I Belong

ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on the experience of an immigrant returning for a visit to her home country after forty years. She describes her surprise at finding herself “at home,” her changed relationship to her family, and her desire to be buried in her ancestors' crypt. She alludes to the immigrant's fate of not belonging to either country.     

Family Reconstruction

SUMMARY

The author claims that a process developed by Virginia Satir and called “Family Reconstruction” by her, is the epitome of her contribution to the field of therapy. This article describes the process, its goals and theory, the conditions necessary for an effective therapeutic breakthrough. How this therapeutic process can be powerfully effective in healing couple's relationships is shown. In a final note, Nerin suggests that Satir's model not be dubbed “communication theory,” but called “eco-psychological.”     

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.     

Frieda fromm-reichmann,loneliness and deafness

Abstract

This paper explores the rôle that Fromm-Reichmann's parents' adult-onset severe familial deafness may have played in the development of Fromm-Reichmann's career choice and of her charismatic style. She, too, became deaf. Her final paper, “Loneliness” is perhaps her most emotionally evocative work. Perhaps her own increasingly severe experience of loneliness motivated her writing on this theme. Just as she expected self-honesty from her Chestnut Lodge colleagues, this paper demonstrates that she held herself to this same standard. The author urges the deaf community to seek out the newly deaf and to encourage their learning to sign, thus ameliorating the newly deaf individual's loneliness.     

Where the Rainbow Speaks and Catches the Sun

Abstract

Living with a neurobiological brain disorder, commonly known as a mental illness, requires a lifetime of diligent work toward recovery and wellness. This paper outlines the story of one occupational therapist's journey with her own mental illness. She prefers to call her own road of “recovery” one of “discovery,” as it has led her to discover true talents and gifts (strengths) even amongst encounters with old models that emphasize weaknesses and disability over abilities and capabilities. The following journey unfolds as advances in research, changes in services, increased focus on consumer as leader and increased tools and resources available lead the way toward a more positive ability to live a purposeful life, engaging in meaningful activities in spite of an illness. This paper gives a personal account as a tool to be used by other therapists as they travel along their own treatment journeyswhether with, or as consumers, of mental health services.     

A Book to Think With: Margaret Miles’ Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter

Margaret Miles’ work with Augustine’s Confessions offers a model for a “philosophical life,” a term used in an earlier century for a life focused on seeking wisdom. As Miles reviews her life, she traces how she has come to see in all the particularity of her experience “what really exists.” She shares many scenes from her life, but most striking is her frank exploration of sexual experience in its complexities as a doorway to the kind of knowing that leads us to gratitude. She found Plotinus’ understanding of what really exists as the “surround-love of the All” most useful. This review describes how her autobiography permits fresh thinking and talking about God among those of us with a modern worldview.     

Death and the Meaning of Life

Abstract

Thoughts of mortality sometimes bring on a crisis in confidence in the meaning in one's life. One expression of this collapse is the midlife crisis. In a recent article, Kieran Setiya argues that if one can value activities as opposed to accomplishments as the primary goods in one's life then one might avoid the midlife crisis. I argue that Setiya's advice, rather than safeguarding the meaning in one's life, substitutes for it something else, a kind of happiness. I use Susan Wolf's concept of meaning in order to make this case. Wolf has not written much about the importance of death, but I argue that her account of meaning shares essential features with the theories developed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. Sartre argues that death is an unqualified harm, while Heidegger argues that there is meaning in life only because we are mortal. I conclude by showing how Heidegger's theory of mortality underwrites accounts of meaning like those found in Wolf.     

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.     

“Till Death Us Do Part”: Issues of Fidelity in End of Life Care

SUMMARY

This paper was born of the experience of caring for a loved one at the end of life. The sense of being torn between accepting one's lot and wishing for something “other” is at the heart of the concept described as “intimate fidelity.” Intimate fidelity is discussed as part of a multi-layered concept of fidelity, embracing aspects of the professional caring relationship, and which builds into a value that shapes the fabric of the community.

Academic literature fails to address this understanding of fidelity, so with some creativity, we turned to popular literature—novels and biographies—to find rich understandings of the concept of fidelity. Then following a traditional system of thematic analysis, three aspects of the concept of fidelity are presented, in the context of caring for loved ones, professional caring, and caring in the community.     

A home of her own: (Writing) a family story of separation and second chances

Abstract

On March 16, 1996, the author interviewed her mother, Beth Tillmann, about Beth's parents' divorce and her life as a foster child. From detailed notes taken during this phone conversation and from family stories told to the author throughout tier life, the author constructed a narrative titled “A Home of Her Own” Its structure and tone mimic the way her mother speaks about the dissolution of her family of origin and her attachments to and separations from those who tried to lielp her rebuild a sense of home. After the story is a discussion of what narrative representations of loss offer the writer, the subject, and the reader.     

Metanoia

SUMMARY

The author draws on her experience working with individual men who are violent to their partners to think about the problem of international violence. A parallel is drawn between a man's feeling of “entitlement” to forcefully keep his partner “in line” and feelings of national entitlement to engage in violence to force one group's agenda on another. The differences between morals and taboos are discussed underscoring the community value of that which becomes socially and ethically “unthinkable.”     

An Interpersonal and Intercultural Embrace

SUMMARY

Using Ono's (1997) “letter” format to share one's multiplicity of “voices,” I discuss the negotiation of interpersonal and intercultural factors of a gay, transcontinental, HIV serodiscordant relational connection with my late partner and a multicultural relational connection with my current partner. In this letter, I work to open paths of inquiry and understanding of our connections by intersecting relational “differences” (e.g., ethnicity, nations of birth, social class, HIV status, and religion/spirituality) with relational “similarities” (e.g., attraction and love, age status, shared gay identity, shared languages, and educational privilege). Finally, I address our learned and practiced skills for sustaining relational healthiness.     

The Role of Background Behavior in Televised Debates: Does Displaying Nonverbal Agreement and/or Disagreement Benefit Either Debater?

ABSTRACT

This study examined the effects of background nonverbal behavior displayed with the purpose of undermining one's opponent in televised debates. Students watched one of four versions of a televised debate. In each, while the speaking debater appeared on the main screen, subscreens displayed her nonspeaking opponent's background nonverbal behavior. In one version, the non-speaking debater remained “stone faced” during her opponent's speech, while in the other three she nonverbally displayed occasional disagreement, nearly constant disagreement, or both agreement and disagreement. After viewing the debates, students rated the debaters' credibility, appropriateness, objectivity, and debate skills, in addition to judging who won the debate. Analysis indicated that background nonverbal behavior influenced audience perceptions of debaters' credibility, appropriateness, objectivity, debate skill, and the extent to which the debate was won. These results suggest that adding nonverbal agreement to expressions of nonverbal disagreement do not reduce the negative impacts of communicating disagreement nonverbally during an opponent's speech and may in fact further decrease the audiences' perception of a debater's credibility and overall performance.     

Marrying Mr. Rochester: Redeeming the Negative Father Complex

Injurious childhood experiences with one's personal father form the psychic bedrock of a negative father complex: never good enough. This complex has a part that is exciting and uses hope as its hook, and a part that disappoints and persecutes. The negative father complex can be imaged as the ghostly lover, as depicted in the fairy tale “The Singing, Springing Lark” and in Charlotte Brontë's life and famous novel, Jane Eyre. The ghostly lover holds a woman's creative energies hostage to the tantalizing possibility of being the special one who can redeem the negative masculine and win his love.

To heal a complex, its contents must be personified, or imaged, so that an individual can come into conscious relationship with it. The tale of the “Singing, Springing Lark” illustrates collective roots and images of healing a wounded relationship with the masculine. Charlotte Brontë transformed her relationship with the ghostly lover through her novel Jane Eyre, with Mr. Rochester as the image of her own wounded, bewitching masculine energy. Brontë herself was subsequently able to marry, despite her father's objection, overcoming her negative father complex. The fairy tale, novel, and Brontë's life show that several attempts are usually necessary to bring the complex to light. Although consciousness seeks redemption through its pursuit of the masculine, the complex also—mysteriously—seeks its own transformation. Ego alone cannot fulfill the mission of individuation; the Self must aid the process.     

The nature of stress experienced by lesbians and gay men

Abstract

This study examined both the meanings and sources/causes of stress from the perspectives of lesbians and gay men (n=30), using a series of focus groups. The findings suggest that stress is considered a part of life itself, and is perceived to contain both negative (e.g. detrimental effects on health and overall functioning, unfairness, out-of-control), and positive (e.g. a motivator, growth-facilitator) elements. The sources/causes of stress (i.e. stressors) identified include stress experienced from the “coming out” process, stress in family relations and intimate relationships, conflict over one's sexuality given society's homophobic and heterosexist attitudes toward lesbians and gay men, as well as stress from financial and work-related issues. More importantly, this study suggests that culture/ethnicity, gender, and aging, which are interconnected with one's sexual identity, play an important role in shaping the experiences of stress among lesbians and gay men.     

A process of mourning in the life and in the analysis of an adolescent

Abstract

This paper concerns the subject of “loss”, and the way “loss” is dealt with. A loss occurs which may be related to a real object - such as the death of a loved one - or to anything else which may represent a lost object, such as a stage or a function lost in life. Thus in adolescence, one has to face the loss of an infantile state.

Being alive, growing up, developing oneself presupposes losses and gains. One loses something in order to gain something else. This paper attempts to examine the subject, both in its theoretical and clinical aspects. In its theoretical aspect, I bring forward the points of view of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, concerning loss and how one deals with it.

In its clinical aspect, I present the case of an adolescent who, already in the process of having to face up to the loss of an infantile state - as happens to every adolescent - is obliged also to face the death of a loved one. Besides, the process of analysis itself presupposes that a person, in order to develop psychologically, has to face other losses, such as that of one's omnipotence, that of one's idealised objects, etc. Therefore, I am presenting for examination a situation in which a particular person deals with his losses in the light of the analytical transference.     

Simone Weil on Labor and Spirit

This essay argues that Simone Weil appropriates Marx's notion of labor as life activity in order to reposition work as the site of spirituality. Rather than locating spirituality in a religious tradition, doctrine, profession of faith, or in personal piety, Weil places it in the capacity to work. Spirit arises in the activity of living, and more specifically in laboring—in one's engagement with materiality. Utilizing Marx's distinction between living and dead labor, I show how Weil develops a critique of capital as a “force” that disrupts the individual's relation to her own work by reducing it to the mere activity of calculable “production.” Capital reduces labor to an abstraction and thereby uproots human subjectivity, on a systemic scale, from its connection to living praxis, or what Weil calls spirituality. Life itself is exchanged for a simulacrum of life. In positioning living labor as spiritual, Weil's work offers a corrective to these deadening practices.     

Maternal intrusion: Its roots and consequences

Abstract

Behind an intrusive mother’s view of her actual child lies a disproportionate, hidden desire to revive an ideal relationship with a perfect mother. The resulting image of an idealized child then becomes a strategic aspect of the mother’s own identity, representing an idealized figure from her own past. As the mother’s idealization is disturbed by the reality of the child, the mother experiences the situation between herself and the baby as “pathological,” that is, disruptive to her. She then attempts to repair the idealization by resisting any change in the status of her relationship to her child, even as the child grows older. Her rigidity in this regard necessarily excludes a paternal presence that could challenge or change the mother–infant idealized dyad. The mother’s orientation is also contradictory to, and acts as a resistance to, psychoanalytic therapeutic interventions, which aim at any “change.”     

The Exorcist and the Spiritual Problem of Modern Woman

The archetype is not evoked by will; it appears in a situation which demands compensation (spontaneous archetypal intervention). Religion calls such happenings “God's will.” A situation may present one with illness or endanger one's life. Consciousness finds this state overwhelming. Even people who boast no particular religious belief find themselves forced involuntarily to give way to prayer: that is, the archetype of a helpful being is constellated producing at the last moment a turn which is felt to be miraculous

C. G. Jung A letter (modified), written February 1960, in Spring, 1961.

It appears almost incredible to us that late into the 18th century it should have been possible that emotional confusions and erotic abberations of phantasy were brought in relation to demons and witchcraft. States of “ possession,” “obsession” or certain types of “imagination,” but above all “anaestesia,” the stigma diaboli par excellence, mutism, sleep-walking and convulsive states. were all condemned as the work of demons

Liliane Frey-Rohn from The Beginning of Depth Psychology