Metamorphosis

In this article, I indicate that I have spent most of my life in self-hatred, taking abuse from everyone; teachers, peer, family, and society at large. I am a beautiful person, we all are, and I believe that as women it is time we stopped being dictated to by others who rule the diet and fashion industries. It's time that we stopped trying to live up to unrealistic role models. We are individuals who are as different as the colors of the rainbow, and we should be treated as such, and respect each other's differences.     

“蜕变”——记南京威龙投资公司总经理伊滢姊妹

“我是信靠耶稣成为我们的教主,真光就会进入我们内心和生命,驱散沮丧与迷茫,这真光不断安慰我们,催促我们走过悲伤的时刻。”伊滢姊妹的话语中,是否在表明一种心迹?是否亦是心灵的——     

Spirituality: Transformation and Metamorphosis

Spirituality has increasingly featured in writings about religion. This article explores the diverse and often contradictory ways in which this term is now being employed, it questions the reasons for its present popularity, and asks to what extent it can serve the purposes to which it is being put. Finally, by using the insights of contemporary anthropology and especially the work of Michael Carrithers, it suggests a more satisfactory way in which the ideas associated with spirituality might be investigated.     

Reliability in Dream Research: A Methodological Note

The coefficients of internal consistency and retest reliability had been rarely investigated within the methodology of dream content analysis. Analyzing a dream series of elderly, healthy persons obtained from weekly telephone interviews, the internal consistency of a series of 20 dreams and retests after 4 or 22 weeks, respectively, had been computed. The findings indicate that dream recall and dream length are quite stable, but dream characteristics such as bizarreness and emotional tone underlie large intraindividual fluctuations. In order to obtain reliable measures for these variables which will be important for correlational studies, including waking-life trait measures, one has to obtain as many dreams as possible (about 20) in a very short time period. Further research is needed to extend the present findings to diary dreams and laboratory dreams.     

The Dream in Terminal Illness: A Jungian Formulation

It is a central assumption of Jungian theory that psychical transformation occurring during the critical developmental stages of the life cycle is anticipated, inspired, and orchestrated by the archetypal symbol. In this way, archetypal dreams are afforded particular significance during these transitional stages. The present paper purports to consider the clinical and theoretical implications of this understanding with reference to the dying process. The concepts discussed are illustrated by a series of dreams of a terminally ill cancer patient, which are elucidated by way of the method of amplification. Thematic analysis of the dream series supports Jung's conceptualization of death and dying as being a critical stage of the individuation process, characterized by profound psychical development of a specific and purposeful nature. The value of using dreams in the psychotherapeutic care of dying patients and their families is discussed, with case illustrations. It is suggested that such an approach may foster creative development, assist patients to integrate meaningfully subjective experiences pertaining to dying, and counteract the sense of isolation experienced by the terminally ill. The need for further research and the development of specific treatment modalities is highlighted.     

From Mortification to Metamorphosis

The psychoanalyst treating primitively organized people has to be primitive and porous enough to carry the projections and enter into a seemingly undifferentiated envelope to establish contact. Like a member of a dysfunctional couple, he or she must evolve a separate skin so that language has the clout of bridge, rather than discharge. In this way, the analyst is trying to provide a distinct outcome to the formerly thwarted separation–individuation journey and in so doing functions simultaneously as a leading out and identificatory other. Language is only trusted when one trusts that living in one's own skin will not result in annihilation of self or other.

Inevitable breakdowns and failure of attunement occur in any treatment. An undiscovered countertransferential conflict can open up creative space, rather than ossify unresolved painful conflicts into stultified reenactments of sadomasochistic exchange. In two cases, feeling mortified, “Why couldn't I have known this sooner; how could I have done this?” the author finds that honest handling of such exposures marked the beginning of opening of creative space rather than a continuation of futile repetition.     

Organizational Revivalism: Explaining Metamorphosis of China's Catholic Church

The classical works of Troelsch and Niebuhr suggested that sect movements had been the origin of reform and revitalization of the church. More recently, Finke and Wittberg supplemented that thesis by suggesting that the Catholic Church was able to reform itself not through the sect development, but through the establishment of religious orders within the Catholic Church itself. This article suggests, from historical and contemporary archival sources, that the revitalization of the Catholic Church in China was through indigenization of the Church. The vitalization has been achieved despite tensions between the underground church committed to Rome and the national church, which advocated self-government without political and financial ties to the Catholic hierarchies outside China. Both the Chinese government's accommodation of the ecclesiastical authority of the papacy, and the Vatican's silence in response to the underground church's pleas to disregard the national church, had helped the indigenization process and the growth of the church without a possible schism.     

The Metamorphosis of Projective Methods

Early approaches to projective methods emphasized the use of unstructured materials as stimuli designed to elicit symbolic material within a psychoanalytic framework. Current theorizing concerning projective methods emphasizes the multi-level nature of test behavior and the unique role that projective methods play in the assessment armamentarium.     

Critique and Cure: A Dream of Uniting Psychoanalysis and Philosophy

Critical theory, whose aim was to historicize philosophy through integrating it with the social sciences, turned to psychoanalysis to find its way through an accounting of philosophy after the Second World War. Over 50 years after this initial project, the rift between philosophy and psychoanalysis has never been greater. If Jacques Lacan could be considered one of the few psychoanalysts to maintain and foster links to philosophical thought in the latter half of the 20th century, his work has sadly remained marginal in the clinical field throughout America and Europe. Both critical theory and Lacan remain skeptical of the direction taken by psychoanalysis after Freud. Reflecting on the history of these two disciplines, as well as through an examination of Theodor Adorno's posthumously published dream journal, critique and cure emerge as two dialectically intertwined themes that gain momentum in the dream of the unification of the philosophical and psychoanalytic projects.     

The oedipal wound in two stories by Kafka: The Metamorphosis and A Country Doctor

Kafka read Freud and was interested in psychoanalysis but believed there was no ‘cure’ for what was essentially the problem of living. As always with creative artists, the writer is his own psychoanalyst, and the actual process of writing is his means of self-revelation. The aim of this paper is to consider, in relation to two stories (The Metamorphosis and A Country Doctor), Kafka’s use of this background oedipal conflict with his father or received values (the ‘law’) as a springboard for the type of wound that results in creative writing. The wound for him became a kind of personal myth, and was also associated with other painful stimuli, including his tuberculosis and his troubled love affairs, but above all with his identity as a writer. The writing process and the ‘faith-value’ it demands is an underlying metaphor behind these narratives of Kafka’s ‘dream-like inner life’. There are parallels here with Bion’s psychoanalytic philosophy of ‘suffering’ and ‘psyche-lodgement’.