Hidden Treasures in Theological Education: The Writing Tutor,the Spiritual Director,and Practices of Academic and Spiritual Mentoring

Mentoring is an important but often overlooked resource in theological education and students' academic and spiritual formation. This essay profiles the mentoring practices and postures of the writing tutor and the spiritual director as exemplars of academic and spiritual mentoring. An extended probe of this analogy affirms the integration of academic and spiritual formation as a core value in theological education; identifies mentoring in theological education as a hidden treasure fostering this integration and warranting attention as a theological practice; and re‐envisions the theological practice of mentoring under the traditional rubric of the “care of souls,” embracing the relational, educational, formational, spiritual, and rhetorical dimensions of this practice.     

Humor and Its Contributions to Mental Health

Self control assistance includes steady doses of humorous comment and reflection. Getting past the perfect person syndrome en route to an emotionally healthier existence can be done by the appreciation of use of humor. Distinguishing between commercialized and rational humor allows for more permanent long range happiness and survival. To be able to laugh and learn at the same time are two bull's-eyes that promote more optimal emotional well-being. Humor ignites thirty-seven listed provisions in the service of emotional health. Fifteen precise dimensions of mental health that humor can pave the way toward are reviewed. Twenty-nine irrational beliefs about humor are fleshed out followed by nine types of rational humor. Stories and stormy anecdotes from the wiles of the author's practice of psychotherapy and parenting misdemeanors further document the topic under consideration.     

Therapist responses to requests for disclosure of therapeutic records: An introductory study

This paper describes a questionnaire survey of therapists in the UK who have been subject to requests for disclosure of client records as part of a legal process. Therapist responses are outlined in terms of the perceived effect of such disclosure on the client, therapist and the therapeutic relationship. Negative effects included the experience of exposure of sensitive client material in an adversarial legal system, of powerful emotional responses by therapists, and a sense of feeling professionally de‐skilled in an unfamiliar and often challenging legal environment. Positive effects for the client included the achievement of valued outcomes such as compensation, and, for the therapist, the facilitation of support for the client in this process. These findings are discussed in terms of a contrast between therapist perceptions of consensual and contested disclosure. In the former, therapist and client are in agreement about the restorative value and outcome of disclosure. In contested disclosure, the process is experienced as disrupting therapeutic privacy, undermining professional self‐confidence and introducing an unwelcome element of critical re‐evaluation of client motives for undertaking therapy.     

The Therapeutic Community Sing: Music Therapy Inpatient Group Process

Early psychoanalytic authors and music educators in both Europe and the United States pointed to the contemporary use of music therapy as a powerful modality in an inpatient psychiatric unit. The inpatient community sing is discussed in its capacity to address both individual and group goals. A clinical vignette from such a group is presented and discussed.     

A framework and two sketches concerning psychoanalytical training and practice

The author discusses the mode of knowledge production in psychoanalysis based on a reflection on the psychoanalytical education and its relationship to clinical practice. She points out that there is a risk in a form of clinical activity found in our education, which, under the fascination of the analyst's power of operating in the metaphorical domain of words, loses sight of the material dimension of the clinical action. In other words, this form of clinical activity loses sight of the meeting with another human being, of the repertoire of theories and experiences that informs this action and the patient's and the analyst's concrete life situation. The author highlights the role of writing as a privileged way of dealing with the material and immaterial facts that constitute the clinical action and reflects on some of the forces that structure nowadays the reception of knowledge production inside the psychoanalytical field. She uses the notion of 'minor literature', by Franz Kafka, to express the possibility that a live circuit of writings exchanged among psychoanalysts can offer to an interchange of experiences and ideas that is the live expression of the history of the psychoanalytical groups. A clinical session is presented in order to promote considerations about the psychoanalytical education, theory and practice.     

Rejoinder to Harold Blum2

The author's main disagreement with Harold Blum is over Blum's contention that symptomatic improvement is directly linked to the recovery of memories. The idea that memories are laid down in childhood and preserved until the time of their later recovery flies in the face of what we now understand as the creation of memories by the neurobiological systems underpinning this aspect of mental function. No evidence directly links symptomatic improvement to reconstruction and thus to outcome; care should be taken to avoid confusing co‐occurrence with causality. While reconstruction of how things actually were in childhood can significantly contribute to therapeutic action, it is the process rather than the outcome of this reconstruction that is therapeutic, due to the opportunity thus afforded to rework current experiences in the context of other perspectives. The author clarifies his definition of transference to show some areas of agreement between his position and Blum's. He disusses contemporary neuroscientific views on memory and identifies a number of psychoanalytic writers who have used these productively.     

Destructiveness, atrocities and healing: epistemological and clinical reflections

In this paper, destructiveness is approached as a multi-dimensional phenomenon where the mental health perspective addresses only one of these dimensions. An attempt is made to locate this phenomenon in the context of epistemological and societal considerations. Critical of mono-dimensional explanations based on causal-reductive epistemology, the paper instead proposes the idea of an 'ecology of destructiveness', according to which mental health professionals cannot possibly continue to assume the role of detached observers. The ordinariness and archetypal fascination of destructiveness are discussed as preventing the psychologizing and pathologizing of it. In addition, it is suggested that 'destructiveness may be a tragic facet of the human condition', without this implying any justification of it. Based on my work with a group of Bosnian ex-camp prisoners, some basic principles of how one can work with survivors of atrocities are derived and discussed. A central feature of this work is the attempt to create an appropriate therapeutic context within which a 'therapeutic presence' and 'therapeutic witnessing' can be developed. Finally, the relevance of Jungian insights to this kind of work is reviewed and the emergence of new types of defences of the self is identified.     

Reading and writing difficulties do not always occur as the researcher expects

Making a prognosis about reading and learning difficulties is a tricky business, even if a large array of relevant variables is taken into account. The present article discusses such an endeavour, on the basis of a longitudinal four-year study which started with an orthodox intervention on linguistic awareness. However, after initial success, new groups of reading, writing and math disabled children were identified in the course of years. Membership of these groups could not always be predicted on the basis of extensive cognitive diagnostics performed during the preschool. Rather, the pupil’s adaptive behaviour while coping with the demands of school work emerges as an important prognostic factor. This was particularly evident in an interaction combining math and reading comprehension in grade 3.