Criticism From Within An Interview With Kerrie James

Kerrie James is the Clinical Director at Relationships Australia (NSW). Having trained in family therapy in Canada in 1979, Kerrie came back to Australia and was employed by Relationships Australia (NSW), then the Marriage Guidance Council, to develop one of the first professional training programs in family therapy. Since then Kerrie has taught and supervised in family therapy both in Australia and overseas. Through her publications and presentations, Kerrie has made a significant contribution to the feminist debate within family therapy. Kerrie is currently completing a Masters in Womens Studies in which she is researching connections between the social constructions of gender and violence.     

‘Somebody Else's Roadmap’: Lived Experience of Maudsley and Family‐based Therapy for Adolescent Anorexia Nervosa

The Maudsley and more recent family‐based therapy manualised approaches are positioned by some as the gold standard, evidence‐based therapy for adolescent anorexia nervosa (AN). However, a significant proportion of adolescents and their families either discontinue this therapy and/or find that it simply does not work for them. These adolescents and families are under‐represented in the literature on therapeutic interventions for adolescent AN. This paper begins to address this gap with an in‐depth qualitative case study that explores the lived experience of Maudsley family therapy (MFT)/family‐based therapy (FBT) for one female adolescent (age 14 years) and her family over the period of 3 years (ages 11–14). Although initially handing over the responsibility for her eating was comforting and reinstated a sense of control in the family system, these experiences were not maintained. When she did not progress past the first phase of FBT, she and her family experienced the approach as blaming. She felt silenced and family alliances were weakened. This paper analyses how the family members negotiated and preserved their identities within this disabling context.     

‘Lady,Leave My Culture Out of It!’ An Interview With Nada Miocevic

Nada Miocevic is a social worker and family therapist who trained at Zagreb University in Croatia and at Melbourne University in Victoria, Australia. She completed her training in family therapy in 1975 at the Bouverie Centre, Melbourne. Since migrating to Australia in 1967, her work with migrant and refugee families has taken her throughout Australia and overseas. Currently she is in private practice. Her work involves conducting training courses in supervision and supervision of supervision, as well as her continuing work with families who experience long‐term illnesses.     

A Single-Case Study of Resiliency After Extreme Incest in an Old Order Amish Family

This exploratory research brief presents a single case study of the resiliency of “Mary B.” She grew up in an Old Order Amish family where isolation, secrecy, and patriarchy masked repeated sexual assaults by her older brothers that began at age 7. By the age of 20, Mary alleged she had been raped on more than 200 separate occasions by members of her Amish family. After years of pleading with her mother and church officials to intervene, she sought therapy outside the Amish community. This led to three of her brothers being incarcerated. Her family disowned her and she was banned from the Amish community, leaving with an 8th grade education and little more than the clothes she was wearing. In less than 2 years, Mary had moved to a new town, completed her GED, obtained a car and driving license, maintained a small home, and worked as a certified nursing assistant. She consented to tape recorded interviews and completed several quantitative diagnostic measures. Scores on the diagnostic measures placed her within the normal range on self-esteem, competency, depression, stress, social support, and life skills. Analysis of interviews revealed Mary rebounded from her past by reframing her experiences. Themes identified within the interviews supported 6 of the 7 types of resiliencies (insight, independence, initiative, relationships, humor, and morality) outlined in the therapeutic Challenge Model.     

Feminism and Beyond: Interview with Carolyn Quadrio

In interview with Kasia Kozlowska, Melbourne‐born psychiatrist Carolyn Quadrio describes the impact of growing up in a Greek migrant family, the significant influences on her choice of profession, and the ways in which she gradually developed a feminist position simultaneously with embracing a systemic perspective on ‘depression’ and other diagnostic categories. Quadrio talks frankly about her challenges to the male‐dominated psychiatric establishment, her struggles to get her critique of it published, her excitement about the family therapy field, and her later disillusionment with it. Her current work is in the area of forensic psychiatry.     

A Passion for Prevention: An Interview with Anne Sved‐Williams

Anne Sved Williams is a perinatal and infant psychiatrist, who was trained in family therapy at the Ackerman Family Institute in New York, in 1976–77. In 1979, she was one of two women (the late Eleanor Wertheim being the other) invited to join the original Editorial Board of this journal. She is Director of Helen Mayo House and Psychiatric Services to the Women's and Babies Division, Women's and Children's Hospital Adelaide. She is a Clinical Senior Lecturer, University of Adelaide. In speaking with Colin MacKenzie, she recalls her introduction to family therapy, her training, her decision to move away from repair work with parents needing help in parenting adolescent children, in order to start ‘at the beginning’ with the parents of infants. She speaks of her pride in the ANZJFT's continuing tradition of Education Update, originally Anne's own initiative.     

‘Drawing the Circle That Takes Them In’: Liz Mackenzie in Conversation

Liz Mackenzie's involvement with family therapy began in 1978 at the Psychiatry Department of the Adelaide Children's Hospital. She contrasts the field then and now, naming some of the dysfunctional facets of family therapy. She became manager of a specialist foster/residential program in the non‐government sector, definitely the most difficult, extending and satisfying period in her working life. In 2007, she is back where it began for her, in the (renamed) Women's and Children's Hospital, working in a Child and Adolescent Community Health team     

Bargaining With Time: An Interview With Helen Pavlin

Helen Pavlin is an accredited mental health social worker and family therapist and accredited family dispute resolution practitioner in private practice in Darwin. She has been involved in social work and family therapy since the early 1970s in Australia and internationally. In 1996 she received the 50th Anniversary Commemorative Medal from the Australian Association of Social Workers. She is one of the assessors and associate editors for the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy. In 2007 Helen received the Journal Award for her outstanding contribution to the family therapy field in Australia. She is an accomplished writer and a member of the Australian Society of Authors. Her poems and book reviews have been published frequently in ANZJFT.     

The futility of child therapy

Summary If one takes into consideration modern communication and family systems theory, it is apparent that the therapist's effectiveness may be greatly hampered in situations where she works with the child alone in a play therapy situation. Seeing a child alone in play therapy often tends to play into the already existing double bind situations in a family. The family aims at rejecting new behavior patterns which emerge because it has adapted to the problem behavior. By seeing the child and related family members, an open therapeutic contract can be established aimed at educating and preparing the family to be more receptive to new behaviors via new means of communication. The therapist becomes the active intervening agent in the system, available to all of the members. With the therapist serving as the nurturer which the family lacked, its members learn how to be available to each other in a new way. Once nurturance occurs, the family members feel strengthened to maturate and respond differently to each other.     

A SELF-MANAGEMENT MODEL FOR SUPERVISION

The authors present a management-of-self model of supervision that is currently being used in the graduate training program in marriage and family therapy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. The major proposition of the model is that as the supervisee comes to understand how family of origin and family constellation patterns learned in the past are reenacted within the therapeutic context, he/she can then interrupt those patterns of interaction that tend to inhibit his/her therapeutic effectiveness.     

Challenging cultural constraints: a personal testimony

DISHA is one of the oldest Oxfam project partners in Uttar Pradesh, India. DISHA works with rural women and rope-makers; it encourages village-level women's organizations to fight against obstacles to women's empowerment and to institute income-producing activities; and it provides legal, educational, and health care services. In this article, a Muslim woman tells the story of her involvement with DISHA and how that involvement gave her the courage to reject the restrictions of purdah and of the wearing of the bourkha. This woman was married at age 13. She suffered ill treatment at the house of her in-laws and returned to her father's home with her 3 daughters. Her husband eventually joined her at her father's house. She was approached by a coordinator of DISHA and asked to apply for a job. She was offered the job, which she accepted. When she started going into the villages, she felt that the restrictive dress of the bourkha interfered with her ability to work. With the permission of her father and her husband, she set aside the bourkha. She had to endure criticism and censure for this action, but eventually people have been won over to her position as they have seen the positive results of her work on behalf of society. After having 5 daughters, she finally had a son. Now she is determined that her daughters will never wear the bourkha, even if they must remain single as a result of this resolve. She feels that DISHA has given her the power to overcome oppression in her own life, in the life of her family, and in society.     

An Interview with Joyce Edward: Exemplary Clinician, Advocate, and Scholar

Over the years, noteworthy social workers have been interviewed for the Clinical Social Work Journal. This article features an interview with Joyce Edward who is recognized for her many extraordinary contributions to clinical social work. Joyce has co-written or co-edited three exceptional books for the social work clinician, she has been an esteemed teacher and a vocal activist for quality mental health care. In this interview Joyce reflects on family influences, her work as a social caseworker, the psychoanalytic luminaries with whom she trained, her concerns about the clinical education of today's social work students, and finally, her perspective on managed mental health care.     

桑兰：梦想在延续

1998年7月21日,在美国参加第四届友好运动会的中国女子体操队队员桑兰在赛前练习中颈椎受重伤,胸部以下瘫痪。在遭受如此重大的变故后,当时仅17岁的桑兰表现出难得的坚毅。她说:"我对自己有信心,我永远不会放弃希望。"10年来,桑兰用她的勇气延续着自己的梦想,坚持治疗、在北大求学、担任北京申奥大使、主持奥运电视节目、当选北京奥运会火炬手……她充满力量的笑容总能给人希望!     

Keynote Address: Making Campuses Safer Communities for Students

As a chief spokesperson for a national movement to prevent violence and a frequent speaker in national media and public forums, Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith is a nationally recognized public health leader. In 1987, she was appointed the first woman Commissioner of Public Health for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In that role, she established the first Office of Violence Prevention in a state department of public health, expanded prevention programs for HIV/AIDS, and increased drug treatment and rehabilitation programs. Dr. Prothrow-Stith currently serves as Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Professor of Public Health Practice at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and founding director of the Division of Public Health Practice.

Dr. Prothrow-Stith supports the application of rigorous scientific methods to strengthen violence prevention programs. She developed and wrote The Violence Prevention Curriculum for Adolescents, a forerunner of violence prevention curriculum for schools and communities. She is the author of Deadly Consequences, the first book to present the public health perspective on violence to a mass audience. She has authored and co-authored more than 80 publications on medical and public health issues.

Dr. Prothrow-Stith was the keynote speaker for the annual meeting of American College Health Association in May 2006. The Editors of The Journal of American College Health have revised her speech to share her comments in this issue and thought her words would be a proper introduction to the ACHA White Paper on Domestic Violence.     

The Downfall of Gomułka

Marina Tsvetaeva’s 1934 “Chërt” (The Devil) forms a central part of the cycle of autobiographical prose she wrote in emigration. This article assembles clues to the hidden origins of the Devil she describes in prose about her grandfathers, some of it censored in pre-1990 editions of her works. Tsvetaeva’s Devil is not simply metaphysical: it has the unusual appearance of a Great Dane. Though she goes on to trace its appearances in the literature and culture of her childhood, some of its physical features (eyes, nose, colour and posture) link it with other people in her life. The vivid details of the Devil suggest relationships, though peculiarly mediated ones, to members of her own family, especially her maternal grandfather, Aleksandr Danilovich Mein. The poet describes herself using Pushkin’s poem “Utoplennik” to camouflage her own sense of self from her mother. Much of the rest of “The Devil” describes her recognition of the Devil in varying symbolic or even phonetic guises, tracing how the poet stayed faithful to him even after he ceased to appear visibly, how she found and read his symbols in surrounding reality—e.g., card games, toys, rituals for finding lost objects—and in unexpected, otherwise respectable, parts of society, including her own grandfather. As always, Tsvetaeva creates a story that affirms her identity as a poet and illustrates the work she had to do to achieve that identity.     

Lifting the veil of silence: Jamuna's narrative of pain

This article relates the story of the life of Jamuna, a married mother of two boys and a girl living among a scheduled caste in India. The female researcher had been interviewing Jamuna's husband, who sells excess cloth to wholesalers and is active in the Bahujan Samaj Party, which is seeking to liberate India's lower castes. Jamuna usually ignored the female researcher or treated her curtly. The researcher, however, invited herself to lunch at Jamuna's house one day, and Jamuna unexpectedly began talking about her life while she prepared the food. Jamuna refers to her husband as "Bhim's father" (Bhim is her oldest son). Bhim's father rules the household, controls the money, never consults his wife, and treats her like a servant. Jamuna looks much older than her estimated 25 years. She was engaged when she was 8, never attended school, and was kept indoors. Her children attend an expensive school, and her husband wants them all to stay in school as long as possible and then get jobs. Jamuna was married to Bhim's father because his family did not demand a dowry. Both families have small farms, but her family grows more crops and makes more money. She used to live with her in-laws but now they avoid her. Jamuna feels strongly that girls should be married early to avoid disgrace. Jamuna was shocked by menstruation and intercourse. After her third delivery, Bhim's father allowed her to become sterilized. She hates her husband and believes he hates her. He treats her like a slave and insults her. His only virtue is that he ignores other women. Jamuna has no friends or confidants. She was not consulted about the move from the village to Delhi. When Bhim's father is away, she has to tend to his business and risk his anger over her mistakes. After this outpouring, Jamuna retreated to silence when the interviewer came to visit.     

Family migration and the economic status of women in Malaysia

"The impact of family migration on women's economic position in a developing country setting is an area that has received relatively little research attention. Incorporating a lifetime perspective, this study makes use of the retrospective migration histories of husbands and wives from the second round of the Malaysian Family Life Survey to estimate how joint migration with the husband affects women's socioeconomic achievement. The findings show that family migration depresses the chances of working, but it does not significantly reduce socioeconomic attainment of those who do work. However, when a woman migrates with her husband she does forgo the substantial advantage she could have derived had she moved alone."     

Letter From a Dead Mother to a Ghost Child

The author reflects on recurring issues to do with maternity and mental/emotional health throughout the generations of her family. Drawing on the ”dead mother” complex as theorized by André Green, she analyzes the legacy left to her by the mothers in her family.     

Belorussian Culture in the Sixteenth Century

The autobiographical writings of the sometime Canadian resident Ilona Duczynska (1897–1978), born near Vienna of a Polish father and Hungarian mother (both of the lower nobility), were designed to show how experiences within the family during childhood and youth led to her becoming a revolutionary. Duczynska claimed to have experienced a species of class struggle—involving the families of her idealized father and her much criticized mother—that brought about the death of the former and marked her personally with the sign of inferiority. It followed, then, that education was powerless to amend what Duczynska decided she had already ‘learned’ within the family, including her malcontent father’s characteristic spirit of negation. Consequently, Duczynska describes the various stages of her distinctly privileged education in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Hungary—almost entirely in terms of how she availed herself of opportunities to take a ‘stand’ against existing institutions. Inevitably, in 1922 even the ‘party school’ of the Hungarian Communist Party forfeited her confidence. Further research, drawing on psychological insights, may show why Duczynska’s family experiences should have led to a mistrust of the family as an institution, fascination with ‘revolutionary violence’, and life-long hatred of liberal democratic (and capitalist) institutions.