Feedback in dynamic psychotherapy: Definitions and essential concepts

Conclusion This paper gives a central place to that systemic process within dynamic psychotherapy that is called feedback. I have given the historical antecedents of the multileveled, mutually influencing processes in feedback in terms of their evolution from cybernetics, information, and system theories. Major interdisciplinary contributors included Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Jurgen Ruesch, Warren Mc Culloch, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Kurt Lewin, and Lawrence S. Kubie, who came from such fields as mathematics, neurophysiology, psychiatry, anthropology, psychology, ecology, and psychoanalysis. The place of free-associations, the domain of intrapsychic and interpersonal feedback, the requirements for a matrix allowing for nurturing, curative interaction, the nature of interventions, and the significance of transference-countertransference and reality in the feedback that occurs in dynamic psychotherapy have been focused on in this initial presentation on the subject. Paper presented at the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis of the Karen Horney Psychoanalytic Institute and Center on April 22, 1993. Author of many publications on verbal and nonverbal communications.     

Notes on infant psychotherapy

The idea of „infant psychotherapy”︁ is easily misunderstood, especially by those who associate psychiatry with images of crazy behavior. Nevertheless, there is a type of activity conducted by adults with infants, discussed with increasing frequency in recent literature, which is best understood in an analogy with adult psychotherapy. This activity may be called infant psychotherapy or infant-centered activity. Briefly, it consists of encouraging the infant to take the lead, and asking the adult in charge to follow or „track”︁ the infant's behavior as unobtrusively as possible. This is more easily said than done, and the present work tries to show why this is so. A discussion of the maternal-infant program at the Milwaukee County Mental Health Centre accompanies the observations.     

Religious issues in psychotherapy

Religious belief is important to a large proportion of our population. It has been found to be a potent neutralizer of death anxiety. Religion and psychotherapy shave values relating to self-actualization. It is the responsibility of psychotherapists to be aware of their own ambivalences and biases; to assess the significance of religious belief in the lives of their clients; to clarify conflicting views and values of client and therapist; to treat the client's psychodynamic problems; and respectfully to refer spiritual problems outside the domain of psychotherapy to the client's minister. An illustrative example from the author's practice is included.Based in part on a paper presented at the annual meeting of the California State Psychological Association, San Francisco, California, February 4, 1983. Dr. Sacks is Associate Dean Emeritus California School of Professional Psychology, Fresno. He has been in the private practice of psychotherapy for more than 30 years.     

Developmental issues in psychotherapy research

Research on psychosocial interventions with children requires attention to developmental principles such as age-specific competence, maturational shifts, increasing cone of relevant contacts, and socioeconomic context of biological stages. Research strategies that include such variables should lead to ecologically sound investigations and the correct selection of outcome variables. A consideration of the specificity of treatment and controlled design alone are not sufficient to guide the study of the psychological treatment of developing organisms and persons.     

The Tower of Babel: Searching for core clinical,theoretical and ethical issues in psychotherapy

This paper is about how different groups of therapists view the others now that UKSPC has voted to initiate a register and 1992 is here. Therapy has a set of common aims and these link all therapies together. This paper tries to draw fundamental conclusions for practitioners and trainees. It is a first step in the author's investigations of the frame or field of psychotherapy, which holds both clients and psychotherapists. Mental health practitioners are joined together by a common bond of having the same type of vocation: to help those who are in emotional pain. It is posited that what happens in one part of the field of mental health care affects all other parts of the field.     

Existential issues in group psychotherapy

Existential issues in group psychotherapy derive from existential thought both as a philosophy and as a value system. Its origins derive from the weakening of traditional values and the growing alienation of man from himself. The unique features of existentialism can be applied to all forms of therapy. These features are universal to humankind. They are finiteness, aloneness, guilt, responsibility, and freedom. In including existential concerns as part of group psychotherapy, therapist and patients move more closely to bilateral relationships and subjective interactions.     

Pharmacological interventions in autism: theoretical and practical issues

Focused on issues of drug treatment in relation to autism. Pharmacological treatment studies in autism are complicated by various factors including a tremendous range of syndrome expression, a lack of robust animal models of the disorder, and various methodological problems. Theories have tended to follow treatments, and various neurochemical systems have been the focus of study. Neurochemical systems potentially implicated include those involving dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, and neuropeptides. The dopaminergic system has been the most extensively studied. Treatments developed are effective relative to certain disabling symptoms but "core" problems (e.g., in social relatedness and communication) appear less responsive to medications. The development of new approaches to assessment, including integration of behavioral and pharmacological approaches, is an important research priority.     

Information processing in bilinguals: Some selected issues

Summary Issues concerning some perceptual, attentional, and memory processes in bilinguals are reviewed and discussed with regard to language dominance and the interaction between the bilingual's language systems. The first part of the paper focuses on the speed of basic decoding and encoding operations: speed (automaticity) of processing is considered to be a major factor in language dominance. Speed of perception and rehearsal is shown to be affected by covert pronounceability of words which is typically poorer for the bilingual's weaker language. Factors causing short-time changes in the relationship between the non-balanced bilingual's languages are then considered: high information load, noise, rapid switching, and language set. Noise is thought of as enhancing language dominance by two mechanisms: the masking of inner speech, and increased arousal. The second part of the paper focuses mainly on the interaction between the bilingual's language systems. The issue of language independence/interdependence is illustrated by a task involving parallel encoding and decoding; it is shown that the input switch which is considered to be automatic can select information by language. Experiments on memory are commented on with reference to the two major models of bilingual-storage systems: the common-store hypothesis, and the separate-stores hypothesis. While most experimental data are clearly supportive of the former, it is argued that both language-specific and language-free storage takes place, depending on task demands. The problem of the retention of language-information along with item-information in verbal learning tasks is then discussed: in addition to the specific task demands (e.g., meaningfulness), retention time appears to be a decisive factor here. A model of bilingual memory storage is suggested which combines the two extreme models (i.e., the shared and the separate ones). The model assumes that working memory plays a different role with regard to the language-free and the language-specific stores respectively. Finally, some problems in the use of more than one language in the process of verbal learning are pointed out.Most of the research work reported in this paper was supported by grants from the Swedish Council for Social Science Research (now the Swedish Council for Research in Humanities and Social Sciences).