Transforming despair to hope in the treatment of extreme trauma: a view from the supervisor’s chair

The author considers how, when working with severely traumatised patients, times of despair can be transformed into moments of hope within the therapeutic process. She considers these moments from the perspective of ‘the supervisor’s chair’ and what emerges within the supervisory relationship when difficult and distressing sessions are openly and honestly bought to supervision. Drawing on Thomas Ogden’s ideas about ‘dreaming up the patient’ in supervision, and Michael Parsons’ thoughts about the supervisory relationship, she gives two examples of this process in action, the first about the transformation of despair to hope in the consulting room, and the second about the transformation of despair to hope in the professional network. She argues that these transformational moments of hope correspond to what Daniel Stern and his colleagues have described as ‘moments-of-meeting’ and are indicative of a potential turning point in the therapy. These fleeting moments need to be attended to and nurtured so that their potential for change and emotional growth and recovery can be harnessed.     

Children’s and adults’ use of spelling-sound information in three reading tasks

This research examined the effects of irregular spelling and irregular spelling-sound correspondences on word recognition in children and adults. Previous research has established that, among skilled readers, these irregularities influence the reading of only lower frequency words. However, this research involved the lexical decision and naming tasks, which differ from the demands of normal reading in important ways. In the present experiments, we compared performance on these tasks with that on a task requiring words to be recognized in sentence contexts. Results indicated that adults showed effects of spelling and spelling-sound irregularities in reading lower frequency words on all three tasks, whereas younger and poorer readers also showed effects on higher frequency words. The fact that irregular spelling-sound correspondences affected performance on the sentence task indicates that access of phonological information is not an artifact of having to read a word aloud or perform a lexical decision. Two other developmental trends were observed: As children became more skilled in reading, the effects of irregular spelling were overcome before the effects of irregular spelling-sound correspondences; the latter effects were eliminated on silent reading tasks earlier than on the naming task.     

The Craik-O’Brien-Cornsweet effect: New varieties and their theoretical implications

New visual displays related to the Craik-O’Brien-Cornsweet effect are presented and their relevance for theories of the effect is assessed. The displays include a luminance cusp that does not induce the standard effect, an illusory chessboard, a brightness variant of the impossible staircase, and a display in which brightness varies with stimulus motion. Theories of the effect are grouped within the nonisomorphistic, the cognitive, and the mechanistic approaches. The nonisomorphistic approach is criticized as being seriously incomplete. Existing cognitively oriented proposals are criticized as inadequate. Mechanistic theories are divided into integration theories, which model the visual processing stages with standard mathematical operations such as differentiation and integration, and filling-in theories, which stress the processing dynamics of interconnected neural networks. The reported variations of the Craik-O’Brien-Cornsweet effect support the latter class of theories.     

Maternal experience of their infants’ crying in the context of war trauma: Determinants and consequences

We examined, first, how prenatal maternal mental health and war trauma predicted mothers’ experience of their infant crying, indicated by emotions, cognitions, and behavior; and second, how these experiences influenced the mother–infant interaction and infant development. Participants were 511 Palestinian mothers from the Gaza Strip, reporting their war trauma, symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and perceived stress during pregnancy (Time 1). They reported experiences of infant crying at 4 months (Time 2), and the mother–infant interaction and infant sensorimotor and language development at 12 months of infants’ age (Time 3). Results revealed that maternal mental health problems, but not war trauma, were important to experiences of infant crying. A high level of PTSD symptoms predicted negative emotions evoked by infant crying, and high depressive symptoms predicted low active and positive responses to crying. Unexpectedly, high prenatal perceived stress predicted high active and positive responsiveness. Concerning the consequences, mothers’ sensitive interpretation of infant crying predicted optimal infant sensorimotor development, and mothers’ active and positive responses predicted high emotional availability in mother–infant interaction. Crying is the first communication tool for infants, and mothers’ sensitive responses to crying contribute to infant well-being. Therefore, reinforcing mother's optimal responses is important when helping war-affected dyads.     

The ethical implications of Sengzhao’s concept of the Sage

This paper is an exploration of the ethical significance of Sengzhao’s concept of the sage as exhibited through a Buddhist practitioner’s expanded understanding and cognition of reality. From a philosophical point of view, I aim to show that the ethical significance of his concept of the sage comprises a shift first from ontology to epistemology, and then from epistemology to ethics. I firstly define Sengzhao’s concept of the sage and present a preliminary account of this concept before elaborating on its philosophical aspects. Next, I attempt to illustrate how ethical implications can be derived from Sengzhao’s ethical shift, and lastly, I shed light on the value and significance of this philosophical standpoint within Buddhist philosophy.     

Infants’ and adults’ use of duration and intensity cues in the segmentation of tone patterns

Adults and 8-month-olds were presented with sequences in which every third complex tone was either longer or more intense. Segmentation was measured by comparing the detection of silent gaps inserted into three possible locations in each pattern: Silent gaps inserted at perceived segmentation boundaries are harder to detect than gaps within perceived phrases or groups. A go/no-go conditioned head-turn (hand-raising for adults) procedure was used. In Experiment 1, detection was worse for the gaps following the longer complex tones than for the gaps at the other locations, suggesting that the longer tones marked the ends of perceived groups for both infants and adults. Experiment 2 showed that an increase in intensity did not result in any systematic grouping at either age.     

KIM and the rabbit: The use of the KIM-1 microprocessor to control classical conditioning of the rabbit’s nictitating membrane response

The KIM-1 microprocessor combined with a plug-board interface provides an inexpensive and highly flexible system for controlling classical conditioning of the rabbit’s nictitating membrane response. The system is described in the context of a program for differential conditioning.     

Iraqi refugee men’s experiences of psychotherapy: clinical implications and the proposal of a pluralistic model

The psychotherapy experiences of a sample of Iraqi refugee men, in later stages of exile, were explored with the aim of shedding some light on how this client group can experience therapy. Ten adult male Iraqi refugees – who had lived in Sweden for at least five years and had been psychotherapy clients at some point during that time – were recruited for this study. Using individual semi-structured interviews (in Arabic), three main areas were explored with each participant: (1) reasons for seeking psychotherapy; (2) perceptions of the psychotherapy professional; and (3) experiences of the psychotherapy process and outcome. The interviews were then translated into English, transcribed, and then analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Most participants/clients described exile-related stressors as their main reason for seeking psychotherapy, but some described distress due to a combination of pre-migration trauma and post-migration stress. They also found some aspects of therapy to be positive (mainly verbalising ones thoughts and feelings, and feeling less marginalised) and some negative (mainly experiencing racist or culturally insensitive treatment by therapists, and experiencing a lack of competence and transparency in therapists). The findings were explored in terms of clinical implications and a pluralistic model was proposed to address the identified needs.     

Husserl’s Conception of Physical Theories and Physical Geometry in the Time of the Prolegomena: A Comparison with Duhem’s and Poincaré’s Views

This paper discusses Husserl’s views on physical theories in the first volume of his Logical Investigations, and compares them with those of his contemporaries Pierre Duhem and Henri Poincaré. Poincaré’s views serve as a bridge to a discussion of Husserl’s almost unknown views on physical geometry from about 1890 on, which in comparison even with Poincaré’s—not to say Frege’s—or almost any other philosopher of his time, represented a rupture with the philosophical tradition and were much more in tune with the physical geometry underlying the Einstein-Hilbert general theory of relativity developed more than two decades later.     

“Hotspots” in trauma memories in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder: A replication

“Hotspots” refer to memories of detailed moments of peak emotional distress during a traumatic event. This study investigates hotspot frequency, and the emotions and cognitions contained in hotspots of memory for trauma, to replicate a previous study in this area (Holmes, Grey, & Young, 2005). Participants were patients receiving treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at a specialist outpatient clinic after experiencing a range of traumatic events. The main finding was that, after fear, the most common emotions reported were anger and sadness. Cognitions related to psychological threat to the self were more common than those related to physical threat.     

Nature’s drawing: problems and resolutions in the mathematization of motion

The mathematical nature of modern science is an outcome of a contingent historical process, whose most critical stages occurred in the seventeenth century. ‘The mathematization of nature’ (Koyré 1957, From the closed world to the infinite universe, 5) is commonly hailed as the great achievement of the ‘scientific revolution’, but for the agents affecting this development it was not a clear insight into the structure of the universe or into the proper way of studying it. Rather, it was a deliberate project of great intellectual promise, but fraught with excruciating technical challenges and unsettling epistemological conundrums. These required a radical change in the relations between mathematics, order and physical phenomena and the development of new practices of tracing and analyzing motion. This essay presents a series of discrete moments in this process. For mediaeval and Renaissance philosophers, mathematicians and painters, physical motion was the paradigm of change, hence of disorder, and ipso facto available to mathematical analysis only as idealized abstraction. Kepler and Galileo boldly reverted the traditional presumptions: for them, mathematical harmonies were embedded in creation; motion was the carrier of order; and the objects of mathematics were mathematical curves drawn by nature itself. Mathematics could thus be assigned an explanatory role in natural philosophy, capturing a new metaphysical entity: pure motion. Successive generations of natural philosophers from Descartes to Huygens and Hooke gradually relegated the need to legitimize the application of mathematics to natural phenomena and the blurring of natural and artificial this application relied on. Newton finally erased the distinction between nature’s and artificial mathematics altogether, equating all of geometry with mechanical practice.     

From Searle’s Chinese room to the mathematics classroom: technical and cognitive mathematics

Employing Searle’s views, I begin by arguing that students of Mathematics behave similarly to machines that manage symbols using a set of rules. I then consider two types of Mathematics, which I call Cognitive Mathematics and Technical Mathematics respectively. The former type relates to concepts and meanings, logic and sense, whilst the latter relates to algorithms, heuristics, rules and application of various techniques. I claim that an upgrade in the school teaching of Cognitive Mathematics is necessary. The aim is to change the current mentality of the stakeholders so as to compensate for the undue value presently attached to Technical Mathematics, due to advances in technology and its applications, and thus render the two sides of Mathematics equal. Furthermore, I suggest a reorganization/systematization of School Mathematics into a cognitive network to facilitate students’ understanding of the subject. The final goal is the transition from mechanical execution of rules to better understanding and in-depth knowledge of Mathematics.

Kupalov’s concept of shortened conditional reflexes: Psychophysiological and psychopharmacological implications

In the regulation of cortical excitability tonus, Kupalov described a particular acquired, learned mechanism, the shortened conditional Reflex (SCR). SCR is an essential mechanism by which an adequate cortical tonus is established by environmental cues as an anticipatory set-up preparing the individual qualitatively and quantitatively for expected forthcoming events. An original physiological example is given, the conditional “transfer” of motor behavior at cortical electrical stimulation. Three psychopharmacological implications are presented, namely environmental-dependent, stress-related events, environmental-dependent drug conditioning, and drug-tolerance experiments. Future eventual psychophysiological and psychopharmacological lines of research related to the shortened conditional reflex concept are discussed.     

What’s in God’s name: literary forerunners and philosophical allies of the imjaslavie debate

The aim of this paper is to explore the interaction between a tradition that belongs originally to the realm of orthodox contemplative monasticism (i.e., hesychasm) and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian intellectuals. In the first part, this paper will explore how hesychasm gradually penetrated nineteenth-century secular culture; a special focus will be on the hermitage of Optina Pustyn?? and its renowned elders, as well as their appeal to members of the Optina-intelligentsia, especially F?dor Dostoevskij. Then, attention will shift to the imjaslavie controversy at the beginning of the twentieth century, which flared up initially as a dispute between Athonite monks and reached a sad culmination in 1912?C1913 with a manu militari intervention by troops of the Russian Holy Synod. However, the debate was taken up by some prominent intellectuals of the Russian religious renaissance, such as Pavel Florenskij, Nikolaj Berdjaev, and Sergej Bulgakov, who explicitly sided with the imjaslavcy (??Glorifiers of the Name??) and actively stepped into the debate.     

On people’s understanding of the diagnostic implications of probabilistic data

Two lines of prior research into the conditions under which people seek information are examined in light of two statistical definitions of diagnosticity. Five experiments are reported. In two, subjects selected information in order to test a hypothesis. In the remaining three, they selected information in order to convince someone else of the truth of a known hypothesis. A total of 567 university students served as subjects. The two primary conclusions were as follows: (1) When the task is highly structured by the environment, subjects select information diagnostically, and (2) when the task is less structured, so that subjects must seek relevant information not manifest, they select information pseudodiagnostically. Possible relations to other laboratory inference tasks and to clinical judgment are discussed.     

Being white,being Jungian: implications of Jung’s encounter with the ‘non-European’ other1

This personal account charts the changing relationship to a Jungian identity arising from the interrelated processes of understanding the roots of the colonial and racial ideologies that underpin Jung’s thinking, and a developing awareness of what it means to be a white person in a system of racism that maintains white supremacy. This is illustrated with reference to the image of a black man appearing in the dream of the white author and with use of post-Jungian thinking to critique the notion of an objective, non-racial psyche.     

Student clinicians’ and clients’ perceptions of the therapeutic alliance and outcomes in stuttering treatment

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to examine how the therapeutic alliances (TA) of graduate student clinicians and adult clients who stutter relate to perceived treatment outcomes.MethodsStudent clinicians (N = 42) and adult clients who stutter (N = 22) completed a survey assessing their TA strength and perception of treatment outcomes. Responses were analyzed to determine similarities and differences in how clinicians and clients relate the TA to perceptions of treatment effectiveness, progress, and outcome satisfaction.ResultsResults suggest that clinicians and clients who stutter both relate the TA to treatment outcome, but in different ways. While clinicians associate the TA most with treatment effectiveness and client progress, clients relate the TA most to outcome satisfaction.ConclusionClinicians should be aware that for adult clients who stutter, outcome satisfaction is related to the degree of shared understanding, agreement on daily tasks, and bond they experience with their clinician. To ensure a strong TA and client satisfaction, clinicians should actively seek their clients’ perspective regarding TA status.