A price above rubies: Patriarchy and the feminine

Jung's understanding of individuation as the way consciousness develops in some people in the second half of life is not well conveyed by images suggesting the heroic capture or sacrifice of consciousness by an ego seeking to gain a broader standpoint. Such images derive from Jung's writings in the first half of his professional career, when his own psychological horizon was rapidly enlarging, but he had not yet arrived at a conception of the Self. What he means by individuation once the Self enters the picture becomes clearer if we turn to Chinese philosophy, whose three main traditions, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, all influenced Jung's mature psychology. That the move from ego to Self involves a change in perspective as to the nature and origin of consciousness is made evident by the process of “turning the light around,” described in The Secret of the Golden Flower, which has been identified as a practice of Buddhist meditation. As a consequence of the successful cultivation of the Self, individuation also entails a difference in the level of a person's consciousness, a difference that the Confucian Classic of Change, the I Ching, recommends that the person take into account. Finally, the consciousness produced by individuation, because it hovers between ego and Self, is often uncertain of its ground. This paradoxical development is beautifully conveyed by the Taoist philosopher Chuang-Tzu, whose famous dream of himself as a butterfly led him, upon waking, to question his true identity.     

The self in analysis

This paper develops a theoretical and clinical approach to the self which is non-essentialist and post-modem. Briefly, it offers a framework for theorizing Self based on hermeneutics and psychological constructivism. It then develops a critique of the essentialist Jungian theory of Self in which the Self is frequently described as a human subject with views, intentions and desires of its own. With this is background, a post-modern Jungian framework for Self is advanced, with a brief clinical account of the self in analysis.     

Feminist Psychotherapy and Diversity:

This paper examines how one's ethnic, racial, and class identity is internalized and shaped by social relations and the external conditions of oppression and privilege. Psychotherapy issues are discussed from a Self Psychology perspective which emphasizes the role of the therapist's empathetic responsiveness in facilitating trust and disclosure and promoting psychological development through the vehicle of the transference relationship. Countertransference dynamics are explored with regard to social differences and distance between client and clinician. Issues of interpersonal trust and the effects of social conditioning toward prejudice are examined with respect to the therapeutic relationship. Finally, areas of compatibility between Feminist Therapy and Self Psychology are elucidated.     

G. H. Mead's alleged behaviorism

This paper seeks to clarify those conceptual foundations of G.H. Mead's social behaviorism which are assumed, but not made explicit, in that writer's well-known volume Mind, Self and Society. These foundations are shown to be an outgrowth of Mead's early commitment to the organic conception of conduct underlying the psychological functionalism of the Chicago School. Further light is shed upon Mead's position by pointing out the fundamental differences between his model of conduct and that characteristic of the behaviorist tradition in American psychology.     

Seduction,date rape,and aborted surrender

Abstract

This paper clarifies the dual-layered nature of the “demon lover complex,” with its background of both pre-Oedipal trauma and Oedipal-level desire. It draws on an object relations understanding of the unconscious and dissociated addiction to an internal demon object that has derivations in the personalities of the actual parents, and in the internalization of these parents. The dramatic case of early trauma compounded by adult date rape trauma serves to illustrate how a “developmental mourning process” in treatment can resolve such trauma. It also illustrates how reparation with the mother that partially heals pre-Oedipal trauma cannot immunize anyone against Oedipal-level attractions to a “demon lover” father, as represented in a displacement, resulting in victimized behavior, and in an aborted surrender to heterosexual desire. However, this victimization can be resolved, as seen in the clinical illustration, when the psychoanalyst has an understanding of the mourning process in developmental terms, working with a natural interaction between mourning and transference evolutions in treatment. The case also demonstrates the transitional object role of the psychoanalyst who is involved with the healing of pre-Oedipal trauma through mourning.     

Contemplating the Self: A Brief Phenomenological Participatory Action Study

This study examines Self contemplation from a heuristic phenomenological and applied psychological perspective using a participatory action research approach. The participant authors (n = 6; females = 50%, majority ethnicity = isiZulu = 67%) engaged in reflective contemplation of the Self to generate qualitative data that captured its core features and psychological applications. The data were thematically analyzed. Core features of the Self were revealed in contemplative, spiritual, ancestral, healing and psychotherapeutic themes. Specific psychological applications consisted of various universal characteristics of healing including the therapeutic relationship, therapeutic moments, integrity, dialogue, authenticity, intentionality, will, belief, practice and breath-work.     

Enactivism and the “problem” of perceptual presence

One of the classic debates in cognitive science is between nativism and empiricism about the development of psychological capacities. In principle, the debate is empirical. However, in practice nativist hypotheses have also been challenged for relying on an ill-defined, or even unscientific, notion of innateness as that which is “not learned”. Here this minimal conception of innateness is defended on four fronts. First, it is argued that the minimal conception is crucial to understanding the nativism-empiricism debate, when properly construed; Second, various objections to the minimal conception—that it risks overgeneralization, lacks an account of learning, frustrates genuine explanations of psychological development, and fails to unify different notions of innateness across the sciences—are rebutted. Third, it is argued that the minimal conception avoids the shortcomings of primitivism, the prominent view that innate capacities are those that are not acquired via a psychological process in development. And fourth, the minimal conception undermines some attempts to identify innateness with a natural kind. So in short, we have little reason to reject, and good reason to accept, the minimal conception of innateness in cognitive science.

     

Perceptions of Microaggressions: Implications for the Mental Health and Treatment of African American Youth

Race continues to be a salient and impactful component of psychological well-being in diverse modern societies. Significant race based disparities in mental health with respect to children and youth have been noted. Such disparities are evident in both access to and types of treatment. Confounding this issue are the race based phenomena that shape the dynamics between mental health and disorder for African American children and youth. While all races of children experience typical childhood mental health challenges such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and Conduct Disorder, African American children who report perceived racism are more than twice as likely to have such disorders using Winnicott’s True and False Self as a framework, the following qualitative study explored how African American seventh grade students perceived personal racist encounters. Implications for treatment will be discussed within the context of therapeutic strategies.     

Connectionism and Self: James,Mead, and the Stream of Enculturated Consciousness

William James conceptualized I, the self as subject as a stream of consciousness. When this conception is augmented with George Herbert Mead's view of self as a radically socialized and enculturated process, a result is the James-Mead model of dynamic self as a stream of enculturated consciousness. In this paper, we argue that connectionism is best suited to theorize this challenging notion. Based on the view that a connectionist model should describe psychological processes that carry out psychological functions grounded in a biological living system, we propose the I-SELF (Imitative and Sequence Learning Functional) model, which is designed to capture the temporal dynamics of a stream of consciousness whose content can be acquired via symbolically mediated social interaction with others in society. We identify four implications of the James-Mead model of dynamic self (embodiment, narrative and self, individual and collective self, and culture and self), and report computer simulations to show the utility of I-SELF in conceptualizing the dynamic self-processes in the contemporary social psychological literature. Theoretical and metatheoretical implications of the connectionist approach to self are discussed.     

The Deep Self Model and asymmetries in folk judgments about intentional action

Recent studies by experimental philosophers demonstrate puzzling asymmetries in people’s judgments about intentional action, leading many philosophers to propose that normative factors are inappropriately influencing intentionality judgments. In this paper, I present and defend the Deep Self Model of judgments about intentional action that provides a quite different explanation for these judgment asymmetries. The Deep Self Model is based on the idea that people make an intuitive distinction between two parts of an agent’s psychology, an Acting Self that contains the desires, means-end beliefs, and intentions that are the immediate causal source of an agent’s actions, and a Deep Self, which contains an agent’s stable and central psychological attitudes, including the agent’s values, principles, life goals, and other more fundamental attitudes. The Deep Self Model proposes that when people are asked to make judgments about whether an agent brought about an outcome intentionally, in addition to standard criteria proposed in traditional models, people also assess an additional ‘Concordance Criterion’: Does the outcome concord with the psychological attitudes of the agent’s Deep Self? I show that the Deep Self Model can explain a very complex pattern of judgment asymmetries documented in the experimental philosophy literature, and does so in a way that has significant advantages over competing models.     

A Strange Fire: an exploration of psycho‐spiritual development aided by Jungian analysis and Vedanta

This paper explores the process of psychological and spiritual development through a series of active imaginations arising from the author's ‘psycho‐spiritual quest’, a process of transformation in which the individual progressively frees themselves from the ego's identifications and may be afforded a vision of the ‘self as consciousness’, as described by Vedanta. The author describes how this quest was facilitated by the disciplines of Transcendental Meditation, Jungian analysis and Vedanta, and how these three disciplines can work together to foster psycho‐spiritual development. The paper aims to de‐mystify the actual experiences that can accompany these practices. The records of these active imaginations, tracing some key stages in this process, are then presented, with a commentary by Marcus West, linking them to Jung's concepts of ego and Self and recent understandings of consciousness and ego development. There is a discussion of Jung's conceptualizations of the ego and the Self and his rejection of the Vedantic understanding of the Self as consciousness. These views are then explored and a reconciliation is suggested through the understanding of the process of disidentification where the difference between Jung's view of the Self and that of Vedanta is understood to be due to the extent of disidentification from the contents of consciousness.     

The Spacious Mind: Using Archetypes for Transformation Towards Wisdom

The spacious mind model combines Hindu and Buddhist philosophy on spiritual maturity with the Jungian view on psychological maturity to delineate how archetypal work can spur the development of wisdom. Both psychological and spiritual development defuse the ego's hold on reality to create a spacious mind that has contact with the spiritual Self. To explain such a transformation, this article discusses 5 parts of the mind: the ego, the conscious, the unconscious, the archetype, and the Self. The innovative features here are an integrated view of spiritual and psychological development, and the insight that archetypal work can be a mechanism for growth in both domains, because an archetype resides in the energetic plane with the Self and in the conscious mind with the ego.     

An Analogue Study of the Psychological and Psychosocial Processes Associated With Post‐concussion Symptoms

This study used an analogue design to investigate post‐concussion syndrome and the psychological and psychosocial processes associated with post‐concussion symptom (PCSx) reporting. The study examined the role of expectation in reporting of PCSx, the nature of associated psychological and psychosocial difficulties, and the “good‐old‐days” phenomenon. Forty‐five healthy participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: (1) a control group or (2) an expectation group who were asked to perform as if they had experienced a mild traumatic brain injury. Fourteen psychiatric patients comprised the clinical group. Self‐report questionnaires assessing PCSx and psychological and psychosocial variables were administered. It was hypothesised that PCSx would be non‐specific, that the expectation group would report greater dysfunction than controls, and that the “good‐old‐days” phenomenon would cause the expectation and clinical groups to underestimate pre‐morbid PCSx. All participants reported some degree of dysfunction, and the expectation and clinical groups underestimated past PCSx. The expectation group reported more PCSx and psychological and psychosocial dysfunction than controls, resembling the clinical group. The results demonstrate that expectation can cause otherwise healthy individuals to resemble a clinical group in terms of their level of endorsement of psychological and psychosocial dysfunction.     

儿童糖尿病血糖管理

儿童糖尿病的治疗目标是达到和维持正常的生长与发育,减少由低血糖或高血糖所引起的临床症状,减少或延缓慢性并发症的发生。要实现这一治疗目标其中心环节就是要保证患者具有良好的血糖控制水平。糖尿病治疗必须在自我监测的基础上选择合适的胰岛素/药物治疗方案和饮食管理等以及糖尿病知识教育和心理支持的综合管理下才能达到满意效果。     

The Phenomenology of erwin Straus: An overview and appraisal of its relevance for human studies

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the veridicality of nonconventional cognitions as they pertain to transpersonal psychological inquiry. It is argued that the validation and efficacy of transpersonal constructs are dependent upon the manner by which they are theoretically and empirically supported, namely, accurately conceptualized and operationalized, and not metaphysicalized. Salient impediments germane to the study of transpersonal phenomena are also reviewed with the concomitant assumption that their ontological and epistemological status should be consistent with objective, nomothetic, empiricism. In response to this scientific appropriation, one measurement instrument is discussed, the Self‐Expansiveness Level Form (SELF; Friedman, 1981; 1983), which is both reliable and valid in measuring transpersonal‐like phenomenon. Taking into consideration these notions, this paper closes with a discussion on the implications of this measurement scale to the field of transpersonal psychology as well as to conventional psychological research and clinical applications.     

Images of the Abyss

Images of the abyss in traditional Christian theology and psychology are generally symbolic of hell, destruction, or death. Here, the notion of abyss is regarded afresh through the experiences of Jacob Boehme, the 17^th century German shoemaker and mystic, and Carl Jung, the 20^th century Swiss psychoanalyst. Boehme's pre-existent abyss, which he called the Ungrund, or un-ground, and saw as underlying all of creation, even God, relates to the unitary reality of Jung's Self. The Self is before the beginning of the individual human psyche and also its ultimate goal in terms of psychological life.     

Psychologism as a style of reasoning and the study of persons

“Psychologism” is proposed as a “style of reasoning” dominant in psychology that has set the agenda for determining what counts as psychological phenomena, their nature, and how they are to be investigated and understood. The assumptions of psychologism and particularities of its procedure are detailed and, subsequently, illustrated by example using the psychological study of attitudes. The failure of psychologism is raised and an alternative to the conception of persons implicit in psychologism is discussed as an initial step in forging a style of reasoning adequate to psychological inquiry.     

Psychological Crisis in a Marathon and the Buffering Effects of Self‐Verbalizations1

In the present study, we investigated the effects of psychological crises on goal striving and the buffering effects of self‐verbalizations in the context of a marathon race. Study 1 showed that during a marathon, a psychological crisis—which is characterized by a strong impulse of goal disengagement and thoughts about benefits and costs—occurred at about Kilometer 30 and that this crisis had negative effects on race performance. Study 2 experimentally induced the use of self‐verbalizations. The results confirmed the hypothesis that self‐verbalizations are an effective strategy to buffer against negative effects of psychological crisis on race performance. Self‐verbalizations are discussed as a general self‐regulatory tool in goal striving.     

Self-Deception and Moral Responsibility

The self‐deceived are usually held to be moral responsible for their state. I argue that this attribution of responsibility makes sense only against the background of the traditional conception of self‐deception, a conception that is now widely rejected. In its place, a new conception of self‐deception has been articulated, which requires neither intentional action by self‐deceived agents, nor that they posses contradictory beliefs. This new conception has neither need nor place for attributions of moral responsibility to the self‐deceived in paradigmatic cases. Accordingly, we should take the final step toward abandoning the traditional conception, and drop the automatic attribution of responsibility. Self‐deception is simply a kind of mistake, and has no more necessary connection to culpability than have other intellectual errors.     

Freedom for Relationship: An Initial Exploration of the Theology of Zizioulas and the Psychoanalytic Insights of Winnicott in Dialogue

In exploring the theology of John D. Zizioulas in conversation with the psychoanalytic theory of Donald Winnicott, this paper highlights how the theological concerns of personhood, sin, faith, and redemption may correlate, without conflation, to healing in the psychoanalytic context. Using a particular chapter of Zizioulas’s book, Communion and Otherness; Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, this paper looks at Zizioulas’s notion of what constitutes personhood and discusses this in light of Winnicott’s understanding of development of the True Self and False Self. I underscore the emphasis placed by both theology and psychoanalysis on the need to experience both dependence and otherness in order to become a self, that we might heal from being a False Self (Winnicott) or ‘thing’ (Zizioulas) capable only of living in opposition and fragmentation and grow towards living in communion and authentic relationship. I conclude by contending that both disciplines, in this case, flow towards an elucidation of pathological narcissism and the need for the healing of this condition as addressed both from a theological as well as psychological perspective.