extent to which the status of what we “criticize” and teach silently reproduces a subject/object economy of privilege. In the pages that follow, my contribution to the case against the sacralized status of art emerges out of the implicit dialogue that Paul Wunderlich initiates with James Joyce on the “subjects” of sexism, anti-Semitism, art, and politics, set against the background of the Holocaust. My target is neither Wunderlich nor Joyce—nor is it any of the groups that they might be said to represent—but the political implications of artistic privilege, a priveilege that criticism, even “resistant” criticism, may seek to redistribute but not to challenge. My aim is not to desecrate Joyce’s authority nor to objectify him as a stereotypical sexist or anti-Semite, but to deauthorize and rehumanize his monumental status by recontextualizing the grounds of his achievement, climbing down to . She is currently working on a book about the politics of representation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.3 (2003) 473-476 [Access article in PDF] Metamorphoses and Metamorphosis:A Brief Response David H. Porter Like Joseph Farrell, I found much to admire in Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses, 1 but I nonetheless left the theater disappointed. Given all that the play—and this production—had to offer, what was it that I looked for but did not find? Excerpts from the foreword to Cesare Pavese's Dialogues with Leucò (...) suggest an answer: What is more acutely disturbing than to see familiar stories troubled into new life?... The surest, and the quickest, way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare, unafraid, at a single object. Suddenly—miraculously—it will look like something we have never seen before. 2For me, what Pavese describes did not happen in Metamorphoses: I found the play an imaginative retelling of Ovid, but I'd been hoping for a true metamorphosis. In terms of the play's most famous feature, the pool of water that serves as a central stage, I felt most of the time that figures I knew from Ovid were playing out their expected roles around and in this pool. My hope had been that this brilliant theatrical innovation might mirror a play in which Ovid's tales themselves take on liquid freedom and fluidity, plunging, as it were, into this central metaphor to emerge changed, unexpected, reborn.The distinction I draw is one I've found useful both in assessing modern versions of ancient myth for myself and in teaching such works. 3 Readers will undoubtedly vary widely as to their favorites among the growing list of such versions, but I expect most would agree that a handful, including perhaps Joyce's Ulysses, Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, [End Page 473] Strauss's Elektra, Yeat's "Leda and the Swan," and Picasso's "Guernica," fall into a special category: different as they are in genre, style, and approach, all strike us as works of artists who have so inhabited a myth, so made it part of themselves—and themselves part of it—that what emerges is totally their own, totally transformed: a re-creation. With each we feel that never before have we experienced the myth this way, and that never again will the myth be quite the same for us—precisely what a New York Times reviewer wrote about a version of Medea that was playing at the Classical Theater of Harlem in April 2002: "I suspect that no matter how many versions I see in the future, my perception of them all will be affected by the revelations here." 4Again, this is the sort of reaction that Metamorphoses, for all its virtues, did not elicit in me, and I would extend this exclusion to most other modern reworkings of ancient myth—among them Pavese's own Dialogues with Leucò, which, despite the penetrating insights of his foreword, strike me the same way—as charming, distinctive retellings, not revelations. The issue, I think, has to do with the depth and degree of an artist's immersion in a myth, something that goes well beyond the superficial test of how far the artist diverges from "the original." Eliot's and O'Neill's myth-based plays, for instance, or a novel like Updike's The Centaur, make radical changes in the names and settings of the ancient myths, but in contrast to Joyce's Ulysses, the changes feel artificial, incompletely realized—transpositions rather than transformations. In contrast, Odilon Redon's painting of Polyphemus as a mountainous crag from which a huge voyeuristic eye peers out springs directly from an image in the Odyssey—and yet has a nightmare quality that is indeed "like something we have never seen before." 5A musical analogy may be useful. Listeners reported that when Franz Liszt played Beethoven, he gave the impression at each performance [End Page 474] that he was creating the music anew. 6 And Edward Steuermann, Arnold Schoenberg's long-time colleague, once wrote, "Is not music, the great music, so much alive because it was... (shrink)

Ulysses is certainly the greatest novel in the English language, and one might argue for its being the greatest single work of art in our tradition. How significant, then, and how teasing, that this masterwork should be a comedy, and that its creator should have explicitly valued the comic "vision" over the tragic—how disturbing to our predilection for order that, with an homage paid to classical antiquity so meticulous that it is surely a burlesque, Joyce's exhibitionististicicity is never so (...) serious as when it is most outrageously comic. Joyce might have been addressing his readers when he wrote to Nora in 1909: "Now . . . I want you to read over and over all I have written to you. Some of it is ugly, obscene, and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it is myself." Joyce Carol Oates is the author of, among others, them, Wonderland, and The Assassins. "Jocoserious Joyce" is part of a book on tragedy and comedy. Her contributions to Critical Inquiry, include "Lawrence's Gotterdammerung" and “The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde's Parable about the Fall". (shrink)

Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any (...) implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking--staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms--if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"--might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject.Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality. (shrink)

In The Myth of Morality, Richard Joyce argues that moral discourse is hopelessly flawed. At the heart of ordinary moral judgements is a notion of moral inescapability, or practical authority, which, upon investigation, cannot be reasonably defended. Joyce argues that natural selection is to blame, in that it has provided us with a tendency to invest the world with values that it does not contain, and demands that it does not make. Should we therefore do away with morality, (...) as we did away with other faulty notions such as witches? Possibly not. We may be able to carry on with morality as a 'useful fiction' - allowing it to have a regulative influence on our lives and decisions, perhaps even playing a central role - while not committing ourselves to believing or asserting falsehoods, and thus not being subject to accusations of 'error'. (shrink)

The pragmatic character of the Dutch book argument makes it unsuitable as an "epistemic" justification for the fundamental probabilist dogma that rational partial beliefs must conform to the axioms of probability. To secure an appropriately epistemic justification for this conclusion, one must explain what it means for a system of partial beliefs to accurately represent the state of the world, and then show that partial beliefs that violate the laws of probability are invariably less accurate than they could be otherwise. (...) The first task can be accomplished once we realize that the accuracy of systems of partial beliefs can be measured on a gradational scale that satisfies a small set of formal constraints, each of which has a sound epistemic motivation. When accuracy is measured in this way it can be shown that any system of degrees of belief that violates the axioms of probability can be replaced by an alternative system that obeys the axioms and yet is more accurate in every possible world. Since epistemically rational agents must strive to hold accurate beliefs, this establishes conformity with the axioms of probability as a norm of epistemic rationality whatever its prudential merits or defects might be. (shrink)

Atheism is a familiar kind of skepticism about religion. Moral error theory is an analogous kind of skepticism about morality, though less well known outside academic circles. Both kinds of skeptic face a "what next?" question: If we have decided that the subject matter (religion/morality) is mistaken, then what should we do with this way of talking and thinking? The natural assumption is that we should abolish the mistaken topic, just as we previously eliminated talk of, say, bodily humors and (...) unicorns. The fictionalist, however, offers a less obvious recommendation. According to the fictionalist, engaging in the topic in question provides pragmatic benefits that do not depend on its truth-in a way roughly analogous to engaging with a novel or a movie. The religious fictionalist maintains that even if we were atheists, we should carry on talking, thinking, and acting as if religion were true. The moral fictionalist maintains a similar view regarding moral talk, thought, and action. Both forms of fictionalism face serious challenges. Some challenges can be levelled at either form of fictionalism (or at any form of fictionalism), whereas others are problems unique to moral fictionalism or to religious fictionalism. There are important questions to be asked about the relationship between these two kinds of fictionalism. Could moral fictionalism be plausible even if religious fictionalism is not (or vice versa)? This is a volume of thirteen previously unpublished papers on the topics of religious fictionalism, moral fictionalism, and the relation between these views. (shrink)

Numerous scenarios explain the origin of the eukaryote cell by fusion or endosymbiosis between an archaeon and a bacterium (and sometimes a third partner). We evaluate these hypotheses using the following three criteria. Can the data be explained by the null hypothesis that new features arise sequentially along a stem lineage? Second, hypotheses involving an archaeon and a bacterium should undergo standard phylogenetic tests of gene distribution. Third, accounting for past events by processes observed in modern cells is preferable to (...) postulating unknown processes that have never been observed. For example, there are many eukaryote examples of bacteria as endosymbionts or endoparasites, but none known in archaea. Strictly post‐hoc hypotheses that ignore this third criterion should be avoided. Applying these three criteria significantly narrows the number of plausible hypotheses. Given current knowledge, our conclusion is that the eukaryote lineage must have diverged from an ancestor of archaea well prior to the origin of the mitochondrion. Significantly, the absence of ancestrally amitochondriate eukaryotes (archezoa) among extant eukaryotes is neither evidence for an archaeal host for the ancestor of mitochondria, nor evidence against a eukaryotic host. BioEssays 29: 74–84, 2007. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Following Kripke and Putnam, the received view of chemical kinds has been a microstructuralist one. To be a microstructuralist about chemical kinds is to think that membership in said kinds is conferred by microstructural properties. Recently, the received microstructuralist view has been elaborated and defended, but it has also been attacked on the basis of complexities, both chemical and ontological. Here, I look at which complexities really challenge the microstructuralist view; at how the view itself might be made more complicated (...) in order to accommodate such challenges; and finally, at what this increasingly complicated picture implies for our standard assessment of chemical kindhood—primarily, for the widespread assumption that chemical kinds in general are more neat and tidy than those messy biological ones. _1_ The Received View _2_ A Taxonomy of Chemical Kinds _3_ Atomic Number _4_ H2O, H3O+, OH−, and More _5_ Complicating the Microstructuralist Picture _6_ Concrete and Other Mixtures _7_ Macromolecules, Especially Proteins _8_ Abandoning Sameness of Elemental Composition _9_ Not So Different after All. (shrink)

This book defends the view that any adequate account of rational decision making must take a decision maker's beliefs about causal relations into account. The early chapters of the book introduce the non-specialist to the rudiments of expected utility theory. The major technical advance offered by the book is a 'representation theorem' that shows that both causal decision theory and its main rival, Richard Jeffrey's logic of decision, are both instances of a more general conditional decision theory. The book solves (...) a long-standing problem for Jeffrey's theory by showing for the first time how to obtain a unique utility and probability representation for preferences and judgements of comparative likelihood. The book also contains a major new discussion of what it means to suppose that some event occurs or that some proposition is true. The most complete and robust defence of causal decision theory available. (shrink)

Some Bayesians have suggested that beliefs based on ambiguous or incomplete evidence are best represented by families of probability functions. I spend the first half of this essay outlining one version of this imprecise model of belief, and spend the second half defending the model against recent objections, raised by Roger White and others, which concern the phenomenon of probabilistic dilation. Dilation occurs when learning some definite fact forces a person’s beliefs about an event to shift from a sharp, point-valued (...) subjective probability to an imprecise spread of probabilities. Some commentators find dilation disturbing, both from an epistemic and a decision-theoretic perspective, and place the blame on the use of sets of probabilities to model opinion. These reactions are based on an overly narrow conception of imprecise belief states which assumes that we know everything there is to know about a person’s doxastic attitudes once we have identified the spreads of values for her imprecise credences. Once we recognize that the imprecise model has the resources to characterize a much richer family of doxastic attitudes than this, we will see that White’s charges of epistemological and decision theoretic incoherence are unfounded. (shrink)

There is a perennial philosophical dream of a certain natural order for the natural kinds. The name of this dream is ‘the hierarchy requirement’. According to this postulate, proper natural kinds form a taxonomy which is both unique and traditional. Here I demonstrate that complex scientific objects exist: objects which generate different systems of scientific classification, produce myriad legitimate alternatives amongst the nonetheless still natural kinds, and make the hierarchical dream impossible to realize, except at absurdly great cost. Philosophical hopes (...) for a certain order in nature cannot be fulfilled. Natural kinds crosscut one another, ubiquitously so, and this crosscutting spells the end of the hierarchical dream. (shrink)

Joyce Avrech Berkman interprets Edith Stein’s autobiography as time and space bound, yet arrestingly transgressive. She probes the origins, nature, and afterlife of Stein’s work, which sheds light on Stein’s response to Nazi antisemitism and the roots of her key philosophical and spiritual concerns.

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An important role of memory, both individual and collective, is to remind us of what we owe to the past. To understand this role, we need to conceive memory not merely in cognitive terms, but also as what Nietzsche called "memory of the will." It is this "conative" aspect of memory which explains the link between memory and identity. There still remain problems of how to explain how a collective memory "of the will" is transmitted over long periods of time, (...) and how to explain certain familiar pathologies. In the later parts of the paper, I look at Jan Assmann's important contributions to this question. (shrink)

ABSTRACTJulian of Norwich, anchorite and seer, was, according to the twentieth-century mystic poet and monk Thomas Merton, “one of the most wonderful of all Christian voices” and “with Newman the greatest English theologian.” Her Shewings, or Revelations of Divine Love, are an account, meditation, and teaching proceeding from sixteen visions she experienced on a single day in May of 1373. This “Soundproof Room” encounter takes the form of a mild creole of medieval and postmodern English of the sort that in (...) prior works, most notably Paris Views and Foucault in Winter, in the Linnaeus Garden, the author has called “mixed language.” Here also the author takes his cue from Merton’s reputed avowal that “Rather than ‘Sister’, one calls her the ‘Lady Julian’,” by making dialogue a like instance of seeking how to address another. (shrink)

This paper considers the character of moral peoplehood, our life as a people, and the rules and principles through which that life is expressed. In so far as those rules and principles take legal form, as determining the ground rules of association and denoting political rights and duties, this moral community is also a jural community. The paper engages with Bernard Williams’s thought with a view to resolving the tension between two conceptions of the constitution that differ in their account (...) of the relationship between norms and time. Williams offers the prospect of a non-Kantian liberalism that grows out of the habits and minds of persons but which does not collapse into relativism. I argue that Williams’s account of moral personhood devotes insufficient attention to the dynamics of moral deliberation, essential to the growth of personhood. I argue that Williams’s account of moral peoplehood is similarly deficient in that it overlooks the role constitutional deliberation plays in constructing the jural community. Plural politics requires accepted ground rules and the sense that we are a unity of plural associates, and this is what constitutional deliberation aims to provide. (shrink)

This volume considers how current transitions in postsecondary education are impacting Higher Education institutions and subjects in a number of Northern nations, as well as how these transitions are indicative of the wider shift from the welfare to the market state. The university is now considered a key site for training and wealth generation in the so-called 'knowledge economy' that operates in a globalising, high tech world. Further, these transitions are underpinned by neo-liberal economic ideas that assume that the public (...) sector is a drag on the economy unless it is subject to the rules, regulations and assumptions that govern the private sector. This excellent volume - an important contribution to Education as well as Economics and Politics - furthers our understandings of universities as marketable entities as part of the globalized economy. (shrink)

Provides an integrated introduction to artificial intelligence. Develops AI representation schemes and describes their uses for diverse applications, from autonomous robots to diagnostic assistants to infobots. DLC: Artificial intelligence.

Ross Poole displays the social content of the various conceptions of morality at work in contemporary society, and casts a strikingly fresh light on such fundamental problems as the place of reason in ethics, moral objectivity and the distinction between duty and virtue. The book provides a critical account of the moral theories of a number of major philosophers, including Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Habermas, Rawls, Gewirth and MacIntyre. It also presents a systematic critique of three of the most significant (...) responses to modernity: liberalism, nationalism and nihilism. It takes seriously the suggestion that men and women are subject to different conceptions of morality, and places the issue of gender at the centre of moral philosophy. Poole has written a valuable addition to the Ideas series. (shrink)

The United States considers educating all students to a threshold of adequate outcomes to be a central goal of educational justice. The No Child Left Behind Act introduced evidence-based policy and accountability protocols to ensure that all students receive an education that enables them to meet adequacy standards. Unfortunately, evidence-based policy has been less effective than expected. This article pinpoints under-examined methodological problems and suggests a more effective way to incorporate educational research findings into local evidence-based policy decisions. It identifies (...) some things educators need to know and do to determine whether available interventions can play the right casual role in their setting to produce desired effects. It examines the value and limits of educational research, especially randomized controlled trials, for this task. (shrink)

Meaningful and long-lasting progress in equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) continue to elude academics, practitioners, and policymakers. Extending Chater & Loewenstein's arguments to the EDI space, we argue that, despite conventional focus on individual-level solutions (i-frame), increasing EDI also requires a systemic focus (s-frame). We thus call for the design, testing, and implementation of multipronged s-frame interventions.

Moral skepticism is the denial that there is any such thing as moral knowledge. Since the publication of The Myth of Morality in 2001, Richard Joyce has explored the terrain of moral skepticism and has been willing to advocate versions of this radical view. Joyce's attitude toward morality is analogous to an atheist's attitude toward religion: he claims that in making moral judgments speakers attempt to state truths but that the world isn't furnished with the properties and relations (...) necessary to render such judgments true. Moral thinking probably emerged as a human adaptation, but one whose usefulness derived from its capacity to bolster social cohesion rather than its ability to track truths about the world. Essays in Moral Skepticism gathers together a dozen of Joyce's most significant papers from the last decade, following the developments in his ideas, presenting responses to critics, and charting his exploration of the complex landscape of modern moral skepticism. (shrink)

In his travels, and in his accompanying readings, he had come to the conclusion that the essential secret of life was harmony. . . . And he proceeded to put his philosophy into practice by forcing order into the established world, translating the mystic word harmony into the practical word organisation.1 Harmony becomes organization. And Gerald dedicates himself to work, to feverish, totally absorbing work, inspired with an almost religious exaltation in his fight with matter. The world is split in (...) two: on one side matter , on the other side his own isolated will. He wants to create on earth a perfect machine, "an activity of pure order, pure mechanical repetition"; a man of the twentieth century with no nostalgia for the superannuated ideals of Christianity or democracy, he wishes to found his eternity, his infinity, in the machine. So inchoate and mysterious is the imaginative world Lawrence creates for Women in Love that we find no difficulty in reading Gerald Crich as an allegorical figure in certain chapters and as a quite human, even fluid personality in others. As Gudrun's frenzied lover, as Birkin's elusive beloved, he seems a substantially different person from the Gerald Crich who is a ruthless god of the machine; yet as his cultural role demands extinction , so does his private emotional life, his confusion of the individual will with that of the cosmos, demand death—death by perfect cold. He is Lawrence's only tragic figure, a remarkable creation on a remarkable novel, and though it is a commonplace thing to say that Birkin represents Lawrence, it seems equally likely that Gerald Crich represents Lawrence—in his deepest, most aggrieved, most nihilist soul. · 1. All quotations from Women in Love are taken from the Modern Library edition. Joyce Carol Oates' works include the novels Childhood, Son of the Morning, and a collection of short stories, Night-Side. “Lawrence’s Götterdämmerung” is part of a larger work exploring tragedy and comedy. Her contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Jocoserious Joyce" , and "The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde's Parable about the Fall". (shrink)

Bleiman and Boisen offer a simple yet profound perceptual framework designed to lead us back to dominion -- the state where we feel balanced, connected and in harmony with ourselves and the world. People from all walks of life, from parents and teachers to couples and corporate executives, will find this a powerful tool for effecting change at the personal and global level.

In this thesis I argue that Adam Smith is committed to moral egalitarianism, which extends to his theory of political economy. While Smith’s work is often used to justify economic inequality in society, I show that his political theory is best understood as a kind of relational egalitarianism. Using Elizabeth Anderson’s Democratic Equality as a model, I examine Smith’s commitment to equality in the space of social relationships. In particular, I argue that Smith’s focus on eliminating inequalities that cause oppression (...) in society in conjunction with his efforts to design a political and economic system that will yield social conditions of freedom for individuals make him a relational egalitarian. (shrink)

When people argue they routinely challenge the opinions, views, and attitudes of one another, they seek to cast the other as the aggressor or party at fault, and otherwise exert social control. This article illustrates how members work to hamper challenges, evade control or avoid being negatively characterized by systematically blocking access to a turn in the third position and stopping their opponent’s agenda. Examining 100 hours of public disputes in varieties of English, I use membership categorization analysis and conversation (...) analysis to unpack resistance as part of the structural organization of disputes. I identify two methods of resisting an agenda: passively, whereby a responsive turn stalls the progressivity of the interaction, and actively, whereby a responsive turn disaligns to outrightly suspend the progressivity of the interaction. I discuss how resistance sequentially unfolds across sequential positions, and as an interactional phenomenon which solves the trouble of a challenge. Overall, this article contributes to social interaction research on resistance, public disputes and how social order is constituted in and through talk-in-interaction. (shrink)

More than a decade of exacting scientific research involving paleontological fragments and ancient DNA has lately produced a series of pronouncements about a purportedly novel population of archaic hominins dubbed “the Denisova.” The science involved in these matters is both technically stunning and, socially, at times a bit reckless. Here I discuss the responsibilities which scientists incur when they make inductively risky pronouncements about the different relative contributions by Denisovans to genomes of members of apparent subpopulations of current humans. This (...) science is sensational: it is science which empirically speculates, to the public delight’s and entertainment, about scintillating topics such as when humans evolved, where we came from, and who else we were having sex with during our early hominin history. An initial characterization of sensational science emerges from my discussion of the case, as well as a diagnosis of an interactive phenomenon termed amplified inductive risk. (shrink)

In Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective, Joyce Slochower brings a contemporary relational framework to bear on Winnicott's notion of the analytic holding environment. She presents a fresh, thought-provoking, and clinically useful integration of Winnicott's seminal insights with contemporary relational and feminist/psychoanalytic contributions. Seeking to broaden the concept of holding beyond work with severely regressed patients, she addresses holding in a variety of clinical contexts and focuses especially on holding processes in relation to issues of dependence, self-involvement, and hate. (...) She also considers clinical work with patients "on the edge" - patients who seem deperately to need a holding experience that remains paradoxically elusive. Slochower begins her study by questioning the therapeutic limitations of an interactive style. There are times, she proposes, when certain patients simply cannot tolerate evidence of the analyst's separate subjective presence and instead need a holding experience. Though this holding function is essential to work with difficult patients, it enters into the treatment of all patients, whether as figure or ground. Slochower's relational understanding of holding leads her to consider the impact of holding on patient and analyst alike. Throughout, she emphasizes the analyst's and the patient's co-construction, during moments of holding, of an essential illusion of analytic attunement; this illusion serves to protect the patient from potentially disruptive aspects of the analyst's subjective presence. Slochower's case vignettes helpfully illuminate the intersubjective aspects of the holding process, including the clinical picture when a holding frame fails. She elaborates her thesis by considering the therapeutic function of holding in mourning. And she concludes her study with a cogent examination of the theoretical and clinical limitations of working with a holding process. A welcome reprise on an essential Winnicottian theme, Holding and Psychoanalysis broadens and deepens our understanding of the therapeutic role of the analyst's holding function. (shrink)