Toward pastoral counseling integration: one Bowen oriented approach

Integration between the resources of faith and of the behavioral sciences in pastoral counseling is a challenging endeavor. The two domains have points of contact and many shared values. Yet, their fundamental presuppositions are quite different. The multiplicity of faith positions and of behavioral science positions complicates the effort enormously. This article presents one application of a comprehensive model of integration in one composite case. Based on an understanding of Bowen Theory, such a model (1) treats the relationship between the client and God in a way similar to the client's other significant relationships, (2) involves religious community and sacred texts as "God's available next of kin," and (3) considers "I positions" (which include the idea of therapist neutrality) as a framework for therapist authentic expression of faith without an authoritarian attempt to dictate the faith of the client. This case illustrates how one intervention based on this model made a positive contribution to the well being of a representative client. Therapists with other faith positions and other behavioral science positions would develop different models of integration, of course. This small slice of one case example is offered to further the discussion as others take positions of their own.     

Aspects of the Client's Conscious Control of the Psychotherapeutic Process

An analysis is made of the opening moments of dialogue between and a client and her therapist in the light of the client's commentary given during an Interpersonal Process Recall interview about the moments. These moments are drawn from a study of 14 clients' reports on their experiences of therapy, thus particularizing the general understanding derived in the larger project. This passage of dialogue was chosen because the client's commentary revealed that, in the brief space of time involved, she had exerted control in terms of the three main relationships as experienced by all clients in the larger study: the relationship with the self, the therapist, and the therapist's techniques. Such control is understood to be an expression of clients' reflexivity, defined as self-awareness and agency within that self-awareness. The understanding that there is an agential involvement in reflexivity is based on both the participants' reports and the author's examination of his own consciousness. The study is discussed in terms of clients' covert experience of therapy and ways of gaining greater access to the unspoken in order to facilitate the working alliance.     

The concept of boundaries in counselling and psychotherapy

Boundaries in the mind—the relative 'thinness' and 'thickness' of many kinds of boundaries—has been studied as a measurable dimension of personality. Persons scoring 'thin' overall on the Boundary Questionnaire can be described as open, trusting, vulnerable, and usually having a rich fantasy life; they are people in whom 'everything gets through'. People who score very 'thick' tend to be solid, well-organised, and sometimes rigid. The relationship of boundaries to other measures of personality, to dreams and nightmares, to clients' occupations and interests, and finally to the conduct of psychotherapists and counsellors, including the question of boundary violations, is discussed. Some boundary violators have very thin boundaries and are unable to maintain clear distinctions between the client's needs and their own; others have relatively thick boundaries which make them insensitive to the damage that boundary violations can cause. Awareness of the client's boundaries and one's own can be useful in 'matching' a client with a therapist and in the conduct of therapy, especially at stressful times. It is also useful at times to discuss boundaries with clients.     

Looking at Systems as Process

This article proposes that the social systems family therapists are concerned with may usefully be conceived of as interactive processes. It discusses limitations to the organismic view, in which social systems are seen as autonomous entities with boundaries, internal structures, and self-perpetuating behaviors, and argues, from Maturana and Varela, that social systems are qualitatively different from organisms. It develops from chaos theory an alternative view in which social systems are seen as complex nonlinear processes. It proposes that this view can free the therapist from the notions of family dysfunction and the systemic function of symptoms, and from reifications in which the family is seen as having covert rules, keeping secrets, neutralizing the therapist, and the like. This view leads to a redefinition of the therapist's place in the system and to the conclusion that family therapists can only influence systemic process by working with individuals.     

A Negotiation Approach to Intake and Treatment Choice

Treatment choice is the decision process whereby the psychotherapeutic methods and the psychotherapist are determined when psychotherapy is recommended for a specific client. In this article the problem of treatment choice is situated within an integrative view of psychotherapy. A review of the literature confirms the usefulness of the following concepts for treatment choice: client preferences, client control of the situation of choice, and the mutual acceptability of differing views of therapists and clients. These research findings reveal the importance of four elements in the psychotherapeutic intake strategy: exploration of the client's perspective, informing the client, negotiation as a process of confrontation between the client's and the clinician's perspective, and the client's ultimate choice between alternative treatment proposals.     

Aesthetic cognition

The purpose of this article is to integrate two outstanding problems within the philosophy of science. The first concerns what role aesthetics plays in scientific thinking. The second is the problem of how logically testable ideas are generated (the so-called "psychology of research" versus "logic of (dis)proof" problem). I argue that aesthetic sensibility is the basis for what scientists often call intuition, and that intuition in turn embodies (in a literal physiological sense) ways of thinking that have their own meta-logic. Thus, aesthetics is a form of cognition. Scientists think not in equations or words or other logical abstractions, but emotionally and sensually, using visual and aural images, kinesthetic and other proprioceptive feelings, sensations, patterns, and analogies. These aesthetic forms of thinking have their own logics that I call "synosia", from the root words synaesthesia (a combining of senses) and gnosis, "to know". Synosia denotes understanding that integrates feeling that one knows with feeling what one knows. Eminent scientists universally describe an explicitly secondary process in which such personal knowledge must be "translated" into a formal language, such as words or equations, in order to be communicated to other people. Many of the unsolved problems that philosophers of science (as well as psychologists and artificial intelligence researchers) have had in making sense of scientific thinking have arisen from confusing the form and content of the final translations with the hidden means by which scientific insights are actually achieved.     

Emergenesis. Genetic traits that may not run in families.

Traits that are influenced by a configuration--rather than by a simple sum--of polymorphic genes may not be seen to be genetic unless one studies monozygotic twins (who share all their genes and thus all gene configurations) because such "emergenic" traits will tend not to run in families. Personal idiosyncrasies that have been found to be surprisingly concordant among MZ twins separated in infancy and reared apart may be emergenic traits. More speculatively, important human traits like leadership, genius in its many manifestations, being an effective therapist or parent, as well as certain psychopathological syndromes may also be emergenic. These ideas reemphasize the importance of the role played in human affairs by genetic variation.     

The Negotiation of Values in Therapy

Values are integral to all social systemic operations and therefore to the heart of the therapeutic process. For the therapist, values are an essential component in defining and assessing a problem, determining goals, and selecting therapeutic strategy. Therapists do not have a choice about whether they need to deal with values in therapy, only about how well. The training of therapists about their values needs to be integrated with the training about their own emotional and family issues. This training should be carried out in the context of treating families and have as its primary focus the relationship of the therapists' personal issues to the conduct of their therapy with families. Personal insight and mastery over handling their own values and family issues will maximize therapeutic effectiveness.     

Religious issues in psychotherapy

Religious belief is important to a large proportion of our population. It has been found to be a potent neutralizer of death anxiety. Religion and psychotherapy shave values relating to self-actualization. It is the responsibility of psychotherapists to be aware of their own ambivalences and biases; to assess the significance of religious belief in the lives of their clients; to clarify conflicting views and values of client and therapist; to treat the client's psychodynamic problems; and respectfully to refer spiritual problems outside the domain of psychotherapy to the client's minister. An illustrative example from the author's practice is included.Based in part on a paper presented at the annual meeting of the California State Psychological Association, San Francisco, California, February 4, 1983. Dr. Sacks is Associate Dean Emeritus California School of Professional Psychology, Fresno. He has been in the private practice of psychotherapy for more than 30 years.     

The Client's Theory of Change: Consulting the Client in the Integrative Process

This article casts a critical eye upon the integration literature and asserts that, as in psychotherapy in general, the client has been woefully left out of the therapeutic process. An alternative that privileges the client's voice as the source of wisdom and solution is presented. It is proposed that conducting therapy within the context of the client's own theory of change offers ways of integrating multiple therapy perspectives. An argument is made for not only recasting the client as the star of the drama of therapy, but also giving the heroic client directorial control of the action as it unfolds.     

Therapist Self-as-Context and the Curative Relationship

This article discusses how the way the therapist relates to his or her personal responses to client material during the session contributes to making the relationship with the client an effective tool for treatment. Ideas from third wave behavior therapy are used to describe aspects of therapist involvement in the relationship and modes of therapist awareness of inner responses. In two vignettes, negative client reactions to an intervention bring problematic therapist material to the fore. Both cases highlight how the stories the therapists spun about themselves as professionals and persons could easily have limited their effectiveness in responding to the material. The vignettes also illustrate how clinicians can overcome personal meanings and judgments to access a more productive mode of interacting with the feelings a critical incident in the relationship evokes in them. It is argued that observing their own content from a psychological distance makes it possible for clinicians to use their feelings without getting caught up in them. These same feelings may then help the therapist perceive how the incident relates to the client’s daily life problems. The therapist’s engagement in a sense of self-as-context is described as a therapeutic stance that provides the psychological distance needed to help overcome alliance ruptures and other potential gridlocks and which may transform the therapist’s inner response to client content into a tool for addressing important client issues.     

Adolescents in “Transition”: The Sexual Risk of Self-Channelization

Does labeling teenagers as reckless, impulsive, ruled by hormones, and incapable of considering the consequences of unprotected sex help us understand them better? The present article proposes an interpretation of adolescence as a combination of processes that allow teenagers to undertake experiments, much like (naïve) scientists, with the aim of finding new constructions of self, including in the area of sexuality. After considering some theoretical aspects in construing adolescents’ points of view, examples of adolescents’ stories are presented to suggest an alternative perspective of their risk-taking behavior. It is proposed that this alternative view of adolescents may influence those who work with young people to think differently when drawing up healthcare plans and sex education courses, in which the idea of right and wrong behavior gives way to one of elaborative choice.     

Object Relations and the Development of Values

Values acquisition as a part of the therapeutic interaction that occurs between client and therapist is a clear and focused representation of what naturally occurs between people who influence one another. As the relationship develops in therapy, and the client begins to trust the therapist, he or she also becomes inclined to emulate that therapist in greater or lesser degrees. From an object relations point of view, a developmental process unfolds between these two people, which reflects the means by which a person realizes his or her value system. The discussion begins with the etiology of identification, because according to this viewpoint, the process described above begins, and is supported by, the dynamics of identification. Referring specifically to the ideas of Heinz Kohut, the authors describe the mechanisms of idealization as the intrapsychic process most basic to the final formation of values.     

Complementary cultures in children's psychotherapy groups: conflict, coexistence, and convergence in group development.

This article presents a model for understanding development within children's psychotherapy groups. It is proposed that two complementary cultures exist within children's groups, one, indigenous peer culture, strictly of the children's making and the other, therapeutic group culture, created by the therapist in collaboration with group members. The therapist is wise to approach indigenous peer culture as an ethnographer might a native culture, with an emphasis on observation and seeking understanding rather than on intervention. The therapist can use the indigenous peer culture to speak to the children in their own language and eventually to engage them in collaboratively building a meaning system that is uniquely designed to address their psychotherapeutic needs. The article defines these concepts, develops them theoretically, and illustrates them clinically.     

Therapeutic moments are the key: foster children give clues to their past experience of infant trauma and neglect

Foster parents often despair over the lack of information about the past experience of the children in their care, particularly with children who have experienced infant trauma and neglect. In the context of family therapy these unknowns pose both a challenge and an opportunity. The author proposes that foster children gives clues to their past experiences in therapeutic moments, which the therapist may recognize as a result of her own inner conversation. In conjunction with a sound theoretical knowledge of infant trauma and neglect, these moments have the capacity to open a dialogue in the relationships between therapist, child and foster family. This dialogical process offers an opportunity for the child's past experience of infant trauma and neglect to be expressed in silence, and the foster parent's present experience to be heard in stillness, opening for them a way to go on beyond the family therapy sessions.     

The Impact of Alternatives to Settlement in Dyadic Negotiation

This study examines how differential power among negotiators (in the form of alternatives available to the individuals if the parties fail to reach a negotiated settlement) influences the parameters (e.g., the aspiration levels and reservation prices), the process, and the outcome of the negotiation. The results suggest that (a) the possession of an alternative increases one′s own outcome as well as joint outcome; (b) the more attractive or valuable the alternative, the greater the benefits regarding own and joint outcome; and (c) the better one′s own alternative relative to the other parties′ alternative, the larger one′s piece of the resource pie (i.e., one′s benefit increases).     

浅谈栗谷的四端七情论

关于“四端七情”的问题在中国儒学尤其是朱熹哲学的心性论方面占有核心的位置 ,但并没有被朱熹以后的性理学者们继续关注 ,却得到韩国朝鲜王朝 ( 1 392— 1 91 0年 )的性理学者们的吸收及发挥。退溪与栗谷并称为韩国性理学的双璧 ,虽然他们都受到朱熹哲学的影响 ,不过在朱熹哲学的基础之上两位学者都建立了自己独特的哲学体系。栗谷的“四端七情说”在理气之妙、理通气局、气发理乘等理气论的基础上发挥了朱子学 ,他反对退溪理气互发的观点 ,对朱熹哲学作出了自己的理解和诠释     

An experimental inquiry into transference roles and age

In this psychotherapy analogue investigation, the effects of client age and therapist age on transference-like projections onto therapists were examined. Young (25-35) and older (60-70) pseudoclients compared paraprofessional therapists to significant figures in their own lives after a dyadic "helping" interview. The results provide empirical support for the phenomenon of reverse transference in therapy with older patients. Older clients were more inclined than young clients to view therapists, particularly younger therapists, as similar to their children. Young clients more willingly attributed parental qualities to older therapists. Both old and young clients may see therapists more as peers or friends than as family members.