Canadian Bioethics Society

ABSTRACTMary Koszmary (2007) is one short film from a trilogy by Israeli artist Yael Bartana, which centers on the exhortations of a Polish radical politician calling for the comeback of three million Jews to Poland. This Polish trilogy focuses a lens, both artistic and psychoanalytic, on the place of the unbearable in the human psyche, reality which must be neither attended to nor acknowledged. The example of the unbearable and inassimilable which Bartana chooses is Poland's complicity and cooperation with the murder of her Jews. The Jewish genocide roughly seventy years ago involves inassimilable shame and guilt, defended against by national repression, denial and fetishistic dissociation. Bartana imagines a symptom in today's generation which both refutes and repeats the history enacted by their grandparents. Bartana assumes a deep‐set collective trauma manifesting bizarrely two generations later and conjures an unflinching picture of why failure to come to terms with and to mourn traumatic losses is relentlessly a problem in human history. The purpose of this paper is to explore the symptoms of the intergenerationally transmitted collective trauma as these symptoms translate from those of the individual traumatic condition in order to deepen our understanding of the effects of both individual and collective trauma when unresolved over time and particularly over generations. The first step toward healing is to acknowledge. Bartana's film sets up the opportunity for acknowledgment shining a clear cool light on so many modes of obfuscation. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Many prominent bioethicists argue that positive consequences follow from avoiding disability in offspring by preconceptual, preimplantation or prenatal means. This paper critiques two variants of these positions: ‘Open future’ arguments that avoiding disability is in the interest of the persons who will be affected by it if born and ‘non‐person‐affecting’ claims that failures to avoid disability in offspring are wrong for reasons independent of their effect on affected offspring. Difficulties with both person‐affecting and non‐person‐affecting accounts are discussed in support of the charge that these arguments do not show that positive consequences follow from disability avoidance.

Aims: To compare the neuropsychological functioning and behaviour of children with non-syndromic end-stage renal disease (ESRD) and sibling controls. Methods: The study was carried out at two tertiary care paediatric teaching hospitals, in Halifax and Vancouver, Canada. Children with ESRD were on a renal transplant waiting list and either pending dialysis or on dialysis therapy. Twenty two patient-sibling pairs were evaluated. Neuropsychological assessments consisting of measures of intelligence, academic achievement, memory, and motor abilities were carried out. Maternal ratings of behaviour and self-report rating of self-esteem were collected. Results: The Verbal, Performance, and Full Scale IQs of patients with ESRD were significantly lower than the IQs of the sibling controls. The mean differences were 8.6, 11.7, and 10.9 points, respectively. ESRD patients also had significantly more difficulty on measures of fine motor coordination and ability to copy geometric designs than sibling controls. There were no differences between groups on measures of academic achievement, memory, behaviour, or self-esteem. Conclusions: Although children with ESRD exhibited mild deficits on measures of intelligence and some measures of motor abilities, their neuropsychological outcome was more favourable than earlier reports indicated.