An Analyst Has a Birthday - Can Forgiveness Heal?

Forgiveness is a challenging endeavor in human experience and in clinical work. Is it an important and/or legitimate analytic concept? Long the province of theologians and philosophers, forgiveness has had little theoretical place in the psychoanalytic lexicon. This paper considers the analytic place of forgiveness through a treatment that was shadowed by two lost mothers – the patient’s and analyst’s - in the consulting room. The patient’s question, “must we forgive to heal?” will be examined in this story of healing for both him and his analyst.     

Hope and Forgiveness: Reply to Davies and Hirsch

As I had hoped, each of the discussants on the idea of forgiveness in the consulting room approached it from their own very different theoretical and personal slant. Davies (this issue) offered the perspective of one who works such concepts from the framework of multiplicity. Hirsch’s (this issue) ideas on the work with such concepts is with an eye on using it only if it inhibits the achievement of a fuller life. Both left room for non-resolution and ambivalence, a concept with which I fully agree. In my reply to these insightful papers, I expand on my use of forgiveness, as well as other multivalent concepts. My effort to try and open up these avenues is always to help someone retain hope underneath the frequently threatening life review, and often personality reconstruction, that we undertake. I have included a response to Davies’ question of analyst self-maintenance in and around challenging therapeutic situations. And finally, I consider how we might usefully expand difficult discussions that straddle values, religious and cultural beliefs, and similar concepts that we ourselves may not believe in or share.     

FLUENCY SNAPSHOTS: A QUICK SCREENING TOOL FOR YOUR CLASSROOM

In this article, the authors present a research-based, classroom tested assessment tool, the Classroom Fluency Snapshot (CFS). This assessment is grounded in the research that establishes fluency as an important component of initial reading instruction and in the work on the efficacy of curriculum based measurement. The article presents the case of one classroom in which a teacher uses the CFS as a pre-, post-assessment. Rich classroom examples, details of the teacher's interpretation, and instructional decision making are shared along with ideas for instruction.     

Theory of mind selectively predicts preschoolers’ knowledge‐based selective word learning

Children can selectively attend to various attributes of a model, such as past accuracy or physical strength, to guide their social learning. There is a debate regarding whether a relation exists between theory‐of‐mind skills and selective learning. We hypothesized that high performance on theory‐of‐mind tasks would predict preference for learning new words from accurate informants (an epistemic attribute), but not from physically strong informants (a non‐epistemic attribute). Three‐ and 4‐year‐olds (N = 65) completed two selective learning tasks, and their theory‐of‐mind abilities were assessed. As expected, performance on a theory‐of‐mind battery predicted children's preference to learn from more accurate informants but not from physically stronger informants. Results thus suggest that preschoolers with more advanced theory of mind have a better understanding of knowledge and apply that understanding to guide their selection of informants. This work has important implications for research on children's developing social cognition and early learning.