MAKING ROOM FOR MADNESS IN MENTAL HEALTH: THE IMPORTANCE OF ANALYTICALLY‐INFORMED SUPERVISION OF NURSES AND OTHER MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONALS

In this paper, I discuss the importance of psychoanalytically informed supervision and training of nurses and other professionals in mental health settings. Using examples from supervision groups I will illustrate how a psychoanalytic approach to mental health can complement other ways of thinking about practice and management. Psychoanalysis provides a framework for understanding the relationship between the internal world of the patients, the therapeutic relationship and the social system. I will also argue that this understanding helps to develop and maintain therapeutic factors while reducing the risk of damaging behaviour and beliefs.     

Catch 22: the inflammatory nature of insight

I will describe a man I saw in psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a history of serious drug abuse and violent psychotic episodes. At the start of therapy my patient had little capacity to tolerate the anxiety, depression or the inevitable frustrations involved in facing reality. Over time and with the support of the therapy he was able to increase his capacity for self observation noticing the way he withdrew from the world of shared reality into psychotic states of mind in order to avoid painful feelings of rage, humiliation and shame. In the book ‘Catch 22?, Joseph Heller described the paradox of pilots who wish to claim insanity in order to avoid fatal flying missions, while the authorities maintain that in claiming insanity to avoid suicidal missions the individual demonstrates a sane awareness of the insanity of the missions! This insight is deemed to be evidence of the individual’s sanity and consequently their plea of insanity is denied. In this paper, I will show how Mr. A’s developing capacity for reflective functioning lead to a ‘Catch 22’ as the insight he needed as part of the process of recovery threatened to overwhelm him with depressing realities about the extent of his illness.     

Adapting Motivation,Control, and Compensation Research to A New Environment

The authors discuss the need to adapt research in three substantively related but paradigmatically diverse research domains (salesperson motivation, control systems, and compensation) in light of the evolving selling environment. A key objective is to suggest the desirability of integrating these literatures, which, ultimately, all seek to inform management regarding how salespeople and sales organizations can be encouraged to become more productive. The authors maintain that specification of the right goals and metrics constitutes a fundamental common denominator across the three literatures.     

Two-Year-Olds' Object Retrieval Based on Television: Testing a Perceptual Account

Two-year-olds frequently fail to use information provided by video to find objects hidden in an adjacent room. Schmitt and Anderson (2002) hypothesized that they fail to map the 2-dimensional (2D) video image onto the 3D layout of the search space. Two experiments tested whether 2-year-olds can successfully use information from video when the search space is 2D or when the information is provided verbally (by telling the child where the toy is hidden). In both experiments, children performed poorly in the video conditions but performed well in direct live experience comparison conditions, contradicting Schmitt and Anderson's hypothesis. Performance was above chance on the first trial in the video conditions, suggesting that 2-year-olds do have a memory of the hiding location, albeit one that is easily disrupted by perseverative errors on subsequent trials. Overall, the results are most consistent with the hypothesis that very young children give priority to direct experience over mediated information.     

Problem-solving Strategies and Expertise in Engineering Design

A study is reported which focused on the problem-solving strategies employed by expert electronics engineers pursuing a real-world task: integrated-circuit design. Verbal protocol data were analysed so as to reveal aspects of the organisation and sequencing of ongoing design activity. These analyses indicated that the designers were implementing a highly systematic solution-development strategy which deviated only a small degree from a normatively optimal top-down and breadth-first method. Although some of the observed deviation could be described as opportunistic in nature, much of it reflected the rapid depth-first exploration of tentative solution ideas. We argue that switches from a predominantly breadth-first mode of problem solving to depth-first or opportunistic modes may be an important aspect of the expert's strategic knowledge about how to conduct the design process effectively when faced with difficulties, uncertainties, and design impasses.     

Predicting the difficulty of complex logical reasoning problems

The aim of the present research was to develop a difficulty model for logical reasoning problems involving complex ordered arrays used in the Graduate Record Examination. The approach used involved breaking down the problems into their basic cognitive elements such as the complexity of the rules used, the number of mental models required to represent the problem, and question type. Weightings for these different elements were derived from two experimental studies and from the reasoning literature. Based on these weights, difficulty models were developed which were then tested against new data. The models had excellent predictive validity and showed the relative influence of rule based factors and factors relating to the number of underlying models. Different difficulty models were needed for different question types, suggesting that people used a variety of approaches and, at a wider level, that both mental models and mental rules may be used in reasoning.     

Implicit learning,consciousness, and the psychology of thinking

Abstract

Berry, D., & Dienes, Z. (1993). Implicit learning: Theoretical and empirical issues. Hove, UK: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Ltd. 197pp. ISBN 0-86377-223-4 £19.95 (hbk).

Reber A. S. (1993). Implicit learning and tacit knowledge: An essay on the cognitive unconscious. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1 88pp. ISBN 0-19-505-9425 £30.00 (hbk).