Rape Flashbacks: Constructing a New Narrative

This article offers an approach to the dissolution of rape flashbacks when the usual treatment of talk and group support doesn't work. The client, with her family, constructs a new rape scenario to replace her abusive story. In the new story, the client introduces a chosen protective figure into the flashback, which has the effect of interrupting the old scenario so that it cannot take place in the same way again. This approach relies on the client finding a new or freed voice in the treatment conversations in order to tell her story differently. The new, repopulated story eventually has the effect of altering her memory and renewing her life direction and belief in herself.     

It's Not a Story

This writing presents a firsthand account of living with the certain knowledge that you can't rely on your brain the way you used to. Epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, brain tumor—what do these words really mean day by day, moment by moment? The author blends poetry and prose in her account of forging a new relationship with her own brain. Activities that were once routine are now difficult and even dangerous. No longer is her brain a silent partner as she navigates the debilitating, embarrassing, and occasionally humiliating symptoms of her disease. Can I really get through this shower? How much help do we need today, Brain? Mindfulness practice helps the author become more aware of her moment-by-moment experience. Her therapist prods her to dig into her own story, but the author resists. She resists and yet she shares her story that may not be a story.     

The psychiatrist

This short story concerns a court-appointed psychiatrist who must evaluate the sanity of a young woman who killed her eight-month-old daughter. The woman tells of her pain and helplessness at being unable to comfort her infant daughter, who speaks of her own mortality with terrible dread! The story attempts to convey something of the experience of the professional working on the borderline of the real and the unreal, the possible and the impossible, tragedy and absurdity and having to make decisions that have major life consequences.     

A Journey into Grief

The experience of the death of her Grandmother immerses the author in an intimate experience of grief. She reflects on her journey into grief and presents insights into grief's impact on her personal story as well as her professional life, i.e., her clinical work as a young psychoanalyst-in-training. Other metaphors and dream images, such as life, death, home, homelessness, silence, speech, story, voicelessness, aloneness and loneliness echo throughout the reflection as the author attempts to articulate an understanding of the profound Self-change birthed by death, grief and loss.     

Follow the Bird—A Story of Survival in the Treatment of Addictions Commentary on Paper by Lisa Director

Lisa Director proposes a relational model with an emphasis on enactment for the treatment of chronic drug and alcohol use. She illustrates her thesis with an extensive case report. The story of her patient's addiction, and of the embroiled analytic developments, is engaging, disturbing, and rewarding. I suggest that the telling of this inspiring story, and the narration of her theoretical framework, is a response to the devastation involved in the encountering of addictions and that this story unintentionally obscures some basic issues about addiction and the psychoanalytic treatment of it. I believe that the survival of patient and analyst was achieved with the help of three underemphasized factors: Director is an expert in the assessment and treatment of chemical dependency problems, and her patient, Helena, knew this; despite her chronic addiction, Helena brought exceptional resources for survival to the analysis; and the authority of the analyst was used for leverage to help replace Helena's reliance on drinking and drugs.     

Stable Strategies for Personal Development

In her short story “Stable Strategies for Middle Management,” Eileen Gunn imagines a future in which Margaret, an office worker, seeks radical genetic enhancements intended to help her secure the middle-management job she wants. One source of the story’s tension and dark humor is dramatic irony: readers can see that the enhancements Margaret buys stand little chance of making her life go better for her; enhancing is, for Margaret, probably a prudential mistake. This paper argues that our positions in the real world are sufficiently similar to Margaret’s position in Gunn’s fictional world that we should take this story seriously as grounding an argument from analogy for the conclusion that radical genetic enhancements are, for us, probably a prudential mistake. The paper then defends this method. When the question at hand is one of speculative ethics, there is no method better fit to the purpose than argument from analogy to speculative fiction.     

MULTIPLE FRACTURES IN TIME: REFLECTIONS ON A CAR CRASH

This essay offers a story of a traumatic event experienced by the author on September 6, 1999. Presented here in autoethnographic and multivoiced form, the author narrates a fraction of time in her life that has left her forever changed: a near-death car crash. She uses literary mode in the crash story and recollected dialogue in the rescue story. In the effort to engage readers into the particulars of such a horrific experience, she seeks to connect with trauma survivors and perhaps offer illumination for those who (for their own reasons) seek further understanding in what will, hopefully for them, never be a first-order experience.     

“Spacious Enough to Receive What Came to Me”: An Interview with Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky tells the story of how synchronicity and a bad dream flung her into a Jungian analysis, how her experiences as a young woman in India opened her to the Jungian Weltanshauung, and how analysis gave her access to her passionate and absorbing inner life. She speaks about her relationship to inner figures—her muse, her ancestors—and how they continue to influence her life and writing.     

Influence of the reason for the other's affect on preschoolers' empathic response

Forty-six preschoolers were individually presented four slide-sequence stories in which the main character performed acts that resulted in the character displaying happiness (in two stories) or sadness (in two stories). Within each happy and sad story pair, one story portrayed the main character as having an "acceptable" reason for his or her affect (e.g., the character was happy after finding a friend to play with) and one story portrayed the character as having an "unacceptable" reason for his or her affect (e.g., the character was happy after transgressing against another child). Affective and evaluative responses to the main characters in the four stories were assessed. The preschoolers generally empathized more with (and evaluated more favorably) a story character whose affect was associated with the performance of an acceptable rather than an unacceptable act.     

Fictionalism and Incompleteness

The modal fictionalist faces a problem due to the fact that her chosen story seems to be incomplete—certain things are neither fictionally true nor fictionally false. The significance of this problem is not localized to modal fictionalism, however, since many fictionalists will face it too. By examining how the fictionalist should analyze the notion of truth according to her story, and, in particular, the role that conditionals play for the fictionalist, I develop a novel and elegant solution to the incompleteness problem.     

Lucy's dividing family: My discovery of the person in the subject

Abstract

This essay is excerpted from a larger project the author conducted with adolescent and preadolescent children of divorce. It tells the personal story of the author's first interview experience with her first participant in this project, here called Lucy. At the time of the interview, she was 11 years old and her parents had been divorced for 3 years. In the effort to engage the reader as an outside interpreter of her story, this essay invites the reader in, to the “raw data” of Lucy's experiences, as described in her words. Presented here in dialogue are the two voices of participant and researcher, as well as researcher reflections and recollections of this memorable experience.     

The pearl of great price

“The Pearl of Great Price” is a short story that explores the ways faith can go wrong. The central character, Janet, a single mom in a dead end job, is drawn into a multi-level marketing scheme, Benevite, by an unscrupulous salesman. She is encouraged to believe in herself and her dream and to give everything she has to it. She is fed the standard clichés to the effect that you can achieve whatever you want if you try hard enough. In the end her faith in her dream leads to the loss of her relationship with her child and other losses. Her pursuit exhibits many of the standard features of faith, belief, desire, resilience, tenacity, passion, and yet she does not save herself. The story is not meant as an indictment of faith in general, but as an acknowledgement of the fact that faith can be a vice and an exploration of when this might be so.     

Abracadabra Tongue: Poetry Magic

The author has known that poetry is magic since she was a child. However when she sat down to write about it she went blank, confronted by the taboo against magic in our rationalistic culture. In the way of Jungian magic she is helped by dream figures. The Muslim Solomon takes her on a flying carpet journey which reveals the magic of poetic influence: how Hafiz influenced Goethe influenced Lorca influenced her, which is how Persian mysticism found its way into her poetry. She tells the story of her development as a poet, how she learned fermentation magic—the difficult and often painful process required by poetic vision and revision in which grapes must be crushed, favorite phrases and metaphors must be ruthlessly smashed. The Queen of Sheba, another dream figure, shows up to tell her version of the story of her relationship with Solomon. She reveals the dark, fierce, and lusty lineage of her “old black magic” and how it has made its way into the author's poetry.     

Medical Family Therapy for a Woman with End-stage Crohn's Disease and Her Son

Medical family therapy grew out of the experiences of family therapists working with other professionals to provide comprehensive, integrated healthcare for patients (McDaniel, Hepworth, & Doherty, 1992). This is the story of one such patient, her son, and those of us who were the three primary participants on her treatment team. To provide an account that comes closest to the experience itself, we have taken quotes from videotaped sessions and electronic mail communications that occurred throughout the course of therapy. Each provider tells part of the story in his or her own voice. The commentary is provided by Susan McDaniel.     

Googling for ghosts: a meditation on writers' block, mourning, and the Holocaust

The author describes her father's experience of being a Holocaust survivor and how his unfinished mourning contributed to her struggle with muteness, her own story being dwarfed by the magnitude of her father's losses. When her non-Jewish mother is chosen to be honored by Yad Vashem, the ceremony proves unexpectedly powerful. The witnessing by community, through the Internet, helps dissolve the shame and isolation, heals some of the trauma, and promotes greater psychological freedom. In creating this paper, the author memorializes her parents and her lost relatives, and succeeds in working through much that had haunted her.     

Being marked as different: The emotional politics of experiences of depression and migrant belongings

This article asks the question: “What does it mean to think about ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ when migratory experience is enmeshed with the story of depression?”. The article focuses on the personal story of a woman who migrated from the United States (US) to Australia, and whose sense of disconnection and displacement in relation to everyday life is embedded within a narrative of depression. Our discussion of her twin narratives of emotional distress and migration is located within theoretical debates about depression, migration and the constitution of subjectivity. In particular, we draw on psychoanalytical approaches to subjectivity to argue that her emotional distress and the medical diagnosis of depression together represent a form of ‘experienc[ing] oneself as a subject’ (Butler, 2005), and function as a precondition to her narrative of migration. Ultimately, we conclude, the woman's intertwined narratives of depression and migration operate simultaneously to provide retroactive order to her subjectivity.     

This century,this country: One survivor's story of posttraumatic stress syndrome

Abstract

Posttraumatic stress syndrome, also called posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), affects people who have experienced extremely traumatic events. Individuals who live with posttraumatic stress syndrome must continually overcome many obstacles to live their daily lives. The following is one woman's story of abuse, its after effects, and survival. By telling her story, I hope to make her suffering that much more meaningful. In addition, I wish to call attention to what goes on behind closed doors and explain what we can do about it.     

Patient — heal thyself

(This is a story of a courageous woman who refused to accept the fact that her medical disease was incurable or irreversible. This paper was written about 18 months ago. Since then, the author has continued her struggles, her risk-taking searches, and her hope. -Ed.)     

‘That Old‐time Religion’: Aimee Semple McPherson and perceptions of Pentecostalism, 1918–26

The story is told of Aimee Semple McPherson, a star female evangelist in the USA in the 1920s. Theologically and in her own understanding of doctrine she resisted denominational or classical Pentecostalism and asserted her own view, stemming from Azusa Street, that the message of Spirit baptism belonged to the church at large.     

The Limits of Narrative and Culture: Reflections on Lorrie Moore's “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk”

This article provides a discussion of the limits of both narrative and culture based on a close textual analysis of the short story, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk," by Lorrie Moore. In this story, a mother describes her experiences on a pediatric oncology ward when her infant son develops Wilms' tumor. The authors examine how the story satirically portrays the spurious claims of language, story, and culture to protect us from an unjust universe and then exposes their false promises. The various personal, professional, and genre-specific narratives we use to create order and coherence from the terror of serious illness are ultimately ineffective. Similarly, the superficially comforting culture of the hospital ward cares more about creating the illusion of control than it does about the suffering of sick children. Language and culture cannot make sense of human anguish, the article concludes, yet they are all we have to hold back the chaos. Mystery and uncertainty, as part of the human condition, must become part of our stories and part of our culture.