Martina Ferrari

Background Psychological practitioners often seek to directly change the form or frequency of clients' maladaptive perfectionist thoughts, because such thoughts predict future depression. Indirect strategies, such as self-compassion interventions, that seek to change clients' relationships to difficult thoughts, rather than trying to change the thoughts directly could be just as effective. This study aimed to investigate whether self-compassion moderated, or weakened, the relationship between high perfectionism and high depression symptoms in both adolescence and adulthood. Methods The present study utilised anonymous self-report questionnaires to assess maladaptive perfectionism, depression, and self-compassion across two samples covering much of the life-span. Questionnaires were administered in a high school setting for the adolescent sample, and advertised through university and widely online to attract a convenience sample of adults. Results Moderation analyses revealed that self-compassion reduced the strength of relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and depression in our adolescent Study 1 and our adult study 2. Limitations Cross-sectional self-reported data restricts the application of causal conclusions and also relies on accurate self-awareness and willingness to respond to questionnaire openly. Conclusions The replication of this finding in two samples and across different age-appropriate measures suggests that self-compassion does moderate the link between perfectionism and depression. Self-compassion interventions may be a useful way to undermine the effects of maladaptive perfectionism, but future experimental or intervention research is needed to fully assess this important possibility.

This article accounts for a particular kind of politicised anonymity, namely ‘disobedient anonymity’, that operates as a liberatory response to the longue durée of gender violence. We examine the street performance Un violador en tu camino created by the Chilean feminist theatre collective LASTESIS, to show how disobedient anonymity is an embodied and collective disruption of colonial subjectification and state-sanctioned gender violence. Building on the insights of the Argentinian decolonial feminist scholar Rita Segato's analysis of high-intensity patriarchy as well as discussions of perverse anonymity in critical phenomenology, we examine how disobedient anonymity operates in Un violador as an embodied practice that makes possible a decolonising, feminist liberatory public. We argue that through the deployment of disobedient anonymity, Un violador re-territorialises and re-temporalises colonial fields of sens. In doing so, it institutes a new form of political subjectivity that upends colonial logics.