Considerations on Therapy: Theoretical, Theo-Radical, Theor-Ethical?

The author describes changes in his thinking over the past 20 years regarding therapy. Language is now the main tool of his approach. The author discusses such ideas as those of language-bound, from being to doing, from doing to possibilities, from possibilities to cooperating, from cooperating to experts using expertise, from expertise to forming frames.     

王弼易与伊川易之比较--关于《周易》的体例与原则

王弼在吸取<易传>乘、承、比、应、当位、中位等说的基础上,详细论述了<周易>的体例以及原则,进一步阐发了<易传>所蕴含的取义说、适时说,还提出了主爻说、初上不论位等说,确立了义理派解易的基本思想方法.尽管程颐在对<周易>体例的看法上基本上承袭王说,但亦有发展与创新之处.他在王氏"适时说"基础上强调<易>随时取义的观点,提出了中则正、乾坤卦变以及卦才说等,丰富了义理派解易的方法,增加了解释卦爻象和卦爻辞的灵活度.本文在论述以上观点时,还对前人之说提出了一些异议.     

Living in the soap bubble: the infertile couple and the standstill of the transcendent function in the treatment of an adolescent girl1

Abstract: This paper considers disturbances of identity and developmental breakdown in the phase of ‘emergent adulthood’ with young adults together with a disturbance of the capacity of the Self for coniunctio. It is proposed that the capacity for effective intrapsychic linking as conceptualized in analytic psychology with the concepts of the coniunctio and the transcendent function, is disturbed because of an unconscious identification with an infertile ‘couple’. This unconscious couple fantasy can lead to a standstill of the transcendent function and prevents the growth of meaning via the linking between parts of the psyche. This can lead to considerable clinical disturbances. A clinical vignette from the treatment of an adolescent girl should illustrate these hypotheses. The patient had developed a not good enough internal space and she suffered from fragmentation anxieties. She tried to control these anxieties by obsessive behaviour and by forms of adhesive identification. The standstill of the transcendent function was manifested when the patient developed a negative therapeutic reaction.     

Moving into tummy time,together: Touch and transitions aid parent confidence and infant development

“Back to sleep” messages can reduce prone practice for infants, with potential for motor delay and cranial deformation. Despite recommendations for “tummy time,” young infants fuss in prone, and parents report uncertainty about how to help infants tolerate prone positioning. We hypothesized that a Child'Space Method lesson, teaching proprioceptive touch and transitions to prone, would facilitate prone tolerance, parent behavioral support, and parent self-efficacy. This randomized study recruited parents (N = 37) of 2- to 5-month-old infants. On two visits, parents answered questions about infant behavior and parent experience, and played with their infant. Lesson group parents had the lesson following the first free play. One week later, lesson parents reported that infants tolerated more prone time and that parents showed more supportive behaviors in bringing infant to prone, as compared to waiting parents. Lesson parents’ efficacy, and infant behavior during play, trended in the hypothesized direction. The study demonstrated how a lesson in preparatory touch, and gradual transitions, promoted infant prone tolerance and also parent support of rolling, side-lying, and prone positioning. The lesson could be incorporated in parent education and early pediatric visits, helping infants and parents negotiate the prone challenge and setting the stage for further parent support of infant development.     

Basic visual perceptual processes in children with typical development and cerebral palsy: The processing of surface,length, orientation,and position

The present study aims to assess how the processing of basic visual perceptual (VP) components (length, surface, orientation, and position) develops in typically developing (TD) children (n = 215, 4–14 years old) and adults (n = 20, 20–25 years old), and in children with cerebral palsy (CP) (n = 86, 5–14 years old) using the first four subtests of the Battery for the Evaluation of Visual Perceptual and Spatial processing in children. Experiment 1 showed that these four basic VP processes follow distinct developmental trajectories in typical development. Experiment 2 revealed that children with CP present global and persistent deficits for the processing of basic VP components when compared with TD children matched on chronological age and nonverbal reasoning abilities.     

Friends in Low-Entropy Places: Orthographic Neighbor Effects on Visual Word Identification Differ Across Letter Positions

Visual word recognition is facilitated by the presence of orthographic neighbors that mismatch the target word by a single letter substitution. However, researchers typically do not consider where neighbors mismatch the target. In light of evidence that some letter positions are more informative than others, we investigate whether the influence of orthographic neighbors differs across letter positions. To do so, we quantify the number of enemies at each letter position (how many neighbors mismatch the target word at that position). Analyses of reaction time data from a visual word naming task indicate that the influence of enemies differs across letter positions, with the negative impacts of enemies being most pronounced at letter positions where readers have low prior uncertainty about which letters they will encounter (i.e., positions with low entropy). To understand the computational mechanisms that give rise to such positional entropy effects, we introduce a new computational model, VOISeR (Visual Orthographic Input Serial Reader), which receives orthographic inputs in parallel and produces an over-time sequence of phonemes as output. VOISeR produces a similar pattern of results as in the human data, suggesting that positional entropy effects may emerge even when letters are not sampled serially. Finally, we demonstrate that these effects also emerge in human subjects' data from a lexical decision task, illustrating the generalizability of positional entropy effects across visual word recognition paradigms. Taken together, such work suggests that research into orthographic neighbor effects in visual word recognition should also consider differences between letter positions.     

幼儿在地图任务中对自我位置与自我朝向的结合

使用地图-空间和空间-地图两种地图定向任务,设置需同时表征自我位置和自我朝向的任务情境,探讨了5~6岁幼儿在地图使用中结合自我位置和自我朝向表征的能力。结果发现:(1)位置选择和朝向选择同时正确的比率显著高于概率水平;(2)被试在位置选择上的准确性显著高于朝向选择;(3)位置表征与朝向表征之间的关系在不同任务条件下表现出一定的差异。这些结果说明,5~6岁幼儿在使用地图时已经能够同时关注空间位置与朝向,实现位置表征与朝向表征的结合。     

Hidden gifts of love: A clinical application of object relations theory

Using an extended clinical example, the author applies aspects of Kleinian, Fairbairnian, and Bionian theory to demonstrate how individuals may come to hide away feelings of both love and aggression. In the clinical material presented, a version of a schizoid retreat was understood as a pervasive response to trauma. The author attempts to explore more specifically the nature of a ‘traumatizing outer world’ ( Guntrip, 1969 ) and how these experiences cause an individual to retreat and undermine movement toward healthy adult dependency. An understanding of these dynamics helps inform the psychoanalytic treatment process and can serve as a type of roadmap in navigating through challenging transference–countertransference enactments.     

“THE MYSTERY OF HUMAN UNIQUENESS”: COMMON SENSE,SCIENCE, AND JUDAISM

Uniqueness implies singularity, incomparability. Nonetheless, as applied to everything within the human lifeworld, including ourselves, uniqueness is relativized. This becomes clear in the tension between “commonsensical” and “scientific” perspectives on the human. Our commonsense approach posits that human beings are unique among animals—unique because of our properties, most especially our consciousness, as well as because of our significance and value. From a scientific perspective, however, the uniqueness of the human—if it can be affirmed at all—is possibly a matter of degree, not kind. Additionally, the scientific perspective prescinds from judgments of the value of the human. To join these perspectives, without giving up on the importance of either one, is a philosophical and theological challenge. A Jewish approach to the challenge is offered here.