Life Planning Services: Helping older placed children with their identity

Life Planning Services for Older Children is a time-limited and intensive approach for working with youngsters who are or have been in the American foster care system. The program is designed to help children and adolescents explore the way in which their life experiences influence their selfimage as well as to examine the availability of family membership for the present and the future. The program staff work to strengthen existing family connections or to help youngsters look at alternatives. After examining the impact of identity on placement, the author describes some of the methods used by Life Planning Services staff to help placed children meet the challenges of adolescent identity development.Sheila Merry, Kay Donley, and Betsy Cole are thanked for their helpful comments and suggestions.     

Disability and Attitudes to Family Care in Britain: Towards a Sociological Perspective

Attitudes to family care are critical to the quality of community support offered to people with physical and mental handicaps. Yet despite their importance, they have attracted comparatively little social research. This paper examines the 'hotchpotch' of material which is available through the eyes of psychology and sociology. The potential of the psychologist's four-part anatomy of attitudes is recognised: the perceptual, evaluative, affective and behavioural components. However, attention is drawn to the narrow, consensual framework within which these components are often placed, and an alternative sociological or structural model is developed for family care, where the attitudes of disabled people and their relatives are seen as products of the family's socio-economic role. The conclusion discusses some of the policy implications.     

Psychiatric nursing recruitment. Roles for educators and nursing staff

Recruiting new nurses to a relatively unpopular specialty in the midst of a nursing shortage is challenging. However, the literature offers educators and clinical nursing staff important insight regarding the promotion of student interest in psychiatric nursing. Clearly, a collaborative effort is needed. Educators and clinicians should work together to provide students with a satisfying psychiatric nursing experience. Through a combination of effective, intellectually stimulating classroom instruction and positive, welcoming clinical experiences, educators and clinical nursing staff may increase the number of nursing graduates who pursue this rewarding specialty.     

A multidimensional typology of countertransference responses

Of all the countless phenomena intrinsic to psychoanalytic therapy, the construct of countertransference is one of the most conceptually and technically burdensome. As yet, no single theoretically consistent and universally accepted classification of countertransference responses exists. This article proposes a multidimensional typology of countertransference phenomena which can be employed to help monitor clinical practice.     

France,Holland, Belgium and Germany—a look at their housing problems and policies

The Overall common problems of these four countries could be summarised as follows: a very rapid rise in the price of land and building costs; the contrast between a high level of housing need and an apparent over-production of housing; the universal realisation that older properties are often potential slums and that not more than 2.3% of the total stock is new housing, therefore continual renovation is essential for keeping up reasonable housing standards.