Scaling Up Family Therapy in Fragile,Conflict‐Affected States

This article discusses the design and delivery of two international family therapy‐focused mental health and psychosocial support training projects, one in a fragile state and one in a post‐conflict state. The training projects took place in Southeast Asia and the Middle East/North Africa. Each was funded, supported, and implemented by local, regional, and international stakeholders, and delivered as part of a broader humanitarian agenda to develop human resource capacity to work with families affected by atrocities. The two examples illustrate how task‐shifting/task‐sharing and transitional justice approaches were used to inform the scaling‐up of professionals involved in each project. They also exemplify how state‐citizen phenomena in each location affected the project design and delivery.     

Two Jungs. Apropos a paper by Mark Saban

Jung's idea of the ‘personal equation’ amounts to the reflection that theoretical differences between the psychologies that people teach are rooted in their personalities, in other words, that they are due to the psychology each one ‘has’. This concept also applies to different interpretations of Jung's work. The serious difficulties that Mark Saban has with my psychology are a case in point. Recourse to the concept of the personal equation reveals that Saban has his Jung and I have mine. With his insistence on his Talmudic methodological principle of dream interpretation, that ‘the dream is its own interpretation’, according to Saban Jung means nothing but a rejection of Freudian free association. My Jung goes far beyond that. Jung understands this methodological principle above all in terms of what he calls ‘circumambulation’. The main part of this paper is devoted to an elucidation of what circumambulation involves as a mode of dream interpretation. The paper concludes with the distinction Jung himself introduced between two types of reading of his work, either as ‘paper’ and ‘dead nostrums’ or as ‘fire and wind’, and pleads for a reconstruction of Jung's psychology as a whole in terms of his most advanced, deepest insights, instead of a dogmatic reading mainly based on the early Jung, a reading for which his later revolutionary insights are at best negligible embellishments.     

Conspiracies of immanence: Paul Tillich,Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and C.G. Jung

Jung's psychology proffers a sustained reflection on the traditional religious question of the relation of divine transcendence to immanence. On this issue his psychology affirms a position of radical immanence in its contention that the experience of divinity is initially wholly from within. Though this position remains on the periphery of religious and theological orthodoxy Jung is not alone in holding it among moderns. Paul Tillich adopts a similar stance with his controlling symbols of the divine as ‘Ground of Being’ and ‘Depth of Reason’. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin understands divinity as the experiential energy of evolution itself working within nature and humanity toward greater configurations of universal communion as the basis of community. All of Jung's master symbols of individuation assume such an understanding of immanence uniting individual and totality. His psychology strongly suggests and contributes to the current emergence of a new religious sensitivity based on the awareness of the intra‐psychic origin of all religions. In his later writings he held out such a position as a significant alternative to genocide.     

Saying goodbye to the hero: Jung,Liber Novus and conversion from addiction

Two chapters in Liber Novus throw fresh light on Jung's epistemology of addiction. Taking these as a starting point, the nature of the challenges that patients confront in leaving addiction behind are explored. It is suggested that an archetypal process of separation is constellated at the point of quitting as the precursor to a life without the object of the addiction. A short account is given of Jung's part in the inception of Alcoholics Anonymous and the potential role of a ‘conversion experience’ as an initiation into psychological reorientation away from the negative individuation experienced by the hero. The case of a patient addicted to heroin illustrates the contribution of an analytic approach in an NHS setting, along with other workers in a rehabilitation centre. Certain challenges of working with addicted people are outlined, including arousal of the psychotherapist's rescue fantasies.     

Relationships,Environment, and the Brain: How Emerging Research is Changing What We Know about the Impact of Families on Human Development

Recent research is providing family therapists with new information about the complex interaction between an individual's biological makeup and his/her social and physical environment. Family and social relationships, particularly during sensitive periods early in life, can affect a child's biological foundation. Additionally, stress during the early years can have a lasting effect on an individual's physical and mental health and contribute to the onset of severe mental illness. Community programs have been developed to intervene early with families who have an at‐risk child to prevent or minimize the onset of mental illness including providing partnerships with at‐risk mothers of infants to shape attachment relationships. Programs are also developing individual and family interventions to prevent the onset of psychosis. Practicing family therapists can incorporate emerging neuroscience and early intervention research and leverage the growing base of community programs to enhance the effectiveness and sustainability of mental health outcomes for clients. Additionally, family therapy education programs should broaden student training to incorporate the growing body of information about how family relationships affect individual mental health development.     

Factors Impacting the Mental Health of the Caregivers of Children with Asthma in China: Effects of Family Socioeconomic Status,Symptoms Control,Proneness to Shame,and Family Functioning

Caregiver mental health is widely considered to be an important factor influencing children's asthma symptoms. The present study aimed to examine key factors that contribute to caregiver mental health in pediatric asthma with a Chinese sample. Two hundred participants reported their family socioeconomic status (SES), proneness to shame, asthma symptoms control of their child, family functioning, and their depression and anxiety symptoms. Results suggested that low family SES, low family functioning, and a high level of shame proneness were associated with high levels of anxiety and depression for caregivers. Family functioning mediated the effects of SES and shame on caregiver mental health and also moderated the effects of SES and shame on caregiver depression. This study highlights the importance of reducing experience of shame and enhancing family functioning in families affected by pediatric asthma.     

Rôle du contrôle exécutif dans le raisonnement par analogie chez l’enfant et le primate non humain

Analogical reasoning (AR) is a cornerstone of human cognition. Two main theories have historically been proposed to account for the ontogeny of AR. They propose that analogical skills are constrained by children's logical skills or limited knowledge of the relations to be considered. We adopt an alternative perspective in this review paper suggesting that AR abilities depend on the efficiency of executive control. We present convergent data collected in children and monkeys highlighting the role of three main executive functions: inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility and working memory updating. The analysis of children's reasoning suggests that the contribution of relational knowledge and executive control to analogical reasoning cannot be considered independently.