A Longitudinal Study of Parental Depressive Symptoms and Coparenting in the First 18 Months

Although the negative impact of postpartum depression on parenting behaviors has been well established—albeit separately—for mothers and fathers, the respective and joint impact of both parents' mood on family‐group interactive behaviors, such as coparenting support and conflict behaviors between the parents, have not yet been investigated. The aim of this study was to examine the association between parental depressive symptoms and coparenting behaviors in a low‐risk sample of families with infants, exploring reciprocity between the variables, as well as gender differences between mothers and fathers regarding these links. At 3 (T1), 9 (T2), and 18 months postpartum (T3), we assessed both parents' depressive symptoms with a self‐report questionnaire and observed coparenting support and conflict during triadic mother–father–child interactions. The results revealed that higher maternal depressive symptoms at T1 were associated with lower support at T1 and T2. Conflict at T3 was associated with higher maternal depressive symptoms at T3 and, more surprisingly, with less depressive symptoms in mothers at T2 and fathers at T3. Cross‐lagged associations suggested that parental depressive symptoms were more likely to influence coparenting than the reverse. Moreover, maternal depressive symptoms were more likely to be linked to coparenting behaviors than were paternal depressive symptoms. These results confirm that parental—mostly maternal—depressive symptoms, even of mild intensity, may jeopardize the development of healthy family‐level relations, which previous research has shown to be crucial for child development.     

Attachment Representation and Sensitivity: The Moderating Role of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in a Refugee Sample

It has been hypothesized that adult attachment representations guide caregiving behavior and influence parental sensitivity, and thus affect the child's socio‐emotional development. Several studies have shown a link between posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and reduced parental sensitivity, so it is possible that PTSD moderates the relationship between insecure attachment representations and insensitivity. In this study symptoms of PTSD (Harvard Trauma Questionnaire), parental sensitivity (Emotional Availability Scales), and attachment representations (Attachment Script Assessment) were assessed in 53 parents who were asylum seekers or refugees. Results showed that when parents were less able to draw on secure attachment representations, symptoms of PTSD increased the risk of insensitive parenting. These findings suggest that parental sensitivity is affected not just by attachment representations, but by a conjunction of risk factors including symptoms of PTSD and insecure attachment representations. These parents should therefore be supported to establish or confirm secure models of attachment experiences, to facilitate their ability interact sensitively and form a secure relationship with their children.     

The future of Jungian analysis: strengths,weaknesses, opportunities,threats (‘SWOT’)

Using a methodology derived from management and organizational studies, the author reviews the future of Jungian analysis. The methodology is termed SWOT – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. A selected list in each of these categories is presented. The author is transparent in allowing for the fact that the paper not only derives from a public lecture on the topic, but also retains the immediacy and the contrarian and opinionated style of such a lecture.     

Bridging worlds: participatory thinking in Jungian context

Introducing the ‘participatory’ paradigm associated with the work of transpersonalists Richard Tarnas and Jorge Ferrer, the author outlines an approach to Jung's archetypal thinking that might offer a more adequate basis in which to ground a non‐reductive approach to practice. In order to demonstrate the relevance of this outlook at the present time, the author begins by examining recent debates concerning the nature of ‘truth’ in the clinical setting. Reflecting on the difficulties analysts face in attempting to maintain professional authority without falling into an implicit authoritarianism, it is argued that any approach to therapy seeking to orient itself towards ‘the unconscious’ must posit the challenges of pluralism as a central concern for practice. With reference to the relationship between analytical psychology and the psychoanalytic mainstream, attention is drawn to the theoretical problems raised by the relational commitment to constructivist epistemologies, and a consequent tendency towards biological reductionism. Turning to the Jungian literature, similar tensions are observed at play in the present state of analytical psychology. Drawing attention to the process‐oriented qualities of Jung's work, it is suggested that the speculative nature of Jung's psychology offers a more adequate basis for contemporary practice than might be assumed.     

Disintegration of the self and the regeneration of ‘psychic skin’ in the treatment of traumatized refugees

This paper presents a tentative understanding of the characteristics of the extreme traumas, elsewhere called ‘complex PTSD’, that some refugees and asylum‐seekers bring into therapy. It suggests that these kinds of traumas suffered during adulthood may involve a disintegration of the self and a loss of ‘psychic skin’. This conceptualization is derived from the treatment of a refugee who survived multiple extreme traumas and with whom efforts were made in therapy to identify a complex methodology making use of supplementary therapeutic tools in addition to individual psychotherapy. The case demonstrates how the disintegration of self implies not only a deep somato‐psychic dissociation, but also a loss of intrapsychic and interpersonal space. In the treatment this was worked through via repetition of the victim‐aggressor dynamics at multiple levels. In the end, the therapeutic context was structured like a set of concentric layers, creating a ‘bandage’ over the patient's wounds whilst his ‘psychic skin’ was able to regenerate. The conditions triggered by extreme traumas in refugees challenge some of the cornerstones of individual psychoanalytic technique, as well as the idea that individual therapy may be thought of as existing in an environmental vacuum.     

The latency complex: the dead hand of anti‐development

It is common knowledge that the same phenomena can be viewed in a variety of ways. This paper considers the implications of a constellation observed in some adult patients who have increasingly reminded the author of some of the children of latency age with whom he has also worked. In the literature these patients may also have been thought about in terms of ‘defences of the self’ (Fordham), patients who are ‘difficult to reach’ (Joseph), ‘psychic retreats’ (Steiner), and those who make ‘attacks on linking’ (Bion). They may equally be considered in terms of schizoid, narcissistic or borderline personalities, or as showing features on the autistic spectrum, such as mindlessness and extreme obsessionality. Writers such as Helene Deutsch with her concept of an ‘as‐if personality’, Winnicott with his ‘false self’, and Rosenfeld, discussing the split‐off parts of the personality in narcissistic patients, have also offered much to think about in their consideration of some of these phenomena. This paper proposes yet another vertex – the author's own imaginative conjecture – that is by no means mutually exclusive of any of these others.     

A lemma science of mind: the potential of the Kegon (Flower Ornament) Sutra

The paper argues for a new perspective on the relationship between Buddhism and European psychology, or sciences of the mind, based in the Kegon Sutra, a text that emerged in the early stages of Mahayana Buddhism (3^rd ‐ 5^th century CE). The basis of European science is logos intellection, formalized by Aristotle as following three laws: the law of identity, the law of contradiction and the law of the excluded middle. Logic in the Buddhist tradition, by contrast, is based in lemma (meaning to understand as a whole not with language, but with intuition). Lemma‐based science born in the Buddhist tradition shows that rational perception is possible even without the three laws of logos. The Kegon Sutra, which explains what Buddha preached only a week after he attained enlightenment, is unified under the logic of lemma and can be seen as an effort to create a ‘lemma science of the mind’. The fundamental teaching of the Kegon Sutra is explored, and its principles are compared with primary process thinking and the unconscious as outlined by Freud and Jung. Jung's research of Eastern texts led him to create a science of the mind that went further than Freud: his concept of synchronicity is given by way of example and can be seen anew within the idea of a lemma‐based science.     

Psychological implications of a vision disorder

The paper discusses how the condition of crossed‐eyes affects a baby's eye contact with mother and potentially results in the loss of a vital emotional connection with her during the earliest days of life. This loss may contribute to a rupture that arrests emotional development at a deep psychic level. It is suggested that, in the same way as premature separation, the rupture can precipitate a ‘fusional complex’, a defence that develops to protect the infant against psychotic anxieties. The paper proposes that psychological development atrophies in this place and creates a blind spot. These ideas are explored through analytic theory and developmental literature. The dreams of a patient and his art are used to illustrate a 10‐year ‘alchemical’ process of bringing repressed material into consciousness and transformation. Healing the psychological wounds of deficits in early eye contact may be found to bring sight to a blind spot that was created by the nature of the condition itself.     

Unformulated experience,dissociation, and Nachträglichkeit

The paper is divided into two parts. The first part is an interpersonal/relational psychoanalytic account of some relationships between dissociation, time, and unformulated experience. Trauma, and the dissociation to which trauma leads, freezes time, which makes it impossible to formulate certain kinds of new experience. Instead, potential new meanings remain unformulated. The route of clinical access to frozen time is the interpersonal field: to thaw time and allow new experience, the ways in which the interpersonal field is itself frozen need to be addressed. A clinical illustration of these ideas is offered. The second part of the paper presents and explores a point of confluence between the views in Part 1 and certain aspects of French psychoanalysis, with particular reference to the concept of Nachträglichkeit in the work of Jean Laplanche and Haydée Faimberg.     

‘Clemency on the way to the gallows’: death,dreams and dissociation

The survivor of a decade of childhood sexual trauma and violence, perpetrated by a monstrous father, produced a series of dreams in the final year of a ten‐year analysis. They illuminated the ‘death drive’ beneath a lifelong preoccupation with dying and fantasies of submission to death, perpetuated by the promise of hoped‐for freedom from pain and release from a life of suffering. The initial dream involved the collapse of a team of white horses drawing him in a pillory cart to his own hanging for a crime he did not commit. It signified the collapse of a fragile psychological system based on his role as the ‘sacrificial lamb,’ protecting a (not so) innocent mother. The raw truth was now unconcealed: primal, violent, and terrifying dreams and affects emerged where he was now the murderous aggressor. His dreams would become primary agents for an instinctive, life‐giving authenticity to emerge, offering him clemency from the shattering repetitions of persecution and dissociation.