Winnicott's invitation to ‘further games of Jung‐analysis’

Winnicott signs off his celebrated review of Jung's (1963) autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections with the warning that translation of ‘erreichten’ as ‘attained’ (implying assimilation) rather than as ‘reached to’, could ‘queer the pitch for further games of Jung‐analysis’. This subtly underscores his view that Jung—who he described earlier as ‘mentally split’ and lacking ‘a self with which to know’—remained essentially dissociated. However, Winnicott, whilst immersed in this work on Jung, wrote a letter to Michael Fordham describing himself as suffering ‘a lifelong malady’ of ‘dissociation’. But this he now reported repaired through a ‘splitting headache’ dream of destruction, dreamt ‘for Jung, and for some of my patients, as well as for myself’ (Winnicott 1989, p. 228). Winnicott's recurrent concern during his last decade was with ‘reaching to’—that quintessential Winnicottian term—some reparative experience that could address such difficulties in constellating a ‘unit self’. This is correlated with his engagement with Jung and tracked through his contemporaneous clinical work, particularly ‘Fear of Breakdown’ (1963). Themes first introduced by Sedgwick (2008) and developed by the author's earlier ‘Winnicott on Jung; destruction, creativity and the unrepressed unconscious’ (2011) are given further consideration.     

Voices :‘A lot of people need someone to talk to.’

The quotations in the three “Voices” photo essays are excerpted from interviews conducted by Steve Boyd and Terry Casteel, guest editors of this special issue. They spoke with people on the street, in schools, and in many other settings, asking them about their needs and about their views of counseling.     

How students’ achievement goals shape their beliefs about effective teaching: A ‘build‐a‐professor’ study

Background. Which instructor qualities do students consider most important? The answer likely depends on the student. This study attempted to trace beliefs about the most essential instructor qualities to students’ academic achievement goals. Aims. The present study tested the hypothesis that students pursuing mastery goals favour instructors who stimulate and challenge them intellectually, whereas those pursuing performance goals favour instructors who present material clearly and provide clear cues about how to succeed. Sample. Participants were 157 students at a 4‐year public university. Method. Participants designed the ideal professor through a hypothetical combination of nine widely valued instructor qualities, such as enthusiasm, presentation clarity, and an interactive teaching style. The more they acquired of any one instructor quality, the less they could acquire of the others, thus compelling students to distinguish necessary qualities from desirable luxury qualities. Results. Students’ achievement goals corresponded to their views about the most essential instructor qualities. Mastery goals predicted greater demand for professors who intellectually challenge students and possess topic expertise, whereas performance goals predicted high demand for professors who present material clearly and provide cues about how to succeed in the course. Conclusions. The findings support emerging theorizing about how mastery and performance goals nudge students to pursue different learning agendas, with distinct consequences to their learning experience.     

‘Grandpa,Do You Like Roller Coasters?’: Identifying Age‐Appropriate Personality Indicators

Personality development research heavily relies on the comparison of scale means across age. This approach implicitly assumes that the scales are strictly measurement invariant across age. We questioned this assumption by examining whether appropriate personality indicators change over the lifespan. Moreover, we identified which types of items (e.g. dispositions, behaviours, and interests) are particularly prone to age effects. We reanalyzed the German Revised NEO Personality Inventory normative sample (N = 11,724) and applied a genetic algorithm to select short scales that yield acceptable model fit and reliability across locally weighted samples ranging from 16 to 66 years of age. We then examined how the item selection changes across age points and item types. Emotion‐type items seemed to be interchangeable and generally applicable to people of all ages. Specific interests, attitudes, and social effect items—most prevalent within the domains of Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Openness—seemed to be more prone to measurement variations over age. A large proportion of items were systematically discarded by the item‐selection procedure, indicating that, independent of age, many items are problematic measures of the underlying traits. The implications for personality assessment and personality development research are discussed. © 2019 European Association of Personality Psychology     

From the ‘Village of a Thousand Souls’ to ‘Race Crossing in Jamaica’: Arnold Gesell,eugenics and child development

Perhaps best known for providing age‐related norms in early development, norms that are still used as a basis for measures of developmental maturity, Arnold Gesell was a key figure in developmental psychology from the 1920s through the 1950s. After examining Gesell's reputation and status in the field, we explore Gesell's changing relationship to eugenics, both in terms of Gesell's often contradictory attitudes about the role of hereditary and environmental influences in development, and in terms of the broader relationship between the eugenics movement and science. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Community-Based Guidance: A ‘Tupperware Party’ Approach to Mid-Life Decision Making

This article examines a community-based approach to assisting women in their mid-life decisions through networking, peer-counseling, and professional support.     

‘A DESIRE UNTO DEATH’: THE DECONSTRUCTIVE THANATOLOGY OF JEAN‐LUC MARION*

One of the most persistent questions in modern theology has been that of how we can adequately acknowledge the stranger. Drawing upon the work of post‐Heideggerian theorist of language and death, Jacques Derrida, and his own creative re‐reading of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, the Catholic theologian and phenomenologist Jean‐Luc Marion has attempted to reconstruct what he regards as a genuinely Husserlian phenomenology. In so doing he has mapped out a phenomenology of love and a phenomenology of that divine gift as ‘being given as givenness’; that is, a condition of life itself. In fact, as I will argue, this rests on the boundary between theology and thanatology (the philosophy of our encounter with that most radical stranger, death) and in his recent reflections upon ‘saturated phenomena’ Marion has explored the interplay between traditional theological topics such as hope and death and contemporary arguments on meaning, symbol and ritual. Christian hope resides in an act of remembrance and Marion argues for the eucharist – in its recollection of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ – as the site of human hope; only this crucial eucharistic move upwards and outwards can overcome the burden of Western metaphysics. It is a literary move which takes us some way towards elevating the language which we use in talking about and recognising the other beyond that of the narrow model offered to us by some commentators of Levinas and one which encourages us to look again at poetry, hymn and Scripture.