Becoming Each Other: A Single Case Exploration of Relational Consciousness in Couple Therapy

The concept of “relational consciousness” has gained increasing attention in the last decades in the fields of philosophy, sociology, and psychotherapy. Yet human consciousness with its concomitant awareness of self and other as distinct is linguistically and culturally situated in the individual mind. This article explores the lived experience of shared consciousness in the practice of “becoming the other” with a focus on therapy with one couple. The historical development of our understanding of consciousness as a relational phenomenon is addressed with particular attention to the observations, insights, and practices of Lev Vygotsky, George Herbert Mead, and Gregory Bateson, who have each contributed substantially to our understanding of mind as relationally experienced and constructed. The article explores implications for practice and future directions this methodology might take.

Sustained Empathic Focus and its Application in the Treatment of Couples

Although all psychoanalytically informed approaches to couples therapy recognize the importance of underlying dynamics, there are important differences in the focus of the treatment. This paper suggests a focus that is based on a self-psychological/intersubjective viewpoint. Two concepts that exemplify this model, a sustained empathic focus and an appreciation of the experience of vulnerability, are discussed and applied to a couples session. What is emphasized in this material is a process of focusing on underlying vulnerability, affect and subjective experience.

Culture and Masculinity: When Therapist and Patient are Latino Men

Treating clients from diverse cultural backgrounds, and supervising clinicians who are treating clients of the same ethnicity and gender, are now common experiences in our mental health system. As the growth of minorities in the US greatly outpaces the training of minority clinicians, more attention to these situations is needed. Operating from the premise that interpersonal sensitivity is a fundamental aspect of cross-cultural and cross-ethnic sensitivity, we describe the treatment of a Latino male by a Latino male clinician, in this case both of Puerto Rican descent. We outline the contours of the therapy with a man whose life history included numerous incidents of humiliation and thwarted efforts at efficacy, mastery, agency, and competence, resulting in an adult character structure based on shame and self-doubt. We also discuss the challenges to the clinician posed by working with a man whose traditional upbringing mirrored his own, with all the positives and negatives that must be considered in the countertransference. We describe clinical and cultural reasons for various interventions, and their resulting outcome. The framework of a dynamic interpersonal therapy and the challenges of transference, countertransference, therapist disclosure, and working-through are covered.     

Wrapping and Unwrapping Emotions: Clinical Practice with East Asian Immigrant Elders

Using the cultural norm of the way gifts are wrapped, unwrapped, and exchanged as a metaphor for interpersonal connections, this paper presents the way therapists can establish therapeutic relationships with East Asian clients who do not express emotions openly. We first discuss the ways in which emotions are conceptualized, experienced, and expressed in East Asian cultures. We then present vignettes of our work with older Chinese and Japanese immigrant women to illustrate the importance of therapist authenticity and co-construction of the therapeutic relationship. Using the framework of relational/cultural theory, which posits that healing takes place in the context of mutually empathic growth-fostering relationships, we illustrate the importance of establishing mutuality between therapist and client as a form of cultural empathy.     

Clinical Social Work and Psychoanalysis: Introduction to the Special Issue

As clinical social work developed in America it was highly influenced by the concepts and techniques of psychoanalysis and many of its practitioners became interested in seeking psychoanalytic training. More and more psychoanalysts are now coming from a background in clinical social work due to the development of a network of interdisciplinary training institutes and the opening of the Institutes of the American Psychoanalytic Association to non-medical candidates. This special issue considers how psychoanalysis may be affected as more of its practitioners and contributors come from a background in clinical social work. This introduction reviews the history of the development of clinical social work and outlines the issues related to “lay analysis” in this country.

Efficiency Wages,Productivity and Simultaneity: A Meta-Regression Analysis

This study reports a meta-analysis of 75 estimates of the efficiency-wage effect. It reveals a strong efficiency-wage effect that depends upon whether researchers control for potential simultaneity between wages and productivity. Studies that control for simultaneity tend to report stronger effects. Clear evidence of publication selection is also found. E24, J30.

What Fills the Gaps Left by Employer-Provided Insurance?

Employer-provided insurance is the leading source of medical insurance for non-elderly Americans. However, it leaves many without coverage. Evidence suggests that the non-group insurance market does a poor job of filling in these gaps, for those with both short- and long-term uninsurance. It does so for all income and age groups, as well as for both genders. It does fill some of the gaps in employer-provided coverage for those with middle and high incomes, though very incompletely.     

The making and unmaking of a “transborder nation”: South Korea during and after the Cold War

The burgeoning literature on transborder membership, largely focused on the thickening relationship between emigration states in the South and the postwar labor migrant populations and their descendants in North America or Western Europe, has not paid due attention to the long-term macroregional transformations that shape transborder national membership politics or to the bureaucratic practices of the state that undergird transborder claims-making. By comparing contentious transborder national membership politics in South Korea during the Cold War and Post-Cold War eras, this article seeks to overcome these limitations. In both periods, the membership status of colonial-era ethnic Korean migrants in Japan and northeast China and their descendants was the focus of contestation. The distinctiveness of the case—involving both a sustained period of colonial rule and a period of belated and divided nation-state building interwoven with the Cold War—highlights the crucial importance of three factors: (1) the dynamically evolving macro-regional context, which has shaped transborder national membership politics in the region in distinctive ways; (2) the essentially political, performative, and constitutive nature of transborder nation-building; and (3) the role of state registration and documentation practices in shaping the contours of transborder national membership politics in the long run. By incorporating Korea—and East Asia more broadly—into the comparative study of transborder nation-building, this article also lays the groundwork for future cross-regional comparative historical studies.

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