Thinking about denial

This essay notes the frequent and varied uses of ‘denial’ in modern political discourse, suggests the specific psychoanalytic meanings the term has acquired and asks how useful such Freudian concept may be for historians. It notes the long and vexed debates that have occurred over the uses of psychoanalysis in historiography, before comparing and contrasting ‘denial’ with other terms that have particular psychoanalytic inflections, such as ‘disavowal’, ‘splitting’ and ‘negation’. The authors dwell, especially, on ‘disavowal’ and argue it may, sometimes provide a particularly useful basis for exploring how and why states of knowing and not knowing co-exist, in individuals and groups. This account also provide particular historical examples: most briefly, a fragment from a report about the war criminals, produced by an American psychiatrist at the Nuremberg Trial; at greater length, the political arguments and historical writings of an eighteenth-century slave owner; and finally, a case in a borough of London in the late-twentieth-century London, where the neglect, abuse and murder of a child was shockingly ‘missed’ by a succession of social agencies and individuals, who had evidence of the violence available to them. The essay refers more briefly to various more recent discussions, of denial and associated, relevant terms in the work of psychoanalysts, psychologists, and social theorists

Observation of a nanophase segregation in LiCl aqueous solutions from Transient Grating Experiments

Transient Grating experiments performed on supercooled LiCl, RH2O solutions with R>6 reveal the existence of a strong, short time, extra signal which superposes to the normal signal observed for the R=6 solution and other glass forming systems. This extra signal shows up below 190 K, its shape and the associated timescale depend only on temperature, while its intensity increases with R. We show that the origin of this signal is a phase separation between clusters with a low solute concentration and the remaining, more concentrated, solution. Our analysis demonstrates that these clusters have a nanometer size and a composition which are rather temperature independent, while increasing R simply increases the number of these clusters.Comment: 19 pages+ 8 figures+ 2 table

Interference of Higgs boson resonances in mu^+ mu^- -> neutralino_i neutralino_j with longitudinal beam polarization

We study the interference of resonant Higgs boson exchange in neutralino production in \mu^+ \mu^- annihilation with longitudinally polarized beams. We use the energy distribution of the decay lepton in the process \neutralino_j \to \ell^\pm \slepton^\mp to determine the polarization of the neutralinos. In the CP conserving Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model a non-vanishing asymmetry in the lepton energy spectrum is caused by the interference of Higgs boson exchange channels with different CP eigenvalues. The contribution of this interference is large if the heavy neutral bosons H and A are nearly degenerate. We show that the asymmetry can be used to determine the couplings of the neutral Higgs bosons to the neutralinos. In particular, the asymmetry allows to determine the relative phase of the couplings. We find large asymmetries and cross sections for a set of reference scenarios with nearly degenerate neutral Higgs bosons.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures, minor typos corrected, to appear in Eur. Phys. J.

Determination of the Gaugino Mass Parameter M_1 in Different Linear Collider Modes

We study the different linear collider modes with regard to the determination of the gaugino mass parameter M_1. In a specific mSUGRA inspired scenario we compare four processes with polarized beams: (a) e+ e- --> neutralino_1 neutralino_2 --> neutralino_1 neutralino_1 e+ e-, (b) e- gamma --> neutralino_1 selectron_{L/R} --> neutralino_1 neutralino_1 e-, (c) gamma gamma --> chargino_1^+ chargino_1^- --> neutralino_1 neutralino_1 e+ e- neutrino_e anti-neutrino_e, (d) e- e- --> selectron_{L/R} selectron_{L/R} --> neutralino_1 neutralino_1 e- e-.Comment: 5 pages, 8 figures, LaTex, Talk given at the 5th International Linear Collider Workshop (LCWS 2000), Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois, Oct. 24-28, 200

Regular vs. classical M\"obius transformations of the quaternionic unit ball

The regular fractional transformations of the extended quaternionic space have been recently introduced as variants of the classical linear fractional transformations. These variants have the advantage of being included in the class of slice regular functions, introduced by Gentili and Struppa in 2006, so that they can be studied with the useful tools available in this theory. We first consider their general properties, then focus on the regular M\"obius transformations of the quaternionic unit ball B, comparing the latter with their classical analogs. In particular we study the relation between the regular M\"obius transformations and the Poincar\'e metric of B, which is preserved by the classical M\"obius transformations. Furthermore, we announce a result that is a quaternionic analog of the Schwarz-Pick lemma.Comment: 14 page

Selectron Pair Production at e-e- and e+e- Colliders with Polarized Beams

We investigate selectron pair production and decay in e-e- scattering and e+e- annihilation with polarized beams taking into account neutralino mixing as well as ISR and beamstrahlung corrections. One of the main advantages of having both modes at disposal is their complementarity concerning the threshold behaviour of selectron pair production. In e-e- the cross sections at threshold for seleectron_R selectron_R and selectron_L selectron_L rise proportional to the momentum of the selectron and in e+ e- that for selectron_R selectron_L. Measurements at threshold with polarized beams can be used to determine the selectron masses precisely. Moreover we discuss how polarized electron and positron beams can be used to establish directly the weak quantum numbers of the selectrons. We also use selectron pair production to determine the gaugino mass parameter M_1. This is of particular interest for scenarios with non-universal gaugino masses at a high scale resulting in |M_1| << |M_2| at the electroweak scale. Moreover, we consider also the case of a non-vanishing selectron mixing and demonstrate that it leads to a significant change in the phenomenology of selectrons.Comment: LaTex, 23 pages, 14 figures, v2, typos corrected, version to appear in Eur.Phys.J.

NK Cells Respond to Haptens by the Activation of Calcium Permeable Plasma Membrane Channels.

Natural Killer (NK) cells mediate innate immunity to infected and transformed cells. Yet, NK cells can also mount hapten-specific recall responses thereby contributing to contact hypersensitivity (CHS). However, since NK cells lack antigen receptors that are used by the adaptive immune system to recognize haptens, it is not clear if NK cells respond directly to haptens and, if so, what mediates these responses. Here we show that among four haptens the two that are known to induce NK cell-dependent CHS trigger the rapid influx of extracellular Ca2+ into NK cells and lymphocyte cell lines. Thus lymphocytes can respond to haptens independent of antigen presentation and antigen receptors. We identify the Ca2+-permeable cation channel TRPC3 as a component of the lymphocyte response to one of these haptens. These data suggest that the response to the second hapten is based on a distinct mechanism, consistent with the capacity of NK cells to discriminate haptens. These findings raise the possibility that antigen-receptor independent activation of immune cells contributes to CHS

Disentangling Genetic and Prenatal Maternal Effects on Offspring Size and Survival

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from University of Chicago Press via the DOI in this record.Organizational processes during prenatal development can have long-term effects on an individual's phenotype. Because these early developmental stages are sensitive to environmental influences, mothers are in a unique position to alter their offspring's phenotype by differentially allocating resources to their developing young. However, such prenatal maternal effects are difficult to disentangle from other forms of parental care, additive genetic effects, and/or other forms of maternal inheritance, hampering our understanding of their evolutionary consequences. Here we used divergent selection lines for high and low prenatal maternal investment and their reciprocal line crosses in a precocial bird-the Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica)-to quantify the relative importance of genes and prenatal maternal effects in shaping offspring phenotype. Maternal but not paternal origin strongly affected offspring body size and survival throughout development. Although the effects of maternal egg investment faded over time, they were large at key life stages. Additionally, there was evidence for other forms of maternal inheritance affecting offspring phenotype at later stages of development. Our study is among the first to successfully disentangle prenatal maternal effects from all other sources of confounding variation and highlights the important role of prenatal maternal provisioning in shaping offspring traits closely linked to fitness.The study was financially supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (PP00P3_128386 and PP00P3_157455 to B.T.)