Treating Depression During a Recession: Psychotherapy with Indigent Clients

During the last few years, the global economy has struggled and many clients have experienced significant financial hardship. It can be difficult to confront emotional problems when there are multiple life stressors impinging on clients and disrupting their daily functioning. Several recommendations are provided for helping clients to oppose their depressive tendencies when financial problems are real, significant, and lasting. First, therapists can provide a stable and supportive relationship that helps to ease the client’s emotional distress and lays the foundation for other aspects of treatment. Second, therapy can help to protect an optimistic attitude and instill hope for a better future. Third, behavioral activities can be used to encourage productive activity each day. Fourth, problem-solving skills can help many clients deal with stressors in a direct, constructive, and proactive manner. Fifth, therapy can examine ways to expand and improve the client’s social relationships. Finally, psychotherapists should collaborate with other health care professionals in order to ensure the optimal, integrated care for the client. It is hoped that these recommendations will be helpful for therapists who work with financially impoverished clients.     

Interpretation and method

Abstract

Interpretation started as the central tool of psychoanalytic theory, but it has undergone changes, just as the theory it was based on has evolved. Not only have these significant changes been determined by cultural trends, but different authors have also contributed to their evolution through their approaches to various other pathologies besides neurosis. Today, the cure process is divided between those who believe that therapeutic efficiency should be based on the different interpretation models, and those who maintain that it can be only sustained by the modifying capacity of the therapeutic relationship. Both positions are supposedly upheld by the results of tests that both models believe are sufficient proof but that, in the current author's opinion, lead back to the type of pathology they arose from, although they may at times attempt to cover the entire theoretical spectrum. The position upheld by Gedo—who considers that the psychoanalyst's intervention will depend on the degree of evolution that the pathology has achieved—is of great interest for specific practice. Hence, the more primitive levels require a treatment founded on holding, whereas more evolved pathologies require a more classic level of interpretation. This implies that the stages of a particular patient's evolution may require interventions at different levels, even though these may be founded on different theoretical models. This model, which we may brand as eclectic, is basically the one we find underpinning different theoretical models, which effectively appear to integrate others.     

The uses of humor in life,neurosis and in psychotherapy: Part 2

Abstract

The first part of the paper focused on the dynamics of wit in life, literature, and psychoanalysis; the second part of this paper is devoted to the use of humor in therapy. The central concept is Freud's psychoanalytic method, as distinguished from Freud's various theories of disorder, or neurosis, with a further elaboration of Freud's inherently interpersonal conception of the analytic process, already present in the cathartic phase of the therapeutic technique. The cathartic, or discharge, function of humor is connected to reciprocal free association (a term coined by the author) to define the mutual and reciprocal free association in analysand and analyst, playing an essential role in the genesis of insight and interpretation. Humor has its role in loosening repression, facilitating the emergence of unconscious emotions and ideas, bringing to light character defenses, and thus driving the process of analysis.     

Chasing the Title VII Holy Grail: The Pitfalls of Guaranteeing Adverse Impact Elimination

Purpose

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided industrial/organizational (I/O) psychologists with a unique role as professional test developers and consultants involved in assisting organizations in establishing the job-relatedness/validity defense to charges of discrimination, specifically charges based on an adverse or disparate impact theory. However, these activities have transmogrified into the fairly common occurrence of public municipalities and organizations demanding the reduction or absence of adverse impact as part of the scope of work or contracts and for practitioners and consultants to guarantee adverse impact reduction or elimination a priori. Plaintiffs and their experts also routinely argue that the observed adverse impact could have been allayed or eliminated if the defendant had only just used alternative testing methods. This then begs the following question: “Are there well established techniques and procedures that can reduce, minimize, or eliminate adverse impact in a predictable, generalizable, and replicable fashion in the same manner that we might guarantee validity?” The present paper seeks to answer this question.

Approach and Findings

With the preceding as a backdrop, the present paper identifies and discusses four overlooked critical attributes of adverse impact that collectively and in conjunction work against and obviate adverse impact reduction and elimination guarantees.

Conclusions and Implications

We conclude that the search for guaranteed adverse impact reduction or elimination is a “Holy Grail” and that we should avoid predictions and guarantees regarding adverse impact elimination in specific situations, including those based on the inclusion of “alternative” selection devices. However, in the context of civil rights legislation, and the intersection of I/O psychologists with said legislation, what we can guarantee as a science and profession are sound and valid tests and assessment devices that can be defended accordingly should the use of said tests and devices be challenged.     

Different origins and meanings of acute acting-out in an inpatient psychotherapeutic setting

In this paper I describe four different sources of acute acting-out behaviour as may be observed in long-term hospitalised patients suffering from severe personality disorders. I hope to demonstrate that acute psychological distress does not happen in a vacuum, but that specific intrapsychic and interpersonal dynamics within the hospital setting are at the root of what appears overtly as nonspecific emotional and behavioural disturbance. I argue that the hospital team's correct insight into the factors underlying acute acting-out is crucial to the implementation of therapeutic interventions aimed to decrease the patient's disturbed state of mind.     

Remembering and repeating in multiple personality

This paper is a case-history of a student in his early twenties tortured by different personalities of different ages and sexes vying for control of his body. Guilt over an incestuous relationship with his mother is uncovered and understood in the context of his whole life. Confusion between memories of fantasies, memories of sleep dreams, memories of daydreams, and memories of actual memories are described, the elucidation of which lead to clearer thinking and memory, and more tolerance for the previously distorted affectladen situations of his past. Thus his belief that he was experimented on in an alien spaceship becomes the memory of an operating-room diagnostic experience.

A hypothesis is put forward that the separate personalities in the multiple personality are not simply the products of ego splits, but are at the instant they are formed a ‘doubling’ of the personality that is being copied. Immediately thereafter, splitting mechanisms create differences between the two separate personalities, using projective and introjective mechanisms. Integration of the various personalities, the ultimate goal in treatment, is made difficult by the patient's fear of loss of self through fragmentation, when the self is felt to be in danger of being intruded upon.     

On some types of hallucinatory experience

There are types of non-visual hallucinatory experience which occur in the psychoses other than those which have a critical and derogatory content. Wish-fulfilment plays an important part in the formation of the content of these hallucinations. In others, ‘persecutory’ anxiety also occurs. A comparison is made between hallucinatory and dream content. An hypothesis is presented to account for the perceptual quality of these hallucinatory experiences. The therapeutic implications of these considerations concludes this presentation.     

Self-Esteem Among Young Adults: Differences and Similarities Based on Gender, Race, and Cohort (1990–2012)

The major purpose of this study was to examine the joint effects of race and gender on the self-esteem of young adults. Data came from a large sample of undergraduate students (N?=?7,552; 2,785 men and 4,767 women) enrolled at a Midwestern U.S. University over the period 1990–2012. Consistent with prior research, we found that men had higher self-esteem than women and that Blacks had higher self-esteem than Whites, Hispanics, and Asians. The analyses, however, revealed that the gender differences in self-esteem were not found among Blacks and that the higher self-esteem of Blacks relative to other races was greater among women than among men. The effects of race and gender did not change controlling for social class and other demographic variables, did not differ across domains of self-esteem, and were not affected by period of time. This study deepens our knowledge of social group differences in self-esteem, providing evidence that the higher self-esteem of men (relative to women) and of Blacks (relative to other races) persisted across the past two decades.