Infant mental health: Monitoring our movement into the twenty-first century

At a time when our guidance is increasingly sought by parents, courts, and social policy planners, it is critical that infant mental health professionals establish clearer standards for training, engage in more rigorous self-monitoring of our clinical and our research efforts, and recognize the extraordinary risks for bias in all of our work. It is not necessary that we speak with one voice. In fact, our field has been enriched by its transdisciplinary nature and by its many points of view. But it is critical that we offer assessments, engage in treatment, conduct our research, and do our teaching free of uncontrolled contamination by our own unresolved childhood experiences, our idealizations, our needs for control: in short, that we be truly open to the data and truly available to the families. Examples are offered of the risks if we fail, and a call is made for careful transdisciplinary training, supervision, individual psychotherapy, and collegial monitoring for infant mental health clinicians, researchers, and educators, alike.     

Psychoanalytic education in the twenty-first century: a syllabus for all seasons

I am suggesting that psychoanalytic training facilities restructure their curriculum to include opposing views, in an effort to avoid the inevitable disintegration of the field at large. Without a sense of requirement for any particular viewpoint, I have suggested the model of class modules, usually based around three differing positions, be applied in as many classes as possible. This method enhances the very nature of psychoanalysis while it extends the educational provenance of each separate institute, and specifically each teacher of psychoanalysis. In so doing, candidates across the board will feel and think in a more collegial manner, and may find that learning psychoanalysis is to learn something new and exciting.     

Imagining solidarity in the twenty-first century: towards a performative postsecularism

Imagining solidarity in the twenty-first century is particularly difficult in light of three factors: religious diversity, a religious/secular binary and uncertainty as to the political future. This article employs myth as a lens for exploring and developing responses to these difficulties coalescing around the term postsecular. It suggests that these difficulties are reproduced rather than overcome in Jürgen Habermas’ work. It then distinguishes between the postsecular, postsecularity and postsecularism to demonstrate how recent work offers new possibilities. Finally, it draws on original ethnography to develop this work. It claims that myth is central to how both religious and nonreligious people imagine solidarity. It suggests that myth is primarily performed rather than rationally argued, and calls for myths to be judged on the basis of the performances they produce. Finally, it suggests that the content of myths is less important than how and by whom they are constructed. Together, these insights constitute performative postsecularism.     

Teaching psychodynamics in the twenty-first century

A lack of clarity in psychoanalytic education has negatively affected the educational experience of candidates now in training and makes it difficult for prospective candidates to understand the field. Three basic educational concepts--learning objectives, operationalizing, and adult learning theory--can help psychoanalysts teach and assess their students in a clearer, more objective way. Using these concepts has broad implications for both psychodynamic and psychoanalytic education in the twenty-first century.     

Educating career guidance practitioners in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT

Rapidly changing policy contexts in England have dramatically affected the provision of career guidance, and the training and development of its practitioners. This paper takes an autoethnographic and self-reflexive approach to exploring the experience of a Senior Lecturer in Career Guidance who manages a centre that offers the Qualification in Career Guidance (QCG), and the Level 6 Diploma in Career Guidance and Development. Key questions are considered, such as: the effects of policy context on the type of qualification and curriculum offered, and their differences; the challenges of engaging learners in theoretical concepts and reflective approaches; and the tensions between ‘training’ practitioners and ‘educating’ them to develop a strong core of professionalism. The paper also considers the extent to which the learners develop as ‘knowledgeable social actors’.     

Children and computers. Approaching the twenty-first century

The "effects" that various forms of "computer" use are likely to have on different children's learning, motivation, and social behavior have been a source of heated debate and continuing controversy. In this article, various aspects of this controversy are characterized, and sources of disagreement concerning educational computing are examined. Difficulties in the current state of empirical research in this area are then considered, and recommendations regarding directions for future research are proposed.     

Little Hans "analyzed" in the twenty-first century

Freud's monograph on the analysis of Little Hans is examined from a perspective aimed at highlighting elements of current thinking that would be considered mutative from those originally emphasized at the time it was written, and with a specific focus on the relative importance of verbal versus nonverbal interventions.     

Racial/ethnic diversity in doctoral programs of psychology: Challenges for the twenty-first century

Changing demographics and accompanying cultural pluralism pose challenges to psychology departments in terms of multicultural curriculum, generation of culturally sensitive research and theory, and representation of racial/ethnic minority students and faculty. The impact of the European-American worldview as the foundation of the dominant culture is explored as it relates to psychology. Implicit and explicit examples of ethnocentrism are offered, which reflect the imposition of the dominant culture on other cultures. Universal psychology is challenged as culture-bound and subsequently viewed as nonexistent. Organizational and individual multicultural development models are advanced, along with specific strategies for how departments can embrace diversity through commitment to structural change and inclusion of paradigms that reflect alternate worldviews.     

Marital research in the 20th century and a research agenda for the 21st century

In this article we review the advances made in the 20th century in studying marriages. Progress moved from a self-report, personality-based approach to the study of interaction in the 1950s, following the advent of general systems theory. This shift led, beginning in the 1970s, to the rapid development of marital research using a multimethod approach. The development of more sophisticated observational measures in the 1970s followed theorizing about family process that was begun in the decade of the 1950s. New techniques for observation, particularly the study of affect and the merging of synchronized data streams using observational and self-report perceptual data, and the use of sequential and time-series analyses produced new understandings of process and power. Research in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the realization of many secular changes in the American family, including the changing role of women, social science's discovery of violence and incest in the family, the beginning of the study of cultural variation in marriages, the expansion of the measurement of marital outcomes to include longevity, health, and physiology (including the immune system), and the study of comorbidities that accompany marital distress. A research agenda for the 21st century is then described.