Questioning the couch: Historical and clinical perspectives.

Since the beginning of the last century, when Freud introduced the couch in the psychoanalytic room, a number of “objects” have been removed or renovated, yet the couch has almost always remained in place, at least officially. This article has two distinct aims. The first is to offer a reconstruction of the psychoanalytic history of this element of the setting. The second is to rethink the couch, saving it from being reduced to a mere icon. Recent contributions coming from affective neurosciences, infant research, and psychotherapy research seem to question the utility of this element and the nature of the very mechanisms of its therapeutic action. The authors wonder whether the use of the couch is primarily protective for the therapist rather than necessarily helpful for all patients. Taking into account these observations implies bringing the couch out from a silent dimension and reflecting on its role in the conception of therapeutic action and mental functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mapping Twitter hate speech towards social and sexual minorities: a lexicon-based approach to semantic content analysis

ABSTRACT

Though there are currently no statistics offering a global overview of online hate speech, both social networking platforms and organisations that combat hate speech have recognised that prevention strategies are needed to address this negative online phenomenon. While most cases of online hate speech target individuals on the basis of ethnicity and nationality, incitements to hatred on the basis of religion, class, gender and sexual orientation are increasing. This paper reports the findings of the ‘Italian Hate Map’ project, which used a lexicon-based method of semantic content analysis to extract 2,659,879 Tweets (from 879,428 Twitter profiles) over a period of 7 months; 412,716 of these Tweets contained negative terms directed at one of the six target groups. In the geolocalized Tweets, women were the most insulted group, having received 71,006 hateful Tweets (60.4% of the negative geolocalized tweets), followed by immigrants (12,281 tweets, 10.4%), gay and lesbian persons (12,140 tweets, 10.3%), Muslims (7,465 tweets, 6.4%), Jews (7,465 tweets, 6.4%) and disabled persons (7,230 tweets, 6.1%). The findings provide a real-time snapshot of community behaviours and attitudes against social, ethnic, sexual and gender minority groups that can be used to inform intolerance prevention campaigns on both local and national levels.