Reconsideration of “Motherhood” in Contemporary Japan

In this paper, the author reconsiders motherhood in Japan. This reconsideration is based on Japanese psychoanalytic knowledge and a case study of a woman. As a child she was physically abused by her father, and struggled throughout her life with conflicts with her mother. The Japanese have historically idealized the concept of motherhood and maintained that it was possible for women to become the ideal mother for their children. The author maintains that motherhood is not dependent only on mothers, but is created and shared by fathers, children and all of society. In psychotherapy, the therapist provides a motherly energy to the client and shares the motherhood fantasy with the client to a certain extent. The therapist assists the client in the gradual process of abandoning the desire to be loved by the ideal mother and accept motherhood from other sources.Kiyoko Kamibeppu, R.N., Ph.D., Associate Professor, The University of Tokyo, Clinical Psychologist, Japanese Association for Clinical Psychology. Address correspondence to Kiyoko Kamibeppu, Department of Family Nursing, Faculty of Medicine, Graduate School of Health and Nursing, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1, Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan; e-mail: kkamibeppu-tky@umin.ac.jp.     

Treating the “Wise Baby”

In a previous examination of Ferenczis concept of the Wise Baby (1996), I had noted both its applications and its limitations in the analytic treatment of an unusually intelligent adult. Ferenczis concepts of the origin of intellect in trauma and of the wise baby have often left the indistinct impression of being interrelated phenomena. In this paper, I regard as arguable the notion that very high intelligence is pathological when it is precocious. This return visit to the territory of the wise baby extends Ferenczis ideas about the origin and use of the intellect to include a consideration of what may constitute effective treatment for those who suffer from giftedness.Judith E. Vida, M.D. edits On the Arts for this journal. She is a Founding Member and Faculty of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, CA, a member of both American and International Psychoanalytic Associations, and of the Sándor Ferenczi Society of Budapest. Her private practice is in Pasadena, CA.Address correspondence to Judith E. Vida, 301 S. Fair Oaks Ave., Suite 406A, Pasadena, CA 91105, USA; e-mail: jvida@spence.net     

Completeness and Decidability Results for Some Propositional Modal Logics Containing “Actually” Operators

The addition of actually operators to modal languages allows us to capture important inferential behaviours which cannot be adequately captured in logics formulated in simpler languages. Previous work on modal logics containing actually operators has concentrated entirely upon extensions of KT5 and has employed a particular model-theoretic treatment of them. This paper proves completeness and decidability results for a range of normal and nonnormal but quasi-normal propositional modal logics containing actually operators, the weakest of which are conservative extensions of K, using a novel generalisation of the standard semantics.     

Remarks on Gregory's “Actually” Operator

In this note we show that the classical modal technology of Sahlqvist formulas gives quick proofs of the completeness theorems in [8] (D. Gregory, Completeness and decidability results for some propositional modal logics containing actually operators, Journal of Philosophical Logic 30(1): 57–78, 2001) and vastly generalizes them. Moreover, as a corollary, interpolation theorems for the logics considered in [8] are obtained. We then compare Gregory's modal language enriched with an actually operator with the work of Arthur Prior now known under the name of hybrid logic. This analysis relates the actually axioms to standard hybrid axioms, yields the decidability results in [8], and provides a number of complexity results. Finally, we use a bisimulation argument to show that the hybrid language is strictly more expressive than Gregory's language.     

The Impact of ‘the Dream’ on Women's Experience of the Midlife Transition

Daniel Levinson's claim for the universality of age-linked periods is considered highly controversial considering that his theory evolved from a study consisting of males only. Theories relating to women's development, particularly at midlife, are somewhat scarce and restricted. Using Levinson's theory of adult development as a framework, the present study retrospectively examined the Dream and its impact on women's psychological health and adjustment to the Midlife Transition. Three hundred midlife women completed a questionnaire examining Dream Status, Dream Content, Dream Success, and the psychological health variables, depression, anxiety, self-esteem, and life satisfaction. Dream Success was significantly related to psychological health on dimensions of well-being and composure, and interesting changes were observed in Dream Content across the early and current Dream. Our findings revealed that, despite the overall greater complexity of women's Dreams, Levinson's theory is largely applicable to women's development.     

Creating “Maneuvering Room”: A Grounded Theory of Language and Influence in Marriage and Family Therapy

Influence in psychotherapy has been described as a characteristic of the therapist, a characteristic of the therapeutic relationship, and a negotiated process. This study combines grounded theory and task analysis to explore language patterns in facilitating change in family therapy. Thirty-one episodes of therapy were analyzed, resulting in the emergent concept of creating maneuvering room. Therapists introduce uncertainty into clients beliefs about problems then offer new ways of defining problems by speaking from three dimensions: therapist as expert or non-expert, therapist as participant or observer, or family members experiences as similar or different. The findings of this study support a possible common factor in family therapy.     

A Work in Progress

After expressing gratitude to each contributor, and briefly commenting on each, I probe several main themes of my work, addressing the question of the apparent difference between my earlier philosophical and later clinical writings. Central to both is the reflexivity of the human agent, and that each exhibits a form of practice regardless of the specific aims embedded in each. I then address the theme of narrative writing as my work has developed over the past several decades – at the heart of which are questions of self and integrity.     

Bringing “The Dead” to Life: Reading James Joyce

The author offers a personal reading of James Joyce's The Dead. She focuses on how the sounds of the language are used to portray the main character's deadness and his beginning to come to life once the barriers to inner self and self-knowledge are broken.     

Lordship, Bondage, and the Formation of Homo Religiosus

After a brief exploration of Hegel's writing on the formation of self-consciousness, including the place of religiosity in this formation, the article examines Kojeve's response to a Hegelian homo religiosus, followed by a counter-response to Kojeve's atheism through a peculiar, Jaspersian reading of Erich Fromm's discussion of the x experience. Finally, it will be argued that the desire for mutual recognition, and humanity's yearning for transcendence, are essential experiences in the formation of self-consciousness.     

What did mummy say? Dyadic interactions between young "hard to manage" children and their mothers

Thirty preschoolers rated as hard to manage on Goodman's (R. Goodman, 1997) Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), and a group of matched control children were observed and recorded on audiotape at home, interacting with their mothers (Time 1). At the 18-month follow-up home visits (Time 2), the children and mothers were filmed across 4 observation settings. Mother–child interactions were rated on affect, control, responsiveness and connectedness of communication. At Time 1, mothers of the hard to manage group used more negative control and engaged in fewer connected conversations than did mothers in the control group. At Time 2, mothers of the hard to manage group displayed higher levels of negative control and lower levels of positive control. These results are discussed in terms of the importance of examining connected communication and different observation contexts when examining dyadic mother–child interactions.     

A narwhal is an animal: partial word knowledge biases adults' decisions

Adults' accuracy on a sentence verification task was measured to assess reliable biases in their responses as a function of their level of knowledge about the target words, as well as adults' ability to reject incorrect ontological category membership for their partially known words. Three levels of word knowledge (known, frontier, and unknown) were assessed in two experiments. Results indicated that participants were conservative decision-makers about sentences using the vocabulary words and that the conservative bias increased in strength as their level of knowledge about the target word increased. When biased guessing was discouraged, results indicated that participants were able to accurately identify both correct and incorrect sentences using targets at all three levels of knowledge, including their partially known words, but were least reliable at rejecting false sentences using unknown targets. Implications for the role of knowing not in adults' vocabulary acquisition are discussed.     

The Factor Structure of the Beavers Interactional Scales

Confirmatory factor analysis and regression analyses of the Beavers Interactional Scales did not appear to support the model offered by its developers, namely, several specified family attributes contributing respectively to two global factors of Family Competence and Family Style. Moreover, regression analysis indicated that only three of 12 items predicted raters' assessments of Global Family Health, and one of seven items predicted Global Family Style. Individuals interested in the family dynamic centripetal/centrifugal might best think of that as a unitary entity and rate it accordingly.     

“The Dead”

Gabriel Conroy, central to James Joyce's novella, The Dead, keys the reader's experience of the evening portrayed. A third-person narration allows for distance, but Gabriel's closely depicted thought processes and actions, and his insistent self-consciousness, shape the story. As such they invite psychoanalytic interpretation and reward it. Gabriel's shocking discovery and reaction to it can be seen to be informed by rendered psychodynamics and a credible internalized past. Joyce and Freud, actual contemporaries, can be seen as contemporaneous in imagination as well.     

Rereading sophistical arguments: A political intervention

This essay argues that Aristotle's categories of oratory are not as useful in judging the methods of Sophistical rhetoric as his presentation of time. The Sophistical argumentative method of making the weaker the stronger case is re-evaluated as a political practice. After showing this argument's relation to power and ideology, Aristotle's philosophy, which privileges a procedure of argument consistent with the politics of a polis-ideal rhetoric, is offered as reason for objecting to Sophistical rhetoric. The essay concludes that Sophistical rhetoric prefers the concept of possibility over Aristotelian actuality, and offers a need for an ideological space of radical, generative possibility in rhetorical theory.     

Operative Group Dynamics in School Settings: Structuring to Enhance Educational, Social, and Emotional Progress

This article will describe the dynamics taking place in school settings, particularly in classrooms. Literature pertaining to the use of group dynamics in classrooms will be presented. A number of significant group therapy concepts will be addressed. These will include group-as-a-whole, group structure, transference-countertransference, the school and the classroom as holding environments, and therapeutic factors. Some practical dynamic strategies that are meant to strengthen group operations in classroom will also be included. The article will be guided by the writer's personal experiences within school settings and classrooms.     

Inferential Intensionality

The paper is a study of properties of quasi-consequence operation which is a key notion of the so-called inferential approach in the theory of sentential calculi established in [5]. The principal motivation behind the quasi-consequence, q-consequence for short, stems from the mathematical practice which treats some auxiliary assumptions as mere hypotheses rather than axioms and their further occurrence in place of conclusions may be justified or not. The main semantic feature of the q-consequence reflecting the idea is that its rules lead from the non-rejected assumptions to the accepted conclusions.First, we focus on the syntactic features of the framework and present the q-consequence as related to the notion of proof. Such a presentation uncovers the reasons for which the adjective inferential is used to characterize the approach and, possibly, the term inference operation replaces q-consequence. It also shows that the inferential approach is a generalisation of the Tarski setting and, therefore, it may potentially absorb several concepts from the theory of sentential calculi, cf. [10]. However, as some concrete applications show, see e.g.[4], the new approach opens perspectives for further exploration.The main part of the paper is devoted to some notions absent, in Tarski approach. We show that for a given q-consequence operation W instead of one W-equivalence established by the properties of W we may consider two congruence relations. For one of them the current name is kept preserved and for the other the term W-equality is adopted. While the two relations coincide for any W which is a consequence operation, for an arbitrary W the inferential equality and the inferential equivalence may differ. Further to this we introduce the concepts of inferential extensionality and intensionality for q-consequence operations and connectives. Some general results obtained in Section 2 sufficiently confirm the importance of these notions. To complete a view, in Section 4 we apply the new intensionality-extensionality distinction to inferential extensions of a version of the ukasiewicz four valued modal logic.     

Mel Gibson’s Big Gamble: <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Passion of Christ</Emphasis>

Mel Gibsons film is a creative reworking of opportunities provided by migrating to Australia as a boy and a life-long desire to be reconciled to his father, Hutton Gibson. If the film is read as a study in psychology and biography, then biblical and theological critiques, along with contemporary politically correct stances towards what Gibson did, can be set temporarily aside in search of a larger trajectory of meaning implicit in the film. The embodied nature of the film, along with other violent films in which Gibson starred in the past three decades, points to wellsprings of power in the blood. Violence becomes an idiom of reconciliation with authority. Gibsons relationship to his father plays a major role in such a reading of the film. A continuous reconciliation with his father is evident not only in thematic continuities over the course of Mel Gibsons professional acting career and starring roles. It also structures the directors construction of Christs Passion. A desire not to be forsaken gives rise to this idiosyncratic and controversial film, itself a cinematic statement about Gibsons own personal spiritual torment.Richard A. Hutch is Director of Studies of the Faculty of Arts and Reader in Religion and Psychological Studies in the School of History, Philosophy, Religion, and Classics at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia 4072.     

Relationship between psychological stress and lymphocytic 5′-ectonucleotidase

The relationship between psychological stress and lymphocytic 5-ectonucleotidase, an enzyme marker for lymphocyte differentiation, was studied. Lymphocytic 5-ectonucleotidase was decreased significantly by about twofold in persons experiencing psychological stress, with a corresponding change in Total Mood Disturbance scores of the Profile of Mood States. Enzyme values were reversible in that they returned to normal once the stress had been reduced. Administration of high doses of ascorbate to severely depressed patients also normalized 5-ectonucleotidase activities, and implied that low enzyme values in stressed persons may be mediated by oxygen radical damage. This finding was consistent with previous reports of heightened inflammatory responses occurring in depressed patients. The primary cause of lowered 5-ectonucleotidase during stress may be the breakdown in the homeostatic mechanisms of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and immune system resulting in lymphoid tissue resistance to corticosteroids. It is suggested that this lowering of lymphocyte 5-ectonucleotidase may contribute to stress-mediated immune suppression by inhibiting lymphocyte maturation.     

Betrayal And Paranoia: The Psychotherapist's Function as an Intermediary

We present an approach to the problem of structuring a therapeutic alliance with patients presenting paranoid symptoms, using both psychoanalytical and cognitive techniques. Initially, we focused on one of the main aspects of the paranoid worldview: the fear of being betrayed and the tendency to betray. This is a defense maneuver, through which patients deny their passivity, and the impotence in the relationship with their own internal needs and with the significant people in the external world, including the therapist. In our experience to build up a working relationship, both a psychoanalytical interpretation of unconscious conflicts and the cognitive analysis of dysfunctional beliefs are needed. Often, in more serious cases, the role of nonqualified object must be accepted at the beginning, due to the patient's need to be in control of the situation. Only then can a therapeutic phase begin, in most cases, through an integrated approach that includes pharmacological, psychodynamic, and cognitive modalities.