Controlling,Avoiding, or Protecting the Object: Three Reactions to the Breakdown of Psychic Retreats

In working psychoanalytically, it is common to encounter patients who need to carefully manage their immediate objects. This is evident in their stories about external life at home, at work, and with friends as well as in how it emerges within the transference. While a frequent theme in many analytic cases, the motives behind this need are varied.

Case material is used to show how these reactions emerge when psychic retreats fail. When unable to find refuge in pathological organizations or psychic retreats, patients are exposed to the worst of paranoid and depressive anxieties with only a fragile foxhole to withdraw into or defend from. In such a precarious psychological state, fantasies of unbearable self and object danger emerge, leading to various forms of acting out, overreliance on projective identification, and perverted images of giving and receiving. These fantasies result in the desire for idealized objects, the drive to resurrect fallen objects, and the need to avoid cruel and attacking objects that have taken over and replaced the sought out ideal.     

A Comparison of Teacher and Parent Delivered Consequences: Improving Classroom Behavior in Low-Income Children with ADHD

Both teacher and parent delivered consequences have been shown to be effective in improving the classroom behavior of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). However, there is a delay between the behavior and delivery of parent provided consequences. The delay may make the consequences less salient and effective, for children with ADHD. The current study compared the effectiveness of parent delivered consequences (PC) to teacher delivered consequences (TC) for increasing academic performance and appropriate classroom behavior in African American, low income, elementary students with ADHD. Results indicate that the two interventions are equally effective in improving children's on-task behavior and classwork productivity.     

A Clinical Trial of In-Home CBT for Depressed Mothers in Home Visitation

Despite negative outcomes for depressed mothers and their children, no treatment specifically designed to address maternal depression in the context of home visitation has emerged. In-Home Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (IH-CBT) is an adapted treatment that is delivered in the home, focuses on the needs of new mothers, and leverages ongoing home visiting to optimize engagement and outcomes. This study examined the efficacy of IH-CBT using a randomized clinical trial. Subjects were 93 new mothers in a home visiting program. Mothers with major depressive disorder identified at 3 months postpartum were randomized into IH-CBT and ongoing home visitation (n = 47) or standard home visitation (SHV; n = 46) in which they received home visitation alone and could obtain treatment in the community. Depression was measured at pre- and posttreatment, and 3-month follow-up using interviews, clinician ratings, and self-report. Mothers receiving IH-CBT showed improvements in all indicators of depression relative to the SHV condition and these gains were maintained at follow-up. For example, 70.7% of mothers receiving IH-CBT were no longer depressed at posttreatment in terms of meeting criteria for major depressive disorder compared to 30.2% in the SHV group. These findings suggest that IH-CBT is an efficacious treatment for depressed mothers in home visitation programs.     

Trauma and healing: from ‘furor sanandi’ to ‘animus sanandi’

In his last period (1928–33), Ferenczi tried to complement the ‘negative’ technical principles first introduced by Freud in the 1910s. He introduced diverse and successive ‘positive instructions’, and specific techniques known as ‘elastic’ of ‘relaxation and neocatharsis’, and also made an unsucessful attempt to introduce ‘mutual analysis’. These techniques are implemented around a series of new technical principles including ‘tact’, ‘empathy’, ‘indulgence’, ‘intense sympathy’. All of these positive technical principles and innovations demonstrate the importance of considering the dimension of ‘healing’ in all analytic experiences and the importance of the analyst's functioning as the ‘healer’. The emphasis on the use of these new technical principles is consistent with the emphasis Ferenczi places upon countertransference and traumatic factors in psychopathogenesis.     

Dreaming up the patient in supervision: from the concrete to the symbolic*

This paper discusses the importance of parallel processes within the therapeutic and the supervisory context of therapy with an eight-year-old boy diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. During the first months of the therapy, through powerful projective identification, the therapist found herself in the ‘clothes’ of the ‘dead mother’. She was unable to think and feel in the sessions. Deadness could not be symbolised – it was enacted in the sessions. The therapeutic encounter had to start elsewhere: the supervisor’s reverie brought to life the patient’s material in the context of the supervision, allowing thinking to occur, first within the supervisory relationship and only then in the therapeutic relationship. In the context of supervision, the encounter of two mentally alive people could contain anxieties, metabolise them and open the way to mental connections. This encounter facilitated the development of creative thinking of both the therapist and the young patient in the consulting room, which allowed the child to become the subject of his existence and to evolve.     

家庭学习环境对儿童早期学业和社会技能的作用

家庭学习环境作为个体出生后最先接触到的学习环境,对个体早期乃至未来一生的发展都有重要作用。本研究以181名年龄在53~67个月的学前儿童及其母亲为被试,考察了家庭学习环境对儿童早期语言、数学和社会技能的作用。结果发现:(1)控制个体性别、年龄后,家庭学习环境对儿童早期语言、数学和社会技能的解释率分别为9.2%、4.4%和9.6%,均大于家庭社会经济地位和学前教育经历对三方面技能的解释率;(2)进一步控制家庭社会经济地位和学前教育经历后,家庭学习环境仍可显著预测个体早期语言、数学和社会技能,解释率分别为7.4%、3.2%和8.5%;(3)家庭学习环境的不同方面与儿童早期发展不同方面的关系不同。其中,家庭学习活动是儿童早期语言和数学技能的重要预测变量,丰富生活经验是儿童早期社会技能的重要预测变量。     

The Oedipus complex: A confrontation at the central cross‐roads of psychoanalysis

The theory of the Oedipus complex as Freud formulated it rests on the following pillars: the child's characteristic sexual and aggressive impulses concerning the parents, phallic monism, and the castration complex. This paper reviews the context in which Freud discovered the Oedipus complex, as well as Freud's theory. It then examines the proposals of later authors whose general Oedipal theories differ from Freud's in an attempt to point out both their possible correlations and confrontations with Freud. It includes Klein's pre‐genital Oedipal theory, Lacan's structuralist reinterpretation, Bion's reconception of the complex under the knowledge vertex, Green's generalized triangulation theory, Meltzer's notions of the aesthetic object and sexual mental states, and Chasseguet‐Smirgel's archaic Oedipal matrix     

沉浸式生死教育教学——参观殡仪馆

尝试在生死教育课程中开展了参观殡仪馆活动,理由有二,一是受到具身认知理论和沉浸理论两个教学理论的支持;二是生死教育课程本身的要求,即借鉴国外死亡教育的经验、落实“以死观生”的生死教育理念和帮助学生死亡脱敏的要求。在教学设计中,把参观活动分为一般沉浸活动和深度沉浸活动两种,学生参观后的自愿报告显示教学效果良好。参观殡仪馆活动可以在其他高校有条件地推广,但必须遵循两个重要原则,即心理建设原则和完全自愿原则。

     

THE ELUSIVENESS OF MASCULINITY: PRIMORDIAL VULNERABILITY,LACK, AND THE CHALLENGES OF MALE DEVELOPMENT

Reaching beyond the Oedipus prototype to address the unrepresentable vulnerability founded on the boy's infantile helplessness in contact with the mother's body, the author aims to identify the inherent tensions and enigmas of being male. He proposes that both the repudiation of femininity and the overvaluation of phallicity are unconsciously constructed to withstand the fundamental deficiency grounded in the asymmetry of the boy's prephallic relation with his primary object. This bodily based primordial vulnerability, marked by absence and lack, remains elusive—an unsymbolizable experience that provides the archaic matrix for adaptive and defensive phallicism, the oedipal complex, and genital progression. A clinical vignette is presented to illustrate these concepts.     

Introduction: The role of shame in psychoanalytic theory and practice

Introducing three papers by Leon Wurmser, Claude Janin and John Steiner the author gives an overview of the development of the concept of shame in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Different aspects of the phenomenon of shame are being discussed including its relation to guilt, object relations and identity as well as the role of gaze when emerging from a psychic retreat.