Counselors' Evaluation of Rogers-Perls-Ellis's Relationship Skills

Twenty-two participants (12 employment counselors and 10 counselor supervisors) attended a three-week workshop on enhancing relationship skills, after which each participant evaluated the Rogers, Perls, and Ellis film, Three Approaches to Psychotherapy, on 15 skills. Results indicate that there was general agreement between the counselors and the supervisors when judging levels of therapist functioning by the relationship skills. However, they also show that within each group there is wide divergence of judgment. Neither counselors nor supervisors agree among themselves on their evaluation of the relationship skills of Rogers, Ellis, and Perls. Implications are drawn for the use of the film as a training/evaluation aid for employment counselors and supervisors.     

The complementarity of behavioral styles among female same‐gender romantic couples

This study extended previous research on complementarity through the examination of female same‐gender romantic dyads. One‐hundred and forty‐four women (72 couples) completed interpersonal circumplex ratings of their romantic partner and a relationship measure of love and harmony. Results indicated that high levels of relationship quality were reported by participants who were warm and submissive or who had partners who possessed these characteristics. Additionally, members of female same‐gender couples tended to complement each other in terms of dominance but not warmth. However, consistent with past research stressing the unique importance female same‐gender couples tend to prescribe to relationship equality, dyads that contained members who were equivalent in terms of dominance tended to experience high levels of relationship quality.     

THE PRAYER OF THE MOLINIST

According to the ‘Power of Prayer’ objection to Molinism, the insights of the Church's great saints and spiritual directors regarding how best to grow in the spiritual life conflict with Molinism: spiritual growth is best achieved by praying from a Thomistic attitude towards Providence. Thomas Flint has recently replied to this objection as it was raised by Fr. Reginald Garrigou‐Lagrange. In this paper, I respond on behalf of Garrigou‐Lagrange.     

THE SORROW THAT DARE NOT SAY ITS NAME: THE INADEQUATE FATHER,THE MOTOR OF HISTORY

Although the following essay is literary‐philosophical, it arose from a practical interest. I have been struck by how widespread today is the complaint about the ‘inadequate father’. Of course a father may be inadequate in diverse ways, either absconding, absent and weak, or overbearing, bullying, and tyrannical, or some combination of these. Further, I am not restricting the term ‘father’ to its narrow biological sense, but using it rather as a metaphor for any institution or structure which an individual or a group feels should have been in place to guide, direct, and protect them in important situations, but did not do its job properly. Consequently they are willing to concede they are not all they could have been, but they insist it is not their fault, rather the fault of the ‘father’ who should have done his job better. This ties in with the fashionable appeal of ‘victimhood’. Everybody today seems to want to cast themselves as a ‘victim’, for reasons similar to those mentioned above. If you are a ‘victim’, then there must be an ‘oppressor’– and some ‘parent’ organization that should have guided, directed, and protected you against the oppressor, but again did not do its job adequately. It is striking how many individuals and groups around the world today choose to perceive themselves, and to present themselves to others, as ‘victims’; it has indeed become a preferred characterization of our age, for it carries with it a rhetorical advantage that trumps all others. If you are able to cast yourself as a ‘victim’, and have others accept this, you disarm and neutralize criticism, not only of what you are, but of what you are currently doing – because the latter can be presented as a just ‘compensation’ for what you have suffered. As with guilt, there is no built‐in quota or statute of limitations. This rhetoric was not as common thirty or forty years ago. There is an added factor here in America and the New World generally where, according to a whispered criticism, as our ancestors crossed the ocean, they experienced a ‘drop in civilization’. Life here was initially without some of the structures and institutions which had evolved over thousands of years in the Old World, which could thus be presumed there but here were absent. As we won with difficulty our independence, we unconsciously repudiated much of the ‘higher culture’ of the colonial master, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. As the ‘economic bubble’ of having won the Second World War has gradually dissipated, we discover we are handicapped by an absence of the forms of maturation and self‐realization that arise in and are necessary for dealing with prolonged peace. In our ‘ideology of liberty’, our adults become essentially grown children, unschooled in anything higher, and thus have particular difficulty assuming the responsibilities of parenthood. They are forced to fall back upon a military style of giving orders, because on this side of the water, ‘final causes’ in the form of commonly admired or agreed on goals for striving are not in place. In this sense there is an absence of the ‘adequate father’. Further, as ‘American Culture’ expands through publicity and the media, we spread the same disease. There is another relevant factor, the ‘celebrity‐liberationist’ lifestyle that has been diffused into the general population since the 1960's and has become a default secular ethic of our time, replacing the traditional Judeo‐Christian decalogue. The former is invoked as a justification for aggressively seeking fame and fortune, and making no attempt to conceal this; rather than worrying that such an attitude will cause offense, it is worn proudly and defiantly in the hope that others will identify with it, thereby branding the performer a cultural hero. This popular strategy towards fulfilment itself rests on a metaphysic of ‘expressive individualism’, a position that holds that the supreme ethical imperative to which other obligations must be subordinated is for each to bring forward their hidden noumenal core, the only source of value, into phenomenal appearances where it may be admired and benefit others and such that creation will for the first time be complete. This change in Western culture made possible by greater affluence and security represents a trickle‐down phenomenon and democritization of the awe reserved for the artist revered as a genius during the nineteenth century, now spread to the entire population. Anything that constrains this expansion, which interrupts or limits this transfer, is to be rejected as parental abuse, psychological repression, or cultural imperialism.     

TARGET PRACTICE: AN ORGANIZATIONAL IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT APPROACH TO ATTRACTING MINORITY AND FEMALE JOB APPLICANTS

On account of a number of factors, many companies have increased recruitment targeting female and ethnic or racial minority job applicants. Despite evidence suggesting that these applicants are attracted by different factors than traditional applicants and an abundance of recruitment tactics suggested in the popular press, no empirically based approach to recruiting these populations has emerged. This article reviews and integrates literature on organizational impression management, recruitment, marketing, and social psychology and provides a framework to assist practitioners in attracting minority and female job applicants. In addition, several avenues for future research are discussed.