The Therapeutic Relationship as Viewed by Existential Psychotherapy: Re-Embracing the World

Existential psychotherapy places pivotal significance upon the interrelational aspects of human experience. By so doing, the therapeutic relationship itself becomes the principal means through which the client's presenting symptoms and disorders are disclosed as direct expressions and outcomes of the client's overall way of being rather than as isolated and disruptive impediments. This paper examines the therapeutic relationship as viewed from four primary interrelational dimensions. Further, it focuses upon psychotherapy's tendency to exclude the world from the therapeutic relationship and provides two novel and challenging alternatives whose principal aim is to bring the world back into the therapeutic relationship.     

A Work in Progress

After expressing gratitude to each contributor, and briefly commenting on each, I probe several main themes of my work, addressing the question of the apparent difference between my earlier philosophical and later clinical writings. Central to both is the reflexivity of the human agent, and that each exhibits a form of practice regardless of the specific aims embedded in each. I then address the theme of narrative writing as my work has developed over the past several decades – at the heart of which are questions of self and integrity.     

Richard Zaner’s Phenomenology of the Clinical Encounter

The clinical ethics propounded by Richard Zaner is unique. Partly because of his phenomenological orientation and partly because of his own daily practice as a clinical ethicist in a large university hospital, Zaner focuses on the particular concrete situations in which patients and their families confront illness and injury and struggle toward workable ways for dealing with them. He locates ethical reality in the clinical encounter. This encounter encompasses not only patient and physician but also the patients family and friends and indeed the entire lifeworld in which the patient is still striving to live. In order to illuminate the central moral constituents of such human predicaments, Zaner discusses the often-overlooked features of disruption and crisis, the changed self, the patients dependence and the physicians power, the violation of personal boundaries and their necessary reconfiguring, and the art of listening.     

Test of a potential link between analytic and nonanalytic category learning and automatic, effortful processing

The link between automatic and effortful processing and nonanalytic and analytic category learning was evaluated in a sample of 29 college undergraduates using declarative memory, semantic category search, and pseudoword categorization tasks. Automatic and effortful processing measures were hypothesized to be associated with nonanalytic and analytic categorization, respectively. Results suggested that contrary to prediction strong criterion-attribute (analytic) responding on the pseudoword categorization task was associated with strong automatic, implicit memory encoding of frequency-of-occurrence information. Data are discussed in terms of the possibility that criterion-attribute category knowledge, once established, may be expressed with few attentional resources. The data indicate that attention resource requirements, even for the same stimuli and task, vary depending on the category rule system utilized. Also, the automaticity emerging from familiarity with analytic category exemplars is very different from the automaticity arising from extensive practice on a semantic category search task. The data do not support any simple mapping of analytic and nonanalytic forms of category learning onto the automatic and effortful processing dichotomy and challenge simple models of brain asymmetries for such procedures.     

决策与推理的双系统——启发式系统和分析系统

近来,在决策与推理的研究中,研究者提出了双系统作用模型：基于直觉的启发式系统和基于理性的分析系统。启发式系统加工速度较快,不占用或占用很少的心理资源,容易受背景相似性、刻板印象的影响;分析系统加工速度慢,占用较多的心理资源,遵从逻辑和规则,而且两个系统有不同进化历史和神经基础。该文根据已有的相关研究,综述了双系统在决策与推理中可能的作用机制、相互关系、个体差异,同时指出了目前研究存在的不足     

From symbolic law to narrative capacity: A paradigm shift in psychoanalysis?1

In the Freudian perspective, the primal phantasies, a refl ection of prehistory, oblige us through our phylogenetic heritage and its repetition in the ontogenetic to recognize the limits of generation and sex, to submit to the symbolic law represented by the father of the primal horde and to fi nd‐as is sought in the treatment‐one's ‘right’ place in the primal scene (Oedipus complex). Clinical experience with patients suffering from narcissistic disorders soon led certain analysts to propose a paradigm change, which has brought about important modifi cations to technique, but also, more recently, modifi cations at the level of metapsychology. Certain contemporary analysts have a conception of the subject focused on processes of interaction and communication between ‘thinking apparatuses’ in the here and now. The author shows that this current development is taking place in parallel with major trends in our postmodern era in which communication and negotiation replace former religious, mythical, philosophical, moral or political beliefs.     

Alphabetizing in old age

Abstract: A long term, intensive analysis with a woman in old old age is reported. An attempt is made to answer the question, ‘What, in analytic work, is healing?’. The patient's previous classical Jungian work is contrasted with the author's developmental perspective. It is suggested that an enactment, representing what Neville Symington has called an analyst's act of freedom, was crucial in effecting a profound transformation in the patient's psyche.     

Optimum route of the south transcontinental gas pipeline in SE Europe using AHP

The development of a south energy corridor connecting Europe with the natural gas reserves of the broader Caspian Region and Middle East aims at increasing the EU security and diversification of energy supply. In this paper, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method with geopolitical, economic and technical criteria is applied to define the most preferred route of the transcontinental gas pipeline that branches in SE Europe to transport Caspian gas further into the targeted markets of Europe. The paper is divided into five sections. The first introduces the purpose of the paper. The second describes the used AHP method in detail (criteria, sub-criteria, weights, consistency indexes). The third briefly addresses the need of EU to diversify its supply sources and the planned gas projects in SE Europe. In the fourth section, the method is applied to the four alternative pipeline routes and the robustness of the results is examined with sensitivity analysis. The fifth section comments on the results of the method. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The day the clock stopped. Primitive states of unintegration,multidimensional working through and the birth of the analytical subject

This paper is based on one idea and built around one clinical experience that helped me to broaden my comprehension of it. The idea, underlying the work of several authors, is that when the analytic field is saturated with primitive and unintegrated mental contents, the analyst’s somatic countertransference is a precious indicator of a deep, dissociated form of communication. The clinical experience concerns the difficult elaboration of a complex, multifaceted countertransference that took place during the early stages of the analysis of a sensitive patient who used to communicate in a very dissociated way and that I found hard to contain. This experience, closely described in the article, led me to formulate the clinical idea that the transference field may be made of distinct layers (psychoid, affective, verbal), and that each one of them may potentially convey dissociated, even contrasting bits of information. The corollary of this is that the analyst should be ready to accept contrasting sensations, feelings and thoughts at the same time, as they might be the basic ingredients of a complex reverie. The analyst could find himself/herself in front of his/her own internal unelaborated multiplicity before a symbolic image may emerge to link the scattered pieces of the experience. Nevertheless, the heart of this paper is not about suggesting an idea, but in the sharing of a complex working through, which fostered the birth of a new, more human relational perspective: the capacity of being together in time, in a transitional space where there is neither total separation nor fusion.