Consensual Understanding Research Articles

Letter Writing In Relational Therapies

Starting with Sigmund Freud, a literature Nobel Prize winner, therapists have had a long-standing relationship with the written word as a tool to document the client’s account and the therapeutic process. In the last two decades, though, therapists have been found collaborating with clients in the sharing of their intimate wonderings as well as the nuances of the therapeutic process. While narrative therapy (White & Epston, 1990) highlighted or brought to the forefront the possibilities of employing writing as a transformative device, many others in the larger world of psychotherapy as well as the systemic therapy world have explored its uses (Bacigalupe, 1996). The authors in this special section extend this tradition with the use of letters written to clients: one article employs brief therapy tenets, a second paper is informed by a narrative focus, and a finally a paper based on interpretive research about the tone of the therapeutic relationship. Brief therapy demands that therapists focus on creating a context for change in every interaction with their clients; George Graham writes letters to clients as a first step to orient them to a therapeutic context that gives a central role to talk of change. His letters are sent to clients before they attend their first session, providing clear instructions that orient clients toward change. Continuing the purposefulness of interactional therapies, Graham uses the letters to aid clients in defining the problem, clarifying expectations, developing a consensual understanding of the therapeutic goals, and normalizing the difficulties of finding solutions. Mary Ann Majchrzak Rombach contributes a template for letter writing that uses narrative and solution-oriented ideas in detailing clients’ strengths in the formulation of letters to clients. Besides narrative tenets that counteract the psychiatric assessment through problem externalization, Rombach celebrates cli-

Negotiating control and meaning: home birth as a self-constructed choice in Finland

Each society has its own consensual understanding of birth and its determinants: caregivers, location, participants and loci of decision-making, which in the Western world are based on biomedical knowledge. However, two competing cultural models of childbirth, the biomedical/technocratic model and natural/holistic model, mediate women's choices and preferences for the place and caregiver in childbirth. This article explores the way in which these cultural models of birth and the existing practical possibilities for choices shape women's and men's understanding of home birth. Based on interviews with 21 Finnish women and 12 Finnish men, the reasons for and experiences of planning and building toward a home birth are examined through an analysis of birth narratives. The analysis focuses especially on the women's definitions of what is ‘natural’ and their relationship with health services where biomedical practices and knowledge are the norm. The analysis shows that the notion of ‘natural birth’ holds various meanings in Finnish women's narratives namely self-determination, control, and trust in one's intuition. I seek to demonstrate that just as the biomedical management of childbirth exhibits distinct cross-cultural variation, so also does resistance to biomedical hegemony, as such resistance is strongly embedded in the local socio-cultural situation.

"One China, One Taiwan": An Analysis of the Democratic Progressive Party's China Policy

At the largest opposition party in the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) influence on Taipei's future approach to cross-Strait relations can not be ignored. This study aims to systematically examine the DPP's China policy and its implications for future cross-Strait relations. It concludes that, without altering the fundamental principle of China, one Taiwan, the DPP has moderated its outright calling for Taiwan's de jure, when the governing Nationalist (KMT) has been more articulate in claiming a distinct Taiwanese identity separate from China. The apparent consensual understanding reached between the KMT and the DPP on the issue of Taiwan's status in essence denies both the option of immediate reunification with China and the option of immediate (de jure) independence for Taiwan. It implies that in the near future Taiwan's current cross-Strait policy is unlikely to change without a dramatic reshuffling in the domestic political landscape.

Black Gates and Fiery Galleries: Eastern Architecture in "The Fall of Hyperion"

ACCORDING TO RECENT DISCUSSIONS, KEATS'S HYPERION FRAGMENTS draw on a historiography of style that opens with the ancient sublimities of Egypt and moves on to the lucent beauties of Greece and Rome. This argument is based largely on descriptions of the Titans which allude to Egyptian sculpture, thus recasting the war with the classical Gods as an international event pitting the west against a prototypical Orient.(1) The identification of the Titans with Egypt is also grounded in Keats's biography; Egyptian sculptures were displayed in the British Museum next to the Elgin Marbles, where the poet viewed and was impressed by both.(2) However, the Titans' spectacular temples and palaces are not exclusively or even primarily Egyptian. Rather, they participate in the Regency's architectural exoticism, which included Egyptian and Greek designs but drew on a broader range of eastern styles among which Indian sources were prominent.(3) Like the Egyptian, the Indian stood for antiquity and sublimity, for the commercial and imperial domination of the East by Europe, and for a generic thrill related to but separable from these other effects.(4) Because of British involvement in the subcontinent, the Indian also foregrounded, more clearly than did domestically neutral Egyptian elements, the exotic style's potent but ambiguous status in the culture at large.(5) Indian designs were pervasive and controversial, and if the discourse surrounding them tended in one way or another to construct India as Other, it remained unclear whether this Other was properly an object of rigorous intellectual inquiry or a source of lucrative cheap thrills.(6) Meditating on how best to please his audience, Keats had concluded that they want is ... sensation, and his descriptions of eastern architecture are significant not because they express a vision of history but because of their sensationalism, which poses itself against the anti-pictorial, anti-commercial orthodoxy of the Regency's critical establishment.(7) The question of description is suggestive for an inquiry into the social elements of literary and taste because it bears on the fundamental between image and word. This difference, which criticism has often emphasized in order to favor the latter over the former, has recently faced a turn in theory. W. J. T. Mitchell, for example, refuses to absorb poetry and painting into a single semiotic but argues that there is no essential difference between them, and Christopher Collins, surveying research in psychology, concludes that mental imaging closely resembles the seeing of the eye, although their physiological and phenomenological differences are also important.(8) That is, we don't have to pretend to confuse poems with paintings in order to acknowledge that visual conceptions can be transmitted through the agency of language and that the pleasures of pictorial are genuinely visual.(9) The exclusively linguistic mind is thus a discriminating mind in an entirely social sense. The elite reader, whose interpretive strategies emphasize what is most difficult to do but also what can be naturalized over time, favors the culturally and semiotically allusive over the vulgarly, simply referential.(10) Complex codes of linguistic signification are more difficult to internalize than the Skills required by most pictorial strategies, which depend upon a combination of immediate, consensual understanding (a noun stands for a common, if potentially complicated, object) and detail-by-detail reconstruction of significant people, places, or things.(11) Conversely, when pleasure is generated by written language, not painting or sculpture, it offers to destabilize critical orders based in linguistic authority. As Collins argues, such orders maintain their own credibility by asseverating the truth of their written messages, but the power of words to produce images is an all-too-vivid reminder of their power to lie. …

Translational ethics: a perspective for the new millennium.

Modern medical care is increasingly dependent on the application of science to clinical practice, which occurs through clinical or translational research. We propose the concept of translational ethics, which incorporates the contributions of research codes of ethics that involve the protection of human subjects into the ethics of clinical practice. The modern research environment, which has contributed the scientific tools of modern medicine, has also framed the ethical environment in which medicine is practiced. The single most important contribution of research codes for protection of human research subjects to clinical practice is the doctrine of informed consent. Translational ethics, based on autonomy and informed consent, progresses beyond the narrow interpretation of those 2 concepts. It requires consensual understanding of a spectrum of clinical interventions that are increasingly complicated. Translational ethics helps navigate the ethical ramifications of technological and scientific advances that will increasingly challenge the corporate-oriented health system in the new millennium.

Measurement for evaluation

Problems of measurement in management science are discussed in the context of methods of evaluation. Different approaches to evaluation are compared in terms of the level of measurement required and the process of generating numerical values. It is suggested that the difficulties of measuring are not always appreciated and that soundly-based measures are products of theories developed and tested within a consensus on basic constructs. Conclusions are drawn for the practitioner to set his level of measurement in terms of consensual understanding and suggestions are made for research.