A Family Myth: Sex Therapy Gone Awry

The treatment of sexual disorders has achieved considerable popularity and respectability within the mental health profession and the lay community. As a consequence, it has become increasingly difficult to elude requests for this type of treatment and even more difficult to balance sexual concerns with the numerous other modes of relating that exist within a dyadic relationship. This paper will report two versions of a case study in which sexual dysfunction served as a myth that was carefully constructed to veil certain more fundamental problems.     

Raging better: Reflections on the Myisha Cherry's The Case for Rage

Myisha Cherry's The Case for Rage is a significant addition to the growing body of analytic philosophy that succeeds in not just engaging but shaping and even creating new forms of public discourse. It does so while remaining an exemplar for what good analytic philosophy should look like: filled with systematic and clear distinctions that illuminate rather than obfuscate real and concrete lived phenomena. I offer two challenges to Cherry's typology of rage: first, I rehabilitate two of variations she takes to be morally and politically problematic, and, second, I argue that the freedom to feel, express, and act on Lordean rage proper should be more limited than Cherry allows. I then raise a set of questions about the aesthetics of persuasive anger. Finally, I highlight two striking insights in Cherry's rich argument.     

Rage Against the Machine: The Case for System‐Level Emotions

Although psychologists have generally conceptualized emotions in light of individual‐ and group‐ level approaches, in the current paper we propose that there are also system‐level emotional events, including both system‐based emotions (experienced as a direct or indirect consequence of system‐level characteristics) and system‐targeted emotions (reflecting evaluations that support or oppose the overarching social system). We begin by discussing how emotions are embedded in the social system and what system‐level functions they serve. We draw on system justification theory to understand the reciprocal relations between emotional life and ideologies that justify or challenge social systems. We then focus on three empirical propositions concerning the dynamics of system‐level emotions: (I) System‐based emotions reflect one’s subjective as well as objective standing in the social order; (II) System‐based emotions reflect one’s subjective appraisal of the social order; and (III) System‐level emotions affect action tendencies and behaviors, including behaviors that promote system stability versus change. The investigation of system‐level emotions promises to deepen our scientific understanding of the motivational dynamics of social stability and social change and to uncover the affective dimension of system justification processes. Extending the social psychological analysis of emotions to include contextual features at the level of social systems builds a much‐needed bridge between emotion research in psychology and sociology.     

The rage we should have: Comments on Myisha Cherry's The Case for Rage

In The Case for Rage, Myisha Cherry demonstrates that antiracist rage can be instrumentally valuable, a fitting response to racism, and, therefore, wrong for us to dismiss. That is, on Cherry's account, antiracist anger is useful, fitting, and (in some sense) permissible. In this article, I argue that we should go beyond saying that this antiracist rage is permissible, that the correct thing to say is that people should have antiracist anger, and that anger should be of a (somewhat) specific intensity. I further argue that this antiracist anger must also involve action, because the mere experiencing of Lordean rage is not a sufficient act of “resistance.” I lastly argue that we should countenance more “destructive” forms of antiracist rage as permissible, including what Cherry calls “ressentiment rage.”     

Expressing and receiving negative emotions: Comments on Myisha Cherry's The Case for Rage

Responding to Myisha Cherry's The Case for Rage, I discuss how the book touches on the difficulties of disentangling emotions and their expressions. Then I suggest two ways in which destructive rage might be good, one on Kantian grounds and another via extension from experience. Finally, I raise the issue of whether there might be other Lordean emotions.     

Abstract: A Meta-Analysis of the Autocorrelation in Single Case Designs

Single case design (SCD) experiments in the behavioral sciences utilize just one participant from whom data is collected over time. This design permits causal inferences to be made regarding various intervention effects, often in clinical or educational settings, and is especially valuable when between-participant designs are not feasible or when interest lies in the effects of an individualized treatment. Regression techniques are the most common quantitative practice for analyzing time series data and provide parameter estimates for both treatment and trend effects. However, the presence of serially correlated residuals, known as autocorrelation, can severely bias inferences made regarding these parameter estimates. Despite the severity of the issue, few researchers test or correct for the autocorrelation in their analyses.

Shadish and Sullivan (in press) recently conducted a meta-analysis of over 100 studies in order to assess the prevalence of the autocorrelation in the SCD literature. Although they found that the meta-analytic weighted average of the autocorrelation was close to zero, the distribution of autocorrelations was found to be highly heterogeneous. Using the same set of SCDs, the current study investigates various factors that may be related to the variation in autocorrelation estimates (e.g., study and outcome characteristics). Multiple moderator variables were coded for each study and then used in a metaregression in order to estimate the impact these predictor variables have on the autocorrelation.

This current study investigates the autocorrelation using a multilevel meta-analytic framework. Although meta-analyses involve nested data structures (e.g., effect sizes nested within studies nested within journals), there are few instances of meta-analysts utilizing multilevel frameworks with more than two levels. This is likely attributable to the fact that very few software packages allow for meta-analyses to be conducted with more than two levels and those that do allow this provide sparse documentation on how to implement these models. The proposed presentation discusses methods for carrying out a multilevel meta-analysis. The presentation also discusses the findings from the metaregression on the autocorrelation and the implications these findings have on SCDs.     

Rage and aggression in youth: A self psychological perspective

The conceptual development of self psychology has emphasized that traditional psychoanalytic drives (sexuality, aggression) become pathological in their expression when self-selfobject ties at crucial developmental periods are problematic, flawed or damaged. This theory was derived from Kohut's psychoanalytic work with adult patients and not from direct observation of behaviorally and emotionally disturbed youth. This paper examines the experience of the self and its relationships in the development of aggressive behavior in children and adolescents. It argues from a largely self psychological perspective that rage and aggression in many youth may be conceptualized as reactions to actual or threatened loss of tenuously held selfobject relationships that render the self feeling anxious, helpless and without value. The aggression attempts to restore cohesion and self-value by punishing the deficient selfobject, nullifying its actions and/or by compelling the selfobject (or substitute) to reverse the behavior or deed that produced the initial self-selfobject rupture.     

How Group Analysis Cures: An Exploration of Narcissistic Rage in Group Treatment

This paper addresses the use of group analysis in treating individuals for whom chronic narcissistic rage is a prominent feature of their character. Such individuals are often especially suspicious of participating in group experiences, as their sensitivity to slight and circumscribed empathy for others often leaves them vulnerable to being attacked and ostracized in groups. Their history often reveals experiences in which they were either the scapegoat of the family or of the playground, often both. Such individuals, however, may also long for inclusion and acceptance, and thus participation in a therapeutic group may be a particularly important part of their continued development. An extended clinical vignette illustrates how such work occurs within a therapeutic group using a self-psychological model. Narcissistic rage as manifested within the group-as-a-whole or groupself is also examined.     

Adult Attachment Interview and Psychoanalytic Perspective: A Single Case Study

In this single case study we present a female patient diagnosed with a narcissistic personality disorder and a borderline organization. The interplay between attachment and psychoanalytic perspective will be focused. The analyst describes his impressions of the initial interview with the patient and essential steps during treatment. The patient was interviewed with the Adult Attachment Interview and classified as “insecure preoccupied” with an “unresolved state of mind” concerning loss and abuse. The analyst was asked to comment the AAI's essential characteristics of this patient. We discuss converging and diverging aspects of clinical and attachment interpretation in this single case.     

When Suspicious Minds Go Political: Distrusting and Justifying the System at the Same Time

Drawing on the sensitivity to mean intentions model, we hypothesized that sensitivity to injustice from a victim's perspective (victim sensitivity) is negatively related to the acceptance of political reforms due to an inclination to attribute ulterior motives to policy makers. In Study 1 with a Canadian sample, initial evidence for this mediational model was obtained, as victim sensitivity uniquely predicted distrust of policy makers through general trait suspiciousness. In Study 2, victim‐sensitive Austrians and Germans ascribed sinister motives to initiators of an economic reform when contextual cues of initiators' untrustworthiness were given. This situational suspiciousness led them to subsequently oppose this particular reform, and it even generalized to the whole economic system by reducing economic‐system justification. However, in both studies, mutually suppressive tendencies toward both opposing and justifying the system occurred. This suggests that victim‐sensitive individuals may be torn between distrusting and endorsing the system because it can not only victimize but also promote a sense of security from victimization by conferring order.     

Dissociation between Contour-based and Texture-based Shape Perception: A Single Case Study

A single case study of a patient suffering from a temporo-parietal lesion is presented. He was impaired at recognizing shape on the basis of texture information, whereas shape recognition on the basis of contours seemed comparatively preserved. To investigate the impaired level in texture processing, we used two alternative forced-choice tasks totestfigure-ground segregation based on textural differences in contrasting modalities (tactile vs. visual) and viewing conditions (static vs. apparently moving stimuli). The results showed that the deficit was specific to visual stimuli (both static and dynamic). Moreover, this deficitdid not occur with local texture analysis, but was always present in global texture segregation tasks. This suggests thatcontour analysis and texture segregation are separable operations in shape processing. The patient's impairments are attributed to an inability to activate global processing of stimuli defined by texture but not by contours.     

A Picture Book of Internal Events: The Colours of Rage and Love

The views on countertransference in psychoanalytic theory and practice have undergone a change within the last fifty years. From being considered an impediment to analysis, countertransference is today looked upon as an important potential for a tentative understanding of what is unconsciously communicated from the analysand to the analyst. This implies that the analyst is susceptible to the unconscious interaction in the transference and the countertransference, and that he/she becomes conscious as quickly as possible of what is taking place. This applies especially to erotic feelings which are often intensified in analyses with patients with a serious psychopathology, as well as in analyses with patients in regressive phases where projective identification is the dominant factor used as a defence and a communication. Opinions differ as regards the question of how to deal with such a situation, especially whether it is right to be candid about the analyst's countertransference feelings towards the analysand, something most would caution against. In an example from an analysis, the analyst describes how he was influenced by an unconscious erotic countertransference. After three years of therapy with a patient with a serious psychopathology, he developed ?motherly” feelings, which he interpreted as reflecting a child's longing for closeness and physical contact. The result was that a few times, he ?forgot” to indicate the end of the session, which was then prolonged, and also that he embraced her on several occasions before she left the session. One year later, he had intense sexual fantasies and dreams about the analysand, which he experienced as both enticing and alarming, and as an impediment to the analysis. He soon became aware of the element of projective identification in the interaction, and by interpreting the analysand's unconscious communication, he regained his ability to maintain an analytic attitude and clear boundaries.