Toward a More Optimal Selfobject Milieu: Family Psychotherapy from the Perspective of Self Psychology

This paper applies the theory of self psychology to the understanding and treatment of families. The healthy family is viewed as a reliable source of selfobject experience for its members, while problems in or between family members are seen as due to a lack of adequate selfobject experience for one or more members. Causes of selfobject failures or misattunements in the family are examined, with an emphasis on the influence of previous relational experiences on current needs, capacities, and experiences of others. Curative factors in this form of family therapy are then outlined, and a treatment approach designed to help family members become better able to provide empathically attuned responses to each other is described, with a case example used to illustrate key points.     

Global Anti‐Money Laundering Standards and Developing Economies: The Regulation of Mobile Money

This article discusses the confluence of international initiatives to counter money laundering and terrorist finance with migrant remittances and the growing use of mobile telephone technology for more than making a call. The experiences of Kenya and the Philippines with mobile telephone‐based financial services are outlined as potential models consistent with the ‘risk‐based’ approach now promoted by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), one objective being to encourage the implementation of regulation of m‐money services by recognising the development and social‐welfare opportunities offered by the technology in the context of a developing economy.     

Psychotherapy and Schizophrenia: The Mirror of Countertransference

The relationship between psychotherapy and schizophrenia has undergone pronounced changes over the last several decades. The advent of psychiatric medication led to remarkable breakthroughs that obscured the existential issues inseparably tied to the lived experience of illness and overshadowed the role of psychotherapy in the treatment of schizophrenia. Recent years have brought renewed scrutiny of the place of psychotherapy in the treatment of persons with major mental illness but much less attention has been shown to matters of countertransference. The complex legacy of loss and grief assumes a special dimension in the therapeutic relationship and touches the lives of client and clinician alike. Both travel a common path and share privileged moments. It is the intersection of these life experiences, and how their confluence shapes the course of therapy that is the focus of this essay.     

The Desomatizing Selfobject Transference: Analysis of an Eating Disorder

This article documents the manner in which psychological treatment, with its attentiveness to the vicissitudes of the unfolding selfobject transference, gradually enabled a patient to contain and articulate painful affect states. The patient's passionate relationship with food, strikingly illustrated in the clinical material, including her dreams, endowed eating with the functions of an idealized selfobject. Over the course of treatment, she seemed to traverse a psychic bridge that took her from an isolated reliance on food through a more focal awareness of her body and her feelings, to an investment in, and capacity for, deepened relationships with other people.     

Micro Ruptures and Repairs in the Beginning Phase of Cross-Cultural Psychotherapy

The article discusses misunderstandings and misattunements that occur in the beginning phase of cross-cultural psychotherapy. Sources of micro ruptures are outlined, including client maladaptive patterns, therapist misunderstandings, cross-cultural misunderstandings due to cultural variations, and asymmetrical power relations involving the impact of prior experiences or current therapy practices. Multiple clinical vignettes illustrate the rupture/repair process, drawing on Safran and Muran’s (2000) list of direct and indirect techniques.     

Money management and control in the Indian joint family across generations

Studies of money management and control will have more cross‐cultural relevance if the family context of money across generations is taken into account. The study of money management and control in middle‐income nuclear and joint family households in urban India illustrates the importance of examining money flows within the wider family context because there is a two‐way flow of money beyond the married couple – between parents and adult children, siblings and other members of the extended family. In the three or four generational joint family, control and management at the household level is not necessarily duplicated for the constituent couples. We draw on open‐ended interviews of 40 persons from 27 urban middle‐income households in North India, between November 2007 and January 2008, to show that the male control of money is the dominant pattern. This pattern is linked to the ideology of male dominance that is found among the middle, lower middle and struggling households, particularly in non‐metropolitan households. The upper‐middle‐class households predominantly in metropolitan households show a pattern of joint or independent control. The focus is on the couple's money decisions within the context of the wider family.     

Money as a Tool for Negotiating Separateness and Connectedness in the Therapeutic Relationship

It is nothing new to suggest that money has meaning. Whether or not one accepts Freud's (1908)linkage of money and feces, within our culture money is frequently seen as a direct pathway to feelings of power, agency, self-directedness, and personal satisfaction. Trachtman (1999) states, Money, psychologically speaking, is our projection onto coins, bills, bank accounts, and other financial instruments of our beliefs, hopes, and fears about how those things will affect who we are, what will happen to us, and how we will be treated by others or by ourselves...(Trachtman, 1999, p. 283). Yet this material is often unavailable for therapeutic exploration or understanding until it explodes into the therapy, often in unmanageable and countertherapeutic ways. This article will look at some of the ways in which money can be utilized to negotiate the ever-changing tensions between self and other, object and subject, intrapyschic and interpersonal, connection and separation that appear in every relationship. In particular, it will explore some ways that money issues within the therapeutic relationship can be turned into significant tools for understanding and working with anxieties about connection and separateness, both within and outside the therapeutic dyad.     

The Mind of a Stranger: A Philosophic Contribution to Bi-Cultural Psychotherapy

Several philosophic paradigms reveal different ideas about how we know who we are to ourselves and to others. Emerging out of a plethora of notions, one area of philosophic thought, the intersubjective philosophy of Donald Davidson and Marcia Cavell reveals a perspective which I found significant in deepening psychoanalytic theory as well as work with patients, including people from other cultures. Two Chinese patients are presented, and the usefulness of the philosophic and psychoanalytic theory addressing their issues are discussed.     

The Relevance of Attachment Research for Adult Narratives Told in Psychotherapy

This paper discusses categories of attachment organization in infants, with an emphasis on the avoidant and disorganized/disoriented category. An example of how the avoidant infant attachment organization shows continuity throughout the lifespan is discussed. Finally, a case example of a man seen to have a dismissing/unresolved pattern of attachment organization is presented. In the ensuing discussion, the authors suggest that knowledge of infant attachment research can help therapists identify patterns that manifest in adult psychotherapy.     

The Role of Monthly Spending Money in College Student Drinking Behaviors and Their Consequences

Objective: Alcohol use among college students is pervasive and affected by economic factors such as personal income and alcohol price. The authors examined the relationship among students' spending money, drinking rate, and alcohol-related consequences.

Participants: In 2005, the authors conducted a Web-based survey among a random sample of 3,634 undergraduate students from 2 large universities.

Methods: The authors used multiple logistic regression to model drinking behaviors and multiple linear regression to model alcohol-related consequences.

Results: The lowest reported levels of average monthly spending money were associated with reduced levels of drinking and getting drunk. Spending money was independently associated with experiencing alcohol-related consequences caused by a student's own drinking, even after the authors controlled for personal drinking behaviors. The effects for consequences caused by others' drinking were significant for students who had gotten drunk.

Conclusions: These findings have implications for alcohol price and marketing, particularly around colleges, and suggest actions for parents to consider.     

The Search for Fuller Mutuality and Self Experiences in a Women's Psychotherapy Group

This article examines the reconnection experience of four women, mutually sharing their feelings, thoughts, and implicit relational knowing of each other within the group treatment setting. Initially, Carol, Marcia, Helen, and Nancy were in a six-month psychotherapy group, describing and recounting their histories and life narratives of rape, abuse, neglect, and generally traumatic childhoods. Four years later, they met again, just to see how everyone was doing. The social worker hired a camera-woman to film the five hours of this re-engaging group process. What emerged was a dynamic example of intersubjectivity, affect attunement, emotional regulation, and the power of mutuality and intrinsic responsiveness.     

The Presentation of Dead Selves in Everyday Life: Obituaries and Impression Management

This study draws on obituary content and meanings to extend Goffman's explication of the vagaries of face‐to‐face interactions to situations where people pursue goals without corporeal copresence of actor and audience. Data for the study was collected in Kumasi, the capital city of the Asante people of Ghana, West Africa. My analysis suggests that obituaries embody self‐presentation strategies that include star crafting, social risk management, and mobilization of external resources. I conclude that obituaries are cultural texts that appropriate social symbols to facilitate the presentation of the dead as part of the bereaved's identity projects. My specific observations about obituaries hint at more general reflections on self‐presentation strategies that may be extended to other aspects of social life. They also raise questions for future research.     

Soundtracking Everyday Life: The Use of Music in Redefining Situations*

As a result of technological advances, music is presently widely available as a means of modifying social occasions. As with other artifacts, the use of music requires technical knowledge. Leaving aside the more crystallized segments of this knowledge, such as musical therapy and movie soundtracking, the study sought to explore the functional correlation college students established between types of music and social occasions. The existence of a body of consistent, though uncodified, technical knowledge is confirmed. This knowledge prescribes types of music appropriate for social occasions, and specifies the particular effects that can be obtained and the role played by some of the music's elements.     

Tuning and Practicing the Therapeutic Instrument: The Therapist's Life Experience

This article views the therapeutic use of self broadly as if through a wide-angle lens focusing on the therapist within his or her surroundings. These contextual features can be seen as projections of the therapist's self and therefore useable in treatment. Through an interest in alternative brain functions due to her own struggles with a neurological illness, the author arrived at the idea of utilizing her personal interests which naturally come into the milieu as therapeutic vehicles. Personal interests that are compatible with the patient's character offer alternative modes for experiencing, expressing and regulating affect states. These interests in the expressive arts together with the person of the therapist constitute a medium for rotating attention around unfamiliar parts of the mental landscape. Disavowed or dissociated affects can be unearthed, made conscious, put into language, and treated. This idea in practice nests neatly within recent thinking in psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and the philosophy of science. When language alone is not enough to move the therapeutic process forward, other working knowledge in the therapist's life can be brought to bear as a powerful evocative force for therapeutic change.     

When the Management of Grief Becomes Everyday Life: The Aftermath of Murder

This study examines how others indicate that our emotions violate social norms and how people feel about and respond to those indications. The data come from in‐depth interviews with thirty‐two people who had recently lost a loved one to murder (“bereaved victims”). Through the symbolic interaction process, bereaved victims came to appreciate the burden their grief imposed on others, and some of them took steps to minimize that burden. Despite their awareness of the burden, however, many of the bereaved expected others to express heartfelt sympathy for their loss. Instead, people offered inappropriate (and even hurtful) responses, including avoiding the topic of their loss, offering unnecessarily dramatic responses to the loss, and telling them to move on. The responses suggest that current feeling rules and emotion norms surrounding grief do not reflect the true extent of bereaved people's actual experiences, creating awkward situations for potential supporters and the bereaved.     

The Extramarital Affair: A Language of Yearning and Loss

This paper presents an extramarital relationship as an experience of self-enhancement, not of pathological conflict. It will suggest that the simultaneous relationship with the lover AND an empathically attuned therapist can be healing for the patient. It is seen as often an opportunity for essential developmental needs to be fulfilled when damaging failures in the bond between child and caretaker have restricted the vitalizing atmosphere of mutual influence that results in unrecognized subjectivity. Rather than viewed as a reality-escaping midlife enactment, these relationships can be better thought of as efforts to revisit the traumatic experiences that have created the organizing patterns that have limited a patient's self-development. An extramarital affair is often about yearning and loss and the freedom to enact one's own desire.     

Your Money or Your Life: Behavioral and Emotional Predictors of Money Pathology

This study sought to examine self-reportedemotional and behavioral correlates of money pathology,defined as inappropriate behavior with respect to moneyand associated material goods. In all, 267 British adult subjects completed a battery ofquestionnaires including Rubinstein's (1981) extensivePsychology Today survey on money and Forman's ipsativemeasures that describe five Money Pathology Scales(miser, spendthrift, tycoon, bargain hunter, gambler),an overall pathology scale combining the five and hisshort moneysanity measure. The former measure was factoranalyzed and selected factor scores regressed on to the moneysanity measure along withdemographic measures in order to attempt to establishwhich individual difference factors best predicted thedifferent types of money pathology. Thus females were more extravagant, prone to depression, but lesslikely to take moral risks for money, while richer, moreright-wing people tended to be more materialistic. Thosewith overall less money sanity tended more to believe luck and dishonesty were moreimportant in making money; were self-denying andeconomically pessimistic, and had powerful negativeemotions like anger and anxiety around money. Multiple regressions on to the money types showed thatbetween 15 and 30% of the variance could be explainedand accounted for, by the selected independent variables(demographic, religious and political belief, illness, and more general attitudes towardwealth). Demographic variables like age, and negativeemotions about money were consistent predictors of moneypathology. Results are discussed in terms of the small, but growing literature on the psychologyof money (Furnham, 1997; Furnham & Argyle,1998).     

Understanding Everyday Life: Generic Social Processes and the Pursuit of Transcontextuality

This paper joins earlier interactionist projects in advocating for an analytical attentiveness to generic social process (GSP). This dynamic form of theorizing is indebted to the thought of Herbert Blumer and the extended phenomenological and pragmatist traditions. Rather centrally, the study of GSPs draws upon the foundational concepts of duration, intersubjectivity, and the self. Such concepts have contributed to some of symbolic interactionism's most enduring, empirically grounded and theoretically robust work. Drawing on a series of ethnographic research projects, this paper offers a research agenda for engaging GSPs transcontextually. Specifically, I argue for extending the study of GSPs through the examination of management in everyday life, the creation of subcultural value, and the social construction of doubt.