Pragmatic Psychodynamic Psychotherapy—Bridging Contemporary Psychoanalytic Clinical Practice and Evidence-Based Psychodynamic Practice

Pragmatic psychodynamic psychotherapy (PPP; Summers & Barber, 2009 Barber, J. P. 2009. Toward a working through of some core conflicts in psychotherapy research. Psychother. Res, 19(1): 1–12. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) describes the therapeutic principles and approaches found in many forms of manualized psychodynamic psychotherapies, which are being used in research studies with the aim of building an evidence-based psychodynamic practice. This article focuses on one such treatment, Supportive-expressive psychotherapy (SEP; Luborsky 1984), which employs the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme (CCRT) method to formulate core interpersonal problems and treatment goals and identify therapeutic interventions. To illustrate SEP, we describe the 40-session treatment of a patient who met diagnostic criteria for several personality disorders. The case illustrates how complex ego-syntonic character pathology is expressed in CCRT terms and worked through in the transference, gradually becoming ego-dystonic and amenable to modification. In this case, the patient became more aware of his interpersonal wishes and vulnerability. Although his anxiety increased somewhat, he had an improvement in psychosocial functioning.     

Zum sprachlichen Verständnis von kol. 2, 23

In this article, the author attempts to clarify the motivation and goals of early Christian ascetics by treating asceticism as a political concept. By reading the ascetic tracts of Isaac of Nineveh (7^th century), and drawing on some views on the role of the body in the practice of resistance in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the author argues that ascetics like Isaac used their bodies to resist the control of ancient society and to create a tangible image – or icon – of a different way of living and of a different kind of society – the kingdom of God. Using a threefold typology of asceticism as transformative, performative and bodily, and focusing especially on the role of the body, a new way of understanding Christian asceticism emerges that, on the one hand, clearly distances itself from earlier models that viewed asceticism as an alien element in the Christian tradition; and, on the other hand, makes it possible to use the concept of asceticism to understand present day forms of resistance.     

Anxiety in Swedish School Children: Situational Specificity,Informant Variability and Coping Strategies

In a school sample, 463 Swedish children aged between 8 and 12 years reported their experience of anxiety during 11 "typical" home and school setting activities. In addition to rating the frequency and type of anxiety experienced, the children reported whether they used coping strategies to reduce their anxiety. Parents and teachers also rated the anxiety levels in the same children. Nine percent of the children reported that they experienced anxiety "often" during at least 1 of the 11 home and school activities and 1.5% reported an anxiety level of "often" averaged across all of the 11 activities. The parents reported that 9% of the children experienced "moderate" to "very much" anxiety levels averaged across the home-related activities, whereas the teachers reported that 38.5% of the children had such anxiety levels at school. Overall, the children's ratings of their frequency levels of anxiety were found to depend more on age than on gender. The children and their parents both regarded anxiety to be most common during "leaving home for school" and "going to bed at night" activities. The correspondence between child, parent and teacher reports of overall anxiety in the children was low; similar findings were obtained for anxiety among children in the various setting activities. The 8-year-old children reported a higher use of various coping strategies than did the 12-year-olds. The results are discussed in view of the current literature on anxiety and fears in children.     

Connecting Experience and Economy—Aspects of Disguised Positioning

The focus of this article is the use of experience made within the literature of the “new” economical discipline of experience economy. By combining a methodological individualism with a causal and dehumanising picture of the process of experience, this discipline conceives economic interactions as acts of autonomy. These acts, it is claimed, are part of economical instrumental reason restructuring itself by using experiences as tools in convincing consumers that they are free to pursue their respective paths of lives. Described through the use of positioning theory, however, this turns out to be a result of an effort of equipping consumers with a new economic norm of forced positioning disguised as deliberate self-positioning.     

中国古代小说视野中的民众“仙界”观念

道教创立后,在汲取古代神话传说及民间信仰基础上,形成了自己的神仙境界系统,并对中国文学产生了巨大影响。“仙境”的观念早在道教之前就存在。虽然道教产生后在汲取“仙境”传说基础上形成了宗教色彩更浓的神仙境界理论,但“仙境”本身并非是一个纯宗教范畴。从最早的乐园神话开始,“仙境”就是中国先民集体意识中和谐富裕、平和安乐生活的象征,是中国人理想生活的一个缩影以及隐蔽在他们心灵深处的一个美好梦想。道教在先民原有的“仙境”思想的基础,又构造了自己的神仙谱系。道教认为,神仙有不同等级,居于不同的仙境,《太平经》分神仙为…     

PROBABILITY DISCORDANCE AND CHOICE REACTION TIME: I. Effects of discordant probability on choice reaction time during prolonged training

Successive development of disinhibitory action over long monotonous training periods was studied with choice RT stimuli possessing discordant properties related to their relative frequency and the direction of movement. The results indicate that stimuli with strong initial proactive interference on ensuing reaction to the critical probe-stimulus become, with prolonged training, the least interfering.     

Effects of encoding strategy,presentation modality,and scoring method on STM performance with the Peterson and Peterson technique

The Peterson and Peterson (1959) STM experiment was replicated with variation of presentation modality and encoding strategy. The effect of various scoring criteria was also analyzed. The recall data showed that a Peterson and Peterson type forgetting curve was obtained using auditory presentation and instructions to rehearse vocally the trigrams when scoring only completely correct recall within the first 3 sec of the recall interval. With visual presentation and instructions to find meaningful trigram interpretations, the forgetting curve was higher and much more flat, especially when scoring position correct recall within the total 0-10-sec recall interval. In a buildup of PI experiment, no buildup of PI could be detected when visual presentation was used together with instructions to find meaningful trigram interpretations. The importance of the different encoding activities for recall performance was discussed.