Therapeutic Intimacy

Abstract

This essay describes therapeutic intimacy as a deeply personal and evolving definition of what each therapist finds uniquely curative. The author arrived at her definition following the events of September 11, 2001, and notes that constructs such as vicarious traumatization do not adequately convey the profound impact that such a catastrophic event can have on the clinician's personal and professional life. She introduces the term “shared trauma” to describe the lasting, transformative changes in one's self-concept taking place when the clinician and client are exposed to a collective trauma. The arbitrariness of professional boundaries is captured through discussion of client narratives.     

The Third Time Was the Charm

Abstract

A therapist's three experiences as a recipient of psychotherapy have led her to appreciate the ways in which one therapy informs another. She examines what may be learned from a less than successful therapy. She reflects on several lessons she has learned from her own therapieslessons that have shaped her as a clinician. In particular, she notes that when the therapist and patient are remarkably similar in their values and strengths, the therapist needs to take great care that key issues are not glossed over or mishandled.     

Pentimento

Abstract

When asked to consider writing a personal essay about a transformational moment in the development of myself as a clinician, this unfolding of events immediately came to mind. This moment captures a story about my development as a clinical social worker through my personal psychoanalysis. Sometimes, when one can contain his/her anxiety about receiving, a spontaneous and wonderful gift may present itself for the opening. This is my offering-a gift to students of clinical process.     

Forced termination: Reconsidering theory and technique

Abstract

Forced terminations typically are described in the therapy literature as grim mourning processes fraught with peril and little benefit. Such endings, although not optimal, are potential opportunities for mastery, growth, and maturation. Overemphasizing the grim aspects of forced termination may impair the departing therapist's ability to sustain a belief in the client's ability to survive loss, use the process productively and, when indicated, transfer to another therapist. Case histories are used to illustrate other constructions and differential interventions during forced terminations.     

Use of Self-Disclosure for the Gay Male Therapist: The Impact on Gay Males in Therapy

ABSTRACT

Homophobia and heterosexism often can negatively affect a gay male's development, and developing internalized homophobia can challenge connecting with others. Using a sample of eight therapist–patient pairs (16 participants), each participant responded to how often the therapist self-disclosed. In addition, each participant completed a measurement inventory to determine how connected each was to the other (patient to therapist or therapist to patient). Findings indicated that self-disclosure occurred often during therapy, and there was a fairly high level of connection between patients and therapists. Patients who perceived that their therapists self-disclosed more often also reported higher levels of connection when compared with those who perceived a lower level of therapist self-disclosure. Recommendations for future research are made along with practice implications designed to help therapists effectively use self-disclosure when working with gay male clients.     

Cultural practice and utopian desire in German Social Democracy: Reading Adolf Levenstein's Arbeiterfrage (1912)

During the Wilhelmine period, leaders of the German Social Democratic Party began to redefine socialism as a 'cultural movement' which was concerned as much with the educational, artistic and leisure-time needs of workers as it was with trade union struggles and the future prospect of revolutionary social transformation. This drew them into a debate about the relationship between politics and 'culture', understood in terms of both 'high' and 'mass' culture, and the role of the latter in mobilizing German workers to the cause of socialism. Drawing on the methods of cultural studies, this article offers a close reading of Adolf Levenstein's important survey of the attitudes, 'hopes and wishes' of male rank-and-file Social Democrats and trade unionists from 1912, and his other related publications, in order to examine the ways in which German workers assigned meanings to cultural texts. In this way, it identifies the utopian political investments revealed in workers' leisure-time practices, ranging from poetry writing to novel reading, and their challenges to the structuring binarisms - oppositions between culture and politics, high culture and mass culture, art and everyday life, the masculine and the feminine, and reality and fantasy - of Social Democratic cultural politics in pre-war Germany.     

‘Making It’ Versus Satisfaction: How Women Raising Young Children in Poverty Assess How Well They Are Doing

ABSTRACT

Using in-depth interviews with 17 women raising young children in urban poverty, two separate standards were examined—“making it” and satisfaction. “Making it” referred to one's perceived ability to meet the basic physical needs of her children. In contrast, satisfaction referred to how closely one's current life circumstances align with her personal notions of success. Results indicated that self-expectations greatly influenced which standard individuals prioritized, such that those with higher expectations valued satisfaction while those with lower expectations prioritized “making it.” Self-expectations aligned largely with one's poverty status, and women with the fewest economic resources typically expected the least for their lives. Findings from this study suggest that efforts to support women raising young children in poverty must address both standards if they are to be relevant, effective, and sustainable. Similarly, if individuals are to succeed in such interventions, they must be supported in developing higher expectations for their lives, given the role that expectations play in catalyzing one's sense of a life beyond survival. Future research and implications for theory and practice are outlined.     

The Dance

Abstract

“The Dance” is a story of a young social worker's journey in a HIV+ women's support group. It discusses issues of death, HIV, use of self, and theory application. Most specifically, this essay honors the role of individual strength and love within a group setting.     

“Altered Observation of Modern Eyes”: Mina Loy's Collages,and Multisensual Aesthetics

ABSTRACT

This article traces the emergence of a multisensual aesthetic in the works of modernist avant-garde artist and poet Mina Loy. Loy's creative efforts were heterogeneous, spanning multiple media: a poet and painter, she was also a designer, actor and inventor. Seeking to instantiate herself in a cultural climate which tended to objectify the female body, Loy's multisensual art aimed to make the viewer/listener/reader sense as she did, and, in so doing, made important advances in the cultural configuration of women as whole, complex beings worthy of intellectual, physical, artistic and spiritual presence in the world.

Loy's assemblage art of the 1950s is shown to be a radical attempt to push the medium of collage into a more complex dimensionality in an effort to represent emerging understandings of perception and consciousness, positioning her as a major contributor to a defining art form of modernism. Bolstered by an appreciation of her own body as sensually charged and relational, Loy ascertained the simultaneity of present absence, connectivity and juxtaposition characterizing collage. This article articulates how, by troubling normative conceptions of dimensionality Loy's assemblages underscore the material and textual aspects of language explored in her collage-inflected poetry.     

Sonic Envelopes

ABSTRACT

This article examines ways in which an individual's experiences of spatial environments are informed by physical and psychic perceptions of sound. It explores how sonic images, memories, voices, spaces and events constitute “sonic envelopes.” These aesthetic figures are developed out of the late-nineteenth-century writings by the philosopher Henri Bergson and from contemporary audio-walks by the artist, Janet Cardiff. Each shows that sound, space and time are embodied in the individual's powers of sensory perception. Bergson and Cardiff's sonic envelopes may therefore enable reevaluations of the relationships between sound, space and time that connect the individual to his or her environment.     

Retrospective Book Review: Teaching a Methods Course in Social Work with Groups

SUMMARY

Eight years after its publication, Teaching a Methods Course in Social Work with Groups serves as a reminder to social workers of group work's historic roots and its value as a method of practice with diverse populations. The author shares her experiences in utilizing the teaching text in her work with MSW students and students of the arts who facilitate activity-based groups in community settings. Citing examples of students' experiences in group work facilitation, the author touches on the constraints emerging group workers face in translating social work skills and values to practice. The author's retrospective review of the teaching text underscores its continued importance in the field of social group work instruction.     

“What Could Happen and What Couldn't Happen”: A Poetry Club for Kids

SUMMARY

This essay describes the development of a classroom-based poetry club for young children attending an alternative school, a school-based mental health program, for elementary school students identified as having serious emotional disturbances. The essay emphasizes the importance of pre-group planning, contracting, and negotiating values and norms with teachers; demystifying mutual aid; integrating group purpose and academic goals; and tapping in to children's strengths to develop creative activities.     

In Praise of Wordless Comfort

Abstract

This paper explores the author's experience as a cancer patient. She explains why she did not seek talk therapy after learning of her diagnosis. Instead, art therapy provided access to her unconscious and helped her process bodily changes after surgery. It facilitated communication of her experience to others and expanded her self-definition. She describes the importance of other avenues of non-verbal communication, including touch, and concludes that many different modalities may provide support and comfort during critical life crises.     

To disclose or not to disclose: Political conflicts in the countertransference

Self‐disclosure is a frequent topic in the relational psychotherapy literature. However, there are few psychoanalytic writings or empirical studies that concern self‐disclosure in the context of cross‐cultural treatment; specifically treatment between Israeli therapists and Palestinian clients. This particular subject broadens the investigation of cross‐cultural treatment beyond race and color into the domain of religious and political differences between client and clinician. An Israeli‐American therapist's counter‐transference reflections around self‐disclosure and its impact on her Palestinian client will be the subject of investigation in the following paper.

Self‐disclosure has been increasingly examined in the relational literature over the past ten years in the context of the therapist's subjectivity within the therapeutic encounter (Aron, 1991; Renik, 1995). Few psychoanalytic writings, however, have focused on self‐disclosure as embedded within race and culture, and fewer still address the impact of religious and political differences between client and therapist, differences that, in the case of a Palestinian client and an Israeli therapist, reflect larger social and political conflicts. The transference‐countertransference dynamics around self‐disclosure and the way these shape the therapeutic encounter between a Palestinian client and an Israeli therapist will be the subject of investigation in this paper.     

The frequency of Mislabelled chemicals from commercial suppliers

This essay provides an analysis of conflicts of interest (COIs) that arise in university relationships with private industry and articulates the concept of an "institutional" COI. It compares personal and institutional COIs in order to shed some light on the difficulties universities face in managing their own COIs. The essay discusses some proposed strategies for responding to institutional COIs, such as developing independent boards to monitor and oversee the university's COIs, building firewalls between various parts of the university to prevent financial interests from affecting university functions, creating independent research institutes, and prohibiting some types of university investments.     

Transformation and the Woman in Stiletto Pumps

Abstract

This essay uses memoir to discuss transformative experience in the context of ongoing development. The relationship with an idealized teacher laid a foundation to observe and understand the world in a reflective stance influenced by Freud's theories. This beginning personal worldview evolved, through decades of intentional study and clinical training, into a consolidated psychoanalytically informed theory of practice.     

Abstracts of Doctoral Dissertations, 2005 Smith College School for Social Work

Abstract

This essay reflects on personal transformative experiences as explored using ideas from transformative learning, developmental perspectives and the practice of spiritual direction. This reflects the multi-disciplinary, relationally based perspectives that are useful in exploring transformation when spirituality is an essential dimension of understanding the meaning of critical incidents or events in one's life. Using the metaphor of spinning a kaleidoscope to identify memories that elucidate critical transitions in a personal narrative, there are memories from childhood, early professional life and recent events which afford an opportunity to revisit and explore the meaning of those events. The essay provides insight into the practice of spiritual direction that has similar parallels in clinical practice. These parallels include: the importance of attending to the relationship; of paying attention to one's own stillness and silence; and of engaging the other in owning the transformative power of insights from their explorations.     

Caring for the Child Welfare Client: Am I Good Enough?

ABSTRACT

Given the demographics of youth served by the child welfare system, culturally responsive approaches are critical to effective social work practice and desperately needed. Like many adolescents who grow up in the child welfare system, Paul, a White adolescent male in foster care, was beset by a lack of adequate environmental resources and multiple stressors and had little hope or motivation to work on improving his situation. This article highlights the author's “use of self” as an African American male therapist who worked with Paul, using a Winnicottian and caring framework. Because child welfare workers are often overburdened by the demands of work, including large caseloads and clients with few to no resources, they find it difficult to consistently provide empathic and caring behaviors for their clients. The author highlights his therapeutic work and struggles with Paul and offers cultural insights and Winnicottian strategies when working with adolescents in the child welfare system who are ultimately in need of permanency and stability.     

Guinea Pigs on the payroll: The ethics of paying research subjects

Regulatory bodies and scholars have traditionally conceptualized biomedical research on healthy subjects in the same way as research on patients. Guidelines and regulations have portrayed payment to a healthy subject as a potential constraint, or “undue influence,”; on the subject's free consent. In this essay we suggest an alternative way of conceptualizing research on healthy subjects, which sees the basic issue not as one of undue influence but as one of justice. Healthy subjects generally enroll in research protocols not for humanitarian reasons but for the money they will receive. Many of these protocols are conducted by profit‐driven corporations. Yet current guidelines and regulations prohibit subjects from negotiating for fair payment for the risks, discomforts and inconveniences they undergo, and IRBs are not staffed adequately to monitor the subject's safety. We propose to remedy the situation by regulating payment to healthy subjects as a labor relation.