Split Self Affairs and Their Treatment

SUMMARY

The Split Self Affair is a long-term serious relationship. The split being played out in the affair reflects an internal split between doing things “right” and the emotional self. Treatment for those involved centers on understanding the origins of the internal split and on reclaiming the neglected emotional self. Long term individual therapy is the treatment of choice, augmented by other modalities.     

Reality-Testing a Vocational Choice: Congruence Between Self,Ideal, and Occupational Percepts Among Student Nurses

A total of 168 student nurses (24 each at 7 levels of vocational experience and preparation) Q-sorted 50 self-relevant, socially neutral statements to measure self-concept, ideal self-concept, and occupational role percept. Mean r's for congruence between ideal and occupational percepts tended to exceed and to reach higher levels of significance than corresponding r's for congruence between either self and ideal or self and occupational percepts. Congruences between self, ideal, and occupational percepts reach significance at p = .01 for graduate students, who have attained “adult” professional status. However, no significant relationship appears to obtain between either pre-professional or professional nursing experience and congruence between self and ideal, self and occupational role, or ideal and occupational role percepts. Results are interpreted in terms of a self-concept theory of vocational development.     

Beyond the Tools of the Trade: Heidegger and the Intelligibility of Everyday Things

In everyday life, we constantly encounter and deal with useful things without pausing to inquire about the sources of their intelligibility. In Div. I of Being and Time, Heidegger undertakes just such an inquiry. According to a common reading of Heidegger's analysis, the intelligibility of our everyday encounters and dealings with useful things is ultimately constituted by practical self‐understandings (such as being a gardener, shoemaker, teacher, mother, musician, or philosopher). In this paper, I argue that while such practical self‐understandings may be sufficient to constitute the intelligibility of the tools and equipment specific to many practices, these “tools of the trade” are only a small portion of the things we encounter, use, and deal with on a daily basis. Practical self‐understandings cannot similarly account for the intelligibility of the more mundane things—like toothbrushes and sidewalks—used in everyday life. I consider whether an anonymous self‐understanding as “one,” “anyone,” or “no one in particular” —das Man—might play this intelligibility‐constituting role. In examining this possibility, another type of self‐understanding comes to light: cultural identities. I show that the cultural identities into which we are “thrown,” rather than practical identities or das Man, constitute the intelligibility of the abundance of mundane things that fill our everyday lives. Finally, I spell out how this finding bears on our understanding of Heidegger's notion of authenticity.     

Subjectivity as Encounter: Feminine Ethics in the Work of Bracha Lichtenberg‐Ettinger and Anne Enright

The fragility of the subject is a recurring issue in the work of Anne Enright, one of Ireland's most remarkable and innovative writers. It is this specific interest, together with her attempt to make women into subjects, that inevitably links her work to Bracha Lichtenberg‐Ettinger's theory of the matrixial borderspace, a feminine sphere that coexists with the Lacanian symbolic order and that, even before our entrance into this linguistic system, informs our subjectivity. By turning to a point in time before language—the encounter between “self” and “other” during pregnancy—both Enright and Ettinger test the boundaries of and the gaps within the linguistic system. It is the going before language that ultimately enables both to go beyond some of the most persistent dualisms present within the linguistic system and to create room for an alternative—a feminine—understanding of the ethical relationality between self and other.     

A content analysis of person‐centered expressive therapy outcomes

Abstract

This study is a content analysis and follow‐up of thirty‐two former participants in multi‐modal expressive therapy training workshops conducted by the Person‐Centered Expressive Therapy Institute. The theoretical foundation of the study is based on Carl Rogers’ concept of the “significant learning” and Natalie Rogers’ concept of the “creative connection.” The expressive therapy applies core conditions of acceptance, empathic understanding, and congruence in a learning setting that uses writing, visual arts, drama, music and dance. Narratives of significant incidents were analyzed phenomenologically. Results revealed important learnings and shifts of self‐perceptions towards greater self‐awareness, improved self‐confidence, risk‐taking, deeper self‐exploration and appreciation for the process involved in the creative act. This qualitative study shows expressive therapy as making an important contribution to person‐centered theory and practice.     

On paradoxes and the experience of duality

Abstract

Opposing attitudes, emotions, or perceptions of self and other that set the stage for experiences of duality influence our interactions and self–other schemas. The experience of duality that has been conceptualised as “conflict,” “self state,” and “paradox" in psychoanalytic theory has been extensively considered, particularly in terms of its manifestation in transference–countertransference relations and in the analytic material from patients' experiences. They have not, however, been compared and contrasted as entities that lead to similar kinds of experience. Scant attention has been paid, moreover, to paradox as a mental organisation that underlies certain experiences of duality. The concept of paradox has thus been emphasised and developed in this paper.     

Contradictions of emotion in schizophrenia

This paper considers contradictory features of emotional or affective experience and expression in schizophrenia in light of the “Kretschmerian paradox”—the fact that schizophrenia-spectrum patients can simultaneously experience both exaggerated and diminished levels of affective response. An attempt is made to explain the paradox and explore its implications. Recent research on emotion in schizophrenia is reviewed, including subjective reports, psychophysiological measures of arousal or activation, and behavioural measures, focusing on flat-affect and negative-symptom patients. After discussing relevant concepts and vocabulary of emotion (“affect”, “emotion”, “mood”, “feelings”, the “passions”), the need for a phenomenological approach focusing on subjective experience is proposed. Four modes of nonparanoid experience in schizophrenia are discussed: Bodily Alienation, Disengagement, Unworlding, and Subjectivisation. Each mode involves withdrawal from functional contexts—temporal, practical, and interpersonal—normally associated with emotional reactivity and expression; each may be accompanied by forms of non-emotional affectivity no less intense than the emotions they replace. Possible relationships between psychophysiological measures, expressive behaviour, and subjective emotional or affective response are considered.     

Maternal representations: A clinical and subjective phenomenological view

The relationship — as represented — is proving to be of growing value in our thinking about clinical problems such as “intergenerational transfer.” It is also an extremely positive influence in our thinking about how the interpersonal world is remembered, abstracted, and lived. Yet, the nature of a “represented relationship” remains unclear. This paper is an attempt to clarify some of the problems and areas for needed study regarding this concept. The mother's representation of her infant and of the people in her own life who have played “maternal roles” will be taken as the model. First, we will explore the richness and complexity of these representations and conclude that, for clinical purposes, different models are used to simplify this richness and render it therapeutically useful. Three models will be discussed. The first is the disfortion model which measures the distance between the mother's subjective experience of her interaction or relationship with another and some objective, observable “reality.” The model of overdeter-mining themes is a second model, largely the inspiration of psychoanalysis but inclusive of Bowlby's theory of attachment. Here psychobiological and/or psychodynamic themes organize the clinical material. Finally, a coherence model is discussed. Here the motive is goodness of the narrative construction rather than the historical “truth.” A second issue discussed is the capacity to represent dyads vs. triads and actual vs. second-hand narrated relationships. These issues are crucial for notions not only about the nature of such representations but also their limitations in understanding family interactions and relationships, i.e., where many members are concerned. A third issue concerns the nature of the subjective experience for a mother when a representation of her infant or herself in relation to the infant is “activated.” There exists here an unknown typology of experience. Finally, we will discuss what all of the above have to contribute to our further understanding of the nature of represented relationships.     

Place and the self: An autobiographical memory synthesis

In this article, I argue that the relationship between place and self can be accounted for by recent theoretical work on autobiographical memory. The link between place and self is conceptualized as a transitory mental representation that emerges as a “place of mine” (personal autobiographical experience) from a “place” (declarative knowledge). The function of “place of mine” is to guide personal memory and self-knowing consciousness of periods of our lives. I combine inquiries of memory, self, and place in a triadic relationship, a synthesis, suggesting a conceptual model for the phenomenon of place-related self as a sub-system of the self. This is formed by a causal progression from a physical place across time via emotional and cognitive bonds, components of the autobiographical information grounding the self, apportioned across declarative memory. Finally, using the methods of factor analysis and structural equation modeling, I show that the proposed model accounts for previous and new data on place-related identity.     

“Till Death Us Do Part”: Issues of Fidelity in End of Life Care

SUMMARY

This paper was born of the experience of caring for a loved one at the end of life. The sense of being torn between accepting one's lot and wishing for something “other” is at the heart of the concept described as “intimate fidelity.” Intimate fidelity is discussed as part of a multi-layered concept of fidelity, embracing aspects of the professional caring relationship, and which builds into a value that shapes the fabric of the community.

Academic literature fails to address this understanding of fidelity, so with some creativity, we turned to popular literature—novels and biographies—to find rich understandings of the concept of fidelity. Then following a traditional system of thematic analysis, three aspects of the concept of fidelity are presented, in the context of caring for loved ones, professional caring, and caring in the community.     

A Warrior's Stance: Commentary on Paper by Terry Marks-Tarlow

This commentary highlights specific aspects of a psychoanalytic complexity perspective in considering and discussing Terry Marks-Tarlow's article, “Merging and Emerging: A Nonlinear Portrait of Intersubjectivity During Psychotherapy.” The advantages of a complexity theory sensibility reside in the areas of (a) providing a robust theoretical framework for understanding the sources and phenomenology of complex emotional life and (b) understanding the clinical implications of thinking through a complexity theory lens. The latter involves examining the attitudes that emanate from such a revolutionary perspective and their impact on the therapeutic relationship and on therapeutic action and change. Special emphasis is placed on the distinction between two vital dimensions of psychoanalytic discourse: the phenomenological and the explanatory. This distinction is used as a lens through which the author considers the essential themes of understanding the complexity of the multiple sources of personal lived experience and their concomitant meanings, personal situtatedness (or “thrownness”), emotional responsibility, and personal freedom.     

Sartre and Fanon: The Phenomenological Problem of Shame and the Experience of Race

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that existing accounts of shame are incomplete in so far as they don’t take account of the problem of shame. This is the problem concerning the possibility of a primary experience of shame. It is the problem Sartre considers under the terms of a “primitive shame” or shame “in its primary structure” that grounds other more complex experiences of shame. This problem is centred on the tension between shame as an immediate, pre-reflective experience and the requirement that shame must involve an awareness of some definitive aspect of the self. I’m going to suggest, correlatively, how by trying to resolve this problem we end up with a more nuanced understanding of shame. In the second part of the paper, I go on to look at how this new interpretation of shame helps us understand race. Looking at Fanon, I explore how a fundamental and overlooked ineffability in our relation to others impacts upon responses to racialized shame.     

At the verge of unthinkable anxiety: On the relevance of a neurophysiologically informed relational perspective on meaning-making in psychosis

Abstract

This article examines the relevance of relationally oriented psychoanalytic phenomenology as a frame of reference for understanding psychotic states in schizophrenia. The etiology and structural characteristics of such states are examined from both a neurophysiological, and a relational and interpersonal point of view. Many findings indicate organic abnormalities in schizophrenia, acquired through an exposure to physical risk factors and genetic predisposition, but relational traumas also seem to have an impact on the form and content of psychotic states. This may happen through interruptions in the “use-dependent” maturation of the brain in a relational milieu. In addition, at the level of meaning-making, we find that the emotional and relational contexts—both past and present—give the substance or “raw material” for hallucinations and delusions. In a psychotic state, the person also tries to handle basic affects and relational needs, and to make meaning in states of overwhelming chaos and anxiety. Donald W. Winnicott's theory of “a holding environment”, Stephen Mitchell's theory of the relational matrix, and Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange's concepts of a “shattered world” and annihilation anxiety are used as a framework in the analysis of the phenomenology of psychosis. Two case illustrations, one from child psychotherapy and one from therapy with an adult patient, are used to illuminate the theoretical points of view.     

Rethinking Affective Experience and Popular Emotion: World War I and the Construction of Group Emotion in International Relations

Research in International Relations (IR) frequently confronts claims about the emotions shared by members of a group. While much attention has been devoted to the potential for affective and emotional experience beyond the individual level, IR scholars have said less about the politics of invoking popular emotion. This article addresses that gap. Specifically, we argue that between individual—and even shared—affective experience on the one hand and group‐based “popular emotion” on the other exists not mechanisms of aggregation but rather processes of framing, projection, and propagation that are deeply political. We distinguish between two tropes that commonly structure references to popular emotion: communal emotion, the idealized attribution of an authentic, unifying emotional response of “the people,” and mass emotion, a volatile and potentially dangerous mob‐like reaction, but one also susceptible to manipulation. Using the outbreak of World War I as a showcase, we demonstrate the political significance of popular emotion, including its enduring relevance for understanding contemporary populism.     

Self psychology and projective identification—whither shall they meet? a reply to the editors (1995)

The concept of projective identification continues to be viewed as alien, even dangerous, by self psychologists. Six aspects of self‐psychology/intersubjectivity theory are explored in an attempt to understand the presumed incompatibility of self psychology and projective identification: 1) the empathic vantage point; 2) the focus on subjective reality; 3) the emphasis on the analyst's personal contribution; 4) the focus on selfobject experience; 5) the disruption—restoration process; and 6) the defining of transference and countertransference as “organizing activity.”; The self‐psychological/intersubjective concepts that come closest to describing the phenomenon of projective identification—that is, empathic immersion, affect resonance, and reciprocal mutual influence—fail to capture at least three of its essential elements 1) the patient's persistent, unconscious intent to communicate certain unformulated aspects of self through the other; 2) the analyst's sense of being “taken over”; by the patient's experience; and 3) the intensely visceral quality of the analyst's experience. It is argued that self psychology ignores this important form of patient communication to its own detriment and that the concept of projective identification needs to be reformulated in terms that are more experience near to self psychologists. It is suggested that there exists a normal, developmental need, a selfobject need, to communicate intolerable, unsymbolized affective experience through the other's experience—a need that remains more pervasive and intense in some of us than in others—and that the longed‐for selfobject response is to have one's communication received, contained, and given back in such a way that one knows the other has “gotten”; it from the inside out.     

Employing autobiographical memory perspective to influence self‐congruence and brand preference

This paper advances our understanding of consumer behavior by examining the influence of autobiographical memory perspective on consumer's self‐congruence. While extant research has primarily restricted itself to the consequences of self‐congruence, this work focuses on an antecedent, by examining the psychological processes associated with the consumer's autobiographical memory perspective and the resulting impact on self‐congruence. Through three experiments, we demonstrate that visualizing autobiographical memories from a first‐person versus a third‐person perspective impacts consumers' self‐brand congruence differently under varied circumstances. Specifically, differing degrees of self‐brand congruence are experienced when consumers focus on differences (vs. similarities) between their present and recalled selves, combined with distinct autobiographical memory perspectives. The autobiographical memory perspective is identified as a key determinant of consumers' perceived change in self‐image, which, in turn, has a cascading effect on their self‐brand congruence. Thus, consumers' perceived change in self‐image is identified as the mechanism underlying the main effect. Furthermore, as an important component of self‐image, this research determines and examines a moderating influence of self‐esteem in the relationship between autobiographical memory perspective and self‐congruence. Collectively, these results facilitate our understanding of the autobiographical memory perspective as an antecedent of consumer's self‐congruence, with implications for nostalgia advertising and retro branding.     

Do We Know How Happy We Are? On Some Limits of Affective Introspection and Recall

This paper aims to show that widespread, serious errors in the self‐assessment of affect are a genuine possibility—one worth taking very seriously. For we are subject to a variety of errors concerning the character of our present and past affective states, or “affective ignorance.” For example, some affects, particularly moods, can greatly affect the quality of our experience even when we are unable to discern them. I note several implications of these arguments. First, we may be less competent pursuers of happiness than is commonly believed, raising difficult questions for political thought. Second, some of the errors discussed ramify for our understanding of consciousness, including Ned Block's controversial distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Third, empirical results based on self‐reports about affect may be systematically misleading in certain ways.     

A meditation on the nature of self‐healing and personality change in psychotherapy based on Gendlin's theory of experiencing

Abstract

From a humanistic point of view psychotherapy is a creative transformational process in which therapists assist clients’ intrinsic self‐healing tendencies. However the nature of the self‐healing process is poorly understood. I briefly consider two theories of self‐healing, Rogers’ self‐actualization theory and dialectical theory, but focus on Gendlin's theory of experiencing as providing a more complete explanation. I consider the fundamentally implicational nature of change and portray personal change as “paradigm evolution” rather than paradigm revolution. I conclude with an examination of the self‐healing process in therapies that provide minimal prosthetic assistance to the client: client‐centered therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, and focusing‐oriented therapy. I conclude that the self‐healing/self‐change process occurs when intellectual, “top‐down” cognitive and self‐critical activity is interrupted, and when clients adopt a receptive, listening attitude towards inner experience.