Prayer as Therapeutic Process Toward Aliveness Within a Spiritual Direction Relationship

This article underscores the potential benefit of a specific form of Christian prayer that creates space within a spiritual direction relationship for the creation of inner images that reveal a person’s unconscious relational longings and co-created representations of God. In this specific type of prayer that can be facilitated by mental health professionals and pastoral counselors, imagery of God’s presence is created in the space between a Christian spiritual director and a Christian directee while they are open to inner experiences that reveal God’s presence interacting with infantile processes toward aliveness. Aliveness is understood using Winnicottian notions in dialog with theories proposed by Allan N. Schore, affective neuropsychologist and Clinical Faculty at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, Ann Belford Ulanov, Jungian Analyst and Professor of Psychiatry and Religion at Union Theological Seminary and W.R.D., British psychoanalyst in the Objects Relations School. Ideas of transitional space, good enough mother, holding environment, aggression, creativity, and play are set alongside theories of affect regulation, the developing brain, co-created objective God images, the relational nature of God and being received as good while illuminating three prayer experiences during one 30-year-old Asian American woman’s 16-month therapeutic process toward aliveness.

Nodal structure and the partitioning of equivalence classes

By definition, all of the stimuli in an equivalence class have to be functionally interchangeable with each other. The present experiment, however, demonstrated that this was not the case when using post-class-formation dual-option response transfer tests. With college students, two 4-node 6-member equivalence classes with nodal structures of A-->B-->C-->D-->E-->F were produced by training AB, BC, CD, DE, and EF. Then, unique responses were trained to the C and D stimuli in each class. The responses trained to C generalized to B and A, while the responses trained to D generalized to E and F. Thus, each 4-node 6-member equivalence class was bifurcated into two 3-member functional classes: A-->B-->C and D-->E-->F, with class membership precisely predicted by nodal structure. A final emergent relations test documented the intactness of the underlying 4-node 6-member equivalence classes. The coexistence of the interchangeability of stimuli in an equivalence class and the bifurcation of such a class in terms of nodal structure was explained in the following manner. The conditional discriminations that are used to establish a class also imposes a nodal structure on the stimuli in the class. Thus, the stimuli in the class acquire two sets of relational properties. If the format of a test trial allows only one response option per class, responding on those trials will be in accordance with class membership and will not express the effects of nodal distance. If the format of a test trial allows more than one response option per class, responding on those trials will be determined by the nodal structure of the class. Thus, the relational properties expressed by the stimuli in an equivalence class are determined by the discriminative function served by the format of a test trial.     

观念运动理论：内涵与证据

人类日常动作有两种类型, 一是是对外界刺激的反应, 是一种自下而上的动作模式, 即感觉运动(sensorimotor)模式; 二是以人们头脑中的观念意图为基础, 由观念引导, 为了实现一个特定的目标而执行特定的动作, 是一种自上而下的动作模式, 即观念运动(ideomotor)模式。观念运动理论(ideomotor theory)所解释的就是以基于意图的动作。该理论经历了长期的演变, 一般动作执行与动作模仿领域内的行为与神经科学研究的证据初步证实了观念运动的理论构想与主要机制：共同编码机制与镜像神经机制。观念运动理论在贯通感知觉与动作方面具有重大意义, 由此还产生了共享环路模型(shared circuits model, SCM)等新近观点。此外, 观念运动理论还强调了目标和预期的重要地位。未来还需加强对动作与意图之间的通路, 以及动作的本体性效果等方面的研究。     

NEAR‐DEATH EXPERIENCES AND SPIRITUALITY

Abstract. Some individuals when they come close to death report having experiences that they interpret as spiritual or religious. These so‐called near‐death experiences (NDEs) often include a sense of separation from the physical body and encounters with religious figures and a mystical or divine presence. They share with mystical experiences a sense of cosmic unity or oneness, transcendence of time and space, deeply felt positive mood, sense of sacredness, noetic quality or intuitive illumination, paradoxicality, ineffability, transiency, and persistent positive aftereffects. Although there is no relationship between NDEs and religious belief prior to the experience, there are strong associations between depth of NDE and religious change after the experience. NDEs often change experiencers' values, decreasing their fear of death and giving their lives new meaning. NDEs lead to a shift from ego‐centered to other‐centered consciousness, disposition to love unconditionally, heightened empathy, decreased interest in status symbols and material possessions, reduced fear of death, and deepened spiritual consciousness. Many experiencers become more empathic and spiritually oriented and express the beliefs that death is not fearsome, that life continues beyond, that love is more important than material possessions, and that everything happens for a reason. These changes meet the definition of spiritual transformation as “a dramatic change in religious belief, attitude, and behavior that occurs over a relatively short period of time.” NDEs do not necessarily promote any one particular religious or spiritual tradition over others, but they do foster general spiritual growth both in the experiencers themselves and in human society at large.     

SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION,HEALING, AND ALTRUISM: INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM

This essay introduces the five articles that follow, whose aim is to show how altruism emerges out of spiritual transformation and is integral to healing process in four kinds of ritual healing systems—popular, folk, an indigenous religious healing tradition, and complementary and alternative medicine represented by consciousness transformation movements. In this introduction I situate these largely marginalized religious and spiritual practices within the context of the religion‐science discourse, which has focused for the most part on the relationship between the established, mainstream religions and the dominant biomedical system. Antecedents of two of these types of religious practices, Spiritism and consciousness transformation movements, were part of the development of the psychological sciences in the nineteenth century but lost ground in the twentieth. Despite discrimination and persistent negative attitudes on the part of the established religions and biomedicine, these healing traditions have not only survived through the twentieth century but appear to have gained both followers and interest in the twenty‐first. In future decades, at least for complementary and alternative medical practices and perhaps also for spirit healing centers, there may be a reversal in status through greater acceptance of their unique combination of scientific and religious perspectives.     

DISCUSSION: ALTRUISM,SPIRITUALLY MERGING WITH A FELLOW HUMAN BEING'S SUFFERING

This discussion focuses on the details of the wellsprings of altruism. The preceding articles in this section portray how spirit figures in various cultural guises appear in human lives with the gift of altruism, in a kind of seeding of the willing healer with the spirit's presence and its accompanying power of love, altruism, and healing. The word altruism is related to the French autre and autrui, “other,” with a special meaning here implying a relationship of identification.     

Semiotic transformations in psychoanalysis with infants and adults

The author addresses issues that emerge when we compare psychoanalytic experiences with adults and with infants. Two analyses-one with a 35 year-old woman and one with a 2 week-old boy and his mother-illustrate that infant psychoanalytic experiences help us understand and handle adult transference. However, we cannot extrapolate infant experiences to adult work. Truly, witnessing the baby's communication widens our sensitivity to non-verbal layers of the adult's communication. Infant work also offers a direct encounter with the container and the contained personified by a mother with her baby. But we need to conceptualize carefully the links between clinical experiences with babies and adults. When we call an adult transference pattern 'infantile', we imply that primeval experience has been transformed into present behaviour. However, if we view the analytical situation as one in which infantile invariants have transformed into adult symptoms, we face the impossible task of indicating the roots of the present symptoms. The author rather suggests that what is transformed is not an invariant infantile essence but signs denoting the patient's inner reality. He proposes we define transformation as a semiotic process instead of building it on an essentialist grounding. If we view the analytic situation as a map of signs that we translate during our psychoanalytic work, we can proceed into defining containment as a semiotic process. This idea will be linked with a conceptualization of the mother-infant relation in semiotic terms.     

制度伦理与我国社会转型期医患关系

我国社会转型期中出现的诸多医患利益冲突向人们提出了严峻挑战,亟需对其加以调节和平衡.这种调节与平衡,不能完全甚至不能主要地交由市场去运作,不能完全任凭医患双方自由地去博弈;政府必须明确并履行自己的职责,为正确调节与平衡社会转型期的医患利益创立一个全方位的合理的框架.     

Matfit: A fortran subroutine for comparing two matrices in a subspace

This research was supported by grant APA 3020 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. The author would like to thank Dr. David O'Hare for providing the data used to illustrate the use of the program MATFIT.