Citizen participation and emprowerment: The case of local environmental hazards

Local environmental hazards place millions of citizens at risk of physical, emotional, and financial harm. While the discovery of such hazards can be fundamentally disempowering for individuals and communities, few scholars have examined the dynamics of empowerment in this context. We explore the relationships among forms of empowerment, citizen participation, and local environmental hazards, and offer a model of the processes of empowerment and disempowerment appropriate to a broad range of citizen issues. On the basis of this analysis we recommend a partnership approach to community decision making that is designed both to reduce the likelihood that local environmental hazards will develop and to minimize the disempowering impact of any threats that do occur.     

Acting,feeling and thinking: psychoanalytic psychotherapy with Tracey

This paper consists of a case study and commentary which formed a part of the inaugural lecture in a series entitled ‘Working with Psychosomatic Issues’*. The audience consisted of psychoanalytic, body psychotherapy and integrative practitioners. The presentation was divided into three parts, (1) an outline of philosophical themes that inform perspectives on health, illness and psychosomatic phenomena, (2) the case study reproduced below and (3) a summary of Winnicott's work (1960, 1966, 1988) on ‘the indwelling of the psyche in the soma’. The case study describes work with a young woman who harms herself through self-hitting and, in addition, expresses other physical manifestations of psychological distress. The core approach of the practitioner is psychoanalytic. The work is informed also by postmodern sensibilities and phenomenological themes.     

Challenges in treating patients with psychosomatic disorders: some patterns of resistance

The treatment of people suffering from psychosomatic disorders poses important clinical challenges to psychoanalytic practice, including early abandonment, difficulties in engagement and superficial involvement in the treatment. The lack of systematic research on the subject suggests that a better understanding of the resistances and dynamics involved in such episodes is needed. Using supervision group to study treatments and inspired by action-research paradigm, this paper presents the results of an 18-month mixed-method qualitative clinical research on treating 22 cases. Thematic analysis revealed a frequent pattern of resistance to experience emotions that presented in two states: failure of repression (thin-skin) and massive repression (thick-skin). Narcissistic dynamics in the therapeutic relationship taking the form of ‘resistance to transference’ and a tendency to action were evident in both presentations. Symmetric and complementary counter-transference reactions, which compromised treatment, were also identified. Some technical implications are highlighted, such as the need to focus in the recovery of the patient's actual emotional experience and to understand such experience in the context of the ‘here and now’ of the therapeutic encounter. These findings suggest the need for a flexible approach to therapeutic work that moves between an ‘intrapsychic’ and a ‘relational’ focus.     

The effect of hypnosis therapy on the symptoms and disease activity in Rheumatoid Arthritis

Abstract

The present study aimed to assess the effectiveness of clinical hypnosis on the symptoms and disease activity of Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA). Sixty six RA patients participated in a controlled group design. Twenty six patients learnt the hypnosis intervention, 20 patients were in a relaxation control group and 20 patients were in a waiting-list control group. During hypnosis, patients developed individual visual imagery aimed at reducing the autoimmune activity underlying the RA and at reducing the symptoms of joint pain, swelling and stiffness. Subjective assessments of symptom severity and body and joint function, using standardised questionnaires and visual analogue scales, were obtained. Objective measures of disease activity via multiple blood samples during the therapy period and at the two follow-ups were also taken. These measurements were of erythrocyte sedimentation rate. C-reactive protein, haemoglobin and leukocyte total numbers. Results indicate that the hypnosis therapy produced more significant improvements in both the subjective and objective measurements. above relaxation and medication. Improvements were also found to be of clinical significance and became even more significant when patients practised the hypnosis regularly during the follow-up periods.     

The moderating effects of gender on the associations between multidimensional hostility and psychosomatic symptoms: a Chinese case

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of gender on the relationship between multidimensional hostility and psychosomatic symptoms in Chinese culture. The participants in this study were 398 Chinese college students (40% female) recruited from Taiwan. Four dimensions of multidimensional hostility-hostility cognition, hostility affect, expressive hostility behavior, and suppressive hostility behavior-were measured by the Chinese Hostility Inventory. After controlling for the effects of depression and anxiety, the results of path analysis revealed that the multidimensional hostility predicted psychosomatic symptoms directly, and predicted psychosomatic symptoms indirectly through negative health behavior. Furthermore, gender moderated the relationships between multidimensional hostility and health outcomes. Expressive hostility exacerbated psychosomatic symptom in females but buffered it in males, while affective hostility exacerbated psychosomatic symptoms in males. Additionally, suppressive hostility behavior was correlated to psychosomatic symptoms indirectly through negative health behavior in females. Moreover, expressive hostility was correlated to psychosomatic symptoms indirectly through negative health behavior more in males than in females.     

论神经哲学的兴起

人类心身问题的研究一直是科学界关注的热点。近年来,国外学者将神经科学与哲学研究统一起来,集合两门学科的研究方法、综合双方的研究成果,以此来共同推进人类心身问题的研究,因此诞生了一门介于神经科学和哲学之间的独立学科,它有着学科交叉的研究领域和特殊的跨学科研究方法,这门学科就是神经哲学。     

On being, knowing and having a self

This paper(1) takes the distinction between being conscious ('core consciousness') and knowing that one is conscious (self-reflexive consciousness) as a starting point for differentiating between three different aspects of the self: 1) the overall process of psychosomatic being which we share with all living creatures and which expresses itself through action (self as totality), 2) the conscious awareness of knowing the self that is a peculiarly human phenomenon consequent on the development of symbolic imagination (sense of self including numinous experiences of the self) and 3) having a self (or soul) as an essential attribute of being human that can only be achieved through being endowed with a self in the mind of others (self-identity leading to the self as the centre of the personality). Some clinical implications of these distinctions are considered including the role of interpretation as fostering integration through the provision of alternative self-images, the loss of self-reflexive consciousness in states of overwhelming affect and the attack on the spontaneous psychosomatic being of the self in states of self-hatred and self-division.     

Predictors of middle childhood psychosomatic problems: An emotion regulation approach

Development of the psychosomatic problems picky eating and headache and stomachache complaints in middle childhood was investigated from an emotion regulation perspective. The role of negative emotionality and family emotion regulatory factors (attachment to mother and parental perceived control) was studied. The sample (N=87) was a predominantly middleclass, community sample. The study was longitudinal, based on data from several data collections between child age 11 months and 9 years. The results showed that headache and stomachache complaints were mainly predicted by early negative emotionality, and picky eating by the family factors. More negative emotionality, insecure attachment and less perceived control were related to more psychosomatic problems in linear and interaction models. The findings were interpreted as showing that by considering emotion regulation, a fruitful perspective for understanding the development of psychosomatic problems could be elaborated. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Perceived organizational support and employees’ well-being: the mediating role of organizational dehumanization

Perceived organizational support (POS) has been found to predict important organizational outcomes such as increasing employees’ well-being. In this research, we examine a new underlying mechanism of the relationship between POS and employees’ well-being, that is, employees’ perceptions that their organization dehumanizes them. This proposition was tested across two studies. Using an experimental design manipulating POS in a laboratory setting, Study 1 indicated that in the high POS condition, the subsequent feelings of being dehumanized by the organization were lower than in the low POS condition. More importantly, organizational dehumanization perceptions were found to mediate the POS condition and satisfaction link. Furthermore, using a sample of 1209 employees, results of Study 2 indicated that organizational dehumanization mediates the relationship between POS and three indicators of employees’ well-being (i.e., job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, and psychosomatic strains). Implications for research on both organizational support theory and dehumanization theory are discussed.     

Possible psychosomatic hazards to the therapist: patients as self-objects

This speculative paper concerns certain fundamentals of healing and psychotherapy which we mistakenly tend to take for granted. I discuss our need for the feeling of harmony, wholeness, and oneness. I call this archetypal need our 'normal autistic expectation'. When met, we experience well-being and 'healing'. If not sufficiently and reliably met, this expectation becomes an omnipotent demand ('autistic demand'). Frustration then brings about angry destructiveness, either outwardly directed or inwardly directed, with bodily changes which must be processed if bodily damage is to be minimized. Bereavement, the loss of a person necessary for one's feeling of wholeness (a 'self-object'), is an extreme and well-researched example of such damage. Our selfobjects are 'healing' when they help us to complete our sense of self. Our patients-, our profession, our colleagues, our place of work and our financial security are normally all part of our self-object structure. I give examples where patients' own needs for survival or intactness mean that they have to externalize their own hurt and anger for long periods of their therapy. This often means that the therapist's own wholeness and health are under attack, and even damaged permanently, or at least until the damage can be processed. The nature of 'processing' in this sense is therefore in need of energetic research.