Career and Employment Counseling With Soviet Jewish Immigrants: Issues and Recommendations

This article addresses issues faced by career and employment counselors working with Soviet Jewish refugees and provides recommendations for working effectively with this population.     

EDUCATION SECTION: Infant observation in Britain:The Tavistock approach

The author draws attention to something distinctive in the psychoanalytic 'air' from the early 1960s onwards: the strong emphasis upon the very early psychological, emotional and cognitive view of infants and young children. She focuses on the work of two analysts in particular, Esther Bick and Wilfred Bion, and the comparable, though differently expressed, centrality of the observational method in their work. Each explored not only the pathological picture but also the nature and integrative function of psychic containment in earliest mental life. Each also shared a preoccupation with what constituted a psychoanalytic attitude and with the process of becoming a psychoanalyst and, in Bick's case, a child analyst or psychotherapist. The author provides an historical background to the idea of observation, followed by an account, with detailed examples, of the nature of infant observation and the observational method as taught and practised at the Tavistock Clinic, London since the late 1940s, and subsequently in many other training institutions. Here the themes of Bick and Bion are constantly interrelated such that the prototype or model for the creation of emotional meaning and thought can be appreciated and learning from experience can take place.     

Multicultural Counseling and Intrapersonal Value Conflict: A Case Study

The internal conflict between professional and personal values that counselors can experience when working with clients whose culture and values are different from their own is discussed. This is not a conflict between the counselor and the client, but is a conflict experienced within the counselor who is attempting to help resolve problems within the client's frame of reference, or worldview. A case study is presented that illustrates the senior author's experience in coping with a specific value conflict. It is suggested that as counselors become more proficient in multicultural counseling and more able to promote decision making from another's point of view, feelings of internal conflicts will decrease. Means of decreasing the likelihood of value conflicts are offered.     

Authorship Credit and Ethical Guidelines

This article examines the literature concerning problems in the assignment of authorship credits resulting from collaborative research within and between psychological, counseling, and medical professions. In addition to previously cited reasons for the proliferation of multiauthored articles, we argue that the determination of authorship is correlated with the ethical standards of the professional organization to which a researcher belongs. Thus, possible conflicts between collaborators can spring from two sources: (a) ambiguous language regarding authorship in an ethical code within a discipline and (b) lack of guidelines for working across disciplines, especially if individual collaborators have competing goals and expectations.     

An Infertility Primer for Family Therapists: II. Working with Couples Who Struggle with Infertility

The distress of infertility and its medical treatments are profound, and the effects reverberate in each partner, the couple dyad, and the couple's relationships with family, friends, and medical systems. Yet family therapists, like others in our society, are often uninformed or misinformed about the experience of infertility. While the legacies of infertility may be painful and enduring, they often remain unspoken, and hence may be overlooked in standard interviews. This article describes the experiences of couples struggling with infertility, most of whom have sought medical intervention, and it provides treatment interventions for guiding couples through this difficult and often uncharted terrain. Case vignettes derived from 2 years of this clinical research study are included.     

The Family Life Cycle: Developmental Crises and Their Structural Impact on Families in a Community Mental Health Center

A typology for troubled families was developed based on the configuration of family members and the position of the identified patient within the family structure. This typology was investigated by surveying the demographic and clinical characteristics of 110 families of patients treated in a day hospital. Four types or “constellations” were found in the sample population. The families in the four Constellations differed significantly from one another in the gender, age, and diagnoses of the identified patient and the income level of the families. The Constellations thus appeared to constitute distinct clinical entities in the population studied. The reasons for the differences among Constellations are discussed in terms of the stress families experience during developmental crises involving structural change.     

Student Attitudes Toward Children and Adolescents With Severe Burns

Using color photographs donated by burned and nonburned children as stimulus materials, the authors compared attitudes of 218 practice teachers, senior nursing students, and counselors-in-training toward children and adolescents described as typical, having emotional and psychological problems, or having been severely burned and scarred. With the Adjective Generation Technique and a researcher-designed Attitude Scale, the authors found that children with severe burns and facial scarring were regarded less favorably and were given fewer predictions of future success than the other 2 groups. Significantly fewer of the students expressed a willingness to work with them, and many had little confidence that they would be able to help burned clients. Questions generated by participants concerning things they wanted to know about the 3 groups before working with them revealed that burned children were most often asked about their injuries and scarring but were rarely asked about school, leisure activities, or friends.     

An Infertility Primer for Family Therapists:

A seemingly "self-evident truth" in most people's lives is that one day they will have children. This universal, biopsychosocial assumption goes unchallenged until a couple faces infertility. Although the effects of such a challenge are profound, infertility is often treated as a nonevent — both within our society as a whole, and within the field of family therapy in particular. To assist clinicians who work with this numerically increasing population, and the many others who have been affected by their encounter with infertility in the past, this article discusses the biological/medical, psychological, and social factors that shape the experience of infertility in our society.