Emotional Struggles Research Articles

Bringing the ‘left behind’ back into view in Asia: a framework for understanding the ‘migration–left behind nexus’

A middle-aged man moves from the hinterland of China to the east coast to find work as a construction worker; a young woman from rural Indonesia takes up a factory job in Jakarta; a Vietnamese woman joins her fellow villagers in Hanoi to work as a scavenger . . . Migration scholars policy-makers and the public media may see in these phenomena the migrant the journey and the arrival. But for the migrants these activities also signal departure separation and leaving family members loved ones and familiar places behind. Indeed leaving behind often entails emotional and psychological struggles as well as complex rearrangements of the material aspects of daily life of a magnitude as significant as moving to and settling in places of destination. An individuals migration presents a major rupture of the inner workings and everyday life of an entire household. While it is well recognised that rural--urban labour mobility continues to rise in terms of both magnitude and geographical scope across Pacific Asia -- more people are migrating from more places to more destinations -- the left behind (by definition a much larger group than the migrants themselves) are often forgotten. (excerpt)

The family conference

Most patients in prolonged coma will ultimately remain unconscious, survive disabled, or die. It is incontrovertible that the dignity of these patients will be compromised, and limiting life-sustaining treatment for comatose patients is often taken into consideration. Such decisions are made by physicians and families or their surrogates and rarely involve a hospital ethics committee. Families endure an emotional struggle filled with sorrow, fear, and even guilt. However, the decision to let go—with maximal comfort—is the most common cause of death in comatose patients. In this issue of Neurology , the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) reaffirms their prior position of following the patient’s own preference for healthcare through living wills, advanced directives, or after wishes voiced to families or surrogate decision makers are made known.1 The AAN does not dictate withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment in prolonged comatose patients. A position that would endorse only withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment clearly interferes with the autonomy of the patient or those making decisions for the patient. The AAN re-emphasizes the need for education of its members and to promote better understanding of patient preferences for medical care. However, most insistently, the AAN opposes any restriction of end-of-life decisions. With the introduction of multiple state bills—that would require actual proof of the patient preference—a troubling trend has emerged. Rather than being directed by a consensus agreement of family members, such a level of proof would almost certainly be followed by a court challenge. The AAN position—and most guidelines of professional organizations, including the American Medical Association—advise against involvement of the courts. …

Averting Dementia of the Alzheimer's Type in Women: Can Counselors Help?

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is most common cause of dementia in late life, taking its greatest toll on women over age 80. This article provides an overview of AD, including risk factors and counseling strategies targeting risk. Counseling strategies address stress, cardiovascular health, social integration, depression, and holistic wellness. ********** The life experiences of women, their educational and vocational opportunities, their access to health care, medications, and disease exposures may affect their risks of Alzheimer's Disease in ways that current research is only beginning to comprehend. --Lerner, 1999, p. 1831 Among many challenges encountered in late life, a diagnosis of dementia is particularly devastating. Not only does diagnosis represent a personal tragedy for those with dementia, it portends a harrowing experience for families and other caregivers. One of best known forms of dementia, dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT), is a disorder that, as its name indicates, is an outcome of Alzheimer's disease (AD) process. As is case for all dementias, DAT presents affected individuals with an array of cognitive deficits and emotional struggles. Unlike most other forms of dementia, however, impact of DAT is greater on women than it is on men (Baum, 2005). Although DAT remains an incurable, dreaded disorder, contemporary research in biomedical sciences suggests that there is some hope that disease can be averted. There are, in fact, a host of strategies, many falling within purview of counseling practice, which may be able to alter progression of AD process. This article explores role of counseling in averting devastating effects of DAT, giving particular attention to how counselors can help women in fight against AD. It begins with an overview of statistics, symptoms, etiology, pathology, and risk factors related to disorder. Strategies for controlling symptoms of DAT are then considered and are followed a discussion of how counselors are uniquely positioned to assist in initiatives targeting control of women's brain health in late life. Finally, role of holistic wellness counseling as a lifelong prevention strategy is considered. AN OVERVIEW OF DAT Statistics Data provided Alzheimer's Association (2006a) on late-onset AD indicate that disorder doubles every 5 years in individuals over 65 years of age and that by age 85, risk reaches nearly 50 percent (p. 1). Late-onset AD is most common form of disorder and definition includes cases that begin after age 65. The incidence of AD developing before age 65, a form of disease termed early onset, is more rare, tends to run in families, and accounts for less than 5% of all AD cases (Alzheimer's Disease Education and Referral Center, 2004). A report commissioned Alzheimer's Association estimates that AD costs businesses in United States $61 billion per year. This figure includes $36.5 billion to cover productivity loss, absenteeism, and worker replacement for caregivers and $24.6 billion to provide health care to AD patients (Kopel, as cited in Alzheimer's Association, 2006b). The estimated average lifetime cost to care for an individual with AD ranges from $200,000 to $400,000 (Shankle & Amen, 2004). The Symptoms of DAT The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (4th ed., text rev.; DSM-IV-TR; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2000) states that the essential feature of a dementia is development of multiple cognitive deficits that include memory impairment and at least one of following cognitive disturbances: aphasia, apraxia, agnosia, or a disturbance in executive functioning (p. 147). To meet criteria for a diagnosis of dementia, cognitive deficits be severe enough to cause problems in occupational or social activities and must represent a decline from a previous level of functioning (p. …

"Difficult Patients" in Mental Health Care: A Review

"Difficult Patients" in Mental Health Care: A Review

The struggles of the lower-scoring students

Nuthall's exceptional quantitative and qualitative analyses provide us with an illuminating picture of the cognitive and emotional struggles of low-scoring students. His poignant portrayals leave us to consider the types of classroom modifications and settings that will best help these students. The second section explores some apparent differences between Nuthall's finding that the need for four spaced encounters applies to all students and the older research on individual differences in the rate at which students learn new material.

Who's afraid of the Wolfe couple: the interlocking traumatic scene

Fulfilling intimate relationships require a constant emotional and psychological struggle to disentangle strangleholds created by the interpenetration of unresolved complexes stemming from previous disappointing relational experiences. These complexes may manifest as an encrypted pattern of engagement that each partner brings to the marriage, like a 'malignant dowry'. The dowry box, once opened, releases its nefarious contents to create an extremely complex and entangled drama I call the 'interlocking traumatic scene'. Partners unconsciously entrap each other to play a part in such a scene with double (sometimes multiple) roles for each antagonist. The imaginal space between the two characters can be seen as a projection screen, upon which are superimposed two separate shadow plays, one on each side of the screen. A third play, which is a co-created product of these two individual traumatic scenes, can also be observed. Three plays are performed simultaneously. The defensive systems that the two individuals bring to the equation dovetail together, but the actual interlocking mechanism itself deadlocks in such a way that it seems to have its own malignant presence, a 'malevolent third' (after Ogden 1994). I outline therapeutic interventions using the metaphor of the therapist as 'anti-director' and I introduce my concept of the conjoint selected fact (after Bion 1963 after Poincaré 1952).

Jena Romanticism and Zen

Jena Romanticism and Zen Dennis McCort (bio) But what drew him with all its power was a tall, light blue flower that stood beside the stream and touched him with its broad, glittering petals. Surrounding it were countless flowers of all colors, and the rare fragrance filled the air. He saw nothing but the blue flower and regarded it for a long while with indescribable tenderness. Finally he made as if to approach it when it suddenly stirred and began to change. The petals became even more brilliant and pressed themselves against the growing stem. The flower inclined towards him, its petals forming a broad blue collar in which a tender face hovered. —Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen1 All at once, his biographer relates, Bassui felt as though he had "lost his life root, like a barrel whose bottom had been smashed open." Sweat began to pour from every pore of his body, and when he left Koho's room he was in such a daze that he bumped his head several times along the walls trying to find the outer gate of the temple. Upon reaching his hut he wept for hours from his very depths. The tears overflowed, "pouring [End Page 98] down his face like rain." In the intense combustion of this overwhelming experience Bassui's previously held conceptions and beliefs, we are told, were utterly annihilated. —Kapleau, The Three Pillars of Zen Introduction Two scenarios above: the first presents the climax of a lucid dream in which Heinrich, the poet-hero of Novalis' signature novel of German romanticism, experiences an apotheosis of nature centering on the mystical Blue Flower, a mandala whose dynamic perfection of rounded form reveals to him the ecstatic unity of all being. In the second, the medieval Rinzai Zen monk Bassui undergoes the near-violent collapse of an ego-based personality-structure eroded by years of meditation and the consequent influx of an all-pervasive radiance. Though different in particulars (including the difference between fiction and biography), both texts convey the same apocalyptic, life-transforming event, known to Zen as satori and to German romanticism, variously, as die Erleuchtung, romantisieren, or das goldene Zeitalter. This is the summum bonum sought by both these spiritual movements, the goal of all spiritual practice, intellectual inquiry and emotional struggle, the pearl of great price worthy of any sacrifice. It brings with it an absolute freedom empowering one to see anything in one's field of consciousness exactly as it is in itself. It reveals nothing less than the noumenal Ding an sich of Kantian transcendentalism, or, as Zen puts it, things in their exquisite "suchness" (Skt., tathatã). Let us refer to this event in the ensuing discussion as "enlightenment," the term generally used by Westerners to signify the supreme goal of Hindu and Buddhist spiritual practice. It is an apt term inasmuch as many, if not most, such experiences are characterized by those who have them as suffused with a profound sense of light or radiance, albeit a radiance in no way oppressive to one's physical vision. Philip Kapleau, an American Zen master, equates enlightenment with "Self-realization," probably both in Jung's sense of individuation (the maturation and harmonization of psychic forces) and in that of the early Chinese master Hui-neng who characterized the event as "seeing into one's own True Nature." Kapleau goes on to describe enlightenment as "opening the Mind's eye, awakening to one's True-nature and hence of [sic] the nature of all existence" (377). [End Page 99] This much description should be sufficient to convey a sense of enlightenment as it is understood by its devotees, that is, as the ultimate emancipation of human consciousness from the prison of separateness and the pressure of any and all constraint, internal or external. This makes both Jena romanticism and Zen an "argument" in favor of the possibility of "pure" or "direct" experience, of consciousness unfettered by the barest taint of cultural conditioning. Both Novalis and Hui-neng insist that there is such a thing as transcendence and that it is "there for the taking," given the requisite surrender of narrow self-interest. The above snippet of Bassui...

Sturdy roots for the graceful eucalyptus: The parallel process of integrating counselling around a client's needs and aligning research paradigms with methodology

This article explores the relationship between the therapist as an eclectic clinician and the therapist as researcher. The process of finding a well-grounded place for my heuristic inquiry in academic discourse is compared with the struggle to find unity and integrity in the counselling of a client using many modalities. The intellectual and emotional struggle in either case is similar. It is posited that the engagement of students of counselling in research, therefore, has a clinical as well as an academic purpose, but that this benefit needs to be made explicit.

Parental Voices: For Angeline: A Mother??s Reflection and Emotional Struggle With the Loss of a Typical Child and How She Stumbles Into an Unexpected World of Special Needs and the People Who Live There

Parental Voices: For Angeline: A Mother??s Reflection and Emotional Struggle With the Loss of a Typical Child and How She Stumbles Into an Unexpected World of Special Needs and the People Who Live There

Women in Rwanda

IN 2003 RWANDAN WOMEN’S ASSOCIATIONS ISSUED AN international call to aid women who had been raped and infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) during the genocide and who were becoming sick and dying. As difficult as it was for the world to comprehend the tragedy of the 1994 events it was even more incomprehensible that while women with HIV were not receiving antiretroviral medications alleged perpetrators were receiving treatment in prison. The associations often led by survivors themselves care for thousands of widows rape survivors and orphans some specifically caring for those infected with HIV. The leaders of these associations knew their members needed antiretroviral therapy immediately to survive. However they also understood the physical emotional familial and economic struggles caused by the civil war and genocide that continued to traumatize these women and knew that successful management of HIV infection would require more than medications. Rwandan women with HIV infection needed counselors and therapy for posttraumatic stress support groups food housing education about their illness and treatment and job training as well as income for their children’s food school fees uniforms and pencils. (excerpt)

Viviendo en la Sombra: The Immigration of Peruvian Professionals to South Florida

The experiences of middle-class Peruvian professionals who have recently migrated to the United States challenge our notions of the migration experiences of Latin American professionals. Many arrive without legal status, language skills or employment sponsorship. Without these resources, they experience employment instability, downward mobility and greater emotional stress. This paper seeks to explain how these new immigrants reconcile downward mobility with their professional backgrounds and personal identities by exploring their resultant emotional struggles.

Measurement of the Experience of Living with Primary Recurrent Headache

Recurrent primary headache is a major public health concern that impacts both society and the individual, reducing productivity and limiting participation in work, social, and leisure activities. The purpose of this study was to develop a valid and reliable instrument to measure the experience of living with chronic recurrent primary headache. This tool, Chronic Pain Experience Instrument-Headache Version (CPEI-HA), is intended to provide a measure of the affective component of headache that could complement the assessment of intensity, density, and disability. Psychometric testing of 25 items with a community-based headache sample ( N = 150) resulted in a 19-item tool with high internal consistency (α = .92). Principal components analysis was used to explore the meaning of the headache experience, and three underlying dimensions (i.e., Helplessness, Stress—Personal and Interpersonal, and Emotional Struggle) emerged to provide a better understanding of the experience. Construct validity was supported by the empiric relationships between the CPEI-HA and the eight theoretically related health concept subscales of the RAND 36-Item Health Survey 1.0. As predicted, all of the relationships were positive and in the moderate range (.31–.52). Findings suggest that the CPEI-HA has the potential for providing a valid and reliable tool for both clinical and research applications with persons who experience primary recurrent headaches.

Turning to Earth: Stories of Ecological Conversion by F. Marina Schauffler

B o o k R e v ie w s Turning to Earth: Stories of Ecological Conversion. By F. Marina Schauffler. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. 161 pages, $49.50/$ 14.95. Reviewed by John Tallmadge Union Institute and University, Cincinnati, Ohio Conversion, in the religious sense, means turning away from one set of beliefs to embrace another. It connotes a major change, not only in attitude and creed but in life and practice. We generally imagine conversion in terms of two great models. For St. Paul, struck blind and admonished by Christ’s disembodied voice on the road to Damascus, conversion was a sudden, cata­ clysmic event. For St. Augustine, whose years of philosophic and emotional struggle had wound his soul to an unbearable tension, all it took was a chance encounter with scripture: conversion was the tipping point in a long process of maturation, like a ripe pear dropping from a tree. For Marina Schauffler, a writer and scholar who lives on the coast of Maine, conversion offers a Kay Hornick. ALTERED BOOK IN GREENS. 2004- An old children’s board book served as the base for collage techniques. The artist sanded the pages of the original book and gessoed each. Then she applied collage techniques to create a new book. 7" x 6 Vi". Courtesy of the artist. B o o k R e v ie w s 2 0 7 fascinating lens through which to interpret the lives and works of important environmental writers. Like many scholars, including historian Stephen Fox, Schauffler discerns a religious impulse in American environmentalism, something deeply personal and spiritual yet independent of churches, established creeds, theology, or the supernatural. She views environmental problems arising from our values and beliefs, the “inner ecology” that affects our actions and thus our engagement with the “outer ecology” of the places we inhabit. To achieve a sustainable future, we must bring the two into harmony. For examples ofhow that can be done, she looks for patterns in the life writing of six notable authors: Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, N. Scott Momaday, Scott Russell Sanders, Alice Walker, and Terry Tempest Williams. On their writing, she finds something different from either the Pauline or the Augustinian models: conversion as an ongoing, cyclical pro­ cess. “The turn to Earth is rarely a straight trajectory from old life to new,” she writes. “More commonly it involves a cycling back, a re-turning [that] creates a spiral of growth” (7). Conversion becomes a life practice rather than a dramatic historical moment, and Schauffler finds six aspects ofenactment: remembrance (of formative encounters w :ith nature), reflection (contemplation of memories to elicit meaning), revelation (transformative, epiphanic experiences), reci­ procity (I-Thou encounters with other creatures), resistance (political action), and ritual (celebration or witnessing through performance and writing). Because Schauffler is less interested in the literary qualities of these works than in the experiences and choices they report, her book aligns itself more with ecopsychology than with ecocriticism. Her concept of ecological conver­ sion recalls Mitchell Thomashow’s “ecological identity” as both a quality ofmind and a reflective practice (Ecological Identity, 1995). In the manner of narrative criticism, she offers her own experiences in modest but resonant counterpoint to those of her writers, which adds a refreshing note of sincerity. This lucid and quietly illuminating book will appeal not only to scholars of literature, psychology, or religion but to anyone seeking guidance toward a deeper and more wholesome relation with nature. Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk across Victorian America. By Linda Lawrence Hunt. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 2003. 301 pages, $16.95. Reviewed by Brandon R. Schrand University of Idaho, Moscow “Private chronicles can corroborate public ones,” Elizabeth Hampsten once told us in Read This Only to Yourself (1982). That phrase, which reads more like a mantra now, is central to recovery projects that illuminate the lives and voices of those often forgotten or marginalized. In Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk across Victorian America, Linda Lawrence Hunt recovers the ...

Indias Abroad: The Diaspora Writes Back

The loss of an identity, or the representation of new identities as the globablised world has imposed, has become a fundamental part of current postcolonial studies. A sort of imperative ambiguity seems to be taking the lead of many cultural processes nowadays. In the case of the Diaspora subject under globalisation, this is most acutely felt as an anxiety to feel sincere gratefulness toward the host country in that this seems to be in direct relationship with a sense of unfaithfulness to the motherland. Diaspora criticism appears as stunningly wide in its goals and ranges and a single text collecting the contributions from different authors on such a wide area would probably miss its goal. This title, therefore, focuses its attention on the phenomenon by making the 'Indian case' the centre of analysis. The literary field has been chosen as the common and primary thread linking the various discourses, but it must be stressed that recourse to areas of different interests has been equally encouraged. As a result, the ambivalent relationships with the host land and with the motherland have become the common target, hence the title Indias abroad: The diaspora writes back. The danger of the diaspora writers' dalliance with the India theme is that sometimes the writers play into the hands of international readers who look for the exotic, a kind of tourist/museum culture in their yearning for Indian writings. Writings of the Indian diaspora continue to raise difficult questions, address issues of human need and significance and challenge readers to deeper levels of thought and feeling. The essays and fictional pieces in this text are evidence that the Indian diaspora has come of age. Salient issues around the concept of diaspora are addressed and include: the tension between the host country and motherland, the repertoire of ties that bind with India and the cultural and emotional struggles associated with movement/journey/migration/exile. Its ascendancy, leverage and intensity of engagement within the context of world literatures is unprecedented.

The Secret Life of the Dyslexic Child: How She Thinks, How He Feels, How They Can Succeed

The Secret Life of the Dyslexic Child: How She Thinks, How He Feels, How They Can Succeed

Restorative Justice and De-Professionalization

Restorative Justice and De-Professionalization John Braithwaite (bio) Restorative justice is a process where all the stakeholders affected by an injustice have an opportunity to discuss how they have been affected by the injustice and to decide what should be done to repair the harm. With crime, restorative justice is about the idea that because crime hurts, justice should heal. It follows that conversations with those who have been hurt and with those who have afflicted the harm must be central to the process. Empirically it happens to be the case that victims of crime are more concerned about emotional than material reparation (Strang, 2003). Lawyers are obviously not well placed to give an account of these emotional harms and how they might be healed. Hence, the practice of restorative justice has become a de-professionalizing project. Yet we will see that lawyers still have an important, though decentred, place in a restorative justice system. Restorative justice comes in many forms. The most common in Europe and North America is victim-offender mediation. But the movement, inspired by New Zealand conferring and Canadian circle innovations, has been toward widening the circle to include supporters of the offender, supporters of the victim and sometimes other kinds of stakeholders from the community such as representatives of the school community when a crime occurs at school, or a congregation where it occurs within a church. So the first stage under most conferencing models is to approach the victim and offender to ask them not only to participate in a meeting with each other, but also to ask them to nominate who they would most like to have support them during the conference. When lawyers prepare for a court case, they invite people who, as witnesses, can inflict maximum damage on the other side; restorative justice facilitators empower stakeholders, both victims and offenders, to invite the people who will provide maximum support to their own side. Conferrees discuss what happened and who was harmed by it. Sometimes the offender will be asked to summarize all the harms that have been mentioned by the participants. Then the conversation turns to what might be done to right the wrong. A plan with specific commitments on the part of the offender will be agreed upon and then this agreement will be signed by the victim, the offender and other stakeholders who have obligations under the agreement. Some programs have follow-up conferences to check implementation of the agreement and some even hold a celebration circle when implementation is completed. Citizens beyond the victim and the offender might also sign the agreement because they assume responsibility for some aspect of the agreement. For example, the victim of a violent crime might ask that the offender attend an anger management program. A supporter of the offender says that after a previous offense the judge ordered attendance at an anger management program. The offender attended a couple of times and then just stopped bothering to attend. An uncle chimes in and offers to pick the offender up every Tuesday evening at 7 pm to ensure that this time he attends. The offender agrees that attendance would be good for him, but the program is confronting and an emotional struggle for him. So he would like the weekly support of his uncle to make him attend. Thus the uncle signs the agreement as well. Note how restorative justice involves a shift from passive responsibility to which offenders are held by professionals for something they have done in the past to citizens taking active responsibility for making things right into the future. Active responsibility is a virtue of civic participation. As in the anger management example, restorative justice is about creating participatory spaces where active responsibility might be taken by offenders, but not only by offenders. Active responsibility is sometimes shared by victims. Occasionally burglars will explain to victims in a conference why their house is such an attractive target for practitioners of their craft. The burglar will assist the victim, perhaps with help from a police officer who is also in attendance, to design a target hardening strategy for which the victim voluntarily decides to take responsibility. The evaluation literature now...

The Politics of Gentrification

The author examines the local dialectics of power associated with gentrification in the community of West Town in Chicago, discussing the process, contentions resulting from opposite interests, strategies of the major players involved, and the painful and emotional struggles that have resulted from the advance of gentrification. Today, West Town is bitterly split between contending agents of gentrification and resistance. Although the process has not been completed, expectations have placed the community in a difficult position as institutions, businesses, and households feel its impact and wonder about the future. In particular, the role of class, race, and ethnicity in the process of gentrification is examined.

Service Responses to Women with Mental Health Needs

There are individual mental health professionals who respond to women with mental health needs with warmth and intelligence; staff whose practice is antioppressive and fully cognisant of the impacts of poverty, domestic violence and racism upon their patients’ lives; and there are doctors, nurses and therapists who work in solidarity with the women in their care and who fully appreciate their practical and emotional struggles. However, only a handful of mental health services could be described in such terms. Most services fail to provide the support and safety women with mental health needs require and many routinely demean women, dismiss their distress and replicate the dynamics of abuse and exclusion that have characterised their previous lives. This article suggests we have reached a turning point in Britain in relation to mental health service provision for women. Not only is there considerable evidence of an association between women’s social experience and their mental health, but this association is also acknowledged by the majority of mental health workers. Many staff also recognise that the professional training they received provided them with a wholly inadequate preparation for engaging helpfully with their patients. As individuals some have abandoned the medical paradigm altogether and no longer ask ‘What is wrong with this woman?’ but rather ‘What has happened to this woman?’ In this paper we draw upon evidence from a range of sources to explore these issues, including some of the work we have ourselves carried out in the last two years. Particularly relevant in this context is information gathered as part of a national programme to develop and pilot training for staff in secure services who work with women with mental health needs (Scott & ParryCrooke, 2001). As part of the training needs assessment phase of this programme, data was collected by questionnaire from 63 multi-disciplinary staff and through interviews with 60 staff in six secure services. We also draw upon findings from a recent survey (Williams et al, 2001a) of attitudes to mental health services for women, which was carried out to inform the Mental Health Strategy for Women currently being developed by the Department of Health.

Waiting (review)

"What were you doing while the poor were suffering, their humanity and their lives consumed by flame?" This question, first posed by Guatemalan poet Otto Rene Castillo and later offered to Kate Banner, an American midwife working in Nicaragua, lies at the heart of Patricia Henley's debut novel, which was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award. How is it possible to go about one's life—to prepare a meal, bathe, sleep, fall in love—once you've become aware that horrific acts of violence and injustice are taking place all the while? Ifs a question Kate faces the night she helps a woman give birth in the midst of a hurricane, only to watch that woman die the next day, leaving her child without a mother. Tired of good works that seem to reap little reward, Kate leaves Nicaragua and her longtime boyfriend for a few weeks' vacation in Antigua. "Ifs a question, once you ask it, you have to ask it every day," says Father Dixie Ryan, Kate's housemate in a home that's become a meeting place for world-weary souls. Dixie's arrival opens the novel, but his significance to the narrative isn't made clear for some time; this is a risky narrative strategy that works in retrospect but initially creates unnecessary confusion about the novel's focus. Nevertheless , Henley draws her characters with such precision that when Dixie returns to the foreground, we remember how he arrived on the scene: questioning his vocation, Dixie has come to Antigua to examine his heart. When Kate and Dixie meet, however, it's clear they've been brought together for a purpose. Though the narrative is uneven, Henley's story is compelling. There are moments when Henley might have trodden more lightly on her characters' psychological anguish and others when she omits crucial information. Still, Kate and Dixie are the kind of characters one seldom sees in contemporary novels—they're deeply flawed but, in that sense, fully human. They make bad choices, deal with the consequences and move on. And Henley's brand of altruism isn't without its selfish aspect. In Kate's concern for Marta, an abandoned child who appears in her home, we see Kate's need to provide comfort to others and the curative effect on her psyche as well as the positive results Kate's attentions prompt in Maria's development. Kate's relationship with Dixie grows along these same lines. As the two of them move toward a physical relationship that will decide the question of Dixie's future, we see both characters achieve a more even balance between the need to save others and the desire to have a life of one's own. In the end, we find ourselves hoping for a happy ending that would be impossible in the brutal world of Henley's novel. More than a love story, Hummingbird House is an examination of the human spirit—what it endures and what it survives. (PJ) Waiting by Ha Jin Pantheon, 1999, 308 pp., $24 Ha Jin's National Book Awardwinning second novel, Waiting, is worthy of all the accolades it's received. Based on a true story, this carefully paced tale of flawed but real The Missouri Review · 183 characters chronicles two decades of unrequited love. The story is set amid China's cultural revolution, but Jin is less interested in depicting an oppressive state than he is in using the politics and authoritarianism of post-Mao China to mirror his characters ' emotional struggles. Lin Kong is an army doctor who, out of familial obligation, married Shuyu, a simple peasant woman. After the couple has a daughter, the result of their only sexual encounter, Lin goes to Muji City, where he is a doctor in the Chinese army for the next eighteen years. His only link to his country home is through the financial support he dutifully provides . When he visits his family in Wujia town for two weeks each year, he and Shuyu keep separate rooms as though they were siblings. The purpose of these annual furloughs is always the same: to divorce Shuyu. But each year the provincial authorities...

Being married, doing gender: a critical analysis of gender relationships in marriage

In one of the first psychological studies of women in heterosexual relationships, Caroline Dryden examines the social context of their experiences and emotional struggles. Unlike the developmental literature in which women are studied only as mothers, or the clinical literature which has little theoretical basis, Being Married, Doing Gender places case study material in the context of the power balance between women and men. Caroline Dryden finds that there are contradictions between stereotypical gender roles and the maintenance of an equal partnership that can cause problems for both women and men. Being Married, Doing Gender will be valuable to students studying psychology or gender and women's studies and to marriage guidance counsellors and psychotherapists.