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JournalISSN: 0033-2623

Psyche 

Klett-Cotta Verlag
About: Psyche is an academic journal published by Klett-Cotta Verlag. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Genus & Psychoanalytic theory. It has an ISSN identifier of 0033-2623. Over the lifetime, 5649 publications have been published receiving 42750 citations. The journal is also known as: Psyche (Stuttgart. Print) & Psychoanalyse (Stuttgart. Online).


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Journal Article
01 Dec 2005-Psyche
TL;DR: Riviere as mentioned in this paper argued that women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men, and that masquerade and womanliness are used as a device for avoiding anxiety.
Abstract: Joan Riviere’s ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, published in 1929, is one of the most frequently referred to papers in this collection. The title of the paper takes its cue from the dreams that an analysand, whose history is summed up here, had of people putting on masks in order to avert disaster and injury. Riviere first offers a synopsis of Jones’s essay ‘The Early Development of Female Sexuality’ (with its rough schema of heterosexual, homosexual and ‘intermediate’ types) to introduce her analysand, ‘a particular type of intellectual woman’, who, as one of Jones’s intermediate types, is principally heterosexual in development but also displays strong features of the other sex. Riviere’s suggestion is that women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men. The case study is given in support of this claim: womanliness is assumed and worn as a mask both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if found guilty of the crime (cf. her analogy with the thief). The paper is of particular interest, for it erases the distinction between genuine womanliness and masquerade. It also raises the question of ‘the essential nature of fully developed femininity’, a question lurking everywhere in the controversy, yet never properly addressed. Both masquerade and womanliness are used as a device for avoiding anxiety, Riviere argues. They should therefore not be seen as primary modes of sexual enjoyment. If one sketches the early libido development of womanliness as a mask, one finds that the womanly woman’s reactions to both men and women lies in the little girl’s reaction to her parents during the oral biting-sadistic phase. In its content, the womanly woman’s fantasy in relation to the father is similar to the normal Oedipal one, the difference being that it is predicated on sadism. Because she has ‘killed’ her mother, she is also excluded from enjoying what the mother had, and what she does obtain from her father, she has to extort. For Riviere, as for Deutsch and Jones, fully developed womanhood originates in the oral-sucking stage, the source of primary gratification , i.e., receiving a child from the father (via nipple, milk, penis, semen). The acceptance of castration is partly determined by the overestimation of the object in the oral-sucking phase, but mainly by the renunciation of sadistic castration wishes during the later oralbiting phase. Thus full heterosexuality coincides here with that of genitality. What makes a female homosexual, then, is the degree of sadism and anxiety involved in castration.

411 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1989-Psyche
TL;DR: This paper aims to verify a prediction that the larger the colony size, the less foraging is individually based and the more teamwork is required in ant foraging strategy.
Abstract: Some 12,000 ant species are known by now, with colony sizes ranging from a few individuals to 20,000,000 individuals. What constraints does this vast range of colony sizes place on the systems of organisation that they use? Alternatively, how does this range of colony sizes reflect the different systems of organisation used? We shall examine these questions in relation to ant foraging strategy, which as well as being the most visible aspect of their activity illustrates most clearly the roles and limits of communication in their collective behavior. This paper aims to verify a prediction of the following hypothesis (Pasteels et al. 1985; Deneubourg et al. 1986). In theory, the organization of a small insect society can rely on most individuals at any moment \"knowing\", principally by learning, what it must do, where it must go, etc., and the workers’ behavior has a strong determinist component. In a large insect society organization by individual learning is harder to achieve (Deneubourg et al. 1987). The workers’ behavior is necessarily more random and their coordination becomes a major problem. To cope with this, a completely different organisational system is added to that already in place. This supplementary system is based on the complex collective structures, patterns and decisions that spontaneously emerge from simple autocatalytic interactions between numerous individuals and with the environment, mediated by essentially chemical communication (see, e.g., Pasteels et al. 1987; Goss and Deneubourg 1989; Beckers et al. in press; Deneubourg et al, 1989, in press; Goss et al. 1990). The prediction that follows from this hypothesis is that the larger the colony size, the less foraging is individually based and the more

273 citations

Journal Article
01 May 1953-Psyche

265 citations

Performance
Metrics
No. of papers from the Journal in previous years
YearPapers
202329
202246
20216
202020
201950
201835