Abracadabra Tongue: Poetry Magic

The author has known that poetry is magic since she was a child. However when she sat down to write about it she went blank, confronted by the taboo against magic in our rationalistic culture. In the way of Jungian magic she is helped by dream figures. The Muslim Solomon takes her on a flying carpet journey which reveals the magic of poetic influence: how Hafiz influenced Goethe influenced Lorca influenced her, which is how Persian mysticism found its way into her poetry. She tells the story of her development as a poet, how she learned fermentation magic—the difficult and often painful process required by poetic vision and revision in which grapes must be crushed, favorite phrases and metaphors must be ruthlessly smashed. The Queen of Sheba, another dream figure, shows up to tell her version of the story of her relationship with Solomon. She reveals the dark, fierce, and lusty lineage of her “old black magic” and how it has made its way into the author's poetry.     

In the Midst of Multiplicity: How to Stay in the Saddle

The author asks the question, how is the human psyche impacted by the current rapid cultural change, globalization, etc., that is presently occurring in our world. She describes the relationship between the horse and the rider as an amplification of the relationship between the psyche and the ego in coping with change. How does one build a good relationship? In times of confusion and rapid change, the horse will likely panic and throw the rider if there is a poor relationship between them. She describes some of the clients in therapeutic riding centers, particularly the more vulnerable teenage clients, as being “unhorsed”—disconnected from their positive instincts—and how this form of therapy is particularly helpful because it reconnects them with their “inner horse.” She describes how she learned to develop a bonded relationship with her own horse and how that kind of relationship can operate within a context of the cutting horse competition.     

Reflections on receiving an award

Reflecting on the events that culminated in her receiving the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Applied Psychology as a Professional Practice, Canter, an independent practitioner, discusses the road she traveled to become a clinical psychologist and to become involved in professional organizational activities. She believes that this award was given to her because of her contributions to psychology over her lifetime as an effective and hardworking leader, mentor, and role model in her home state of Arizona and nationally. She addresses some of her ideas about effective leadership and mentoring in the American Psychological Association (APA), providing many examples from which she has learned. Canter also shares some thoughts about APA's position as a leader in the development and enforcement of professional ethics.     

Crossing the Borders: An Interview with Julia Kristeva

In this June 2004 interview, Julia Kristeva takes us through her long and extraordinary career as a writer, an intellectual, and an academic. She speaks of her early years as a radical poststructuralist, postmodern feminist, and discusses how her scope has broadened with the addition of psychoanalytical theory and practice. She answers questions about her work on the abject, melancholy, motherhood, and love, and reveals how personal experiences, like the death of her father, have shaped parts of her literary output.     

“My Spiritual Journey to Know and Find Myself”: An Interview with Manisha Roy

In this interview, Manisha Roy shares how she became interested in Jungian psychology and how the concept of the shadow became a living help in her life. She relates how she has dealt with the heritage from her native country of India and shares her experience with marriage and divorce. She expresses her opinions about the future of depth psychotherapy.     

Coming Out in Voices

This paper articulates the personal experiences of a woman with a physical disability who enters therapy to explore issues involving lesbian identity, health and illness, disability oppression and pride, and relationships. Written in the first person, the article uses anecdotes, poetry, and journal entries to chart the author's process of self-discovery. As a woman, a lesbian, and a person with a disability, the author frequently finds herself at odds with the culture around her. This creates conflicts between the author's real self, and the self she must present to others. She discusses how she had learned to "silence the voices" which were not useful in challenging the stereotypes, making others comfortable, or communicating with assistants. The author describes how therapy offered her the opportunity to unlearn the silence, value all of her voices, listen to herself, resolve her internal dilemmas, and develop a deeper sense of self.     

A Complicated Friendship

The author presents a complicated friendship with a woman who helped to raise her children. As a feminist therapist, the author is aware of the non-egalitarian nature of an employer/employee relationship, resulting in a complicated friendship. She discusses the valuable lessons she learned from her comadre (co-mother or allomother) on poverty, Latino culture, and immigration. The author applies these valuable lessons to her work as a feminist therapist, supervisor, and teacher.     

The experiential problem for petitionary prayer

Sometimes people petition God for things through prayer. This is puzzling, because if God always does what is best, it is not clear how these prayers can make a difference to what God does. Difference-Making accounts of petitionary prayer attempt to explain how these prayers can nonetheless influence what God does. I argue that, insofar as one is motivated to endorse a Difference-Making Account because they want to respect widespread intuitions about this feature of petitionary prayer, they should also be motivated to endorse an account of prayer that respects widespread intuitions about other central features of petitionary prayer. I describe three problematic cases and the intuitions we have about them, and show how these intuitions restrict any Difference-Making account of petitionary prayer.     

Encounters with raven

I have been visited by Eurydice. She first came to me, unbidden, unexpected, in the way things usually first come to me–in a poem. But there was something different about how this poem happened. On one of my Fridays devoted to writing, I was suddenly hijacked by Eurydice's point of view, her voice, her demand that I speak for her. She was shrill. She was insistent. She gave me no choice but to work on the poem till I had gotten it how she wanted it. She feels she has been much neglected and misunderstood, and she let me know a poem was not enough. It was just the beginning. She wants prose. She wants essays. She wants public presentations. She wants me to tell her version of the story.     

The Pregnant Clinical Psychologist:

Le is a married 35 year old South Vietnamese refugee who works two jobs to support her three children and elderly relatives. The family of eight was one of many boat people whose journey to freedom involved prolonged stress as they left their home secretly and withstood the deprivation of a refugee camp for more than a year before being chosen by a sponsor to relocate in the U.S. Ten years later, Le proudly recites the new responsibilities she has acquired through this transition which have profoundly affected her roles as an employee, mother, and wife. Her story reveals several key elements which hold theoretical significance for the study of successful coping. She refers often to the salience of family values learned early in her life, and the importance of adhering to these during the most stressful periods. She lists several attitudes that helped her maintain hope and focus on her goals during the most difficult times. And, she describes a variety of supportive networks that were developed at different stages of the refugee experience that contributed to a successful transition. These elements clarify the interwoven effects on predisposing factors, coping, and social support on psychological functioning, and imply parameters that clinicians may find helpful in working with a refugee population.     

People are not cabbages: reflections on patient and analyst change

The author describes how her own internal change was a vital part of transformation between herself and two patients. She draws on Loewald's work as she discusses how change in her own internal relationship with her father was part of a lifelong emotional reorganization of Oedipal relations. She describes a process of mutual change whereby her and her patients' unconscious growth each stimulated the other. She suggests that the analyst's own emotional growth is a vital, not an incidental, part of psychoanalysis, as it brings new life to the work for patients as well as analysts themselves.     

A physically handicapped teenager is helped to own her body

In this paper I am presenting my work with a 15-year-old girl, Nina, who was born premature with congenital feet deformities. Her twin had died at birth, and Nina spent eight weeks in a Special Care Baby unit. She had also suffered from bronchial asthma, which was under control during the months she was in therapy with me.

An attempt to overdose, and a letter she had written to a teacher, brought Nina to our services and to individual psychotherapy. The weekly sessions gave Nina the opportunity to elaborate her mourning for the dead twin and to face her physical problems more realistically. She had coped with these by idealising a beautiful body and giving it, in her phantasy, to her dead sister for whose death she felt responsible. Her identification with characters from horror stories, of which she was an avid reader, was a key to understanding how she felt trapped in her deformed body, to which she would refer in the phrase ‘It doesn't bother me.’ The working through of her feelings of guilt, anger, and envy enabled her to lessen the split and to own her body.     

“Spacious Enough to Receive What Came to Me”: An Interview with Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky tells the story of how synchronicity and a bad dream flung her into a Jungian analysis, how her experiences as a young woman in India opened her to the Jungian Weltanshauung, and how analysis gave her access to her passionate and absorbing inner life. She speaks about her relationship to inner figures—her muse, her ancestors—and how they continue to influence her life and writing.     

Praying with those who might forget: pastoral considerations with memory impairment

This article gives an account of a person who had memory impairment and received pastoral care, with an emphasis on pastoral needs and prayer. The author provides a first-hand account addressing both sides of the pastoral care interaction. She experienced years of memory impairment comparable to mild to moderate Alzheimer's Disease. Now, however, she is a seminarian. She provides a detailed account of pastoral care received during the time of memory impairment and considers both the visiting pastor's intent and the author's recollection of the prayer and pastoral care received. Part of the uniqueness of this account is that persons with memory impairment do not usually regain their cognitive functioning and then also obtain pastoral education from which to provide the guidance gained as both patient and pastor.     

A Book to Think With: Margaret Miles’ Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter

Margaret Miles’ work with Augustine’s Confessions offers a model for a “philosophical life,” a term used in an earlier century for a life focused on seeking wisdom. As Miles reviews her life, she traces how she has come to see in all the particularity of her experience “what really exists.” She shares many scenes from her life, but most striking is her frank exploration of sexual experience in its complexities as a doorway to the kind of knowing that leads us to gratitude. She found Plotinus’ understanding of what really exists as the “surround-love of the All” most useful. This review describes how her autobiography permits fresh thinking and talking about God among those of us with a modern worldview.     

When I Reach the Place I'm Goin', I Will Surely Know My Way

This is a story of love and courage. As the author describes some of her most memorable experiences while traveling on the first all women's raft trip down the Grand Canyon in 1978, we learn how her love for the outdoors inspires and informs her sense of courage. She learns that courage can be gentle and "quiet" or boisterous and "noisy." She describes how the exigencies of river life require that women learn to cooperate and work together despite discord and differences, and how working together results in an increased sense of competency, self-esteem, and power.     

Working with psychotic processes in art therapy

In this paper the author describes in some detail her work in the art-therapy department of Hill End Hospital. She used not only her understanding of the work of psychoanalytical writers on schizophrenia, particularly Bion and Searles, but, more importantly, her own experience of the patients at the Hospital, to gain an insight into how these very regressed patients think of themselves and their relationship to reality. She illustrates how she used objects and images created by patients from the art materials supplied, during (usually) five two-hour sessions a week, together with conversations (and notes made in the patients' presence of these conversations) about these images at structured weekly individual-therapy sessions, to help patients to develop from a state of meaninglessness to a position in which they can choose to engage in continuing therapy.     

The Body Doesn't Lie: Five Tales of Superobesity as Somatic Language

The bodies of the five patients described here seemed to signal their ongoing dilemma: they could not fully grow up and therefore resorted to a somatic language that fairly shouted to be recognized. The author presents the case histories from an unusual point of view: She reaches her patients by working with the incomplete body images in both verbal and nonverbal modes. While the patients are on the couch, she uses verbal interpretations. When pre- and nonverbal phenomena raise their heads, she uses dance therapeutic interventions. She describes how and what she does with her patients from the point of view that motility is another way to reach the unconscious. Some of her patients were able to use movement improvisation like free association. Her highly sophisticated conceptualizations about the why and how of superobesity shine a new light on the etiology of this particular syndrome     

Who,What, When,Where, How,and Mostly Why?

SUMMARY

The death of a client by suicide was very emotionally destabilizing to this therapist. She worked hard to distance herself personally from the pain at first and at the same time she found herself overfocused on the “psychological autopsy.” She had difficulty accepting new clients and wanted to withdraw from a meaningful appointment to a state advisory committee. Only when she was able to identify with the client's pain and realize how that pain touched her own history of loss was she able to grieve productively. She realized that gender was relevant in her identification with the victim and in sorting out each of their histories of loss.