The Therapist’s Needs: Beyond Mutual Recognition

Abstract

As early as 1965, Harold Searles argued that therapists’ needs for healing and growth are part and parcel of their work with patients. Since then, the relational movement has corroborated this idea by articulating the healing function of treatment for both patient and clinician. In this article, the authors examine therapists’ needs that have been overlooked or those that have not been considered fully in the literature. Using various ideas related to the concept of what the authors call therapeutic freedom, this article argues that clinicians must strive to adopt a therapeutic vision that aims to loosen their own ties to safe, familiar modes of engaging with patients, particularly in moments of enactment or impasse. The authors elucidate these ideas with case material from their clinical work and show how embracing various forms of therapeutic freedom results in a type of mutual surrender on the part of both patient and therapist, creating opportunistic conditions that generate therapeutic action and new possibilities for the dyad.     

Mutual Funds Efficiency Measurement under Financial and Social Responsibility Criteria

Socially responsible investors pursue financial as well as nonfinancial goals. Whereas the role of financial criteria in investment decisions is well understood, much less is known on the influence of social responsibility considerations. This work seeks to integrate both dimensions within a data envelopment analysis framework consistent with second‐order stochastic dominance efficiency. We compare the performance of conventional versus socially responsible mutual funds on an empirical data set. Our data do not support the conjecture that conventional mutual funds exhibit superior overall performance. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Innovative moments and poor outcome in narrative therapy

Aims: To analyse a poor outcome case of narrative therapy with a woman victim of intimate violence. Method: The Innovative Moments Coding System: version 1 was applied to all sessions to track the innovative moments (i‐moments) in the therapeutic process. I–moments are the narrative details that occur in psychotherapeutic conversations that are outside the influence of the problematic narrative. This research aims to describe the processes involved in the stability of meanings in psychotherapy through a dialogical approach to meaning making. Findings: Contrarily to what usually occurs in good outcome cases, re‐conceptualization i‐moments are absent. Moreover, two specific types of i‐moments emerged with higher duration: reflection and protest. Qualitative analysis showed that the potential meanings of these i‐moments were surpassed by a return to the problematic narrative. Conclusion: The therapeutic stability seems to be maintained by a systematic return to the problematic narrative after the emergence of novelties. This process was referred from a dialogical perspective as a mutual in‐feeding of voices, one that emerges in the i‐moment and another one that supports the problematic narrative, which is maintained by an oscillation between these two types of voices during therapy.     

Human responding with mutual reinforcement: Baseline and effects of an intervention1

Pressing a key by one undergraduate provided another undergraduate with points exchangeable for money, and vice versa. Four types of response patterns were found. Points were often delivered with a delay from the last response or with no response. When a contingency that responses lost points (punishment) was added to participants who had emitted more responses than the partner had, their response rates decreased while the rates of their partners increased. These results demonstrate that, under the contingency of mutual reinforcement: (a) response patterns that had occurred between monkeys were replicated between humans; (b) obtained response‐reinforcer relations were different from those generally programmed in the basic reinforcement schedules; and (c) the behavior of the participant was controlled by changing the behavior of the partner.     

Exclusion constraints facilitate statistical word learning

The roles of linguistic, cognitive, and social-pragmatic processes in word learning are well established. If statistical mechanisms also contribute to word learning, they must interact with these processes; however, there exists little evidence for such mechanistic synergy. Adults use co-occurrence statistics to encode speech-object pairings with detailed sensitivity in stochastic learning environments (Vouloumanos, 2008). Here, we replicate this statistical work with nonspeech sounds and compare the results with the previous speech studies to examine whether exclusion constraints contribute equally to the statistical learning of speech-object and nonspeech-object associations. In environments in which performance could benefit from exclusion, we find a learning advantage for speech over nonspeech, revealing an interaction between statistical and exclusion processes in associative word learning.     

Effects of knowledge about cross-language equivalents on children's use of mutual exclusivity in interpreting novel labels

Young children seem to assume that words pick out mutually exclusive object categories. This assumption of mutual exclusivity can be useful in word learning, but it is fallible. This study examined the effects of knowledge about cross-language equivalents on children's use of mutual exclusivity in interpreting a novel label coming from a foreign language and in interpreting a novel label within their first language. It was found that 4-year-olds with such knowledge suspended the assumption of mutual exclusivity in interpreting a novel label coming from a foreign language. Furthermore, they were willing to accept multiple labels for an object even within a language, as long as the context suggested that they should do so. In contrast, 3-year-olds did not seem to make use of such knowledge in either case. Thus, it appeared that 4-year-olds could make use of knowledge about language to fine tune the use of mutual exclusivity, but that this seemed to be difficult for 3-year-olds.     

Three- and four-year-olds spontaneously use others' past performance to guide their learning

A wealth of human knowledge is acquired by attending to information provided by other people – but some people are more credible sources than others. In two experiments, we explored whether young children spontaneously keep track of an individual’s history of being accurate or inaccurate and use this information to facilitate subsequent learning. We found that 3- and 4-year-olds favor a previously accurate individual when learning new words and learning new object functions and applied the principle of mutual exclusivity to the newly learned words but not the newly learned functions. These findings expand upon previous research in a number of ways, most importantly by showing that (a) children spontaneously keep track of an individual’s history and use it to guide subsequent learning without any prompting, and (b) children’s sensitivity to others’ prior accuracy is not specific to the domain of language.     

Five Key Topics on the Frontier of Theology and Science Today

Abstract : This article explores the creative mutual interaction between Christian theology and the natural sciences through five key issues: (1) the relation between creation ex nihilo and Big Bang cosmology; (2) biological evolution and continuous creation; (3) the search for non‐interventionist objective divine action in light of physics and biology; (4) the problem of suffering in nature and with it the turn to redemption theology via the bodily Resurrection of Jesus; and (5) the challenge raised for its eschatological implications by scientific predictions for the future of the universe. The article concludes with a brief suggestion for the ways Christian theology, reformulated in light of these sciences, might offer creative suggestions for future scientific research, and, in doing so, complete the loop promised by the phrase “mutual creative interaction.”     

Gender symmetry in prevalence, severity, and chronicity of physical aggression against dating partners by university students in Mexico and USA

The paper reports results from analyses of the physical aggression against dating partners by four samples of university students in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Mexican Americans and Non-Mexican Whites in El Paso and Lubbock Texas, and New Hampshire (N=1,544). The percent reporting partner violence (PV) was high in all samples, but also differed significantly between samples. The lowest rate was in New Hampshire (29.7%), followed by Texas, Non-Mexican Whites (30.9%), Texas Mexican American (34.2%), and the highest rate was in Juarez (46.1%). When only severe assaults were compared, the differences between samples was similar, i.e., lowest in New Hampshire and highest in Juarez. In all four samples, there was no significant difference between males and females in either the overall prevalence of physical aggression or the prevalence of severe attacks. Among the 553 couples where one or both of the partners were violent, in almost three quarters of the cases (71.2%) there was gender symmetry in the sense that both partners engaged in this type of behavior. When only one partner was violent, this was twice as likely to be the female partner (19.0%) as the male partner (9.8%). Among the 205 couples where there was an act of severe aggression, symmetry was less prevalent (56.6%), but when only one partner was violent, it was again twice as likely to be the female partner (29.8% female only versus 13.7 male partner only). These results are consistent with the gender symmetry in PV found in many studies. They extend those results by showing that gender symmetry prevails in four different cultural contexts. The presence of gender symmetry in these different cultural contexts, combined with studies showing that women are injured more often and more seriously by partner-assaults, and studies showing that women initiate PV as often as men, suggests that programs and policies aimed at primary prevention of PV by women are crucial to ending PV and for reducing the victimization of men and women.     

Harmony and Justice

The reason why justice and harmony are the most-prized values and the highest aims of human beings is that these qualities are the foundation which makes possible the realization of all other positive goals. Interpersonal conflicts and conflicts between individuals and the society lead to social, cultural, and moral crises. Confucian culture argues that moral reason is only possessed by human beings, and that this is what can make human existence harmonious and rational. Harmony creates power, and power can defeat impediments. As a result, physical qualities are humanized, and moral qualities increase. Goodness promotes the establishment of mutually beneficial systems and procedural justice in a society. Therefore, Chinese traditional culture provides a method for resolving contemporary social conflicts and crises, including accumulating goodness to increase virtue, constructing social integrity and harmonious righteousness, and the building up of a just society.