Bereavement and Transformation: A Psycho-spiritual and Post-traumatic Growth Perspective

In the aftermath of loss, it is not uncommon for individuals to disclose psycho-spiritual experiences that lead to personal changes and psychological growth. This article argues for and outlines a broad conceptual framework that captures and acknowledges the significance of these subjective experiences. The model synthesises and integrates two approaches to healthy growth: Lawrence Calhoun and Richard Tedeschi’s post-traumatic growth model and Stanislav and Christina Grof’s model of psycho-spiritual transformation. A rationale for a broader model and underpinning theory is briefly discussed, and their shared understandings about the human potential for growth in the struggle through loss are explored.     

儿童社会观点采择能力发展的干预研究

本研究针对小学低年级学生的认知发展特点,编制了有关心理活动课程,并选取小学一年级学生进行了为期半年的干预研究。研究结果表明,通过干预训练发展儿童的社会观点采择能力是可行的,且本研究中所编制的心理活动课程对于促进儿童该能力的发展具有良好的效果。     

The Social Dynamics of Cigarette Smoking: A Family Systems Perspective

This paper uses family systems concepts and the Family FIRO model to show how cigarette smoking occurs in the context of the important relationships in a smoker's life. Specifically, smoking is viewed as a way a person is included in relationships, is in control in relationships, and perhaps is intimate in relationships. When smoking is well-established in the relationship, predictable interaction patterns surround it. When a person tries to quit or succeeds in quitting, these patterns change and may need to be replaced by nonsmoking alternatives. Partners may respond with support and willingness to create alternative patterns, or with undermining behavior stemming from a perceived threat to the established patterns. The model is offered for its heuristic value in guiding research and clinical experimentation. The paper also describes implications for family therapists as consultants to smoking-cessation programs.     

Aging and Family Personality: A Developmental View

The dramatic numerical and proportional increase in the elderly population has important implications for family dynamics and the family life cycle. This paper considers some of the issues of aging, death, loss, and separation, as they relate to individual and family development and to shifting roles and responsibilities of family members.     

Cultural Competence When Working With American Indian Populations: A Couple and Family Therapist Perspective

This article focuses on treating the underrepresented American Indian and Alaska Native population in therapy. The lack of literature on this topic may impede the ability of couple and family therapists (CFTs) to work effectively with members of this group. Issues such as the underutilization of therapy, dropout rates, culturally syntonic joining and assessment, religion, and spirituality are discussed. In addition, potential boundary issues of gift giving and community integration are explored. Finally, cultural strengths are addressed so they may be clinically integrated with this unique population.     

Gender and Group Process: A Developmental Perspective

Until recently, the study of gender development has focused mainly on sex typing as an attribute of the individual. Although this perspective continues to be enlightening, recent work has focused increasingly on children's tendency to congregate in same-sex groups. This self-segregation of the two sexes implies that much of childhood gender enactment occurs in the context of same-sex dyads or larger groups. There are emergent properties of such groups, so that certain sex-distinctive qualities occur at the level of the group rather than at the level of the individual. There is increasing research interest in the distinctive nature of the group structures, activities, and interactions that typify all-male as compared with all-female groups, and in the socialization that occurs within these groups. Next steps in research will surely call for the integration of the individual and group perspectives.     

The Undecided Student: A Developmental Perspective

Student indecision regarding careers and college majors has been the focus of research studies for more than 50 years. Yet these students have indicated few significant differences between undecided and decided students. This article portrays undecided students as normal, growing, predictable individuals in various stages of vocational and cognitive development and discusses the use of developmental concepts in academic advising, career counseling, teaching, and administration.     

Obsessional Disorders: A Developmental Systems Perspective

The paper resumes the discussion of obsessional disorders in view of developments that have followed the 1965 Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association when the last systematic analytic discussion of the Obsessional Neuroses took place. The paper reexamines principal contributions to that congress in an attempt to understand the failure of psychoanalysis to favorably influence the course of these disorders. It notes the subsequent findings of a burgeoning field of child observation that have called attention to the larger infant-caregiver constitutive system within which the intrapsychic phenomenology of the obsessional neuroses is produced and maintained. It draws attention to the crucial impact of the analyst and his causal theories, insufficiently recognized at the lime, in the co-determination of the course and outcome of analytic treatment and proposes a contextual systems approach to the reconfigured understanding of normal and pathological development.

The paper discusses the special role of cumulative trauma in the infant-caregiver system on the formation of enduring obsessional and compulsive patterns. It suggests that in the traumatic developmental system, endangerment to the self and unbearable pain are ever-present threats lo the child, and protective strategies, including importantly the processes of pathological accommodation, occupy a primary motivational status. It describes the automatic shaping of subsequent experience by the internalization of such processes in template formation. Freud's emphasis on aggression and unconscious guilt in the pathogenesis of the obsessional neuroses system is reexamined in the light of the contextual perspective proposed, and a clinical excerpt is offered to illustrate the thesis of aggression and guilt as contextual products of a traumatic developmental system. Special considerations that enter into the reconfigured analytic treatment of obsessional disorders are proposed, and some observations follow about problems commonly encountered in the new approach.

The paper argues for the systematic extension of the quintessential psychoanalytic tools of empathic-introspective investigation and illumination into the contextualization of inner experience in a fresh approach to the psychoanalytic treatment of these disorders.     

Ethnic and Cultural Diversity:

Within the past decade, feminist therapists have successfully taken a leadership role in challenging the traditional and inherent prejudice and discrimination concerning women in psychotherapeutic counseling theory and practice. As progress is made in research, theory, and practice affecting the mental health of women in therapy, more complex issues emerge. This paper will focus on the issues of ethnic and cultural diversity, as it applies to women of color seeking therapy.     

Multicultural Peer Counseling: A Developmental Perspective and Rationale

This article focuses on the creation and growth of a peer counseling program assisting ethnic minority college students. A brief rationale of the program is offered. Problems are described and recommendations are made for subsequent program deuelopment.     

Understanding and Counseling Gay Men: A Developmental Perspective

The author reviews current concepts and research concerning homosexuality with emphasis on understanding gay men and their relationship behaviors. Because the current focus is on homosexuality as a developmental process, counseling considerations are presented from a developmental perspective and a case example is included.     

Career Indecision: A Family Systems Perspective

In existing theories of vocational development career indecision is generally attributed to character deficits in the young adult. The authors present an alternative, family systems perspective on career indecision. Also, they speculate on the family patterns that contribute to career indecisiveness and on the functions that this problem may serve within the larger family network.