Digital play as a spiritually formative activity

The ubiquitous presence of technology in children’s lives and the likelihood that technology will remain a significant part of young people’s culture means that scholars and practitioners need to ask how digital play may exert a positive spiritual influence on children and youth. This essay therefore explores four spiritually nurturing aspects of digital participation: (1) connections between the polyphonic nature of digital identity and the ideal of a spiritual disciple open to divine influence and change through new experiences and habituating practices; (2) ways in which young people’s empowerment as producers of the self and communities may transfer to ‘real’-world transformation efforts; (3) theories suggesting that the relational nature of social networking and gaming encourages and reinforces relational consciousness and increases young people’s conscious participation in relationship building; and (4) links between the imaginative elements of digital play and the facilitation of ritual experience and spiritual self-knowledge. The essay also attends to some of the dangers that lurk in the digital world and suggests how we might discern when young people’s digital play is spiritually healthy and when it veers into spiritual desolation.     

Constructing We‐ness: A Communal Coping Intervention for Couples Facing Chronic Illness

Communal coping occurs when relationship partners view a stressful health problem as “ours,” rather than yours or mine, and take collaborative action to deal with it. Although research employing linguistic (we‐talk) and other measures of communal coping demonstrates relevance to a variety of chronic illnesses, the literature offers little about how clinicians can actively promote we‐ness and teamwork to help patients and their partners achieve the health benefits this appears to confer. This paper highlights clinical and supporting scientific features of a narrative intervention designed to foster communal coping by couples in which one partner has a chronic illness. The illustrative illness is diabetes, but with modification the protocol is suitable for other chronic conditions as well. Grounded in systemic and narrative models of problem maintenance and change, the communal coping intervention represents a distillation of research and clinical experience with family consultation over several decades. In contrast to more directive and educational approaches, the intervention consists entirely of questions, with no direct suggestions or instruction about how patients, partners, or couples should change. These questions comprise 8 sequential modules (Coping Challenges, Trajectory and Focus, Illness as External Invader, You as a Couple, Past Teamwork in Overcoming Adversity, Present and Future Teamwork, Obstacles to Teamwork, and Wrap‐Up), described here in manual‐like detail.     

数字生态系统中创业机会的形成与发展：基于社会资本理论的探究

数字创业浪潮方兴未艾, 机会属性变化引起的数字创业机会形成与变化规律尚未被揭示。本研究以数字生态系统作为研究情境, 分析创业者利用数字生态系统可供性积累的社会资本, 如何影响创业机会形成与发展。从机会的合意性维度和内容维度两方面解释创业机会的变化规律, 考察创业者认知监控与新创企业数字化程度对这一路径的调节作用。本研究拓展社会资本理论在数字创业背景下的应用, 深化数字生态系统中的创业机会研究, 有助于指导创业者利用数字平台开展“破坏性创造”, 提升机会识别质量和效率, 促进创业生态系统建设。     

The Limits of Photography

Abstract

This paper is about what counts as a photograph and what does not. One way in which this question arises stems from new technologies that keep changing our way of producing photographs, such as digital photography, which not only has now widely replaced traditional film photography but also challenges the very limits of what we count as a photograph. I shall discuss below at some length different aspects of digital photography, but also want to focus here on a new striking type of photographic camera, announced in early 2012 by Lytro, Inc., namely, the so-called ‘Light Field Camera’, which is said to represent a revolution in the photographic world. Indeed, unlike in the case of any previously available cameras, the photographs produced by a Light Field Camera can be re-focused after the photograph has been taken, which harbours many interesting consequences with regard to the resulting image and the way we interact with it. But of course, the initial question also arises in the case of traditional film photography as well as ‘traditional’ digital photography. The question amounts to asking about what the essential features of photographs are – in short, what their nature is.     

Exposing operations of power in supervisory relationships

Through a poststructural lens, we examine how power may show itself in relationships between supervisees and supervisors, producing both helpful and harmful effects. Drawing from our own experiences, as well as conversations with other members of our supervisory group, we demonstrate how privileged discourses around professional status, gender, and race may bring about difficulties including a sense of doubt, worry, inadequacy, and a fear of speaking up. We also illustrate how these difficulties can be addressed in a manner that may lessen their influence, while increasing supervisees' sense of agency.     

Collaborative helping maps: a tool to guide thinking and action in family-centered services

This article highlights "disciplined improvisation" as a metaphor for community-based work with multi-stressed families. It introduces Collaborative Helping maps as a tool that both helps workers think their way through complex situations with families and provides a structure to support constructive conversations between workers and families about challenging situations. The article illustrates this map through a clinical vignette and uses interviews with workers to highlight ways in which the map can both enhance worker thinking and support constructive conversations between workers and families about problems that could easily divide them and lead to polarization and escalating tension.     

Digital lives in psychotherapy: ‘the other in the room’

Within the broader area of digital risk, there has been concern over the phenomena of ‘cyber suicide’, a completed or attempted suicide influenced by the internet. We propose a theoretical explanation of the ‘ambivalent self’ in people who go online searching for suicide, by introducing the concept of an inner split between the ‘suicidal part’ (SP) and ‘non-suicidal part’ (NSP) within the personality structure of the individual which struggle for domination of the inner life and external relationships and decisions of the suicidal person. This is grounded in psychoanalytic theory and draws upon a broader conceptualisation of the psyche of the self as split between rival parts, and differing states of mind, competing for control of the vulnerable individual and their capacity to tolerate and manage emotional pain and reality. The recognition and awareness of an inner split between the SP and NSP of the person who goes online, and how this influences virtual relationships, as well as external relationships, such as in psychotherapy, is an important understanding for contemporary psychotherapy and risk management in the digital age.     

Psychotherapy research: an interplay between inner and outer and a succession of meanings

Psychotherapy research is a rapidly developing area of study that aims to explore the integration of inner and outer conditions of an individual’s experience, the interplay between subjective and objective, as well as between individual and collective. Questions regarding a more integrative view and qualitative research in psychotherapy are discussed in the paper. The author introduces some ideas from the studies on psychotherapy effectiveness that were done at Vilnius University by a group of researchers who work in the ‘Centre for research on the psychodynamics of personality’. Clinical psychologists who hold a doctorate degree or who are in doctoral studies in the Department of Psychology at Vilnius University are members of this research group. The subjective understanding about healing episodes and the development of depth premises were the main tasks of these studies. Among other methods, the researchers used the drawing a picture of a healing moment and telling a psychotherapy story recalled by the client to collect data. Two examples of drawing a picture of a healing moment and one example of telling a therapy story are analyzed in the paper. The themes of subjective experience of renewal in psychotherapy as well as the multiplicity of experience and results in psychotherapy are discussed in the paper with case illustrations. This study showed that drawing a picture opens one more dimension of reflection and that it can be an appropriate tool for developing individual narratives as well. Authoring and re‐authoring one’s life narrative is accepted as part of a productive therapy as well as discovering one’s inner authorship. The ability to follow a succession of meanings, as well as a connection to nature and culture could be one of the ways of actualizing an integrative view in psychotherapy research.