Can men talk about problems with weight? The therapeutic implications of a discourse analytic study

This paper discusses the implications for counsellors of a discourse analytic study examining men's talk about body weight. It is argued that research in the area of problems with body has neglected the growing pressures on men to manage body as a feature of self. This research perpetuates the dominant discursive construction of men's relationship to body as unproblematic — a construction that may present many barriers to men in seeking help for any distress encountered. An analysis of men's talk is discussed in terms of the expectation that body is not problematic and the observable downplaying of any concerns acknowledged. The accountability of body as a site of regulation also emerges within the extracts presented. It is argued that this property within the accounts resonates with work highlighting the growing pressures on men to exercise control over body. The contradictions between the two discourses identified are discussed in terms of their therapeutic implications. It is postulated that male distress emerging from the growing pressures to maintain body weight may be neglected within primary care and therapeutic domains if discourses formulating such difficulties as not relevant to men remain dominant.     

Where are you,my beloved?: On absence,loss, and the enigma of telepathic dreams

The subject of dream telepathy (especially patients' telepathic dreams) and related phenomena in the psychoanalytic context has been a controversial, disturbing ‘foreign body’ ever since it was introduced into psychoanalysis by Freud in 1921. Telepathy ‐ suffering (or intense feeling) at a distance (Greek: pathos + tele)‐is the transfer or communication of thoughts, impressions and information over distance between two people without the normal operation of the recognized sense organs. The author offers a comprehensive historical review of the psychoanalytic literature on this controversial issue, beginning with Freud' years‐long struggles over the possibility of thoughttransference and dream telepathy. She then describes her own analytic encounter over the years with five patients' telepathic dreams' dreams involving precise details of the time, place, sensory impressions, and experiential states that the analyst was in at that time, which the patients could not have known through ordinary sensory perception and communication. The author's ensuing explanation combines contributory factors involving patient, archaic communication and analyst. Each of these patients, in early childhood, had a mother who was emotionally absent‐within‐absence, due to the absence of a significant figure in her own life. This primary traumatic loss was imprinted in their nascent selves and inchoate relating to others, with a fixation on a nonverbal, archaic mode of communication. The patient's telepathic dream is formed as a search engine when the analyst is suddenly emotionally absent, in order to find the analyst and thus halt the process of abandonment and prevent collapse into the despair of the early traumatization. Hence, the telepathic dream embodies an enigmatic ‘impossible’ extreme of patient‐analyst deep‐level interconnectedness and unconscious communication in the analytic process. This paper is part of the author's endeavour to grasp the true experiential scope and therapeutic significance of this dimension of fundamental patient‐analyst interconnectedness.