A Trust-Based Intervention for Complex Developmental Trauma: A Case Study from a Residential Treatment Center

This case study, conducted in a Midwest residential treatment center, reports results from an attachment-based intervention that addressed the needs of a 16-year-old female, Rachel. Rachel had a long and documented history of severe abuse and neglect before her adoption from a Bulgarian orphanage at age 12 and numerous psychiatric hospitalizations in the years subsequent. Upon entering this residential treatment center, Rachel did not respond to traditional residential treatment modalities and was considered one of the most difficult children the facility had ever attempted to help. After the intensive attachment-based intervention for Rachel, her adoptive parents, and facility staff, dramatic increases in pro-social and attachment behaviors were noted, as well as a significant decrease in violent and self-injurious behaviors. The intervention consisted of three phases of differing levels of intensity and was designed to address the attachment system and related sub-systems in order to facilitate the development of healthy attachments.     

Ursula Trüper. The Invisible Woman: Zara Schmelen,African Mission Assistant at the Cape and in Namaland

Between 1935 and 1963, Zainunnessa ‘Cissie’ Gool was probably the most politically powerful woman of colour in Cape Town, yet her history has remained largely undocumented and unknown even in her own city. This article traces a skeleton of the biography of Gool and offers a few reflections on the process of making two theatre pieces, Cissie (2008) and This Woman is Not for Burning (2011). Both works were oriented around Gool’s life and the world of her constituency, District Six. Like the two plays it focuses on, this article is concerned with the efficacy and limitations of restorative archiving and historiography through performance and the potential seductions of hagiography. I suggest that both plays were acts of feminist biography, governed, in part, by the (often silent, sometimes unacknowledged) narrative of auto/biography. The article is also an attempt to forge a critical and creative cohesion between the multiple forms of inquiry (imaginative, anecdotal and theoretical) that underpinned both works.     

Justice,utility, and interpersonal comparisons

One of the most common objections against utilitarianism is that it cannot account for the claims of distributive justice. This objection can be answered by appeal to the principle of Diminishing Marginal Utility (DMU), which says that the value of a given portion of a commodity tends to increase as a person's supply of the commodity decreases. DMU implies that, other things equal, the way to maximize the value of a commodity is to distribute it equally. Some economists have objected to DMU on the ground that it presupposes interpersonal comparisons of utility, but the arguments which they have advanced against the objectivity of such comparisons are unsound. Moreover, the interpersonal comparisons presupposed by DMU are ordinal, rather than cardinal, and there are reasons for believing that ordinal comparisons, at least, do have an objective basis.     

Estimation in Epidemics with Incomplete Observations

The construction of estimating equations by martingale methods is generalized to yield estimators with explicit expressions for the parameters of the birth-and-death and the general epidemic processes when only partial observations are available. (For the birth-and-death process the death process is observed but the number of births is observed only at the end and for the general epidemic process only the removal process is observed.) For large populations, the use of the martingale central limit theorem yields asymptotic confidence regions for the parameters. Explicit expressions are derived for estimators of the variances of the large sample distributions. The range of validity and usefulness of the new estimators is determined by simulation.