Amy Taylor - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Amy Taylor
Technology critique, as taken up by humanistic psychology, has remained grounded in late Heidegge... more Technology critique, as taken up by humanistic psychology, has remained grounded in late Heidegger. is critique has had little practical effect on the development of technology and everyday technology use. I postulate reasons for this, which include that this critique regards technology in general rather than specific technologies, overlooking the multistability of any particular technology. I then discuss a different humanistic, phenomenological ground for technology critique from the position that human beings are at home with technology, meaning that technology does not threaten disembodiment or disengagement with any other important components of humanity. I draw inspiration primarily from Don Ihde's and Marshall McLuhan's phenomenological, descriptive works on the ways human beings are shaped and extended by technology. I end with a discussion of embodied experience in cyberspace which serves as a model for new humanistic, phenomenological techno-critiques.
Technology critique, as taken up by humanistic psychology, has remained grounded in late Heidegge... more Technology critique, as taken up by humanistic psychology, has remained grounded in late Heidegger. is critique has had little practical effect on the development of technology and everyday technology use. I postulate reasons for this, which include that this critique regards technology in general rather than specific technologies, overlooking the multistability of any particular technology. I then discuss a different humanistic, phenomenological ground for technology critique from the position that human beings are at home with technology, meaning that technology does not threaten disembodiment or disengagement with any other important components of humanity. I draw inspiration primarily from Don Ihde's and Marshall McLuhan's phenomenological, descriptive works on the ways human beings are shaped and extended by technology. I end with a discussion of embodied experience in cyberspace which serves as a model for new humanistic, phenomenological techno-critiques.
I wrote this paper after completing a fellowship exploring substance use treatment services in th... more I wrote this paper after completing a fellowship exploring substance use treatment services in the Pittsburgh area. This paper is about the social construction of the "addict" and how women with addictions are in a complicated spot around how they do and do not fit this construct, and challenges this poses to providing treatment for them. My paper makes specific reference to people and organizations in Pittsburgh working to reconsider how we think about addiction and "addicts" in order to better serve the diverse range of people with substance use problems. In the spirit of existential phenomenological psychology, I include a first-person description of the experience of a person in recovery which shows that typical ways of thinking about addiction or "addicts" miss important pieces of a person's experience of being in recovery.
More about the Scaife Medical Student Fellowship:
http://ireta.org/tag/scaife-advanced-medical-student-fellowship/
Since Freud first seriously addressed the development of femininity late in his career, psychoana... more Since Freud first seriously addressed the development of femininity late in his career, psychoanalysis has greatly expanded its clinical and theoretical domain in the psychology of women. In particular, psychoanalysis has extended into feminism to address how gender identity and femininity develop in women. This intersection of psychoanalysis and feminism has produced a spectrum of responses to Freud's notions about gender identity and femininity. These responses range from outright rejection of Freud-Kate Millet, for instance, categorizes Freud as a "counterrevolutionary" and believes that Freud's ideas do nothing but work against feminist progress-to responses that come from within psychoanalytic thought but that explain femininity differently than Freud, and finally responses which preserve but reinterpret Freud's psychosexual schema. In this paper, I will explore two kinds of responses which are both feminist and psychoanalytic, but which are in conflict.
Review of Conversation Analysis and Psychotherapy
Those individuals whom one might refer to as class clowns are a misunderstood group. Prior studie... more Those individuals whom one might refer to as class clowns are a misunderstood group. Prior studies show a range of contradictory perspectives on clowning phenomena. This pilot study aims to understand the lived experience of class clowns and thereby give voice to this group via narrative methods which elaborate the meaning and context of class clowning. Following an interview approach that addressed interviewee's experiences of their class clowning at multiple levels, interviewees discussed not only their direct experiences of clowning, but how others reacted to them, how clowning fit into their lives at the time of the event, how their clowning changed over time, and how they viewed their clowning at the time of our interview. Through this method of interview, interviewees went from participants in the project to coresearchers, discussing their experiences from gradually increasing spatial and temporal distance. Through hermeneutic analysis of interview texts, a theme which emerged was "disjointedness." All participants discussed experiences of disjointedness, expressed in contexts including relationship with the teacher or adult figure at the time of the initial event, setting in terms of the space, time, and the others present, family and social context, and relationship to one's own body. Implications for this study include restructuring classrooms and other similar spaces with children and adolescents in such a way that the class clown will not feel so rigidly confined that she disrupts that structure.
In this study, I propose to interview a select group of MySpace cybercommunity members about thei... more In this study, I propose to interview a select group of MySpace cybercommunity members about their experience of participating in that community and their reasons for doing so. I am interested specifically in why they set up and maintain a MySpace profile. The participants I seek out will be MySpace users whose gendered identities online differ in some way from their gendered identities offline. Participants may include a user who identifies or is identified as female offline but expresses herself as male online, a user who does not strongly identify with a gender offline but expresses a strongly masculine or feminine gender online, or a user who avoids creating an online representation that may be easily identified by others as male or female. These interviews will, at least in part, take place in the presence of a computer screen displaying the participant's MySpace profile so that we may discuss together the decisions the participants made in setting up and maintaining their online representations. I hope to develop some understanding about how these users articulate their identities in terms of gender in this community. These are users who present themselves in some way differently than they do offline, and this study will aim to uncover how these presentations differ and also ask why they differ in the context of asking why they set up and maintain profiles in this community.
Teaching Documents by Amy Taylor
This class covers some classic and contemporary classic texts and ideas on gender and sexuality w... more This class covers some classic and contemporary classic texts and ideas on gender and sexuality within psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality followed by criticism and reformulations of gender from within psychoanalysis using work by Ken Corbett, Avgi Saketopolou, Christopher Bollas and others. Class participants will be asked to bring questions about gender and sexuality (their own, their patients, in general) in clinical practice to our discussion and to share clinical material linked to class topics.
Office: Hall College Center, second floor Office Hours: 9:30-10:30 Wednesdays and by appointment ... more Office: Hall College Center, second floor Office Hours: 9:30-10:30 Wednesdays and by appointment Class meeting time: 5:40-8:30pm Mondays
This class invites reconsideration of a prominent psychoanalytic metaphor of surface and depth, o... more This class invites reconsideration of a prominent psychoanalytic metaphor of surface and depth, of a mind encased in a body. It draws attention to the inherent dualism in both Freud's structural and topographical metaphors of the psyche, which are echoed in contemporary prominent conceptualizations of mind. It then recasts psychological experience as lived bodily experience, and we will work with thinking clinically in ways that maintain human being as embodied being.
As a teacher, my aim is to encourage my students to to regard themselves as producers rather than... more As a teacher, my aim is to encourage my students to to regard themselves as producers rather than mere consumers of knowledge. I want my students to recognize that their own experiences and one another's experiences, taken seriously and examined, are their most important source of learning. In line with this, my courses always involve critical inquiry, as students articulate and then explore questions that interest them. Often, this involves developing firsthand knowledge through field experience and reflective engagement with the rest of the class in relation to this experience. For example, students in my Psychology of Development course (Duquesne University, 2009) engaged in semesterlong service learning projects with local organizations, including a residence for senior citizens, a residential substance use disorder recovery program for mothers that allowed their young children to live with them, and an after school program for adolescents. Students considered the theories discussed in class in relation to these communities, and examined their own impressions and emerging theories about development in relation to this work. Finally, they shared their observations in a symposium with students from other classes in the department at the end of the semester.
Conference Presentations by Amy Taylor
Improving men's mental health and promoting gender equality through elaboration of male bodily experiences and masculinities (Featured Panel on Health). (Presented at the International Conference on Masculinities, 2015. New York, NY, USA.)
This paper addresses how social demands for men's bodies to symbolically stand for meaning beyond... more This paper addresses how social demands for men's bodies to symbolically stand for meaning beyond their function as bodies may leave men with troubled relationships to their bodies and masculine identities. The author opens up discussion of strategies to free men from this bind, in part by moving toward recognition of the vast range of male bodies and masculine identities and away from hegemonic masculinity. The author discusses expectations placed on the sexual male body in particular, and notes that the penis seems to be the human body part most inscribed with cultural significance and a part placed under great performance demand and scrutiny; indeed, “the penis is haunted by the phallus” and is expected to “live up to the phallic cultural expectations” (Don Ihde, 2002, p. 28). In other words, the penis as a symbol of abstract power and the penis as a material body part have a gulf between them, with a demand that the latter approximate the former. This confusion of the penis and the symbolic phallus leaves men feeling alienated from bodily experience and oriented toward attaining bodily ideals rather than developing integrated bodily experiences, with consequences for their ability to love, enjoy sexual life, and maintain self-esteem. Additionally, this false link between penis and phallus implies a naturalness to patriarchy, i.e., it implies that power belongs to and naturally accrues in those bodies identified as male, with (or assumed to have) a penis. The author aims to de-link the penis as a symbol/ phallus and the penis as a body part (and moreover, to de-link the symbolic phallus from gender, or from any particular body part). She grounds some of the discussion in a case example of a cisgendered heterosexual couple which successfully navigates changes to the man's sexual body following typical prostate cancer treatment-- the case involves how this couple gains some distance from abstract bodily demands such that the man explores his individual bodily experience and develops a nuanced identity.
Autoethnographic Reflections on Self-Authorization and the Collaborative Process of Learning and Teaching Psychoanalytic Inquiry. (Presented at the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology, 2015. New York, NY.)
(Presented as part of the panel, "Psychoanalytic contributions to qualitative inquiry and psychoa... more (Presented as part of the panel, "Psychoanalytic contributions to qualitative inquiry and psychoanalytic psychoeducation: Navigating transferences to psychoanalysis in and beyond the clinic and classroom")
Lacan famously stated that the authorization of an analyst can come only from himself. As I understand it, this means that becoming constituted as an analytic thinker and becoming responsible for one’s own mind is reflexive, developmental process and involves attention to experience as a source of data. Drawing from my experiences learning and teaching psychoanalytic inquiry as a psychoanalytic trainee and psychotherapist, teacher, supervisor, and interviewer, I employ authoethnographic methodology (C. Ellis) to elaborate my own reflexive process of “learning about learning” and inviting others into a process of learning about their minds and authorizing themselves to take seriously their own experiences as points of access. This process involves learning to tolerate ambiguity and becoming sufficiently aware of and differentiated from one’s context to appreciate one’s unique experience and become curious about diverse experiences. In speaking about the “how-to” of learning to engage in psychoanalytic thinking, I discuss psychoanalytic inquiry as a narrative method which aims to draw out the stories of students, patients, and research participants. I discuss psychoanalytic inquiry as a hermeneutic of suspicion which points to meanings outside of a subject’s conscious awareness that point toward broader group, social, and cultural meanings which provide context for her experience.
The widening scope of psychoanalytic subjecthood: Reflections on psychoanalytic treatment of patients with intellectual disability. (Presented at the International Psychoanalytical Association 49th Congress, 2015. Boston, MA, USA.)
In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud references a parental death wish against abnormal ... more In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud references a parental death wish against abnormal children. Children with intellectual disabilities (ID) are more frequently abused and neglected in their families than children of average cognitive ability. The intellectually disabled adults some of these children become bear the effects of trauma as, to use Ferenczi’s term, “unwelcome children” in their families (and unwelcome citizens in the world), directing death wishes toward themselves in the form of symptoms that exacerbate their disabilities.
This paper discusses ID as a cause and, in part, an effect of internalized death-wishes through a case example of a woman who incurred brain damage shortly after birth. She entered treatment with suicidality, active self-injury, and obsessive-compulsive symptomatology that further limited her access to her thinking and impaired her development. This patient related to her disability in the same manner as her parents and other significant attachment figures, attempting to disavow or murderously destroy those aspects of herself that were rejected and attacked within her family.
Over the course of treatment, she came to bear her aggression in a manner that allowed her to make fuller use of her mind and to gradually reduce her aversion to life. This paper links the position this woman took on in her family to the role people with intellectual disability occupy more broadly as receptacles for unbearable grief, rage, and hatred. It also addresses complex treatment dynamics around aggression and dependency that appear in a person who is functioning developmentally at multiple levels; the intellectually disabled patient is an adult and yet is impaired around managing basic needs without the support of others.
Technology critique, as taken up by humanistic psychology, has remained grounded in late Heidegge... more Technology critique, as taken up by humanistic psychology, has remained grounded in late Heidegger. is critique has had little practical effect on the development of technology and everyday technology use. I postulate reasons for this, which include that this critique regards technology in general rather than specific technologies, overlooking the multistability of any particular technology. I then discuss a different humanistic, phenomenological ground for technology critique from the position that human beings are at home with technology, meaning that technology does not threaten disembodiment or disengagement with any other important components of humanity. I draw inspiration primarily from Don Ihde's and Marshall McLuhan's phenomenological, descriptive works on the ways human beings are shaped and extended by technology. I end with a discussion of embodied experience in cyberspace which serves as a model for new humanistic, phenomenological techno-critiques.
Technology critique, as taken up by humanistic psychology, has remained grounded in late Heidegge... more Technology critique, as taken up by humanistic psychology, has remained grounded in late Heidegger. is critique has had little practical effect on the development of technology and everyday technology use. I postulate reasons for this, which include that this critique regards technology in general rather than specific technologies, overlooking the multistability of any particular technology. I then discuss a different humanistic, phenomenological ground for technology critique from the position that human beings are at home with technology, meaning that technology does not threaten disembodiment or disengagement with any other important components of humanity. I draw inspiration primarily from Don Ihde's and Marshall McLuhan's phenomenological, descriptive works on the ways human beings are shaped and extended by technology. I end with a discussion of embodied experience in cyberspace which serves as a model for new humanistic, phenomenological techno-critiques.
I wrote this paper after completing a fellowship exploring substance use treatment services in th... more I wrote this paper after completing a fellowship exploring substance use treatment services in the Pittsburgh area. This paper is about the social construction of the "addict" and how women with addictions are in a complicated spot around how they do and do not fit this construct, and challenges this poses to providing treatment for them. My paper makes specific reference to people and organizations in Pittsburgh working to reconsider how we think about addiction and "addicts" in order to better serve the diverse range of people with substance use problems. In the spirit of existential phenomenological psychology, I include a first-person description of the experience of a person in recovery which shows that typical ways of thinking about addiction or "addicts" miss important pieces of a person's experience of being in recovery.
More about the Scaife Medical Student Fellowship:
http://ireta.org/tag/scaife-advanced-medical-student-fellowship/
Since Freud first seriously addressed the development of femininity late in his career, psychoana... more Since Freud first seriously addressed the development of femininity late in his career, psychoanalysis has greatly expanded its clinical and theoretical domain in the psychology of women. In particular, psychoanalysis has extended into feminism to address how gender identity and femininity develop in women. This intersection of psychoanalysis and feminism has produced a spectrum of responses to Freud's notions about gender identity and femininity. These responses range from outright rejection of Freud-Kate Millet, for instance, categorizes Freud as a "counterrevolutionary" and believes that Freud's ideas do nothing but work against feminist progress-to responses that come from within psychoanalytic thought but that explain femininity differently than Freud, and finally responses which preserve but reinterpret Freud's psychosexual schema. In this paper, I will explore two kinds of responses which are both feminist and psychoanalytic, but which are in conflict.
Review of Conversation Analysis and Psychotherapy
Those individuals whom one might refer to as class clowns are a misunderstood group. Prior studie... more Those individuals whom one might refer to as class clowns are a misunderstood group. Prior studies show a range of contradictory perspectives on clowning phenomena. This pilot study aims to understand the lived experience of class clowns and thereby give voice to this group via narrative methods which elaborate the meaning and context of class clowning. Following an interview approach that addressed interviewee's experiences of their class clowning at multiple levels, interviewees discussed not only their direct experiences of clowning, but how others reacted to them, how clowning fit into their lives at the time of the event, how their clowning changed over time, and how they viewed their clowning at the time of our interview. Through this method of interview, interviewees went from participants in the project to coresearchers, discussing their experiences from gradually increasing spatial and temporal distance. Through hermeneutic analysis of interview texts, a theme which emerged was "disjointedness." All participants discussed experiences of disjointedness, expressed in contexts including relationship with the teacher or adult figure at the time of the initial event, setting in terms of the space, time, and the others present, family and social context, and relationship to one's own body. Implications for this study include restructuring classrooms and other similar spaces with children and adolescents in such a way that the class clown will not feel so rigidly confined that she disrupts that structure.
In this study, I propose to interview a select group of MySpace cybercommunity members about thei... more In this study, I propose to interview a select group of MySpace cybercommunity members about their experience of participating in that community and their reasons for doing so. I am interested specifically in why they set up and maintain a MySpace profile. The participants I seek out will be MySpace users whose gendered identities online differ in some way from their gendered identities offline. Participants may include a user who identifies or is identified as female offline but expresses herself as male online, a user who does not strongly identify with a gender offline but expresses a strongly masculine or feminine gender online, or a user who avoids creating an online representation that may be easily identified by others as male or female. These interviews will, at least in part, take place in the presence of a computer screen displaying the participant's MySpace profile so that we may discuss together the decisions the participants made in setting up and maintaining their online representations. I hope to develop some understanding about how these users articulate their identities in terms of gender in this community. These are users who present themselves in some way differently than they do offline, and this study will aim to uncover how these presentations differ and also ask why they differ in the context of asking why they set up and maintain profiles in this community.
This class covers some classic and contemporary classic texts and ideas on gender and sexuality w... more This class covers some classic and contemporary classic texts and ideas on gender and sexuality within psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality followed by criticism and reformulations of gender from within psychoanalysis using work by Ken Corbett, Avgi Saketopolou, Christopher Bollas and others. Class participants will be asked to bring questions about gender and sexuality (their own, their patients, in general) in clinical practice to our discussion and to share clinical material linked to class topics.
Office: Hall College Center, second floor Office Hours: 9:30-10:30 Wednesdays and by appointment ... more Office: Hall College Center, second floor Office Hours: 9:30-10:30 Wednesdays and by appointment Class meeting time: 5:40-8:30pm Mondays
This class invites reconsideration of a prominent psychoanalytic metaphor of surface and depth, o... more This class invites reconsideration of a prominent psychoanalytic metaphor of surface and depth, of a mind encased in a body. It draws attention to the inherent dualism in both Freud's structural and topographical metaphors of the psyche, which are echoed in contemporary prominent conceptualizations of mind. It then recasts psychological experience as lived bodily experience, and we will work with thinking clinically in ways that maintain human being as embodied being.
As a teacher, my aim is to encourage my students to to regard themselves as producers rather than... more As a teacher, my aim is to encourage my students to to regard themselves as producers rather than mere consumers of knowledge. I want my students to recognize that their own experiences and one another's experiences, taken seriously and examined, are their most important source of learning. In line with this, my courses always involve critical inquiry, as students articulate and then explore questions that interest them. Often, this involves developing firsthand knowledge through field experience and reflective engagement with the rest of the class in relation to this experience. For example, students in my Psychology of Development course (Duquesne University, 2009) engaged in semesterlong service learning projects with local organizations, including a residence for senior citizens, a residential substance use disorder recovery program for mothers that allowed their young children to live with them, and an after school program for adolescents. Students considered the theories discussed in class in relation to these communities, and examined their own impressions and emerging theories about development in relation to this work. Finally, they shared their observations in a symposium with students from other classes in the department at the end of the semester.
Improving men's mental health and promoting gender equality through elaboration of male bodily experiences and masculinities (Featured Panel on Health). (Presented at the International Conference on Masculinities, 2015. New York, NY, USA.)
This paper addresses how social demands for men's bodies to symbolically stand for meaning beyond... more This paper addresses how social demands for men's bodies to symbolically stand for meaning beyond their function as bodies may leave men with troubled relationships to their bodies and masculine identities. The author opens up discussion of strategies to free men from this bind, in part by moving toward recognition of the vast range of male bodies and masculine identities and away from hegemonic masculinity. The author discusses expectations placed on the sexual male body in particular, and notes that the penis seems to be the human body part most inscribed with cultural significance and a part placed under great performance demand and scrutiny; indeed, “the penis is haunted by the phallus” and is expected to “live up to the phallic cultural expectations” (Don Ihde, 2002, p. 28). In other words, the penis as a symbol of abstract power and the penis as a material body part have a gulf between them, with a demand that the latter approximate the former. This confusion of the penis and the symbolic phallus leaves men feeling alienated from bodily experience and oriented toward attaining bodily ideals rather than developing integrated bodily experiences, with consequences for their ability to love, enjoy sexual life, and maintain self-esteem. Additionally, this false link between penis and phallus implies a naturalness to patriarchy, i.e., it implies that power belongs to and naturally accrues in those bodies identified as male, with (or assumed to have) a penis. The author aims to de-link the penis as a symbol/ phallus and the penis as a body part (and moreover, to de-link the symbolic phallus from gender, or from any particular body part). She grounds some of the discussion in a case example of a cisgendered heterosexual couple which successfully navigates changes to the man's sexual body following typical prostate cancer treatment-- the case involves how this couple gains some distance from abstract bodily demands such that the man explores his individual bodily experience and develops a nuanced identity.
Autoethnographic Reflections on Self-Authorization and the Collaborative Process of Learning and Teaching Psychoanalytic Inquiry. (Presented at the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology, 2015. New York, NY.)
(Presented as part of the panel, "Psychoanalytic contributions to qualitative inquiry and psychoa... more (Presented as part of the panel, "Psychoanalytic contributions to qualitative inquiry and psychoanalytic psychoeducation: Navigating transferences to psychoanalysis in and beyond the clinic and classroom")
Lacan famously stated that the authorization of an analyst can come only from himself. As I understand it, this means that becoming constituted as an analytic thinker and becoming responsible for one’s own mind is reflexive, developmental process and involves attention to experience as a source of data. Drawing from my experiences learning and teaching psychoanalytic inquiry as a psychoanalytic trainee and psychotherapist, teacher, supervisor, and interviewer, I employ authoethnographic methodology (C. Ellis) to elaborate my own reflexive process of “learning about learning” and inviting others into a process of learning about their minds and authorizing themselves to take seriously their own experiences as points of access. This process involves learning to tolerate ambiguity and becoming sufficiently aware of and differentiated from one’s context to appreciate one’s unique experience and become curious about diverse experiences. In speaking about the “how-to” of learning to engage in psychoanalytic thinking, I discuss psychoanalytic inquiry as a narrative method which aims to draw out the stories of students, patients, and research participants. I discuss psychoanalytic inquiry as a hermeneutic of suspicion which points to meanings outside of a subject’s conscious awareness that point toward broader group, social, and cultural meanings which provide context for her experience.
The widening scope of psychoanalytic subjecthood: Reflections on psychoanalytic treatment of patients with intellectual disability. (Presented at the International Psychoanalytical Association 49th Congress, 2015. Boston, MA, USA.)
In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud references a parental death wish against abnormal ... more In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud references a parental death wish against abnormal children. Children with intellectual disabilities (ID) are more frequently abused and neglected in their families than children of average cognitive ability. The intellectually disabled adults some of these children become bear the effects of trauma as, to use Ferenczi’s term, “unwelcome children” in their families (and unwelcome citizens in the world), directing death wishes toward themselves in the form of symptoms that exacerbate their disabilities.
This paper discusses ID as a cause and, in part, an effect of internalized death-wishes through a case example of a woman who incurred brain damage shortly after birth. She entered treatment with suicidality, active self-injury, and obsessive-compulsive symptomatology that further limited her access to her thinking and impaired her development. This patient related to her disability in the same manner as her parents and other significant attachment figures, attempting to disavow or murderously destroy those aspects of herself that were rejected and attacked within her family.
Over the course of treatment, she came to bear her aggression in a manner that allowed her to make fuller use of her mind and to gradually reduce her aversion to life. This paper links the position this woman took on in her family to the role people with intellectual disability occupy more broadly as receptacles for unbearable grief, rage, and hatred. It also addresses complex treatment dynamics around aggression and dependency that appear in a person who is functioning developmentally at multiple levels; the intellectually disabled patient is an adult and yet is impaired around managing basic needs without the support of others.