Darwinian Happiness: Can the Evolutionary Perspective on Well-Being Help us Improve Society?

The concept of Darwinian Happiness was coined to help people take advantage of knowledge on how evolution has shaped the brain; as processes within this organ are the main contributors to well-being. Fortuitously, the concept has implications that may prove beneficial for society: Compassionate behavior offers more in terms of Darwinian Happiness than malicious behavior; and the probability of obtaining sustainable development may be improved by pointing out that consumption beyond sustenance is not important for well-being. It is difficult to motivate people to act against their own best interests. Darwinian Happiness offers a concept that, to some extent, combines the interests of the individual with the interests of society.     

Social Values and the Creative Ethos in the Greek Knowledge Society: A Phenomenological Analysis

Departing from Richard Florida's theory of the Creative Class, this article attempts to delineate the Greek creative ethos. The research involved in-depth interviews with knowledge and service workers in Greece. Adopting an existential view of creativity, which emphasizes the natural human inclination to create and engage with one's acts, and using valuing processes as tools to analyze workers’ discourses opens up the elements that underpin workers’ efforts to experience authenticity across life spheres and construct the meaning of work and good living. These efforts were sketched against a backdrop of adverse lived realities and intersected with anxious, alienated, and disempowered constructions of selfhood. Contrary to Florida's claims, the present article goes beyond positions of more or less creative workers and examines the various meanings of creativity underpinned by different lived realities.     

Mens sana in corpore sano: Psychotherapy with a cerebral palsy child aged nine months

This paper is the acount of the psychoanalytic understanding and treatment of a nine-month-old cerebral-palsy infant and her mother. When first seen, Abigail hung over her mother's arm, and would scream unceasingly if moved from this position. The mother-child relationship seemed to involve their sticking to each other without looking or losing contact. The mother's hidden hate, anger and resentment were communicated non-verbally and Abigail showed signs of finding it difficult or impossible to integrate experiences, given the amount of trauma she had suffered from an attempted abortion and the lack of enough experience of being loved to enable her to grow internally.

The process of assessing the internal world of the infant and her mother, and the thinking and planning of the psychotherapy that followed, are described. In order to promote the secure attachment of the mother-child dyad, and the emotional growth of both, the helping process focused on understanding both the baby's and mother's states in order to make sense of the child's inner world to the mother. Because of the acute pain this process involved for the mother, she was treated individually too, by a different therapist.     

Effects of impoverished environmental conditions on working memory performance

This cross-cultural study investigates the impact of background experience on four verbal and visuo-spatial working memory (WM) tasks. A total of 84 children from low-income families were recruited from the following groups: (1) Portuguese immigrant children from Luxembourg impoverished in terms of language experience; (2) Brazilian children deprived in terms of scholastic background; (3) Portuguese children from Portugal with no disadvantage in either scholastic or language background. Children were matched on age, gender, fluid intelligence, and socioeconomic status and completed four simple and complex span tasks of WM and a vocabulary measure. Results indicate that, despite large differences in their backgrounds and language abilities, the groups exhibited comparable performance on the visuo-spatial tasks dot matrix and odd-one-out and on the verbal simple span task digit recall. Group differences emerged on the verbal complex span task counting recall with children from Luxembourg and Portugal outperforming children from disadvantaged schools in Brazil. The study suggests that whereas contributions of prior knowledge to digit span, dot matrix, and odd-one-out are likely to be minimal, background experience can affect performance on counting recall. Implications for testing WM capacity in children growing up in poverty are discussed.     

Attachment Mediates the Childhood Maltreatment–Daily Hassles Link in Low-Income,Suicidal African American Women

This study examined if attachment patterns mediated the link between childhood maltreatment and total daily and interpersonally oriented life hassles in 135 low-income, inner-city, suicidal African American women. Participants completed self-report measures of childhood maltreatment, attachment styles, and daily life hassles dimensions. Bootstrapping analyses revealed that (a) negative views of self mediated the relationship between childhood maltreatment and social and cultural difficulties and social acceptability; and (b) negative views of other mediated the relationship between childhood maltreatment and total daily life hassles, social victimization, and social and cultural difficulties. These findings can inform interventions for suicidal African American women with a history of childhood maltreatment and subsequent maladaptive attachment styles.     

Alpha and evangelical conversion

A semi-structured interview study was conducted among 11 ‘Born Again’ Christians eliciting their conversion narratives. Informants emphasised the importance of embodying the Holy Spirit and developing a personal relationship with Christ in the process of conversion. The Alpha Course played an important role in this process.     

The fieldwork model: An anthropological perspective on the process of change in long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy

The question of what takes place in the psychoanalytic consulting room, and whether it has any therapeutic effect on the patient, has consistently been behind various criticisms of the long-term psychoanalytically informed therapies. When it comes to goal-oriented talking therapies –the only ones favoured by the state mechanism – statistical proof of their efficacy is thought of as proof of their scientific value. However, disciplines such as social anthropology have consistently based their complex understanding of social phenomena in qualitative data. This article draws upon the anthropological fieldwork model. It also looks at how anthropological theory has evolved as a result of the increasing centrality of the fieldwork model and a gradual acceptance of the inter-subjective process. It aims to highlight how lived experience, the paradigm on which the fieldwork model is based, constitutes a highly effective way of understanding in depth the patient and the patient's history. Such understanding is in turn the main factor behind profound and lasting psychological change. It is argued here that psychotherapy research and practice could be enhanced by following the example of anthropological qualitative research.     

Learning beyond the known

In this paper issues related to adult learning, such as self-directed and experiential learning are shown to hold a trace of the unknown, which has implications for psychotherapy training and practice. The unknown is traced through the problematic of individualistic approaches that restrict the emergence of unknowns by limiting possibility of the other, hindering recognition of our own cultural position and seeking to avoid anxiety. Learning is also shown to have links with experiences of change and loss, having in common the generation of anxiety, seen as both the driving force to know and the need to close down unknowing. Subsequently, learning is viewed as involving the potential to repeat the already known as well as opening up the possibility for something new. Psychoanalysis and continental philosophy are shown, in different ways, to help our understanding of the reasons for the anxiety occurring in times of transition, also showing the way fragmentary experiences act as a reminder of death. It is proposed that the relational aspects of learning are an important factor in learning to tolerate the anxiety and adult learning is thus seen as requiring possibility of the other, in relationship, in order to permit the unknown.