Falling in Love as a Therapeutic Moment-Therapy as a Moment of Falling in Love

The author compares falling in love in ordinary life with falling in love in therapy. This way, he offers a wider understanding of these phenomena, regarding in particular to transferring processes. The result is a model, inside the frame of reference of Gestalt Therapy, to work through the positive sources of falling in love process-in ordinary life and in therapy. Among other things, he means by that: (1) an understanding of the links between one's original family and partner's choice and (2) a new perspective of the alternatives of behavior the person has now (in the resolution phase of falling in love), in comparison with his/her experience in his/her original family.     

Poles of Meaning: Pushing Language Up and Down

I discuss the problem of using the emotional/cognitive duality as a satisfactory way of formulating the problem of linguistic origins and of the distinctiveness of literary language. I address in particular Shanahan’s use of the work of Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer. I point out that Cassirer offers us a multileveled model of language’s sense-functions which avoids false oppositions and that Langer shows that literature does not belong to the discursive but to the presentational order of symbolism. Such insights strengthen rather than weaken Shanahan’s main points about the ‘localization’ and nature of meaning.

Reaching Up,Down, In,and Around: Couple and Family Coping During the Coronavirus Pandemic

The worldwide coronavirus (COVID-19) has had profound effects on all aspects of life: physical health, the ability to travel locally or to more distant destinations, material and financial resources, and psychosocial wellbeing. Couples, families, and communities and individual persons in those relationships have struggled to cope with emerging depression, anxiety, and trauma, and the rise of relational conflict. In this article, we suggest that the existential nature of the pandemic’s challenges requires more than just the usual psychosocial interventions. We propose a taxonomy of responses to foster coping and resilience—“Reaching Up, Down, In, and Around.” “Reaching Up” includes accessing spiritual, religious, and ethical values. “Reaching Down” includes ideas and practices that foster a revised relationship with the Earth and its resources, and that engage families to participate in activities that aid the Earth’s recovery from decades of human-caused damage. “Reaching In” represents a turn towards experiences available in the mind and in shared minds in relationships that provide pleasure, excitement, joy, and peace, given that external sources of these emotions are of limited availability due to quarantine. “Reaching Around” involves reframing the mandate for “social distancing” as fostering social connection and support while maintaining physical distancing. The challenges for family therapists, whose practices are confined largely to online therapy, and who are struggling with the same fears and constraints as those persons they are attempting to help, are also discussed.     

Dressing Up/Dressing Down: Power,Performance and Identity in the Book of Judith

Abstract

In this paper Sawyer reads the book of Judith through the lens of queer theory and contemporary French feminist philosophy. She argues that the story of Judith is a clear example of gender subversion in the ancient world, a rupture in the metanarrative, a disruption of boundaries. Particularly interesting is the depiction of Judith as becoming feminine, putting on drag, as it were, in order to entice Holofernes. Judith puts on a particular performance of gender to achieve her purpose and then resumes her role as gender subverter imitating a male warrior at the end of battle by loading up her mules with booty!     

Choice of Therapeutic Approaches as a Function of Sex of Subject, Type of Problem, and Sex and Title of Helper

A study was carried out using 96 subjects to discover how their preferences for four therapeutic approaches varied as a function of their sex, the type of problem they were asked to imagine they had (intimate or work/academic), and sex and title (counsellor or psychotherapist) of the professional from whom they would seek help. The four approaches used were: psychoanalytic therapy, cognitive-behavioural therapy, humanistic therapy, and a 'common-sense' approach consisting of responses typically given by non-professional helpers (e.g. friends and relatives). The results showed that the cognitive-behavioural approach was preferred overall, closely followed by the humanistic approach; the common-sense approach and psychoanalytic therapy were given the lowest ratings. However, interactions showed the picture to be more complex than this: women preferred female helpers, with men having no particular preferences; and the type of approach subjects preferred depended to some extent on the type of problem they had and the title of the helper consulted. The results suggest that counselling centres should be staffed with helpers of both sexes and differing theoretical backgrounds, so as to give clients as wide a choice of therapeutic help as possible.     

The Guru, the Logician, and the Deflationist: Truth and Logical Consequence

The deflationary view of truth and reference as I've presented it … applies only to words and sentences that we understand. This may well seem worrisome, and it is important to ask both whether it should seem worrisome and whether it could be avoided. Field (1994, 260)     

Turning Up the Heat: Inflammation as a Mechanism Linking Chronic Stress, Depression, and Heart Disease

ABSTRACT— Mounting evidence indicates that chronic stressors and depressive symptoms contribute to morbidity and mortality from cardiac disease. However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms responsible for these effects or about why depressive symptoms and cardiac disease co-occur so frequently. In this article we outline a novel model that seeks to address these issues. It asserts that chronic stressors activate the immune system in a way that leads to persistent inflammation. With long-term exposure to the products of inflammation, people develop symptoms of depression and experience progression of atherosclerosis, the pathologic condition that underlies cardiac disease.     

A Comparison Between Bottom–Up, Top–Down, and Bidirectional Models of Relationships Between Global and Life Facet Satisfaction

ABSTRACT We compared "bottom-up,""top-down," and "bidirectional" models of relationships between global and life facet satisfactions in a sample of university professors A bottom-up model proposed that specific life facet satisfactions determine satisfaction with life in general A top-down model proposed that global life satisfaction determines satisfaction in specific life domains A bidirectional model proposed reciprocal influences between global and life facet satisfaction We used LISREL-VI to contrast these models and, overall, the bidirectional model received strongest support However, direction of relations between global and life facet satisfaction varied across life domains We suggest that differences in domain scope, criticality, and centrality may determine the direction of the relationship between overall and life facet satisfaction     

Scaling Up the Self,Scaling Down the World: Self-objectification and the Politics of Carbon Offsets and Personalised Genomics

Two global initiatives, the Genographic Project and the Carbon Lottery, share an ambition to make abstract, global processes—human evolution and climate change—comprehensible and engaging to non-specialists. Despite their differences, they both do so by means of self-objectifications that scale up the selves of participants and scale down complex, spatio-temporal models of human–world relations. The author’s auto-ethnographic experiences in both initiatives illustrate how carbon calculators and personalised genomics involve a pragmatics of scale that evaluates and compares users on the basis of their relative expression of, or deviation from, a standard. Furthermore, this is not based on actual resources that participants do or do not possess, but on forms of capitalist exchange that underwrite carbon trading and population genomics, as experts and corporations make intellectual property derived from purportedly rare DNA and sustainable practices, which are typically indigenous and non-western. In fact, the global inequalities that make possible transactions in carbon offsets and genetic ancestry are obscured from view. As a result, though initiatives like the Genographic Project and Carbon Lottery may provide comprehensible self-objectifications, they potentially make the world more unequal in the process.     

Acceptance of Help as a Function of Similarity of the Potential Helper and Opportunity To Repay1

College students were given the task of making an object from balloons while being observed by someone who they were told had highly similar values (similar conditions) or highly dissimilar values (dissimilar conditions). Later they were to observe while the other made an object from wire coat hangers that were already unwound (no opportunity to repay conditions) or were not unwound (opportunity to repay conditions). In preparation for the subject's task, the balloons had to be blown up and the other offered to help. The number of balloons the subject gave the other was the measure of acceptance of help. An interaction between similarity and opportunity to repay was found. As hypothesized, acceptance of help was greater when the potential helper was similar than when he was dissimilar only when the opportunity to repay was anticipated; when no opportunity to repay was expected, the reverse was found.     

What Goes Up Apparently Needn't Come Down: Asymmetric Predictions of Ascent and Descent in Rankings

In eight studies, we document an upward mobility bias, or a tendency to predict that a rise in rankings is more likely than a decline. This asymmetry was observed in predictions of classroom performance, NBA and NFL standings, business school rankings, and employee performance rankings. The bias was found for entities people care about and want to see improve their standing, as well as entities in which people are not invested. It appears to result from people's tendency to give considerable weight to a focal agent's intentions and motivation, but to give less weight to the intentions of competitors and other factors that would thwart the focal agent's improvement. We show that this bias is most pronounced for implicit incremental theorists, who believe that performance is malleable (and hence assign more weight to intentions and effort). We discuss implications of this asymmetry for decision making and for an understanding of the underdog bias. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.