How is Systemic and Constructionist Therapy Change Process Narrated in Retrospective Accounts of Therapy? A Systematic Meta‐synthesis Review

Despite the considerable potential of qualitative approaches for studying the systemic and constructionist therapy process due to shared theoretical and epistemological premises, to date there is lack of a comprehensive qualitative synthesis of how change process is experienced and conceptualized by clients and therapists. To address this evidence gap, we performed a systematic meta‐synthesis review of 30 studies reporting clients’ and therapists’ retrospective narratives of change process across systemic and constructionist models and across a range of client configurations, including individuals, couples, families, and groups. The studies were identified following a systematic search in PsycINFO and MEDLINE resulting in 2,977 articles, which were screened against eligibility criteria. Thematic analysis led to the identification of four main themes: (1) navigating through differences, (2) toward nonpathologizing construction of problems, (3) navigating through power imbalances, and (4) toward new and trusting ways of relating. Findings illustrate the multifaceted aspects of systemic and constructionist change process, the importance for their reflexive appraisal, and the need for further research contributing to the understanding of the challenges inherent in the systemic and constructionist therapeutic context.     

The Milan Approach,History, and Evolution

The two authors intend to underline the continuities and discontinuities that organize the Milan Approach, after the splitting from Selvini Palazzoli and Prata; they intend to tell the teachings of Luigi Boscolo and Gianfranco Cecchin from the beginning of training in 1978 till nowadays. After having spoken of some important stages in the work till the death of the two masters, the article underlines two major new aspects. 1. We speak about the corporeal turn: embodied experience as preconceptual know‐how from which concepts are structured. We speak about the connections between bodies and social issues that enact forms of knowledge and understanding. 2. In this period of war, violence, and tyranny, we speak about epistemology and ontology as complementary stances: the need to let others disclose themselves, by allowing them to speak their own terms of engagement. The therapeutic effort is one of deactivating the dangers of one’s own presuppositions and prejudices that limit one’s capacity to describe and make hypothesis. There are social ontologies, communities with strong moral intensity, historical and social realities that need therapists to take position, since they need to take side and be aware of the categories they utilize. Historical and social ontology deals with the continuous change of symptoms in connection to the continuous change of the social panorama in the context we live in. We live by the bodies we are.     

Reflections on a wounded and bleeding temenos

COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and financial and political turmoil have uprooted our sense of personal and collective safety and predictability. Analysts are faced with professional and personal challenges, as well as a charge to help make sense of this new normal. This reflective piece focuses on the author’s thoughts on a wounded and bleeding temenos. She grapples with the new reality of analysis carried out via technology (e.g. Zoom or telehealth). The article interweaves personal experiences with theoretical and professional reflections on two Jewish myths that relate to creating temenos or sacred space in the face of ancient disasters. Specifically, she discusses Choni HaMagel, a first-century BCE Jewish scholar and miracle-maker who prays for relief from a drought from inside a sacred circle. She also tells the tale of four Chassidic Rebbes who face crisis from a sacred space in the forest. The author frames this piece with two personal and numinous dreams dreamt during the pandemic; one offering scenes of destruction and one offering hope for a future transformation.     

Archetypes of the pandemic

This paper attempts to read the psychological and emotional impact of the COVID-19 pandemic through the archetypal images contained in patients’ dreams. In these dreams, symbols related to the power of nature and to extreme danger are paired with feelings of detachment that seem to point to a traumatic dissociation, due to the archetypal experience that erupts in familiar surroundings. Through the humanization of the ineffable experience, dissociation, which in the beginning of the pandemic showed in high levels of anxiety, panic attacks and depersonalization, can be transformed into the overview needed for the search for meaning. The container for this process of transformation is the analyst, the real, virtual or imagined one, and his or her ability to relate and feel.     

Embodying the psychological attitude: types of consciousness in the transformation of culture

It is time to reclaim C.G. Jung’s vision of psychology as the foundational science upon which all sciences and institutions would be based, and as the discipline, theory, and practice necessary for fostering humanity’s overall psychocultural development. Jung identified eight distinct ‘types’ of consciousness through which humankind engages its emerging psychological attitude. Jung’s view of psychological development as hingeing on the differentiation of function-attitudes provides the means for understanding not only ourselves and each other, but our society as well. This paper offers an example of such an analysis by focusing on the current conflict within American political culture. The goal is as lofty as it is necessary: the operationalization of Jung’s vision of psychology as the powerful influencer of human cultural evolution that it has the potential to be. The immediate goal is to instigate the first step toward this vision of Jung’s ‘complex psychology’ by stimulating conversations among Jungians about how they can foster that vision, leading them towards taking up roles as ‘citizen therapists’, actively involved in their communities in cultivating greater empathy and the withdrawal of projections in the interest of furthering ‘collective consciousness’.     

Go Set a Watchman: revealing phantom narratives and shattering projections in the era of Black Lives Matter

Harper Lee’s novels, To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman, are examined through the lens of reader-response theory and the Jungian concept of the cultural complex or phantom narratives. Socio-historical context includes the American civil rights movement of the 60’s as well as Black Lives Matter. The clinical and institutional implications are briefly considered.     

Coronavirus: does its activation of archetypes of evil cause added psychological suffering?

Fear and grief caused by the pandemic have produced a powerful unconscious narrative in the collective psyche that the coronavirus is driven by an innately evil, and possibly divine, force. The resulting archetypal dimension of fear causes an extra layer of psychological suffering in individuals. This paper discusses how and why this narrative was created and why it is so compelling by looking at 1) the myth-making nature of the human psyche, 2) the psychodynamics of fear that drive the narrative, 3) the properties of the coronavirus and the pandemic that activate negative poles of some archetypes, in particular, archetypes of evil, and 4) asking how analytical psychology can help ease psychological suffering caused by these negative narratives, where one possibility is to invoke the transcendent function. The author’s personal experiences as both biochemist and analytical psychologist elucidate how the transcendent function can promote healing.     

Clinical experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic

Most of the clinical experiences discussed in this article arose from monthly Zoom meetings at Rome’s Italian Centre of Analytical Psychology (CIPA). We set up a discussion group in April 2020, one month after lockdown began in Italy, and these monthly online meetings continue to this day. All senior analysts and analysts-in-training at Rome’s CIPA, whose backgrounds range from child and adolescent psychotherapy to adult psychotherapy and analysis, to sandplay therapy and medicine and psychiatry, have been participating in these meetings. The group discussions focus on the present time and its impact on us, as well as on our relationships with patients. By further developing these reflections during the lockdown in Italy (9 March - 3 May 2020), it is fair to ask whether a sense of unreality, depersonalization, or derealization has occurred, either in the therapist or patient, and if so, whether it is possible that therapists miss the human contact more than clients. We will mainly refer to clinical and personal experiences as our most precious guidelines.     

Editorial

This paper is a response to William Meredith-Owen’s paper presented at the inaugural joint conference on ‘Alchemy, a bridge to Jung’s objective psyche’, for The Society of Analytical Psychology and the West Midlands Institute of Psychotherapy in autumn 2020. The paper presents a way of understanding the collective unconscious through the functioning of the core self, and thus offers a bridge which addresses the indivisibility of the personal and collective psyche/unconscious, referencing Mary Williams’ (1963) classic paper. Specifically, this is applied to Winnicott’s dream of destruction that he had after reviewing Memories, Dreams, Reflections, as well as to parts of the psyche that were dissociated due to significant early deprivation – the primary narcissistic wounds. Alchemical metaphors are shown to relate to the analytic process, which allows the primitive core self (with its identificatory, participatory, connecting nature), when integrated through relationship, to sink back into the unconscious and function as the Self.