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.     

The Mother Who Didn't See Her Baby and the Hospital That Didn't See the Psychiatrist

Abstract

This paper discusses the initiation of an infant preschool child psychiatric consultation service in a tertiary level paediatric hospital, where there had been no service such as this in the past ten years. The case presented illustrates the complex nature of both feeding disorders in infants and the cases seen in this tertiary level institution. It also describes a parallel process: The mother who was uninvolved with her infant and the hospital that was indifferent to the child psychiatric-consultation service development process. An understanding of the psychodynamic aspects of the child, the mother, and the interactions between the medical team and the child psychiatrist were crucial to the success of the treatment. This psychodynamic understanding is also essential to the development of a continuing working relationship between the child psychiatric-consultation liaison service and the hospital.     

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.     

Effects of the war on marriage relationships 1

Abstract

This article discusses the major themes that emerged from a Smith College School for Social Work student's Master's thesis, “Communication Styles in Wind River Native American Clients and the Therapeutic Responses of their Clinicians”. The project explores differences in communication styles between Wind River native people and Anglo‐Americans. Secondly, it seeks to discover therapeutic approaches and styles that are effective with Wind River native people.

Semi‐structured, exploratory interviews were conducted with ten clinicians who worked with Native American clients on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. The participants included mental health care professionals and paraprofessionals from the following professions: psychology, social work, counseling, nursing, and community action.

The findings of the research revealed the importance of understanding cultural differences in human interaction and meaning making as conveyed in communication style. As clinicians, these complex and often subtle differences play a crucial role in our ability to establish a therapeutic alliance and conduct sensitive, effective therapy. Many theoretical models, such as psychodynamic, cognitive and behavioral, family systems, ecological, constructionist, and narrative theories support the successful approaches discussed in the article.     

Female entrepreneurship: business,marriage and motherhood in England and Wales, 1851–1911

ABSTRACT

This article offers a new perspective on what it meant to be a business proprietor in Victorian Britain. Based on individual census records, it provides an overview of the full population of female business proprietors in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911. These census data show that around 30% of the total business population was female, a considerably higher estimate than the current literature suggests. Female entrepreneurship was not a uniform experience. Certain demographics clustered in specific trades and within those sectors employers and own-account proprietors had strikingly different age, marital status and household profiles. A woman’s life cycle event such as marriage, motherhood and widowhood played an important role in her decision whether to work, the work available to her and the entrepreneurial choices she could make. While marriage and motherhood removed women from the labour force, they had less of an effect on their levels of entrepreneurship. Women who had young children were more entrepreneurial than those who had none, and entrepreneurship rates rose with the arrival of one child and continued to rise the more children were added to the family.     

Being the Only One: Finding Connection through the Shared Experience of “Otherness”

ABSTRACT

There is a noticeable paucity of clinical resources that help clinicians of color to name and navigate the multitude of challenges in working through racial, cultural, and power differences in psychotherapy with White clients. African American therapists rarely receive adequate preparation for clinical practice in identifying, addressing, and working through transference and countertransference reactions in racially mixed dyads. The author highlights the challenges she faced early in her career with addressing racial and sociopolitical differences as an African American female clinical social worker providing individual psychotherapy to her older White male client whose traumatic experience focused on racial issues.     

September 10, 2001

Abstract

This essay chronicles the impact of a patient's suicide on the therapist, reflecting on the initial trauma, the therapist's repeated attempts to deal with the loss, and her ultimate physical collapse. Time off from work began the healing of her physical symptoms, and the spontaneous writing and immediate sharing of her raw and unformulated feelings with a writing group she had just joined, began the process of grieving which, until this point, had only been known physically. Working and re-working this essay kept her safely, but affectively connected to the loss and gave her experiential understanding of the adaptive function of somatization, leading finally to the acceptance of the limitations of both patient and therapist.     

“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.     

The Cost of Hope

Summary A conversation with a woman, recently widowed, living in a poorblack community of London, reveals the difficulty in merelysurviving that she, her family and families like her own presentlyare experiencing. Her concers are with housing, schools, healthcare for herself and her children, ageing when one lives inpoverty, and perhaps most significantly, her gradual loss ofhope that anything can be done to improve her circumstances.The study reported has been done on one single family; it isnot a composite of several families, although clearly, the lifeof this one woman is most representative of families livingwhere she lives.     

Disney’s modern heroine Pocahontas: revealing age-old gender stereotypes and role discontinuity under a façade of liberation

Disney’s animated heroine Pocahontas has been touted as a new type of protagonist differing from her predecessors whose lives revolve around men. Pocahontas’ romance eventually does become subordinate to her role in protecting the social fabric of her village. Yet in placing the needs of her community before her own personal desires, she fulfills societal expectations of today wherein young women are supposed to progress from selfish absorption in relationships to selfless dedication nurturing others. Pocahontas, then, models the submersion of a young woman’s desires to allow a commitment to selfless altruism.     

Manchester through the Ears

ABSTRACT

As part of a wider sensory ethnography on the development of place attachments and situated knowledge amongst international newcomers to a city (Manchester, England), this article tells the story of my collaboration with Phoebe, a student of acoustics from bandung, Indonesia. Using a participatory sensory ethnographic method, Phoebe was encouraged to devise her own contribution to my project, which was modeled around her own sensory preferences and technological expertise. Our work together took place over a period of 4–5 months and yielded a series of soundscape compositions and accompanying narrative texts, all of which conveyed Phoebe's newly acquired sound-based knowledge, or acoustemology, of Manchester. Using narrative textual accompaniments to her recordings, Phoebe ascribes qualities to her surroundings that overlap with her own personal qualities, in effect showing how much she blends with her new city. As Phoebe and I subsequently listened to and “talked over” her soundscape compositions, they evoked sound marks, or sensory memories, of the landscape, sounds and music that Phoebe left behind in Indonesia. these sound-elicited interviews added further layers of emplaced knowledge to both of our constructions of the city.     

Some Bibliographic Practices in Interdisciplinary Work: Accounting for Citations in Library and Information Sciences

Interdisciplinary studies involve the use of concepts, methods and theories developed in other disciplines. Using sociology and library and information science as researchable fields, this paper examines how interdisciplinary presentations appropriate discipline-specific concepts. Itemizing materials in a bibliography is a claim to familiarity with the content of those materials. Bibliographic anomalies are apparent in papers by Elfreda Chatman, published in library and information science journals. Misspellings and disjunctive uses of material suggests that Chatman is unfamiliar with the literature bases she invokes. Working through texts and accompanying bibliographies, this article shows how the entailments of research programs that Chatman claims to use can be reflected back onto her own work. The article provides suggestions on how to make interdisciplinary studies more accountable to academic communities.     

The story of Lucy: lessons learned,lessons taught

ABSTRACT

This article provides an extended case example highlighting the value of a supportive approach to practice, in addition to the importance of holding a psychodynamic developmental frame of reference. Concepts of repetition compulsion, the holding environment, and object constancy are applied to the clinical material. The case is underscored for its value as a teaching tool.     

Indecisiveness aversion and preference for commitment

We present an axiomatic model of preferences over menus that is motivated by three assumptions. First, the decision maker is uncertain ex ante (i.e., at the time of choosing a menu) about her ex post (i.e., at the time of choosing an option within her chosen menu) preferences over options, and she anticipates that this subjective uncertainty will not resolve before the ex post stage. Second, she is averse to ex post indecisiveness (i.e., to having to choose between options that she cannot rank with certainty). Third, when evaluating a menu she discards options that are dominated (i.e., inferior to another option whatever her ex post preferences may be) and restricts attention to the undominated ones. Under these assumptions, the decision maker has a preference for commitment in the sense of preferring menus with fewer undominated alternatives. We derive a representation in which the decision maker’s uncertainty about her ex post preferences is captured by means of a subjective state space, which in turn determines which options are undominated in a given menu, and in which the decision maker fears, whenever indecisive, to choose an option that will turn out to be the worst (undominated) one according to the realization of her ex post preferences.     

“Feeling for Beauty”

ABSTRACT

May Morris (1862–1938), renowned craftswoman and daughter of William Morris, had an unconventional Victorian childhood in a home where all the members of the family were engaged in various forms of aesthetic labor, either as amateurs or professionals, and shared an aesthetic philosophy that blended the artisanal and the experimental from which would develop the Arts and Crafts movement. This article will examine the fragmentary recollections of her childhood recorded by May Morris in the introductions she wrote for the twenty-four-volume edition of The Collected Works of William Morris as a rich resource for Victorian sensory history because of the emphasis she places on the development of the child's sensorium, especially in relation to touch as the vital sense that linked family intimacy with creative activity. Employing the term “tactile aesthetics,” I show how, in the Morris household, the pleasurable sensual apprehension of the objects or materials worked by the hands of the craftsperson was inseparable from the complex feelings of connection with others. In such an environment, a feeling for beauty comprised a vital component of habitus, the embodied knowledges and aptitudes that, according to Pierre Bourdieu, are acquired from earliest childhood through the practices of everyday life within a specific social setting.     

Domestic responsibilities and the employment of young Māori women

Abstract

While the employment rate of women has risen steadily in New Zealand over the last two decades, employment is still highly variable by ethnicity and age. One of the groups least engaged in paid employment is young Māori women (15–24 years). Their employment rates are much lower than their Pākehā counterparts (42 and 64%, respectively) and this is not offset by their greater involvement in education.

Although there is a general awareness of these differences, there has been no systematic enquiry into the possible reasons for the relatively low engagement of young Māori women in the formal economy. Using a full set of 178,776 unit records pertaining to all young Māori and Pākehā women from the 2001 Census of Population and Dwellings, we develop a number of novel measures of household composition as indicators of domestic responsibilities. These become arguments in a multivariate statistical model in which young women are modelled as choosing to participate in the formal paid workforce and/ or in education.

Our results show that young Māori women's choice of paid work is no more sensitive to her domestic responsibilities than those of young Pākehā women, but they do encounter these responsibilities far more often. The results have a number of important implications for Māori development.     

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.     

Children's and carers' perspectives of a therapeutic intervention for children affected by sexual abuse

This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study with children affected by sexual abuse who had recently completed a therapeutic intervention (N = 12) and their carers (N = 17). Four themes emerged from the thematic analysis that influenced participants' satisfaction with the service: the attribution of the child's recovery to the therapeutic support received; the therapeutic relationship between the child and practitioner; children's recollection of important aspects of the intervention and the relationship between the carer and the child's practitioner. The findings indicate that the process elements of therapeutic support, including the development of strong relationships and allowing children choice and control, are as important as the content.     

On the Value and Meaning of Trauma-Informed Practice: Honoring Safety,Complexity, and Relationship

ABSTRACT

In social work, as in other mental health fields, there has been a surge of literature regarding trauma-informed practice. Even so, the value and meaning of being a trauma-informed practitioner still call for further explication and analysis, especially in the realm of clinical social work practice. Approaching and engaging traumatized clients with a trauma-informed lens carry profound implications in the assessment, diagnostic, and intervention stages of treatment, and these implications warrant further unpacking. Additionally, it is critical to explore, through real-world case examples, the significance of working with a trauma-informed lens. This article develops a stage-based, relational definition of trauma-informed practice and argues that trauma-informed practice prioritizes client complexity, social context, and the therapeutic relationship throughout the assessment, diagnostic, and treatment process. In addition, it prioritizes the nuanced experiences and needs of the client, in particular the need for safety, above specific treatment modalities. In this way, it has vital importance to the field of social work. The significance of being trauma informed is considered at all stages of treatment and will be illuminated through practice examples and a longer clinical vignette.     

Parenting stress and behavior among single mothers of preschoolers: The mediating role of self‐efficacy

Abstract

This study examines the role of perceived self‐efficacy in mediating relations between mothers’ parenting behavior and variables such as maternal employment status, depressive symptoms, parenting stress, and child behavior problems. Subjects were 93 employed and 95 nonemployed, single, black mothers of a 3–5‐year‐old child who were current and former welfare recipients. Using linear structural relations modeling (LISREL), the findings support a model whereby (a) the more behavior problems the child is perceived to have, the more depressive symptoms the mother feels; (b) the more depressive symptoms the mother feels, the more likely she is to rate herself high in parenting stress; (c) the more depressive symptoms and parenting stress the mother experiences, the lower is the mother's estimate of her self‐efficacy; and (d) the lower the mother's self‐efficacy, the less competent is her parenting. The findings for employment status are similar; i.e., maternal employment predicted a trajectory leading to somewhat better parenting. In addition, child behavior problems were associated with less competent parenting both directly and indirectly through their effect on parenting stress and self‐efficacy. These results suggest that self‐efficacy has import as a mediator of the relations between maternal parenting and other psychosocial variables. There is no evidence, based on these findings, that employment in the low‐wage market is harmful either for single black mothers or their preschool children. However, job availability and an increase in the minimum wage are important policy considerations.