Psychoanalysis in later life

After decades of heeding Freud's admonition against taking patients older than fifty years of age into psychoanalytic treatment, psychoanalysts began to treat them and to report encouraging experiences. This essay is another in a series of case reports that confirms and extends the nature of changes possible in the analytic treatment of elderly patients. In order to demonstrate both specific changes and the possibility of satisfactory terminations with patients of advanced age, the author describes his analytic work with a woman who first consulted him when she was sixty-eight years old.     

Psychoanalysis and the “life cycle”: An introduction

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Abstract

This paper is concerned with some limitations of the vignette methodology used in contemporary appraisal research and their implications for appraisal theory. We focus on two recent studies in which emotional manipulations were achieved using textual materials, and criticise the investigators' apparent implicit assumption that participation in everyday social reality is somehow comparable to reading a story. We take issue with three related aspects of this cognitive analogy between life and its narrative representation, by arguing that emotional reactions in real life are not necessarily mediated by symbolic processes, that people are involved participants of real life rather than neutral observers, and that in real life people's evaluations and emotions are typically part of an ongoing dialogue rather than the expression of a soliloquy. Results from these studies of emotional vignettes therefore tend to overestimate the importance of constructive, abstract, and individualistic processes in the everyday causation of social emotions. In real life, people do not necessarily have to calculate, transform, or internally represent the meaning of the dynamic situation in order to make emotional sense of what is happening to them in the social world.     

The sense of life time in human development

The subjective sense oflife time is the medium within which issues of identity and growth take place. Youth, middle age, early old age, and old age are each presented as developmental stages with dominant experiences oflife time. Directivity, or purposeful movement toward a goal, is then related to the experience of future and occurs in the gap between present and future. The sense of now in old age is viewed as a stage in the life cycle with the potential for unique personal creativity and growth, being free from bondages found at other points in the life cycle.     

Relations among self-certainty,sense of control and quality of life

This article investigates the mediation effect of the sense of control on the relationship between self-certainty and quality of life (QOL). In the first study, 101 students at National Taiwan University (NTU) completed a self-certainty rating scale with respect to interpersonal traits of the general self and three role-specific selves (son/daughter, sibling, and friend). They also filled out the WHOQOL-BREF (World Health Organization Quality of Life questionnaire—brief version) Taiwan version to assess QOL. A two-factor confirmatory factor analysis revealed that self-certainty on interpersonal traits has a positive relationship with QOL. In the second study, 121 NTU students completed a self-certainty rating scale with respect to personality traits of the general self and two role-specific selves (son/daughter and friend), a control scale measuring sense of control, and the WHOQOL-BREF Taiwan version assessing QOL. A two-factor confirmatory factor analysis revealed that self-certainty on personality traits has a positive relationship with QOL. In addition, a structural equation model revealed that the sense of self-control mediated the positive relation between self-certainty and QOL. The findings showed that people with higher self-certainty had a higher sense of control and, hence, led a better life. The results also showed that the positive relationship between self-certainty and QOL was stronger when self-certainty was assessed with interpersonal traits than with personality traits. Implications of this study for self research and adjustment are discussed.     

Psychoanalysis and the political process

The Political Process is Society's mechanism for debating value systems. The term can also be used to describe a debate in a variety of other settings — subsystems of Society — about value systems. This paper is about the contributions that psychoanalysis, both as a theory and in its various applications, can make to the understanding of the process of debate and its setting. It is also about the implications for our conduct that arise from this understanding.