Adolescent Readiness for Change and the Working Alliance in Counseling

The authors examined the relationship between readiness for change and the quality of the working alliance of adolescents (ages 14–18 years) and their counselors. As predicted, clients who were more ready for change had more positive alliances, particularly with respect to goal and task collaboration. There was also a trend toward the association of the maintenance or postchange stage with a weakened bond.     

The manifestation of transference during early psychotherapy sessions

Despite the clinical use of therapeutic transference across various schools of psychotherapy, there have been relatively few empirical studies of this phenomenon, none of which has examined transference with a non‐pathological population. In this study, the core conflictual relationship theme (CCRT) method was used to examine the manifestation of therapeutic transference in the first three sessions of 22 counselling contracts with high‐functioning individuals. Factor analyses of the wish (W) and response of other (RO) components of the CCRT indicate a complementary pattern of relating in which the therapist is idealised and others are devalued. Within the response of self (RS) component, clients exhibited a concordant relational transfer whereby they had a negative response to both the therapist and others. Additionally, control issues emerged in the W component for significant others and in the RS component for the therapist.     

Creativity and oedipal fantasy in Austen's Emma: 'An ingenious and animating suspicion'

Austen's Emma is one of the great novels of the Western tradition. In this paper the author explores the meaning of Emma's 'ingenious and animating suspicion' that Jane Fairfax seduced her best friend's husband, Mr Dixon. The interpretation that a psychoanalytic understanding makes possible shows how this suspicion represents an oedipal fantasy projected on to Miss Fairfax. Further exploration demonstrates how the fantasy is linked both to Emma's systematic unkindness to Jane Fairfax and to Emma's famous insult to Jane's aunt, Miss Bates. Emma's suspicion projects an oedipal fantasy with its incestuous impulses on to her rival and satisfies an envious aggression at the same time. The author's purpose in this paper is to bring to light through psychoanalytic understanding Austen's dramatisation of the complexity and creativity of the oedipal situation. In addition to the regression in oedipal fantasy, the primary process also functions with a progressive quality that expands and enriches the ego, a double movement described in Keats's 'negative capability', which has been elaborated by Bion. The primal-scene fantasies are often brought alive in the analytic transference. These situations and painful emotions are dramatically portrayed through Austen's genius as vehicles for change. A sudden integration follows a phase of disorganization: 'It darted through her with the speed of an arrow. Mr Knightley must marry no-one but herself'. Emma, who is Austen's 'imaginist', moves from the projected fantasy of the sad love triangle through envy aggression and the narcissistic blows of self-doubt and loss of love to moments of illumination and connection.     

Effects of relative nurturance and social power on observational learning and imitation

Preschool children observed two models, one of whom (controller of resources) controlled rewards dispensed to the child and to the other model (rival consumer of resources). The nurturance of the controller was varied in terms of his relative generosity towards the subject and rival consumer. Controllers were imitated to a greater extent than consumers only when the controller had been more nurturant to the child than to the rival consumer. Imitation of the controller and consumer were affected differently by the various conditions of nurturance, but children's learning of each model's behaviors were affected similarly by the conditions. The learning and imitative performance of each model's behaviors were uncorrelated, and imitation of one model did not correlate with imitation of the other. However, the learning of the two models' behaviors was highly correlated.