When culture fails: coping with cultural trauma

The research into the phenomenon of cultural trauma is growing as the effects of historical transformations are recognized and analysed. The concept of cultural trauma and the analytic concept of the cultural complex is a suitable theoretical approach for this research. The Lithuanian experience of cultural trauma after the historical shifts indicates the importance of the interplay between societal and individual factors in coping with trauma. Academic psychotraumatological studies carried out at Vilnius University indicate a stronger traumatic experience by people who are survivors of direct political repression and even intergenerational transmission of trauma, but this group also seems to demonstrate an intergenerational transmission of resilience. Paradoxically, from a long‐term perspective, the victims of direct repression seem to have suffered less than the people who accommodated to the regime, and this applies also to their offspring. Analysis in terms of overcoming cultural trauma indicates that society is gradually integrating historic traumatic experiences, although a healthy cultural identity has not yet been restored.     

Primo Levi’s bearing witness and the reinterpreted past: post‐truth and the authoritarian other

The stark realism of Primo Levi’s experiences of the Shoah is considered in light of the current political climate in which the authoritarian other induces a divergence between reality, a state of things as they actually exist or existed, and truth, that which to some extent accords to reality. In this paper I will consider how truth becomes divorced from reality by considering Giegerich’s interpretation of Plato’s Parable of the Cave, arguing that truth is affected by perception and belief. After addressing ‘truth’ in justice, analytic work and the family, the post‐truth phenomenon is discussed and defined as a force erosive to reason and sensibility; its general purpose is to avoid doubt and anxiety. The past is interpreted and re‐interpreted to advance multiple geopolitical interests. Levi warned, in 1976, that the authoritarian state considers it quite permissible to alter the perception of what is true.     

No one here gets out alive: the Bluebeard story in therapy and in the culture

In this paper, the Bluebeard story is used to highlight mechanisms underlying an individual analytic case and some cultural phenomena from a Jungian perspective. I describe a patient whose psyche was dissociated into a tormenting monstrous figure and a regressed childish self, which Kalsched explains as activation of the archetypal defence system. As her analyst, I had to survive attacks of the patient's persecuting inner object, which she related to Bluebeard as a representation of relentless murderousness. At the cultural level, Bluebeard pertains to the concept of the totalitarian object (Sebek 1996) and to the pole of grandiosity of the Russian cultural complex.     

Maternal and infant characteristics connected to shared pleasure in dyadic interaction

The aim of the study was to analyze which maternal factors (depressive symptoms, effect of life events, maternal sensitivity and structuring) and infant characteristics (temperament, social withdrawal symptoms, interactive behavior, genotype, gender) contribute to shared pleasure (SP) in parent–infant interaction. Participants were 113 mother–infant dyads. The mothers filled in the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, the Infant Behavior Questionnaire, and the Life Events Questionnaire. The dyads were videotaped in a free-play situation, and the videos were analyzed using the Alarm Distress Baby Scale and the Emotional Availability Scales. The infants were genotyped for four genes involved in emotion regulation. The occurrence and duration of SP (SP-MD) in mother–infant interactions were analyzed from the videotapes. Higher maternal sensitivity and depressive symptoms, better infant responsiveness, and the infant having the GG variant of the gene tryptophan hydroxylase isoform 2 (TPH2) -307 were associated with the occurrence of SP. Lower level depressive symptoms, better maternal structuring, and greater infant involvement were associated with the longer duration of SP. Those dyads where the mother and infant were best able to read each other's positive cues and to respond to them were more likely to experience mutual positive affect, as seen in SP.     

Associations between child physical abuse potential,observed maternal parenting,and young children's emotion regulation: Is participation in Early Head Start protective?

Clinicians working with Early Head Start (EHS) families consider family well-being and positive parent–child relationships as foundational to school readiness. Understanding the links between risk factors and these dimensions of family engagement can inform clinical decision-making, as risk assessments are used to tailoring program services. The current study examined the associations between high risk, or potential, for child physical abuse and both parenting quality and children's emotion regulation (ER) during toddlerhood; EHS participation was examined as a buffer. The sample included EHS-eligible mothers of infants (N = 80) drawn from one site of the EHS Research and Evaluation Project. Associations were tested between mothers’ potential for child physical abuse, measured during infancy, and observed maternal sensitivity, positive regard, harshness, and children's ER skills at child ages 1 and 2 years. Results indicated that high potential for child physical abuse was associated with lower positive regard at age 1 and lower ER skills at age 2. EHS participation operated as a buffer on each of these associations. Implications for screening for child physical abuse potential and the constructs it represents in clinical settings as well as how EHS can promote family engagement are discussed.     

Influence of maternal reflective functioning on mothers’ and children's weight: A follow-up study

Based on cross-sectional research linking poor reflective functionining (RF) to eating disorders, the current follow-up study tested whether maternal RF would explain the variance of mothers’ and children's weight beyond the effects of maternal emotional dysregulation. During pregnancy (Time 1 [T1]), 51 women were administered the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) and interviewed using the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). Seven months after delivery (Time 2 [T2]), mother–baby dyads who remained in the study (n = 44) were videotaped (Feeding Scale) during their feeding interaction. Last (Time 3 [T3]), the weight of the 34 children who were still in the study was collected at 3 years of age. Maternal AAI-RF at T1 did not correlate with the DERS at T1 nor with the quality of the feeding interacions at T2. However, it correlated, significantly, with maternal body mass index (BMI) at T1, r = −.298, P = .034, and marginally significantly with baby's BMI at T3, r = −.296, P = .089. Moreover, multiple regression models showed a trend indicating that maternal AAI-RF might explain the variance of mothers’ and children's weight beyond the effects of maternal emotional dysregulation. These findings suggest that working on maternal mentalization might contribute to helping prevent childhood obesity from pregnancy.     

Observing home-visiting quality at scale with the home visit rating scales and a supervisor checklist in Peru

As home-visiting programs expand, there is a need to develop cost-effective tools to monitor their quality at scale. We compare the Home Visit Rating Scales (HOVRS), an instrument to measure home-visit process quality widely used in the United States, to a checklist designed for the Peruvian national home-visiting program, Cuna Mas. Both instruments were administered to a sample of 554 home visits and an equal number of mother–child dyads by their 176 home visitors. While the HOVRS was scored on video recordings of the visits by trained coders, the checklist was scored live by Cuna Mas supervisors. We assessed the validity of both measures in their first application in rural Peru, compared their performance, and selected a subset of items in the checklist to propose a simplified, shorter, and more cost-efficient instrument. To this end, we reorganized checklist items into constructs that best mapped those covered by the HOVRS and selected the highest performing according to predefined criteria. We found that both the HOVRS and the checklist had high reliability and acceptable levels of validity. We argue that the simplified checklist could prove useful for quality monitoring of service delivery of at-scale home-visiting programs and as a tool to support in-service training.     

The affective basis of violence

Violence is a complex matter, and understandingly perhaps, it is the objective, behavioral aspects that are commonly focused on. Here, however, it is the subjective psychological and especially affective substrates of violence that are brought to the fore. Psychoanalytic perspectives provide a way of thinking about these that also sets them in a human-developmental context. In this essay, psychoanalytic ideas about aggression and violence are considered, and what they have to say about the relationship between states of mind and behavior is critically reviewed. There also is an exploration of the ways that some recent findings in developmental science and neuroscience can refine and augment an understanding of these relationships, facilitating the construction of a psychobiological model, which may be placed in a social context. From this biopsychosocial perspective, aggression is seen as a heuristic concept that encapsulates numerous interacting elements that in ordinary development integrate and serve to promote optimal organism survival: By contrast, from this perspective, in humans violence may be understood as a pathological variant of aggression.     

The early biopsychosocial development of boys and the origins of violence in males

We apply a biopsychosocial approach to introduce early-in-life experiences that explain a significant part of the male preponderance in the perpetration of violence. Early caregiver abuse and neglect, father absence, and exposure to family and neighborhood violence exacerbate boys’ greater risk for aggressive behavior and increase the probability of carrying out violent acts later in life. We examine the development of the psychological self and explore conditions that encourage physical aggression, focusing on the impact on the infant and toddler's emergent mental representation of self, others, and self–other relationships. Boys’ slower developmental timetable in the first years of life may enhance their vulnerability for disorganization in emergent neurobiological networks mediating organization of socioemotional relationships. Emergent attachment and activation relationship systems may differentially affect risk and resilience in boys and girls, particularly in single-parent families. Evidence has suggested that the dramatic increase in single-parent families is especially linked to corresponding increases in behavioral undercontrol, antisocial behavior, and the emergence of violence in boys.