PARENTAL CONFLICT RESOLUTION

Six-, 12-, and 15-month follow-up data are presented evaluating a program for high-conflict parents. Funded by a grant from Health and Human Services, the program's content reflects an extensive review of research literature, including the relevant literature on personality disorders. Introduced in Phoenix, Arizona in October 1999, the program has served more than 1,000 families in several jurisdictions. Whereas other programs for entrenched, high-conflict cases are typically time intensive, involving 2 to 6 months, this is a one-time 4-hour program. As such, the authors are heartened to report a suprisingly positive—and enduring—response from the parents.     

The Effects of Pregnancy Experience on Contraceptive Practice

Retrospective reports of contraceptive use on two occasions of intercourse (separated by 2 years on average) were used to examine change in contraceptive practice as a function of intervening pregnancy experience in a randomly selected biracial (Black, White) sample of 466 female adolescents. Although all groups of adolescents regardless of pregnancy experience improved their contraceptive use, adolescents experiencing an unplanned pregnancy or pregnancy scare appeared to improve relatively more. However, differences between groups could be explained by the differential passage of time, and this was true among both Black and White adolescents. Specifically, ever-pregnant adolescents had been sexually active the longest and showed the most improvement; never-pregnant adolescents who had never had a pregnancy scare had been sexually active the shortest period and showed the least improvement, while adolescents experiencing a pregnancy scare were intermediate on both variables. These findings suggest that prior research may have drawn faulty conclusions about the effects of pregnancy experience on subsequent contraceptive behavior, and that future research on these topics may need to pay greater attention to the passage of time as an important substantive and methodological factor in its own right.     

The Liquefaction of Desire: Music,Water and Femininity in Victorian Aestheticism

This article reconsiders Victorian images of mermaids and sirens through a detailed examination of two images: Frederic Leighton's Lieder ohne Worte (1861, oil on canvas, Tate Britain) and Edward Burne-Jones's The Depths of the Sea (1886, oil on canvas, private collection). It demonstrates that the themes of water, music and femininity were entwined in the Victorian imagination, by setting these two paintings within the context of Victorian artistic, literary and cultural production. It shows that musical images were prevalent in the emerging Aesthetic movement. Musical subjects freed artists and audiences from the conventions of narrative interpretation, and allowed them instead to concentrate on exploring mood and colour.

Pictures of mermaids add a further twist to the Aesthetic preoccupation with music. This article reveals that mermaids made explicit the underlying connection between musical performance and sensuality. It also suggests that the idiosyncratic depiction of the mermaid by Burne-Jones and the ambiguous sexuality of Leighton's figures could be read as symptomatic of changing conceptions of desire. It argues that these images embodied the shift from ardour to libido. In other words, love was no longer described as burning and fixed, but as fluid and shifting. This transformation in the way desire was theorised was most urgently presented in Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality (1905). However, this article suggests that the same ideas were being made visible in Aesthetic art and writing from the mid-nineteenth century.     

(En)Gendering indochina: Feminisation and female figurings in french colonial discourses

The issue of gendering highlights the indeterminacy of France's own conception of its role abroad, whose ambiguous and confused emphases are contained in the term la mère-patrie, and find expression in France's double mission to both nurture and subdue. The gendered and sexualised images variously attributed to Indochina in French colonial discourses sit uncomfortably alongside the more parental or familial configurations of the Franco-Indochinese relationship as expressed by the ideological imperatives of mise en valeur and the French colonial doctrine. The arrival en masse of women settlers and the consequent feminisation of settler society conflicted with the initial conceptualisation of Indochina as a male utopia. Whilst official France desired the further domestication of Indochina, and hoped to achieve this partly through the tacit moral arbitration of women, certain sections of the settler community resented this evolution, and desired instead a return to what was perceived as a more authentic and unadulterated society and relationship with Indochina.     

The OAS Democratic Solidarity Paradigm: Questions of Collective and National Leadership

This article examines the prospects for an interamerican "paradigm of democratic solidarity." Although the region has seen genuine progress in the promotion and defense of democracy, a significant deficit in collective and national leadership hinders the consolidation of hemispheric prodemocracy activism. As illustrated by a number of recent cases, including the controversy over Peru's May 2000 election, these impediments are not only situational but structural. This article concludes with a discussion of ways to move beyond these problems and to buttress the democratic solidarity doctrine.