Psychological Needs and the Facilitation of Integrative Processes

ABSTRACT The assumption that there are innate integrative or actualizing tendencies underlying personality and social development is reexamined. Rather than viewing such processes as either nonexistent or as automatic, I argue that they are dynamic and dependent upon social-contextual supports Pertaining to basic human psychological needs. To develop this viewpoint, I conceptually link the notion of integrative tendencies to specific developmental processes, namely intrinsic motivation; internalization; and emotional integration. These processes are then shown to be facilitated by conditions that fulfill psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and forestalled within contexts that frustrate these needs. Interactions between psychological needs and contextual supports account, in part, for the domain and situational specificity of motivation, experience, and relative integration. The meaning of psychological needs (vs. wants) is directly considered, as are the relations between concepts of integration and autonomy and those of independence, individualism, efficacy, and cognitive models of “multiple selves.”     

Book reviews

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Preemption and a counterfactual analysis of divine causation

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - This paper aims to outline a counterfactual theory of divine atemporal causation that avoids problems of preemption. As a result, the presentation...     

Classroom goal structures and communication style: the role of teacher immediacy and relevance-making in students’ perceptions of the classroom

Social Psychology of Education - We examined the relationships between teachers’ communication styles and students’ perceptions of the classroom goal structure. Within the context of...     

THE CHURCH AND MENTAL HEALTH: THEOLOGICAL AND PRACTICAL RESPONSES

Over the past few years, the number of Christian projects and charities working in the mental health sector in the United Kingdom has increased dramatically. At the same time, scientific and medical understandings of mental health have been advancing rapidly. These parallel trends beg a serious question: is the Christian Church's response to mental health authentically engaging with a changing scientific picture? Are theological questions like responsibility, sin, redemption, and reconciliation taking account of a changing landscape? This is not a theoretical question, but has major practical consequences for developing practical pastoral responses.     

Anger Can Help: Clinical Representation of Three Pathways of Anger

Anger is a powerful emotion prevalent in therapy. An integrative model situating varied manifestations of anger within a purposive context of healing and repair following relationship trauma is needed. A first paper (Butler, Meloy-Miller, Seedall, & Dicus, 2017) approached anger as a psychological and relational construction of diffuse physiological arousal and provided a conceptual model of how the experience of offense interacts with a person's view of self in relation to other (VSIRO) in the formation of anger. Three resulting trajectories and pathways of anger were outlined. Here we provide clinical representations of these pathways—two pathways of hostile anger arising from pathogenic VSIROs (inflated, with accompanying externalizing anger, and collapsed, with accompanying internalizing anger), and a third pathway of benevolent anger, arising from a balanced VSIRO. Clinical application of the model through several vignettes illuminates its use in discriminating helpful from harmful pathways of anger and developing interventions for reshaping pathogenic anger to beneficent anger.