Writing ourselves into being: writing as spiritual self‐care for adolescent girls. Part One

This paper, the first of two parts, reports the claims of a participatory qualitative research project that explores the inner self‐awareness and self‐presentation of adolescent girls based on excerpts from their own adolescent writings. The participants selected material from their own diaries and poetry written between 1969–1999 (ages 11–17) that spoke to their adolescent spiritual concerns. The research team addressed questions of audience, voice, intention in writing and the role writing played in maintaining an inner life and sense of self. The persistent themes that arose were creating solitude, transforming to calm, preserving sensitivity, nurturing voice and connecting beyond the self, while the central identified theme was care of self. This first paper sets out context and process then addresses the first two themes. Part Two, to be published in a later edition of this journal, will explore the remaining themes and some implications for care work with adolescent girls.     

Writing ourselves into being: writing as spiritual self‐care for adolescent girls. Part Two

This paper, the second of two parts, reports the claims of a participatory qualitative research project that explores the inner self‐awareness and self‐presentation of adolescent girls based on excerpts from their own adolescent writings. The participants selected material from their own diaries and poetry written between 1969 and 1999 (ages 11–17) that spoke to their adolescent spiritual concerns. The research team addressed questions of audience, voice, intention in writing and the role writing played in maintaining an inner life and sense of self. The persistent themes that arose were creating solitude, transforming to calm, preserving sensitivity, nurturing voice, and connecting beyond the self, while the central identified theme was care of self. Part One set out context and process and then addressed the first two themes. Part Two explores the remaining themes and some implications for care work with adolescent girls.     

Parenting,Protecting, Preserving:Mission of the Adolescent Female Runaway

This paper presents a systemic framework for therapy with families of adolescent female runaways. The runaway adolescent is viewed as serving three functions within her family. First, she often parents her parents and siblings. Second, she protects her parents' marriage and regulates marital distance. Third, she preserves her family unit at the preadolescent developmental stage. Interventions are described that remove the adolescent from those roles by empowering the parents to take charge of the adolescent, by changing the communication process such that the couple deal with their marital issues without the help of the teenager, and by facilitating the family's movement toward a new stage of separation and individuation.     

Adolescence: a literary passage.

Using Erikson's and Gilligan's theories of adolescent development, this paper presents a content analysis of the depiction of adolescent development in a sample of Newbery Medal winners and honor books. Some diversity was found among the major characters, but white males were overrepresented. Many of the characters underwent an identity crisis. Some passed through the identity versus role confusion stage; others, especially in the almost prototypical male-initiation-rite stories, discovered ways to deal with nature (industry) which engendered a far clearer sense of self (identity). The major female characters experienced the two phases more or less simultaneously, but a similar fusion existed for a number of the male characters. The themes of "separation" and "connection" were paramount in the stories, and what Gilligan has called "the ethic of care" was presented positively. Some main characters matured only when they recognized their responsibility to others.     

青少年学生疏离感及其发展的研究

本研究采用<青少年学生疏离感量表》对重庆市和兰州市的1502名青少年学生进行调查,结果表明:青少年学生在生活环境疏离感和压迫拘束感上的平均分相对较高;各学生群体在社会疏离感、人际疏离感和总体疏离感之间的差异,主要体现在年级和地区的交互作用上,而环境疏离感的差异主要体现在性别和片区的交互作用上。各群体疏离感的差异主要表现在年级和片区之间;青少年学生的疏离感大体呈现出三个阶段的发展趋势,即是:初中阶段发展比较平稳,没有大的起伏变化;高中和大学阶段都是从低到高,再从高到低的倒“V”字型发展变化趋势。     

青少年学生疏离感的理论构建及量表编制

通过文献分析和实证研究 ,构建了疏离感的理论维度 ,并据此编制了青少年学生疏离感的测量量表。对量表进行探索性因素分析和验证性因素分析后表明 :疏离感是一个多层次、多维度的体系 ,本身包含 2个层次和 9个维度 ,该研究所构建的疏离感理论体系比较合理。疏离感量表具有较好的信度和效度 ,可以作为青少年学生疏离感研究的测量工具     

JEWISH WOMEN'S PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING: THE ROLE OF ATTACHMENT, SEPARATION, AND JEWISH IDENTITY

The purpose of this study was to examine the contributions of attachment, separation, and Jewish identity to psychological well-being in a sample of 115 late adolescent Jewish women. Results from multiple regression analyses demonstrated that attachment to parents, separation from parents, and Jewish identity collectively accounted for variance in psychological distress, as measured by anxiety, depression, self-esteem problems, and interpersonal problems. Thus, late adolescent Jewish women's psychological functioning may be fostered by therapeutic interventions addressing their relationships with parents and Jewish identity.     

Suicide as a resolution of separation-individuation among adolescent girls

The purpose of this study was to discover if there is a relationship between suicidal adolescent girls and borderline phenomena, and to examine separation anxiety in suicidal girls. Hansburg's Separation Anxiety Test and Gunderson's Diagnostic Interview for Borderline Disorder were administered to 40 adolescent girls. Only those girls that had attempted suicide were included in this study. The findings of this research suggested that adolescent suicide is a borderline phenomena that has its roots in the early separation-individuation phase of development, resulting in separation anxiety. The adolescent girl gets relief from the abandonment depression and feelings of separateness by using suicide as a vehicle for regression to a symbiotic state where she earlier had experienced safety.     

Angels and devils: sadism and violence in children

This paper looks at violence and sadism in child and adolescent patients. Psychoanalytic and developmental ideas are brought together to make sense of these children’s presentations and the clinical challenges of therapeutic work with them. Differences are outlined between cold and hotter forms of aggression. The contribution of Glasser and his concept of the core complex is central to the paper, as is an understanding of addictive processes often seen in aggression, including sexual aggression.     

Enhancing intuitive skills among adolescent mothers

Studies indicate that adolescent mothers differ from adult mothers in their ability to interact with the infant in an adaptive fashion. In particular, teenage mothers appear to possess immature representational capacities which prevent them from predicting imminent infant achievement. As a result, they behave in a manner that undermines the emergence of new developmental skills in the infant. For example, the visual and vocal cues of adolescent mothers tend to be either subdued or absent, while holding behavior often fails to convey a sense of security. Physically punitive actions are also more common among these younger caregivers than among adult mothers. The application of a new developmental strategy referred to as previewing may, however, reverse these trends by fostering representational and interpersonal skills in adolescent mothers.     

The application of psychodynamic ideas to professional dance training

Concern about the welfare of professional dance students is growing as it becomes clearer that the training is not producing emotionally healthy and mature young people. Psychodynamic ideas and concepts offer a means of analysing the problems of the training and indicating where change needs to be implemented. This paper looks first at the areas of adolescent development towards separation, autonomy, the creation of peer relationships and the development of sexual identity and awareness, and shows how traditional dance training fails to facilitate their growth. The paper then discusses envy and competition and argues that they need to be addressed within dance training if they are not to be so destructive. The paper then suggests that group theory could enable the better use of the dance class. Finally, the idea of the body storyline is used to show that dance training has the capacity to have a creative and remedial effect on students, if training institutions provide a sufficiently facilitating environment.     

A GENDERED APPROACH TO ADOLESCENT DATING VIOLENCE: CONCEPTUAL AND METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES

This article argues that adolescent dating violence should be considered within a social ecological model that embeds the individual within the context of adolescent friendships and romantic relationships, as well as family and other social institutions that shape a young person's sense of self. Two additions to the model are recommended. First, gender is considered in the model at the individual, interactional and structural levels. Second, identity is treated as a meta-construct, affecting and being affected by all levels of the social ecology. Examples from research are presented and recommendations for future research are offered.     

Adolescent acting out when a parent has cancer

The psychological stresses which cancer exerts on a family system can be immense, both situationally and developmentally. These stresses can be unusually intense for the adolescent who has a parent ill with cancer. They can impact upon the adolescent in overt ways, such as increased household or child care duties, or in more covert ways such as in subtle role shifts in the relationship between the adolescent and both the ill and the well parent. The covert role shifts are especially thought to promote acting out and potential decompensation on the part of the adolescent. The acting out can have system-defecting and system-unifying properties, with the decompensation secondary to unbearable role shifts that reintensify the adolescent emotional contact with parents in the midst of a developmental process of separation. General clinical intervention points are suggested to reduce the crisis and ameliorate the negative developmental potential.1979, Fall     

Adolescent acting out when a parent has cancer

The psychological stresses which cancer exerts on a family system can be immense, both situationally and developmentally. These stresses can be unusually intense for the adolescent who has a parent ill with cancer. They can impact upon the adolescent in overt ways, such as increased household or child care duties, or in more covert ways such as in subtle role shifts in the relationship between the adolescent and both the ill and the well parent. The covert role shifts are especially thought to promote acting out and potential decompensation on the part of the adolescent. The acting out can have system-defecting and sytem-unifying properties, with the decompensation secondary to unbearable role shifts that reintensify the adolescent emotional contact with parents in the midst of a developmental process of separation. General clinical intervention points are suggested to reduce the crisis and ameliorate the negative developmental potential.     

ABSTRACTS OF LITERATURE

This paper attempts to formulate dynamics based on clinical material from family sessions rather than based on individual reconstruction. It is believed that the identified adolescent patient regresses with narcissistic symptoms because, in the struggle for independence, he upsets the family equilibrium. The parents emerge from their adolescence with low self-esteem and the need for the support of external objects. The adolescent's separateness from the family recreates the problem for the parents and prevents his individual growth as well as his separation from the family.     

Adolescence: a growth period conductive to alienation

This paper clarifies the relationship of alienation to the period of adolescence by developing a portrait of the alienated and the at-risk adolescent. Current research on adolescent alienation follows two converging themes, the socio-psychological, where deviant behavior is viewed as evidence of adolescent estrangement from self and society, and the sociological, where alienation is divided into a series of dimensions for empirical assessment. These two perspectives converge to describe the alienated adolescent. The alienated adolescent is disruptive, rebukes authority, drops out of school or becomes a passive participant, is prone to suicide, abuses drugs and alcohol, and rejects the norms established by family, school, and society in general. Adolescence is a high-risk period wherein the adolescent experiences multiple environments which exacerbates higher levels of alienation. These environments include disorganized or disruptive families, schools that encourage students to become passive participants in the learning process, and a high-pressured pace of life. To lessen the at-risk nature of adolescents toward alienation, society can take steps to humanize their environment. These steps include the intergenerational integration of adolescents, their assimilation into responsible societal activities, providing them with a sense of meaning, and enfranchisement into the decision-making process.     

Rites of passage in families with adolescents

In previous generations society defined expectations and constructed events to promote individual development, a functional family organization, and cultural continuity. Culturally defined and accepted rites of passage that were previously observed in families with adolescents have given way to a more vague and meaningless set of adolescent expectations and affirmations. It is proposed that this change has interfered with the mission of the family to promote functional adolescent development and with the ability of the family during this life cycle stage to operate with a sense of community attachment. This paper addresses the importance of rites of passage as they pertain to family development and change and presents ideas about making them explicit in family therapy to change family interaction and structure. Prescribed family rituals that are straightforward, developmentally relevant, and interactional can be effective without consideration to whether they are paradoxical. Three clinical illustrations are presented to highlight this therapeutic approach.     

Demons,voices and virtual realities in adolescence–an exploration of zeitgeist,culture and cultural complexes

This paper contrasts two aspects of the adolescent's sojourn in the metaphorical landscape of the borderland. Either this ‘dance with death’ can prove life‐affirming and serve individuation as the intensity of being poised on the cusp between life and death negates numbing dissociation, or it can spiral into madness and suicide when the adolescent gets trapped in a mimetic hall of mirrors. This paper considers both the oscillations between mimesis and alterity, and how culture and cultural complexes may define expressions of distress. It concludes with the question of whether one can–and whether one should–make sense of the demons from the other side; and whether they are psychotic, pseudo‐psychotic or dissociative manifestations as they emerge during the course of therapy.     

Change in self-concept during adolescence

Malaysian adolescents, like their Western counterparts, undergo rapid growth and development. It is hypothesized that self-concept improves as adolescents mature and become more adjusted to the changes. This study therefore sought to ascertain whether the self-concept changes with age, not only in the global sense but in the various components of the self-concept. The Tennessee Self-Concept Scale and the Brookover Scale of Academic Ability were administered to 375 adolescent boys, ranging in age from 14.7 to 17.0 years, and to 289 adolescent girls, ranging in age from 14.4 to 17.2 years. The findings show that the self-concept of adolescent boys changes with age in the direction predicted. The trend is less obvious and less consistent for girls.     

To stay or to return: Rapprochement processes in the migration of adolescents and young adults

The migration of adolescents and young adults is analyzed in terms of the separation-individuation process—an attempt at separation, reflecting conflictual feelings around autonomy and dependency needs. This paper focuses on the acute ambivalence typical of the rapprochement phase of personality development during childhood and applying this to understanding the adolescent and young adult during their migration experiences. The young immigrants to Israel are observed to alternate between physical approaching and then distancing in relation to both the new country (Israel) and the country of origin (the homeland). Four clinical examples of young persons are presented to illustrate the rapprochement process in some immigrants.