Gender as Soft AssemblyGender as Soft Assembly weaves together insights from different disciplinary domains to open up new vistas of clinical understanding of what it means to inhabit, to perform, and to be, gendered. Opposing the traditional notion of development as the linear unfolding of predictable stages, Adrienne Harris argues that children become gendered in multiply configured contexts. And she proffers new developmental models to capture the fluid, constructed, and creative experiences of becoming and being gendered. According to Harris, these models, and the images to which they give rise, articulate not only with contemporary relational psychoanalysis but also with recent research into the origins of mentalization and symbolization. In urging us to think of gender as co-constructed in a variety of relational contexts, Harris enlarges her psychoanalytic sensibility with the insights of attachment theory, linguistics, queer theory, and feminist criticism. Nor is she inattentive to the impact of history and culture on gender meanings. Special consideration is given to chaos theory, which Harris positions at the cutting edge of developmental psychology and uses to generate new perspectives and new images for comprehending and working clinically with gender. |
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... affect - per- haps , in particular , aggressive affect for women and vulnerability or tenderness in men - may be the motility in the system that disequilibrates an attractor state and institutes a phase shift . Humor , too , the ...
... Affect While acknowledging a powerful place for social interaction and at- tachment , Locke ( 1993 ) also notes that the explanation of affect still lags behind cognition in the study of child language . The absence of Tomkins ( 1962 ...
... affect ? An anxious mastery ? I am impressed ( as I am much of the time in this treatment ) by the mother's ability to tolerate all the modalities her child uses to absorb this new reality . Pam has been able to let Sarah find a ...