A future for community psychology practice

Community psychology has never really looked at its practice as a profession, though many of us as students came to the field with high expectations that we could learn how to make a difference in communities. This article discussed what I think about community psychology practice and how I have tried to approach it. I thank and recognize several people: Paul Florin for his colleagueship, friendship and his contributions to what I have done in the field; Tom Wolff for never letting me give up on the field; Bob Newbrough for his consistent support, encouragement and as my teacher; and Julian Rappaport for his comments on an earlier draft. I thank my colleagues at Rutgers for helping make the dream come true. This article is dedicated to students, past, present, and future.     

Therapeutic Action in the Work of a Playful Clinician: A Reflection on Dr. Silber’s Reimagining of Humpty Dumpty

ABSTRACT

In my discussion of Dr. Silber’s paper, Reimagining Humpty Dumpty: The Therapeutic Action of Play, I mirror Dr. Silber’s playful posture in her use of the Humpty Dumpty fable to talk about children and their care by society. My reflections on Dr. Silber’s therapeutic work with her two young patients focus on her co-creating meaning with each child’s parents as well as with the child. I discuss that by holding in her mind both the subjectivities of the child and his parents, Dr. Silber is able to practice a fundamentally relational therapy. I would have liked to have heard more about her emotional reactions in her work with both cases as another important dimension of her work. Finally, I emphasize through my play with Humpty Dumpty several ways that society can support children and families that are essential for their development: parental leave, developmentally approptiate expectations for children in school, and the facilitation and protection children’s open ended time and ability to play.     

The Free will Revolution (Continued)

I seek to reply to the thoughtful and penetrating comments by William Rowe, Alfred Mele, Carl Ginet, and Ishtiyaque Haji. In the process, I hope that my overall approach to free will and moral responsibility is thrown into clearer relief. I make some suggestions as to future directions of research in these areas. I thank Michael McKenna for his thoughtful comments, his generous introduction, and all his hard work in putting this together. Also, I wish to thank J. Angelo Corlett for his very pleasantly surprising decision to do this volume, and for his outstanding work in editing this wonderful journal from its inception.     

Capturing excellence in applied settings: A participant conceptualizer and praxis explicator role for community psychologists

Community psychology faces a crisis of personpower similar to that which Albee identified in the clinical field four decades ago. It is clear that there are not, and likely never will be, a sufficient number of community psychologists to be able to provide assessment, consultation, and planned change toward facilitating an inclusive psychological sense of community and sound health and prosocial development in all settings that could benefit from such assistance. To help resolve this crisis, an expanded role for community psychologists is proposed: that of participant conceptualizer and praxis explicator. A participant conceptualizer and praxis explicator has the role not only of working within settings to understand and help conceptualize change processes but also of reflecting on action processes that are a part of the setting, of reflecting on theory, and of generating products that share relevant learnings. How action research serves as the methodology that allows the flow and interplay of theory and action to take place also is discussed. Illustrations are drawn from the work of Leonard Bernstein, Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog, and the author's work in area of school-based social competence promotion. This article is based on much further reflection after my Distinguished Contribution to Practice in Community Psychology award address at APA in Toronto, August 1993. The latter was designed as a talk and featured musical excepts from Leonard Bernstein and Kermit the Frog, who also made an appearance at the talk and spoke briefly. A tape of the talk can be obtained from APA, for the curious. I think of my work as a public corporation, shares of which belong to many colleagues, friends, and mentors, far too numerous to mention. I give special thanks to Jim Kelly and Ed Trickett, to Irma Serrano-Garcia and Jim Dalton, to Emory Cowen and Roger Weissberg, to George Spivack and Myrna Shure, to Jack Chinsky and George Allen, to Tom Schuyler and to my parents, to those who generously shared selective truths about me that Jim Kelly compiled into marvelous and deeply appreciated introductory comments, and to my chief shareholders, my family, Ellen, Sara, and Samara, whose daily love, patience, and support I am honored to receive.     

Forebrain circuits and control of feeding by learned cues

Professor Richard F. Thompson and his highly influential work on the brain substrates of associative learning and memory have critically shaped my research interests and scientific approach. I am tremendously grateful and thank Professor Thompson for the support and influence on my research and career. The focus of my research program is on associative learning and its role in the control of fundamental, motivated behaviors. My long-term research goal is to understand how learning enables environmental cues to control feeding behavior. We use a combination of behavioral studies and neural systems analysis approach in two well-defined rodent models to study how learned cues are integrated with homeostatic signals within functional forebrain networks, and how these networks are modulated by experience. Here, I will provide an overview of the two behavioral models and the critical neural network components mapped thus far, which include areas in the forebrain, the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, critical for associative learning and decision-making, and the lateral hypothalamus, which is an integrator for feeding, reward and motivation.     

Considering Community Psychology Competencies: A Love Letter to Budding Scholar-Activists Who Wonder if They Have What It Takes

Recently, community psychologists have re‐vamped a set of 18 competencies considered important for how we practice community psychology. Three competencies are: (1) ethical, reflexive practice, (2) community inclusion and partnership, and (3) community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness. This paper will outline lessons I—a white working class woman academic—learned about my competency development through my research collaborations, using the lens of affective politics. I describe three lessons, from school‐based research sites (elementary schools serving working class students of color and one elite liberal arts school serving wealthy white students). The first lesson, from an elementary school, concerns ethical, reflective practice. I discuss understanding my affect as a barometer of my ability to conduct research from a place of solidarity. The second lesson, which centers community inclusion and partnership, illustrates how I learned about the importance of “before the beginning” conversations concerning social justice and conflict when working in elementary schools. The third lesson concerns community education, information dissemination, and building public awareness. This lesson, from a college, taught me that I could stand up and speak out against classism in the face of my career trajectory being threatened. With these lessons, I flesh out key aspects of community practice competencies.     

Quantum realism: Naïveté is no excuse

Conclusions The work of Gleason and of Kochen and Specker has been thought to refute a naïve realist approach to quantum mechanics. The argument of this paper substantially bears out this conclusion. The assumptions required by their work are not arbitrary, but have sound theoretical justification. Moreover, if they are false, there seems no reason why their falsity should not be demonstrable in some sufficiently ingenious experiment. Suitably interpreted, the work of Bell and Wigner may be seen to yield independent arguments for the falsity of naïve realistic approach to quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is no more like classical statistical mechanics than its creators thought it was.Many of the ideas in this paper have been distilled from a Ph.D. thesis presented to the Harvard Philosophy Department in December 1977. I wish to thank Michael Friedman and Hilary Putnam for helpful discussions and constructive criticism of my work; Arthur Fine for stimulating my interest in this topic by his writings; and the Thyssen Foundation for support of research.     

The duality of non-conceptual content in Husserl’s phenomenology of perception

Recently, a number of epistemologists have argued that there are no non-conceptual elements in representational content. On their view, the only sort of non-conceptual elements are components of sub-personal organic hardware that, because they enjoy no veridical role, must be construed epistemologically irrelevant. By reviewing a 35-year-old debate initiated by Dagfinn Følledal, I believe Husserlian phenomenology can be updated to offer an important contribution to this discussion. On my interpretation, what Husserl calls “hyletic data” may be read as that subjective quality of experience inarticulable as a propositional attitude – and, thus, hyletic data are non-conceptual. In anticipation of the recent conceptualist position, Føllesdal and his adherents argued that what Husserl had called “noema” or representational content is, however, entirely conceptual. A closer inspection of the relevant texts, however, reveals that Husserl admits non-conceptual elements into his characterization of the noema. If that is correct, then Husserl must have been a dualist about non-conceptual content. In turn, I believe what explains this dualism is a non-foundationalist reconstruction of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction.An earlier version of this paper was delivered at Fordham University on the occasion of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Husserl Circle. I am grateful to Prof. Steven Crowell who, in his capacity as respondent, offered incisive and helpful commentary. I also thank Prof. John J. Drummond for organizing the meeting, and all those present during my talk; as well as two anonymous reviewers for Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, who offered helpful questions and comments.     

Sexuality, society, and senior citizens: An analysis of sex talk among prostate cancer support group members

After attending meetings of a prostate cancer support group for three years, I considered the ways group members talked about sex and sexuality. I reviewed extant research on the disease and its effects on sexual function, along with relevant work on sexuality in general. In my role as a participant-observer at the group meetings, I noted the amount and prevalence of talk about sex in the survivors’ conversations about prostate cancer. I investigated the survivors’ efforts to contest and revise the definition of sex that they inferred from society at large—a definition that limits “real” sexual activity to spontaneous acts of penile-vaginal penetration. Such a definition also denounced anything else as phony at worst, and incomplete at best. Consequently, the meetings illustrated the dissonance between group members’ prior expectations, beliefs, and experiences of sexuality and a new set of behaviors that could constitute sexuality. My observations also revealed the significance of support group facilitators in generating talk about sexuality. I thank Professors Christy M. Ponticelli and Marsha L. Vanderford for the constructive critiques and encouragement that facilitated the evolution of this article.     

On the alleged connection between moral evil and human freedom: A response to Trakakis’ second critique

In this essay, I answer Nick Trakakis’ second critique of my argument against the adequacy of traditional free will theodicy. I argue, first, that Trakakis errs in his implicit assertion that my argument relies upon our being strongly malevolent by nature. I argue, second, that Trakakis errs in thinking that our being weakly benevolent, morally bivalent, or weakly malevolent by nature is sufficient to refute my critique of the traditional freewill theodicy. I still maintain that the argument from freedom of the will offers an explanation of moral evil that is, in the final analysis, manifestly inadequate. I thank Nick Trakakis for his continuing interest in my essay, “On the Alleged Connection Between Moral Evil and Human Freedom.” The exchange of ideas in an atmosphere of mutual respect is the very heart of philosophy and I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in such an exchange. I believe, as a consequence, that my thinking concerning the inadequacy of the traditional free will theodicy has become more fully articulated.     

Theoretical Hubris and the Willingness To Be Radical: An Open Letter to James J. Gibson

J.J. Gibson's direct perception thesis is the cornerstone of ecological psychology. Not to understand this is not to understand ecological psychology. Beginning in the summer of 1968, when I first met Gibson, and after working with him for the next year at Cornell, I underwent a conversion crisis. I came to appreciate his thesis through a few philosophical insights that I here share with the reader through an open letter to Gibson, where I seek to illuminate the reasons for my conversion from being a Miller-Chomsky psycholinguist and a Piaget devotee to a radical Gibsonian. This conversion has influenced my work even until the present. Indeed, I am still working through its implications in all that I attempt. I share this intimate portrait of my relationship to Gibson and his profound ideas in hope that others who have struggled with his thesis might be helped along their way as I was.     

Clinical Commentary

Abstract

This paper is the narrative of a first-time father with a son born seven weeks early by Caesarean section. Against the anxiety and trauma of his infant's birth and his wife's illness, another inner darker drama is being relived. Michael shows all the wounds of a battered child. He asks two awesome questions - Will I be to my son as my father was to me? Will my son be to me as I was to my father? Fearful and at first unvoiced questions, the developing interviews gave them a voice. We respected Michael's sharing of the early and fearful days and nights when his infant first came home. We sometimes found it hard to empathize with his running away to hide in work, until we understood what he was hiding from. Most poignant was his struggle with his anger and hurt with his father and his desire to understand, ‘Why?’, so that he would not be like this to his son. We saw a sensitive revelation of life being born inside him anew, as he made contact with his real infant and his psychic infant within. Of particular interest was the therapeutic use of the research interview space and the interviewer.     

Emotional engagement in the context of development and spirituality research

An awareness of spirituality and religion is increasingly being integrated within development theory and practice in order to recognise the way that many people approach community development. There are significant implications for researchers and their methodological practice that arise in paying attention to this area of development studies, particularly with regard to spiritual aspects of emotional engagement for researchers. This paper explores some of those implications from an analysis of my participatory research into geographies of development and spirituality. Two community groups with self-identified Christian spiritualities took part: a Melanesian settlement in Fiji and a women’s church-based group in rural Tanzania. I argue that emotional engagement and spiritual engagement are implicitly connected and demonstrate how attention to emotional knowledge provides valuable insight within this area of research. In particular, I illustrate how a relational approach to emotional knowledge, inspired by the philosophic and psychoanalytic work of Luce Irigaray, is particularly suited to approaching human and spiritual relationships and resonates with key concerns within participatory and community development. Paying particular attention to the concept of fidelity and the spatiality of subjectivity within her work, this paper illustrates the challenge from Luce Irigaray’s work regarding the relational framing of emotional knowledge and the transformational potential implicit within all research relationships.     

On the function of weak phantasmata in perception: Phenomenological,psychological and neurological clues for the transcendental function of imagination in perception

Weak phantasmata have a decisive and specifically transcendental function in our everyday perception. This paper provides several different arguments for this claim based on evidence from both empirical psychology and phenomenology.I would like to express my gratitude to Bill McKenna for his help with the English text and his critical remarks. This paper was presented in the Cork Roundtable for Philosophy in March 2003, at University College, Cork, and I would like to thank Julia Jansen, Tony O’Connor and the other participants for their constructive critique.     

Semantics and supervenience

I have presented much of this research in talks at the University of Costa Rica and the University of Texas at Austin. I am grateful to my audiences for their comments and advice. I would like especially to thank Luis Camacho, Nicholas Asher, and Robert Koons. Many of the ideas in the paper stem from an informal seminar on type-free theories held at the University of Texas's Center for Cognitive Science from 1984 to 1987. I am grateful to the participants in that seminar — Ignacio Angelelli, Nicholas Asher, Herbert Hochberg, Hans Kamp, Frederick Kronz, Per Lindström and Mark Sainsbury — for their many insights into type-free semantics, and to the Center for Cognitive Science for providing such a hospitable environment for this work. I have also profited from the criticisms of two anonymous referees. Finally, I am indebted to the University of Texas's University Research Institute and to the National Science Foundation's Information Science and History and Philosophy of Science programs for grant support.     

The wall and the shield K-K reconsidered

With apologies to Professor Sosa. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Eastern Division Meetings of the APA held in Washington, D.C., December 27 through December 30, 1988. I would like to thank my commentator Professor Gary Gleb of Rutgers University for his thoughtful comments, I also wish to thank Glenn Ross, Steven Davis and Arthur Ripstein for their sound advice.     

The Dialectics of Relational Psychoanalysis and Group Psychotherapy: Commentary on Paper by Robert Grossmark

In this commentary, I address the question of why so few psychoanalysts become group therapists as I respond to the thoughtful and impressive paper written by Robert Grossmark on his work with a psychotherapy group, now in its 10th year of meeting. Prior to discussing the clinical material, and to set the stage for a discussion of Grossmark's work, I comment on my sense of the prevailing attitudes on group affiliations and group therapy within our culture and field as they have progressed over time. I then discuss my reactions to Grossmark's handling of his group session. Many of his conceptualizations of group treatment are in accordance with my own beliefs. There are some differences, however, in how I view my role as a leader and some ideas I have about group treatment that Grossmark did not address.