The person-centred approach as an ideological discourse: a discourse analysis of person-centred counsellors' accounts on their way of being

In accord with humanistic psychology, the person-centred approach (PCA) highlights individuality and is characterised by subjectivity and freedom vs. objectivity and determination. This study endeavoured to define how person-centred counsellors position themselves within PCA. In order to employ a critical frame of mind, analysis focused on identifying constructions, contradictions and functions of language that pointed to power relations. This study revealed a power relation between PCA and the counsellors, displaying five discourses: the philosophical discourse, the discourse of freedom, the discourse of religion/spirituality, the discourse of militarism and the discourse of eros (love). PCA is thought to empower the client in relation to its respectful and non-directive, therapeutic framework. Analysis suggests that despite rhetorical endorsement of PCA as enabling, the approach has implications for subjectivity and practice regarding the counsellor him/herself. Adhesive attachments closely resembling religious and erotic ones seem responsible for dogmatic and militaristic phenomena as described by participants. Strong emotions such as pride and guilt are indicative of this adhesive investment. Furthermore, the analysis shows that as the discourse of freedom becomes embedded in the philosophical discourse of PCA, it has connotations of truth. Lastly, the discourse of religion/spirituality seems to organise PCA in terms of meaning coherence.     

Contacting a 19 month‐old mute autistic girl: A clinical narrative

Conveying that psychoanalysis offers rich opportunities for the very early treatment of autistic spectrum disorders, this clinical communication unfolds the clinical process of a 19 month‐old ‘shell‐type’ encapsulated mute autistic girl. It details how, in a four‐weekly‐sessions schedule, infant Lila evolved within two years from being emotionally out‐of‐contact to the affective aliveness of oedipal involvement. Following Frances Tustin's emphasis on the analyst's ‘quality of attention’ and Justin Call's advice that in baby–mother interaction the infant is the initiator and the mother is the follower, it is described how the analyst must, amid excruciating non‐response, even‐mindedly sustain her attention in order to meet the child half‐way at those infrequent points where flickers of initiative on her side are adumbrated. This helps attain evanescent ‘moments of contact’ which coalesce later into ‘moments of sharing’, eventually leading to acknowledgment of the analyst's humanness and a receptiveness for to‐and‐fro communication. Thus the ‘primal dialogue’ (Spitz) is reawakened and, by experiencing herself in the mirror of the analyst, the child's sense of I‐ness is reinstated. As evinced by the literature, the mainstream stance rests on systematic early interpretation of the transference, which has in our view strongly deterred progress in the psychoanalytic treatment of autistic spectrum disorders.     

Keeping the Result in Sight and Mind: General Cognitive Principles and Language‐Specific Influences in the Perception and Memory of Resultative Events

We study how people attend to and memorize endings of events that differ in the degree to which objects in them are affected by an action: Resultative events show objects that undergo a visually salient change in state during the course of the event (peeling a potato), and non‐resultative events involve objects that undergo no, or only partial state change (stirring in a pan). We investigate general cognitive principles, and potential language‐specific influences, in verbal and nonverbal event encoding and memory, across two experiments with Dutch and Estonian participants. Estonian marks a viewer's perspective on an event's result obligatorily via grammatical case on direct object nouns: Objects undergoing a partial/full change in state in an event are marked with partitive/accusative case, respectively. Therefore, we hypothesized increased saliency of object states and event results in Estonian speakers, as compared to speakers of Dutch. Findings show (a) a general cognitive principle of attending carefully to endings of resultative events, implying cognitive saliency of object states in event processing; (b) a language‐specific boost on attention and memory of event results under verbal task demands in Estonian speakers. Results are discussed in relation to theories of event cognition, linguistic relativity, and thinking for speaking.