Fairy tales,landscapes and metaphor in supervision: An exploratory study

Objective: Supervision is an important requirement for most health professionals and finding innovative and creative forms of ensuring safe and ethical practice are helpful to practitioners. This paper explores the use of fairy tales, mental landscapes and metaphors to illuminate the therapeutic and supervisory relationship. A therapy case study was used as reference. Design: The design was based on a grounded theory methodology and qualitative‐based collaborative meetings between professionals. Both researchers/participants were from different therapeutic backgrounds; drama therapy and integrative counselling. Findings: Two main themes emerged relating to the therapeutic process: (1) Using Archetypal themes in fairy tales to enhance the clarity of the therapeutic landscape; and (2) The facilitation of the sense system through the use of small objects to reconceptualise the therapeutic dynamic. Conclusion: The use of metaphor and small objects to explore retrospective therapeutic encounters can enhance the role of supervision by broadening the cognitive landscape of the therapist. Implications for the therapist/client and supervisor relationships are considered.     

Beyond Biblical Literacy: Developing Readerly Readers in Teaching Biblical Studies

Theological education in biblical studies often has focused on information, but it needs to emphasize developing skills and sensibilities in students that will produce confident, imaginative, and attentive readers. To form readers with a disciplined imagination—what we are calling “readerly readers”—educators need to inculcate skills and sensibilities that will enable students to interact with the text as a living voice, rather than as an object to be mastered, and to allow the text to provoke difficult, profound, or long‐term questions.     

Structure Disclosed. Replete Moments and Aesthetic Experience in Reading Novels

ABSTRACT

Despite the huge interest in different philosophical questions surrounding literature, particularly analytic philosophers have had relatively little to say about literature’s specifically aesthetic character. Peter Kivy has developed this antiaesthetic tendency furthest, ultimately denying that the reading of prose literature has any deep aesthetic content. Building on Alan Goldman’s and John Dewey’s work on aesthetic experience, I argue that a key literary feature of novels I single out – what I term a replete moment – has the potential to trigger in readers significant aesthetic experiences. Along with revealing aesthetic aspects in reading that Kivy’s position does not cover, my account shows that contemplation of the overall structure of the novel is not the sole, more substantial form aesthetic experience can take in the case of reading, as Kivy’s formalistic literary aesthetics assumes. This conclusion is argued to be significant also for the general philosophical discussion on aesthetic experience. An analysis of a key passage in John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany is an important part of the view of literary aesthetic experience put forth.     

Is Literary Arabic a Second Language for Native Arab Speakers?: Evidence from Semantic Priming Study

The mother tongue of the absolute majority of native Arabic speakers is Spoken Arabic (SA), which is a local dialect that does not have a written form. For reading and writing, as well as for formal communication Literary Arabic (LA) is used. For the literate Arabs, these two languages are extensively inter-twined in every day life. Consequently, it is possible that, despite the difference between them, LA is not processed like a regular second language by the cognitive system of the native Arabic speakers but rather as an enhancement of the spoken lexicon. In the present study we examined this possibility comparing semantic priming effects in auditory lexical decision within SA (L1), with the effects found across languages with LA or in Hebrew (L2). Hebrew is doubtlessly a second language for native Arabic speakers. In this study we have manipulated semantic priming. In Experiment 1 the targets were in Spoken Arabic and the primes in any of the three languages. The semantic priming effect was twice as large within L1 as between languages and there was no difference between Hebrew and LA. In Experiment 2, all primes were in SA whereas the targets were in any of the three languages. The priming effects in that experiment were doubled relative to the previous experiment, but the inter-language relationships were the same. For both language pairings, the semantic priming was larger when the primes were presented in SA (and the targets in either Hebrew or LA) than when the primes were presented in one of the second languages and the targets in SA. The conclusion is that, despite the intensive daily use adult native Arabic speakers make of SA and LA, and despite their shared origin, the two languages retain their status as first and second languages in the cognitive system.     

The Products of the Imagination: Psychoanalytic Theory and Postmodern Literary Criticism

This article considers some of the affinities between postmodern literary theory and the psychoanalytic theories concerned with intersubjective phenomena. Postmodern literary theory is described briefly, and it is argued that one of its major concerns is the nature of, and the political and cultural influences on, subjectivity and identity. Despite that, postmodernism generally, and literary postmodernism in particular, can be said to lack a theory of the psychological and interpersonal dimensions of the experience of self. This article contends that the more relational schools of psychoanalytic theory can provide an example of the construction of selfhood that is of importance to contemporary and postmodern literary criticism. The academy has, to a considerable extent identified psychoanalysis with the work of Jacques Lacan, but since the 1980s the work of such theorists as Jane Flax and Jessica Benjamin, building on the work of Nancy Chodorow, have increasingly opened up the possibilities of relational and object relations theory for literary studies. The relational psychoanalytic theories operate in the same epistemological universe as postmodern literary criticism, congruent with the postmodern idea of truth as constructed and relational, and selfhood as shifting, contingent, and always-in-process. Particular attention is paid to the work of Wilfred Bion, whose understanding of self provides an account both of the failure of meaning, and of the development of mind. Some examples of a relational approach to literary analysis are provided.     

‘Sleeping beauties’: succession problems of adolescence

The author explores the succession problems of adolescence. She uses the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale Sleeping Beauty to consider various characters and narratives possible in the analytic field during the succession process. Use of the characters in a fairy tale allows an analyst to play with the different roles the patient unconsciously assigns her. The author conceives of the avoidance of adolescent turbulence as a common reaction to adolescence, but one that can also become entrenched, and result in a restriction of emotional growth. The paper explores the psychic isolation of adolescence and the splitting required to manage the conflicting desires of the phase. The persistent absence of passion, including in the analytic process, constitutes a psychic retreat from developmental turbulence. The analyst of such an adolescent may need to allow them to be ‘somnolent’ for some time, but may eventually need to wake them (metaphorically) or even pierce the somnolent, avoidant state. The author uses clinical vignettes of late adolescents to demonstrate such transitions, exploring her countertransference experience as well as the reaction of adults to the succession process of adolescence.     

试论韩非的音乐美学思想

韩非的文艺观点代表了新兴地主阶级的思想,提出了"礼为情貌者也,文为质饰者也"等观点。韩非的音乐思想与其文艺观是一致的,是其文艺美学思想的体现,主张文艺要表现现实,为法制路线服务,具有强烈的政治性。韩非意识到了音乐具有多种功能,但是他仅仅把音乐作为法制例证的手段,具有极端的功利性。     

Simone de Beauvoir and the Graying of American Feminism

Simone de Beauvoir's study on age and aging can be read as an example of feminist scholarship presenting the contradictions and the ambivalence inherent in any topic dealing with women and society. Beauvoir's work both applauded and criticized by feminist scholars offers an important document for addressing the double discrimination based on gender and age, and has been influential in defining a feminist approach to the discussion of gender and age. With the graying of American feminists in the 1990s, age became a concern and Beauvoir's contribution to the area of age studies received recognition as an early contribution to the humanist exploration of the topic of aging. This article surveys interpretations of Beauvoir's work on aging by literary critics, feminist historians, and a gerontologist.     

阅读改变人生吗?阅读文学小说提升社会认知的争议

阅读文学小说曾经被认为只是大众消遣娱乐的方式,但最近的研究表明,阅读文学小说能够提升个体的社会认知。然而,有些研究并未发现阅读文学小说能够提升社会认知。本文首先批判性地分析支持和质疑“阅读文学小说提升社会认知”的相关证据,随后提出未来的研究将如何解决这一争论,包括开发新的研究工具和技术、明确文学与小说的操作性定义、确定读者的关键特征、创新研究设计等多个方面。     

The Little Mermaid: Hans Christian Andersen's Feminine Identification

While verbally transmitted fairy tales express universal human concerns, the literary fairy tale, the written creation of an individual author, permits a psychodynamic understanding of the writer. The little mermaid's willingness to undergo the pain and mutilation involved in the loss of both her tail and was voice in order to become a mortal and marry a prince has been regarded as illustrating problems in female sexual development. However, a review of Hans Christian Andersen's biographical data indicates that the story also represents his unconscious homosexual conflicts and supports Freud's concept of the role of castration anxiety in the negative Oedipus complex.