Understanding the Self in Self-Transcendence

Based on the work of William James and Bernard Lonergan, this article proposes an understanding of the self as a duplex, dialectical, first-person reality constituted by consciousness and experienced as I and me.     

A Study of Church Members During Times of Crisis

The purpose of the current study was to understand what church members experience during a situational crisis and identify the resources of social support that are helpful for them. By identifying the degree to which personal religious beliefs and participation in a particular congregation help people in crisis, this study sought to provide a foundation from which religious as well as mental health professionals can understand the psychological benefits of religious involvement. For the purposes of this research the investigators developed the Crisis Appraisal and Coping Interview Protocol. The research team collected interview data from 26 members of one Southern Baptist congregation within two weeks of a crisis event. Qualitative analysis identified several key themes that appeared which are discussed.     

Counseling the abortion patient: A pastoral perspective

Unplanned pregnancies are common among women in every congregation. Ministers have an opportunity to offer pastoral abortion counseling to those who wish it that is different from secular problem pregnancy counseling; the minister can offer a value context and facilitate a deep investigation of the decision-making process in a personal way. Concrete information regarding abortion procedures, situational factors important in problem pregnancy decisions, and emotions associated with problem pregnancies are discussed under the headings healing, guiding, and reconciling.She has been involved professionally in the family planning field for six years.     

MMPI-2 Assessment of Varying Levels of Posttraumatic Stress in Vietnam Combat Veterans

The effectiveness of the MMPI-2 in the detection of posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptomatology was investigated. Forty-nine veterans at a VA posttraumatic stress clinic were evaluated for PTS symptomatology according to DSM-III-R criteria. The ability of the MMPI-2 to differentiate between Vietnam combat veterans (VCV) who met DSM-III-R criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; N = 36) and those who reported varying levels of posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS; N = 13) was examined. Overall, the MMPI-2 was effective in differentiating between the two groups of veterans. Of the 15 MMPI-2 scales used to evaluate PTS symptomatology, 12 significantly differentiated veterans with PTSD from those with PTSS. Diagnostic efficiency statistics for the MMPI-2 PTSD scales (PS and PK) were calculated at four cutoff points (T 65, 70, 75, and 80). The PS Scale was the most robust and effective index in differentiating between veterans with PTSD and those with PTSS. Implications for the assessment of varying degrees of PTS are discussed.     

Freud and Erikson: Their Contributions to the Psychology of God-Image Formation

Sigmund Freud's construct of the father of personal prehistory (1961), provides the foundation for the argument that our earliest and most enduring representations of God emerge in infancy during a process Freud calls primary identification, that is an identification with this first father, whom Freud says is actually both parents and the flow of feeling between them. Erik Erikson's work on infants' earliest experiences provides support for this argument if it does not anticipate it. Pastoral psychotherapist in private practice in     

Attention and distractibility during reading in hyperactive boys

Nonhyperactive and clinically defined hyperactive boys were administered reading tasks under quiet and distracting conditions. Hyperactive boys were less attentive to task relevant stimuli and more attentive to task irrelevant stimuli than their controls. Our results demonstrate that the previous findings of inattentiveness among hyperactive boys on laboratory tasks can be generalized to more typical school activities such as reading.     

Theological and Biblical Interpretations of Current Movements and Emerging Paradigms Within Bereavement Studies

Among the predominant themes in the last few years of bereavement studies have been those around disenfranchised grief, masculine grief, spirituality and grief, and the movement from medical/hierarchical models of grief work/counseling to a more non-hierarchical model that emerges internally, inherently, and intrinsically within the bereaved. In the latter model the grief counselor becomes a facilitator or, as Alan Wolfelt noted at the Chicago ADEC conference, a companioning presence. The intent of this article is to take this conversation into the realm of theology, and/or biblical theology. The following offers theological analysis of what is already good clinical theory. Integrating theories from anthropology and theology, this article will explore the concepts of voice, etic and emic theory, and incarnational theology as they relate to emerging patterns in bereavement studies. It will also relate a model of the Kingdom of God to disenfranchised grief, as well as offer support for the theory of masculine grief from biblical sources and complementary fields of study.     

Recreating Near-Death Experiences: A Cognitive Approach

I describe a guided meditation that, when used by near-death experiencers (NDErs), recreates fragments of their NDEs. The meditation is based on Michael Persinger's neurological theory regarding the God Experience, and its success supports that theory. The present study included too few subjects to support quantitative analysis, and must be regarded as a pilot study.     

Pastoral care and the people of god

Various attempts in the last twenty years have sought to understand pastoral care as a function of the congregation, yet even ardent supporters have lost sight of their own vision. This article proposes that we define pastoral care as the work of the church, tie it more closely to the suffering associated with carrying out the church's mission, and develop a model of pastoral care that will differentiate everyday untrained lay pastoral care, care by clergy and trained laypersons, and pastoral psychotherapy. It offers theological rationales and draws implications for pastoral theory.Reverend Burck is Chaplain-Supervisor and Assistant Professor of Religion and Health, Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center, 1753 West Congress Parkway, Chicago, Illinois 60612     

Competence and the overjustification effect

The overjustification effect is manifested in decreased interest in an activity as a result of having been rewarded for participation in the activity. According to attribution theory's discounting principle, decreased interest occurs because the subject discounts the role of intrinsic motivation when a salient extrinsic reward is present. An alternative analysis based on the competence principle suggests that only rewards that convey no message of competence foster the overjustification effect, while manipulations that do convey competence information do not. A study crossing Reward (no reward-monetary reward) and Task Difficulty (hard-easy) supported the competence analysis. Subjects who succeeded on the hard task and thus felt competent manifested higher subsequent interest in the task. Consistent with the competence analysis, presence or absence of reward did not influence subsequent interest in the task.This research has been supported by a grant from the Ohio University Research Fund. I am grateful to Mark Henault, who served very ably as the experimenter. The hard work of Joel Ghitman and Craig Alexander is also gratefully acknowledged.     

Family therapy for the “Truncated” nuclear family

The truncated nuclear family is the commonest or gardenvariety family psychopathology observed by therapists, and consists of a two-generation group in which heated, prolonged conflict has produced a polarization of values which has generated pathogenic relating, raising the potential for a family member to become scapegoated and react in a disorganized or disoriented manner. Although many so-called intact families are of the truncated variety, the single-parent family is at special risk. Go-between process is a useful family therapy for the truncated nuclear family because it enables the therapist to depolarize sharply conflicted values and is a mechanism for reducing pathogenic relating.This article was originally an invited presentation for the Third Annual Research Symposium of the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, held in Philadelphia on February 22, 1980.     

“God as Friend”: Metaphoric Theology in Pastoral Care

Because of postmodernity's claim of deconstruction, the naming of God has become a crucial issue for a hermeneutics of pastoral care. Inadequate and inappropriate perceptions of God, because of specific experiences of faith, create unhelpful images of God which eventually lead to a pathology of faith. Taking into consideration the figurative means of symbolic language and its rootedness in culture, this article explores the possibility of the metaphor, God as Friend, in order to move beyond the paradigm of the suffering God (theopaschitic theology) to the paradigm of the faithful God—God as our Soul Friend.     

Positive and negative instructions in symbolic paired comparisons with the months of the year

Summary We investigated the semantic interpretation of positive (MORE THAN) and negative (LESS THAN) instructions in a symbolic paired comparison task with an overlearned and finite series of stimuli. French-speaking subjects were asked to indicate which member of month pairs occurred PLUS TOT (earlier), PLUS TARD (later), MOINS TOT (less early), or MOINS TARD (less late) in the year. In Experiment 1, the sign of the comparative instruction (MORE vs. LESS) was kept constant, while its attribute (EARLY vs. LATE) varied. In Experiment 2, the attribute of the instruction was kept constant, while its sign varied. The main results indicate that (1) negative instructions (with adverb LESS) yielded longer response latencies than positive ones (with adverb MORE); this difference was particularly salient on the first experimental session but, on subsequent sessions, it was reduced in Experiment 1 and neutralized in Experiment 2; (2) a symbolic-distance effect was observed on response latency and response accuracy with the four forms of the comparative instruction; (3) violations of monotonicity were noted in the symbolic-distance effect when June was used as a reference month in the analysis; (4) the serial-position effect had the form of a double-bowed curve with three stable anchor points around January, June, and December; and (5) the pattern of semantic-congruity effect with negative instructions was the exact reversal of that obtained with positive instructions; that is, if the month pairs occurred early in the year, response latencies were shorter with the instruction less late than with less early, whereas if the month pairs occurred late in the year response latencies were shorter with instruction "less early than with less late. The theoretical implications of these results for Banks' Semantic-coding model and Holyoak's Reference-point model are discussed.     

Aspects of language pragmatics and the social perception of lying

Two experiments were conducted in order to examine the influence of linguistic and extralinguistic variables on the attribution of lying. In the first experiment, one of two tape recordings of a target person, who responded either true or false to a list of adjectives, was evaluated by 83 subjects. The subjects' task was to attempt to discover when the target person was not telling the truth. The stimulus tapes were constructed such that the time between the adjective and the target person's response was systematically varied and the adjectives varied on the likability of a person possessing that trait. Overall, it was found that if the target person responded either too quickly or too slowly the subjects attributed his response as a lie more often than if the delay was more intermediate in duration (p<0.01). The adjective likability value in combination with the true or false response of the target person also contributed to the attribution of lying (p<0.01). In the second experiment, the adjectives were rescaled on another dimension thought to influence the attribution of lying: the degree to which the adjective is true of the general population. The results suggest that this new scale is related to the degree to which lie attributions are made.This research was supported in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development under Research Grant 1 P01 HD-01762-01 and the National Institute of Mental Health under Research Grant MN 08260.     

The recovery of feelings in a folktale

The purpose of this essay is to explore the symptom of the denial of feelings and the subsequent recovery of feelings in relation to the task of uniting the human self. The spiritual, emotional, and physical implications of an exemplary narrative from the collection edited by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are discussed in relation to the telescoping of the emotion of fear, the sensation of shuddering, and the experience of anxiety about the integrity of the self. The reader is cautioned that the study of folktales enriches our telling of them and is itself justified by that telling.     

The responsive order: A new empiricism

The uniqueness of logic is upheld and contrasted with twenty roles of a wider responsive order that includes us and our procedures. Empirical responses are precise, but different in different approaches. Procedures and findings are independent of (not separable from) their concepts. Two-way feedback obviates a top-down derivation of findings from assumptions, hypotheses, history, or language. The postmodern problems of interpretation, conditions of appearances and relativism involve the ancient error of making perception the model-instance of experience. Instead, bodily interaction functions in language and precedes perception and interpretation. Logic, space time locations and individuated referents involve positional relations derived from comparing. Beyond Kuhn, Feyerabend, Newton and Einstein, if we can give interaction priority over comparing, the responsive objectivity of both can be upheld. A new empiricism, neither naive nor constructivist, uses the words order, explication, truth, and exactly to build on Wittgenstein and on Dilthey's hermeneutic. Natural language is metaphor-like, originally crossed. Logic must ignore its assumptions. It must render everything as a machine and drop humans and animals out. A new discipline is proposed, to move between the logical and the responsive orders, to deal with the machine/human interface and the social uses of science such as bioengineering.     

The Self Psychology of Heinz Kohut: What's It All About Theologically?

As a psychoanalytic thinker who offered by means of his self psychology a new paradigm of psychological development and functioning, Heinz Kohut was also a theologian manqué. With the help of the method of interpretation devised by Paul Tillich and David Tracy, Kohut's limit-concepts of tragic man, the self-object, and empathy, all set within his theory of narcissism, are elucidated as theological constructs. These are critiqued for adequacy from a Christian perspective. The conclusion is that Kohut's understanding of the human dilemma and of the way of salvation correlates well with Christianity, while his view of empathy as the means of salvation has created some confusion. Kohut has thus left an unfinished, profoundly important, agenda for theologians and clinicians.     

Computer content analysis of sex differences in the language of children

This study presents empirical procedures for the collection and content analysis of the oral language of kindergarten children. The analysis technique used material and machines available to most researchers. The results of the analysis of language samples of 144 randomly selected children from the entire kindergarten class of the Ithaca, New York, school system showed that boys produced significantly more language than did the girls as well as significantly more references to aggression, self, time, space, quantity, fears, good, act of oral communication, negation, and affirmation, and asked more questions of the examiner than did the girls. The girls made significantly more female references than did the boys. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Aspectual Constraints in the Mental Lexicon

This study addresses the question of whether constraints on aspectual semantics play a role in lexical processing. Two universal cognitive constraints are identified: states cannot be delimited and telic predicates cannot be further telicized. The study investigates how these are obeyed in the productive process of perfective preverb and stem combination in Bulgarian. An off-line task ascertains that Bulgarian native speakers have a default semantic interpretation for the preverbs under investigation. A visual lexical decision task shows clear legality effects in nonwords composed of existing preverbs and stems, thereby supporting decompositional approaches. It is argued that, after the process of morpheme search, there must be a process of checking for combinatory felicity of the morphemes activated in the lexical access.     

From I: A/M to “Who am I?”—Aggregation/Massification and Trauma-Based Affects and Object Relations in Groups: A Response to Earl Hopper

Hopper's portrayal of the fourth basic assumption of Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification has two components: (1) a revision of Turquet's theory of BA Oneness to incorporate the polarity of aggregation and massification stemming from annihilation anxiety; and (2) a conception of the difficult patient as having an encapsulated psychosis. Hopper's theory of the encapsulated psychosis offers an important but incomplete perspective in explaining borderline and narcissistic pathology, as well as psychological trauma. In this response to Hopper, I suggest that the fourth assumption is in fact a still more primitive state of boundary opening and closing. I also see a need to differentiate trauma as such from borderline pathology, and further hold that the relationship between Hopper's British Independent theory and trauma theories based on dissociation needs to be clarified.