Community as Outsider Witness: Utilising Community Members in the Reconstitution of Problem-Saturated Identities

This study explored community members' ability to enlist discourses affirming of psychiatric patients' quest for generative identities. The participants were members of the public who attended an exhibition of psychiatric patients' artwork (n = 7, age range 18–55). A Foucauldian discourse analysis was used to analyse the research interviews. Results revealed that the majority of community members used dominant cultural discourses to speak about psychiatric patient-artists. These discourses conferred a problem-saturated identity on to psychiatric patients. We conclude that community members can be recruited as outsider witnesses to support psychiatric patients' search for generative identities, provided community members resist discourses that produce problem-saturated identity conclusions.     

Reconsidering religion and fandom: Christian fan works in My Little Pony fandom

Studies of religion and fandom have tended to explore the extent to which fan cultures might be seen as forms of surrogate religion. This article suggests that a more detailed examination of the way in which believers use their faith within their individual fandoms would offer more interesting insights into both contemporary religious practice and fandom. Conducting a case study of ‘Brony’ fandom (adult fandom of cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic), this article explores the ways in which Christian fans use fan fiction and art to promote religious literacy, explore theological issues and engage in evangelism and exegesis. Fan knowledge is used as a way to quickly impart and explore complex religious concepts in a manner which utilises the shared culture of fandom. This should not be seen as a symptom of ‘mediatisation’ but as part of a complex synthesis of faith and popular culture.     

Using Stories in Dynamically Oriented Clinical Social Work

Abstract

This paper uses concepts from discourse analysis to understand the meaning making functions of narrative in clinical treatment and to describe the interactive processes through which these functions are achieved. “Negotiative” and “heuristic” narrative processes are described as they occur in ordinary conversation. The relevance of these concepts to clinical practice is then explored using case material.     

The Imperatives of Narrative: Health Interest Groups and Morality in Network News

This article examines some of the story conventions of network television news to explain the ways in which healthcare interest groups develop and maintain their presence in this medium—a process that has significant implications for public understanding of healthcare issues, and therefore to bioethics. The article is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on three major normative conventions of television news: adherence to a simple narrative structure, the balance ethic, and avoidance of the “think-piece” and outlines the basic strategies available to interest groups for exploiting these normative conventions. Section two introduces three case studies of organizations and individuals who have run high-profile media campaigns. Section three explores the implications for bioethics of the observations made in this article.     

Spiritual,Religious, Nonspiritual,and Nonreligious Narratives in Marginalized Older Adults: A Typology of Coping Styles

SUMMARY

Narrative therapy is an important tool in the phenomenological framing of life events with older clients. Seventy-nine older adults who lived independently in four subsidized high-rise housing facilities in Chicago were interviewed in a research project about managing life challenges. Cases represent four types in a spiritual-religious typology: religious and spiritual, religious only, spiritual only, and neither religious nor spiritual (Zinnbauer, 1997). This article explores how older adults managed adversity and maintained a sense of self-efficacy. Findings indicate that older adults use many references to religion and spirituality in their narratives, either embracing these domains or defining themselves in contrast to them. Narrative therapy suggests that the implications of religious and spiritual resources addressed in client stories may reinforce coping capacity and promote aging well.     

‘Wholeness,Dignity and the Ageing Self’: A Conversation Between Philosophy and Theology

SUMMARY

Winifred Wing Han Lamb: My philosophical interest straddles the areas of education, religion and theology. As a teacher involved in school philosophy programs, I have also been interested in the philosophy of childhood and particularly in the recurring notion of the ‘whole child’ in education. In considering what ‘wholeness’ could mean for children's education, I have also been led to consider what meaning it holds for the self through the ‘changing scenes’ of life, especially in the face of the challenges of ageing.

The notion of ‘wholeness’ holds an intuitive appeal and invites articulation of the deep truths of our faith with respect to persons in all ‘sorts and conditions.’ In section one of this chapter, I attempt that articulation. But this conversation needs to be complementary. Our chapter is the beginning of a dialogue between philosophy and theology in which both affirm the ageing self in the light of the human search for wholeness and dignity.

Heather Thomson: My theological research into humanity as an image of God led me to inquire about the way in which we could speak meaningfully of ageing and dying in terms of imaging God. This challenged how God-likeness was to be understood in relation to glory, honour and power, terms associated with imaging God and exerting dominion. In searching for a theological view of the self that would confer dignity on the ageing, I was led into conversation with various philosophies of the self, some very helpful for my task.

It seems to me that, if ageing people are to be counted as having dignity and worth, and not discounted, then one's theory of the human person was significant. In pondering the issue, it appeared that a conversation between philosophy and theology would be fruitful. Hence, this joint paper. We each speak from our own discipline but find resonance with each other's work. We see this as a first step in a constructive conversation.     

Between the street and the consulting room: The role of therapeutic frame in working with homeless clients

This paper explores the context of psychotherapy with people who are homeless and the kinds of dynamics and challenges that typically arise in this work. The paper specifically considers the process of therapy as it takes place with clients who have been recurrently homeless and who have difficulties with sustaining shelter that has its roots in deficits in early containment. Clinical case material from psychotherapy conducted with two homeless men is presented and the implications of the approach adopted are explored both in relation to policies around the provision of services for homeless people and the more specific issue of psychotherapy intervention.

It is argued that a clear, well-articulated set of expectations has to be developed around this work in order to protect it and to provide it with the greatest opportunity for providing the kind of safety that is required for the development of this work. It is argued that the most important issue here relates to the provision of a consistent therapeutic framework and a care around the development of the specific psychotherapeutic frame within, and in relation to, the other frames present in the person's life.     

Constructing and deconstructing psychotherapeutic discourse

This paper reviews recent work on the social construction of the self in counselling and psychotherapy, and argues that we need to attend to the ways in which the therapeutic self is fashioned (a) in relation to the ‘psy-complex' as the network of theories and practices concerned with psychological governance and self-reflection in modern Western culture and (b) in the context of ‘therapeutic domains' outside the clinic and academe, domains of discursive regulation and self-expression which then bear upon the activities of professional and lay counsellors. Therapeutic domains contain repertoires, templates and complexes within which counsellors and clients fabricate varieties of truth and story a core of experience into being. I then turn to describe and assess some of the various ways in which this kind of critical reflection on therapeutic discourse and counselling practice now already underpins the work of social constructionist ‘narrative' therapists. Some attention is given to the different pragmatic and deconstructionist approaches which make the discursive constitution of the problem into the problem, either by dissolving or by externalizing the account the client presents. Here I argue that the activities of social constructionist counsellors can be viewed as forms of deconstruction-in-process (a deconstruction of the discursive frames which have been constructed by the client), but that they should not be viewed as stepping outside the discursive conditions of possibility which ground their work. the psy-complex and therapeutic domains still function as relatively enduring structures which limit the degree to which we may construct and deconstruct psychotherapeutic discourse.     

SOME IMPLICATIONS OF BION'S THOUGHT

Following up Bion's idea that dreaming is a continuous process that takes place in waking life as well as in sleep, the author develops its theoretical and technical implications. He describes the narrative derivatives of waking dream thought as the means, or interface, whereby access may be had, albeit indirectly, to the constantly forming sequences of alpha-elements. Examples of the formation of these sequences out of childhood memories, present-day experiences and sexual feelings are given. Reference is also made to the notion of the analytic field. The author goes on to demonstrate the clinical value of these concepts both for studying the session's microtransformations and as a means of in-depth examination of the analyst's own mental functioning, including its lapses, in a session. Abundant clinical material is presented to help analysts who normally apply different models of the mind share these ideas. Finally, it is suggested that night dreams result from a further elaboration of the elements formed during waking life.     

The Evolution of a Pauline Toxic Text

The earliest followers of Jesus authored their identity narrative within the metanarrative of Jewish faith, thereby creating a new Jewish-Jesus sect. The Christian identity narrative arose as a new story and could not call upon either a Jewish or a Pagan metanarrative for its justification. It was a new creation inspired by the Spirit and authored by Paul. With his guidance, the Pagan followers of Jesus, Christians, articulated their personal and communal experiences of empowerment by the Spirit in a new identity narrative that would in time establish itself as the dominant metanarrative for Western civilization. Members of the Jewish-Jesus community in Jerusalem immediately denied the validity of the Christian narratives. They sought to subjugate the new story to their official and dominant story: that one had to be Jewish in order to follow Jesus. Paul urges the Christians to remain faithful to their personal stories of empowerment by the Spirit. Unfortunately, he also resorts to the use of toxic texts to disenfranchise his Jewish opponents.