God of the hinge: treating LGBTQIA patients

This paper looks at systems of gender within the context of analysis. It explores the unique challenges of individuation faced by transsexual, transgender, gender queer, gender non‐conforming, cross‐dressing and intersex patients. To receive patients generously we need to learn how a binary culture produces profound and chronic trauma. These patients wrestle with being who they are whilst simultaneously receiving negative projections and feeling invisible. While often presenting with the struggles of gender conforming individuals, understanding the specifically gendered aspect of their identity is imperative. An analyst's unconscious bias may lead to iatrogenic shaming. The author argues that rigorous, humble inquiry into the analyst's transphobia can be transformative for patient, analyst, and the work itself. Analysis may, then, provide gender‐variant patients with their first remembered and numinous experience of authentic connection to self. Conjuring the image of a hinge, securely placed in the neutral region of a third space, creates a transpositive analytic temenos. Invoking the spirit of the Trickster in the construction of this matrix supports the full inclusion of gender‐variant patients. Nuanced attunement scaffolds mirroring and the possibility of play. Being mindful that gender is sturdy and delicate as well as mercurial and defined enriches the analyst's listening.     

Christianity in Iran: A Brief Survey

This article reviews the long and varied history of Christianity in the country now known as Iran. The historical emphasis is on the Assyrian Church of the East, although other churches are also mentioned. The relationship, successively, with Zoroastrianism and with Islam, as the dominant religious traditions, is discussed, as are its implications for the wider Islamic world. Western contacts with Iran, and, in particular, those of western churches, are also examined. In the light of this historical analysis, and from discussion of the situation since the Islamic Revolution, some conclusions are advanced about the prospects for Christianity in the new contemporary context.     

Two Shi‘i Jurisprudential Methodologies to Address Medical and Bioethical Challenges: Traditional Ijtihād and Foundational Ijtihād

The legal‐ethical dynamism in Islamic law which allows it to respond to the challenges of modernity is said to reside in the institution of ijtihād (independent legal thinking and hermeneutics). However, jurists like Mohsen Kadivar and Ayatollah Fa?lalla have argued that the “traditional ijtihād” paradigm has reached its limits of flexibility as it allows for only minor adaptations and lacks a rigorous methodology because of its reliance on vague and highly subjective juridical devices such as public welfare (ma?la?a), imperative necessity (?arūra), emergency (i?tirār), need (?āja), averting difficulty (‘usr) and distress (?araj), hardship (mashaqqa), and harm (?arar) without interrogating the fundamentals (u?ūl) of ijtihād. In contrast, in the “foundational ijtihād” model theology, ethics, intellect, epistemology, linguistics, hermeneutics, modern sciences, history, cosmology, anthropology, and the sources of Islamic legal theory (u?ūl al‐fiqh) interact with one another to obtain resolutions that are just and non‐discriminatory.     

Marital Processes Linking Gender Role Attitudes and Marital Satisfaction Among Mexican‐Origin Couples: Application of an Actor–Partner Interdependence Mediation Model

Informed by dyadic approaches and culturally informed, ecological perspectives of marriage, we applied an actor–partner interdependence mediation model (APIMeM) in a sample of 120 Mexican‐origin couples to examine (a) the associations linking Mexican immigrant husbands’ and wives’ gender role attitudes to marital satisfaction directly and indirectly through marital processes (i.e., warmth and negativity) and (b) whether the associations between spouses’ gender role attitudes and marital processes were moderated by wives’ employment. Although previous research has identified spouses’ gender role attitudes as potential predictors of spouses’ marital satisfaction, no study has examined these links in a dyadic model that elucidates how gender role attitudes may operate through processes to shape marital satisfaction and conditions under which associations may differ. We found that when spouses reported less sex‐typed attitudes, their partners reported feeling more connected to them and more satisfied with the marriage, regardless of whether wives were employed. Our results suggest that marital satisfaction was highest for those Mexican‐origin couples in which marital partners were less sex‐typed in their attitudes about marital roles to the extent that partners’ attitudinal role flexibility promoted spouses’ feelings of warmth and connection to their partner.     

Treating Multidimensional Presenting Problems with a Mutually Integrative Approach Using the Genogram

The present article introduces a case study and describes a mutually integrative approach to treating a complex presenting problem. This article examines the specific issues surrounding integration when a supervisor and supervisee hold different theoretical perspectives. On occasion, such a relationship demands that the supervisee adhere to the model being taught by the supervisor. Examining integration in this format presents many advantages for both treatment and training. The key to the mutual integration is that two schools of psychotherapy can be combined in a way that creates a synergy; in that, together they are more powerful than either may be in isolation. A genogram with symbols from each model is incorporated to focus the treatment and create a format for the mutual integration.     

Cultural identity in Siberia and in analytical practice

This paper discusses the main features of Siberian identity formed throughout the historical development of Siberia under the influence of social, economic, geographical, climatic, and other factors. Siberian cultural identity is closely connected with the mythology and ancient religion of the indigenous peoples of Siberia – shamanism, whose rituals, images, symbols, and motifs are often manifested in the clients’ dreams. Following an in‐depth study of Siberian history and culture, I formulate a complex of homelessness rooted in a deep collective trauma that left its imprint on people’s psyche. Three clinical cases presented in the paper reveal a deep relationship between cultural complexes and collective traumas on the one hand, and individual complexes and traumas, on the other. My psychotherapeutic practice shows that a client’s awareness of their history and culture brings them closer to the meaning and source of their suffering, which, in turn, helps them find their own way of individuation, rather than relive the transgenerational trauma of their ancestors.     

Comments on the 2018 IAAP Conference on Archetype Theory: defending a non‐reductive biological approach

During the course of the 2018 IAAP conference, a criticism of Jung’s idea of the archetype as inherited predisposition was raised that involved examining a number of dreams and visions and assessing them through developments in genetics and neuroscience. From this comparison it was argued that archetypes cannot be inherited and could more reasonably be argued to derive from early experiences. In this essay, the author responds by showing how this conclusion is flawed due to being based on reductive errors. An alternative, non‐reductive but inherited and biological position on the archetype is defended.     

The controversy around the concept of archetypes and the place for an emergent/developmental model

This paper addresses two key controversial questions to do with the concept of archetypes – do they operate autonomously without connection to an individual's personal life experience? Does their biological base mean they are genetically determined, innate and thus a priori inherited psychic structures? These questions are addressed through the case of a person who began life as an unwanted pregnancy, was adopted at birth and as an adult, experienced profound waking visions. An emergent/developmental model of archetype is outlined which stresses developmental start‐points through this infant's engagement via response and reaction to the affective and material world of the infant/birth mother matrix and from which emergence later occurs by way of participation in a socio‐cultural and material context. The emergentism aspect of this model rescues it from being reductionist since it allows for cultural and socialisation inputs. The model's explanatory power is vastly enlarged by combining this with the developmental component. Critically, once developmentally produced mind/brain (image schema) structures are in place, they have the capacity to generate psychological life. Imagery can then appear as if it is innately derived when that is not the case. The contemporary neuroscience which supports this model is both outlined and related back to the case example.     

Beyond the logic of Lemma: the oneness of life and its environment,the oneness of within and without

In this paper the ‘analyst as a citizen in the world’ is understood as the analyst interconnecting and harmonising with his or her environment, including not only society, but also nature and the universe. In this sense, Buddhism teaches the Oneness of Life and its Environment, and links are made between Mahayana Buddhism and Jung's understanding of the Self and individuation. The Logic of Lemma in the Flower Ornament Sutra indicates that all phenomena in the world can merge with each other without losing individuality; ten stages are described from the Lotus Sutra and links are made with the development in respect to the ego; Kenji Miyazawa and his work are given as examples to illustrate this. Causality and synchronicity are explored in terms of the interaction between the individual and the environment, and three examples are given where sometimes individual, egoic, causality is more of a feature and sometimes synchronicity has a greater prominence. The paper ends with an examination of tree drawings, made over a period of 50 years by junior high school students, which indicates the way that these individuals have portrayed themselves and their relation to their environment.