To Die or Not to Die: Zhuangzi’s Three Immortalities

While it is known that the problem of death is a central topic animating the author/s of the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi, leading Chinese and Western interpretations of this Chinese classic have usually focused much more on other themes and aspects. Even more problematic in the author’s view is the fact that the Zhuangzi has been closely associated with one death philosophy, the set of concepts, arguments and figures present in chapter 6. This study puts death back at the very center of the Zhuangzian philosophical project yet insisting at the same time on the difficulties of defending one philosophy of death since different passages introduce new concepts, imagery, nuances and perspectives. The Zhuangzi’s focus on death is being situated within a discussion of the “immortality” ideal––accepting a total death (“to die”) or find refuge in immortality ideals (“not to die”). Different passages from the Inner Chapters are being presented as proposing three distinct immortality projects or strategies––personal, social and cosmic––to address the problem of death. E. Becker’s reflections on the challenge of mortality and the psychological need of a “beyond” in order to cope with the consciousness of death provide the basic theoretical framework underlying the discussion of the Zhuangzi in this essay.     

The influence of Confucianism: a narrative study of Hong Kong teachers’ understanding and practices of school guidance and counselling

School guidance seeks to promote the whole person growth of students. It is regarded as an integral part of an educational programme. In Hong Kong secondary schools, a team of teachers are responsible for school guidance. This article examines how guidance teachers made sense of their caring work in general and specifically the counselling services they offered to students. With the use of a narrative analysis and personal experience methods, the study explores the experience of guidance teachers in counselling. Twelve in-service teachers who had enrolled in the Postgraduate Diploma in Education programme at the Hong Kong Institute of Education were interviewed. The influence of the Chinese philosophy of Confucianism, emerging as a theme from the data, was prominent, as its key principles were incorporated into the teachers’ personal systems of counselling. The findings illuminate the influence of Chinese culture in Hong Kong schools. Implications for the promotion of culturally responsive approaches to counselling and culturally competent practices for helping are discussed.     

Training clinical psychologists for rural and northern practice: Transforming challenge into opportunity

Abstract: The Rural and Northern Program (R&NP) of the University of Manitoba's Department of Clinical Health Psychology (DCHP) is a unique training and service delivery platform that was developed in response to the scarcity of psychological services in rural and northern areas of the province of Manitoba, Canada. Since 1996 rural and northern‐based psychologists, in conjunction with the faculty based in Winnipeg (Manitoba's largest city) have offered training to two interns and one postdoctoral resident (resident) yearly. The current article discusses the nature of the program, the regions of Manitoba that the program services, and recruitment and retention data. The authors conclude by offering suggestions for creating sustainable rural/northern psychological practice.     

Personal values and relational models

In this study, the comprehensive value research by Schwartz (e.g. 1992) was linked to Fiske's relational models theory (RMT, e.g. Fiske, 1991). A sample of 297 people answered the personal values questionnaire (PVQ), the modes of relationship questionnaire (MORQ) and the relationship profile scale (RPS) in a web‐based online survey. As hypothesized, the set of 10 values correlated in a systematic manner—according to the circular structure of personal value systems—with both trait‐like construal of and motivational investment in the relational models communal sharing (CS), authority ranking (AR) and market pricing (MP). Further research concerning a person–environment value congruency approach to predict well‐being is suggested combining the two research traditions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“Not a little Mickey Mouse thing”: How experienced counselling psychologists describe the significance of personal therapy in clinical practice and training. Some results from an interpretative phenomenological analysis

The British Psychological Society's Division of Counselling Psychology currently specifies a mandatory period of personal therapy for trainees. However, evidence for the role of personal therapy in developing practitioner competence is sparse. This paper presents part of a wider ongoing interpretative phenomenological analysis exploring how counselling psychologists describe the meaning and significance of personal therapy in clinical practice and training. Detailed examination of a subset of data from this study suggests that personal therapy is valued as a vehicle for a genuine, often extremely intense relationship with the therapist, through which participants become able to establish authentic emotional contact with themselves and their clients. Whilst most participants felt that personal therapy should remain an obligatory part of the training curriculum, they were ambivalent about specifying its aims or evaluating its outcomes. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of establishing a sense of integrity and authenticity within the personal therapy experience and are tentatively situated within a possible theoretical framework drawing on current developmental literature.     

Towards an integrated identity in counselling psychology: Graduate,professional and academic experiences

The paper is a reflective summary of my identity as a counselling psychologist. It discusses personal life, work and training experiences. The reason I would like to publish such a work is to encourage students in Greece, where the field of Counselling Psychology is less developed, to consider this kind of specialization, as well as to continuously enhance their professional identity, assimilating both practice and research opportunities, throughout their career paths. The paper focuses on three major influences in my development and training in the field: (a) graduate experiences as a doctoral student, writing a thesis on women's professional development, (b) work experiences in a career center of a large academic institution, and (c) academic and instructional experiences in a School of Psychology, where I teach and supervise research of both undergraduate and graduate students. The above influences delineate three separate, yet integrating identities: the identity of a feminist, the identity of a practitioner, and the identity of a researcher and instructor in the academia–that is, the identity of a scientist. My intention is to show how these three identities have been well integrated all these years, improving continuously my level of work in each and every dimension.     

The Teaching Alliance Inventory: Evaluating the student-instructor relationship in clinical and counselling psychology training

The Teaching Alliance Inventory (TAI) was developed to measure the quality of the student-instructor relationship in graduate clinical and counselling psychology classrooms. Based on Bordin's (1983) original concept of the alliance as fundamental to the change process in psychotherapy, we developed the TAI to measure aspects of the classroom relationship that may be fundamental to learning essential skills of counselling and clinical psychology. Factor analysis revealed six subscales, four representing interpersonal variables not evaluated in traditional teaching effectiveness measures. We demonstrated internal consistency and split-half reliability with a large sample of graduate students and described evidence for the scale's face validity and content validity. Construct validity was supported by significant correlations between the TAI and its subscales with an established measure of teaching effectives and its logically related subscales (SEEQ; Marsh, 1987 Marsh, HW. 1987. Students’ evaluations of university teaching: Research findings, methodological issues, and directions for future research. International Journal of Educational Research, 11(Whole Issue 3): 253–288.  [Google Scholar]). The TAI may supplement traditional assessments of instructor quality by providing feedback regarding interpersonal impact in the classroom.     

浅谈我国心理咨询师健康发展之要素

心理咨询与心理治疗效果的关键在于心理咨询与心理治疗师自身的特质,而非理论技巧。因此,心理咨询与心理治疗师在心理咨询与治疗的过程中,会非常直接、深刻和迅速地影响当事人的生活。通过对我国心理咨询师健康发展之要素的探讨,提出心理咨询师的培养应逐步走向正规专业教育和训练途径;同时关注心理咨询师自己的个人成长,健全督导制度是预防心理咨询师的职业耗竭,也是我国心理咨询业健康发展的根本保障。     

Counselling in primary care: a systematic review of the evidence

Primary objective: To undertake a systematic review which aimed to locate, appraise and synthesise evidence to obtain a reliable overview of the clinical effectiveness, cost‐effectiveness and user perspectives regarding counselling in primary care. Main results: Evidence from 26 studies was presented as a narrative synthesis and demonstrated that counselling is effective in the short term, is as effective as CBT with typical heterogeneous primary care populations and more effective than routine primary care for the treatment of non‐specific generic psychological problems, anxiety and depression. Counselling may reduce levels of referrals to psychiatric services, but does not appear to reduce medication, the number of GP consultations or overall costs. Patients are highly satisfied with the counselling they have received in primary care and prefer counselling to medication for depression. Conclusions and implications for future research: This review demonstrates the value of counselling as a valid choice for primary care patients and as a broadly effective therapeutic intervention for a wide range of generic psychological conditions presenting in the primary care setting. More rigorous clinical and cost‐effectiveness trials are needed together with surveys of more typical users of primary care services.     

Poisoning the Well

In this paper it is shown is that although poisoning the well has generally been treated as a species of ad hominem fallacy, when you try to analyze the fallacy using ad hominem schemes, even by supplementing with related schemes like argument from position to know, the analysis ultimately fails. The main argument of the paper is taken up with proving this negative claim by applying these schemes to examples of arguments associated with the fallacy of poisoning the well. Although there is a positive finding in this quest, in that poisoning the well is shown to be based on and associated with these forms of argument in interesting ways, the paper in the end is led to the conclusion that the fallacy is irreducibly dialectical. Poisoning the well is thus analyzed as a tactic to silence an opponent violating her right to put forward arguments on an issue both parties have agreed to discuss at the confrontation stage of a critical discussion. It is concluded that it is a special form of strategic attack used by one party in the argumentation stage of a critical discussion to improperly shut down the capability of the other party for putting forward arguments of the kind needed to properly move the discussion forward.