Intrapsychic Humanism Research Articles

Developing Compassionate Communities Through the Power of Caregiving Relationships

To bring about compassionate communities, helping professionals need robust understandings of human nature and how humans acquire stable self-regulation and self-worth. Intrapsychic humanism's discoveries about human development, the nature of psychopathology, and an effective therapeutic process make it possible to offer effective treatments and to effectively treat people heretofore mislabeled ‘untreatable.’ These discoveries show how caregiving relationships (between caregivers and children and between clients and helpers) enable individuals to develop their innate motive for stable self-regulation of their motives and their well-being, so they can in turn be partners in bringing about compassionate, healing communities.

Therapeutic management of violence in residential care for severely mentally ill clients: An application of intrapsychic humanism*

The innovative psychology, intrapsychic humanism, is applied to formulate guidelines for effectively managing violent symptoms of severely mentally ill clients in residential settings, with the aims of: 1) helping staff reduce client violence; and 2) helping clients regulate their violent behavior. Using intrapsychic humanism, staff can understand, anticipate, and respond therapeutically to client violence. Triggers of violence, such as aversive reactions to pleasure and destructive reactions to real losses are described. Residential program structures that strengthen clients’ constructive motives and staff's caregiving motives are outlined.

Innovative Therapeutic Care for Homeless, Mentally Ill Clients: Intrapsychic Humanism in a Residential Setting

Residential care is increasingly recognized as an invaluable therapeutic resource for homeless, severely mentally ill, and substance-abusing clients. However, those managers and staff seeking to provide residential care can be perplexed by the communications of these clients and would benefit from a conceptual framework for planning psychosocial interventions to address these clients' diverse problems. This paper describes how a comprehensive psychology-intrapsychic humanism-can be used as a flexible, consistent guide for serving this population in residential care. Based on a central principle that staff-client relationships can be a path to healing, intrapsychic humanism's other precepts include treatment planning that recognizes clients' conflicting motives and strengthens their constructive motives, understanding clients' self-destructive responses to positive experiences, and helping clients govern their self-destructive behavior while enhancing their self-respect.

Using the Teacher-Student Relationship to Help Children Diagnosed as Hyperactive: An Application of Intrapsychic Humanism

An original new psychology, intrapsychic humanism, offers a synthesis of research findings about children labeled hyperactive and principles for understanding and helping hyperactive children in classroom settings. Clinical and educational experience has shown that the intrapsychic humanism approach is an effective alternative to stimulant drugs and behaviorism—without negative side effects, it strengthens children's autonomous capacity to form constructive relationships and to enjoy learning. Based on recognizing the different motives children experience in learning, the intrapsychic humanism approach helps teachers regulate children's unwanted behaviors in a compassionate way, while also improving the children's learning ability. The data draw from the author's consultation with teachers, psychotherapy with children, and counseling with parents.

The Privilege of Being a Therapist: A Fresh Perspective from Intrapsychic Humanism on Caregiving Intimacy and the Development of the Professional Self

The internal world of the clinical social worker looks very different when seen from the perspective of intrapsychic humanism, a comprehensive psychodynamic psychology (Pieper & Pieper, 1990). Adopting this view of development and treatment can remedy one of the most perplexing and pressing dilemmas facing even the most conscientious and dedicated mental health professional – the vulnerability to what Hiratsuku termed “compassion fatigue” (1991) — to feeling stuck with an unrewarding daily clinical experience. The following discussion offers social workers three guidelines that will transform their clinical experience and make it exciting and fulfilling: how to recognize clients' aversive reactions to pleasure; how to hear both the process and content meanings of a client's communications; and how to distinguish between the social worker's personal and caregiving motives. These principles will help all social workers, including those doing brief treatment, long-term treatment, school counseling, and traditional casework.

An Empowering Approach to Crisis Intervention and Brief Treatment for Preschool Children

This paper presents an approach to crisis intervention and brief treatment for young children based on the new psychology, intrapsychic humanism. After presenting central theoretical principles, these principles are applied and treatment guidelines demonstrated in the treatment process of a three-year-old child named Paul. The research design for the case study is naturalistic uses qualitative methods of data analysis, and draws from the heuristic paradigm (a postpositivist metatheory of social and behavioral research).

Correlates of accuracy in the assessment of psychiatric inpatients' risk of violence

The authors evaluated characteristics of patients whom clinicians accurately assessed as being at high or low risk for violence and patients for whom clinicians overestimated or underestimated the risk. At admission, physicians estimated the probability that each of 226 psychiatric inpatients would physically attack someone during the first week of hospitalization. Nurses rated assaultive behavior in the hospital with the Overt Aggression Scale. Acute symptoms were rated with the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale. For the group as a whole, assessed levels of risk were substantially related to later physical aggression (sensitivity = 67%, specificity = 69%). Multinomial logit analysis showed that patients with psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia, organic psychotic conditions, and mania were more likely to be accurately assessed by clinicians as being at high risk (true positives) than to be true negatives or false positives. A recent history of violence was associated with higher estimated risk but did not distinguish true positives from false positives. An admission mental status characterized by low levels of hostility, uncooperativeness, and suspiciousness and high levels of depression, guilt, and anxiety differentiated true negative patients from others, but symptom profiles did not differ among true positives, false positives, and false negatives. Clinical judgments emphasizing gender and race/ethnicity were associated with predictive errors: nonwhite and male patients tended to be false positives. While clinicians can accurately classify the potential for violence in the majority of patients at admission, systematic errors characterize inaccurate assessments of the risk. Awareness of these patterns may help improve assessment of the risk of violence in clinical practice.

Response to Jerome Wakefield's "Psychoanalytic Fallacies: Reflections on Martha Heineman Pieper and William Joseph Pieper's "Intrapsychic Humanism""

Although in his article Psychoanalytic Fallacies: Reflections on Martha Heineman Pieper and William Joseph Pieper's Intrapsychic Humanism (Social Service Review 67 [March 1993]: 127-55) Jerome Wakefield criticizes the authors of intrapsychic humanism for producing what he calls a one-motive theory of human development and psychopathology, he has produced a one-theory critique that, because it does not recognize or address the uniqueness of intrapsychic humanism's central tenets, does not apply to intrapsychic humanism. Postpositivist researchers recognize that the articulation of ontological and epistemological assumptions is the hallmark of a scientific explanation and is one way to distinguish scientific theories from magical thinking.' Wakefield claims that intrapsychic humanism lacks evidence, but, in fact, he ignores one of the most important criteria for a sound scientific explanation from within a postpositivist paradigm, which is addressed in intrapsychic humanism: the validity and consistency of the ontological and epistemological assumptions. Furthermore, according to the ontic model of scientific explanation advanced by the well-respected postpositivist philosopher of science Wesley Salmon, an explanation has scientific merit: 1) when we obtain knowledge of the hidden mechanisms, causal or other, that produce the phenomena we seek to explain, 2) when our knowledge of the world is so organized that we can comprehend what we know under a smaller number of assumptions than previously, and 3) when we supply missing bits of descriptive knowledge that answer why-questions and remove us from particular sorts of intellectual predicaments.2 Intrapsychic humanism manifestly meets Salmon's criteria for scientific explanations. In summary, it offers a new explanation for the cause of our subjective experience of personal existence; it is a unified and coherent explanation for many aspects of human development, psychopathology, and the therapeutic process that have been unexplained previously; and it is the first psychology and philosophy of mind that offers a nontheological solution for the significant intellectual predicament of the solipsism of interpersonal consciousness, which has remained unsolved since Descartes posed it so clearly over 300 years ago.3 A theory that advances a new understanding of human consciousness of necessity requires new terms to explain those experiences; any genuinely new scientific theory always requires that language be given new meanings in order to refer to the new discoveries. Examples include Einstein's principle of simultaneity and the terms quarks and string that have accompanied new theories in physics.4 Wakefield dismisses as jargon the terminology that is necessary to refer to the new discoveries about human development,

Response to Jerome Wakefield's "Psychoanalytic Fallacies: Reflections on Martha Heineman Pieper and William Joseph Pieper's "Intrapsychic Humanism""

Previous articleNext article No AccessDebates with AuthorResponse to Jerome Wakefield's "Psychoanalytic Fallacies: Reflections on Martha Heineman Pieper and William Joseph Pieper's "Intrapsychic Humanism""Walter MillerWalter Miller Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Social Service Review Volume 67, Number 4Dec., 1993 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/604020 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1994 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Response to "Psychoanalytic Fallacies: Reflections on Martha Heineman Pieper and William Joseph Pieper's "Intrapsychic Humanism""

Previous articleNext article No AccessDebates with AuthorResponse to "Psychoanalytic Fallacies: Reflections on Martha Heineman Pieper and William Joseph Pieper's "Intrapsychic Humanism""Martha Heineman Pieper and William Joseph PieperMartha Heineman Pieper Search for more articles by this author and William Joseph Pieper Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Social Service Review Volume 67, Number 4Dec., 1993 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/604016 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1994 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Response to Jerome Wakefield's "Psychoanalytic Fallacies: Reflections on Martha Heineman Pieper and William Joseph Pieper's "Intrapsychic Humanism""

Behavior, in Metatheory in ed. D. W. Fiske and R. A. Shweder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 293-314. 6. A. Billingsley, Black Families and White Science, Journal of Issues 26 (1970): 127-42; M. Bricker-Jenkins and N. R. Hooyman, eds., Not for Women Only: Work Practice for a Future (Silver Spring, Md.: National Association of Workers, 1986); R. Hill, Social Work Research on Minorities: Impediments and Opportunities, in Future of Work Research, ed. D. Fanshel (New York: National Association of Workers, 1980, pp. 188-98; Marcia Westkott, Feminist Criticism of the Sciences, Harvard Educational Review 49 (1979): 422-30. 7. Martha Heineman Pieper and William Joseph Pieper, Treating Violent 'Untreatable' Adolescents: Applications of Intrapsychic Humanism in a State-funded Demonstration Project, presented at the Alumni Centennial Invitational Lecture Series, School of Service Administration, University of Chicago, May 1992. 8. Katherine Tyson, The Understanding and Treatment of Childhood Hyperactivity: Old Problems and New Approaches, Smith College Studies of Work 61 (1991): 133-66, Heuristic Guidelines for Naturalistic Qualitative Evaluation of Child Treatment, in Qualitative Research in Welfare, ed. Edmund Sherman and William J. Reid (New York: Columbia University Press, February 1994), in press. 9. Martha Heineman Pieper and William Joseph Pieper, Not Tough, It's Tender Love, in both Child Welfare 71 (1992): 369-77 and Chicago Medicine 94 (April 7, 1991): 10-16. 10. Martha Heineman Pieper and William Joseph Pieper, Intrapsychic Humanism: An Introduction to a Comprehensive Psychology and Philosophy of Mind (Chicago: Falcon II Press, 1990), p. 306. 11. Ibid., p. 323.

Philosophy of Science and the Evaluation of Clinical Theory: A Reply to the Piepers

The Piepers' response to my essay review (Psychoanalytic Fallacies, Social Service Review 67 [March 1993]: 127-55) of Intrapsychic Humanism' confirms my conclusion that the Piepers are insufficiently concerned about the truth of their claims. Rather than responding to my criticisms by attempting to improve their theory or by explaining why my arguments are unsound, they use every rhetorical trick in the book to divert the discussion away from substance to issues about labels like empirical, psychoanalysis, and blame. My review contained dozens of specific arguments regarding the Piepers' theories of motivation, development, psychopathology, and psychotherapy. For example, I offered detailed arguments that their theory of therapy is incoherent, that their developmental hypotheses are ad hoc, that they expand the concept of mental disorder in a way that is conceptually invalid, that their one-motive theory of human striving is evolutionarily implausible, that their claim that inadequate caregiving causes all psychopathology is unsupported, that their notion that children fixate for life on their parents' caregiving style in the way that goslings imprint on mother geese is overly simplistic, and that the data they cite in support of their theory that children delusionally feel loved can be better explained by a much simpler theory. The Piepers do not address even one of my arguments. Instead, they cite various postpositivist developments in the philosophy of science to justify their dismissal of my conclusions. But, philosophy is not alchemy; the mere incantation of philosophical terms and criteria cannot transform theoretical lead into theoretical gold by creating coherence and evidential support where they do not already exist. In this reply, I dissect the Piepers' evasive rhetorical strategies, and I also try to advance the discussion by clarifying issues in the background of the interchange. In particular, although it greatly lengthens my reply, I attempt to correct the philosophical misconceptions, especially those concerning the implications of the failure of positivism, that lie behind the Piepers' dismissal of my arguments because such misconceptions could easily find their way into the broader debate over social work research methodology. The that never was. -First, let's put to rest the nonsense that I have a long-standing feud with Heineman Pieper. There is no such feud, except as a rhetorical device cooked up to divert attention from the substance of my review. I met Heineman Pieper exactly once, in about 1986, when I was invited to respond to her presentation in a session of the doctoral seminar

Psychoanalytic Fallacies: Reflections on Martha Heineman Pieper and William Joseph Pieper's Intrapsychic Humanism

In Intrapsychic Humanism, the Piepers offer provocative theories of love, self-esteem, child development, psychopathology, and therapy. The Piepers' theories are critically examined in this article and used to illustrate fallacies common in the psychoanalytic literature. The identified fallacies include, among others, adopting a simplistic "onemotive" theory of human striving, constructing ad hoc developmental hypotheses to support the one-motive theory, interpreting adult transactions in reductionistic infantile terms, applying an inflated concept of mental disorder that classifies virtually everyone as disordered, blaming all psychopathology on early childhood experiences and inadequate parents, reifying opposing desires into warring inner "selves," labeling people who experience pain as "masochistic," confusing biological function with psychological motivation, simply redescribing clinical case material in a new jargon to "confirm" one's theory, and making unsupported claims of therapeutic efficacy. Finally, despite Heineman Pieper's published arguments that there are alternatives to positivist research methodologies, the Piepers' book fails to provide a coherent model of nonpositivist inquiry.

The understanding and treatment of childhood hyperactivity: Old problems and new approaches

Abstract Current research findings as well as both public protests and lawsuits by parent groups demonstrate the increasing dissatisfaction with prevailing approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of the syndrome termed “childhood hyperactivity.” First, this study summarizes a comprehensive review of research about the syndrome, and elaborates the research and practice issues that give rise to the contemporary controversy. Then, a promising, comprehensive new theory of child development, psychopathology, and treatment — intrapsychic humanism — is applied to the psychosocial treatment of children labelled hyperactive and their families in mental health, educational, and child welfare settings.

The criminality of the mentally ill: a dangerous misconception.

A longstanding controversy is the relative dangerousness and criminality of the mentally ill. The author presents observational data from 1,072 police-citizen encounters in an urban area. The data show that persons exhibiting signs of serious mental disorder were not suspected of serious crimes at a rate disproportionate to their numbers in the population. The patterns of crime for mentally disordered persons and for non-mentally-disordered persons were substantially similar. These data help dispel the myth that the mentally ill constitute a dangerous group prone to violent crime.