Psychoanalysis of maturescence (definition,metapsychology, and clinical practice)

This article offers an entirely new way of addressing middle age or mid‐life. It uses the neologism maturescence to denote this process's metapsychological feature, and it proposes a meta‐psychology of maturescence in order to allow a ‘direct understanding of maturescence’ instead of the ‘indirect understanding of maturescence’, which psychoanalytic literature generally alludes to. The paper examines somatic processes specific to male and female climacterics and is focused on to the tension between the soma and the body. It examines the drive increase that Freud posed in climacterics and the somatic climacteric imbalance that begets specific drive activity demanding psychic work, with very different pathways depending on the individual's specific working‐through activity. It discusses what happens to the individual when he/she is no longer able to procreate and begins to age; why this process is equivalent for individuals who had children and for others who could not or did not. This somatic event provides a universal constant from which it is possible to understand any individual variable.     

Countertransference as a prototype: The development of a measure

Countertransference is a concept that is widely acknowledged, but there exists little definitional consensus, making research in the area difficult. The authors adopted a prototype theory (E. H. Rosch, 1973a, 1973b; see C. B. Mervis & E. Rosch, 1981, for a review) to examine this construct because it conceptually fits well with constructs that elude explicit definition. In Study 1, 45 experienced psychologists highly agreed with the prototypicality of 104 different examples of countertransference providing support for the presence of a prototype. In Study 2, the usage of this prototype in a sample of 35 trainees was related to ability to perceive countertransference in a case example drawn from the literature and positively correlated with self-reports of their experiences of countertransference but not with their self-reported ability to manage countertransference once it was manifest. Implications for training and research are discussed.     

Collecting Informed Consent with Juvenile Justice Populations: Issues and Implications for Research

Researchers must provide participants with opportunities to make informed decisions about whether to participate in research studies. Investigators conducting research with youth in the juvenile justice system face unique ethical, legal, and practical challenges to obtaining informed consent. Juvenile justice researchers must navigate multiple legal and ethical standards for collecting informed consent, take into account youths’ dual vulnerabilities as children and prisoners, and overcome practical limitations to obtaining parental/guardian permission. Given the challenges and complexity of obtaining standard informed consent of youth in juvenile justice facilities, this paper provides suggestions for overcoming obstacles to recruiting these youth for research participation. It offers guidance for fostering the enrollment of juvenile justice youth in research studies using procedures that comply with ethical and legal standards for research with this dually vulnerable population. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Binding,narcissistic pathology and the psychoanalytic process

This article discusses the question of truth claims in psychoanalysis, revolving around the concepts “construction”, “reconstruction”, “historical truth” and “narrative truth”. In Part I of the article, these concepts are discussed in an historical context, in particular, Freud's view, the narrative tradition and some of Bion's ideas. In Part II, an attempt is made to synthesize these concepts. It is argued that the constructed character of the unconscious has to be integrated into the patient's reconstruction of his/her life story. The psychoanalytic project enables the patient to create a new narrative that claims to possess historical validity. It is important in this context not to understand the notion of “history” objectivisticallv as if it were a question of revealing certain objective historical facts. Instead, it is suggested that the connection between the present understanding of the past and the past as it was experienced in the past should be understood as a fusion of horizons. Finally, the necessary function of consciousnesslself-consciousness for the psychoanalytic project of acquiring knowledge about one's unconscious is pointed out.     

Failed-Art and Failed Art-Theory

An object being non-art appears only trivially informative. Some non-art objects, however, could be saliently ‘almost’ art, and therefore objects for which being non-art is non-trivially informative. I call these kinds of non-art objects ‘failed-art’ objects—non-art objects aetiologically similar to art-objects, diverging only in virtue of some relevant failure. I take failed-art to be the right sort of thing, to result from the right sort of action, and to have the right sort of history required to be art, but to be non-art by having failure where being art requires success. I assume that for something to be art that thing must be the product of intention-directed action. I then offer an account of attempts that captures the success conditions governing the relationship between intention-directed actions and their products. From this, I claim that to be failed-art is to be the product of a failed art-attempt, i.e., to be non-art as the result of the particular way in which that art-attempt failed. An art-attempt I take to be an attempt with success conditions, that, if satisfied, entail the satisfaction of the conditions for being art—whatever those may be. To be art, then, is to be the product of a successful art-attempt. As such, any art theory incompatible with my account of failed-art is an art theory for which the notions of success and failure do not matter, and therefore an art theory for which being art needn't be substantively intention-dependent. So, any theory of art unable to accommodate my account of failed-art is ipso facto false.     

DOES USE OF TANGIBLE REWARDS WITH INDIVIDUAL CHILDREN AFFECT PEER OBSERVERS?1

The common assumption that employing tangible rewards with individual children will have adverse effects upon peer observers was studied in the preschool setting. Multiple-subject, multiple-baseline procedures were applied to two classes of children, aged 3.5 to 6 yr. In each group, three consecutive children with low base rates of in-seat behavior received a verbal contingency and food rewards for sitting, while peers (with either low or high rates of in-seat behavior) received neither food nor teacher attention for sitting. Peer reactions measured were in-seat behavior, aggression, nonaggressive disruptive behavior, and complaints. The procedures neither decreased the in-seat behavior of peer observers, nor increased their aggressive or disruptive behavior. On the contrary, peers with low base rates of sitting initially displayed an abrupt, but temporary, increase in sitting. Moreover, although no compensatory attention was delivered, all children exhibited improved sitting by the end of the study. Complaints, which consisted mainly of requests for rewards, decreased in frequency with successive program phases, and within each phase. It is suggested that the class improvement in sitting behavior and the absence of negative effects on observers may be partially due to the high frequency of attention the teacher maintained for other desired behavior and the lack of attention to children's complaints.     

Aggressor's response to the victim's facial expression of emotion

Male college students (N = 96) were met by an experimental confederate who either agreed or disagreed with their opinion. The subjects were then given an opportunity to deliver electric shock to the confederate (victim), who responded to the shock with a facial expression of anger, fear, joy, or neutrality. The opinion condition had no effect, but the victim's facial expressions were clearly perceived by the subjects and two of them significantly influenced the amount of shock delivered to the victim by the subjects. The expression of enjoyment (smile) increased aggression while that of anger decreased aggression. The effects of the fear and neutral expressions did not differ from each other, and neither had a consistent significant effect on the amount of shock administered by the subjects.     

Bridging the HIV Divide: Stigma,Stories and Serodiscordant Sexuality in the Biomedical Age

At a time when advances in biomedicine have rendered people with HIV non-infectious under certain conditions, much public discourse on HIV remains stuck in a paradigm of ‘risk’, which does little to lessen the divide between people with and without HIV in society or challenge the way intimate relationships across this divide are typically stigmatised as undesirable and problematic. We rarely hear the stories of couples who live with mixed HIV statuses and how they themselves perceive and manage their so called ‘serodiscordance’. In this article, we examine such stories by mixed-status couples in Australia. In stark contrast to the dominant discourse, these couples invoked narratives of love, the everyday unimportance and manageability of HIV, and recent developments in HIV medicine, thereby challenging the way serodiscordant sexuality has been cast in public health research. Drawing on Ken Plummer’s work on hidden sexual stories, we consider not only the content of their stories, but the broader significance of stories to the world in which they are enacted, of storytelling as a rally for social and political recognition and legitimacy. Reflecting on our own role in the co-production of research stories, we argue that by moving marginalised sexual stories out of silence, stigmatised communities and researchers can conjointly and incrementally shape a new public discourse and new forms of ‘intimate citizenship’.     

Duty-Related Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms in 911 Telecommunicators: The Roles of Childhood Trauma Exposure and Emotion-Focused Coping

A history of childhood trauma exposure has been linked to the development of posttraumatic stress symptoms in adulthood following new exposure. Unhealthy coping behaviors that could develop or be utilized in response to early trauma could lend themselves to psychological issues in adulthood. Emotion-focused and problem-focused coping strategies in relation to stressful duty-related situations are examined as indirect pathways through which childhood trauma exposure could be associated with duty-related posttraumatic stress symptoms in 911 telecommunicators (N = 808). Multiple mediation models revealed that 3 of the 4 emotion-focused coping strategies, but not the problem-focused strategies, functioned as significant mediators in the association between childhood exposure and duty-related posttraumatic stress symptoms. Pairwise comparisons showed that self-controlling and escape-avoidance strategies were the strongest pathways of the indirect childhood trauma exposure–posttraumatic stress symptoms association. Implications of results regarding coping in response to new traumatic events in adulthood and potential research and intervention directions are discussed.