Teaching psychodynamics in the twenty-first century

A lack of clarity in psychoanalytic education has negatively affected the educational experience of candidates now in training and makes it difficult for prospective candidates to understand the field. Three basic educational concepts--learning objectives, operationalizing, and adult learning theory--can help psychoanalysts teach and assess their students in a clearer, more objective way. Using these concepts has broad implications for both psychodynamic and psychoanalytic education in the twenty-first century.     

Children and computers. Approaching the twenty-first century

The "effects" that various forms of "computer" use are likely to have on different children's learning, motivation, and social behavior have been a source of heated debate and continuing controversy. In this article, various aspects of this controversy are characterized, and sources of disagreement concerning educational computing are examined. Difficulties in the current state of empirical research in this area are then considered, and recommendations regarding directions for future research are proposed.     

Educating career guidance practitioners in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT

Rapidly changing policy contexts in England have dramatically affected the provision of career guidance, and the training and development of its practitioners. This paper takes an autoethnographic and self-reflexive approach to exploring the experience of a Senior Lecturer in Career Guidance who manages a centre that offers the Qualification in Career Guidance (QCG), and the Level 6 Diploma in Career Guidance and Development. Key questions are considered, such as: the effects of policy context on the type of qualification and curriculum offered, and their differences; the challenges of engaging learners in theoretical concepts and reflective approaches; and the tensions between ‘training’ practitioners and ‘educating’ them to develop a strong core of professionalism. The paper also considers the extent to which the learners develop as ‘knowledgeable social actors’.     

Imagining solidarity in the twenty-first century: towards a performative postsecularism

Imagining solidarity in the twenty-first century is particularly difficult in light of three factors: religious diversity, a religious/secular binary and uncertainty as to the political future. This article employs myth as a lens for exploring and developing responses to these difficulties coalescing around the term postsecular. It suggests that these difficulties are reproduced rather than overcome in Jürgen Habermas’ work. It then distinguishes between the postsecular, postsecularity and postsecularism to demonstrate how recent work offers new possibilities. Finally, it draws on original ethnography to develop this work. It claims that myth is central to how both religious and nonreligious people imagine solidarity. It suggests that myth is primarily performed rather than rationally argued, and calls for myths to be judged on the basis of the performances they produce. Finally, it suggests that the content of myths is less important than how and by whom they are constructed. Together, these insights constitute performative postsecularism.     

Little Hans "analyzed" in the twenty-first century

Freud's monograph on the analysis of Little Hans is examined from a perspective aimed at highlighting elements of current thinking that would be considered mutative from those originally emphasized at the time it was written, and with a specific focus on the relative importance of verbal versus nonverbal interventions.     

Psychoanalytic education in the twenty-first century: a syllabus for all seasons

I am suggesting that psychoanalytic training facilities restructure their curriculum to include opposing views, in an effort to avoid the inevitable disintegration of the field at large. Without a sense of requirement for any particular viewpoint, I have suggested the model of class modules, usually based around three differing positions, be applied in as many classes as possible. This method enhances the very nature of psychoanalysis while it extends the educational provenance of each separate institute, and specifically each teacher of psychoanalysis. In so doing, candidates across the board will feel and think in a more collegial manner, and may find that learning psychoanalysis is to learn something new and exciting.     

Normative pluralism: Islam, religion and law in the twenty-first century

Four new books on Islam and law provide the occasion for reflection on legal and religious pluralism. Bringing together a more nuanced and complex understanding of religion — one not determined by Enlightenment ideologies of separation — and of law — one also freed of Enlightenment notions of positivism and secularism — provide opportunities for ways to re-think the cultures of normative pluralism.     

Infant mental health: Monitoring our movement into the twenty-first century

At a time when our guidance is increasingly sought by parents, courts, and social policy planners, it is critical that infant mental health professionals establish clearer standards for training, engage in more rigorous self-monitoring of our clinical and our research efforts, and recognize the extraordinary risks for bias in all of our work. It is not necessary that we speak with one voice. In fact, our field has been enriched by its transdisciplinary nature and by its many points of view. But it is critical that we offer assessments, engage in treatment, conduct our research, and do our teaching free of uncontrolled contamination by our own unresolved childhood experiences, our idealizations, our needs for control: in short, that we be truly open to the data and truly available to the families. Examples are offered of the risks if we fail, and a call is made for careful transdisciplinary training, supervision, individual psychotherapy, and collegial monitoring for infant mental health clinicians, researchers, and educators, alike.     

Bioethics in the twenty-first century: why we should pay attention to eighteenth-century medical ethics.

Those of us who work in the field of bioethics tend to think that, because the word "bioethics" is new, so too the field is new in all respects, but we are not the first to do bioethics. John Gregory (1724-1773) did bioethics just as we do it, at least two centuries before we thought to do it. He deployed philosophical methods as sophisticated as our own. Indeed, Gregory took up the very best moral philosophy available to thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, namely, David Hume's moral philosophy and its core concept of sympathy. Gregory also responded in a conceptually powerful and clinically applicable way to the problems of his time, just as we do. I want here to outline Gregory's accomplishment and to identify some aspects of its importance for bioethics in the twenty-first century.