Limitations of family therapy

Summary This paper concerns inself with therapeutic difficulties in marital and family therapy due to an inability to resolve value discrepancies between the therapist and the family in question. The guarded prognosis due to lack in motivation to change is reinforced by the presence of chronic pathology, cultural differences, and the unwillingness or inability of the family/couple to engage in a valid therapeutic contract. This is especially true when acting-out adolescents are involved. This, and the limitations imposed by an agency and a private practice setting, is exemplified to two case illustrations. Clinical course, details, and psychodynamics are discussed as are the pros and cons of treating such families. Recommendations concerning modifications in techniques of intervention are made. The cases lead to the conclusion that while traditional (or even untraditional) psychotherapeutic procedures are likely to prove ineffective, an analysis of negative outcomes might help to devise strategies to cope with such families and lead to further theory building. References to the pertinent literature are made.     

HEGEL AND CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY: New Perspectives from the Marcuse Archives

Recently published archival material suggests the need to reexamine Herbert Marcuse's interpretation of Hegel's thought. Social theory generally will benefit from reflections upon Marcuse's historical attempts to understand contemporary societal domination, including its abstract forms, and his original social "translations" of Hegel's Subjective Logic. Following sections on Being and Essence, the latter often favored by Marxists, the final part of Hegel's Science of Logic was undervalued in the development of critical social theory before Marcuse's close readings in the years 1932–1941. Marcuse took the lead among Critical Theorists in explicating Hegel's texts. Just as significant, Marcuse was among the first to point out the sociological relevance of key categories in the most abstract final sections of Hegel's most abstract work. The newly published materials document Marcuse's unique attempts to conceive Hegelian dialectic proper as itself a practical force of social transformations. Most important, these articles concern the relationship between theory and social practice that Marcuse investigated in Hegel's dialectic of the idea of the true and the idea of the good—the absolute idea.     

The Construction of Optimal Balanced Incomplete Block Designs When Adjacent Observations are Correlated

An algorithm is described for the optimal rearrangement of the treatments within each block of a Balanced Incomplete Block Design when a specified “nearest neighbour” correlation structure exists among observations from plots in the same block. The procedure uses results obtained by Kiefer & Wynn (1981). Designs obtained using the algorithm are found to compare favourably with those produced by combinatorial methods given in Cheng (1983). The algorithm produces optimal designs for all BIBD parameter sets, including those not covered by the results of Kiefer & Wynn or Cheng.     

Detention in South Africa: A woman’s experience

From the bookLives of Courage: Women for a New South Africa, by Diana E.H. Russell, copyright ? 1988 by Diana E.H. Russell, to be published in the fall of 1989 by Basic Books, Inc.     

The developmental priority of the evaluative dimension in perceptions of nonverbal cues

Researchers who have attempted to map the basic structure of broad psychological domains (such as interpersonal behavior) have invariably pointed to the importance of the evaluative dimension. It was predicted that sensitivity to such a salient dimension would develop prior to sensitivity to other important but apparently weaker dimensions, such as dominance-submissiveness. The predicted developmental trend was supported in a study of nonverbal decoding. When judging pairs of emotional cues communicated by the face or body and by the tone of voice, younger subjects, compared to older ones, were more likely to notice discrepancies in the degree of expressed positivity than in the degree of expressed dominance.     

Women,children and marriage in Swaziland

While sociologists have long theorized that marriage is an almost universal institution developed to create stable units for the rearing of children, data from interviews with 100 rural and 25 urban women in Swaziland in 1988-89 reveal that these assumptions reflect narrow ethnocentric views rather than the relationship between marriage and children which exists in Swaziland where there is a prevailing pattern of early childbearing and later marriage. Whereas half of all Swazi mothers aged 20-30 are unmarried, this proportion drops to a third by age 40 and to a fifth by age 50. It is popular to state that the reason that marriage is not a prerequisite for child-bearing is that a deterioration of morals has accompanied the erosion of traditional morals. However, a careful reading of early essays reveals that the practice is of long standing. In fact, not only is this a normal pattern in Swazi society, there are well understood rules for allocating the responsibility of children outside of marriage which are being strained by the spread of industrial capitalism. The customs which accompany premarital child-bearing include the father paying a compensation (5 cattle) to the mother's family for the birth, the father having the right to "buy" the child, and the traditional right of the king to forbid marriage to warriors. This system of premarital conception has resulted in a very high birthrate and has been fostered by the homestead system with its kinship networks and shared resources. A growing ambivalence to children can be seen in the fact that the marriage rituals which give a husband the right to his wife's sexuality rather than those which involve the paying of a price for the rights to the children are the most commonly performed. In addition, the old image of the natural father proudly asserting his rights to his children is rarely seen in modern Swaziland. The mother's family, from which the child can be claimed at any time up until puberty, tries to avoid investing heavily in a resource (the child) which may be snatched away. The fact that most mothers now assign the father's name to their children indicates their willingness to have the child appropriated. In the meantime, the women are expected to be the sole providers for their children.