Training Service Providers To Work with Gay or Lesbian Adolescents: A Workshop

The authors describe and evaluate a workshop developed to enhance the expertise of service providers who work with gay and lesbian adolescents.     

Some Aspects of Loneliness in Families

Although awareness of the harmful effects of loneliness has increased in recent years, lonely persons continue to be viewed as family outsiders or nonfamily. Beginning with the general-systems concept of loneliness as having a healthy, adaptive function in families, this article explores the family context of different degrees of loneliness. It assumes that prolonged loneliness (in addition to its meaning for the individual system) is a manifestation of certain kinds of family processes. Five such processes involved in the prolonging of loneliness are suggested: unresolved grief, pathological certainty, synchronicity, family expansion, and parental abdication.     

Levels of empathic response

Empathic understanding is a counseling technique that receives attention in many of the training programs that are charged with producing helping personnel. Although empathic understanding is widely taught, there is very little commonality among trainers in terms of what they teach their students to be empathic to. In this article the author presents a general conceptual set that may be applied to any statement a person makes. The set is comprised of six elements to which helpers can be empathic and to which they can respond. The elements are concrete and specific and lend themselves well to systematic training.     

CHRIST's AUTONOMOUS HAND: SIMULATIONS ON THE MADNESS OF GIVING

In Matthew 6:3–4 Jesus counsels: “when you do some act of charity, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing; your good deed must be in secret”. In the following essay we will use this passage as our conceptual touchstone to explore Jacques Derrida's reflections on the “madness” of giving, and how the gift (of Levinasian “hospitality”, for example) hinges on a certain vulnerability and the manifold risks of narcissism. In order to negotiate these themes, we will also draw on Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty, Martin Heidegger's reflections on the “hand”, and the psychological‐neurological literature on “phantom limbs”.     

BRIDGING DIFFERENCE THROUGH DIALOGUE: A CONSTRUCTIVIST PERSPECTIVE

Differences in culture invariably underpin the communication failures and misunderstandings that lead to social conflict and dissension. In contemporary organizations, for example, conflicts in values between different occupational groups have the potential to create significant organizational dysfunction. Equally, however, bridging between these conflicts may present an opportunity for organizational learning and insight. Dialogue provides a means of bridging between such differences, but it is notoriously difficult to implement. In this article, we explore the potential of Personal Construct Theory as a way into dialogue. We illustrate our argument with the results of a workshop that involved senior managers and clinicians from a large public hospital.