Of matters of fact and psychological discourse

Abstract

We build our theories in psychology with words, but words are slippery things. We can hold them to our own purpose only for a while, and even then, they can change shape within our hands. Both in science and in everyday life, we use words not just to understand the world around us, but to communicate and share this understanding with others. As a result, we acquire a consensual view of the world that guides our behaviour and so affects the very reality we attempt to understand.     

Communicating Developmental Science to Nonscientists,or How to Write Something Even Your Family Will Want to Read

ABSTRACT

Developmental psychologists are increasingly writing articles, columns, books, and blogs for the general public, but this type of writing can be challenging. Here, I provide guidance on how to communicate scientific ideas to nonscientists, touching on what content to cover, how to organize that content, what language to use, and what tone to adopt. I highlight common shortcomings in how we package and describe our academic pursuits, and provide alternative strategies for writing about research in a clear and compelling manner.     

Breakdown in communication: On finding the child in the analysis of an adult

SUMMARY

In this paper a patient is described in whom communication with parts of herself and with her objects, internal and external, had broken down. I suggest that her way of communicating was achieved by projective identification, as described by Klein (1946) and Bion (1962). The only way she could deal with and communicate her own very “bothered” feelings was to “put them” into the analyst. In this way she “bothered” the maternal or analytic mind in such a way as to make the analyst experience feeling like a “bothered” child.

I have tried to show how the analyst holds or contains these feelings, and to show the gradual establishment in the patient of a different way of communicating with the analyst and with the more primitive parts of herself.     

Talking to Visitors about Conservation: Exploring Message Communication through Docent–Visitor Interactions at Zoos

ABSTRACT

Education personnel, both paid staff and volunteers, are often used at zoos and other museums as a channel to disseminate educational messages. This exploratory study examined the use of zoo docents to communicate key conservation messages from the zoo to visitors. The study was conducted in 2 phases using an emergent design with mixed methods. The findings suggest that visitors perceive docents to be an important source for conservation messages even though observed message communication through docent–visitor interactions was very limited. Docents view themselves as “facilitators for learning”, but their limited awareness of the institution's messages inhibits their ability to communicate these messages to visitors. Other factors that influence incidence of message communication are duration of the interaction, nature of the exhibit/region, and group composition. In this study, signage was found to be an effective channel for building cognitive awareness of messages among visitors.     

The Epistemology of Testimony: Fulfilling the Sincerity Condition

Abstract

In this paper I aim to defend the claim that we are a priori entitled to accept that a speaker is being sincere, unless there are positive reasons not to. I look initially at the trust approach to testimony, which claims affective trust plays an epistemic role in our coming to believe that a speaker is being sincere. My claim is that this view is mistaken, and yet has something important to say in recognising the essential difference between testimony and other forms of evidence. This difference is intentionality. It is my view that in exploring the real intentions behind assertions we can discover why it is that we have an a priori entitlement to accept that a speaker is being sincere. If we recognise that intending to communicate is intending to transfer belief, then we must recognise that intending to communicate entails sincerity. A hearer is entitled to accept that an assertion which is explicitly offered as communication is in fact sincere.     

The Confluence of Technology and Narrative Approaches in Group Work

Abstract

This article illustrates procedures for using e-journals as a creative and adjunctive approach in group work. Incorporating e-mail based journaling as an ancillary form of group interaction allows members to communicate via written channels, and creates new ways for clients to relate in the group. This article outlines how leaders can use narrative theory to construct e-mail based writing exercises in group settings. Borrowing from established narrative techniques, specific interventions are provided for using interactive e-mails in each group stage. Finally, detailed instructions for establishing encrypted and confidential e-mail communications are provided, and implications and limitations for establishing e-mail based communication systems are overviewed.     

Adolescent Decisional Autonomy Regarding Participation in an Emergency Department Youth Violence Interview

Much attention has been given to determining whether an adolescent patient has the capacity to consent to research. This study explores the factors that influence adolescents' decisions to participate in a research study about youth violence and to determine positive or negative feelings elicited by being a research subject. The majority of subjects perceived their decision to participate to be free of coercion, and few felt badly about having participated. However, adolescents who were alone in the room during the assent process were more likely to report that they chose freely to be a research subject. This study may influence the ways physicians communicate with adolescent patients around research assent within a clinical care environment.     

Non-Speech Based Pastoral Care: A Pastoral Care Program for Aged Care Residents with Little or No Ability to Speak

SUMMARY

Pastoral care depends on the ability to communicate, most commonly through the medium of speech. The aged person who has suffered illness or accident that has adversely affected their speech, is in great need of pastoral care. Yet chaplains and pastoral carers can feel helpless in the face of such a significant deficit and may not know what to do. At Tregenza Avenue Aged Care Service, the Chaplaincy service has developed helpful individual programs for non-speech based pastoral care. Using visual and tactile symbols, pictures, touch, and music, we have been able to minister to people with a variety of speech problems, with promising results.     

“I Am Just an Ordinary Person …”: Spiritual Reminiscence in Older People with Memory Loss

SUMMARY

One of the greatest challenges to people diagnosed with dementia is their search for meaning leading to the development of effective coping strategies as their memory loss and confusion progresses. The challenge for carers is to learn ways of entering the world of people who have difficulties communicating and have behaviour problems, assisting them to communicate more effectively by responding to their interests and needs, and listening to their emotions expressed in various ways. Strategies are being developed for supporting and affirming personhood in those people who are often isolated and withdrawn from even their closest friends and relatives. Spiritual reminiscence work is one way of helping older people with memory loss find meaning in their lives as they cope with the day to day difficulties of memory loss and prepare for death.

This paper will present the results from indepth interviews from 16 participants in a larger study exploring memory loss and spiritual reminiscence. Themes arising from the data analysis revolve around notions of relationships, loneliness, family and attendance at worship.     

Extreme Traumatisation: Strategies for Mental Survival

Sincerity: a Study in the Atmosphere of Human Relations, a previously unpublished book, appearing in D. Meltzer's Collected Papers, explores The Dwarfs, The Birthday Party and The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, both the capacity to communicate genuine emotion and its limitation by the subject's inability to say-what-he-means, because of rigidity and coldness, and to mean-what-he-says, because of an integrated narcissistic structure. That the language of dreams is perhaps the lingua franca of emotionality and the key to aesthetics is the book's conclusion, with a clear indication of the books to come. This article surveys the relevance of the notion of sincerity in Meltzer's further work, in its clinical and metapsychological aspects.     

The Design of an Information Literacy Program at a Non-Traditional Seminary

ABSTRACT

The exponential growth in information resources and the new demands of the information age have put increasing demands upon faculty and students to access appropriate information quickly, to process that information with critical thinking skills, and to communicate both verbally and in writing a product that is practical, interesting, and meaningful. The job of teaching of research methods must include the integral components of an information literacy program. Students need to be encouraged to expertly retrieve the information required for the writing of a paper. They must be helped to think critically, synthesizing ideas and concepts from the numerous information sources.

It is vital that the faculty and librarian at Seminary of the East work together to develop a comprehensive information literacy program that is not only supported by both faculty and library staff, but periodically evaluated to validate the program and to measure its progress in addressing the information literacy needs of both students and faculty.     

Activities of the member societies

Abstract

The impact and legacy of Karen Horney 1885-1952

The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology White Institute Elects New Editor

News from the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, New York, USA

News from Brazil:

Conferences

The Karen Horney Psychoanalytic Institute and Center

The William Alanson White Institute

The VII Scientific Conference of IFPS was held in Munich, August 26-29th 1992. Theme: Psychoanalysis between conformity and opposition.

The V Nordic Conference for members from IFPS Societies in Finland, Norway and Sweden will be held near Stockholm, January 23-24, 1993.     

Verbal cues flexibly transform spatial representations in human memory

ABSTRACT

Humans possess a unique ability to communicate spatially-relevant information, yet the intersection between language and navigation remains largely unexplored. One possibility is that verbal cues accentuate heuristics useful for coding spatial layouts, yet this idea remains largely untested. We test the idea that verbal cues flexibly accentuate the coding of heuristics to remember spatial layouts via spatial boundaries or landmarks. The alternative hypothesis instead conceives of encoding during navigation as a step-wise process involving binding lower-level features, and thus subsequently formed spatial representations should not be modified by verbal cues. Across three experiments, we found that verbal cues significantly affected pointing error patterns at axes that were aligned with the verbally cued heuristic, suggesting that verbal cues influenced the heuristics employed to remember object positions. Further analyses suggested evidence for a hybrid model, in which boundaries were encoded more obligatorily than landmarks, but both were accessed flexibly with verbal instruction. These findings could not be accounted for by a tendency to spend more time facing the instructed component during navigation, ruling out an attentional-encoding mechanism. Our findings argue that verbal cues influence the heuristics employed to code environments, suggesting a mechanism for how humans use language to communicate navigationally-relevant information.     

Statement of Removal

The Journal, Publisher and Author have agreed to remove this article having received expressions of concern regarding the representation of certain clinical data.

For more information, please contact the Publisher or Editor of this Journal.

Article title: Thinking Developmentally: A Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspective

Authors: Sally Bloom-Feshbach

Journal: Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy

Citation information: Volume 17, Number 2, pages 91–95

Version of Record Published Online: 31 May 2018

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15289168.2018.1456122     

The role of philosophy and ethics at the edges of medicine

Background

The purpose of this study is to make a philosophical argument against the phenomenological critique of standardization in clinical ethics. We used the context of clinical ethics in Saudi Arabia to demonstrate the importance of credentialing clinical ethicists.

Methods

Philosophical methods of argumentation and conceptual analysis were used.

Results

We found the phenomenological critique of standardization to be flawed because it relies on a series of false dichotomies.

Conclusions

We concluded that the phenomenological framing of the credentialing debate relies upon two extreme views to be navigated between, not chosen among, in the credentialing of clinical ethicists.

     

Audience with a Healer

Up From Scapegoating: Awakening Consciousness in Groups. 1995. By Arthur D. Colman Wilmette, IL: Chiron.

The Wounded Jung. (1996). By Robert C. Smith Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

The Body: An Encyclopedia for Research in Archetypal Symbolism. 1996. By George R. Elder Boston: Shambhala.

Gifts of Suffering. 1996. By Polly Young-Eisendrath New York; Addison-Wesley Co.

The Religious Function of die Psyche. 1996. By Lionel Corbett London &; New York: Routledge.

Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy. 1996. By Hayao Kawai College Station, TX: Texas A &; M University Press.

The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling. 1996. By James Hillman New York: Random House.

Kinds of Power A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses. 1995. By James Hillman New York: Doubleday.

Psychotherapy as a Mutual Process. 1996. By J. Marvin Spiegelman Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publications.

Soul Cards. By Deborah Koff-Chapin 1995. Langley, WA: The Center for Touch Drawing.     

Engaging Ethics

Abstract

Reflections Upon Reflections

Research As Praxis: Lessons From Programmatic Research In Therapeutic Practice Research in Therapeutic Practice edited by Lisa Tsoi Hoshmand and Jack Martin New York: Teachers College Press, 1995, 252 pp.

Revisioning Supervision

Visual and Active Supervision New York: Norton, 1995, 256 pp. by Antony Williams