Transformative Aspects of Our Own Analyses and Their Resonance in Our Work With Our Patients

As psychoanalysts, our own relational stories, our “wounds that must serve as tools” (Harris, 2009 Harris, A. April 2009. “Keynote address at the meeting of the Division of Psychoanalysis, American Psychological Association, Toronto, Canada.”. In You must remember this April,  [Google Scholar]), represent both our greatest liabilities and potential for change, at times facilitating and at times impeding our capacity to engage deeply in the analytic process. Transformative aspects of our personal analysis dwell, often unconsciously or preconsciously, in the analyst, generating unanticipated opportunities in our work with our patients. In this paper, the author describes how a profound piece of work in her own analysis around healing in her relationship with her young son resonated in her work with a long-term patient, enlivening and deepening the treatment. The author explores how she drew on the interpenetrating experiences of analyst, patient, mother, and child, helping her to deconstruct a complex enactment with her patient, and opening up potential space. In the process, her patient discovered new places within herself, which enabled her to reach out to her vulnerable teenage son in new and reparative ways.     

Celestial Aesthetics: Over Our Heads and/or in Our Heads

I am the daughter of earth and water,

And the nursling of the sky.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Cloud,” 1820

Abstract Looking at the night sky, we may seem cosmic dwarfs, overwhelmed with a sense of otherness, abyss, lostness. But humans alone enjoy such celestial awe. We can move to a sense of the beholder's celestial ancestry and ongoing relatedness in “our cosmic habitat.” That account joins aesthetics with mathematics, finds dramatic interrelationships gathered under “the anthropic principle,” and considers meteorological aesthetics. The wonder is as much this Homo sapiens with mind enough to search the universe. What is out there is inseparably linked with what is down here. We are at home in the universe. The glory is both over our heads and in our heads.     

Regaining the Riches of Our Past and New Hope for Our Future

We can revive Natural Philosophy using thermodynamics and information theory. In constructing an intelligible picture of the world, Natural Philosophy systematizes information from all the sciences so that every field of knowledge of nature supports every other as parts of a concept of general evolution. Change in material systems involves both development and evolution. General evolution is primarily developmental; the specification hierarchy of integrative levels can be used to model it. In this hierarchy, biology is seen as a kind of material system, and social phenomena as kinds of biological systems. This pattern implies that there was a preferred tendency toward psychology in the history of the earth. This scheme is biased by having been produced by psychological, social, biological beings-ourselves, and so it embodies valuation, integrating humans with the rest of the world. Natural Philosophy welcomes the effect of values upon its constructions. There has never been a culture without an origination myth, but the one we call general evolution will differ by referring to its own genesis within a picture of the genesis of the world.     

Our minds and their bodies

Ohne Zusammenfassung

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Our minds and their bodies

     

Confronting Our Own Hypocrisy: Being a Model for Our Students and Clients

Counselor educators, supervisors, and practitioners sometimes act in ways that contradict the most significant beliefs and values that they espouse. Despite communicating to students and trainees the importance of being caring, respectful, warm, flexible, honest, and personally competent, we are sometimes found to be operating quite differently. Issues related to the counselor educator, supervisor, and practitioner's narcissism, self-indulgence, abuses of power, illusions of omnipotence, prejudices, and unresolved issues are discussed. A case is strongly presented that we would all be a lot more effective if we worked to confront our hypocrisies and practice more what we preach.     

Germline Manipulation and Our Future Worlds

Two genetic technologies capable of making heritable changes to the human genome have revived interest in, and in some quarters a very familiar panic concerning, so-called germline interventions. These technologies are: most recently the use of CRISPR/Cas9 to edit genes in non-viable IVF zygotes and Mitochondrial Replacement Therapy (MRT) the use of which was approved in principle in a landmark vote earlier this year by the United Kingdom Parliament. The possibility of using either of these techniques in humans has encountered the most violent hostility and suspicion. However it is important to be aware that much of this hostility dates back to the fears associated with In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) and other reproductive technologies and by cloning; fears which were baseless at the time concerning both IVF and cloning the use of both of which have proved to be highly beneficial to humanity and which have been effectively regulated and controlled. This paper argues that CRISPR should by pursued through researh until it is safe enough for use in humans but there is no reason to suppose at this stage that such use will be unsafe or unethical (Collins 2015).