Reviews: Books and Theater

HEINZ KOHUT: THE MAKING OF A PSYCHOANALYST. By Charles B. Strozier. 475 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001. $35.00. Theater: The Amen Cornerby James Baldwin     

Companion cats and the social support systems of men with AIDS.

60 male pet owners with AIDS were given a formal questionnaire including items related to demographic, lifestyle, and pet ownership, as well as the Comfort from Companion Animals Scale, the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale, and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28). The men lived in the San Francisco area and received assistance from Pets Are Wonderful Support (PAWS), a community organization, in caring for their companion dogs or cats. Participants were a convenience sample of pet owners who volunteered from among 500 PAWS clients and who do not necessarily represent a random sample of men with AIDS who keep companion animals. For these men, their comfort from companion animals was significantly associated with having cats but not dogs, closeness with friends, dissatisfaction with their practical support system, and listing pets as a source of support. Loneliness was negatively associated with having a large practical support network, scoring as healthy on the General Health Questionnaire, and living alone. For these male pet owners with AIDS, pet cats appeared to complement their supportive relationships with friends and family that were protective against loneliness.     

Out of the laboratory and into the community. 26 years of applied behavior analysis at the Juniper Gardens Children's Project.

Application of Skinner's principles to socially significant human behavior had been well articulated by 1968 (Baer, Wolf, & Risley, 1968). Applications of these principles by Baer, Wolf, Risley, Hall, Hart, Christophersen, and their colleagues were in evidence as early as 1964 in the homes, schools, and clinics of inner-city Kansas City, Kansas, at the Juniper Gardens Housing Project. The work continues relatively uninterrupted, having contributed extensively to the literature of applied behavior analysis and the lives of community residents. This article describes the project and illustrates how applied behavioral research was initiated and extended, how the work addressed general concerns in psychology, and how it continues to address contemporary concerns within the community.     

Helen Flanders Dunbar: Physician,medievalist, enigma

Helen Flanders Dunbar was a psychiatrist, an early leader in the field of psychosomatic medicine, and a prophetic proponent of supervised clinical training for clergy. She was a prolific writer educated in theology and medieval studies as well as medicine. Yet she remains largely an enigma despite her achievements. This article explores Dunbar's life and attempts an explanation of why her person and ideas are not widely recognized today.     

Discrimination learning decreases perceived similarity according to an objective measure

Initial identification discriminations between two sizes and between two slants produced better overall performances on subsequent size and slant same-different discriminations, respectively. This size- and slant-specific transfer was due to an improvement on only the different pairs. Time-duration identification discriminations with the identical stimuli and response assignments improved neither overall same-different performances nor performances on different pairs. A good performance on different pairs relative to same pairs should indicate a low perceived similarity. The literature indicates that A-X and B-Y pairings produce a positive transfer on an A-versus-B discrimination when X and Y are relatively low in similarity, and also indicates that a low perceived (not physical) similarity improves discrimination learning. An increase in salience should have also improved performance on the same pairs. The conclusion: the initial discriminations decreased the perceived similarity of parts (size or slant). This decrease resembles perceptual contrast. A discrimination between two parts also seems to increase the extent to which each part is apprehended as a separate group. Therefore, the conclusion accords with the position that two groups are associated with contrast, including for visibility.     

The construction of the gendered self

Feminist contributions to systemic approaches to human behaviour have led to gender being defined in interactional terms. Gender is seen not as a fixed quality or trait but as one socially constructed between men and women. This idea is discussed in relation to the gender debate in family therapy, attachment theory and feminist contributions to psychoanalytic thinking. Gender relationships are created as part of a person's internal working models of self and other. The ways in which gender patterns are carried forward are examined, especially with respect to the contradictions between a person's gendered internal working models and their experience. These ideas are explored through case examples.     

CLOSENESS, AUTONOMY, EQUITY, AND RELATIONSHIP SATISFACTION IN LESBIAN COUPLES

It is often assumed that in lesbian relationships a high degree of closeness is reached at the expense of autonomy of the partners. The present study among 119 Dutch lesbian couples examined the effect on relational satisfaction of two dimensions of closeness, emotional dependency and intimacy, and of autonomy and equity. The women in this study were generally open about their lesbian relationship, and reactions of the social environment were mostly positive. Autonomy was negatively related to dependency, but not at all to intimacy. Intimacy and equity as reported by the respondent and her partner, as well as dependency and autonomy reported by the respondent, were independent predictors of relationship satisfaction. Support from the social environment and participation in lesbian subcultures did not play a role in relationship satisfaction.     

Selective Evaluation and Coping With Stress: Making One's Situation Cognitively More Livable

Selective evaluation processes were examined in a study involving 167 individuals receiving payments under the Disablement Insurance Act in the Netherlands. A factor analysis showed 6 strategies of selective evaluation: emphasizing benefits, downward comparison, devaluing former dimensions, imaging "worse worlds," positive framing, and creating new dimensions. Although emphasizing benefits was relatively less common among those under stress, downward comparisons and the imaging of "worse worlds" were clearly more prevalent among individuals experiencing stress. A regression analysis showed that, independent of the degree of stress, selective evaluation techniques (in particular, emphasizing benefits and imagining of "worse worlds") contributed positively to the way respondents evaluated their situation. Moreover, when controlling for the evaluation of one's situation and stress at Time 1, selective evaluation techniques, and especially imagining of "worse worlds," and creating new dimensions, were positively related to the evaluation of one's situation at Time 2 (1 year after Time 1). The results are interpreted as support for the Taylor, Wood, and Lichtman (1983) model of selective evaluation, and for Wills' (1987) downward comparison theory.     

Social interactions,stressful events and negative affect at work: A micro-analytic approach

In the present study a daily event-recording method, the DIRO (Daily Interaction Record in Organizations), was employed for assessing social interactions, stressful events and negative affect at work. Forty-one secretaries filled out the records during the course of a week. This made it possible to consider both between-and within-subject effects of social interactions. The results showed that the social interactions of secretaries were characterized by three dimensions: intimate support, instrumental support and rewarding companionship. These three dimensions appeared to have different relationships with occupational stress. Instrumental support seemed to play the most important role in the work of secretaries, whereas rewarding companionship played no role at all in alleviating occupational stress. In the discussion some explanations are offered for this unexpected result.