The social supports of suicide attempters: The different roles of family and friends

The social support patterns of a sample of 101 suicide attempters were compared with the patterns of a control sample on the basis of structured interview data. Network characteristics and the extent of support in different functional categories were examined as to their absolute and relative power to discriminate between the suicide attempters and the controls. A clear separation of the functions of kin and of friends/acquaintances emerged. The crucial difference between the attempters and the controls lay in the number of friends with whom the subjects had agreeable everyday interactions and in the number of kin that provided crisis support, both psychological and instrumental. Other support differences between the two groups were of secondary importance. While there was no overall difference in the frequency of social interactions between the two groups, the size of the social network differed greatly. Consequences for the conceptualization and measurement of social support as well as for the prevention of suicidal behavior are discussed.     

Identity as self-transformation: emotional conflicts and their metamorphosis in memory

This paper develops the thesis that personal identity is neither to be taken in terms of an unchanging self-sufficient ‘substance’ nor in terms of selfhood ‘without substance,’ i.e. as fluctuating processes of pure relationality and subject-less activity. Instead, identity is taken as self-transformation that is bound to particular embodied individuals and surpasses them as individuated entities. The paper is structured in three parts. Part I describes the experiential givenness of conflicts that support our sense of self-transformation. While the first part develops an inter-subjective topography of emotional movements, the second part pays attention to their temporal dimension. We work with conflicts and get transformed by them also in the way we remember them. Part II focuses on the process of self-understanding that accompanies conflicts and their metamorphosis in memory. Part III compares and discusses different models of a ‘relational ontology’ of the person, which question the idea that we are defined only by how we define ourselves—just as they question the idea that one’s identity is independent of how one relates to one’s having changed.     

Fisher transformation based confidence intervals of correlations in fixed- and random-effects meta-analysis

Meta-analyses of correlation coefficients are an important technique to integrate results from many cross-sectional and longitudinal research designs. Uncertainty in pooled estimates is typically assessed with the help of confidence intervals, which can double as hypothesis tests for two-sided hypotheses about the underlying correlation. A standard approach to construct confidence intervals for the main effect is the Hedges-Olkin-Vevea Fisher-z (HOVz) approach, which is based on the Fisher-z transformation. Results from previous studies (Field, 2005, Psychol. Meth., 10, 444; Hafdahl and Williams, 2009, Psychol. Meth., 14, 24), however, indicate that in random-effects models the performance of the HOVz confidence interval can be unsatisfactory. To this end, we propose improvements of the HOVz approach, which are based on enhanced variance estimators for the main effect estimate. In order to study the coverage of the new confidence intervals in both fixed- and random-effects meta-analysis models, we perform an extensive simulation study, comparing them to established approaches. Data were generated via a truncated normal and beta distribution model. The results show that our newly proposed confidence intervals based on a Knapp-Hartung-type variance estimator or robust heteroscedasticity consistent sandwich estimators in combination with the integral z-to-r transformation (Hafdahl, 2009, Br. J. Math. Stat. Psychol., 62, 233) provide more accurate coverage than existing approaches in most scenarios, especially in the more appropriate beta distribution simulation model.     

Imago Dei

In Isaiah 6, the prophet is commissioned to speak so that people should not understand and thus be destroyed. The commission has parallels in other 8th century prophets, notably Amos and Hosea, for whom prophecy and history are a divine trap. I will proceed through a discussion of the ethical implications of the commission, using especially the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, to a reading of particular texts: Isaiah 6, 29:1–14, and the Immanuel prophecy in 7:14–25. I will end with a consideration of reading and meaning. Criticism is a process of bafflement, of realising that one will never fully understand, that there are doors in the text one will never open.     

A Voice Crying out from the Wound—with or without Words: On Trauma,Speech, and Silence1

Drawing on memory and trauma studies, psychotherapeutic research, and Holocaust testimonies (in particular those of Wiesel, Semprun, Kulka, and Appelfeld), this article explores the role of speech and silence in the process of working through severe trauma. That which seems “incommunicable” will be considered in regard to the limits of linguistic representation and the problems of communication caused by the interlocutors’ avoidance of the past. How can one ensure that recounting traumatic memories does not become an extra risk rather than a remedy?     

Scenes of shame,social roles,and the play with masks

This article explores various scenes of shame, raising the questions of what shame discloses about the self and how this self-disclosure takes place. Thereby, the common idea that shame discloses the self’s debasement will be challenged. The dramatic dialectics of showing and hiding display a much more ambiguous, dynamic self-image as result of an interactive evaluation of oneself by oneself and others. Seeing oneself seen contributes to the sense of who one becomes. From being absorbed in what one does, one might suddenly become self-aware, shift viewpoints and feel pressed to put on masks. In putting on a mask, one relates to oneself in distancing oneself from oneself. In being at once a moral agent and a performing actor with an audience and norms in mind, one embodies and transcends the social roles one takes. In addition to the feeling of shame, in which the self finds itself passively reflected, the self’s active reflections on its shame are to be taken into account. As examples from Milan Kundera, Shakespeare’s King Lear, a line from Kingsley Amis, a speech by Vaclav Havel and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments indicate, self-(re)presentation in the public and the private sphere is a complex hermeneutical process with surprising twists.     

How a therapist survives the suicide of a patient—with a special focus on patients with psychosis

The article draws from a personal clinical experience of two suicides, not far removed from each other in time. The first patient was a 33-year-old intellectual suffering from depression with narcissistic traits but no psychotic elements, while the second patient was a 21-year-old student with a manifest psychotic episode behind him and with characteristics of post-psychotic depression at the time of suicide. The two suicides had very different impacts on the therapist: the first left open some “space” for reflection, communication, and working-through, while the second closed such a “space,” leaving only a tiny door to the existential roots of human beings and suffering. The therapist was able to find some “shelter” by talking to supervisors, colleagues, and friends in the first case; in the second, the only possible “shelter” was glimpsed in the philosophy of groundlessness (Ungrund) of the Russian existentialist Nicolai Berdyaev. The personal experiences of the therapist, along with some theoretical interpretations of the after-effects of both suicides, are presented using a psychodynamic and existential–phenomenological understanding of the therapeutic relationship with a psychotic and a non-psychotic patient. The main dilemmas exposed by a patient’s suicide, especially if the patient suffers from psychosis, are difficult to deal with in the usual clinical settings and call for resources beyond it. The authors propose that these can be found in philosophical and theological insights.     

Difficulties in Defining the Concept of God: Kierkegaard in Dialogue with Levinas,Buber, and Rosenzweig

This article investigates difficulties in defining the concept of God by focusing on the question of what it means to understand God as a ‘person.’ This question is explored with respect to the work of Søren Kierkegaard, in dialogue with Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas. Thereby, the following three questions regarding divine ‘personhood’ come into view: First, how can God be a partner of dialogue if he at the same time remains unknown and unthinkable, a limit-concept of understanding? Second, if God is love in person and at the same time a spiritual reality ‘between’ human agents, in what ways are his personal and trans-personal traits related to each other? Third, what exactly is revealed through God’s ‘name’? By way of an inconclusive conclusion, divine personhood is discussed in regard to prayer, where the problems of predication that arise in third-personal speech about God are linked with the second-personal encounter with God.