Memoirs of a Mentor: Using Creativity for Counselors in Coping With the Loss of a Mentor

This article was inspired by my (S.S.) own personal loss. My mentor passed away during spring break of my 2nd year postgraduate school after a short battle with systemic lupus. I remember the deep sadness that I felt when it became apparent that she was coming home from the hospital for the last time. No words can describe the emotions; she had helped me through the toughest times in my academic life. How would I ever get the type of mentorship she provided again? She was there when I almost quit as a young student, back when my anger still got the best of me. She talked me down from the edge so many times; I never expected to be on this journey without her.

I dedicate this article to her and mentors like her. Equally, I dedicate this article to mentees who have lost their mentors. I offer my story (in italicized font) in the hopes that it will help others who are dealing with a similar loss. In this article, we attempt to illuminate the true power of mentorship, honor the significance of the relationship between mentor and mentee, and provide a tool useful to anyone who has lost their guide. I share my story in gratitude for my own mentor; I am so thankful that she was a part of my journey and that I can pass on to others the patience she had with me.     

Edna Heidbreder: Systematic and Cognitive Psychologist

After completing her undergraduate degree at Knox College in 1911, Edna Heidbreder was a high school teacher of history for several years. She began her graduate work at the University of Wisconsin where she received a master's degree in philosophy in 1918. Undertaking doctoral work in psychology at Columbia she completed her Ph.D. in 1924 and was offered a position in the Psychology Department at the University of Minnesota. There she remained until 1934 when she accepted a position in the Department of Psychology at Wellesley College which she held until her retirement in 1955. Two lines of interest persisted throughout her career: her work in cognition and systematic psychology. Her book Seven Psychologies published in 1933 has received praise in reviews spanning four decades. Heidbreder views the women of her generation as working during a period when there was a lull in women's rights activism. She believes that most women during that period felt that the best way to improve their situation was to prove that they could be competent professionals as the women pioneers had claimed women could. She believes that today women remain at a disadvantage compared to men in psychology primarily because of the pervasive stereotypes in our society which make it difficult for men to take the intellectual interests and abilities of women seriously.     

Encounters with raven

I have been visited by Eurydice. She first came to me, unbidden, unexpected, in the way things usually first come to me–in a poem. But there was something different about how this poem happened. On one of my Fridays devoted to writing, I was suddenly hijacked by Eurydice's point of view, her voice, her demand that I speak for her. She was shrill. She was insistent. She gave me no choice but to work on the poem till I had gotten it how she wanted it. She feels she has been much neglected and misunderstood, and she let me know a poem was not enough. It was just the beginning. She wants prose. She wants essays. She wants public presentations. She wants me to tell her version of the story.     

Allergic to People: Building Bridges in a Ripped Psychic-Soma

An exploration of the use mind/body metaphors in a woman whose physical, environmental and psychoneurotic trauma culminated in an irreversible colostomy. She lived in a world of concrete symbols, her primary process damaged such that she could not create generative symbols to process her trauma. She regressed to a state of infantile megalomania, recoiling from the external reality of subjective others. Her introjective disorder mirrored her digestive disorder as she could absorb neither good objects nor good nutrients. The analytic situation has been an auxiliary fecal container and we work to bridge her mind body split with mind/body metaphors. As she reclaims lost development mastery, she displays a symbolized sphincter. As her capacity to form symbols grows, she rages and mourns for the loss of her fantasized ideal parents and her ideal body.     

On mirroring in group psychotherapy

“A woman has two images. There is a magical person seen or remembered by those who love her, her finest qualities are flesh and spirit illuminated. She herself knows this ideal self; she projects it, if she is confident; or she daydreams her ideal self; or she recognizes it with gratitude in the admiring eye of others. There is at the same time a second image; the woman as seen by those who dislike or fear her. This cruel picture has an all too powerful mirror in her own negative idea of herself. She sees with fear her own ravaging impulses and most painful of all, a graceless, freakish, and unlovable physical self, this was the mirror her parents held before Edith. Her brothers saw her with love. She herself knew both images. Her life, and her poetry, constituted a flight from the second one.”     

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.     

Living in with Normal Families

Connie Hansen participated in my project, “Methodology for Studying Family Interaction,” in the mid 1960s. One of the purposes of that project was to compare several groups of families, including “normals.” Connie suggested that it might provide a rich source of data if she were to “live in” with a few of the “normal” families and observe them day to day on their own territory. (A year or so before, Dr. Jules Henry had given a talk to the MRI staff about living-in with “schizogenic” families, and I believe that Connie had discussed her idea with him.) Connie was an experienced family therapist — she was one of Virginia Satir's first students — and a most perceptive observer. She lived with three “normal” families for a week each during 1966–67; she was excited by the wealth of material and exhausted by the experience. She tried to develop a group of central themes from her data and gave me a preliminary draft of a paper in 1969. It clearly contained a number of important observations about the complexities and subtleties of family systems and some beginning attempts at conceptualization. She struggled for years to clarify and elaborate on her material. Several times she sent me portions and fragments of new drafts, each with additional insights, but she was never satisfied with her efforts. It seems a fitting tribute to Connie — she died early in 1979 — to attempt to put together her various drafts. We wanted to publish this very important material in a readable form and yet still preserve the immediateness, enthusiasm, and vividness of her observations. I hope, that if she were to read it, she would not be overly critical of this final draft. JULES RISKIN, M.D. It is a special privilege for me to participate in this posthumous publication of Connie Hansen's unique contribution to the further knowledge of family interaction. She died before the material could be published. I feel particular gratitude to the young woman who entered my first training program in 1961 at the Mental Research Institute. This was a time when such training seemed “far out” and was regarded as “probably only a fad.” She was willing to face the risks inherent to her professional standing by choosing to do this training. It was this same courage together with her imagination and curiosity and her willingness to document her experience without judging it that resulted in the article now being published. Farewell, Connie, and thank you for your presence in my life. VIRGINIA M.SATIR     

An Analysis of the Effectiveness of the Intervention

SUMMARY

In this chapter, I examine the specific problem Betty had with her children because, in many ways, it represents the problems most of the volunteers had with their children. Her problem was the most extreme among the participants, and she involved the other volunteers in helping her look for a solution. The vignette that follows comes from my field logs, and it is followed with a layered response from Betty's peers. The vignette offers a close look at Betty's problems with her daughters and the dilemma she experienced in relation to coming to work when her children needed her. Betty told her story to Esther, Dolores, and me one morning in the dayroom.     

Countertransference revisited

A female patient of mine recounts her week. I listen with interest, waiting for her to arrive at particular conclusions. She has suffered a great deal and still does, but prefers not to dwell on it. My interest turns into patience as she continues to talk but circumvents her discontent. She is adroit at avoidance, but easily offended when I point such things out. "I'd better wait" I think. I grow more aware that I must encourage her digressions. I feel frustrated. Getting further and further away, she skirts the issue with supple grace, then strays off into tangentiality. I forget her point and lose my focus, then get down on myself. The opportunity is soon gone. I glance at the clock as her monologue drones on into banality. I grow more uninterested and distant. There is a subtle irritation to her voice; a whiney indecisive ring begins to pervade my consciousness. I home in on her mouth with aversion, watching apprehensively as this disgusting hole flaps tirelessly but says nothing. It looks carnivorous, voracious. Now she is unattractive, something I have noticed before. I forget who my next patient is. I think about the meal I will prepare for my wife this evening, then glance at the time once more. Then I am struck: Why am I looking at the clock? So soon? The session has just begun. I catch myself. What is going on in me, between us? I am detached, but why? Is she too feeling unattuned, disconnected? I am failing my patient. What is her experience of me? I lamentingly confess that I do not feel I have been listening to her, and wonder what has gone wrong between us. I ask her if she has noticed. We talk about our feelings, our impact on one another, why we had lost our sense of connection, what it means to us. I instantly feel more involved, rejuvenated, and she continues, this time with me present. Her mouth is no longer odious, but sincere and articulate. She is attractive and tender; I suddenly feel empathy and warmth toward her. We are now very close. I am moved. Time flies, the session is soon over; we do not want it to end.     

The Body Doesn't Lie: Five Tales of Superobesity as Somatic Language

The bodies of the five patients described here seemed to signal their ongoing dilemma: they could not fully grow up and therefore resorted to a somatic language that fairly shouted to be recognized. The author presents the case histories from an unusual point of view: She reaches her patients by working with the incomplete body images in both verbal and nonverbal modes. While the patients are on the couch, she uses verbal interpretations. When pre- and nonverbal phenomena raise their heads, she uses dance therapeutic interventions. She describes how and what she does with her patients from the point of view that motility is another way to reach the unconscious. Some of her patients were able to use movement improvisation like free association. Her highly sophisticated conceptualizations about the why and how of superobesity shine a new light on the etiology of this particular syndrome     

A second Leonardo da Vinci?

We describe a young woman who suddenly began mirror writing with her right hand and has not reverted to normal writing for more than 6 years, although she writes normally with her left hand. She is ambidextrous, although she had previously used only her right hand for writing and drawing. Since it is much easier for her to use right-handed mirror writing, she uses her left hand only for writing meant to be read by others and her right hand for all other writing. Her hobbies are sculpture and painting, and her chief complaint is migraine accompanied by sensory and perceptive disturbances.     

A body with chronic fatigue syndrome as a battleground for the fight to separate from the mother

I describe the therapy of a 20-year-old woman who believed that her difficulties in concentrating and remembering were caused by her 'ME' (Myalgic encephalomyelitis, Chronic fatigue syndrome, or CFS). She had been fathered by a man who never left his own wife. Work with her dreams revealed a within-body drama in which she was locked in an unspeakable fight to the death with her mother. Her symptoms improved after parallels between a dream and an accident showed her own self-destructive hand in her story. Another dream, reflecting her first 'incestuous' affair, showed her search for her original father-self as someone separate from mother, and a later affair provided a between-body drama, helping her to own the arrogant and abject traits she had before seen only as her mother's. I show how we worked in the area of Winnicott's first 'primitive agony' as experienced by a somatizing patient, stuck in a too-close destructive relationship with her mother-body. I discuss how analytical work can be done with the primitive affects and conflicts against which the ME symptoms may be defending.     

Impediments to the development of attachment

The function of the mother's reverie, as described by Bion, is viewed as a psychological parallel, following birth, to the physical function of the placenta.

Clinical material from psychotherapy with a 3 1/2-year-old girl illustrates that, as long as she maintained the delusion of being attached to her mother's body by a physical placenta, she was hindered from learning to experience herself as a separate individual and from developing normal feelings of attachment and grief over loss.

She was referred soon after her parents' separation when she showed a lack of reaction to the loss of her father. The material suggests that at the time of separation from her father she regressed to an earlier stage where there had already been a failure to work through infantile separation and individuation from her mother

The material reveals stages of her emergence from an illusory state of union, into one in which she could increasingly tolerate her separate existence. There followed an enrichment of her psychological means of communication through the use of imagination and symbolic play. She also became more receptive to her therapist's communications and could increasingly use psychological support to share and face inner pain.     

Norine G. Johnson (1935-2011)

On November 19, 2011, Norine G. Johnson, the ninth woman to serve as president of the American Psychological Association (APA), lost a valiant battle with cancer. Norine's curiosity about her grandmother's strength led to much of her later work on the development of strength and resiliency in adolescent girls and in women. She received her doctorate in 1972, with a minor in child development, and she became one of the first to be considered a pediatric psychologist, a newly emerging specialty. Norine became involved in organized psychology as her children got older. When she learned there had not been a woman president of the Massachusetts Psychological Association (MPA) for almost 50 years, she was appalled. An ardent feminist, who had served on MPA's Board of Directors, she could not let the situation remain that way. She ran for president and won, serving from 1981 to 1983, and then mentored many women colleagues into the role. MPA sent her to the Council of the APA as one of their representatives, and she immediately ran for a seat on the Finance Committee, later serving as chair of the committee. During her tenure on the Finance Committee, she helped create financial policy that changed APA from an organization whose assets were threatened and shrinking to a financially solid association. Norine considered Division 35 (Psychology of Women) to be her home in APA, a place filled with warmth, collegiality, and shared values. She and Judith Worell spearheaded the extremely important and successful 1993 National Conference on Education and Training in Feminist Practice. Norine was elected to the APA Board of Directors in 1997, where she served with distinction, continuing to focus on the financial well-being of the Association. Not surprisingly, she went from that role to being elected APA president. Her focus as president was on the changes in the health care delivery system in the United States. She was a staunch champion of the biopsychosocial model of health. Under her presidential leadership, the APA Mission Statement was amended to add the word "health," confirming the importance of health to the psychological community. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Simone Weil’s Passion Mysticism: The Paradox of Chronic Pain and the Transformation of the Cross

Simone Weil’s theology is deeply connected to her experiences with chronic pain. Pain is paradoxical in that it is an essentially private phenomenon yet it simultaneously demands to be shared with another. Weil’s life and thought exemplify both aspects of this paradox, demonstrating how her pain alienated her from her own body and from others, and how her thought found full expression as she attempted to share experiences with pain. Weil’s experience of pain was transformed in her passion mysticism, the deep connection she felt with the crucified Christ. In this connection, the most unbearable aspect of her pain, the threat, which it presented to her very self through annihilation, was absorbed into the cross and transformed by God’s love. While this did not necessarily diminish Weil’s pain, the meaning it had for her as a person was transformed through an encounter with Christ crucified, in which she experienced God’s suffering along with her.     

Ana?s Nin and the developmental use of the creative process.

Ana?s Nin had the capacity to work through the wound of self-injury through the combination of poetic and analytic exploration demonstrated in her writing. She recreated her father, and confronted the fallacies of her idealization, as well as the suppressed anger that kept her enslaved in wishes for his mirroring admiration. There was no escape from injury for Nin. After the father's departure, she scrutinized herself for flaws, trying to discover a reason for her father's betrayal. Yet, the humiliation was modified by some knowledge of the narcissistic bind that she was in, and by some evidence that her father was unworthy of the kind of worship that she clung to from childhood. Nin transcends retaliation. Her fictional abandonment of her father does not come from vindictiveness. Rather, it comes through growing insight into herself and into her own needs. There is a letting-go of past fantasies of idealization, and a mourning process that is based on both awareness and acceptance of the disappointments in these idealized fantasies. Separation and loss stem from surrendering the fusion with the idealized object and its counterpart grandiose self, a grandiose self seen here as a false self that exists through resonating with image projections and their reflections.     

Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941): mysticism and worship

This article focuses on some themes in the work of Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941). It is now over a century since she began work on the first version of Mysticism (1911). She was a pioneer not only in the study she undertook for this book, but in the specifically Christian theology she was bold enough to work out from it, with Christ in person the paradigm mystic. The Latin Mass of her day she deemed both as recapitulating Christ's own experience, as well as re-presenting the stability and growth of his ‘Body’ present at the Eucharist. Once recommitted to the Church of England in 1921, at a time of liturgical revision and in a deeply troubled political era, her concentration on Christ's sacrifice led her to embrace pacifism as the world lurched towards World War II. Her theological work, summed up in her final major book Worship (1936), reveals her continuing preoccupation with the question of how Christology integrates with liturgy, and therefore with the living of a distinctively Christian life.     

Final Insults & Other Family Matters

We didn't want to put her in a nursing home. Until the last minute, and even after that, we believed it could be otherwise. I'd plan to fly Mom down to stay with me. I painted the guest room and made lace curtains. My sister mentally arranged and rearranged the furniture in her apartment, converting the livingroorn into a bedroom for Mom. But in the end, our mother's dying overwhelmed us. She was so difficult, so unhappy to be dying, and not about to impart: words of wisdom and comfort from her deathbed. The medication, Dilaudid, made her very dark, like she used to get on alcohol. Mean things bubbled out of her mouth. When I came to take her home after her second stay in the hospital, she frowned at me and said, “You're not even the person I want to see.” I found it hard to believe it was just the drugs speaking.