Against Mother's Day and Employee Appreciation Day and Other Representations of Oppressive Expectations as Opportunities for Excellence and Beneficence

Appreciation and gratitude get good press: They are central virtues in many religious and secular ethical frameworks, core in positive psychology research, and they come highly recommended by the self‐improvement set. Generally, appreciation and gratitude feature as good things, in popular consciousness. Of course, on an Aristotelian model, the belief that these are virtues implies they are something people can get right or wrong. This paper examines bad appreciation and bad gratitude, characterizing forms of appreciation and gratitude at the center of some major social norms and practices, and demonstrating that they mask familiar oppressive expectations and power relations.     

Recontact with the analyst following termination: a survey of seventy-one cases

A questionnaire was sent to graduate members of the Denver Psychoanalytic Society asking for their experience with patients making contact with them after the analysis. They reported that within three years after termination two thirds of "successfully analyzed" patients had recontacted them. Seventy-one cases were surveyed. Most contacts were brief and did not seem to be the result of incomplete analysis. Rather, they aimed to satisfy ongoing needs for: the continuing deidealization of the analyst, the reactivation of the self-analytic function, and the restructuring of self- and object representations by reporting developmentally significant accomplishments to the former analyst. The analyst's acknowledgement appears to be an integral part of the restructuring. This is work which either cannot be done before termination or the need for which has not been recognized during the analysis.     

SOME DIRECT AND GENERALIZED EFFECTS OF REPLACING AN AUTISTIC MAN'S ECHOLALIA WITH CORRECT RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

We extended the use of operant procedures to decrease immediate echolalia and increase the appropriate responding to questions of a 21-year-old autistic man. Three experiments were conducted in which the overall plan was to (a) encourage the subject to remain quiet before, during, and after the presentation of questions and (b) teach him to use environmental cues (i.e., word cards or a model's responses) to increase the likelihood of responding correctly. Multiple baseline designs demonstrated that echolalia was rapidly replaced with correct stimulus-specific responses. In addition, there were a variety of generalized improvements in the subject's verbal responses to questions. The procedures and results are contrasted to previous research in an attempt to explain the encouraging findings.