现实性监控研究述评

现实性监控是来源记忆的重要组成部分.总结分析表明,现实性监控的研究成果主要体现在如下方面：①学习项目的比例、学习和测验阶段之间的干扰任务、被试的想象能力等均对现实性监控存在一定的影响;②儿童的现实性监控能力随年龄增长而提高,老人的现实性监控能力相对较低;③不同病人在现实性监控中有不同的困难;④内部来源与外部来源提取激活的大脑区域不同,前额区在区分两类项目时的作用明显.今后应在整合研究结论、建立相应认知模型、构建前额区和顶区联合作用的神经网络和应用推广等方面加强研究.     

THE VALUE OF UNCERTAINTY

The author discusses some of the characteristics of Roy Schafer's contributions to psychoanalysis that he finds most valuable, such as his openness to uncertainty, his anti‐reductive view of analytic constructions, his unique formulation of the analyst's role, and his close attention to how the patient engenders particular emotional reactions in the analyst. The author also presents a clinical vignette illustrating the value of the analyst's tolerance of uncertainty in the face of the patient's push for interpretations, explanations, and reassurance.     

Growth in emotional intelligence. Psychotherapy with a learning disabled girl

This paper describes the once-weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a girl, called Ellie, aged eight at the start of her treatment. Ellie had a learning disability and displayed difficult behaviour at school and at home. In her therapy, Ellie grew in emotional intelligence, more in touch with and able to express her feelings. Her behaviour improved and so did her capacity to learn. In the therapy there were certain limitations to progress and this is discussed in terms of how Ellie's disability affected the basic achievements of emotional development, including a mind with a solid ‘reality ego’, able to contain anxiety, and able to maintain depressive functioning. The importance of parallel parent work, to share observations and understanding of the child's functioning is discussed. Difficulties for both child and parents in dealing with the pain of difference and how this limits emotional intelligence are discussed. The author hopes that this paper will encourage the offering of psychoanalytic psychotherapy to children and young people with learning disabilities, who are significantly more likely to suffer from mental health problems than their peers.     

Individual treatment needs in the therapeutic environment of a special school

This paper is about the therapeutic process and technique in psychotherapy with deprived children. The need to monitor as a coherent whole both the broader environmental setting and the movements of the transference is illustrated by clinical case material. It is concluded that a) the child's attack on the setting and therapeutic relation has to be picked up and contained both in the transference relationship and in the broader network by the team-work, and b) by carefully following the transference, the child can be helped to a dependent relationship inside which feelings can be made sense of, thus furthering resilience by achieving a better ability to separate good qualities of the self from self-destructive, anti-social aspects of the internal object.     

Evaluation of the effect of Spiritual care on patients with generalized anxiety and depression: a randomized controlled study

The present study was conducted to assess the effect of spiritual care in patients with depression, anxiety or both in a randomized controlled design. The participants were randomized either to receive spiritual care or not and Hamilton anxiety rating scale-A (HAM-A), Hamilton depression rating scale-D (HAM-D), WHO-quality of life-Brief (WHOQOL-BREF) and Functional assessment of chronic illness therapy – Spiritual well-being (FACIT-Sp) were assessed before therapy and two follow-ups at 3 and 6 week. However, with regard to the spiritual care therapy group, statistically significant differences were observed in both HAM-A and HAM-D scales between the baseline and visit 2 (p < 0.001), thus significantly reducing symptoms of anxiety and depression, respectively. No statistically significant differences were observed for any of the scales during the follow-up periods for the control group of participants. When the scores were compared between the study groups, HAM-A, HAM-D and FACIT-Sp 12 scores were significantly lower in the interventional group as compared to the control group at both third and sixth weeks. This suggests a significant improvement in symptoms of anxiety and depression in the spiritual care therapy group than the control group; however, large randomized controlled trials with robust design are needed to confirm the same.     

Really Ultimate Reality

This essay sketches a radically apophatic conception of ultimate reality, explains how rational comparison and evaluation of theological views is possible, and indicates how this view comports with the social and natural sciences. Really ultimate reality, whatever it finally is, is beyond being, and thus beyond the putative gods that are held to be beings.     

The 'secret cocoon': fantasies about the private self in the absence of consensual reality

Clinical material is presented from an analysand whose defense of withdrawal to 'a private internal space' was mobilized when she became confused, within her relationships and within the transference, about whose understanding of a shared event was 'real.' Analysis of the defense as resistance revealed a disrupted sense of connection to others and to the analyst in the face of the difficulty in determining a consensual reality. This was accompanied by emotional withdrawal, with a complex fantasy of retreat to a protective inner hiding place, or cocoon. The phenomenology and functions of such withdrawals, the fantasies accompanying them, and the ways in which they changed during the analysis are discussed in this paper. For the patient described, the analysis of her shifting 'cocoon' states and of the fantasies connected with them eventually enabled her to access her creative 'private self' more freely and with less conflict.     

Reading Susan Isaacs: toward a radically revised theory of thinking

The author views Isaacs's (1952) paper, The nature and function of phantasy, as making an important contribution to the development of a radically revised psychoanalytic theory of thinking. Perhaps Isaacs's most important contribution is the notion that phantasy is the process that creates meaning, and that phantasy is the form in which all meanings - including feelings, defense 'mechanisms,' impulses, bodily experiences, and so on - exist in unconscious mental life. The author discusses both explicit formulations offered by Isaacs as well as his own extensions of her ideas. The latter include (1) the idea that phantasying generates not only unconscious psychic content, but also constitutes the entirety of unconscious thinking; (2) the notion that transference is a form of phantasying that serves as a way of thinking for the first time (in relation to the analyst) emotional events that occurred in the past, but were too disturbing to be experienced at the time they occurred and (3) a principal aim and function of phantasy is that of fulfilling the human need to get to know and understand the truth of one's experience. The author concludes by discussing the relationship between Isaacs's concept of phantasy and Bion's concepts of alpha function and the human need for the truth, as well as the differences between Fairbairn's and Isaacs's conceptions of the nature of unconscious internal object relationships.     

WHAT IS “MYTHIC REALITY”?

Abstract. The topic of the March 2011 symposium in Zygon is “The Mythic Reality of the Autonomous Individual.” Yet few of the contributors even discuss “mythic reality.” Of the ones who do, most cavalierly use “myth” dismissively, as simply a false belief. Rather than reconciling myth with reality, they oppose myth to reality. Their view of myth is by no means unfamiliar or unwarranted, but they need to recognize other views of myth and to defend their own. Above all, they need to appreciate the grip that any belief aptly labelled myth has—a grip that holds at least as much for a false belief as for a true one.