Bridging Technical Eclecticism and Theoretical Integration: Assimilative Integration

Assimilative integration is a new type of psychotherapy integration introduced by Messer in 1992. This paper explains the where, what, when, and how of this integrative route, outlines its advantages and weaknesses, and discusses areas for potential assimilative practice in various models of therapy. Following a brief review of the current status of psychotherapy integration and its practices, assimilative integration is conceptualized as a mini theoretical integration and as theoretical eclecticism it is offered as a bridge between theoretical integration and technical eclecticism. Assimilative integration is proposed as the best theoretically and empirically based integrative approach available at this time, particularly for therapists who have been trained in a single mode of therapy before they became integrationists.     

Psychotherapy Integration: Contributions from Lifestyle Theory

The lifestyle theory of intervention is evaluated with respect to its status as an integrated psychotherapy using theoretical integration, technical eclecticism, and the common factors approach as criteria. Because lifestyle theory integrates concepts from evolutionary biology, existential philosophy, cognitive psychology, social learning theory, and various therapeutic models it satisfies preliminary criteria for theoretical integration. To the extent that it provides an internally consistent model and makes use of techniques from disparate schools of psychotherapy, it adopts a technical eclectic approach to intervention. The lifestyle model also appears to qualify as an integrated psychotherapy by virtue of its attention to several common factors in psychotherapy.     

Commentary: Further Thoughts About Assimilative Integration

The models for assimilative integration presented in this issue are considered. It is concluded that some grounding theories may be too structured, or one's interpretation of them too rigid, stifling psychotherapeutic flexibility and creativity by excluding potentially useful interventions. Alternatively, models may be too unstructured, or one's interpretation of them too loose, leading to treatment forms lacking specificity, direction, and coherence. As noted originally by Messer, assimilative integration operates most beneficially when practitioners address the limitations of their therapeutic models, or tap their models' progressive implications in ways that respect the fundamentals of their shared clinical theories. Practiced in this balanced way, assimilative integration can offer a useful, flexible way of navigating a creative yet disciplined psychotherapeutic course between unbridled technical eclecticism and technical and theoretical rigidity. The author also examines and extends some of the integrative ideas put forth in this issue, from a two-person or intersubjective perspective based on a relational psychodynamic treatment model.     

A partially ordered extention of the integers

This paper presents a monotonic system of Post algebras of order +* whose chain of Post constans is isomorphic with 012 ... -3-2-1. Besides monotonic operations, other unary operations are considered; namely, disjoint operations, the quasi-complement, succesor, and predecessor operations. The successor and predecessor operations are basic for number theory.The editing of this unified version of two previous papers [Epstein, Rasiowa 1990, 1991] by the authors was completed, except for footnotes, while the first author visited at Warsaw University during June–July, 1994. The footnotes were added by the first author in September, 1994.Presented byRyszard Wójcicki     

Sprachverstehende maschinen

In this paper the author tries to disentangle some of the problems tied up in John Searle's famous Chinese-room-argument. In a first step to answer the question what it would be for a system to have not only syntax, but also semantics the author gives a brief account of the functioning of the language understanding systems (LUS) so far developed in the framework of AI research thereby making clear that systems like Winograd's SHRDLU are indeed doing little more than mere number crunching. But things would be entirely different, the author argues, if the database of a LUS were built up by the system itself via some perceptual component-at least, if this perceptual component had the capacity to distinguish objects having a certain property F from objects which do not. For in this case the system could store an internal representation of the fact that the object has the property F in its database if and only if the object in fact has that property. And this would be a good basis for calling such a system a genuine LUS. But Searle has objected to a very similar account of J. Fodor that nothing could be further from true language understanding. The reason for this complaint seems to be that Searle holds the view that a true LUS must e.g., know that the word hamburgers refers to hamburgers and that he moreover claims that this knowledge must be explicit or that the system must be aware of the reference of hamburgers to hamburgers. The author argues that this is asking too much. For it seems plausible to say that a system is able to understand e.g., the word hamburger even if it has only implicit knowledge of the fact that hamburger refers to hamburgers in the sense that it has the capacity to tell hamburgers from non hamburgers and the capacity to bring the word hamburger together just with objects of the former kind.     

The liar: What paradox?

Most philosophers believe that the Liar Paradox is semantical in character, and arises from difficulties in the predicate true. The author argues that the paradox is pragmatic, not semantic, and arises from violations of essential conditions that define statement-making speech acts. The author shows that his solution to the paradox will not only handle the classical Liar sentences that are necessarily or intrinsically paradoxical, but also sets of Kripke-sentences that are contingently paradoxical.     

Poetry in Existential Psychotherapy with Couples and Families

The use of poetry during the process of existential psychotherapy with couples and families is described and illustrated. In this approach, poems can be utilized to help the couple and/or family notice meaning potentials in the future, actualize and make use of such meaning potentials in the here and now, and re-collect and honor meanings previously actualized and deposited in the past.     

Does Every Good Behaviorist Deserve Favor? A Reply to Neil Jacobson

This is a response to Dr. NeilJacobson's article, An Outsider's Perspective on Psychotherapy Integration, which appears in this issue. It addresses the issue of the differences between eclecticism and psychotherapy integration as well as the possible advantages integration holds over a one-model therapy system. This article suggests that virtually all psychotherapy systems operate under an integrated three paradigm model, and offers some concrete examples of this explanation. It also suggests that the use of psychotherapy integration may lead to a better paradigm match between client and therapist, and ultimately to better outcome. This article concludes that psychotherapy integration possibly offers the best alternative in terms of reducing the biases of one's underlying treatment oaradiem.     

Private events revisited: Does unobservable mean private?

This paper presents a discussion on the misapplication of the concept private events in traditional psychotherapy interpretation. Shown is that, logically, the term privacy is contradictory to principles of science and it further inhibits anaturalistic approach to observation. Evidence of so-called private clinical events are presented within an alternative model that obviates the role of privacy and encourages primarily an objective outlook on the events.     

Egalitarian sex role attitudes: Scale development and comparison of American and Japanese women

The English Form of the Scale of Egalitarian Sex Role Attitudes was administered to 238 American women after the original Japanese Form was developed and administered to 420 Japanese women. The results reveal that the English Form has a potential for use as a measurement of American women's sex role attitudes. The results of cross-cultural comparisons suggest that American women have more egalitarian attitudes than their Japanese counterparts. However, they have basically similar attitudes toward more general egalitarian values. Among the four roles of woman, wife, mother, and person, the majority of the American women choose person as the most important role, whereas the Japanese women do not claim any clear dominant role. But the results show that the Japanese women's attitudes toward women's roles have become more egalitarian and individualistic during the past two decades.This research was partly supported by a grant from the Dentsu Corporation's Yoshida Hideo Memorial Foundation. The author wishes to thank Roger Brown, Cynthia Chataway, Matina Horner, Ellen Langer, and Annemette Sorensen, Yoshiyasu Uno, and the reviewers for their critical and helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. The statistical help by Ellen Herbener and Valerie Leiter are gratefully acknowledged.     

Nohl, Durkheim, and Mead: Three Different Types of "History of Education"

Historiography of education is not only a question of construction but also of selection. In 19th century history of education was typically a genre of great educators, mostly male and only marginally female. This construct is influential up to now, at least in popular contexts of educational reasoning. The article discusses in the introductory section problems of selection of names and meanings within history of education, and then three types of historiographical writing that are not only concerned with great educators but have larger Philosophical impact. The first type is Herman Nohls history of German progressive education, the second one is Emile Durkheims history of Higher Education in France, and the third one is George Herbert Meads Movements of Thought in 19th Century. The article compares them and discusses their implications for further development of historical writing in education.     

A Field Guide to Cinetherapy: On Celluloid Psychoanalysis and Its Practitioners

This paper addresses the strange bedfellowship between psychoanalysis and cinema since the century's turn. Its specific focus is the idiosyncratic psychoanalysis/psychotherapy practised in mainstream cinema and television. Cinetherapists have consistently fallen into one of three categories: Dr. Dippy, a focus of derision, weirder than his patients; Dr. Evil, Hollywood's psychiatric version of the mad, bad scientist; and the unfailingly benevolent, self-sacrificing Dr. Wonderful. The prevalence of these stereotypes has waxed and waned according to shifting cultural circumstances. The study concludes with reflections on the possible impact, deleterious or otherwise, of distorted filmic images of the impossible profession.     

The drive for meaning in William James' analysis of religious experience

Summary Now that we have looked at the characteristics of mystical experience, we are ready to discuss the assumption made in this paper that mystical experience can be translated into an understanding of integration or the drive for meaning which Fingarette pursues in a much more analytic fashion. Reviewing the conversion process as an integration process we have seen that for the sick-souled, beset with the meaninglessness or melancholy which paralyzes his will, his own awareness of wrong in his situation prevents him from opening up to larger views of reality. But, as James has described, at the same time as the subject is attending so strongly to his own sense of worthlessness, all the while the forces of mere organic ripening within him are going on towards their own prefigured result, and his conscious strainings are letting loose subconscious allies behind the scenes, which in their way work toward rearrangements. Yet the rearrangements can only come about by obeying the command of Chaung-Tse: Cease striving. The result is self-transformation in reconciling, unifying states. There is achieved a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness; facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our active life.However, James cautions us to realize that the same incursions of the subconscious which produce such reconciling, unifying states can also produce pathological states, a diabolical mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down. In such a state the meanings of events become dreadful and the ruling emotion is pessimism. To this possibility James applied the pragmatic test, By their fruits..., and concluded that the mystical experience which brings optimism to the individual is a genuine experience and one which brings truth. In our context then, we would say that real integration brings the subject away from the melancholy and meaninglessness he felt into the genuinely insightful resolution of which Fingarette speaks.Conversion, then, is a process in James's analysis of religious experience analogous to the process of integration and meaning-discovery while mysticism is analogous to the state in which integration or meaning-discovery is achieved. Conversion is climaxed by self-surrender; mysticism is characterized by new determination, self-transformation: two ways of describing an indivisible event. Furthermore, the four characteristics James applies to mysticism are indeed characteristic of the experience of integration.Two other points should be added here which are much in line with James's treatment of experience. In the first place, one of the basic principles of radical empiricism is that not only objects but relations between objects are the subject of experience. Such an experience of relationships, of wholeness, is exactly what characterizes integration. At the same time, the five senses are suspended, and the insight is experienced with such a strong immediacy that it is almost sensed. James refers to this quality of mystical states: The records show that even though the five senses be in abeyance in them, they are absolutely sensational in their epistemological quality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression, - that is, they are face to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist.I am not saying that every integration is a mystical experience. Rather I have been saying that James's discussion of religious experiences such as healthy-minded, sick-souled, melancholy, conversion, and mysticism provide analogues for better understanding the phenomenological processes and characteristics of the drive for meaning and integration which Fingarette analyzes. In fact, the very notion of religion itself for James bears not just an analogous resemblance but perhaps an identification with integration. For in his personal letters James had defined religious experience as Any moment of life that brings the reality of spiritual things more home to one. And in Varieties James defines religion as a man's total reaction upon life....; his attitude towards what he felt to be the primal truth.If we look upon this outlook of James toward religion as an exaggeration of the reality of integration, we can follow James to what he perceives as the importance of religion upon an individual's life. The man of religious feeling possesses the excitement of a higher kind of emotion, an enthusiastic temper of espousal in regions where morality strictly so called can at best but bow its head and acquiesce. So we are brought again to the area of creativity in which an individual has experienced the widening of the area of his immediate experience and is re-born in the karmic pattern, a valid pattern for both James and Fingarette. As Fingarette describes it, the converted individual creates values which the dead reality he had previously faced did not possess. The result of the achieved integration is explained by James when referring to religious experience as an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, dynamogenic order which, like any tonic, freshens our vital powers. This emotion overcomes temperamental melancholy [meaninglessness] and imparts endurances to the subject, or a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the common objects of life.We might sum up this discussion not by a criticism of the shortcomings of James's treatment of the religious life, such as his apparent insensitivity to the part played by institutions in the religious experience itself, but rather by underscoring the richness of the phenomenological analysis James has undertaken. James Edie acknowledges that James's studies of religious experience itself rather than of religion. ... are not only more sound phenomenologically than some of the studies which have, under the influence of Husserl, up to now explicitly invoked the phenomenological method, but they are also the first to establish any solid basis for a true phenomenology of religious experience.And John Wild has pointed out the parallel between James's concept of melancholy and Heidegger's concept of anxiety as the genesis of the process of becoming: beginning with the prospect of death and nothingness, the individual gropes toward new birth.As we have seen, then, James's analysis of the varieties of religious experience leads to a fruitful discussion of the psychological processes involved in melancholy and meaninglessness, rearrangement and integration. In all such experiences, a sense of inner unity is reached to which the following words of Fingarette would apply by analogy: The soul-racking death which leads to blissful rebirth is the death of the subjectively experienced, anxiety-generated self perception; it is the emergence into the freedom of introspective self-forgetfulness of the psychically unified self.     

Endogenous Ketamine-Like Compounds and the NDE: If So, So What?

This commentary on Karl Jansen's ketamine model for the near-death experience expands upon and raises additional questions about several issues and hypotheses: self-experimentation as a source of data; ketamine's similarities to and differences from classical hallucinogens; the need for quantification of unusual subjective states; clinical research and toxicological implications of this model; drugs as gateways to religious states; and evolutionary versus religious significance of naturally occurring compounds released in the near-death state. I suggest future research that could help explicate several of these areas.Formerly Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine     

Paradigms lost: Remembering herstories and other invalid subjects

During the First World Family Therapy Congress, Dublin, 1989, the author was the only women on a six member panel discussing The New Paradigm. This article re-presents her attempt to remember women and other invalid subjects, (e.g. those in poverty) in what was imagined would be an otherwise male oriented discourse. Until recently, within family therapy, the contrary and negatory experiences of women in families and society gained little recognition. This article joins others in adding herstory to history.She is in private practice at Vico Consultation Centre.The author acknowledges her team, Nollaig Byrne and Philip Kearney; and her sister witches (The Women in Therapy Chapter), Kay Gilliland, Bernadette O'Sullivan, Mia Van Doorslaer, and Jane Williams for their valued help and comments on this paper.     

“A Forgotten History” and Related Risks for Speech Genre Users in Trauma Mental Health: A Commentary

This paper utilizes the concept of the speech genre as defined by the Russian literary scholarly Mikhail Bakhtin to examine several discourses related to trauma psychotherapy. It explores the theme of A Forgotten History in trauma mental health and then relates it to current problematic patterns in trauma mental health work with international survivors of human rights violations. It considers the theme of A Forgotten History which has been an important narrative in shaping the trauma mental health movement. It argues that it may put genre users at risk of undesirable practices, and cites as examples current trends in torture treatment and trauma training being used with international survivors of human rights violations. Several recommendations for how the trauma mental health field can better conduct itself as a speech genre are proposed.     

Depression and Anxiety in Persons with Parkinson's Disease With and Without “On–Off” Phenomena

On–off phenomena in Parkinson's disease (PD) are unpredictable motor fluctuations associated with long-term levodopa use. Mood fluctuations have been found to coincide with the motor fluctuations in that depression and anxiety increase while the person with PD is in the off state. What has been relatively unexplored is whether those persons with PD who have on–off phenomena differ psychologically in fundamental ways from those who do not have on–off phenomena. In the present study, depression and anxiety symptoms were assessed in 36 persons with PD (n = 14 with on–off phenomena, n = 22 without on–off phenomena). All those with on–off phenomena were assessed in their on state. Those persons with PD with on–off phenomena had significantly higher levels of anxiety than those without on–off phenomena. However, both groups, regardless of on–off status, were mildly depressed. Neurobiological interpretations of the results implicate the locus coeruleus in the pathogenesis of both on–off phenomena and anxiety, whereas psychological interpretations of the results involve the issues of learned helplessness and control over health symptoms in PD.     

Reflection-impulsivity and information seeking in emotionally disturbed children

Forty-four emotionally disturbed children were administered the Matching Familiar Figures Test by one examiner after which the 13 most impulsive and 13 most reflective were chosen. A second examiner administered the Fixed Alternatives Question-Asking Game in whichSs sought information by asking questions that could be answered either yes or no. These questions were classified on a developmental basis; reflective children were found to employ more mature questions than did impulsive ones. Indirect comparisons between the present results and those obtained with normalSs were made.     

Synergistic Psychotherapy: Post-Eclectic Forms of Therapy for Axis II

Today, it is economic forces that drive developments in psychotherapy. While most therapists are eclectics, eclecticism is not a theoretical orientation. However, practical eclecticism may be, the goals of science are nevertheless the development of ideas and models which integrate the discipline. Likewise, the personality construct is necessarily integrative, and thus specifically prescribes the form of therapies for the Axis II disorders, called potentiated pairings and catalytic sequences. These may be constructed from any of a number of functional and structural domains (e.g., behavioral acts, interpersonal conduct, self image) which parallel traditional perspectives on personality. Despite the promise of forms of therapy addressed to the whole person, and its failure to specify comparable and comprehensive diagnostic attributes across the domains in which the personality disorders are expressed.     

Nietzsche's agon with ressentiment: towards a therapeutic reading of critical transvaluation

This paper examines the therapeutic implications of Nietzsche's critique of ressentiment and revenge as our signature malady. §I examines the obstacles to a therapeutic reading of Nietzsche's thought, including his anti-teleological tendencies and the value he places on sickness. Then there is the energetic problem of finding resources to tackle ressentiment, given the volitional exhaustion of modern nihilism. Finally, the self-referential implications of Nietzsche's critique of slave values threaten to trap his thought in a futile ressentiment against ressentiment. If the impulse to cure or redeem us from revenge through critical destruction repeats the logic of revenge, then the challenge for a therapeutic reading is to think through the transformation of revenge on the basis of repetition.An agonal reading of Nietzsche's philosophical practice is proposed to tackle these problems in §II.In Homer's Contest (1872), Nietzsche describes the transference (Übertragung) of Hesiod's evil Eris – goddess of war and destruction – into the good Eris of the contest or agon: destructive impulses are affirmed as stimulants, but also transformed into culture-building forces through an agonal regime of limited aggression. By superimposing this regime, as a model for Nietzsche's textual confrontations, on their unconscious text of embodied ressentiment, a therapeutic perspective emerges, based on three principles: affirmation; mutual empowerment; and externalisation. The agon performs an affirmative transformation of revenge on the basis of a fertile repetition: destructive affects (as in ressentiment) are transferred into constructive deeds of mutual antagonism. Through Nietzsche's agonal discourse, a reactive regime of internalised aggression is externalised in active deeds of limited philosophical aggression – a therapeutic transformation of (self-)destructive into constructive, philosophical impulses.