Balancing Personal and Professional Lives:

Graduate women have unique concerns as they cope with graduate school and attempt to balance their personal lives and relationships with their professional identity and achievements. In this article a review of women's developmental issues and the conflicts that women experience in graduate school will be described. Clinical observations of support groups for graduate women will be presented. The central themes described by both master's and doctoral level women who participated in these graduate women's support groups will be identified and discussed.     

Using The Mirror Story to Understand Self

Research indicates self-esteem reflects many factors in a person’s life, such as relationships with parents or parent figures, attachment types, experiences of worth enhancement, ethnicity, generation, and cultural values. However, debate continues on whether self-esteem is simply a reflection of Western culture and may not be a universal factor of human nature. This research was undertaken to understand how four persons of diverse ethnic, gender, and age categories may each perceive the self from reading the same story. First, the authors offer a brief overview of how self-esteem is viewed and explore a few cultural, gender and age aspects of self-esteem. They then present our pilot study with the methodology, results, and discussion, and offer implications for mental health counselors.     

Racism's Impact on Counselors' Professional and Personal Lives: A Response to the Personal Narratives on Racism

The author identifies common themes among the personal narratives pertaining to racism (Journal of Counseling & Development, 77[1], 1999) and discusses implications of some themes for counselors' professional and personal development.     

Making Sense of Life: The Existential Self Trying to Deal with Personal Uncertainty

This article is about how people make sense of life and focuses on one core threat that may play a pivotal role in people's lives as existential meaning makers: personal uncertainty. Personal uncertainty is defined as the aversive feeling that you experience when you feel uncertain about yourself. Drawing on an uncertainty management perspective, it is hypothesized that cultural worldviews may provide a means to cope with personal uncertainty and that this may explain why under conditions of personal uncertainty people may respond especially positively to events that bolster their cultural norms and values and particularly negatively to persons and events that violate these norms and values. Findings are reviewed that support the uncertainty management model's predictions. Furthermore, the uncertainty management model may explain why terror management theory is not always about terror, but (at least partly) about personal uncertainty. Finally, conceptual implications, conflicting findings, and loose ends are noted, and testable hypotheses are formulated, which may further insight into the psychological processes pertaining to sense-making, worldview defense, and self-regulation.     

Broadening the Study of the Self: Integrating the Study of Personal Identity and Cultural Identity

This article reviews what is known and what remains to be studied, regarding the association between personal identity and cultural identity. Although these two conceptions of identity have inspired separate literatures and have developed independently of one another, globalization and mass immigration have increased the need to study these two conceptions of identity together. The article puts forth recommendations for integrating the literatures on personal identity and cultural identity. These recommendations include using multidimensional constructs to represent both personal identity and cultural identity, refining the measurement of personal identity and of cultural identity, and of studying these conceptions of identity across various ethnic, cultural, and national groups.     

Changing Metaphors of the Self: Implications for Counseling

This article reviews some of the more prevalent metaphors used to describe the nature and character of the self. These metaphors include the unified and integrated selves as well as the postmodern perspectives of multiple selves. The authors contend that counselors have theories about the self whether implicit or explicit, and that these theories directly influence their practice. They further contend that it is beneficial for counselors and other helping professionals to take the time to clarify their beliefs and assumptions about the self and that metaphors are useful conceptual tools. Various ethical questions associated with different metaphors of the self are posed.     

The Changing Challenges in the Lives of Three Generations of Professional Women

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Our Personal and Professional Lives: Learning Positive Connotation and Circular Questioning

The work of the Center for the Study of the Family in Milan has had wide influence. We describe its influence on us--the positive connotation of many car journeys, our self-training, and changes in how we view, and function in, our personal and professional lives.     

Self Diagnosis of Lynch Syndrome Using Direct to Consumer Genetic Testing: A Case Study

We are reporting what we believe to be the first published case of patient initiated direct to consumer (DTC) genetic testing to test for the presence of a known familial mutation. Our client in this case is from a known MSH2 family; both his/her parent and associated grandparent have previously tested positive for the known familial MSH2 mutation. Using 23andme’s “family inheritance genome-wide comparison” option we were able to determine that our client most likely inherited the known familial MSH2 mutation without pursuing single site genetic testing. Our client pursued DTC genetic testing instead of single site genetic testing due to the fear of genetic discrimination. This case shows that patients are still fearful of genetic discrimination, despite the passage of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), and that DTC genetic testing may be useful despite the overall negative feeling towards this type of testing in the genetic counseling community.     

Dialogical Self and the Changing Body During the Transition to Motherhood

This article explores the transition to first-time motherhood and focuses on the analysis of integration in the self-system of a new I-position – the maternal one. This dialogical interchange between dynamically related I-positions (I-as-pregnant and I-as-mother) is the arena where the personal affective core of the self and the sociocultural background of social role demands are intertwined. During pregnancy and childbirth, the I-as-pregnant position becomes transformed into the lasting I-as-mother I-position. This process is seen as an activity of the subject to organize general dialogical relations within the self under conditions of bodily transformations which result from fetal development.     

Anticipating the Self: Toward a Personal Construct Model of Emotion

Previous accounts of the role of emotion in construct theory place insufficient emphasis on the constructive role of emotion as a “feeling toward.” Emotion is regarded either as an epiphenomenon of acts of construal or as an outcome of prior cognitive processes. It is argued in this paper that emotion performs an anticipatory role in pursuit of the current concerns of the self, a view that follows from a closer analysis of the function of anticipation. A revision of the control systems theory of Carver and Scheier (1981) is proposed, in which emotional anticipation at the level of the self is distinguished from schema-based anticipation at the level of behavior. Given the framework of personal construct theory as a method of analysis, this revised view of emotion enables a range of self-concept processes to be better understood.     

Creativity and Aging: Personal Journals and the Creation of Self

This article considers the writing of personal journals as a process through which an individual constructs a linguistic representation of one's self, with the self constituting a narrative. Rather than a fixed narrative, one's life exists as a narrative subject to revision and reinterpretation. Through journal writing, then, one constructs and reconstructs his or her identity. Berman finds the value in personal journals not only in the themes that surface but also in the creative process they reveal. In this article, he examines passages from five journalists that demonstrate this process of creating and revising meaning in one's life.     

The Self Focus Sentence Completion: A Study of Egocentricity

A 30-item sentence completion blank (SFSC), in which most of the stems contain a self-reference (I, my, me, etc.) is described. Normative data are provided for 2,592 non-psychiatric subjects representing five different kinds of populations, and 273 psychiatric patients from nine different diagnostic groups. Reliability data are presented and the results of six validation studies are discussed. It is suggested that the SFSC, which yields six scores, may provide a useful index of egocentricity as a response orientation or style. The data are discussed in the context of “egocentric balance,” a postulate seemingly compatible with several theoretical positions.     

The Politics of Emancipation: From Self to Society

Emancipation is a legitimate human interest. It may be said that Foucault in his last works is concerned with putting forward a strategy for emancipation. The strategy consists in an aesthetic construction of the self. It is argued that this strategy ultimately fails and that, instead of retreating to the self, we need to return to the community level and to examine the rules of discourse that operate there. Contrary to Foucault's strategy, Habermas argues that what we need is a communicative rationality capable of correcting discursive distortions. Coming from a different angle, Lyotard argues that what we need at the community level is a set of rules that prevent any one discourse totalizing all others. Such rules would ensure just gaming. Together, Lyotard and Habermas offer us an ethics that has the potential to serve the human interest in emancipation.