Interbehavioral Perspectives: On Act Psychologies and the Psychological Nouns

In a recent paper, Lee contrasted “act psychologies” with cognitive psychology, alleging that the former are incomplete in their coverage of what most people consider really psychological. By including the contextual interactionist approach of J. R. Kantor with B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism under the “act psychology” umbrella, Lee has shown that she is unfamiliar with the fact that Kantor, during his 60-odd years of active writing, covered virtually every aspect of psychology. She is particularly concerned about the neglect of those psychological nouns that are meaningful abstractions without being aware that contextual interactionism (interbehavioral psychology) uses the very terms which she mentions as long as they are used in reference to interactions and not to faculties or other psychic entities.

     

HOW TO CONFUSE ORGANISMS WITH MOUSETRAPS: MACHINE METAPHORS AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN

Why do design arguments—particularly those emphasizing machine metaphors such as “Organisms and/or their parts are machines”—continue to be so convincing to so many people after they have been repeatedly refuted? In this essay I review various interpretations and refutations of design arguments and make a distinction between rationally refuting such arguments (Refuting_R) and rendering them psychologically unconvincing (Refuting_P). Expanding on this distinction, I provide support from recent work on the cognitive power of metaphors and developmental psychological work indicating a basic human propensity toward attributing agency to natural events, to show that design arguments “make sense”unless one is cued to look more closely. As with visual illusions, such as the Müller‐Lyer arrow illusion, there is nothing wrong with a believer's cognitive apparatus any more than with their visual apparatus when they judge the lines in the illusion to be of unequal length. It takes training or a dissonance between design beliefs and other beliefs or experiences to play the role that a ruler does in the visual case. Unless people are cued to “look again” at what initially makes perfect sense, they are not inclined to apply more sophisticated evaluative procedures.     

“God is the creator of all life and the energy of this world”: German intersex Christians’ reflection on the image of God and being created in God’s image

ABSTRACT

Intersex individuals are often told they are not human beings because they do not neatly fit into the categories of “female” and “male.” Many are made to feel like monsters. Christianity enforces this model of sexual dimorphism with the notion that to be a human being means to be created clearly “female” or clearly “male” in the image of God. This paper draws on interviews with German intersex Christians to explore their diverse images of God and what it means to be created in God’s image with the goal of creating new “conditions of possibility” that represent the full range of human sex/gender.     

“For We ascend in holiness and do not descend.” Jewish ultra-Orthodox women’s agency through their discourse about media

ABSTRACT

“Permission” and “prohibition” are key terms in Jewish religious discourse. For generations they have dominated as part of the primarily male, rabbinic discourse in talmudic literature. This paper will show that men no longer hold the monopoly on these terms because contemporary Israeli ultra-Orthodox women include them in their daily conversation in multiple and varied ways. The study examines exposure patterns and perceptions of 42 ultra-Orthodox women toward sectarian and general mass media. In responses to detailed questionnaires, the words “prohibited,” “forbidden” and “a boundary” constantly recur along with a variety of negatives, such as “not permitted,” “not allowed” and “not kosher”.

This paper argues that in describing their uses of and perceptions toward mass media, ultra-Orthodox women have adopted terminology borrowed from what was previously a primarily male-dominated conversation. Some might argue that these women are simply working within the bounds of ultra-Orthodox law which they accept as universally applicable; or perhaps that these women are simply reflecting words used by their husbands or rabbis. However, this study argues that their adoption of these terms indicates they are exercising their own agency. With a combined religious and secular education, and work that is primarily outside the house, many of them are the principal breadwinners in their homes. I suggest that this discourse is a part of their highly intelligent navigation of their simultaneous roles as both gatekeepers and change agents.     

Mental Health and Mental Disorder: A Sociological Approach,edited by Arnold M. Rose

This paper presents a model of group analysis based on Aristotle's causal notions. Aristotle's concept of man as a social animal provides a philosophical rationale for an interpersonal treatment forum. His causal theory supplies an encompassing atheoretical model for examining, understanding, and changing “things which have in themselves the source of their changing or staying unchanged.”

Attention to the four causal foci is suggested as the basis for a full-ranging group analysis. Material cause examines: “what” makes a thing what it is. Efficient cause investigates “how” various behaviors and emotions are set in motion. Final cause searches out “where” behavior is aimed. Formal cause traces “why” behaviors take particular forms.

It is suggested that a “cause for pause,” in the ongoing group process, is the emergence of a powerful and specifiable trend, whether a transference, poignant interaction, or groupwide conflict. The “pause to cause” is examined in detail, as each causal foci is elaborated. A sequential analysis moving from “what > how > where > why” is suggested at three levels of possible intervention: individual, interpersonal, and group as a whole. In conclusion, the timing, advantages, and restrictions of such a causal approach are considered.     

Reiteration: The ‘Imperative of the Word’ and Echoing the ‘Significative Terms’

Abstract

The act of reiteration is viewed as a therapeutic reply that is especially responsive in the face of what Lacan (1977) and Heidegger (1927/1962) respectively refer to as “empty speech” and “idle talk.” By hearing and selecting those key signifiers and phrasings that bear the client's story of distress, the act of reiteration allows us to focus and address the “subject who speaks” rather than the commonsense storyline itself. As an active and continuing punctuation of the client's direct discourse at the level of the word, the act of reiteration is only the first moment of a more complete narrative reply. But in keeping the therapist ever grounded in the client's direct expressions, it is this first moment of reiteration that leaves the therapist positioned to be responsive to the client's discourse of “rhetorical displacements,” of intimation and allusion, as these “echo” from “elsewhere.”     

The experiences of transgender and non-binary children and young people and their parents in healthcare settings in England,UK: Interviews with members of a family support group

Abstract

Background: Transgender and non-binary children and young people and their parents in England, UK are poorly served across a range of healthcare settings. Whilst UK equalities legislation and international guidance on transgender healthcare pathways protects this group from discrimination and mandates an affirmative approach, services in England are not keeping pace.

Aims: This study aims to draw on the experiences of transgender and non-binary children, young people and their parents in a support group in England in order to investigate their experiences of healthcare provision, and to develop some ideas for improvement.

Method: Data was collected with participants in a family support group which offers a parent helpline service, social groups for children and parents, and training for schools and other organizations. 65 parents and children from 27 families from the family support group attended participatory workshops where they were given a range of briefs: “health,” “family,” “friends,” and “education.” Their participation involved being asked to define their own interview questions and collect data by interviewing each other. Their interview notes constituted the raw data. Data was coded inductively by the author with respondent checking as a second stage.

Results: Results constitute the views of a small group of people, so cannot be generalized. However, they do illustrate some of the issues which may arise. Participants’ experiences elicited five key themes: professionals’ perceived lack of clinical and therapeutic knowledge; mental distress caused by excessive waiting lists; professionals’ stereotyped gender assumptions; direct discrimination within healthcare settings; and a lack of attention to parent and child voice, especially in terms of school-based experiences and where a patient had a diagnosis of autism.     

“Crunches,” “(K)nots,” and Double Binds—When What Isn't Happening Is the Most Important Thing: Commentary on Paper by Barbara Pizer

This discussion compares Pizer's concept of “relational (k)nots” with “crunches” and double bind impasses. It argues that all of these constructs capture what happens when conventional analytic method—the exploration, elucidation, and interpretation of transference—fails to work. In this context a “last-ditch effort” emerges, a necessary crisis of treatment. The situation is a plea that something must occur “now or never” or the “charade of therapy is over.” This plea is extraordinarily challenging since it embodies contradictory elements wherein the patient's very call for involvement with the analyst is embedded in a process that obfuscates their connection. Notably this sets the stage for the “damned if one ‘gets it’ and damned if one doesn't” experience that is a part of the paradox of recognition/mis-recognition that befuddles many analyses.

Extrication from such impasses requires the analyst's recognition that she is colluding in a kind of avoidance or distraction from recognizing their disconnection. Her second act involves meta-communication about their process. That is how their “relational knot” both binds them together while negating their connection. While this observation may be necessary it is recognized as insufficient on its own. Thus her third move out of the impasse requires her to enter into a state of improvisation. That is, to use some part of herself that must surrender from the one-up one-down impasse position of “either your version of reality or mine.” Instead, she must cultivate through her action a third way in which both she and her patient can think about their impasse and do something about it, including something different from what either one might have imagined before.     

Myth,Memory, and Meaning: Understanding and Treating Adolescents Experiencing Forced Migration

ABSTRACT

Refugee adolescents present a unique challenge to treatment. In their desire to be part of their new country, they often split off the formative years of their development. This includes both the person that they were in the past, their relations with peers and what made them “cool,” along with the officially documented political story that brought them asylum. This can lead them to feel disconnected and disoriented, but also as though their world is in fact built on lies.

They often come to treatment following enactments that make them appear tough, hardened and hard to reach, and which continue in the consulting room. When they are met with an official “trauma” narrative that explains their experience in political and psycho-educational terms they often find the experience alienating. They need to connect the world that they left, the world that live in now, and their own private experiences of love and hate in order to form an integrated identity.

This discussion explores aspects of the refugee narrative of psychoanalysis to help to illuminate the tasks necessary to co-create a meaningful narrative with refugee adolescent patients. It suggests ways to connect to the refugee experience and hear the young patients as they move between the political and the personal, the official and the familial, to understand themselves and return to the developmental task of creating an adult identity.     

Standards of performance and aesthetics in counselling and beyond

ABSTRACT

In this article I discuss how drug counselling can be transformed through “aesthetic documentation”: a hybrid of art with narrative practice. After outlining the concepts of performance and standards, and a critique of “customising” counselling through formalised feedback, five claims are made about “aesthetic documentation”: The art works are prototypes rather than rigid standardisations; they represent collaboration rather than individualised performance; they both display and enact substantial meaning; they objectify and achieve recognition of clients and professionals; they facilitate flexible, diverse and transformative attributions of meaning and value; they address social problems rather than individualised malfunctions. This may help overcoming stigmatisation, and suggest a kind of trans-disciplinary knowledge that is different from the dominant scientific forms.     

Divorce Therapy in Context

Abstract

Partners trying to decide whether to continue or end their marriage rely on the expertise of therapists to help them evaluate their alternatives. Research on what predicts divorce and what consequences divorce has for parents and children is reviewed so therapists are informed in the guidance they give clients. Attention is given to the environmental context of marriage as well as its interior quality. Implications for therapists doing divorce therapy in the context of a “pro-marriage” climate are also discussed.     

Temporal dimensions of the self-concept: Entrapped and possible selves in chronic pain

Abstract

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore temporal aspects of chronic pain patients' conceptions of their selves; what they were in the past, how they were functioning at the present and what they thought about their potential and future. In-depth interviews with 21 chronic pain patients were performed and analysed. The main results of the analysis included four higher-order conceptual patterns: “the body and I”, “maintaining the consistency of past self”, the “entrapped self”, and “projected selves, defined by others”. These results are presented in a systems-oriented model illustrating the temporal dynamic between the perceived functioning self, the body and others, such as health care personnel and significant others. The mechanisms of the process of how selves are developing in the chronisation or healing process of pain are finally discussed. A clinical implication of these findings might be that with an enlarged insight of the temporal dynamic and the importance of interactive and social factors in shaping positive possible selves, health care personnel can contribute more effectively in stew-arding the chronic pain patient toward health-promotive ends and a concomitantly higher quality of life.     

Getting narced: Neutralization of undercover identity discreditation

“Communicative work directed to transforming an individual's total identity into an identity lower in the group's social types is called a ‘status degradation ceremony'” (Garfinkel 1956, p. 420). Status degradation ceremonies are particularly troublesome for undercover narcotics agents. In this context, they act as the mechanism by which agents’ dissembled identities are questioned and their real police ones revealed. This process, what officers call “getting narced,” is the topic of the present paper. Explored here are both its causes and the responses officers proffer to neutralize full identity exposure. Causes are tactical in nature and involve transactional overaggressiveness. Neutralization responses are dramaturgical in nature and involve sarcastic admission, evidential refutation, and belligerent denial/threatening retort. Discussion focuses on the conceptual implications of officers’ counteruncovering moves (Goffman 1969) as these relate to the sociology of accounts (Scott and Lyman 1968). Data were drawn from ethnographic interviews with 30 high school undercover officers operating out of a large U.S. city.     

The “religiosity gap” in a clinical setting: experiences of mental health care consumers and professionals

ABSTRACT

In Western countries, professionals in mental health care (“professionals”) tend to be less religious than “consumers”. This qualitative study explores the meaning of this “religiosity gap” for professionals and consumers in mental health care. Both a regular, secular and a Christian clinic in the Netherlands participated in this study. Content analysis was applied to 35 consumer interviews and 18 interviews with professionals. Consumers reported negative experiences (e.g., perceived disrespect and a lack of confidence) and/or negative expectations (e.g., misunderstanding and misinterpretation) related to a religiosity gap. They also mentioned advantages of a “religiosity match”, like safety and confidence and appreciated professionals’ religious/spiritual self-disclosure. Professionals in secular care setting tended to avoid religion and spirituality. In both clinics, they tended to neutralise religious/spiritual differences and be reticent in self-disclosure. Professionals are recommended to recognise the relevance of a religiosity gap and to consider different strategies in approaching religion/spirituality.     

Attitudes and illusions: Herbert Leyendecker’s phenomenology of perception

In this paper, I discuss aspects of Herbert Leyendecker’s 1913 doctoral dissertation, Towards the Phenomenology of Deceptions (Zur Phänomenologie der Täuschungen), which he defended in 1913 at the University of Munich. Leyendecker was a member of the Munich and Göttingen Phenomenological Circles. In my discussion of his largely neglected views, I explore the connection between his ideas concerning “attitudes” (Einstellungen), e.g., of searching for, observing, counting, or working with objects, and the central topic of his text, perceptual illusions, thematized by Leyendecker as a kind of perceptual “deception” (Täuschung). Indeed, Leyendecker argues that a change of attitude is a necessary aspect of an illusion. I argue that Leyendecker’s use of the notion of attitude in accounting for illusions is problematic; yet I also suggest that his ideas are not devoid of philosophical interest, in relation to current debates.

     

An antidote to illusory inferences

The mental model theory predicts that reasoners normally represent what is true, but not what is false. One consequence is that reasoners should make “illusory” inferences, which are compelling but invalid. Three experiments confirmed the existence of such illusions based on disjunctions of disjunctions. They also established a successful antidote to them: Reasoners are much less likely to succumb to illusions if the inferences concern disjunctions of physical objects (alternative newspaper advertisements) rather disjunctions of the truth values of assertions. The results shed light both on the cause of the illusions and on the current controversy among different theories of reasoning.     

Perceiving the Present: Systematization of Illusions or Illusion of Systematization?

Mark Changizi et al. (2008) claim that it is possible systematically to organize more than 50 kinds of illusions in a 7 × 4 matrix of 28 classes. This systematization, they further maintain, can be explained by the operation of a single visual processing latency correction mechanism that they call “perceiving the present” (PTP). This brief report raises some concerns about the way a number of illusions are classified by the proposed systematization. It also poses two general problems—one empirical and one conceptual—for the PTP approach.     

Parental Reflectiveness,Posttraumatic Symptoms and Alcohol Use Disorder among Israeli Combat-Veteran Fathers

Combat veterans are highly prone to develop Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) following their release from duty, presumably due to high prevalence of prolonged aversive emotional symptoms such as Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms (PTSS). Parental Reflective Functions (PRF) and Parental Sense of Competence (PSOC) have been identified as key protective factors in predicting maternal functioning and well-being, yet little is known of its role among fathers, let alone combat veteran fathers. In this study we explored whether PRF and PSOC moderated the association between PTSS and AUD among 189 Israel Defense Forces (IDF) male combat veterans. Participants filled out validated measures assessing PTSS, PRF, PSOC and AUD. Results indicated that PTSS, as well as PRF’s “interest and curiosity regarding the child’s mental states” subscale, were positively correlated to AUD. In addition, PRF’s “certainty about child mental states” subscale moderated the association between PTSS and AUD, so that PTSS and AUD were significantly correlated for participants who reported average or high levels of certainty about their child’s mental states. This finding may imply that intrusive mentalizing (“hypermentalizing”) by veteran fathers may facilitate the association between PTSS and AUD, presumably by constituting a maladaptive mechanism for coping with the stressful uncertainty embedded in the parent–child relationship.