New York Council for the Humanities

Abstract Generic skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, and communication are essential for students' success in higher education and their careers. This article presents findings from an international study of students' (n ≈ 120,000) generic skills from six countries using a performance‐based assessment. Results indicate that higher education students, on average, gain generic skills between entry and exit. However, learning gain is less marked than could be expected and varies significantly among country samples. Various background variables such as gender, ethnicity, parental level of education, and primary language are also explored. The authors conclude that it is feasible to reliably and validly measure generic skills in a cross‐cultural context and that assessment of these skills is an essential component of best practices in higher education.

Reinterpreted from one end of the century to the other, the psychoanalytic body situates theoretical debate, dispute, and change. Originally and starkly biological and sexual, it has all along carried other, often discordant meanings. Now, in the postclassical era, we are equipped to redraft the classical body. Three perspectives intercut in this interdisciplinary essay—the bodymind in culture, embodiment in psychoanalytic space, and bodies in patriarchy. This splicing of psychic reality, interpersonal relatedness, and systems of power produces bodies of many kinds. The many-drafted body funds the fecund diversity of the individuality that psychoanalysis explores and cultivates, as well as imagined and imaginable possibilities of freedom necessary to protest domination.

This article analyzes and critiques the construct of gender as a psychoanalytic and cultural category. Without succumbing to a nonpsychoanalytic notion of androgyny, the argument developed here challenges the assumption that an internally consistent gender identity is possible or even desirable. Beginning with the idea that, from an analytic perspective, the construct of “identity”; is problematic and implausible, because it denotes and privileges a unified psychic world, the author develops a deconstructionist critique of our dominant gender‐identity paradigm. It is argued that gender coherence, consistency, conformity, and identity are culturally mandated normative ideals that psychoanalysis has absorbed uncritically. These ideals, moreover, are said to create a universal pathogenic situation, insofar as the attempt to conform to their dictates requires the activation of a false‐self system. An alternative, “decentered”; gender paradigm is then proposed, which conceives of gender as a “necessary fiction...

This paper reinterprets the historical problem of penis envy, that is, the girl's wish to be masculine, in terms of a developmental need to identify with father. Many of the problems posed by earlier analyses of femininity can be clarified by recognizing that before the girl “turns”; to the oedipal father as love object, she looks to the rapprochement father for identification. Identification is not merely an internal structure, it is a relationship in which the subject recognizes herself or himself in the other. In rapprochement, love of the father, who symbolically represents the outside world, takes the place of the practicing toddler's “love affair with the world.”; This identificatory love of the father, initially noticed in boys by Freud and later authors, is often frustrated by the father's absence or inability to recognize the daughter. This frustrated longing takes the penis as its symbol of likeness. The pre‐oedipal over‐inclusive phase of identification with the other sex parent is not superced...

Journal Article Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. By Roland Marchand. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. xxii + 448 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliographical essay, and index. $35.00.) Get access William R. Leach William R. Leach New York Institute for the Humanities New York University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 73, Issue 1, June 1986, Pages 233–234, https://doi.org/10.2307/1903700 Published: 01 June 1986