On being dropped and picked up: adopted children and their internal objects

The field of adoption has changed over the past years from one where there were babies available for many adoptive couples to one where increasingly the children who are needing adoption are those who have already suffered deprivations and difficulties in their families of origin, with disrupted attachments and a consequent traumatizing effect of their early history on their internal worlds. Professionals working with these children, who have in effect been 'dropped', face the difficult task not only of placing them appropriately but of supporting their adoptive families. With the new experience of a secure base the original trauma may be reworked, and the new framework tested by these damaged and consequently often damaging children as they replay their feelings of being unwanted and unwantable. In describing once-weekly work with a 6-year-old adopted boy, I suggest that the primary disillusion of his neonatal experience caused an internal catastrophe which was then reworked in his adoptive placement. This child did not experience what Winnicott (1971) called 'gradual disillusion' in terms of his belief that he creates the needed breast, and thus integration of love and hate of the primary object, but remained in a state of hyper-vigilance because of the deficits in his internal world. These deficits have been able partially to be addressed in psychotherapy treatment.     

How to give it up: A survey of some formal aspects of the logic of theory change

The paper surveys some recent work on formal aspects of the logic of theory change. It begins with a general discussion of the intuitive processes of contraction and revision of a theory, and of differing strategies for their formal study. Specific work is then described, notably Gärdenfors' postulates for contraction and revision, maxichoice contraction and revision functions and the condition of orderliness, partial meet contraction and revision functions and the condition of relationality, and finally the operations of safe contraction and revision. Verifications and proofs are omitted, with references given to the literature, but definitions and principal results are presented with rigour, along with discussion of their significance.     

我们如何直面苦难

从《约伯记》看神允许苦难存在的原因,我想至少有四个方面。第一：确实是由于个人的罪譬如：一个人荒宴醉酒,吃喝嫖赌而导致生病,这是罪的工价,那么神要藉着难处来提醒你,管教你。我常想浪子出去,若一帆风顺的话,他不会回来的,于是神用饥荒招他回来,所以他醒悟了,所以有时人犯了罪,是神的管教。神的管教表显了神的爱。别人的孩子犯错误,你不会管教他,自己的孩子犯错误你才会去管教他,所以如果确实是因个人有罪,个人远离了神,个人贪爱世俗,做了很多基督徒不该做的事,那么他们是得到了罪的工价,罪的报应,这个情况下,神要提醒他们,圣灵在他们里面要他们“为罪、为义、为审判,自己责备自己”(约16：8)。圣灵在他们里面提醒他们,提醒不行,圣灵为他们担忧,还要做,那么神的管教来了,对这样的情况,解决的办法是什么呢?就是他们应该从今以后把     

Tolerable Deviance and How it Applies to Cyberbullying

As a result of the modern youth culture’s reliance on technology and instant communications, mainly through social media platforms, bullying has transitioned to the online domain where cyberbullying has emerged. Among youth, cyberbullying can be viewed as a type of tolerable deviancy where youth often do not question the deviant nature of their online behaviors. This research explores the creation of the scale of deviancy as developed through a qualitative popular film analysis where low-, moderate-, and high-level deviancy characterize various cyberbullying behaviors and captures the essence of the escalation of harm faced by cyber victim(s).     

Judgment and condemnation: How we love it!

The violence and death in Charlottesville on August 14, 2017 led to a national and even international barrage of condemnations of white supremacy along with condemnations of those who were slow to condemn. Why do we like to judge and condemn? And why do we do it with such passion and zeal? If the biblical gospel proclaims that we are justified before God by grace and not via self‐justification through condemnation, could we turn our attention more directly to those victimized by the conflict at hand? Specifically, could we listen to the voices of African Americans, Jews, America's Deep South, America's Southwest, and the disenfranchised white working class?     

"沙盘游戏"的理论分析及其在幼儿教育中的应用研究

受荣格积极想象技术及其理论的启发 ,吸收了威尔斯 (H .G .Wells)、玛格丽特·洛温菲尔德 (MargaretLowenfeld)等人有关儿童游戏理论与操作之精要 ,多拉·卡尔夫 (DoraKallf)在 2 0世纪 6 0年代初创设了“沙盘游戏”理论。沙盘游戏作为一种有效而独特的挖掘人类潜意识的技术 ,在国外的发展非常成熟 ,应用十分广泛 ;而国内缺乏对该理论的引介与探讨 ,我们结合正在广州育才幼儿园所做的个案研究 ,概要介绍沙盘游戏的理论与操作 ,进而探索“沙盘游戏”在幼儿园教育实践中的具体应用。     

Working with Runaways and Their Families: How the SAJA Community Does it

This paper presents an account of the development, philosophy, and delivery of a particular kind of human service: counseling with runaways and their families that is based in a Runaway House. It attempts to show some of the relationships between the work of effective counseling, the set of the counselors (almost all paraprofessionals), and the setting in which counseling takes place (a weekly "Family Seminar" that serves a Runaway House functioning as one collective in a community of social service projects, Special Approaches to Juvenile Assistance [SAJA]).     

A social-psychological perspective on tacit coordination: How it works,when it works, (and when it does not)

We present a programmatic line of experimental studies which focus on the how and when of tacit coordination (i.e., the phenomenon that people can successfully coordinate their decisions without communication). We investigated this phenomenon using different types of economic games (i.e., social dilemmas as well as coordination games). Our studies broadly cover three themes: (a) fairness as a coordination rule, (b) uncertainty and common understanding, (c) social information as a cue. By focusing on these themes we have obtained several new insights on the prerequisites and boundary conditions of tacit coordination. We conclude that tacit coordination is often facilitated by mutual adherence to social norms (e.g., fairness rules, rules of deference, etcetera), but that in order to employ such norms people need sufficient environmental and/or social information.     

The triumph of American psychiatry: How it created the modern therapeutic state

Over the past 170 years, American psychiatry has progressively asserted its authority over a larger segment of the American population. From the mid-1800s to the end of World War II, psychiatry had authority over the asylum population, which markedly increased in the first half of the twentieth century due to the influence of eugenics, an ideology that argued the ‘mentally ill’ had to be segregated from society. After the war, American psychiatry adopted Freudian conceptions of mental disorders, which enabled it to begin treating people in the community who were ‘neurotic’ in some way, which dramatically expanded its influence in society. Then, in the 1970s, when many in American society were questioning psychiatry’s legitimacy as a branch of medicine, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) responded by adopting a disease model for diagnosing mental disorders, which it set forth in the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. There were no scientific discoveries that led to this new model, but soon the APA was informing the American public that mental disorders were diseases of the brain, and that psychiatric drugs helped fix those diseases, ‘like insulin for diabetes.’ The APA, in concert with pharmaceutical companies, has successfully exported this belief system to much of the developed world. In order to break free of this ‘therapeutic state,’ the public needs to understand the history of how it came to be, and see the social injury it has caused.     

Nice and easy does it: How perceptual fluency moderates the effectiveness of imagined contact

Recent research has identified several moderators of the effectiveness of imagined contact — a relatively new prejudice-reducing intervention. However, research to date has not examined the meta-cognitive experience of doing an imagined contact task (independent of the content of the instruction set), or the ways in which this meta-cognitive experience could moderate the task's effectiveness. In two experiments, using a font manipulation, we demonstrated that altering the difficulty of the imagined contact task moderates its effects on prejudice. In both experiments, when the instructions were easy to read, participants who imagined intergroup interactions subsequently reported less prejudice than participants in the control condition. However, when the font was difficult to read participants who imagined intergroup interactions subsequently reported as much prejudice or even more prejudice than participants in a control condition. Implications for imagined contact theory, research and application are discussed.