“You Shouldn’t Look at Us Strangely”: An Exploratory Study on Personal Perspectives on Quality of Life of Adolescents with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders in Residential Youth Care

Applied Research in Quality of Life - Adolescents with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders (EBD) have complex needs and experience challenges in various developmental areas and life domains. The...     

What Is the Stuff We Are Made Of? The Body and the Body–Mind Relationship in Early Development: A Discussion of Thomson-Salo and Paul’s “Understanding the Sexuality of Infants”

Acknowledging the importance of the baby’s sensuality and sexuality in the infant–parent dyad, the author emphasizes the role of the body as the basis of the person’s being. The baby needs to develop, through his mother’s reverie, an internal capability to cool down his bodily turmoil. Early bonding requires from the mother a capacity to discriminate the sensual from the sexual in order to help the baby to contain his invasive sensory experience. This area of exploration is deeply related with the body–mind dissociation we often meet in our most difficult adult patients.     

Shame in Relation to the Body,Sex, and Death: A Clinical Exploration of the Psychotic Levels of Shame

This paper explores the topic of shame in relation to the body, viewing it as the expression of a basic conflict that threatens to obstruct the growth of personality by breaking up the body-mind relationship. The paper presents the psychoanalysis of a psychotic patient whose paranoid shame was associated with the delusion of being noticed. During this analysis, the patient's bodily manifestations and hatred were acknowledged as related to his getting closer to an authentic existence of his own. Particular emphasis is given to the analyst's involvement in the analytic process, in the form of both bodily countertransference and dream activation. The containment and working-through of concrete aspects of hatred and death anxiety, together with the analysand's recognizing the value of sensory perception of his own body, fostered an abatement of symptoms, including his tendency to flee and to attempt to burst the confines of his body. The activation of a connection with the body seems a prerequisite to the development of abstract thinking. The paper describes similar dynamics in two vignettes of less dramatic clinical cases.     

The Relationship between Contrast Sensitivity,Gait, and Reading Speed in Parkinson's Disease

ABSTRACT

Parkinson's disease (PD) results in reduced walking speed and visual difficulties, including difficulty reading (Davidsdottir, Cronin-Golomb, & Lee, 2005 Davidsdottir, S., Cronin-Golomb, A. and Lee, A. 2005. Visual and spatial symptoms in Parkinson's disease. Vision Research, 45: 1285–1296. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). PD is characterized by a reduction in dopamine, which is instrumental in determining a person's contrast sensitivity (CS). This study assessed the relationship between CS, gait (step length and walking speed), and reading speed in 18 non-demented PD volunteers with normal acuity. We found that CS correlated with walking speed (r = .57, p = .01), step length (r = .53, p = .02), and reading speed (r = .54, p = .02). Visual acuity (which has not been tied to dopamine in the same way) correlated with reading speed (r_s = –.65, p = .004), but not with gait measures. We also assessed the contribution of age, education, and cognitive status (Shipley Institute of Living Scale) to these variables. We conclude that CS and age both play an important role in determining gait in PD, while reading speed is related to both acuity and CS, but not age.     

Automaticity of chronically accessible constructs in person x situation effects on person perception: it's just a matter of time

Models of Person X Situation influences on social behavior and judgement have invoked two distinct mechanisms: a personality disposition and a situational press. In this study we conceptualized both influences in terms of a single underlying mechanism, construct accessibility. We pitted the characteristic ways that individuals perceive others against situational influences on accessibility (i.e., contextual priming) and tracked over time the relative power of these competing influences on the outcome of an impression-formation task. Subjects possessed either a chronically accessible (chronics) or an inaccessible (nonchronics) construct for either outgoing or inconsiderate behavior. As predicted, as the delay since the priming event lengthened (from 15 to 180 s), chronics were progressively more likely to use the chronically accessible construct instead of the primed alternative construct to categorize an ambiguous target behavior, whereas nonchronics' relative use of the primed and alternative constructs did not change as a function of postpriming delay.     

PRIMITIVE MENTAL STATES AND THE BODY: A PERSONAL VIEW OF ARMANDO B. FERRARI'S CONCRETE ORIGINAL OBJECT

The author explores some psychoanalytic hypotheses about primitive mental states and their implications for a direct focus on body experience in clinical work. Some aspects of current clinical research about the patient's difficulty in achieving awareness of his emotional life as it emerges from object relations are presented, and this problem is viewed in connection with the relation of the analysand to his own body and to his capacity to pass through the different levels of mental elaboration, from motor discharge to abstraction. Ferrari's theories on the body—mind relationship are discussed and compared with the work of other authors. Ferrari calls the body the Concrete Original Object to indicate that it is the first source, differing from person to person, from which mental phenomena are generated and against which they are constantly measured. A clinical case serves as an illustration of the importance of the perception of the body for the birth of genuine, non-imitative mental activity.