Varieties of Psychopathological Experience by Carney Landis

Other muscles can simulate a smile, but only the peculiar tango of the zygomatic major and the orbicularis oculi produces a genuine expression of positive emotion. The entire event is short - typically lasting from two-thirds of a second to four seconds - and those who witness it often respond by mirroring the action, and smiling back.

This emotional data funnels to the brain, exciting the left anterior temporal region in particular, then smolders to the surface of the face, where two muscles, standing at attention, are roused into action: The zygomatic major, which resides in the cheek, tugs the lips upward, and the orbicularis oculi, which encircles the eye socket, squeezes the outside corners into the shape of a crow’s foot. The hand feels the pressure of another hand. The eyes spot an old friend on the station platform. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).A smile begins in our sensory corridors. This article examines how touch and tactility produced meanings for Landis' research subjects and thus illuminated forms of sexual subjectivity not regularly associated with either histories of disability or histories of sexuality. The book represents conventional psychosexual presumptions about disabled women's stunted personality and frustrated sexuality stemming from the absence of a Freudian 'sexual moment.' Yet, the original research notes, housed at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, reveal that many of these women engaged in acts of erotic touching that played a far more dynamic and complex role in the development of their sexual subjectivities than Landis or his researchers could recognize. Landis interviewed the women about their sex lives, their sexual identities, and their relationship to their bodies and published the results in 1942 under the title The Personality and Sexuality of the Physically Handicapped Woman.

In the last quarter of the 1930s, Carney Landis, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia University affiliated with the Psychiatric Institute of New York, headed a Committee for Research in Problems of Sex-funded research project in which he conducted interviews with 100 women between the ages of 18 and 35 who self-identified as physically disabled.

Varieties of Psychopathological Experience by Carney Landis