Boundary regulation in family and personal systems: Perceptions of late adolescents

Examination of boundary regulation can provide family therapists with a framework to describe both the functioning of family systems and personal systems (i.e., the intrapsychic functioning of individual family members). In the present study, late adolescents' perceptions of boundary regulation within their family systems (i.e., ratings of family health, communication, leadership, expressiveness, cohesion, and family conflict) were related to regulation of their personal boundaries (i.e., self-reported personal competence, distress, and patterns of defense mechanism use). In addition, personal system variables reliably discriminated between adolescents who described their families as psychologically healthy versus psychologically unhealthy.     

Joining with all members of a family system: The rhetoric of antilogic in family therapy dialogue

Family therapists face a significant rhetorical challenge in working with families that disagree about the problematic life-situation which brought them to therapy. Therapists must find a way to join with disagreeing family members and then find a way to engage in a therapeutically useful conversation with them. Thus, they must deal resourcefully with contradictions. This article explores the ways that the Sophistic rhetorical concept of antilogic may be employed in helping therapists join and then engage in a therapeutically useful conversation with families who hold contradictory views concerning the problem that brought them to therapy.The author wishes to thank Ronald Chenail, PhD, Douglas Flemons, PhD, and Shelly Green, PhD, for their assistance in the development of this project.     

A plea for more intervision

The author presents an argument for tolerance, mutual understanding and reconciliation in psychotherapy, instead of a continued emphasis of schools. Psychotherapists' work with clients is proposed as a likely area for mutual understanding, rather than continued emphasis on their particular theories and academic matters. Psychotherapeutic intervision groups in which a small number of therapists voluntarily discuss their cases with peers from various backgrounds have become increasingly common again in recent years.Slightly revised version of a presentation made at the Georgetown Family Center Symposium in November 1995.     

When not to choose: A case study

Life situations often seem to require dualistic, either or decision making, but this common method does not always clarify moral decisions. To show this, standard arguments on why to choose or not to choose the sex or ones child are presented. Then, our feminist thinking, which regards clusters of values, and which reframes questions rather than choosing between desirable alternatives, suggests another possibility, in a gynandrous world vision.     

Interpersonal Features of Interviews Between Psychiatric Patients and Nursing Staff1

Observer ratings of one-half hour interviews were undertaken to test two basic concepts of interpersonal relations in a sample of 51 randomly paired male psychiatric patients and female psychiatric nurses. It was hypothesized that the behavior of psychiatric patients could be organized around two orthogonal dimensions reflecting status and feeling, and that patients and nurses would exhibit complementary interpersonal behavior consistent with their institutionally ascribed roles. Interviews were rated with the Leary Interpersonal Checklist. Interjudge reliability was established for Leary's coding system. The hypothesis of status and feeling reference points for patient behavior received strong support when the results of analysis of variance were supplemented by factor analysis. Patient scores on the eight variables measured by the Leary Interperonsal Checklist and nurses' scores for 17 complementary variables were submitted to correlational analysis to test the hypothesis of interpersonal complementarity. As predicted, two hypothesized dependence-assistance response combinations provided the highest correlation coefficients. It was concluded that the study provided empirical support for the utility of an interpersonal model within psychiatric settings that has more commonly been identified with relationships free of psychiatric disturbance.