Anthropos 1–2 (241-242) 2016

PSYCHOLOGY STUDIES

• Lara Delić, Eva Boštjančič:
  Boredom in relation to workplace characteristics and individual susceptibility to boredom

  Many researches were dedicated to the phenomenon of boredom, yet a fair part of its occurrence and consequences remains unexplained. Therefore, authors of the present study focused on boredom resulting from situational and personal factors. In the forefront, the focus is on understanding boredom at the workplace in the context of work features. The research is based on 294 employees working in Slovenian offices. The results showed that boredom at work significantly correlate with al included job features: skill discretion, decision authority, psychological work demands, job insecurity, colleagues’ and supervisors social support. However, when explaining variances in workplace boredom the skill discretion and the psychological job demands showed to be important as predictors.

  Key words: boredom, boredom susceptibility, job characteristics, office employee

• Andreja Pšeničny, Mitja Perat:
  Can Burnout Result from Personality Disorders?

  In their psychotherapy practice, the authors of this article observed that the diagnostic assessment of the personality structure in most patients with burnout syndrome shows features of medium-level borderline personality organization, relatively closer to a neurotic structure or moderately integrated borderline personality structure. Therefore, we examined whether burnout is associated with borderline, narcissistic, and schizoid borderline personality disorders through performance-based self-esteem and workaholism. A total of 3,393 respondents completed six questionnaires (the Adrenal Burnout Syndrome Questionnaire, the Performance-Based Self-Esteem Scale, the Work Addiction Risk Test, and screening tests for borderline, schizoid, and narcissistic personality disorders). We expected that those that had more symptoms of borderline, schizoid, and narcissistic borderline personality disorders would also tend to base their self-worth more on achievements, would be more workaholic, and would therefore show more burnout symptoms. A repeated measures analysis of variance confirmed our empirical observations from clinical psychotherapy practice that the majority of burned-out participants also show a higher level of symptoms of all three borderline personality disorders: borderline, schizoid, and narcissistic. It also confirmed that performance-based self-esteem and workaholism are indicators of the presence of personality disorders because respondents that have no burnout symptoms, but base their self-worth on their achievements and are workaholic, show a higher level of symptoms of these three personality disorders. Discriminant analysis also confirmed the hypothesis that all three borderline personality disorders, with performance-based self-esteem and workaholism as covariates, are relevant predictors of burnout, the most powerful among them being borderline personality disorder.

  Keywords: burnout, performance-based self-esteem, workaholism, personality disorders

• Tanja Pate, Nataša Bratina:
  Family Relations and Parental Support in Adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes

  The research, which included 89 adolescents with type 1 diabetes (T1D) and one of their parents (71 mothers and 18 fathers), investigated the associations between family relationships and parental support in adolescent‘s management of T1D. For the purpose of this research the Self Care Inventory (SCI), Diabetes Family Behavior Checklist (DFBC) and Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scale (FACES IV) were used. The results demonstrated that adolescents’ selfcontrol was associated with parental support and cohesion and flexibility in family relations. Youths reported more unsupportive behavior by parents and described higher disengagement in family relations comparing to parents. Parental support in diabetes management and functional family relations have important role in adolescent’s coping with T1D.

  Keywords: adolescents, parents, type 1 diabetes, self-care, relations

ETHICS, AESTHETICS, POLITICS

• Luka Đekić:
  Formality of Democracy and Normative Political Theory

  In modern times, most political parties declare themselves as democratic, although they have completely different political content. On this basis, the author makes a crucial question: Is democracy solely an organizational form or does it give us a political content, as well? The purpose of this article is to rethink the essence of democracy and its limits. The author argues that democracy itself is only, but at the same time also an extremely important form giving legitimacy to those who govern, whereas it cannot give us a political content. This is given by a normative political theory which does not only deal with empirical facts (“what is the status quo like”) but also with ethical questions (“what should the status be like”).

  Keywords: democracy, nation, indirect governance, direct governance, normative political theory, justice

• Cvetka Hedžet Tóth:
  Throwing an Ink-Pot at Someone Who Doesn’t Exist

  Making use of the words that the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno employed in his work Minima Moralia, the article sets out to critically pose the question of who it was thrown at by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. This involves the principle of subjectivity that is inwardness and as such subjectivity is a means for appropriating oneself and at the same time for self-preservation. What are the extent and limits of the truth that being inwardness, subjectivity is the same as truth? The article gives an analysis of subjectivity that is without objectivity, since by withdrawing within oneself in order to reach one’s perfection an individual is in fact sacrificed. Worshipping freedom turned solely into its own self-infatuated inwardness and making references to some kind of authenticity are but a stubborn internalization of social oppression, the more so the more it involves references to a kind of essence. Such philosophy of inwardness, which not only requires scorn for the world, is at the same time also typical of idealism and the concessions it makes to barbarous brutality of all the external, existing social state that is being preserved with capitalism. The latter certainly does not deserve our solidarity, even though we cannot provide an answer to the question of how to get out of this. Kierkegaard’s principle of subjectivity also includes the ethical aspect. It was here that Kierkegaard won over many an atheist, since it is not so much about subjectivity as subjectivity itself but about subjectivity as a means of one’s own selfpreservation, particularly at present when everything social, external is in bitter disagreement with everything that according to Kierkegaard embodies the ethical as the inward. A developed capacity for ethical judgment is like the capacity for removal out of the system, of closed form, even out of the absolute, and man as an individual possesses the power of ethical exodus of a markedly individual nature. There remains, of course, the question of what exactly should be the ethical system of connectedness that would not keep pushing ethics to the periphery of everything social as the prestige of some beautiful soul and the unique capacity of an individual for the ethical vision of the world, indeed patterned on Kierkegaard’s convincing example. Ethics, after all, is but a system of interpersonal relations and not only and exclusively a self-selected privilege of some beautiful, individual soul. In any case: Truth that lives in subjectivity can start a life in objectivity if only there exist conditions for it. If they are not in existence, then it is necessary all the more to cherish and preserve subjectivity within one’s inwardness, for it to be able to set off, as the exodus of one’s soul, on the journey through the world so that when the journey starts, it also continues. But this moment the journey ends the moment the soul sets off. That is why the article, in the spirit of Kierkegaard, states that when subjectivity builds, it is genuine subjectivity, it is real and Kierkegaard threw the ink-pot at someone who actually existed and also wished to keep existing but could not possibly succeed in it without the ethical foundation. Conceived of in this manner, ethics as a principle of subjectivity and inwardness is by no means an internalized system of repression. It is ethics we employ to appropriate the world and people within it. Ethics within itself contains something permanent, beyond all prescribed shared features, which never again convince us of their permanence, since they have never had an effect without resorting to violence, and atheist Adorno, enlisting Kierkegaard’s help, states that even idealism and violence have been blood brothers – and so right from the very beginning.

  Keywords: Søren Kierkegaard, subjectivity, ethics, self-preservation, criticism of capitalism, idealism

• Timotej Prosen:
  Readymade and Certain Shifts in Art according to Duchamp

  This paper examines Duchamp’s invention of the readymade, and tries to make intelligible some of the key shifts in conception of the artwork and the process of the creation of art, which this work exemplifies and demands of us. This is done by way of reference to Duchamp’s own writings about his work, and through examination of the context, within which his work is situated. Then, three aspects of art most affected by the influence of Duchamp are put in question. These are the art object, the subject (by which we mean both the artist and the spectator), and the institution, which to some degree determines the possible configurations of objects and subjects within the regime of contemporary art.

  Key words: readymade, Duchamp, contemporary art, artistic institution, the death of author

REVIEWS

• Martin Uranič:
  Tonči Kokić (2015): Pregled antičke filozofije. Naklada Breza, Zagreb.