Drawing on themes of relationship, addiction, loss and love, this collection explores, through a series of nonfiction memoir essays, the author's movement toward a mature masculinity. He offers this series of works with hopes that others, too may find some measure of insight, acceptance, and not least of all, humor in the puzzles, contradictions, and small glimpses of light afforded by the gift of being human.

The poetry collection in four sections features pieces concerned with memory, particularly of the author’s childhood in Ireland. Difficult family relationships as well as early romantic failures are prominent obsessions. Landscapes and careful portraits of characters recur. Travel to Eastern Europe and within the author’s adopted United States give the opportunity to meditate on larger issues and spans of time. Domestic pleasures and the struggle to be a good parent and husband provide the ultimate trajectory of the work. The nonfiction memoir consists of eight essays which tackle among other topics a failed first marriage, a return visit to the author’s high school in Dublin, an analysis of how the dead come back to haunt us in the everyday, and a mirroring of colonial exploration in contemporary lives. The common thread is the many ways “home” can be understood and run away from.

Illness. A secret. Feeling alone? Have you ever kept a secret? A life-changing secret that keeps you secluded, isolated, and contained in a bubble, lonely and empty? The daily struggle of coping with your own secret, yet feeling like everyone you come in contact with already knows, takes its toll in the lives of those who carry the burden of a chronic disease. While dealing with judgmental thoughts, and the scrutinizing gaze from others, do we think that the stigma of a medical diagnosis affects our ability to love someone? More specifically, how about being capable of allowing someone to love you knowing that you are HIV positive? In We Were Here, the choreographic research speaks directly to the topic of secrecy and isolation through song, dance, poetry, and videography of people living with life-threatening diseases in today’s society. This piece will take the audience on a short journey through the lives of seven individuals who seek to find peace and understanding in revealing their conditions to their family, friends and loved ones. In seven different journeys, through the highs and lows of coping with a chronic disease, the silver lining of WE WERE HERE, provides a friendly reminder that everyone needs somebody, sometimes.

Let's Rap: An Artist Statement It is not enough for me to cite music solely as a source of inspiration. Hip-Hop, R&B, and, particularly, rap music has as much to do with my upbringing as does the public school system. According to Wikipedia, the components of rap include “content”, “flow” and “delivery”, which are vaguely reminiscent of the visual art terms “concept,” “sequence” and “presentation.” Growing up, music provided a forum to explore and analyze, as award-winning journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates might put it, the necessities for surviving problems of everyday life within and outside the Black American experience. Today, my interest lies in the formality of these art forms and how best to translate them visually. An aesthetic, being ostensibly subjective, offers sight as a material to be used as one uses color, texture or form. As sight is to the visual arts, sound is to music – materials to manipulate and respond to. Furthermore, I am intrigued by the practical similarities of both music and visual art, in their ability to speak to and for their audiences. Sounds formulated into songs often become portals into yesteryear or soundscapes for an extensive but evanescent summer. What can sight formulate into? How can sight be used as a medium to spark thoughtful conversation? Can Picasso's Guernica be repeated at will, or must the visual artist wait for social uproar to amass a lasting impact? Deeply rooted in creative expression, poetry is a means to get beyond conventional reasoning just as concept provides the sublimity necessary to suspend belief. Visual artists have been doing this for years: Marcel Duchamp's urinal or Vik Muniz's depiction of (waste worker) Jardim Gramacho as radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat in Jasques-Louis David's The Death of Marat. As with David Hammons' Higher Goals my approach to object making is comparable to that of a digital recording device, perceptibly replaying discourses between Black America and its audience. Visually weaving the aura of an object with its basic function is synonymous to lyrical play and, too, possesses similar impact. Conceptual and poetic play of the two genres offers the work of the artist to transcend beyond object or record. Therefore, my efforts at object making are to reveal and discover various testimonies within and surrounding Black America.

Mosaic is the story of Alicia O'Day, a woman who looks back at her life from the vantage point of middle age and attempts to arrange the shards of her past into something meaningful. As she relates her story, illustrating her errors, we realize she has changed and grown enough to see herself with added wisdom and humor. The chaos of her younger days is seen as a learning process. The broken vessel has been mended, and the scars from the seams add interest to the original piece. As Alicia reviews her life, she glues the broken fragments back into place and proclams them part of a whole, a work of art. She begins to feel less like a fragmented woman, and more like a multi-faceted human being who has lived through a series of trials. She comes to realize that her friend Jeffrey is not really the glue that has held her together. Instead, she finds that all along the way, it was her own strength of character that caused her to persevere. When completed, Mosaic will be a novel representing the complete picture of a woman's life as she understands it from the vantage point of middle age, a time to re-evaluate the past and start over with a wiser plan.

These collected stories represent a culling from a portion of work that shares a similar theme of loss--its manifestation, its channeling, by various fictional characters, into the palpable and sensate, into the physical world of the body. They are people, mostly women, who have lost their hold on the world to which they are accustomed, who become entangled in situations where their bearings are skewed, their judgment faulty, their decisions based solely on a physical, most often sexual, attraction that simultaneously depletes a sense of worth, while providing its semblance. The loss stems, at times, as in "Manifold," from beyond the control of the character, from the world of adults who cannot, for their own reasons, handle their own despair. It comes from the unavoidable presence of mental illness, and the inability of the character to perceive, amidst the confusion of change, a stable view. Often, as in "She Fell to Her Knees," there is no reference point upon which to base a way to live. Memory is only a trigger for more loss. The characters' own choices bring about loss in other ways--an abandoned infant, promiscuity, an encounter with a stranger--all choices made in an effort to ease, and which result in compounding precarious situations. Brief solace in sex results in inevitable emptiness. Relationships are sought for the safety of their impermanence. The respite from loneliness is always temporary, and almost always sought with the hope that from the physical will emerge the gift of emotional commitment. The stories seek to reveal, not the histories of the characters, but the maps of their emotional pasts. They attempt to portray the routes from which the women have stumbled, and in this way illuminate the emotional present of each story.

Estudar cientificamente o amor é uma árdua tarefa em razão de dificuldades metodológicas e impropriedades conceituais intrinsecamente relacionadas a este tipo de investigação. Pelo fato de ser um conceito tão familiar, muitos supõem que os pesquisadores da área estão de acordo sobre o que constitui o amor e como se pode mensurá-lo. Mas, isto não é o que de fato ocorre. Afinal, o que é o amor? O amor, enquanto um fenômeno psicológico tem condições de ser cientificamente estudado pela psicologia? O presente estudo se propôs a estudar o amor de uma forma menos subjetiva e teve como objetivos: (1) identificar as características mais comumente atribuídas e/ou associadas à palavra amor por sujeitos brasileiros de diferentes idades e condições sociais e (2) verificar se há diferenças estatisticamente significantes em função das variáveis: gênero, faixa etária e grau de escolaridade. Participaram desse estudo 600 sujeitos (390 mulheres 65%; 209 homens 34,83%), com média de idade de 23,82 anos, distribuídos em sete grupos de acordo com a cidade de origem da coleta e o grau de escolaridade dos participantes. Na etapa de coleta, realizada de forma coletiva, aos participantes foi solicitado que fizessem livres associações acerca do estímulo AMOR, em 90 segundos. De posse do material coletado, todas as respostas dos participantes foram digitadas, separadas e tabuladas. Posteriormente, foram criadas 14 categorias, que foram avaliadas independentemente por cinco juízes escolhidos pelo proponente desse estudo. Para este estudo, a confiabilidade das respostas entre os juízes foi de 92,5 %, indicando uma alta concordância entre os conteúdos das categorias. Os dados foram estatisticamente analisados pelo Teste Kruskal-Wallis e pelo Coeficiente de Correlação de Spearman. A análise dos resultados permitiu verificar que: (1) com o passar do tempo, as pessoas vão associando mais o amor a representações positivas e menos a aspectos românticos, familiares e às amizades; (2) as mulheres associam mais do que homens o amor, relacionado à amizade, à família, aos animais e como uma fonte de emoções, atitudes e comportamentos positivos; (3) quanto maior o grau de escolaridade dos participantes, mais eles vão associando o amor a aspectos positivos. Os resultados foram analisados e discutidos de acordo com a teoria de conceitos denominada visão teórica / Study love scientifically is a hard task because of methodological difficulties and conceptual improperties intrinsically related to this type of investigation. Because it can be considered such a familiar concept, many researchers agree about what is love and how it can be measured. But, this is not what actually occurs. After all, what is love? Is it, as a psychological phenomenon, capable of being scientifically studied by psychology? The present study aims to study love empirically and had as objectives: (1) to identify the characteristics most commonly attributed and / or associated to the word love by Brazilian people of different ages and social conditions, and (2) to check if there are differences statistically significant according to the variables: gender, age group and school level. A total of 600 people (390 women - 65%, 209 men - 34.83%) participated in this study, with the mean age of 23.82 years, distributed in seven groups according to the city of origin of the collection and the school level of the participants. At the collection stage, held collectively, participants were asked to make free associations about \'LOVE\' in 90 seconds. With the collected material, all participants\' answers were typed, separated and tabulated. Subsequently, 14 categories were created, later independently evaluated by five judges chosen by the proponent of this study. For this study, the reliability of the answers among the judges was 92.5%, indicating a high agreement between the contents of the categories. The data were statistically analyzed by the Kruskal-Wallis test and the Spearman Correlation Coefficient. The results were discussed according to the theory of concepts called theoretical vision. The analysis of the results shows that: (1) as time goes by, people associate love more with positive representations and less with romantic ones, family and friendship aspects; (2) women associate, more than men, love related with friendship, family, animals, as a source of positive emotions, attitudes and behaviors; (3) the higher level of education of the participants, make them associate love with positive aspects

This Master's Thesis examines what happens when African and Caribbean characters in France or in their own country meet the Other in Francophone literature. How do interracial relationships construct/deconstruct the concept of an intertwined identity? This comparative project explores three 20th century Francophone women writers from Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the West Indies in order to show how their novels construct or deconstruct the identities of migrated female characters through their interracial erotic and amorous relationships. Starting with Plato's Banquet which describes the origin of love as a splitting of identity and the quest of love as a quest to make that identity whole again, I problematize that notion through the intercultural encounters between the female main character and the white male in a postcolonial context. The study focuses on how the Other influences the female character and intervenes in the construction of the self, and looks at otherness as both an exterior force (the lover, the physical other) and an interior force (recognizing part of the self as other). It also explores how love and desire act as filters and motivators that influence the perception of the other and the self. My hypothesis is the following: the "ethnic woman" turns her foreigner status from a fragile one into one of strength and uses the Other for her integration into the Western society. Through otherness, she grasps a better understanding of the Other but also of herself. That encounter in all three novels pushes the ethnic female to return to her roots. Identities are not just hybrid but rather in a constant process of construction, a shift in self-construction in the globalized contemporary world. The female characters reflect the tendency to rethink not only what this new identity is but also the process of identity construction itself. By studying how women authors write on race and interracial relationships, this thesis offers a new understanding of the relation between love and identity and the female in Postcolonial Studies. Through her romantic relationships with the white male, the female has ultimately the power to decide for herself, which includes deciding to leave the relationship and leave for the sake of her newly found identity.

Most of the research related to psychotherapy is about modality, treatments and therapeutic outcomes. There is little research on the psychotherapists themselves; their subjective experiences, their preparation or personal development. Personal growth, which leads to a developmental level permitting self-reflection and relational ability, is considered by the psychotherapy profession to be an important aspect of the psychotherapist's education. This hermeneutic study focuses on students' experience of personal growth during a formal psychotherapy educational programme. The core of the thesis is the presentation of the students' lived experience during training. Recent graduates of psychotherapy programmes were interviewed and their accounts include the process of personal growth, in what ways the developmental journey was felt to be supportive and containing, ways graduates feel changed, the impact on their lives during and after the training, and the meanings they ascribe to the experience. The particular growth experiences of Maori graduates are to some degree explored, as are the experiences of psychotherapy teachers who facilitate personal development. Themes emerged from data analysis; personal growth did happen, was felt to be positive, and took place as a journey. The growth process was turbulent, painful, yet resulted in positive outcomes for the graduates. Love and relationship were experienced as the most significant catalyst in promoting growth towards key outcomes. It was felt that bicultural learning activities enhanced and supported growth for Maori and non-Maori. The nature and complexity of love is discussed; including the place of love in personal change, psychotherapy and psychotherapy training. The discomfort commonly experienced in the profession around describing the therapeutic relationship as one involving love is highlighted. Possible reasons are given for this, for not using the word love in psychotherapy. Implications for psychotherapy education arising from the research are presented; with questions about, and recommendations for, facilitating personal growth, and the utilisation of love in a more open and conscious manner as a part of psychotherapy training. Currently most preparation of psychotherapists occurs in mainstream academic institutions, with a movement in the profession towards more formal qualifications. It is a challenge for educators and students alike to continue to include in traditional academic structures and processes what is felt to be the essence of psychotherapy; love and relationship, the practice of which requires high levels of personal development.

<p>The purpose of the study was to study various factors which might influence the level</p><p>of satisfaction in close relationships. The theories which have been covered are: The</p><p>triangular theory of love, The Investment model, Bowlby´s and Ainsworth attachment</p><p>theories, The Equity theory, and the reward theory of attraction. The variables which</p><p>were studied were: intimacy, rewards, commitment and equity. The level of perceived</p><p>superiority was also studied, as well as satisfaction level in comparison to duration in</p><p>the current relationship. A multiple regression was employed to find out which one of</p><p>the variables above would associate strongest with satisfaction. A questionnaire was</p><p>used to collect the data and a reliability test was therefore carried out. 72</p><p>participants took part in the study, 44 females and 28 males. The result showed that</p><p>commitment had the strongest association with satisfaction, followed by intimacy.</p><p>The result also showed that there was a negative significant correlation between</p><p>superiority and level of satisfaction. More over the result did not show any</p><p>correlation between duration in the current relationship and satisfaction. Two</p><p>regressions were also performed to see which one of the variables (intimacy, reward,</p><p>commitment and equity) would associate strongest with satisfaction in two conditions.</p><p>The results showed that commitment had the strongest association for the condition</p><p>with the participants who had been in their relationship 1-6 years. Commitment also</p><p>had the strongest association in the other condition followed by intimacy. In this</p><p>condition the participants had been in their relationship for seven years or more. The</p><p>main discussion points have been the current results in comparison to other’s</p><p>research in the area as well as suggestions for future research.</p>