Heidegger's Brightness as a Responsibility of the Therapist in Existential Family Therapy

The author reflects upon the Heideggerian concepts of thrown-ness, death imagery, arrogance and brightness and their usefulness in existential family therapy. The article describes and illustrates with clinical material the process of helping a couple or family to move from an arrogance response to thrownness and death imagery to the response of brightness as attendants of Being. The responsibilities of the therapist in facilitating such a process are also described.Director of the Worthington Logotherapy Institute, co-director of Lantz and Lantz Counseling Associates, and a professor at The Ohio State University. College of Social Work     

Resistance in family logotherapy

The author describes a logotherapy view of family resistance and its occurrence in a variety of family situations. In family logotherapy resistance is understood as a manifestation of the human fear of meaning, which is a reaction to the family's discomfort with the two side effects of meaning awareness: vulnerability and responsibility.     

Franklian psychotherapy with adults molested as children

A Franklian approach to treatment with adults who were molested as children recognizes that the trauma client's experiences of trauma and terror as a child can be transformed to discover real meaning potentials in the adult's daily life. In this paper the authors present a five-stage treatment approach based upon the Logotherapy concepts of Viktor Frankl which they have found to be helpful with adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Case material is presented to illustrate the described intervention approach.     

Extreme itching treated by a family systems approach

A case study is presented in which a 16-year-old daughter developed extreme itching and scratching behavior that was triggered by the occurrence of manifested parental conflict. The daughter's scratching also served the family function of helping the parents avoid marital conflict. Family treatment consisted of helping the parents manifest, negotiate, and resolve marital conflict issues in front of the daughter so that she could experience the benefits of dealing with a family conflict in a functional way. This approach has helped the daughter decrease her anxiety about conflict situations which, in turn, has resulted in a significant decrease in her itching and scratching behavior. In addition, the parents report an improved marital relationship now that the daughter's itching no longer occurs and no longer interrupts the parents' attempts to negotiate marital conflict issues.     

Meaning and the family life cycle

In this article, the authors integrate Viktor Frankl's concept of the “Will to Meaning” with a family-life-cycle model. This integration offers an overview of the opportunities for spiritual growth and the development of a sense of purpose for both the family and its individual members. Clinical illustrations highlight applications of the approach in actual practice.     

Indicative conditionals: probabilities and relevance

Philosophical Studies - We propose a new account of indicative conditionals, giving acceptability and logical closure conditions for them. We start from Adams’ Thesis: the claim that the...     

Disorienting Dilemmas - the Significance of Resistance and Disturbance in an Intercultural Program within Kindergarten Teacher Education

As the Norwegian society, and thereby the kindergartens, have become more multicultural, the need for cultivating teachers capable of operating in an ever diversified and global world is highlighted as an important educational strategy within teacher education. The purpose of the specific intercultural program in kindergarten teacher education discussed in this article refers to competences needed as a professional teacher in a multicultural kindergarten. Teachers often have various assumptions and beliefs taken for granted. Therefore, reflexivity appears in intercultural education as a crucial asset. However, the article argues that the notion of self-contemplation and self-reflection that can give the subject freedom as a thinking being needs to be challenged. Questioning beliefs and assumptions includes an examination of one’s emotional experiences, values and perspectives. This examination can threaten one’s core beliefs and create powerful feelings such as anger, shame or resentment. Introducing the concept of disorienting dilemmas, the article problematizes the rationalist intellectual orientation in teacher education and discusses the need to focus on intercultural experiences as sensuous, intellectual and affective. The article illustrates some disorienting dilemmas with narratives from students who have attended the program. Finally, the article considers the conditions and pedagogical means that might support a more holistic approach to learning in intercultural experiences.     

Private Announcements on Topological Spaces

In this work, we present a multi-agent logic of knowledge and change of knowledge interpreted on topological structures. Our dynamics are of the so-called semi-private character where a group G of agents is informed of some piece of information \(\varphi \), while all the other agents observe that group G is informed, but are uncertain whether the information provided is \(\varphi \) or \(\lnot \varphi \). This article follows up on our prior work (van Ditmarsch et al. in Proceedings of the 15th TARK. pp 95-102, 2015) where the dynamics were public events. We provide a complete axiomatization of our logic, and give two detailed examples of situations with agents learning information through semi-private announcements.     

PLS model building: A multivariate approach to personality test data

The aim of this study was to demonstrate how personality test data can be plotted with a multivariate method known as Partial Least Squares of Latent Structures (PLS). The basic methodology behind PLS modeling is presented and the example demonstrates how a PLS model of personality test data can be used for diagnostic prediction. Principles for validating the models are also presented. The conclusion is that PLS modeling appears to be a powerful method for extracting clinically relevant information from complex personality test data matrixes. It could be used as a complement to more hard modeling methods in the process of examining a new area of interest.