Enhancing Forgiveness: A Group Intervention for the Elderly

This article describes a therapeutic model of forgiveness (Enright, 2001 Enright, R. D. 2001. Forgiveness is a choice: A step-by-step process for resolving anger and restoring hope, Washington, D.C: American Psychological Association.  [Google Scholar]) and discusses its applicability to social work intervention with older adults. A total of 20 men and women, aged 57–82, participated in 2 different forgiveness groups, each of which met weekly for 8 sessions with a 4-month follow-up session. Measures of forgiveness, as well as biopsychosocial functioning, were collected before and after the group intervention. Results indicated that participants experienced long-term improvement with respect to forgiveness and depression, short-term improvement of physical health, and no change in relation to anxiety or social support. Clinical issues that emerged during the forgiveness group are discussed, and suggestions for gerontological social workers are offered.     

The Couples Life Story Approach: A Dyadic Intervention for Dementia

This article describes an approach for working with individuals who have dementia, along with their spouses or partners. The 5-week intervention focuses on helping couples communicate, reminisce about the story of their relationship, find photographs and mementoes from their past, and develop a book that incorporates these mementoes. This clinical approach highlights the strengths and the resilience of couples and adds to the limited repertoire of dyadic interventions for dementia care which are currently available. Preliminary findings from 24 couples are presented, including the intervention's feasibility and acceptability.     

Birth Mothers' Perceptions of Their Parented Children's Knowledge of and Involvement in Adoption

An examination of birth mothers' perceptions of the relationship between the children she is parenting and the children she placed for adoption offers unique insight into the life course of openness. In the present study, 94 birth mothers from the United States participated in a semi-structured interview, discussing their oldest parented children's knowledge of and experience with their siblings placed for adoption. Results show that 59 birth mothers have an oldest parented child who is aware of their adopted sibling, although 4 of these do not know their true relationship with the adopted sibling. Of these, 27 had direct contact with the adopted sibling, 4 had indirect contact through the birth mother, and 1 had previous contact that has since ceased. A majority of birth mothers indicated that their oldest parented child would like more contact, direct contact, or more information about the adopted youth. Implications for research and practice with birth mothers and their children separated by adoption are discussed.     

Moments in Laplanche's Theory of Sexuality

This paper is a brief introduction to some of Laplanche's thinking, as well as a commentary on his essay that is published here. Some salient issues in Laplanche's theory are introduced, such as the decentering of the subject and the prioritizing of the other, the postulation of the “reality of the message,” in which gestures from the other both signify and excite/seduce, and an enlarged meaning of seduction. The child's translation of the enigmatic messages conveyed by the adult is a process of being seduced into building interiority and subjectivity. In effect, the present paper proposes not only that “otherness” constitutes the subject, but that an “asymmetrical intersubjectivity” is what enables the transition from instinct to drive and the creation of paradoxical human sexuality. In a meditation that illuminates significant issues in American feminist and psychoanalytic theory, Laplanche's essay analyzes and distinguishes three interrelated terms, gender, sex, and “the sexual” (“le sexual”), or so-called “infantile sexuality”, the latter documenting a Freudian and French emphasis on an additional, counter-realistic, counter-adaptational, and counter-social conception of sexuality. What stands out in this paper no less than “le sexual” is the use of the term “gender” by a French psychoanalyst, who is at once nodding in acknowledgment to contemporary American thinking, and enlisting the concept of gender to reaffirm its “intimate enemy,” infantile sexuality, “le sexual.” Laplanche sees the American-conceived couple sex/gender as a “formidable tool against the Freudian discovery.” Formidableness is what is common to gender and to infantile sexuality, in that both concepts resist and destroy the clear-cut biological/anatomical “destiny” of sex. Both pertain to cultural/acquired/constructed aspects of sexuality; both are phantasmatic and both subvert sexual role divisions. But gender is organized by, hence possibly subordinate to, sex. Laplanche acknowledges gender yet at the same time he makes it dependent on sexuality and thereby “downgrades” it in favor of the inarticulate, perverse, subversive, untameable aspect of human sexuality—“le sexual”, infantile sexuality—which remains outside and in excess of gender.     

Four-wheel drivescapes: Embodied understandings of the Kimberley

In this paper, we explore understandings of the Kimberley as wilderness through the embodied knowledge of sites encountered on the travels of four-wheel drivers. We critically review attempts to conceptualise the social role of automobiles in touring practices then turn to non-representational theory to develop our own conceptual framework of four-wheel drivescapes. Our use of this term acknowledges that understandings of the world are fashioned by our bodily situatedness in, and towards the world. Through the vantage point provided by four-wheel drive technologies, tourists are engaged in generating embodied understandings of tourism destinations through an ongoing process of defining, experiencing, interpreting and responding to human and non-human worlds. We trace the means by which the emobodied knowledge of tourists who travel through the Kimberley by four-wheel drive becomes integral to their understanding of this place as wilderness. Our results suggest how two separate, yet intersecting four-wheel drivescapes of luxury and hardship reconfigure normative ideas of the outback as wilderness.     

Risk Migration and Scientific Advance: The Case of Flame-Retardant Compounds

It is a common experience that attempts to mitigate a risk lead to new risks, and that risks formerly thought to be of one kind become another kind as technical knowledge evolves. This phenomenon of risk migration suggests that we should take processes over time, rather than specific risks or specific technologies, as a unit of analysis. Several of our existing models of the social management of risks-such as that of social risk amplification-are process models of a kind but are still oriented around the playing out of a particular event or issue. A case study of risk in a group of flame-retardant compounds was used as the basis of a grounded, exploratory analysis of migration processes, the phenomena that influence them, and their consequences. This illustrated how migration naturally occurs from risks that are understood, in which risk bearers have at least some agency, to risks that are not understood and not capable of being influenced by risk bearers. It illustrated how the simultaneous improvement in measuring technology, which detects potential toxins at increasingly small concentrations, combines with intuitive models that ignore concentration to produce conditions likely to generate anxiety. And it illustrated how pressure groups and commercial interests exploit this effect. It also showed how migration makes precautionary action problematic, and how more generally it tends to undermine a society's capacity to cope with risk.     

Giving Voice to the Search for Meaning: An Interview With Ruth Schmidt Neven

Ruth Schmidt Neven is a child and adult psychotherapist who trained at the Tavistock Institute in England. She worked in the UK for over 20 years in child and family mental health services of the NHS. During this time, she was responsible for setting up Exploring Parenthood, an organisation which focused on parenting issues. Since migrating to Australia in 1989, Ruth has remained committed to promoting knowledge and understanding about child and family development in the broader community through her clinical practice, training courses and writing. She is currently the director of the Centre for Child and Family Development in Melbourne.     

The views and attitudes of health professionals providing antenatal care to women with a high BMI: A qualitative research study

BackgroundThe prevalence of overweight and obesity is increasing amongst women of child bearing age. The objective of this study was to investigate the views and attitudes of providers of antenatal care for women who have a body mass index (BMI) of 30 kg/m² and over.MethodsA qualitative study using focus groups was undertaken within the department of obstetrics and gynaecology at a large teaching hospital in south-eastern Australia. Three focus group discussions were held. One with hospital midwives (n = 10), one with continuity of care midwives (n = 18) and one with obstetricians (n = 5). Data were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA).FindingsSix dominant themes emerged: (1) obesity puts the health of mothers, babies and health professionals at risk; (2) overweight and obesity has become the norm; (3) weighing women and advising about weight gain is out of fashion; (4) weight is a sensitive topic to discuss; (5) there are significant barriers to weight control in pregnancy; and (6) health professionals and women need to deal with maternal obesity. These themes are drawn together to form a model representing current health care issues for these women.ConclusionHealth professionals, who have a high BMI, can find it difficult to discuss obesity during antenatal visits with obese women. Specialist dietary interventions and evidence based guidelines for working with child-bearing women is seen as a public health priority by health care professionals.     

Development and Validation of the Marital Metaphor Questionnaire (MMQ‐10) for Urban Chinese Women

Metaphors have long been applied to marital counseling and couple therapy. This pioneering study measures marital conceptualization through metaphors. It reports the validation of the Marital Metaphor Questionnaire (MMQ‐10), designed to measure the marriage conceptualization of Chinese women through marital metaphors. The MMQ‐10 was found to have favorable psychometric properties including reliable internal consistency, a good discriminative prediction of marriage at risk and moderate correlation with a Chinese indigenous multidimensional marital satisfaction inventory. Factor analysis reveals that the MMQ‐10 is composed of three dimensions: conjugal relationship, marital anguish, and marital conviction. The MMQ‐10 appears to be suitable for the use with Chinese women in premarital or marital counseling sessions. The present researchers hope that this study may support the use of metaphors in future research and clinical practice in other nations and cultures.     

Women’s Reproductive Choices in Australia: Mapping Federal and State/Territory Policy Instruments Governing Choice

The reproductive choices available to women, and the consequences of those choices, exist within the broader policy context whereby policy is influenced by pervasive ideologies of women’s roles in society and the family. Women’s reproductive rights and their resulting consequences are governed by policy at the federal and state/territory levels within Australia yet little is known about the number or scope of these policies. This study aimed to systematically search and map Australian policy to identify the number and scope of policies governing women’s reproductive choices and their consequences, including how policy interprets the role of women in society through their reproductive choices. The systematic search identified 147 Australian policies in 2013. The mapping of the policies identified common themes that drive policy agenda impacting women’s reproductive choices, including those where the focus is promoting motherhood and/or children, providing economic incentives, regulating reproduction, or a broader health focus. These policy agendas simultaneously construct and are shaped by the context in which women’s reproductive choices and impacts occur. Women’s reproductive choices are highly politicised and regulated, impacting women’s position within society.