A Dangerous Movie? Hollywood Does Psychoanalysis

After the appearance of David Cronenberg’s film A Dangerous Method in 2011, dealing with the relationships of Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung and Sabina Spielrein, Dr. Donald Ferrell published: A Dangerous Method, A Film Directed by David Cronenberg: An Extended Review (Ferrell 2012) in the Journal of Religion and Health. Upon its publication, Dr. Ferrell’s article was nominated for a Gradiva Award by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. On November 1, 2013, the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society held its annual conference at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. Dr. Billie Pivnick, a member at large of the Board of Directors of the APCS and also on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Religion and Health, persuaded the 2013 Conference Program Committee that Cronenberg’s film would make an interesting subject for discussion for conference participants. To that end, Dr. Pivnick invited Dr. Ferrell, C. G. Jung Institute of New York, Dr. Steven Reisner, Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, and Dr. Martin Silverman, Training and Supervising Analyst and Supervising Child Analyst at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education, NYU College of Medicine, Training and Supervising Analyst at the Center for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis of New Jersey, and Associate Editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly to serve as panel members to discuss: A Dangerous Movie? Hollywood does Psychoanalysis. Presentations on Cronenberg’s film and the early history of psychoanalysis were given by Drs. Ferrell and Reisner, followed by a response to their presentations by Dr. Silverman. Dr. Pivnick chaired the session. The articles presented here were given originally at the APCS conference by Dr. Ferrell and Dr. Silverman. Dr. Reisner declined the invitation to submit his presentation for publication. Dr. Silverman’s remarks were based not only on the presentation given by Dr. Ferrell at the session on A Dangerous Movie?, but also on his close and careful reading of the extended review of Cronenberg’s film Dr. Ferrell published in the Journal of Religion and Health, as well as Dr. Reisner’s presentation. It was appropriate for Dr. Silverman to serve in his capacity as discussant since he had earlier published a critical review of A Secret Symmetry. Sabina Spielrein Between Jung and Freud by Aldo Carotenuto (Silverman 1985).     

The social unconscious in persons,groups and societies,volume 1: Mainly theory,edited by Earl Hopper and Heim Weinberg

This paper looks at some instances of young children learning in a school setting, and suggests that ‘emotional learning’ is an integral part of the apparently ‘cognitive’ learning that takes place in school. The paper uses object relations psychoanalysis in order to explore some of the more-or-less hidden emotional states of mind that accompany difficulties and successes with school learning. Three extracts are presented from observations of young children coming to terms with reading and writing. Each of these is then discussed, with the aim of showing how learning always takes place in a dynamic, relational emotional context. From the theoretical perspective outlined in this article, all learning involves unconscious ‘object relating’. Things to be learnt about, and people requiring learning, or assisting with it, are the bearers of the learner's vivid unconscious ‘transferences’. Such transferences colour the learner's emotional experience of the people and things around him or her, constituting a dynamic, internally experienced, ‘emotional context’ for learning. While this emotional context may be partly subjective, it is also more or less affected by others' feeling states, pulling the learner into a shared learning environment which is emotionally complex and inter-subjective.     

INCREASING OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING OF CHILDREN WITH AUTISM: A PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS

We evaluated the effects of monitoring responses on the acquisition of sight words with 3 children with autism. In the training condition, we taught participants a vocal imitation and matching response related to a peer's reading response. In another condition, participants were exposed only to a peer's reading responses. Participants read the words more accurately during test sessions when the monitoring response was required. Results and discussion highlight the importance of identifying component responses of observational learning and the need for additional research in this area.     

Learning As Support For Organizational Innovation: Possibilities And Limitations

Abstract

The present article tells an intervention story where two collectives, from business and academia, came together to address a business problem through collaborative action research. Among other things, the project created new ways of learning and therefore, knowing about the “business problem.” The author argues that in order to talk about an organizational intervention in a learning context, it was helpful to focus observation at the level of practice, in this case the different learning practices brought to the project by the organization and the research group. The “scientific narrative” focuses on how the two practices interacted. The present story's plot revolves around the following questions: What happens when one collective—used to a particular style of learning—decides to engage with another collective with a different approach to learning and what are the consequences for organizational innovation?     

Observational learning of attitudes: A behavioral analysis

Analyzes observational learning of attitudes within the classical conditioning paradigm after reviewing the relevant theoretical formulations and empirical evidence. In this analysis an attitude is conceived of as a habit between an attitudinal stimulus and an attitudinal response, the attitudinal response being an internal emotional response. Thus vicarious emotional arousal is the basis of observational learning of attitudes. A model's positive or negative emotional behavior should normally lead to an arousal of a similar emotion in an observer because of the latter's conditioning history. Given that the model's emotional behavior is in the context of a particular stimulus situation, this stimulus situation should be able to elicit the relevant emotion in the observer through higher-order conditioning. Thus the specific stimulus situation, or another similar stimulus situation, comes to be a positive or negative attitudinal object for the observer, depending on the nature of the model's emotional response.     

Mothers' Attention‐getting Utterances During Shared Book Reading: Links to Low‐income Preschoolers' Verbal Engagement,Visual Attention,and Early Literacy

This study examined associations among low‐income mothers' use of attention‐getting utterances during shared book reading, preschoolers' verbal engagement and visual attention to reading, and their early literacy skills (N = 51). Mother–child shared book reading sessions were videotaped and coded for each utterance, including attention talk, contextualized talk, de‐contextualized talk, and print talk. Preschoolers' attention during book reading was assessed using two measures: verbal engagement by using a rating scale of preschoolers' involvement in book reading discussion and visual attention by coding visual gaze. Findings indicated that mothers' attention talk was positively associated with children's verbal engagement, while maternal print talk was associated with children's visual attention. Further, low‐level maternal print talk was associated with higher early decoding scores of children when it was accompanied with high‐level maternal attention talk. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Therapeutic Action in the Work of a Playful Clinician: A Reflection on Dr. Silber’s Reimagining of Humpty Dumpty

ABSTRACT

In my discussion of Dr. Silber’s paper, Reimagining Humpty Dumpty: The Therapeutic Action of Play, I mirror Dr. Silber’s playful posture in her use of the Humpty Dumpty fable to talk about children and their care by society. My reflections on Dr. Silber’s therapeutic work with her two young patients focus on her co-creating meaning with each child’s parents as well as with the child. I discuss that by holding in her mind both the subjectivities of the child and his parents, Dr. Silber is able to practice a fundamentally relational therapy. I would have liked to have heard more about her emotional reactions in her work with both cases as another important dimension of her work. Finally, I emphasize through my play with Humpty Dumpty several ways that society can support children and families that are essential for their development: parental leave, developmentally approptiate expectations for children in school, and the facilitation and protection children’s open ended time and ability to play.     

Mystical experience as universal connectedness: Leonardo Boff's ‘trans‐cultural phenomenology’

This article engages with the post–1992 (Rio Earth Summit) writings of Leonardo Boff, one of the most prolific and widely read Brazilian writers in the religious field today. The article first outlines Boff's understanding of the prevailing global market paradigm, guided by ‘liberal capitalist’ values and at the point of crisis. Boff's appreciation of the emergent ‘new science’ paradigm as providing conceptual impetus to fresh understandings of relations between the sacred, the self, and the universe is then delineated. The understanding of mystical experience as universal connectedness, informed by the ‘new science’ paradigm and emerging from Boff's ‘trans‐cultural phenomenological’ reading of religious discourse and practice, is subsequently explored in depth.     

Resistance in treatment as a means of avoiding inner conflict

It is not commonly known that, in his eighties, Michael Fordham sought the help of Donald Meltzer in what Dr Meltzer described as ‘more a weekly supervision of dreams than an analysis’. Dr Fordham is said to have commented that it was ‘a weekly supervision of my inner world - and you can't get closer to psychoanalysis than that’ He was greatly helped by these ‘supervisions’ and at the end of their work together, Meltzer suggested that Fordham wrote his memoirs. This resulted in The Making of an Analyst: Michael Fordham, published in 1993.

This fascinating account of Fordham's life and work contains much of interest about his personal development. He talks with candour about his confusions and passions in what is at times a surprisingly revealing manner. In particular Fordham talks openly about his closest relationships and how they affected him. The book was published, as he wanted it to be, after careful discussion with James Astor and Karl Figlio.

We are pleased to be able to publish the following contribution from Dr Meltzer about the book which he prompted. It is a mixture of personal responses on reading the book and memories of the man.     

Is Silence Really Golden? The Role of Spiritual Voice in Folk Pedagogy and Folk Psychology

Most recently, considerable attention has been focused on the social construction of knowledge and an internalist, first‐person perspective on learning. Included in this paradigm shift is a particular ‘hybrid’ of both psychology and educational theory often referred to as ‘theory of mind’ (ToM research) or folk psychology. This article outlines models of teaching, learning, and mind in the hopes that such an advance in understanding children's minds will lead to an improved pedagogy. To address the issues of emotion and ‘spiritual voice’ that may constrain learning in the classroom and self‐development, Belenky et al.’sfive epistemological perspectives or ‘Women's Ways of Knowing’ (New York, Basic Books, 1986) are couched within the framework of Olson and Burner's [Folk Psychology and Folk Pedagogy, in: D. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds) Handbook of Education and Human Development: New Models of Learning, Teaching and Schooling, pp. 9‐27 (Oxford, Blackwell)] four models of mind, teaching and learning. At issue is the dialogical relation between folk psychology and folk pedagogy and its contingency on both culture and context.     

Memoirs from a Mental Health Affiliation

SUMMARY

For students entering the Level II ficldwork experience in mental health, there is often great concern about one's ability to work effectively with the mentally ill population. Developing competency and comfort with this population is a critical area of practice and students can benefit from peer-oriented learning experiences which address their particular issues. This memoir recounts one student's log as a learning chronicle for the benefit of other students. It outlines common fears, coping skills and knowledge that are mastered during the course of practice in a typical psychiatric setting.     

Heidegger,Wittgenstein and St Paul on the Last Judgement: On the Roots and Significance of ‘The Theoretical Attitude’

The article examines Heidegger's lectures on St Paul and provides, in particular, a reading of their discussion of the remarks on the parousia in the letters to the Thessalonians. This reading serves a number of purposes. First, it makes clear how Heidegger's appropriation of a certain ‘anti-theological’ tradition helped first give a sense to his notion of ‘the theoretical attitude’, a problematic notion that plays a central role in his mature early philosophy. Second, it illustrates, and thus helps to refine the identity of, a particular kind of recognizably ‘phenomenological’ reflection that attempts to distance itself precisely from that ‘attitude’; and third, it points to a new perspective on some central and problematic themes in Heidegger's better known early writings and, in particular, their discussion of assertions. An identification of some remarkable similarities between Heidegger's remarks on the Last Judgement and remarks of Wittgenstein's help identify this perspective.     

The Decent Care Movement: Subsidiarity,Pragmatic Solidarity,and Cross-Cultural Resonance

Decent Care is the World Health Organization and The Ford Foundation’s joint effort to articulate a healthcare paradigm that makes a patient’s voice equal to the voice of the healthcare provider. In this article, the six tenants of Decent Care are outlined with particular emphasis on subsidiarity. Liberation theology’s preferential option for the poor maxim is presented and compared with other major world religions to demonstrate the cross-cultural focus of “decency.” The power of this paradigm is in its emphasis and proclamation of human flourishing in a healthcare setting, generally speaking, and more specifically, human flourishing in the presence of affliction from chronic disease or dying cross-culturally.     

Arithmetic knowledge from the spontaneous attention to relations

Children's knowledge of arithmetic principles is a key aspect of early mathematics knowledge. Knowledge of arithmetic principles predicts how children approach solving arithmetic problems and the likelihood of their success. Prior work has begun to address how children might learn arithmetic principles in a classroom setting. Understanding of arithmetic principles involves understanding how numbers in arithmetic equations relate to another. For example, the Relation to Operands (RO) principle is that for subtracting natural numbers (A ? B = C), the difference (C) must be smaller than the minuend (A). In the current study we evaluate if individual differences in arithmetic principle knowledge (APK) can be predicted by the learners' spontaneous attention to relations (SAR) and if feedback can increase their attention to relations. Results suggest that participants’ Spontaneous Attention to Number (SAN) does not predict their knowledge of the RO principle for symbolic arithmetic. Feedback regarding the attention to relations did not show a significant effect on SAR or participants’ APK. We also did not find significant relations between reports of parent talk and the home environment with individual differences in SAN. The amount of parent's talk about relations was not significantly associated with learner's SAR and APK. We conclude that children's SAR with non‐symbolic number does not generalize to attention to relations with symbolic arithmetic.     

The End(s) of Philosophy: Rhetoric, Therapy and Wittgenstein's Pyrrhonism

In Culture and Value Wittgenstein remarks: ‘Thoughts that are at peace. That's what someone who philosophizes yearns for’. The desire for such conceptual tranquillity is a recurrent theme in Wittgenstein's work, and especially in his later ‘grammatical‐therapeutic’ philosophy. Some commentators (notably Rush Rhees and C. G. Luckhardt) have cautioned that emphasising this facet of Wittgenstein's work ‘trivialises’ philosophy – something which is at odds with Wittgenstein's own philosophical ‘seriousness’ (in particular his insistence that philosophy demands that one ‘Go the bloody hard way’). Drawing on a number of correlations between Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy and that of the Pyrrhonian Sceptics, in this paper I defend a strong ‘therapeutic’ reading of Wittgenstein, and show how this can be maintained without ‘trivialising’ philosophy.     

THE EVOLUTION OF A RESEARCH DESIGN: A CASE STUDY IN CONTENT READING

In recent years, educators and researchers have become increasingly interested in naturalistic or responsive research. This approach to inquiry seems to be uniquely suited to research in the complex educational setting found in classrooms. This paper discusses one aspect of the application of a responsive paradigm to research in reading in the content area ‐‐ the evolution of the research design. In this study of four secondary school social studies classes major modifications in design were made at several points. These modifications are described and the reasons for the changes are discussed. In summary, allowing the design to emerge as the study progressed resulted in the collection of data that provided a complete view of reading in these classes. In addition, on a personal level, the researchers found that engaging in this type of inquiry influenced their views about how to collect data and what data to collect while, at the same time, enlarging their perspective of reading occurring in content area classrooms.     

The effect of peer collaboration on children's problem‐solving ability

Background. A Vygotskian framework links cognitive change to collaborative interaction with a more competent partner whereas a Piagetian perspective supports the view that cognitive conflict arising from peer interaction leads to cognitive change. Aims. The study investigated the effect of collaborative learning on children's problem‐solving ability and whether differences in knowledge status or the use of explanatory language were contributing factors. Sample. Participants were 100 Year 2 children (aged between 6 and 7 years), from schools in high socio‐economic areas, who individually completed a pre‐ and post‐test comprising a block sorting task. Method. During the experimental phase, children completed a card sorting activity, either individually or in same‐gender dyads. The dyads consisted of same or different ability children who operated under either a ‘talk’ or ‘no‐talk’ condition. Results. It was found that children who collaborated collectively obtained a significantly higher number of correct sorts than children who worked individually. However, post‐testing indicated that only those children of lower sorting ability who collaborated with higher sorting ability peers showed a significant improvement in sorting ability from pre‐test scores. In addition, it was found that when analysis was limited to this particular group, only those children who were required to explain the sort for their partner to carry out improved significantly from pre‐ to post‐test. Conclusion. It is suggested that perhaps the two theoretical positions are not as mutually exclusive as they are often portrayed. Implications of these findings for teachers and children's learning are also discussed.     

Fire at the theatre: (Un)reality of/in the transference and interpretation1

Only in Bion's extended idea of ‘waking dream thought’ is the oneiric paradigm of the cure (already an obvious Freudian principle) completely applicable. The author's basic hypothesis is that, by adopting this paradigm thoroughly, one can combine the radical antirealism which is expressed in the postulate by which all the patient's communications are transference‐connected (here meaning ‘false connection’‐i.e. as projection/displacement of elements of the patient's inner psychic world) with the ‘reality’ of the transference, that is to say with the conviction that the facts of the analysis are co‐determined by the patient‐analyst dyad and actually rooted in how they interact. The Freudian metaphor of the fi re at the theatre is reintroduced here to suggest the crisis of the therapist's internal setting and capacity for reverie, which occurs when the irreducible ambiguity of the transference is resolved defensively, either in the patient's external reality or in his unconscious fantasy constellation. The author gives three clinical examples. The fi rst shows some of the not necessarily negative effects of this temporary crisis. The other two vignettes show a way of listening to the traumatic events of the patient's life from a perspective (that of the ‘analytic fi eld’) which is thought to be potentially the most transformative and vital to the analytical relationship.     

Bowlby's ‘yearning and searching’ phase of mourning as seen in adult psychotherapy

SUMMARY

This paper was given at a conference to celebrate Dr. John Bowlby's 80th birthday. The conference was organised by the External Organising Committee of the Association of Child Psychotherapists and was held at the London Zoological Society on 28th February 1987. The theme of the conference was ‘Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory’. In the paper I outline Dr. Bowlby's theory of mourning with particular reference to the processes of the second phase described by him as ‘yearning and searching’. A clinical account of once weekly psychotherapy with an adult patient is given in order to illustrate work on disordered mourning in which the patient had remained imprisoned in a suspended state of searching for her lost parent. Some resolution of this state is described together with the ensuing feelings of anger, sadness and depression as loss is comprehended.