The career development of Christiaan Neethling Barnard: A psychobiography

This study employs a psychobiographical case study to describe and interpret the career development of Christiaan Neethling Barnard, who performed the first human heart transplant. It interprets Barnard's life history according to the career development model of Greenhaus, Callanan and Godshalk (2010), which proposes the following four stages: occupational and organisational choice, early, middle, and late career. Generally, Barnard's career progression matched the stages proposed by Greenhaus et al. (2010 Greenhaus, J. H., Callanan, G. A., & Godschalk, V. M. (2010). Career management (4th ed.). Los Angeles: Sage. [Google Scholar]). Exceptions were noted that relate to the first and fourth stages: Barnard experienced an extended occupational and organisational choice stage, while he showed no signs of career disengagement during the late career stage. The study confirmed the usefulness of the career development model of Greenhaus et al. within the psychobiographical research tradition.     

Young Women who Have Experienced Unwanted Pregnancy: A Multiple Case Study

Qualitative approaches were used to understand the experience of pregnancy in a group of young Xhosa women (N =10, M age = 19.70, SD = 3.20). Data is provided on their retrospective accounts of factors which contributed towards unwanted pregnancy. Thematic content analysis revealed a range of influences on pregnancy including: background, parenting and restrictions; stigma towards contraception; carelessness and ignorance; power and pressure from the partner; and shifting responsibility.     

Motivating Reductionism about Sets

The paper raises some difficulties for the typical motivations behind set reductionism, the view that sets are reducible to entities identified independently of set theory.     

Naturalizing Moral Justification: Rethinking the Method of Moral Epistemology

The companion piece to this article, “Situating Moral Justification,” challenges the idea that moral epistemology's mission is to establish a single, all‐purpose reasoning strategy for moral justification because no reasoning practice can be expected to deliver authoritative moral conclusions in all social contexts. The present article argues that rethinking the mission of moral epistemology requires rethinking its method as well. Philosophers cannot learn which reasoning practices are suitable to use in particular contexts exclusively by exploring logical relations among concepts. Instead, in order to understand which reasoning practices are capable of justifying moral claims in different types of contexts, we need to study empirically the relationships between reasoning practices and the contexts in which they are used. The article proposes that philosophers investigate case studies of real‐world moral disputes in which people lack shared cultural assumptions and/or are unequal in social power. It motivates and explains the proposed case study method and illustrates the philosophical value of this method through a case study.     

Some effects of external circumstances on the inner experience of two child patients

This paper describes the research findings that formed part of a professional doctorate in Child Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. It explores the impact of unresolved mourning following parental death in early adolescence on subsequent adolescent development. Via reference to a single case study, it describes emergent and overlapping themes related both to the bereavement process and adolescent development, and links the themes with psychoanalytic theoretical research in both adolescent development and bereavement. It considers how these themes changed over the course of an intensive psychotherapeutic treatment.     

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation improves word production in Conduction Aphasia: Electroencephalographic and behavioral evidences

A Conduction Aphasic patient, RH, with many difficulties at the level of phonological output, was subjected to Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) therapy six months after suffering a stroke. Fifteen daily sessions were administered (five days per week). The treatment led to a better intra-hemispheric electrical coherence and inter-hemispheric balance, as shown by the quantitative EEG analysis. Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation therapy was shown to be effective in inhibiting irregular activation of the right hemisphere, offering the healthy areas of the left hemisphere the possibility of reassuming their linguistic processing abilities. Also, the number of errors in picture naming and repetition of words and pseudowords dropped considerably following treatment. The recovery was greater for long stimuli and was not affected by semantic or lexical variables such as familiarity. These results suggest that the Phonological Output Buffer, a mechanism dedicated to the maintenance, ordering and production of phoneme strings, was the processing stage modified by the treatment.     

A Professor's Experience With Loss: An Autobiographical Case Study

The purpose of this article is to present an autobiographical case study chronicling a psychology professor's experience with grief and the loss of her father during the early stages of her academic career. The article highlights the obstacles faced in dealing with anticipatory grief but also demonstrates how clinicians and researchers may use adverse life circumstances to develop research and applied programs centered around their experiences. Rooted in Viktor Frankl's work on logotherapy, the author demonstrates how traumatic experiences can help psychologists find meaning and purpose in their work. Directions for future research focusing on larger scale populations are addressed.     

Model selection for minimum‐diameter partitioning

The minimum‐diameter partitioning problem (MDPP) seeks to produce compact clusters, as measured by an overall goodness‐of‐fit measure known as the partition diameter, which represents the maximum dissimilarity between any two objects placed in the same cluster. Complete‐linkage hierarchical clustering is perhaps the best‐known heuristic method for the MDPP and has an extensive history of applications in psychological research. Unfortunately, this method has several inherent shortcomings that impede the model selection process, such as: (1) sensitivity to the input order of the objects, (2) failure to obtain a globally optimal minimum‐diameter partition when cutting the tree at K clusters, and (3) the propensity for a large number of alternative minimum‐diameter partitions for a given K. We propose that each of these problems can be addressed by applying an algorithm that finds all of the minimum‐diameter partitions for different values of K. Model selection is then facilitated by considering, for each value of K, the reduction in the partition diameter, the number of alternative optima, and the partition agreement among the alternative optima. Using five examples from the empirical literature, we show the practical value of the proposed process for facilitating model selection for the MDPP.     

La pratique du psychologue en Ehpad en période de crise sanitaire : comment maintenir le soin psychique ?

Nursing homes were particularly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic during the two waves of contamination in 2020. Caregivers had no previous support and knowledge to think this crisis. The confinement, the sanitary rules came to reinforce the split between the external world and the interior of these establishments. Everyone was active, in an almost maniacal movement, to reject the death's anxiety. It is in a transitional space between inside and outside that the role and the practice of the psychologist have found their full meaning, by trying to maintain a fragile link with the familiar. From a clinical situation illustrating the evolution of the link between an elderly resident in nursing home, Mrs. O. and her daughter, this article attempts to show how the psychologist needs to reorient his intervention framework, by flirting with limits of it. Not only did this crisis provide irrefutable proof of our vulnerability, but it also allowed us to exploit new resources in our practices.     

A metasynthesis of published case studies through Lacan's L‐schema: Transference in perversion

Transference in perversion is characterized by specific problems such as a defiant and polemic attitude, erotic transference, projections, and aggression. Such transference poses particular problems in the treatment of perversion and might render analytical work with these patients impossible. The authors propose that Lacan's L‐schema can contribute to separating productive from counterproductive aspects of transference as it distinguishes between an Imaginary and a Symbolic dimension in transference. In this meta‐synthesis of 11 published case studies on sexual perversion, patterns of transference are analysed. On the Imaginary dimension, the authors found that patients with perversion tend to (un)consciously engage the analyst in a relationship characterized by identification, fusion and rivalry. On the Symbolic dimension, they found that perverse patients are able to question their motives, lapses, symptoms, and subjective identity. The thematic analysis revealed the importance of the position of the analyst in this work, which is described within the L‐schema as being the representative of the otherness in the Other. Implications for clinical practice and recommendations for further research are outlined.