On Becoming a Psychoanalyst

This article traces an intellectual journey from a university environment in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, under military dictatorship in the sixties, to becoming a training analyst of the British Psychoanalytic Society. The journey includes an M. Phil. in Social Anthropology from the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, followed by a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Reading the classic texts of social anthropology, as well as Latin American writers and the Jewish classics, paved the way for an understanding of the world of others. Training in family therapy and ten years of clinical work in the NHS gave the clinical foundation required for the longed-for training with the British Psychoanalytic Society. From then on, the journey to becoming a training analyst is delineated, as well as the new challenges which this new phase has brought in the last ten years.     

On Becoming a British Psychoanalyst

This article describes a personal journey from social anthropology to psychoanalysis, first through training at the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1956 to 1964, then to becoming a Member and Training Analyst. I describe the development of a career involving the usual things a psychoanalyst is likely to do in addition to clinical practice: supervising students, participation in seminars and discussions with colleagues, teaching, writing, serving on various committees, being editor of a series of psychoanalytic books, and trips abroad to teach and to consult with colleagues about other points of view. This is the bare bones, but I also try to describe the development of some of my psychoanalytic views and attitudes, including a brief look at the British Society with an ex-anthropologist's eye.     

On Becoming a Cybernetician: Highlights and Milestones

In this article, I describe how I encountered cybernetics and how it became an important part of my life. I begin with an account of my time at Brunel University and also describe how I came to work with Gordon Pask, one of the few intellectuals and researchers in the UK who styled themselves as cyberneticians. To enrich my story, I include an overview of the story of cybernetics as I perceive it. Given the importance I attach to cybernetics as an intellectual tool, I end with a plea for it to be included in all educational curricula.     

On My Becoming a Psychoanalyst

I describe my experience of becoming a psychoanalyst in Germany between 1997 and 2002. The article combines my personal criticism of certain aspects of institutionalized psychoanalysis and some established procedures within psychoanalytic training, which underline the need for more evaluation and more transparency within the institutes and associations.     

On Becoming Meta

This presentation will develop the concept of metapsychological capacity and describe the convergence of Systemic, Self, Intersubjective and Horneyan theory that integrates into the metapsychological construct. The traditional concepts of repetition compulsion and projective identification are expanded from their mechanistic roots towards a more real, existential, iterative force that influences the therapeutic process. Metapsychological capacity creates a therapeutic presence enabling greater emotional awareness and psychological growth for both the therapist and the patient. The foundations of repetition compulsion, Horneyan character splits and projective identification serve to frame the intersubjective space from which real self emerges. Focused on subjective/relationship-near immersion, real self emergence and resonating character splits, Horney clearly understood the metapsychological capacity required for emotional growth. Deconstruction of other more classic historical and mechanistic theoretical legacies is required to comprehend and experience this therapeutic presence.     

Toward an Organizational-Relational Model of Open Adoption

Clinicians and social scientists have attempted to demonstrate the advisability of open versus closed adoption (communication and/or contact vs. no communication and/or contact between biological and adoptive parents) from a variety of theoretical perspectives. In our article, we seek a conceptual framework that will (a) elaborate how such divergent conclusions about openness versus confidentiality have heretofore been drawn, and (b) provide a comprehensive analysis of the behavior and experiences of all members of the adoption triad (birthparents, adoptive parents, adoptees). Employing structural aspects of organismic-developmental theory ( Werner, 1957 ) and dynamic aspects of self-in-relation theory ( Miller, 1976 ), we propose an organizational-relational approach to open adoption. Preliminary research findings are also provided.     

On Becoming Extinct

From an impersonal, timeless perspective it is hard to identify good reasons why it should matter that human extinction comes later rather than sooner, particularly if we accept that it does not matter how many human beings there are. We cannot appeal to the natural narrative shape of human history for there is no such thing. We have more local and particular concerns to which we can better appeal but only if an impersonal, timeless perspective is abandoned: only from a generation–centred perspective do such concerns help to make sense of our concern for the timing of our own extinction.     

Toward a New Model of Integrative Psychotherapy: Psychosynergy

The goal of resynthesizing that which has been disconnected in our field is what the author has designated as psychosynergy. This article seeks to advance our shared interest in the subject matter of psychotherapy. Particularly noted are efforts to reconnect the separate realms that give support to therapeutic practice, namely its undergirding scientific principles, its theoretically deduced personality and psychopathologic features, its classification format for organizing psychic pathology, its empirically grounded assessment instruments, and its integration of diverse therapeutic modalities. This overall goal stems from the author's belief that a synthesis of these components not only is possible, but will strengthen progress through mutual reinforcement and reciprocal enhancements.     

Toward an Interpersonal Model of Codependence and Contradependence

Codependence is used increasingly to describe various dysfunctional relationships. This article differentiates codependent from contradependent behavior and defines both in an interpersonal context. A model is proposed to address gender issues, diagnosis, and treatment from an emotional health perspective.     

On Becoming a Religious Therapist in Chinese Culture

Pastoral Psychology - This essay will present an approach to psychotherapy in China that emerges out of Chinese literature and theology. We refer to it as Zhi Mian (i.e., facing life directly)...     

On Becoming A Counselor

Counselor education theory requires a broad-spectrum model that makes room for a wide diversity of orientations. This paper presents several broad-spectrum formulations about the nature of counselor behavior. Counselor behavior is described in terms of three elements (introgression, intervention, implementation), two simultaneous levels, and the principal domain of counseling. Together, these constructs become a theoretical framework with potential for facilitating cognitive communication between counselor educator and counselor trainee. The framework presented here is admittedly in tentative form. It is presented not solely for whatever inherent merit it may have but also to suggest how counselor education theory can help to give direction and meaning to the process of becoming a counselor.     

Toward a Model of Neuropsychological Activity

The main purpose of this research was to establish the intercorrelations existing among different psychological and neuropsychological test scores in a normal and homogenous population. A second purpose was to attempt further step in the component analysis of cognitive activity measured by means of neuropsychological tests. A comprehensive neuropsychological test battery was assembled and individually administered to a 300-subject sample, aged 17–25 years-old. All of them were right-handed male university students. The battery included some basic neuropsychological tests directed to assess language, calculation abilities, spatial cognition, praxic abilities, memory, perceptual abilities, and executive functions. In addition, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale was administered. Forty-one different scores were calculated. Correlations among the different test scores were analyzed. It was found that some of the tests presented a quite complex intecorrelation system, whereas other tests presented few or no significant correlations. Mathematical ability tests and orthography knowledge represented the best predictors of Full Scale IQ. A factor analysis with varimax rotation disclosed five factors (verbal, visuoperceptual, executive function, fine movements, and memory) accounting for 63.6% of the total variance. Implications of these results for a neuropsychological model about brain organization of cognition were analyzed.     

Toward an Integrative Model of Affect Regulation: Applications to Social-Psychological Research

ABSTRACT This article describes a model of affect regulation that integrates research and theory from psychoanalytic, cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary perspectives on personality. It proposes that feelings are mechanisms for the selection and retention of behavioral and mental responses. Individuals select behaviors, coping strategies, and defensive strategies that regulate aversive affective states and maximize pleasurable ones. These affect regulation procedures are encoded as procedural knowledge and are activated under specific circumstances. Some regulation strategies are affect-specific, whereas others can be used to regulate multiple affects of similar valence. These procedures are often activated to resolve discrepancies between perceived and desired states of the self, significant others, and external circumstances. The utility of the model is demonstrated through a reinterpretation and integration of a number of disparate traditions in social psychology, including many of the classic experiments on social influence, in which the processing of emotionally relevant social information plays a substantial part.     

On Becoming Creatures: Being Called to Presence in a Distracted World

In the biblical creation story human beings are depicted as beings ejected from the true home given to them in creation and entrapped in the dynamics of their flight from God. Franz Rosenzweig suggested that modern life is best understood as a type of chronic living death characterized by an animate but nevertheless sterile experience of loss. Following Eric Santner's presentation of this theme in Rosenzweig, this article will explore what it might mean to recover a sense of the goodness of place and particularity. I will examine Santner's suggestion that to become present to ‘place’ is to have undergone the ‘undeadening’ intervention of another person, who offers us an exit route in the midst of the tangle of our lived lives. I will then show how the main lines of his analysis both parallel and offer ways to sharpen important aspects of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's account in Creation and Fall of the dynamics of the Fall and the healing of creatures. Human beings are depicted by Bonhoeffer as in need of being transformed into creatures, a theological insight resting on a complex account of creation, and which I will suggest, in conclusion, is a particularly important theme of a Christian gospel that can speak to a world saturated by the desire to be elsewhere.