The Disappearing Family: The Role of Counselors in Creating Surrogate Families

For most of the world the nuclear and extended family provide the psychological support needed to mature and deal with life's crises. In the United States the family is changing rapidly. The changes sharply limit the ability of the institution to provide the support and role models formerly available. This article documents the emerging issues counselors and clients need to face. It suggests the value of creating surrogate families to fill the void created by the disappearing family.     

A Study on Maintaining Workshop Impact for Employment Counselors

It is the authors' belief that the skills or knowledge acquired in short-term educational experiences are often rapidly washed-out after returning to a work environment. This article describes an attempt to maintain the skills of employment counselors after they return from a workshop setting to their work environment.     

The Role of Risk‐Taking in Songwriting Success

Creativity involves generating novel concepts and products that are valued by the creator as well as by the public. In this paper, we argue that risk‐taking in songwriting increases the likelihood of any individual's product being valued as creative. By reviewing the case histories of several successful songwriters, we show that heightened creativity is associated with a willingness to express novel ideas as well as a willingness to repeatedly confront, and adapt to the possibility of failure.     

On holding and containing, being and dreaming

Winnicott's concept of holding and Bion's idea of the container-contained are for each of these analysts among his most important contributions to psychoanalytic thought. In this light, it is ironic that the two sets of ideas are so frequently misunderstood and confused with one another. In this paper, the author delineates what he believes to be the critical aspects of each of these concepts and illustrates the way in which he uses these ideas in his clinical work. Winnicott's holding is seen as an ontological concept that is primarily concerned with being and its relationship to time. Initially the mother safeguards the infant's continuity of being, in part by insulating him from the 'not-me' aspect of time. Maturation entails the infant's gradually internalizing the mother's holding of the continuity of his being over time and emotional fl ux. By contrast, Bion's container-contained is centrally concerned with the processing (dreaming) of thoughts derived from lived emotional experience. The idea of the container-contained addresses the dynamic interaction of predominantly unconscious thoughts (the contained) and the capacity for dreaming and thinking those thoughts (the container).     

GENERAL SAFETY PERFORMANCE: A TEST OF A GROUNDED THEORETICAL MODEL

In this investigation, we report the results of 2 studies designed to (a) conduct confirmatory factor analytic tests of a model of general safety performance with performance ratings from 550 coworker appraisals (Study 1), and (b) examine hypothesized relationships between indicators of breadth and depth of knowledge constructs and confirmed safety performance factors (from Study 1) with training history data and supervisory appraisals for 133 hazardous waste workers in 23 jobs and 4 organizations (Study 2). Confirmatory factor analytic results from Study 1 provided support for a 4-factor model of general safety performance with performance factors labeled Using Personal Protective Equipment, Engaging in Work Practices to Reduce Risk, Communicating Health and Safety Information, and Exercising Employee Rights and Responsibilities. In general, the results from Study 2 supported the hypothesized dominance of depth of knowledge over breadth of knowledge in the prediction of performance with respect to more routine, consistent safety tasks. Issues concerning the general-izability of these factors to other types of work and the human resource management implications of these results are discussed.