Jungian Analysis of the Chinese Mythological Image of Sun Wukong

This paper examines the symbolism of the cultural image Sun Wukong (the Monkey King), a Chinese legendary hero, and how it influenced an eight-year-old boy’s psychic development. Through an analysis of Sun Wukong’s life from his birth to attaining Buddhahood, a three-phase healing process is identified in Sun Wukong’s tale and the psychotherapeutic process: “naming and initiating,” “nurturing and taming,” and “transforming and transcending,” proposed by Dr. Heyong Shen. Sandplay visually highlighted these key clinical changes in conscious awareness and developmental behaviour influencing the boy’s individuation process. Images found either in cultural traditions or spontaneously emerging from the unconscious in individuals are of significance in human life, offering pathways to psychic healing and development. Further, myths and cultural resources used in clinical work demonstrate that having cultural competency is invaluable in Jungian analysis. Pathogenic and health-maintenance factors of culture can be explored in future clinical practice and research.     

The I Ching as a Potential Jungian Application: History and Practice

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung had a lifelong interest in the I Ching after discovering it in 1919. Jung’s interest in the I Ching is arguably more practical than purely theoretical or intellectual, and references to I Ching divination appear frequently in his various publications, seminars, letters and clinical practice records. After a few observations on the history of the study of the I Ching in China, the author categorizes Jung’s three uses of the I Ching as physical use (to preview future potentials of outer reality), psychological use (to reveal one’s psychological state), and psychical approach (to engage with the divine through “神”[“shen”, spiritual agencies]). Finally, the author discusses the current Jungian engagement by demonstrating clinical cases in contemporary times. Some Jungian analysts practise I Ching divination to obtain insights into the physical and psychological state of therapeutic relationships and for personal development. This paper is a historical and critical engagement of the Jungian practice of I Ching divination.     

Safe haven in adolescence: Improving parental reflective functioning and youth attachment and mental health with the Connecting and Reflecting Experience

Attachment security provides a well-documented protective developmental function for children exposed to individual- and community-level trauma, yet the effectiveness of prevention and intervention efforts targeting attachment during adolescence has been relatively underexplored. The Connecting and Reflecting Experience (CARE) program is a transdiagnostic, bi-generational, group-based, mentalizing-focused parenting intervention developed to dismantle the intergenerational transmission of trauma and support secure attachment relationships across the developmental spectrum within an under-resourced community. This exploratory study evaluated outcomes among caregiver-adolescent dyads (N = 32) in the CARE condition of a nonrandomized clinical trial at an outpatient mental health clinic within a diverse, urban U.S. community with disproportionate trauma exposure exacerbated by COVID-19. Caregivers predominantly identified as Black/African/African American (47%), Hispanic/Latina (38%), and/or White (19%). At pre- and post-intervention, caregivers completed questionnaires regarding parental mentalizing and their adolescents’ psychosocial functioning. Adolescents completed scales regarding attachment and psychosocial functioning. Results showed a significant decrease in caregivers’ prementalizing on the Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire, improvement in adolescent psychosocial functioning on the Youth Outcomes Questionnaire, and an increase in adolescents’ reports of attachment security on the Security Scale. These preliminary findings suggest that mentalizing-focused parenting interventions may be effective in fostering improved attachment security and psychosocial functioning during adolescence.     

Microcomputers in schools: Impact on the social life of elementary classrooms

Microcomputers are becoming increasingly available to schools, but little research is available concerning the impact of this technology for children. Two studies were conducted to examine some possible social effects of the use of microcomputers in elementary school classrooms where children are learning to program in LOGO. First, the task-related interaction that children engaged in with each other was observed and recorded in two classrooms (8- to 9-year-old s, and 10- to 11-year-olds) as the children worked on both computer and non-computer tasks. The children in both classrooms were significantly more likely to collaborate with each other when they worked with the computers, when compared with their interaction over other classroom tasks. The second study examined children's perceptions of their peers as resources for help with a variety of classroom tasks. When compared with other work, the computer context was the one where children more consistently identified certain of their peers as resources for help.     

Conditional reasoning and the competence-performance issue: A developmental analysis of a training task

Empirical investigations of conditional reasoning have generally found that both children and young adults perform poorly on tasks that require the selection or evaluation of those propositions that test the truth status of conditional statements (if p then q). Earlier work (D. O'Brien & W. F. Overton, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 1980, 30, 44–60) suggested that poor performances with these tasks by young adults show improvement following the introduction of evidence that contradicts earlier faulty inferences, and this improvement generalizes to other conditional reasoning tasks. The effects of the contradiction training were not found with younger subjects. The present research is an extension of the contradiction training paradigm. Ten-, fourteen-, and eighteen-year-olds were tested to assess developmental differences in improvement with an evaluation and a conditional syllogism task. Significant improvement in performance was found for the twelfth grade students following the contradiction training, and this generalized across tasks. This effect was not found for the two younger groups. The usual poor performance of the oldest group is considered to be a false negative assessment of their conditional reasoning competency. Further, it is suggested that several correct performances of younger reasoners are false positive assessments of their conditional reasoning competency.     

Developmental effects of typicality and superordinate property dominance on sentence verification

Second graders (mean age, 8 years 3 months), fourth graders (mean age, 10 years 4 months), and adults verified telegraphic sentences with typical or atypical subject nouns and high or low dominant property predicates. The hypothesis tested was that the similarity in the attribute structures of category members to their superordinate prototype should be related to degree of typicality. Adult reaction time and error data supported the prototype model of semantic category structure. Second and fourth graders showed comparable property knowledge to adults, but evidenced different organizational patterns than predicted by the adult model. The results suggest that with development children learn to simultaneously use many attribute dimensions and to abstract the family resemblance structure and relative importance of category properties.