Perspectives on the New Orleans Saints as a Vehicle for the Installation of Hope,Post Katrina

Abstract

The author discusses the effectiveness of popular culture as a tool for the instillation of hope within a community, using as an example the ways in which a National Football League team galvanized the residents of New Orleans in the 18 months following Hurricane Katrina. This article posits that the Saints supplied an impetus for transcendence and healing both individually and communally.     

The Genesis of a Sensibility and the Gulf Coast Oil Disaster of 2010

Intimate biographical, urgent environmental, and political reflections come together in this aesthetically refined depth psychological excursion beyond self and subjectivity to the transpersonal field of the lumen naturae.

From a fateful family car accident through reveries of childhood, school, Boy Scouts, and the influence of a local earth mother and a nature guru sent by Providence, the evolution of a Midwestern child's keen eye and ardent affection for the natural world proceeds tumultuously from art school and a crucial dissociative crisis to a singularly enchanted morning of bird watching on the Louisiana Gulf Coast. There the jarring impact of the explosive British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on the same adult personality 30 hours later and fifty miles off shore is elaborated with no small sense of horror.

Colorful observations of birds, insects and plant species, habitats and locales, personal dreams and key excerpts from an old Ecuador travel journal are subtly interwoven, then highlighted by the collectively significant proclamation of fierce political will by a powerful black woman to her countless earthly children in for an era torn with war and ecological outrages. This prose poem seeks throughout to characterize the unique position of our reflective human consciousness poised between the dazzling if troubled extended world and the inwardly receding expanse of psychic space brimming with living images and struck through with myriad scintillae, the rods and cones of the imaginal retina with which we see and derive our capacity for wonder.     

Iterated Belief Change and the Recovery Axiom

The axiom of recovery, while capturing a central intuition regarding belief change, has been the source of much controversy. We argue briefly against putative counterexamples to the axiom—while agreeing that some of their insight deserves to be preserved—and present additional recovery-like axioms in a framework that uses epistemic states, which encode preferences, as the object of revisions. This makes iterated revision possible and renders explicit the connection between iterated belief change and the axiom of recovery. We provide a representation theorem that connects the semantic conditions we impose on iterated revision and our additional syntactical properties. We show interesting similarities between our framework and that of Darwiche–Pearl (Artificial Intelligence 89:1–29 1997). In particular, we show that intuitions underlying the controversial (C2) postulate are captured by the recovery axiom and our recovery-like postulates (the latter can be seen as weakenings of (C2)). We present postulates for contraction, in the same spirit as the Darwiche–Pearl postulates for revision, and provide a theorem that connects our syntactic postulates with a set of semantic conditions. Lastly, we show a connection between the contraction postulates and a generalisation of the recovery axiom. Portions of this paper were originally presented at ECAI 2002.     

Ritual and Recovery: Traditions in Disaster Ritualizing

The aim of this article is partly to analyze and discuss the ritual traditions in the Norwegian context, called disaster services, which consists in ritualizing as a response to accidents and disasters. Furthermore, we find it relevant to understand these traditions in relation to two aspects of recovery: personal and social recovery. From a practical theological perspective, the new traditions are interesting for the understanding of how the churches work in situations where people have stressful experiences, and for developing an understanding of contemporary religion.     

Portrait of Promise: Moses and the Journey to Consciousness

Recent literature in psychology suggests that the narcissistic personality has become the most prominent personality type in the Western world. The North American over-valuation of individualism and stress on the development of the isolated self are threatening the human maturation needed to successfully engage the challenges of living in the twenty-first century. This article explores the ways in which a psycho-spiritual analysis of the prophetic figure of the biblical Moses presents an antidote to the epidemic of narcissism defeating our potential toward more mutually satisfying and personally integrated living. When asked if civilization would survive, C.G. Jung replied that it would if only enough people would take responsibility for their own consciousness.     

Sexuality,Intimacy, and Recovery

Human sexuality is an inseparable part of the yearning for intimacy, merging, and touch, both for people in general and for those with severe mental disorders. The exploration and acceptance of sexuality and the yearning for intimacy are vital to the recovery process of people with severe mental disorders. Despite this importance, therapists appear to disregard sexual issues in therapy with people with severe mental disorders. This article discusses the sexuality difficulties of these patients resulting from their personal history and examines the difficulties of therapists and therapeutic institutions in dealing with these patients’ sexuality-related issues.     

Applying Buddhist Practices to Recovery: What I Learned From Skiing With a Little Buddha Wisdom

The author describes how 5 Buddhist practices—enlightenment, compassion, acceptance, mindfulness/meditation, and the spiritual community—can serve as a foundation for an integrated recovery model that incorporates numerous perspectives from the 12‐step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. An application of the model illustrates how it is applied to real‐life recovery.     

A Quality Life in the Shadow of Terrorism

After the demise of the Soviet Union, many individuals felt a sigh of relief as fear was leaving them. Yet, over the years, counselors have seen a new fear—terrorism—demonstrated in drive-by shootings, hate crimes, and now, weapons of mass destruction. In helping clients deal with this all-too-real phenomenon, a reframing process is in order, one that views our lives not in permanence, but as constant change. Much needless suffering is due to clinging to permanent belief systems, which, in reality, are impermanent. Many clients I have worked with have found effective ways not only to deal with, but to flourish in whatever life brings, via a self-Being relationship.     

A Journey to Madness: Jane Bowles's Narrative and Schizophrenia

This work is a study of Jane Bowles's madness as revealed through several of her literary works and her life story. On a parallel plane, it is an epistemological exploration of the points of intersection between humanistic psychoanalysis and deconstructive literary criticism. Here we consider the schizoid traits in Two Serious Ladies (1943) and in Camp Cataract (1949), using the theories developed in this area by the psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1927–1989).     

The Practical Challenges to Renewal: An Answer to Stein and Singer

Years ago, as a young man in Jungian analysis, I suffered an identity crisis. Its catalyst was my discovery that–unlike my own analyst, the majority of my colleagues, and Jung himself I am not an introverted intuitive-thinking type. Rather, I was an introverted feeling-sensation type. Suddenly feeling excluded from the professional world that defined me, I experienced a strong pull to connect, through the natural world, to a deeper aspect of myself.     

The Web and the Quilt: Alternatives to the Heroic Journey Toward Spiritual Development

This paper poses a feminist challenge to stage models of spiritual development and suggests alternative metaphors to the common image of a heroic journey. Women's spirituality is typically more intuitive and relational than rational and individualistic and to express this, we employ metaphors of the web and the quilt. Support for the relevance of these metaphors comes from the spiritual autobiography of Jane Goodall, an anthology of African American women's writings about spirituality, and two qualitative research investigations of older women's spirituality. We conclude with an autobiographical account of our own spiritual development and engage in a dialogue-on-the-page in which we respond to each other's narratives.     

The Multidimensional Trauma Recovery and Resiliency Instrument

Abstract

This paper describes two studies leading to the construction of and psychometric support for the MTRR-99, a shortened version of the Multidimensional Trauma Recovery and Resiliency Scale (MTRR-135, formerly MTRR). In the first study, the original body of MTRR-135 data was reevaluated to remove psychometrically weak or theoretically unnecessary items. The remaining 99 items were then assessed for reliability, validity, and internal consistency. In the second study, the new MTRR-99 was applied to assess the recovery status of 164 incarcerated women prisoners with extensive abuse histories. Together, these two studies further document the utility of a multidimensional approach to assessing trauma impact, recovery, and resiliency; in addition, they provide preliminary evidence for the MTRR-99 as a viable measure for use with clinical and non-clinical populations.     

Life Experience Is Not a Disease or Why Medicalizing Madness Is Counterproductive to Recovery

Abstract

The author draws on her personal experience as the family member of an individual with mental illness, on her anthropological research and on that of others to argue that medicalizing madness can be counterproductive to recovery. The medical model is sometimes used in a way that strips away the meaning of the illness experience. Analogies drawn to diseases do not help the understanding of mental illness. Psychiatry is a social practice embedded in a social milieu and that renders it less than objective. It is useful to recognize that the experiences called symptoms have meaning and may have positive and pleasurable aspects.