One-dimensional spatial patterning along mitotic chromosomes: A mechanical basis for macroscopic morphogenesis.

Spatial patterns are ubiquitous in both physical and biological systems. We have recently discovered that mitotic chromosomes sequentially acquire two interesting morphological patterns along their structural axes [L. Chu et al., Mol. Cell, 10.1016/j.molcel.2020.07.002 (2020)]. First, axes of closely conjoined sister chromosomes acquire regular undulations comprising nearly planar arrays of sequential half-helices of similar size and alternating handedness, accompanied by periodic kinks. This pattern, which persists through all later stages, provides a case of the geometric form known as a "perversion." Next, as sister chromosomes become distinct parallel units, their individual axes become linked by bridges, which are themselves miniature axes. These bridges are dramatically evenly spaced. Together, these effects comprise a unique instance of spatial patterning in a subcellular biological system. We present evidence that axis undulations and bridge arrays arise by a single continuous mechanically promoted progression, driven by stress within the chromosome axes. We further suggest that, after sister individualization, this same stress also promotes chromosome compaction by rendering the axes susceptible to the requisite molecular remodeling. Thus, by this scenario, the continuous presence of mechanical stress within the chromosome axes could potentially underlie the entire morphogenetic chromosomal program. Direct analogies with meiotic chromosomes suggest that the same effects could underlie interactions between homologous chromosomes as required for gametogenesis. Possible mechanical bases for generation of axis stress and resultant deformations are discussed. Together, these findings provide a perspective on the macroscopic changes of organized chromosomes.

Pregnant adolescents' lived experiences and coping strategies in peri-urban district in Southern Ghana.

BACKGROUND: Adolescence, a transition period from childhood to adulthood forms the foundation of health in later life. The adolescence period which should have been characterised by good health is often marred with life-threatening and irreparable consequences of public health concern. Teen pregnancy is problematic because it could jeopardise adolescents' safe transition to adulthood which does not only affect adolescents, but also their families, babies and society. There is ample evidence about the determinants and effects of teen pregnancy, but it is fragmented and incomplete, especially in Sub-Sahara Africa. This study presents pregnant adolescents' voices to explain significant gaps in understanding their lived experiences and coping strategies. METHODS: This narrative inquiry, involved in-depth interviews with 16 pregnant adolescents, who were recruited from a peri-urban district in Southern Ghana using purposive and snowball techniques in health facilities and communities respectively. The audio recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed manually using content analysis. RESULTS: Many pregnant adolescents are silent victims of a hash socio-economic environment, in which they experience significant financial deprivation, parental neglect and sexual abuse. Also, negative experiences of some adolescent girls such as scolding, flogging by parents, stigmatisation and rejection by peers and neighbors result in grieve, stress and contemplation of abortion and or suicide. However, adolescents did not consider abortion as the best option with regard to their pregnancy. Rather, family members provided adolescents with critical support as they devise strategies such as avoiding people, depending on God and praying to cope with their pregnancy. CONCLUSION: Adolescent pregnancy occurred through consensual sex, transactional sex and sexual abuse. While parents provide support, pregnant adolescents self-isolate, depend on God and pray to cope with pregnancy and drop out of school. We recommend that the Ministries of Education and Health, and law enforcement agencies should engage community leaders and members, religious groups, non-governmental organisations and other key stakeholders to develop interventions aimed at supporting girls to complete at least Senior High School. While doing this, it is also important to provide support to victims of sexual abuse and punish perpetrators accordingly.

[Aggressiveness, assertiveness, and sexual deviance: An empirical-quantitative examination of Stoller's perversion theory]. / Aggressivität, Assertivität und sexuelle Devianz: Eine empirisch-quantitative Prüfung der Stoller'schen Perversionstheorie.

Aggressiveness, assertiveness, and sexual deviance: An empirical-quantitative examination of Stoller's perversion theory Objectives: The main aim of the present study was to empirically examinate the psychodynamic-founded perversion theory of Robert D. Stoller (1979), particularly his assumption of a transformation of aggressive impulses into sexual deviant fantasies due to traumatic experiences. Methods: In the present study different aspects of the theory were examined by using a sample (N = 954) of individuals convicted of sexually motivated offenses who had been clinically and forensically assessed between 2002 and 2018 at the Federal Evaluation Centre for Violent and Sexual Offenders (FECVSO) in the Austrian Prison System. As a part of the psychological testing procedure, German-speaking questionnaires for the assessment of aggressiveness and assertiveness were applied. Results: The results indicated that participants with a diagnosis of paraphilia showed significantly less spontaneously expressed aggression and less social competence compared to individuals without such a diagnosis. Conclusions: The findings of the present study are in line with the core assumptions of Stoller's perversion theory by demonstrating an inverse relationship between the diagnosis of paraphilia and self-reported aggression.

Georges Canguilhem on sex determination and the normativity of life.

Our goal in this paper is to reassess the relationship between norms and life by drawing on the philosophy of Georges Canguilhem, particularly some of his unpublished lectures about teratology and sexual determination. First, we discuss the difficulties Canguilhem identified in the introduction of life and sexuality as objects of philosophical reflection. Second, we reassess Canguilhem's understanding of normativity as rooted in life and the axiological activity of the living. Third, we analyze how Canguilhem drew from past and contemporary teratology to conceive of the notions of anomaly and abnormality. Finally, we reconstruct Canguilhem's analysis of a case of hermaphroditism, highlighting how he presented it as evidence that sexual determination is the result of a normative choice. One of the key contributions of the paper to scholarly literature on Canguilhem is a better understanding of his notion of choice, which was considered not the conscious and intentional act of a subject but rather an axiological activity of the living. We conclude by positioning Canguilhem's concept of normativity and his belief that norms are produced by the living in relation to the naturalist/normativist divide in medicine.

From Libidines nefandæ to sexual perversions.

A conceptual evolution is traceable from early modern classifications of libido nefanda (execrable lust) to early nineteenth-century allusions to 'perversion of the sexual instinct', via pluralizing notions of coitus nefandus/sodomiticus in Martin Schurig's work, and of sodomia impropria in seventeenth- through late eighteenth-century legal medicine. Johann Valentin Müller's early breakdown of various unnatural penchants seemingly inspired similar lists in works by Johann Christoph Fahner and Johann Josef Bernt, and ultimately Heinrich Kaan. This allows an ante-dating of the 'specification of the perverted' (Foucault) often located in the late nineteenth century, and appreciation of pygmalionism and necrophilia as instances of 'perverted sexual instinct'. In this light, Kaan's early psychopathia sexualis was less innovative and more ambivalent than previously thought.

Emergent perversions in the buckling of heterogeneous elastic strips.

A perversion in an otherwise uniform helical structure, such as a climbing plant tendril, refers to a kink that connects two helices with opposite chiralities. Such singularity structures are widely seen in natural and artificial mechanical systems, and they provide the fundamental mechanism of helical symmetry breaking. However, it is still not clear how perversions arise in various helical structures and which universal principles govern them. As such, a heterogeneous elastic bistrip system provides an excellent model to address these questions. Here, we investigate intrinsic perversion properties which are independent of strip shapes. This study reveals the rich physics of perversions in the 3D elastic system, including the condensation of strain energy over perversions during their formation, the repulsive nature of the perversion-perversion interaction, and the coalescence of perversions that finally leads to a linear defect structure. This study may have implications for understanding relevant biological motifs and for use of perversions as energy storers in the design of micromuscles and soft robotics.

The disorder-specific psychological impairment in complex PTSD: A flawed working model for restoration of trust.

This article methodically gathers concepts and findings from related disciplines to propose that there is a fundamental, disorder-specific psychological impairment, which defines Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as etiologically different from simple PTSD. This impairment is a flawed working model for restoration of trust when one partner fears betrayal. This working model is legacy of childhood relationships with manipulative caretakers who kept the child powerless to test the trustworthiness of their reasons to break promises and to fail the child's expectations. Manipulative caretakers invert the respective roles and responsibilities for restoration of trust, which constitutes perversion of intimacy. This article describes how that fundamental flaw becomes the cause of patients' disorder, by episodically rendering them powerless to ascertain a perception of grave betrayal as true or false in later relationships. Repeated failure with experiments for certainty about others' love explains the characteristic personality traits and beliefs of persons with Complex PTSD, i.e., cynicism about the world's benevolence, self-derogation and sense of a foreshortened future. This article closes with reference to a study that investigated the efficacy of a crisis intervention designed to remediate this fundamental impairment.

Rape of the lock: note on nineteenth-century hair fetishists.

The ostensibly bizarre crime of braid-cutting invited occasional alienist inferences from the late 1850s onwards, until it entered mid-1880s police profiles and forensic-psychiatric taxonomies as a corollary of perversion, specifically sadism and fetishism. Cases were rare, but were reported as late as the mid-1930s and enduringly cited as encompassing a staple variety of fetishism. This note briefly reconstructs entries in German, French and English forensic psychiatry, sexual psychopathology and psychoanalysis.

Helical Structures Mimicking Chiral Seedpod Opening and Tendril Coiling.

Helical structures are ubiquitous in natural and engineered systems across multiple length scales. Examples include DNA molecules, plants' tendrils, sea snails' shells, and spiral nanoribbons. Although this symmetry-breaking shape has shown excellent performance in elastic springs or propulsion generation in a low-Reynolds-number environment, a general principle to produce a helical structure with programmable geometry regardless of length scales is still in demand. In recent years, inspired by the chiral opening of Bauhinia variegata's seedpod and the coiling of plant's tendril, researchers have made significant breakthroughs in synthesizing state-of-the-art 3D helical structures through creating intrinsic curvatures in 2D rod-like or ribbon-like precursors. The intrinsic curvature results from the differential response to a variety of external stimuli of functional materials, such as hydrogels, liquid crystal elastomers, and shape memory polymers. In this review, we give a brief overview of the shape transformation mechanisms of these two plant's structures and then review recent progress in the fabrication of biomimetic helical structures that are categorized by the stimuli-responsive materials involved. By providing this survey on important recent advances along with our perspectives, we hope to solicit new inspirations and insights on the development and fabrication of helical structures, as well as the future development of interdisciplinary research at the interface of physics, engineering, and biology.

MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE: SCORSESE'S "THE WOLF OF WALL STREET" THROUGH A PSYCHOANALYTIC LENS.

In this essay I wish to present some reflections on Jordan Belfort, the protagonist of the movie "The Wolf of Wall Street" from a psychoanalytic prism. The movie, "The Wolf of Wall Street", is a 2013 black comedy film directed by Martin Scorsese and adapted by Terence Winter from Belfort's memoir (2007) of the same name. This movie has already been analyzed from cultural and historical perspectives, with the protagonist representing American culture of the 1980s. I will first summarize some of these views, and then present my psychoanalytic perspective of Jordan's wish to become "Master of the Universe" (Wolfe, 1987; Grunberger, 1993), as expressed through his abuse of drugs, hyper-sexuality, and his aggressive and self-destructive behavior. As the craving for omnipotence and immortality is a universal wish that has existed from time immemorial, I will draw an analogy between certain aspects and symbolic elements in "The Wolf of Wall Street" and Wagner's (1848-1872) four epic operas "Der Ring des Nibelungen." I will conclude with a brief reference to the charismatic appeal of a man like Jordan to the general public.

[The sexualisation of the care relationship by the patient in gerontology]. / La sexualisation de la relation de soin par le patient en gérontologie.

The expression of the sexuality of the ageing patient in the care setting, particularly when it concerns the genital area and involves the caregiver without he or she being aware, constitutes a critical situation for the geriatric teams. A psychodynamic reading of these situations is important for the caregiving teams in order to optimise the somatic treatment and to prevent the risk of an unsuitable reactive treatment. This article presents a clinical case as an example.

[Deviant sexual behaviors, paraphilias, perversions]. / Pratiques sexuelles déviantes, paraphilies, perversions.

OBJECTIVE: To know the new concept of paraphilias, their clinical presentation and their link with a personality disorder as perversion, the French legislation concerning them and the different therapeutic options. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Review of guidelines published on this subject in the Medline database and a reflexion from our own clinical experience, especially in the judicial expertise. RESULTS: Deviant sexual behavior is, in current classifications, known as paraphilia. This clinical entity corresponds to any sexual behavior considered "abnormal" compared with sexual acts in the society where the person lives. It means precisely, firstly, suffering caused by this disorder or deterioration of social, professional, or family life. Paraphilia such as pedophilia have strict age limits. The victim must be aged below 16 years, with an age difference of at least 5 years with the author of the act. Sexual acts which are illegal are crimes or offences according to the degree, and are sanctioned by the law. In ordinary terms, they are known as perverts, committing perversions. This concept is different from that of paraphilia, a pervert can have, or not have, paraphiliac behavior. In order to diagnose a personality disorder such as perversion, all the criteria must be included: narcissism, use of a person as an object for pleasure, with, primarily, mechanisms of denial and a split personality which removes any feeling of guilt from the perpetrator. CONCLUSION: Medical treatment of paraphilia alone is not satisfactory for the denial mechanism is such that only the sex drive is affected with a high risk of recurrence. Only psychotherapy can modify the pathological element of a perverted personality.

"No one can hate you more than I do": The perverse interplay of life and death drives in Roman Polanski's film Bitter Moon.

In this paper, the authors explore the depiction of perversion and the associated interplay of life and death drives in Roman Polanski's 1992 film Bitter Moon. To begin with, a theoretical discussion is presented regarding perverse organizations of mastery and sadomasochism. Perversion is viewed as an expression of the death drive under erotic disguise, in which the destructive fingerprint of the death drive is revealed at every stage, having as its ultimate purpose the destruction of the other. Based on these theoretical insights a dialogue is developed with Polanski's film, which brings to life the theory of sadomasochistic relations through the multidimensional aesthetic medium of cinema. It is shown how Polanski's cinematic oeuvre conveys the essence of the difficult and complex experience of perverse relations, where the life and death drives and their transformations are manifested. The portrayal of the sadomasochistic relations in this film contributes to the experiential knowledge with which the authors promote insight that would potentially enrich the clinical work with patients with perverse organizations.

Structural changes in chromosomes driven by multiple condensin motors during mitosis.

We create a computational framework that utilizes loop extrusion (LE) by multiple condensin I/II motors to predict changes in chromosome organization during mitosis. The theory accurately reproduces the experimental contact probability profiles for the mitotic chromosomes in HeLa and DT40 cells. The LE rate is smaller at the start of mitosis and increases as the cells approach metaphase. Condensin II-mediated mean loop size is about six times larger than loops because of condensin I. The loops, which overlap each other, are stapled to a central dynamically changing helical scaffold formed by the motors during the LE process. A polymer physics-based data-driven method that uses the Hi-C contact map as the only input shows that the helix is characterized as random helix perversions (RHPs) in which the handedness changes randomly along the scaffold. The theoretical predictions, which are testable using imaging experiments, do not contain any parameters.

Masochism.

This text presents how Freud thinks about the masochism. In 1915, it is the return of active sadism in a passive drive which is characteristic of masochism, always secondary. In 1919, he sees in masochism the genesis of perversions. And the article of 1924 knows a primary masochism and distinguishes erotogenic masochism, feminine masochism and moral masochism. After Freud, many studies of clinical forms of masochism can be noted, and in France there is a thesis about the masochism as a first psychic link (Benno Rosenberg, Marilia Aisenstein).

Becoming-Perverse: Queering Sworn Brotherhood in the Non/Human Realm of Songzhuxuan's Hailiwa and Daokousu.

This article examines the pornographic representation of Hailiwa and Daokousu, from Songzhuxuan's novel Yaohu Yanshi, where a sworn brotherhood incorporates an egalitarian homosexual relationship, something highly unusual in the Qing context in which sexual acts, including same-sex ones, were intelligible only via unequal hierarchies. In so doing we explore the queer potentialities of sworn brotherhood, signifying fraternity, friendship and a sexual relationship simultaneously. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, queer theory, and Giffney and Hird's concept of the non/human, we argue this tale and its wider genre enriches the scope of what we might term "queer literatures" in offering us historically and culturally situated stories of desire that refuse to confine themselves to the binaries that supported conventional premodern Chinese understandings of gender and sexuality-including the Confucian model of the heterosexual family unit, but also the highly hierarchical notions of sexual status underpinning Qing conceptualizations of sexual acts.

Embodiment and the Perversion of Desire.

A contemporary definition of perversion is offered that aims to reveal a form of psychic functioning as a quality of being toward others in the external world, translating to a mode of relating toward internal objects, and/or a mode of relating toward one's body as an object. This quality of being is contrasted with perversion denoting a specific set of behaviors, as in classical conceptualizations. Two schematics illustrate healthy and perverse phenomenological positions (i.e. identifiable within the person's preconscious or conscious perspective and experience). These positions highlight ways in which perverse modes of experiencing can be depicted, by use of internal psychic positions and the extent to which these are integrated, interpenetrate one another or are truncated and foreclosed. In particular, a perverse internal psychic mode is proposed where affective, embodied, and pre-reflective self-experience is split off or dissociated. The case of Laura is offered as an illustration of a perverse mode of being and a perverse relationship to her body. I also suggest that perverse modes of relating towards others (primarily through objectification) is more common in males whereas the objectification of one's body is more common in females.

Carbonation dysgeusia associated with topiramate.

PURPOSE: A case of carbonation dysgeusia associated with the use of topiramate is reported in order to bring awareness to a lesser-known adverse effect of the medication so that providers may be able to more effectively counsel patients and provide potential solutions. SUMMARY: A 39-year-old Caucasian woman with longstanding epilepsy was initiated on topiramate therapy after experiencing a generalized seizure (she reported not taking any antiepileptic medication for years). Topiramate was started at a dosage of 25 mg by mouth twice daily and after 3 weeks titrated to a dosage of 100 mg by mouth twice daily for maintenance therapy. After initiation of topiramate therapy, the patient began to experience an immediate change in her carbonation perception when drinking carbonated beverages; all carbonated beverages, including seltzer and beer, tasted "flat." The patient remained on topiramate for the subsequent 12 months without her carbonation perception returning to normal but noted that drinking carbonated beverages through straws slightly mitigated the adverse effect. Case assessment using the adverse drug reaction probability scale of Naranjo et al indicated that topiramate was the probable cause of the patient's carbonation taste perversion. CONCLUSION: A 39-year-old Caucasian woman developed chronic carbonation dysgeusia after initiation of topiramate following a generalized seizure.

Parasitic Language.

This paper presents initial thoughts about the phenomenon of parasitic language. This is a language which clings to the other's linguistic patterns and in doing so produces a double manifestation of omnipotence and impotence; a language that forges a linguistic "prosthesis," and while allowing for a false manifestation of language and thinking, constitutes thoughts as foreign objects that are mechanically and artificially "stuck" to the speaking subject. The early roots of this language, as illustrated in a detailed analytical case description, inhere in the infiltration of language by multi-generational traumatic traces. This turns language itself into a scene of simultaneous repetition of the act of salvation and the act of annihilation.

Creativity and Perversion: Waiting for the Muse.

Although there is an extensive psychoanalytic literature on perversion, and numerous articles about creativity, few authors have explored relations between creativity and perversion. In particular, the role of childhood trauma and its impact on object relations has not been examined in patients with perversions whose creativity is blocked. In association with preoedipal anxieties and fantasies, childhood trauma can not only contribute to the development of perversion, but can also inhibit or distort the creative process by establishing an inner world characterized by the presence of a threatening internal bad object and the elusiveness of an internal good object. Though it is essential to help these patients establish an identification with the phallic father, an internal good maternal object, in the form of a muse, needs to be retrieved to bring inspiration and reduce the anxieties generated by an internal bad object, thereby facilitating the pursuit of authentic creative work. A detailed case report illustrates how this theoretical perspective guided the treatment approach to a male patient with macrophilia who was struggling to realize his creative potential.