'To walk the last bit on my own' - narcissistic independence or identification with good objects: issues of loss for a 13-year-old who had an amputation

This paper describes two years of psychotherapy with Michael, a 13-year-old boy who had undergone a recent emergency amputation of his leg and hip for bone cancer. The work follows Michael's struggle with the enormity of the loss, in the face of his, as well as the system's, use of denial. The amputation as an 'attack' on his physical and emotional autonomy strikes at his early adolescent development. The therapeutic process is aided by his capacity 'to go back to the unhappiness'. The therapy develops from his initial shock, to despair and self-blame, as he struggles with a tendency - in the middle period of the therapy - to lose his mind as well as his leg in a retreat to withdrawal and mindlessness, or to mania. He struggles between an omnipotent, at times self-destructive, wish to 'go it alone', versus a capacity to feel sad and to value life. His capacity to think about the trauma and to find meaning emerges. The paper raises questions about whether some trauma can ever be fully assimilated, and whether, for Michael, the mourning process could lead to a reintegrated sense of self and of a 'psychic intactness', dependent on the survival of his good 'internal couple'. Hospital and ward-based child psychotherapy and its limitations are explored.     

Violence Exposure and PTSD: The Role of English Language Fluency in Latino Youth

Although Latinos have been a rapidly growing population in the US, little is known about how mental health symptoms may present in Latino children especially in the context of those living in poverty and exposed to violence. We explored the level of violence exposure and trauma symptoms in Latino youth and the relationship of these factors with English language fluency. During 2000–2002, 1,601, Latino students from seven middle schools participated in a school-based screening to identify students with exposure to community violence and symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The students completed a self-report instrument, in either Spanish or English, that combined a modified version of the Life Events Scale and the Child PTSD Symptom Scale (CPSS). Bivariate analyses and multivariate regression models showed that youth with higher English language fluency reported greater violence exposure and PTSD symptoms than those with lower fluency. No difference was found in functioning by English language fluency. English language fluency appears to be related to violence exposure and PTSD symptoms in these Latino youth. We discuss the importance of school-based programs especially designed to serve Latino students of varying English language fluency.     

Training service providers working with traumatized children in South Africa: The navigations of a trainer

In South Africa, counselling training poses two related difficulties: working in a situation of ubiquitous, ongoing violence, and offering training to people who have minimal or no qualifications and are often overwhelmed by enormous workload. In this context, there is a temptation either to give up hope in the face of the enormity of the task, or defensively to package counselling as a set of techniques which can be taught without much self-reflection. In this article we discuss, by contrast, an intervention which used psychodynamic principles to develop learner-centred training drawing on trainees' own experiences. We consider the benefits of this approach even in a context of violence and meagre resources.     

Forgiveness in adolescents, young, middle-aged, and older adults

The evolution of the propensity to forgive an offense was studied in a sample of 236 people from various age groups. The effect of a number of circumstances connected with the offense was considered: intent to harm, severity of consequences, cancellation of consequences, social proximity to the offender, apologies from the offender, and the attitude of others. The method was an application of information integration theory. A global increase in the propensity to forgive from adolescence to old age was observed. Several interactions between age and circumstances were found: (a) The effect of the cancellation factor was higher in young adolescents and in the very old than in the middle-aged, (b) the attitude of others and the restoration of harmony factors were important only in adolescents. Finally, the structure of the Forgiveness schema was shown to be an additive one, regardless of the age of the participants.     

Forgiveness is an emotion-focused coping strategy that can reduce health risks and promote health resilience: theory,review, and hypotheses

Experimental evidence suggests that when people are transgressed against interpersonally, they often react by experiencing unforgiveness. Unforgiveness is conceptualized as a stress reaction. Forgiveness is one (of many) ways people reduce unforgiveness. Forgiveness is conceptualized as an emotional juxtaposition of positive emotions (i.e., empathy, sympathy, compassion, or love) against the negative emotions of unforgiveness. Forgiveness can thus be used as an emotion-focused coping strategy to reduce a stressful reaction to a transgression. Direct empirical research suggests that forgiveness is related to health outcomes and to mediating physiological processes in such a way as to support the conceptualization that forgiveness is an emotion-focused coping strategy. Indirect mechanisms might also affect the forgiveness-health relationship. Namely, forgiveness might affect health by working through social support, relationship quality, and religion.     

Rumination: Bridging a gap between forgivingness, vengefulness, and psychological health

It was argued in the present investigation that dispositional forgiveness and vengeance would be differentially related to components of rumination, and thus the mediating role of rumination in their relations with psychological health would also vary. Male and female undergraduates (N = 183) completed questionnaires assessing predispositions toward forgiveness, vengefulness, rumination, depressive affect, and life satisfaction. Regression analyses revealed that higher forgiveness and lower vengefulness were associated with greater psychological health (lower depressive affect; higher life satisfaction). Moreover, the relations between forgiveness (but not vengefulness) and psychological health were partially mediated by the decreased propensity of high forgivers to endorse ruminative brooding. These findings suggest that, although forgiveness and vengeance may be related, their impacts on psychological health reflect distinct ruminative tendencies.     

Retributive justice, restorative justice, and forgiveness: An experimental psychophysiology analysis

This experiment assessed the emotional self-reports and physiology of justice outcomes and forgiveness responses to a common crime, using a three Justice (retributive, restorative, no justice) × 2 Forgiveness (forgiveness, none) repeated-measures design. Participants (27 males, 29 females) imagined their residence was burglarized, followed by six counterbalanced justice-forgiveness outcomes. Imagery of justice—especially restorative—and forgiveness each reduced unforgiving motivations and negative emotion (anger, fear), and increased prosocial and positive emotion (empathy, gratitude). Imagery of granting forgiveness (versus not) was associated with less heart rate reactivity and better recovery; less negative emotion expression at the brow (corrugator EMG); and less aroused expression at the eye (lower orbicularis oculi EMG when justice was absent). When forgiveness was not imagined, justice-physiology effects emerged: signs of cardiovascular stress (rate pressure products) were lower for retributive versus no justice; and sympathetic nervous system responding (skin conductance) was calmer for restorative versus retributive justice.     

Attachment and trait forgivingness: The mediating role of angry rumination

Integrating theories of attachment and forgiveness, we predicted that secure attachment reduces angry rumination and promotes forgiveness. To examine this prediction, in Study 1 (n = 213), participants completed the Experience in Close Relationships Scale (ECR; Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998) and the Trait Forgiveness Scale (TFS; Berry, Worthington, O’Connor, Parrott, & Wade, 2005). Individuals who were classified as securely attached displayed greater dispositional forgivingness than did insecurely attached individuals. In Study 2 (n = 218) we included the Dissipation-Rumination Scale (DRS; Caprara, 1986). Results from Study 2 replicated the association between attachment security and greater dispositional forgivingness and confirmed the mediating role of angry rumination in the attachment–forgivingness relation.     

Responsibility, Control, and Omissions

Previously, I have argued that moral responsibility for actions is associated with guidance control. This sort of control does not necessarily involve the freedom to do otherwise. In this paper I extend the view to apply to omissions. That is, moral responsibility for an omission is associated with guidance control of that omission. This helps to provide a systematic, unified account of moral responsibility.     

Genetics,Faith, and Responsibility

The Battle of Dover is now concluded; and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution has won the legal day. The Theory of Evolution in the Darwainian and neo-Darwinian form is a very fertile theory; it generates hypotheses and research programs that lead to new knowledge. Even as a secular pursuit of knowledge, Christians appreciate science.

What the Christian community cannot tolerate is second-rate science; and it especially eschews pseudo-science. We ask for a general commitment; support the best science in our schools and laboratories as an expression of our Christian faith. In light of the public controversy regarding alternatives to teaching Darwinian science in our public schools, we offer six recommendations.     

Exposure to Violence, Perceived Peer Relationships, and Corresponding Psychological Sequelae

As children’s exposure to violence (EV) has become more evident, concern for the implications that violence has on children has risen. Consequently, researchers have explored the relationship between exposure and outcomes, as well as potential mediators and moderators. In this study, we (a) examined EV in a sample of children from the Midwestern United States; (b) replicated previous findings that identify a direct relationship between EV and psychological sequelae; and (c) explored the possibility that loneliness mediates the exposure–outcomes relationship. Children (11–14 years) in our sample were exposed to elevated levels of violence in their neighborhoods. Furthermore, children who were directly victimized demonstrated greater levels of behavioral difficulties than children who were not. Although loneliness was not a significant mediator, our findings have laid the groundwork for future research regarding the influence of peer relationships on EV and outcomes.     

Community, Communication and Multiplicity in Proust

The essay examines the relation between the explicit aesthetic ideology of Proust’s Recherche and the structure of the “involuntary memory” that is supposed to serve as that ideology’s empirical basis. I challenge the apparent solipsism and idealism of the narrator’s aesthetics by focusing on the one experience of involuntary memory that he omits from his final reflections, in Time Regained, on the relation between memory and art: this is the involuntary memory, in the earlier volume Sodom and Gomorrah, of his dead grandmother, a memory that he describes there as an experience of true otherness. Through a close reading of this passage, I argue that Proust’s interest in involuntary memory implies a concept of literary art as above all ethical in nature, in so far as it is the only means by which individuals can emerge from the solitude to which they are otherwise existentially condemned. In both the Sodom and Gomorrah passage and a later passage from Time Regained this emergence is cast in terms of a rhetoric of multiplicity that emphasizes both the disturbing and the productive dimensions connecting literature with life.

Freedom, Responsibility, and Agency

This paper first distinguishes three alternative views that adherents to both incompatibilism and PAP may take as to what constitutes an agent's determining or controlling her action (if it's not the action's being deterministically caused by antecedent events): the indeterministic-causation view, the agent-causation view, and "simple indeterminism." The bulk of the paper focusses on the dispute between simple indeterminism - the view that the occurrence of a simple mental event is determined by its subject if it possesses the "actish" phenomenal quality and is undetermined by antecedent events - and Timothy O'Connor's agent-causation view. It defends simple indeterminism against O'Connor's objections to it and offers objections to O'Connor's view.