This article describes a psychoanalytic approach to understanding and treating couple relationships, developed from the pioneering work at the Tavistock Institute of Marital Studies, now called Tavistock Relationships. The approach focuses on the influence of the past on relationships, the nature of couple relationships developmentally and dynamically in the present, and the potential for the creative development of the couple in the future. It focuses on unconscious elements including shared unconscious fantasy, the wish to repeat from the past, and the wish to create something new. It explores the central role of projective identification and mutual projective systems in couples. It concludes with an illustration of a couple treatment in which repetitive ways based on unconscious gridlock and shared unconscious fantasy are reworked in the setting of the couple therapy.
Presents a methodology for developing economic literacy using popular education techniques, drawing on 1991/92 fieldwork conducted with a group of women in Peten, Guatemala. It is observed that the first step in any such program is a proper understanding of the economic, cultural, & political reality of women as it is experienced in their daily lives, which is translated into an educational program geared to respond to this reality. The next step is to provide a group experience that allows women to learn from one another & positively reinforces each individual's abilities & knowledges. Women are inspired to become independent learners who can construct concrete visions of their economic futures & act on those visions. Economic literacy must be attached to the availability of capital so that women can expand their enterprises in the context of their communities. It is suggested that this method encourages individual & community economic development & can be used as a stepping stone for women who live in poverty to become agents rather than objects of economic forces. 1 Figure. D. M. Smith
Frustrated by the inefficiency of relying on government channels to reach the very poor, development bank officials are expressing more and more interest in the grassroots approach
During the last two centuries, the way economic science is done has changed radically: it has become a social science based on mathematical models in place of words. This book describes and analyses that change - both historically and philosophically - using a series of case studies to illuminate the nature and the implications of these changes. It is not a technical book; it is written for the intelligent person who wants to understand how economics works from the inside out. This book will be of interest to economists and science studies scholars (historians, sociologists and philosophers of science). But it also aims at a wider readership in the public intellectual sphere, building on the current interest in all things economic and on the recent failure of the so-called economic model, which has shaped our beliefs and the world we live in
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This article investigates the role played by narrative in drawing inferences from statistics before the adoption of formal inference regimes in economics. Two well-known, and exemplary, cases of informal inference provide the materials. Nikolai Kondratiev's struggles to make inferences about the existence of his "long waves" from heaps of statistics in the 1920s contrast sharply with Thomas Robert Malthus's confident account of demographic-economic oscillations made on the basis of the limited numbers available in the late eighteenth century. Comparison of their inferential reasoning, using detailed textual analysis, casts attention on the important role of narrative. These cases prompt the notion of "narrative inference": where informal statistical inference depends on narrative accounts—used to make sense of the numbers by Malthus or to add sense onto the numbers by Kondratiev.
Twentieth-century economics has been characterized as developing an engineering mentality, but this history suggests the importance of distinguishing between a design approach and a problem-solving approach. The former is to be found in economists tasked with reconstructing broken economies (from war or depression) as well as creating "modern" economies in postwar developmental states. The latter is marked by the development of engineering-type tools to solve particular economic problems. While the former mode came into its own in mid-century, and lost confidence in later years, the latter grew up from the early part of the century and maintains its kudos. Accounting for this history depends in part on multiple and sometimes complex intersections between economists and other disciplines. But at least as important were the economic and political events of the century, which molded economists' experiences and fostered their ambitions to make their technocratic economics usable in the world. This involved more than fashioning "tools" to solve specific problems, more than making "cameras" to describe and analyze the world, but even creating "engines" to help design and run economies.
Scientists use diagrams not just to visualize objects and relations in their fields, both empirical and theoretical, but to reason with them as tools of their science. While the two dimensional space of diagrams might seem restrictive, scientific diagrams can depict many more than two elements, can be used to visualize the same materials in myriad different ways, and can be constructed in a considerable variety of forms. This article takes up two generic puzzles about 2D visualizations. First, How do scientists in different communities use 2D spaces to depict materials that are not fundamentally spatial? This prompts the distinction between diagrams that operate in different kinds of spaces: real, ideal, and artificial. And second, How do diagrams, in these different usages of 2D space, support various kinds of visual reasoning that cross over between inductive and deductive? The argument links the representational form and content of a diagram (its vocabulary and grammar) with the kinds of inferential and manipulative reasoning that are afforded, and constrained, by scientists' different usages of 2D space.
This article explores the characteristics of research sites that scientists have called "natural experiments" to understand and develop usable distinctions for the social sciences between "Nature's or Society's experiments" and "natural experiments." In this analysis, natural experiments emerge as the retro-fitting by social scientists of events that have happened in the social world into the traditional forms of field or randomized trial experiments. By contrast, "Society's experiments" figure as events in the world that happen in circumstances that are already sufficiently "controlled" to be open for direct analysis without reconstruction work.
Economics revolves around a central character: "economic man." As historians, we are all familiar with various episodes in the history of this character, and we appreciate his ever-changing aspect even while many of our colleagues in economics think the rational economic agent of neoclassical economics is the same kind of person as Adam Smith's economic man. The fact that this is a familiar history means that I can focus on a few salient examples—a "short" history, rather than a complete history— to provide the raw material for my account which has a more specific agenda than simply a history of economic man. My aim is to re-consider the history of economic man as a model man. This leads to two further questions: What kind of a role has this model man played in relation to the science he inhabits? And, how can we characterize the processes by which economists have arrived at their model characters?To illuminate this history of economic man, I adopt ideas from philosophy about how scientists arrive at models and use them in science. Of course, economists have always had their own ideas about such matters. So in effect, there are two intersecting strands in this account: one is how economists have discussed their strategies in creating these characters, and the other is how philosophers of science have—at the time and since—labeled and thought about such strategies. These discussions, from the economists and from philosophers, will enable us to explore the usefulness of the concept of idealization, a standard way of thinking about model construction in philosophy of science. They will also allow us to consider model man as an ideal type (using Weber's concept) or as a caricature (to follow Gibbard and Varian's label). These analytical labels—ideal types, idealization, and so forth—relate to questions about the status of models and their construction that are sometimes evident, and sometimes lie below the surface, but always remain important in the historical discussions about economics as a science. My account is concerned then with constructions of thepersonaof economic man, how he has changed over the last 250 years, how far we can regard that character as a model, and with reflections on his role in the changing science of economics.