Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders: Individual Differences,Affect, Interaction,and Outcomes

In this article, we have drawn upon the attachment motivational system (Bowlby, 1988; Lichtenberg, 1989; Shane, Shane, and Gales, 1997) as a guide to providing “positive new experience” as the cornerstone of therapeutic progress. We see positive new experience as paramount, over and above insight and/or interpretation because insight and interpretation are so varied among different theories. The common denominator that is effective in therapy, then, must be something beyond insight and interpretation. We call that therapeutic factor the positive new experience and will draw from attachment theory to understand its components. In addition, using the attachment motivation system and trauma research, we elaborate on why certain types of negative experiences in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis should be avoided. We address, in particular, harmful repetitions of traumatic relational patterns or traumatic events in the transference, overemphasis on “the empathic stance,” and the search for motivation in patients' behaviors where such a search may be based on the false assumption that all behavior is motivated. This latter category addresses aspects of behaving that may not be motivated; that is, they just “are,” and as such, the search for and attribution of meaning in such instances may lead to failed understanding and insight and to faulty correctives. We have illustrated with clinical examples both positive new experience and three types of negative experiences to be avoided in treatment.     

Social Identities,Power, and Privilege: The Importance of Difference in Establishing Early Group Cohesion

This article explores the developmental and sociocultural context of difference, as well as the importance of engaging difference in order to establish group cohesion. As groups provide a microcosm of social life, they possess the ability to replicate oppressive systems. If group leaders don’t proactively engage this material, starting with their own awareness, it increases the likelihood that the trauma of marginalized experience will be replicated, thus decreasing possibility for repair and working through. Appreciating the developmental strivings for sameness and the fears of difference is fundamental to understanding the resistance many of us can experience around exploring our identities or helping others engage with this material. Creating a group culture that conceives of difference as the glue for group cohesion and sets a frame for this exploration starts with the leaders’ use and awareness of self. The author also explores patriarchal narratives around power and aggression and how these narratives may have influenced group work theory and technique.     

Coaching of Insolvent Entrepreneurs and the Change in Coping Resources,Health, and Cognitive Performance

As coaching becomes an established learning and development tool, it expands to new work contexts and relevant populations. Exploring coaching outcomes in insolvent entrepreneurs is a new and promising field. Business failure is a devastating experience for entrepreneurs, associated with negative emotions and adverse psychological and physiological reactions. Our study is the first to examine if coaching can help improve the coping resources, health, and cognitive performance of insolvent entrepreneurs. The results of our pre-post-test-within-subject analyses based on 19 participants show a positive improvement in psychological well-being, vital exhaustion, and vigilance. By contrast, no improvements were found with regard to coping resources and biomarkers such as stress hormones concentrations in hair. Unexpectedly, the working alliance between client and coach did not increase the improvements following coaching. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on the effects of coaching; however, our results should be interpreted cautiously as unfortunately we had no opportunity to include a control group in our research design.     

The Spiritual,the Earthly and the Decadent

Under this somewhat grandiose title I want to consider a basic picture that dominates our thinking and feeling in many areas; to show why this picture is inadequate; and to suggest an alternative. I will consider how the embodied self, as both earthly and spiritual, conceptualises and gives meaning to all experience. It is not objects as such but our use of them that determines their 'purity'. Purity consists in being true to, and not corrupting, a desirable form of life. We need to distinguish between what is undesirable because it is corrupt and what is undesirable because it falls into the category of the partial, displaying only one aspect of a desirable form of life. I then consider the notion of decadence and how its cycle can be broken. The human self is not simply a mixture of instincts and regulations for control, but a blend, a state of consciousness in which rules and norms may be pleasurably followed. Good teachers will initiate their pupils into those forms of life that do justice to both these elements.     

Secondary generalization and categorization in pigeons

In Experiment 1, one group of pigeons learned to classify a set of stimuli into the human language classes cat, flower, car, and chair (categorization); another group learned to classify the same set into arbitrary classes (pseudocategorization). Then, both groups were trained on a new categorization task and their performance compared to that of a control group that had no initial classification training. Hull's (1943) notion of secondary generalization (generalization that is not based on physical similarity but on mediating associations) predicts that categorization experience will facilitate the learning of a new categorization task, whereas pseudocategorization experience will impair it. However, in Experiment 1, performance on the new categorization task was not differently affected by prior experience. In Experiment 2, pigeons initially trained to classify a set of 48 stimuli (original training) were later trained to classify a subset of four of these stimuli using new responses (reassignment training). Then, they were tested on the 44 remaining stimuli. Performance better accorded with original than with reassignment training, indicating that categorization training did not lead to the formation of equivalence classes of stimuli, in which the equivalence relationship is mediated by secondary generalization. The lack of evidence of secondary generalization implies that our pigeons failed to meet Lea's (1984) criterion for conceptual behavior.     

The body of the other: intercorporeality and the phenomenology of agoraphobia

How is our experience of the world affected by our experience of others? Such is the question I will be exploring in this paper. I will do so via the agoraphobic condition. In agoraphobia, we are rewarded with an enriched glimpse into the intersubjective formation of the world, and in particular to our embodied experience of that social space. I will be making two key claims. First, intersubjectivity is essentially an issue of intercorporeality, a point I shall explore with recourse to Merleau-Ponty’s account of the prepersonal body. The implication of this claim is that evading or withdrawing from the other remains structurally impossible so long as we remain bodily subjects. Second, the necessary relation with others defines our thematic and affective experience of the world. Far from a formal connection with others, the corporeal basis of intersubjectivity means that our lived experience of the world is mediated via our bodily relations with others. In this way, intercorporeality reveals the body as being dynamically receptive to social interactions with others. Each of these claims is demonstrated via a phenomenological analysis of the agoraphobe’s interaction with others. From this analysis, I conclude that our experience of the world is affected by our experience of others precisely because we are in a bodily relation with others. Such a relation is not causally linked, as though first there were a body, then a world, and then a subject that provided a thematic and affective context to that experience. Instead, body, other, and world are each intertwined in a single unity and cannot be considered apart.     

Bare fingers,but no obvious influence of “prickly” Velcro! In the absence of parents’ encouragement,it is not clear that “sticky mittens” provide an advantage to the process of learning to reach

In their critique of our mittens study, Needham et al. (2015. Infant Behavior and Development) describe our findings as “surprising.” Further; they suggest that babies in our “sticky mittens” condition may have been discouraged from reaching because, in our study, infants may have touched “prickly” Velcro with their bare fingers. In this response, we present data analyses that do not support the interpretation that finger contact with our Velcroed toy surfaces was associated with poor reaching performance in our “sticky” mittens group. We also clarify that our toys were mainly covered with “non-prickly” Velcro. To explain discrepancies between studies, we restate the original intent of our study and reasons for our methodological modifications. We point to confounds and lack of critical control conditions in the Needham et al. studies, which prevent the making of firm inferences about the effectiveness of the “sticky mittens experience” on the learning to reach process. We also present additional analyses on our “sticky” mittens group showing that the increasing rate of finger touch on the toy leads to greater reaching performance while the rate of toy sticking to the mittens does not. We discuss the importance of sensory-motor experience on the development of learning to reach in infancy and conclude that our results are not surprising.     

Consciousness,Free Will,and the Sciences of the Mind

In his review of the trio of philosopher-scientist dialogues on the nature and capacities of the human mind, Paul Thagard (2018) advocates clearly and forcefully for a fairly extreme position, which he advances as preferable to an equally extreme alternative. I will suggest a middle path that becomes attractive when one attends not just to the range of data now pouring forth from the sciences of mind but also to our own experience as minded individuals.     

Attention,consciousness, and the semantics of questions

Attention influences the character of conscious perceptual experience in intricate and surprising ways, including our experience of contrast, space, and time. These patterns of influence have been argued to cause trouble for the attractive thesis that differences in the character of conscious experience flow from differences in what we represent (Block 2010). I present a novel theory of the functional role of attention that has the resources for a systematic representationalist account of these phenomena. On the erotetic theory of attention, we bring an interest to the task of perception, captured as a question we seek to answer. Questions, as understood here, are contents that cognitive systems can represent rather than sentences. We process perceptual input as a putative answer to our question in a way that is modulated by attentional focus; attentional focus aims to pick out something that matches what our question is “about.” In certain cases, this yields a form of predictive coding: if the contribution of focus matches what our question is about, we take it to select one of the possible answers we are entertaining, even though our perceptual input by itself does not supply a full answer. The proposed account also provides a new account of the phenomenology of salience.     

Joining group psychotherapy: developmental considerations.

This article examines the experience of new members joining an ongoing psychotherapy group. The group's stage of development and the new member's personality development are suggested to be important variables in this significant event. The experience of joining is found to share some things in common with the beginning phase of group for the group as a whole, but also noted are some unique elements. The process of joining is viewed as a highly anxious event for the new member, with antecedents in the individual's life experience. The new member is compromised by not knowing the group members, nor their shared history, norms, and dynamics. Concurrently, the group may experience a range of fears, wishes, and anxieties about the new member. Developmental considerations for the new member and the stage of group help to inform intervention strategies.     

"On my bed at night I sought him whom my heart loves"" reflections on trust, horror, G*d, and the queer body in vowed religious life

What can the multifaceted bouquet of queer love reveal about G*d? In this paper I wish to answer this question by reflecting on the queer body of the male vowed religious. I will argue that, since gendering is a key feature in our attempts to create epistemic order, the performance of gender instability in turn destabilizes our attempts to create epistemic order. In short: gender trouble leads to epistemic trouble. Far from being only a passive sign for these troubles, the male religious body, which is stylized by renouncing penetration, is also a field for the active experience of the horror and the need for trust implied in our fragile epistemic situation. Both trust and horror can be interpreted as an experience of the Dark Night, as the experiential side of Negative Theology. I will argue that the grace that we as queer men and women in general contribute to the Church is that we are pointing to and living out the fundamental reality of epistemic uncertainty and the troubling necessity of trust.     

Critique,Ethics, and the Apparatus of Experience: A Foucauldian Framework

The paper explores examples of contemporary experience in order to demonstrate the moralisation of new areas of behaviour (especially in relation to environmental issues).It sketches a Foucauldian framework for understanding the historical transformation of experience,in terms of the "apparatus of experience." On that basis,it presents a novel account of critique,in which critique is seen as the potentially transformational,experiential practice of re-experiencing the contemporary apparatuses of experience.In other words,critique is "experience squared." It is this re-experiencing of our everyday experience that permits us,to a certain extent,to "get over ourselves" and thus to reflect critically on the processes of moralisation and de-moralisation in which we participate.     

States of Spiritual Awareness by Time,Activity, and Social Interaction

We explore how people experience the sacred in their everyday lives using a recently developed research technique—smartphone‐based experience sampling method (S‐ESM). The primary goal of our experience‐driven approach is to explore the contours and variations of spiritual awareness within people's day‐to‐day lives. We seek to better understand when and where spiritual awareness is likely to arise, and the contexts in which it is rare. Our smartphone‐based data allow us to track the many contexts in which an awareness of the sacred occurs, as reported in real time during people's normal daily activities. We parse out how immediate contextual factors and how people's more habitual behaviors are related to their spiritual experiences. This illuminates a wide range of factors that influence spiritual experiences that have not received much scholarly attention, and enables us to connect cutting‐edge quantitative methods with qualitative scholarship on spirituality. We hope this will open the door to the development of new theories of situated spiritual experience.     

Near-Death Experience,Consciousness, and the Brain: A New Concept about the Continuity of Our Consciousness Based on Recent Scientific Research on Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest

In this article first some general aspects of near-death experience will be discussed, followed by questions about consciousness and its relation to brain function. Details will be described from our prospective study on near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest in the Netherlands, which was published in the Lancet in 2001. In this study it could not be shown that physiological, psychological, or pharmacological factors caused these experiences after cardiac arrest. Neurophysiology in cardiac arrest and in a normal functioning brain will be explained. Finally, implications for consciousness studies will be discussed, and how it could be possible to explain the continuity of our consciousness. Scientific study of NDE pushes us to the limits of our medical and neurophysiologic ideas about the range of human consciousness and mind–brain relation.     

A clinical report: The importance of leader preparation in the merging of two psychotherapy groups

Conclusion It is felt that our successful experience in merging two adult outpatient psychotherapy groups demonstrates that this is a workable procedure. It may be applicable in a variety of clinical settings, but could particularly serve the needs of psychiatric centers in facilitating service to the community as well as the training of therapists.In addition, certain other conclusions can be offered. The manner of preparation of the groups for the merger proved most important. Presenting this experience as a merger rather than a termination, and utilizing the existing group process were the means of working through the transition and developing a new group identity. It appears that multiple stresses may not be additive in their detrimental effects upon the group. The only stress truly unique to a merger is that of relinquishing the old identity while simultaneously acquiring a new one. Subsequent to resolution of the we vs. they issue, the group's development paralleled that of any other viable adult therapy group. It appeared that married, assertive patients, operating on higher social-economic levels, who had been group members for a relatively short period of time were more likely to dropout post-merger.The authors acknowledge the helpful advice of Dr. Milton Berger.     

CONTAINING,TRANSLATING, AND INTERPRETIVE ACTING OUT

In analytic treatment, when patients project unspoken aspects of their internal self and object world, the analyst has to find ways to understand and communicate those expelled phantasies without the patient feeling accused, seduced, or persecuted; even when we do our best at interpreting such inner conflicts, the patient may experience our interpretations as assaults, forcing them to give up themselves or their hope for reconnecting with an object. The patient will resist or fight our efforts through the use of projective identification. Caught up in patient's projections, the analyst in turn may enact some of these phantasies by becoming the object rather than translating its presence in the transference, by overemphasizing one side over another of the patient's conflict, or by interpreting accurately but prematurely. These issues are illustrated in two case presentations and discussed in relation to the views of contemporary Kleinian writers on transference and countertransference.     

The Tempo of Verbal Interaction in an Open Therapy Group Conducted in Rotation by Three Different Therapists

This article examines the experience of new members joining an ongoing psychotherapy group. The group's stage of development and the new member's personality development are suggested to be important variables in this significant event. The experience of joining is found to share some things in common with the beginning phase of group for the group as a whole, but also noted are some unique elements. The process of joining is viewed as a highly anxious event for the new member, with antecedents in the individual's life experience. The new member is compromised by not knowing the group members, nor their shared history, norms, and dynamics. Concurrently, the group may experience a range of fears, wishes, and anxieties about the new member. Developmental considerations for the new member and the stage of group help to inform intervention strategies.     

Integral Spirituality, Deep Science, and Ecological Awareness

There is a growing understanding that addressing the global crisis facing humanity will require new methods for knowing, understanding, and valuing the world. Narrow, disciplinary, and reductionist perceptions of reality are proving inadequate for addressing the complex, interconnected problems of the current age. The pervasive Cartesian worldview, which is based on the metaphor of the universe as a machine, promotes fragmentation in our thinking and our perception of the cosmos. This divisive, compartmentalized thinking fosters alienation and self‐focused behavior. I aim to show in this essay that healing the fragmentation that is at the root of the current world crises requires an integrated epistemology that embraces both the rational knowledge of scientific empiricism and the inner knowledge of spiritual experience. This “deep science” transcends the illusion of separateness to discern the unity, the unbroken wholeness, that underlies the diverse forms of the universe. Our perception of connectedness, of our integral place in the web of life, emerges as an attribute of our connection with the eternal, beatific source of all existence. This awakened spiritual vision “widens our circle of understanding and compassion, to embrace all living creatures in the whole of nature” (Einstein, quoted in Goldstein [1976] 1987). Our behavior, as it emerges naturally out of our perception of the sacredness of the natural world, will naturally embody love and respect for all life forms. This vision promotes the healing of our long‐standing alienation from the natural world and offers hope for renewal in the midst of widespread cultural deterioration and environmental destruction.     

Affordances,Dynamic Experience,and the Challenge of Reification

Why is it that affordances have received attention within psychology only in recent decades if they are supposedly what individuals perceive most fundamentally? This paradox can be explained, in part, by the fact that psychologists have usually considered the character of perceiving from a detached stance, and then reified the results of this analysis-an error that William James called the psychologist's fallacy-rather than attending to the immediate flow of perception-action. By the same token, if ecological psychologists were to take stimulus information as what is perceived, rather than as part of a conceptual framework offered to explain how we perceive, they would be committing a similar reification error. Ecological optics as a conceptual framework is always open to revision, even while the reality of affordances is assumed. Bearing in mind this distinction between what is perceived and how it is perceived, investigators need to return regularly to immediate experience, both as a means of verifying that our concepts connect back to our experience of the world and as a way of uncovering new qualities of perceptual experience for investigation. From this perspective, several exemplars of phenomenologically driven perceptual research are examined. Furthermore, the multidimensionality of affordances is considered, with an emphasis on their place in the flow of immediate experience, development, and sociocultural processes.