Avoiding Colonizer Positions in the Therapy Room: Some Ideas About the Challenges of Dealing with the Dialectic of Misery and Resources in Families

Some authors have argued that certain acts of family therapists—despite their best intentions—may represent a form of colonizing the family. When acting as a colonizer, a therapist is understood as becoming overly responsible for the family and focusing too strongly on change. In so doing, the therapist disrespects the family's pace, and neglects their own resources for change. This paper aims to highlight the need for therapists to be hypersensitive both to the resources of families entering therapy as well as to the impact of prevailing ideologies on their own positioning in the session. The kind of sensitivity advocated here is dialectical in the sense that every family is understood as having potentials promoting dynamism, happiness, and well-being as well as potentials contributing to stagnation, unhappiness, and misery. In this article, using illustrations from clinical practice, we present some ideas for resisting the tendency by the therapist to assume a colonizing position as a professional solver of problems for families. Our main aim here is to redirect the therapist toward connecting with the family's suffering, as well as with the resource repertoire it has developed for navigating and negotiating its way through life.     

Reasonable Hope: Construct, Clinical Applications, and Supports

To read this article's abstract in both Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, please visit the article's full-text page on Wiley InterScience ( http://interscience.wiley.com/journal/famp ).
Hope may be the most laden shorthand term of all time. Everyone wants it; few know how to articulate what it is. Although family therapists frequently work to restore hope with hopeless families, they have contributed little to the abundant literature on hope. I present a new conceptualization of hope—reasonable hope—that reflects how family therapists think and practice. By subscribing to reasonable hope, clinicians enhance their ability to offer accompaniment and bear witness to clients. I describe clinical practices that, informed by reasonable hope, also facilitate its cocreation. Finally, I suggest supports for clinicians who practice reasonable hope.     

Parental Separation and Children's Behavioral/Emotional Problems: The Impact of Parental Representations and Family Conflict

In this longitudinal study, we examine whether the effect of parental separation on kindergarten children's behavioral/emotional problems varies according to the level of family conflict, and children's parental representations. One hundred and eighty seven children were assessed at ages 5 and 6. Family conflict was assessed using parents' ratings. Children's parental representations were assessed using a story-stem task. A multiinformant approach (parent, teacher, child) was employed to assess children's behavioral/emotional problems. Bivariate results showed that separation, family conflict, and negative parental representations were associated with children's behavioral/emotional problems. However, in multivariate analyses, when controlling for gender and symptoms at age 5, we found that children of separated parents who showed negative parental representations had a significantly greater increase in conduct problems between 5 and 6 than all other children. In terms of emotional symptoms and hyperactivity, symptoms at 5 and (for hyperactivity only) gender were the only predictors for symptoms 1 year later. Our results suggest that kindergarten children's representations of parent-child relationships moderate the impact of parental separation on the development of conduct problems, and underline play and narration as a possible route to access the thoughts and feelings of young children faced with parental separation.     

Resistance to the influences of others: Limits to the formation of a collective memory through conversational remembering

People often form collective memories by sharing their memories with others. Warnings about the reliability of one conversational participant can limit the extent to which conversations or other forms of postevent information can influence subsequent memory. Although this attenuation is consistently found for prewarnings, there are substantial reasons to suspect that, by carefully manipulating both individual characteristics of the listener in a conversation and the dynamics of the postevent conversation, one can restrict the effect even prewarnings have on the influence a speaker might have on the memory of a listener. Indeed, in situations in which a speaker contributes substantially to a conversation and the quality of memory of a listener is poor, prewarnings have the paradoxical effect of increasing the influence of the speaker on a listener's memory. Warnings may not always limit the formation of a collective memory. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On Being Exposed to Superior Others: Consequences of Self-Threatening Upward Social Comparisons

Being inferior to someone else can be hurtful. But what exactly happens when we found ourselves in such situations? We first address why and when upward comparison can be self-threatening and later review the effects of such threatening social comparison. We argue that two main kinds of disturbances can ensue: affective disturbances and attentional disturbances. Second, three ways to deal with self-threatening social comparison are reviewed: proactive regulation, defensive regulation, and regulation by avoidance. For each of these disturbances and regulation modes, we review empirical findings and later discuss the impact of upward comparison on performance. We conclude by going back to the very need behind the need for a positive evaluation.     

CORRESPONDENCE

Readers are invited to send letters to the Editor on subjects of interest. These will be published, if found suitable, as space permits. It is preferred that they be typewritten and of reasonable length. They will be subject to editing and possible abridgement.     

Reflections on the revolution at Stanford

We inquire into the question whether the Aristotelian or classical ideal of science has been realised by the Model Revolution, initiated at Stanford University during the 1950s and spread all around the world of philosophy of science—salute Suppes. The guiding principle of the Model Revolution is: a scientific theory is a set of structures in the domain of discourse of axiomatic set-theory, characterised by a set-theoretical predicate. We expound some critical reflections on the Model Revolution; the conclusions will be that the philosophical problem of what a scientific theory is has not been solved yet—pace Suppes. While reflecting critically on the Model Revolution, we also explore a proposal of how to complete the Revolution and briefly address the intertwined subject of scientific representation, which has come to occupy center stage in philosophy of science over the past decade.     

Quality of attachment,perinatal risk,and mother–infant interaction in a high‐risk premature sample

Thirty‐three families, each with a premature infant born less than 33 gestational weeks, were observed in a longitudinal exploratory study. Infants were recruited in a neonatal intensive care unit, and follow‐up visits took place at 4 months and 12 months of corrected age. The severity of the perinatal problems was evaluated using the Perinatal Risk Inventory (PERI; A.P. Scheiner & M.E. Sexton, 1991 ). At 4 months, mother–infant play interaction was observed and coded according to the CARE‐index (P.M. Crittenden, 2003 ); at 12 months, the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP; M.D.S. Ainsworth, M.C. Blehar, E. Waters, & S. Wall, 1978 ) was administered. Results indicate a strong correlation between the severity of perinatal problems and the quality of attachment at 12 months. Based on the PERI, infants with high medical risks more frequently tended to be insecurely attached. There also was a significant correlation between insecure attachment and dyadic play interaction at 4 months (i.e., maternal controlling behavior and infant compulsive compliance). Moreover, specific dyadic interactive patterns could be identified as protective or as risk factors regarding the quality of attachment. Considering that attachment may have long‐term influence on child development, these results underline the need for particular attention to risk factors regarding attachment among premature infants.     

Refutability Revamped: How Quantum Mechanics Saves the Phenomena

On the basis of the Suppes–Sneed structuralview of scientific theories, we take a freshlook at the concept of refutability,which was famously proposed by K.R. Popper in 1934 as a criterion for the demarcation of scientific theories from non-scientific ones, e.g., pseudo-scientificand metaphysical theories. By way of an introduction we argue that a clash between Popper and his critics on whether scientific theories are, in fact, refutablecan be partly explained by the fact Popper and his criticsascribed different meanings to the term theoryThen we narrow our attention to one particular theory,namely quantum mechanics, in order to elucidate general matters discussed. We prove that quantum mechanics is irrefutable in a rather straightforward sense, but argue that it is refutable in a more sophisticated sense, which incorporates someobservations obtained by looking closely at the practiceof physics. We shall locate exactly where non-rigourous elements enter the evaluation of a scientific theory – thismakes us see clearly how fruitful mathematics isfor the philosophy of science.