When Evening Falls: The Immigrant's Encounter with Middle and Old Age

This article elucidates the immigrant's encounter with the developmental tasks of middle and old age. It describes the vicissitudes of five psychosocial challenges characteristic of this phase of life and underscores the difficulties faced by the immigrant in each of these realms. These challenges include (1) letting go of the children, (2) retirement, (3) grandparenthood, (4) loss of siblings and peers through death, and (5) declining physical health and anticipation of death. It is suggested that preexisting capacity for mourning alongside a satisfactory marriage, support from homoethnic community, non-job-related sublimations, economic security, and absence of undue physical ailments help sustain a positive attitude as one faces these phase-specific dilemmas of late adult life.     

The Identity Consolidation Inventory (ICI): Development and Application of a Questionnaire for Assessing the Structuralization of Individual Identity

This paper describes the author's effort to develop a self-rating scale to measure the consolidation of identity in a given individual. It describes the construction of the 35-item Identity Consolidation Inventory (ICI) and, as an appendix to the paper, includes the final version of this questionnaire. The scale's reliability and validity are demonstrated via its administration to 238 normal controls, 80 individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder and 13 subjects with Dissociative Identity Disorder (“multiple personality”). The clinical and research usefulness of ICI lies in the realm of discerning the syndrome of identity diffusion that underlies all severe personality disorders.     

Different risk factors are associated with alcohol use versus problematic use in male Pakistani adolescents

Substance abuse is a significant problem in Pakistan (Hussain, 2017), yet, there are few studies of risk factors in this population, particularly in remote areas. Male adolescents (N = 243; M = 16.9 years, SD = 1.3 years) were recruited from schools in Gilgit-Baltistan, and completed questions on demographics, substance use, and psychosocial functioning. As a Muslim country, there are strict prohibitions against alcohol use, yet 44.9% of the sample reported lifetime alcohol use. The Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (Babor, Higgins-Biddle, Saunders, & Monteiro, 2001), was used to quantify level of risk associated with use, and 22.6% of the sample had scores indicating significant risk levels. Logistic regression analyses indicated that lifetime alcohol use was associated with internalising problems (e.g., depression, anxiety), while risky alcohol use was associated with externalising problems (e.g., aggressive and delinquent behaviour). Attention problems were related to both outcomes. Implications for prevention are discussed.     

Repression: A Critical Assessment and Update of Freud’s 1915 Paper

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - The concept of repression has been relegated to the periphery in current psychoanalytic theorizing. This is in part due to a reflexive and ill-informed...