Change,Vulnerability, Fear,and Taking Risks–An Interview with Virginia Satir

SUMMARY

The author addresses the mythic characters of Ulysses and Penelope as archetypes for herself. She reviews divergent attitudes, beliefs and aspirations of her life by detailing an internal conflict between her identification with Ulysses1 adventuresomeness and her reluctant realization that Penelope can also represent her, however much she rejected her for seeming dull and repetitve

In this process the author notes how she constricted her own creativity when she took on uncritically the patriarchal beliefs about the roles of wives and mothers. Nevertheless she wonders whether present-day women's liberation from archaic notions about women inadvertently sacrifices the optimal development of children because of the rigid demands of the work-place.

Finally she experiences the symbolic reunion of Penelope's and Ulysses' different images within herself, and considers how what each represents can have renewed meaning for her as she moves towards the end of her life.     

Harriet Lerner: A Feminist Voice From the Wheat Fields

ABSTRACT

Harriet Lerner, a Menninger-trained psychologist, has published widely in scholarly journals and for a general audience. Her twelve books include The New York Times bestseller, The Dance of Anger, and she blogs for Psychology Today. In this chapter, she shares her personal and professional evolution as a feminist theorist, psychotherapist, and writer.     

Research & clinical exchange

Abstract

Question: Family therapists are often called upon to do consultations to schools about children having social and educational difficulties. In what ways is the family therapist's role different when he or she is called in to consult as an “outsider’ to the school system about a particular child whom he or she does not know, compared to being called upon by the school for advice about a child who is already being seen in treatment by that therapist?     

Reasons in Action

Abstract

When an agent performs an action because she takes something as a reason to do so, does she take it as a normative reason for the action or as an explanatory reason? In Reasons Without Rationalism, Setiya criticizes the normative view and advances a version of the explanatory view. I defend a version of the normative view against Setiya's criticisms and show that Setiya's explanatory account has two major flaws: it raises questions that it cannot answer about the occurrence of one motivational ‘because’ within the scope of another; and it cannot accommodate the fact that, if an agent can φ for the reason that p, then she could take p as a reason to φ without φ-ing.     

Dementia–A Spiritual Journey Towards the Divine: A Personal View of Dementia

SUMMARY

This chapter presents a moving account of one woman's journey into fronto-temporal dementia. Bryden grapples with the difficult issues of loss of self and relationship with God. She examines the significance of memory in the Christian journey, and finally, she proposes ways for relating to her as she moves further into dementia. The strategies suggested uphold her as a fellow member of the Body of Christ, where others may become her memory, and where she can still be nurtured through the love of others and feel God's love through them.     

“A Failure of Curiosity”

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses the clinician's defense against and resolution of the experience of boredom in the countertransference as an incident of projective identification in the treatment of a woman with dissociative identity disorder. The essay details the inner mind of the therapist as she discovers both her own feelings and judgements of those feelings. As the essay progresses, she begins to grasp the significance of her discomfort in informing the therapeutic process. We watch as this material is made use of to move forward a stalled therapy into new territory.     

‘Adolescent fantasies and the horror-film genre‘: The freud museum 1995 spring conference

Abstract

As I walked towards home across Waterloo Bridge, having left this conference in its apt setting of the National Film Theatre, I realized I had attended the day from two points of interest: firstly, from my professional position of working in a university counselling service where I encounter adolescents and their ‘phantasies’ regularly. Only the other day a young student I had been seeing started the session by telling me she had seen the film Interview with the Vampire the night before, had been sick at the end, and then casually ‘threw up’ to me that she did not think she would need to go on seeing me.     

On some footnotes to Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s Defence of the Essay Of Human Understanding

ABSTRACT

Two footnotes added to the version of Catharine Cockburn’s Defence of the Essay Of Human Understanding (1702) reprinted in her Works (1751) have led to various accusations, including that she was confused and an inadequate interpreter of Locke’s moral epistemology. In particular, it is claimed that she did not recognize the gulf that separated her own intellectualist and internalist views from Locke’s more voluntarist and hedonistic position. This paper defends Cockburn’s interpretation of Locke, arguing that the evidence for Locke being a voluntarist and hedonist is not compelling, and that Cockburn’s interpretation of his moral epistemology is well grounded in the Essay Of Human Understanding.     

Virginia at 92

SUMMARY

Richard Docter first met Virginia Prince following a lecture she had given at California State University, Northridge, in 1981. Docter describes how they subsequently became good friends and collaborated on several projects culminating in his recent biography of Prince. Docter then brings us up to date with Prince's life describing how at 92 years of age, she is still very active although living in a retirement community. Focusing on a recent visit to Prince, Docter provides a pen portrait of the person behind the writings showcased in this collection.     

Aiding self-knowledge

ABSTRACT

Some self-knowledge must be arrived at by the subject herself, rather than being transmitted by another’s testimony. Yet in many cases the subject interacts with an expert in part because she is likely to have the relevant knowledge of their mind. This raises a question: what is the expert’s knowledge like that there are barriers to simply transmitting it by testimony? I argue that the expert’s knowledge is, in some circumstances, proleptic, referring to attitudes the subject would hold were she to reflect in certain ways. The expert’s knowledge cannot be transmitted by testimony because self-knowledge cannot be proleptic.     

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.     

Changes

Summary

Working as a psychotherapist gradually changes the person of the therapist. The author describes the positive and negative ways she has been affected characterologically by the experience of doing therapy over many years.     

Part I: Psychoanalysis and Undergraduate Education

ABSTRACT

Part I consists of two articles by the professors who invented the Chicago course, articulating why they think that teaching psychoanalysis to undergraduates is crucial. Marcia Dobson, who is a clinician along with being a professor of Classics, gives some personal history as to why she is so invested in psychoanalysis and offers a clinical understanding for why she thinks undergraduates need psychoanalysis to help them understand themselves better. John Riker, a philosopher, concentrates on why the conceptual tools of psychoanalysis are crucial for undergraduates as they think about who they are, who they want to be, and how they are going to negotiate adult life.     

A Narrative Model of Recovery

Abstract

In this paper I defend the suggestion that narratively understanding her experience of rape can help a survivor in her recovery from the harm that she has suffered. Susan Brison defends a similar suggestion, but, I argue, does not get all of the possible mileage out of narrative understanding because she does not explore what she takes to be the necessary features of a successful narrative itself. I hope to supplement her, primarily relational, account with a richer understanding of narratives themselves, as it is only, I argue, through coming to understand the essential characteristics of a narrative that we are able to grasp the particular explanatory force of narratives and, thereby, all of the potential benefits of narratively understanding her experience for a rape survivor.     

"So Get your High Heels on for Liberation,and Walk!" Some Reflections in Memory of Marcella Althaus-Reid

Abstract

Shore-Goss shares his personal and theological interactions with queer, Latina liberation theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid, and especially on how the Metropolitan Community Church was impacted by her voice and how she was influenced by the open commensality of the Metropolitan Community Church.     

On Hannah Arendt: The Worldly In-Between of Human Beings and its Ethical Consequences

Abstract

In this paper, I show how a concept of ethics can be derived from Hannah Arendt’s theory of action in The Human Condition, which contains from her call for action. When she looks at the ‘political actor’, as well as at the concept of ‘political situation’, her ethical claim is first of all the need to take initiative, to act. Hence, ‘political situations’ as she defines them are discussed as common responsibilities. But common responsibility is rooted in the in-between of human beings, rather than in individual human nature and is determined by Arendt’s principle of humanity. Therefore, at the centre of an implicit Arendtian ethics stands the world and the in-between of human beings.     

Some Recollections of Virginia Satir

SUMMARY

The following excerpts are taken from several hours of conversation with Virginia Satir in which Virginia shares her personal reminiscences of herdevelopment as a therapist and the intellectual environment that stimulated some of her most creative work. She reflects on her association with Gregory Bateson and other prominent theorists in the field. In deceptively concise language, she puts forth her own seminal ideas on the complex nature of change and the processes that underlie family therapy and group therapy.     

Breakdown in communication: On finding the child in the analysis of an adult

SUMMARY

In this paper a patient is described in whom communication with parts of herself and with her objects, internal and external, had broken down. I suggest that her way of communicating was achieved by projective identification, as described by Klein (1946) and Bion (1962). The only way she could deal with and communicate her own very “bothered” feelings was to “put them” into the analyst. In this way she “bothered” the maternal or analytic mind in such a way as to make the analyst experience feeling like a “bothered” child.

I have tried to show how the analyst holds or contains these feelings, and to show the gradual establishment in the patient of a different way of communicating with the analyst and with the more primitive parts of herself.     

Simone Weil: The Ethics of Affliction and the Aesthetics of Attention

ABSTRACT

For Simone Weil the invocation of ‘rights’ to address extreme human suffering–what she calls ‘affliction’–is ‘ludicrously inadequate’. Rights, Weil argues, invite a response, whereas what the afflicted require is not dialogue but simply to be heard. For Weil, hearing the ‘cry’ of the afflicted is the basis of all justice. The task of such a hearing is given over to Weil’s concept of attention, which demands an ethics of creative silence. This paper will argue that central to Weil’s ethics of attention, and thus the way she thinks we should show compassion and act justly, is the Kantian aesthetic concept of disinterestedness. I will argue that whilst Weil is influenced by Kant in multiple ways, it is his aesthetics, rather than his normative moral theory, that is most at play in her own ethical theory of attention.