A Career Developmental Perspective on the Therapeutic Alliance: Implications for Counseling

This review explores the role played by childhood emotional maltreatment (CEM) in selecting a career in the field of mental health and the potential positive and deleterious effects of these career‐choice motives on the therapeutic alliance. The reviewed findings support the assumption that CEM may serve as a precursor for career choice of professions in the mental health field. Implications are suggested for the counselor/therapist–client relationship, also known as the therapeutic alliance, as well as for career counseling.     

The epistemics of ayahuasca visions

In this paper, I discuss substance-induced visions and consider their epistemic status, meaning, and modes of proper interpretation. I focus on the visions induced by ayahuasca, a powerful psychoactive plant-made brew that has had a central status and role in the indigenous tribal cultures of the upper Amazonian region. The brew is especially famous for the visions seen with it. These are often coupled with personal psychological insights, mentations concerning topics of special significance to one, intellectual (notably, philosophical and metaphysical) ideations, as well as powerful religious and spiritual sentiments. Thus, under the intoxication, people often feel that they gain significant knowledge and understanding. The present discussion takes a cognitive-phenomenological perspective coupled with a philosophical analysis of the various epistemological questions at hand.     

A qualitative analysis of contemporary ultra-orthodox rabbinical perspectives on scrupulosity

Scrupulosity is a religiously themed sub-type of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Religious individuals with scrupulosity tend to first turn to clergy for assistance rather than to mental health professionals. This is particularly relevant for Ultra-Orthodox Jewish patients, whose rabbis arbitrate a wide variety of life issues. In the current qualitative study, 15 Ultra-Orthodox rabbis were interviewed regarding their views on scrupulosity and their responses were analysed via grounded theory and thematic networks theory. All rabbis were familiar with scrupulosity and distinguished it from normative behaviors. Their conceptualizations regarding etiology were mostly psychological in nature, as opposed to religious or spiritual. Rabbis were generally supportive of psychology as a professional field and open to collaborating with therapists, although some controversies were raised. Given their isolated lifestyle, these findings are somewhat surprising and encouraging. Results suggest collaboration with Ultra-Orthodox rabbis can be fruitful and at times essential when dealing with scrupulosity.     

Identification and classification of words and drawings in two languages

American and Israeli bilinguals were presented with Hebrew and English words, as well as with drawings of concrete objects. They were timed as they named and classified these items in either their native or non-native languages. The pattern of response times suggests that following reading, semantic processing is conducted in a language-independent mode. Specifically, the patterns exhibited by the two subject groups were almost identical, and neither native-language advantage nor advantage due to a match between language of input and language of output were found.