Creating “Maneuvering Room”: A Grounded Theory of Language and Influence in Marriage and Family Therapy

Influence in psychotherapy has been described as a characteristic of the therapist, a characteristic of the therapeutic relationship, and a negotiated process. This study combines grounded theory and task analysis to explore language patterns in facilitating change in family therapy. Thirty-one episodes of therapy were analyzed, resulting in the emergent concept of creating maneuvering room. Therapists introduce uncertainty into clients beliefs about problems then offer new ways of defining problems by speaking from three dimensions: therapist as expert or non-expert, therapist as participant or observer, or family members experiences as similar or different. The findings of this study support a possible common factor in family therapy.     

The other between fear and desire – countertransference fantasy as a bridge between me and the other

This paper attempts to show how unrepresented rupture/injury of primary expectations of the early relationship is reactivated in the analytic process. This becomes perceptible especially as unconscious fear and a specific defence described as ‘living behind a glass-wall’. The author, however, postulates the existence of an inherent dialogical-dyadic principle in the psyche, which she calls archetypal hope, and shows how this principle may become active in the analytical space. These aspects of analytical treatments are sketched with two vignettes, in which unconscious processes of exchange cause the analyst to experience unrepresented states. The author describes how the analyst is gradually able to experience and understand this, and how this understanding finally – without first becoming explicit – becomes effective in the analytical space. Special attention is given to the analytic attitude. A readiness to accept and move into regression and a receptivity to attune to the early sensory experience of the analysand is regarded as essential. Through this the analyst gains access to the inner space of the analysand and, through bodily experience and pre-symbolic processes, the unrepresented may thus become figurable. The reverie and countertransference fantasies are understood as a bridge: they connect the analytic pair. However, the reverie also creates the transition between that which was not – the absent representation – and that which wants to emerge. It thus bridges the personal unconscious (implicit expectation) and the archetypal (the archetypal hope). Through this, the space of hope may become a space of possibility, and help bridge the chasm between the experienced and the hoped-for.     

Regression I. Experimental approaches to regression

The concept of regression is considered with an emphasis on the differences between the positions of Freud and Jung regarding its significance. The paper discusses the results of experimental analyses of individual experience dynamics (from gene expression changes and impulse neuronal activity in animals to prosocial behaviour in healthy humans at different ages, and humans in chronic pain) in those situations where regression occurs: stress, disease, learning, highly emotional states and alcohol intoxication. Common mechanisms of regression in all these situations are proposed. The mechanisms of regression can be described as reversible dedifferentiation, which is understood as a relative increase of the representation of low-differentiated (older) systems in the actualized experience. In all of the cases of dedifferentiation mentioned above, the complexity of the systemic organization of behaviour significantly decreases.     

Associations between child physical abuse potential,observed maternal parenting,and young children's emotion regulation: Is participation in Early Head Start protective?

Clinicians working with Early Head Start (EHS) families consider family well-being and positive parent–child relationships as foundational to school readiness. Understanding the links between risk factors and these dimensions of family engagement can inform clinical decision-making, as risk assessments are used to tailoring program services. The current study examined the associations between high risk, or potential, for child physical abuse and both parenting quality and children's emotion regulation (ER) during toddlerhood; EHS participation was examined as a buffer. The sample included EHS-eligible mothers of infants (N = 80) drawn from one site of the EHS Research and Evaluation Project. Associations were tested between mothers’ potential for child physical abuse, measured during infancy, and observed maternal sensitivity, positive regard, harshness, and children's ER skills at child ages 1 and 2 years. Results indicated that high potential for child physical abuse was associated with lower positive regard at age 1 and lower ER skills at age 2. EHS participation operated as a buffer on each of these associations. Implications for screening for child physical abuse potential and the constructs it represents in clinical settings as well as how EHS can promote family engagement are discussed.     

Players’ Gender and Male Referees’ Decisions About Aggression in French Soccer: A Preliminary Study

The aim of this study was to examine (a) aggression displayed by players and (b) referees decisions about these behaviors as a function of the gender of the players in French soccer. Twenty-six games (13 for women and 13 for men) were videotaped. Instrumental aggressive acts and referees decisions were then observed. The findings indicated a significant effect of gender on instrumental aggression and referees decisions related to these behaviors. Male players displayed more instrumental aggressive acts than female players did. Nevertheless, relative to the total number of aggressive acts displayed, referees penalized women more than men. Gender stereotypes might be a relevant explanation for these results, as soccer is generally perceived as a masculine-type sport, particularly in France, and aggression as a masculine characteristic.     

Semantics for Dual and Symmetric Combinatory Calculi

We define dual and symmetric combinatory calculi (inequational and equational ones), and prove their consistency. Then, we introduce algebraic and set theoretical– relational and operational – semantics, and prove soundness and completeness. We analyze the relationship between these logics, and argue that inequational dual logics are the best suited to model computation.     

Desires in Palliative Medicine. Five Models of the Physician‐Patient Interaction on Palliative Treatment Related to Hellenistic Therapies of Desire

In this paper, we explore the desires that play a role at the palliative stage and relate them to various approaches to patient autonomy. What attitude can physicians and other caregivers take to the desires of patients at the palliative stage? We examine this question by introducing five physicians who are consulted by Jackie, an imaginary patient with metastatic lung carcinoma. By combining the models of the physician-patient relationship developed by Emanuel and Emanuel (1992) and the Hellenistic approaches to desires analyzed by Nussbaum (1994), five different ways of dealing with desires in the context of palliative care are sketched. The story of Jackie shows that desires are to a certain extent responsive to reasoning. In the palliative process, that can be a reason to devote attention to the desires of patients and caregivers and to determine which desires need to be fulfilled, which are less important, and how they are linked to emotions the patient has.     

Monitoring and self-repair in speech

Making a self-repair in speech typically proceeds in three phases. The first phase involves the monitoring of one's own speech and the interruption of the flow of speech when trouble is detected. From an analysis of 959 spontaneous self-repairs it appears that interrupting follows detection promptly, with the exception that correct words tend to be completed. Another finding is that detection of trouble improves towards the end of constituents. The second phase is characterized by hesitation, pausing, but especially the use of so-called editing terms. Which editing term is used depends on the nature of the speech trouble in a rather regular fashion: Speech errors induce other editing terms than words that are merely inappropriate, and trouble which is detected quickly by the speaker is preferably signalled by the use of ‘uh’. The third phase consists of making the repair proper. The linguistic well-formedness of a repair is not dependent on the speaker's respecting the integrity of constituents, but on the structural relation between original utterance and repair. A bi-conditional well-formedness rule links this relation to a corresponding relation between the conjuncts of a coordination. It is suggested that a similar relation holds also between question and answer. In all three cases the speaker respects certain structural commitments derived from an original utterance. It was finally shown that the editing term plus the first word of the repair proper almost always contain sufficient information for the listener to decide how the repair should be related to the original utterance. Speakers almost never produce misleading information in this respect.It is argued that speakers have little or no access to their speech production process; self-monitoring is probably based on parsing one's own inner or overt speech.     

Processing interactions and lexical access during word recognition in continuous speech

The interactions, during word-recognition in continuous speech, between the bottom-up analyses of the input and different forms of internally generated top-down constraint, were investigated using a shadowing task and a mispronunciation detection task (in the detection task the subject saw a text of the original passage as he listened to it). The listener's dependence on bottom-up analyses in the shadowing task, as measured by the number of fluent restorations of mispronounced words, was found to vary as a function of the syllable position of the mispronunciation within the word and of the contextual constraints on the word as a whole. In the detection task only syllable position effects were obtained. The results, discussed in conjunction with earlier research, were found to be inconsistent with either the logogen model of word-recognition or an autonomous search model. Instead, an active direct access model is proposed, in which top-down processing constraints interact directly with bottom-up information to produce the primary lexical interpretation of the acoustic-phonetic input.