The Moral Significance of Birth

Does birth make a difference to the moral rights of the fetus /infant? Should it make a difference to its legal rights? Most contemporary philosophers believe that birth cannot make a difference to moral rights. If this is true, then it becomes difficult to justify either a moral or a legal distinction between late abortion and infanticide. I argue that the view that birth is irrelevant to moral rights rests upon two highly questionable assumptions about the theoretical foundations of moral rights. If we reject these assumptions, then we are free to take account of the contrasting biological and social relationships that make even relatively late abortion morally different from infanticide.     

Pursuing the Horizon: Striving for Elusive Goals

Counselors are often confronted with client goals that seem to be, at varying levels of awareness, elusive to either the counselor or the client.     

THE ANALYST'S APPROACH AND THE PATIENT'S PSYCHIC GROWTH

Psychoanalysis, which shares many functions with other therapies, is built upon its unique concern for the unconscious forces active behind a patient's symptoms and difficulties. What defines psychoanalysis is the analyst's approach as a disciplined engagement in the service of exploring those forces and their roots, an approach that is the product of curiosity working in the service of the other. As a result of the analyst's actualizing this approach, the patient comes to benefit not only from whatever specific declarative interpretations and insights have been explicitly opened, but also, importantly, from observing and taking in the unspoken underlying psychoanalytic mental processes. In this light, the patient's significant capacities for empathy, a subject often neglected, are also discussed. ¹      

Counselors' Perceptions of Spirituality in the Therapeutic Process

The authors investigated the attitudes of 147 Licensed Professional Counselors (LPCs) in 2 southeastern states concerning spirituality in the therapeutic process. Results indicate that LPCs recognize the importance of being aware of their own spiritual beliefs. Spirituality is also viewed as a universal phenomenon that can act as a powerful psychological change agent. Respondents believe that spirituality is not experienced differently by women and men, although spirituality is believed to be expressed differently as a function of gender. Age of the client emerged as a salient variable. One's place in the aging process and one's perception of the aging process were perceived to affect the client's spiritual search. The results have implications for the training of counselors.     

A Study of Group Counseling with Disadvantaged Workers in an Industrial Setting

The purpose of the study was to examine the process and effectiveness of group counseling as a part of a training program conducted through a Labor Department grant. Trainees in a JOBS program at the Westinghouse plant in Athens, Georgia, who were certified by the Georgia State Training and Employment Service as disadvantaged, received a 90-minute counseling session each week. Members of the training group had better work attendance and less employee turnover than a comparable group not in the training program. The tapes of one counselor—three five-minute segments at the beginning, middle, and end of each tape—were used for analysis, which was done by an affect-topic method. The counselor of the group analyzed presents some personal observations of the counseling process. Some suggestions for improvements of group counseling in similar contexts are also presented.     

Career counseling: beyond “test and tell”

Behavior-oriented inventories need not be used in a static manner. This article presents a way of using John Holland's Self-Directed Search (SDS) as an illustration of how such an inventory can be employed dynamically within a developmental career counseling framework. Use of the SDS is discussed in terms of environmental exploration, self-exploration, and integration of information. The breadth of individual behavior styles and the flexibility of work environments are the key concepts in the approach to career counseling described here.     

Stress, Glucocorticoids, and Damage to the Nervous System: The Current State of Confusion

An extensive literature demonstrates that glucocorticoids (GCs), the adrenal steroids secreted during stress, can have a broad range of deleterious effects in the brain. The actions occur predominately, but not exclusively, in the hippocampus, a structure rich in corticosteroid receptors and particularly sensitive to GCs. The first half of this review considers three types of GC effects: a) GC-induced atrophy, in which a few weeks' exposure to high GC concentrations or to stress causes reversible atrophy of dendritic processes in the hippocampus; b) GC neurotoxicity where, over the course of months, GC exposure kills hippocampal neurons; c) GC neuroendangerment, in which elevated GC concentrations at the time of a neurological insult such as a stroke or seizure impairs the ability of neurons to survive the insult. The second half considers the rather confusing literature as to the possible mechanisms underlying these deleterious GC actions. Five broad themes are discerned: a) that GCs induce a metabolic vulnerability in neurons due to inhibition of glucose uptake; b) that GCs exacerbate various steps in a damaging cascade of glutamate excess, calcium mobilization and oxygen radical generation. In a review a number of years ago, I concluded that these two components accounted for the deleterious GC effects. Specifically, the energetic vulnerability induced by GCs left neurons metabolically compromised, and less able to carry out the costly task of containing glutamate, calcium and oxygen radicals. More recent work has shown this conclusion to be simplistic, and GC actions are shown to probably involve at least three additional components: c) that GCs impair a variety of neuronal defenses against neurologic insults; d) that GCs disrupt the mobilization of neurotrophins; e) that GCs have a variety of electrophysiological effects which can damage neurons. The relevance of each of those mechanisms to GC-induced atrophy, neurotoxicity and neuroendangerment is considered, as are the likely interactions among them.