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.

“Which One Is Yours?”: Children and Ethnography

This paper explores roles that children play in ethnographic research. Based on the limited literature on children in the field, and drawing on examples from ethnographies across disciplines, I identify four roles for children: 1) as “wedges,” or as instrumentally important in helping adult ethnographers gain access in various ways; 2) as collaborators; 3) as objects of study; and 4) as subjects of study. I also discuss the ways in which these roles illuminate key methodological issues in ethnography, like reflexivity, ethics, and agency. The paper synthesizes and integrates previously disconnected research on the presence of children in the field with ethnographies in which children and childhood are the topics of research. I draw on my own fieldwork experiences for further illustration.

$${\mathcal{Q}}$$-anonymous social welfare relations on infinite utility streams

This paper studies a class of social welfare relations (SWRs) on the set of infinite utility streams. In particular, we examine the SWRs satisfying -Anonymity, an impartiality axiom stronger than Finite Anonymity, as well as Strong Pareto and a certain equity axiom. First, we characterize the extension of the generalized Lorenz SWR by combining -Anonymity with Strong Pareto and Pigou–Dalton Equity. Second, we replace Pigou–Dalton Equity with Hammond Equity for characterizing the extended leximin SWR. Third, we give an alternative characterization of the extended utilitarian SWR by substituting Incremental Equity for Pigou–Dalton Equity.     

The NIP graph of a social welfare function

We consider the fraction of pairs of m distinct alternatives on which a social welfare function f may be nondictatorially independent and Pareto when the domain of f satisfies the free k-tuple property. When k = 4 we improve the existing upper bound to . When there are at least 26 alternatives and we obtain an original upper bound, . To obtain these results we define and analyze the graph formed from the nondictatorial independent and Pareto pairs and combine the results of this analysis with known results from extremal graph theory. The authors extend special thanks to the two reviewers and the editor for their comments.     

Minimal covering set solutions

We study necessary and sufficient conditions for a multi-valued solution S to be rationalized in the following sense: there exists a complete asymmetric relation T (a tournament) such that, for each feasible (finite) set, the solution set of S coincides with the minimal covering set of T restricted to that feasible set. Our characterization result relies only on properties relating S across feasible choice sets.