Intrapsychic Process Research Articles

From Cultural Scripting to Autonomy: Influences on Lesbian Identity

This article links postmodern deconstruction of gender categories to the cultural and intrapsychic processes involved in gender script development. Hargaden and Sills's (2001) theory of the development of self is used to discuss the intrapsychic process of lesbian identity development. Poststructuralist theorist Theresa de Lauretis (1994) is discussed in relation to the claiming of body-ego that the lesbian may be expressing. Identity issues experienced by lesbians are discussed along with possible transference issues that may arise when the therapist is perceived as lesbian. Finally, therapists are invited to review their approach to gender and sexual identity development and presentation.

Stimmungen des Kindes und die Chronizität depressiver Symptome: Der einzigartige schöpferische Prozess des Zusammenseins führt zu Wohlbefinden oder in die Krankheit

The ontogenesis of moods and the process that establishes them is addressed. Moods arise out of normal developmental processes at both a macro- and micro-developmental level. Moods are part of normal development as well as a component of pathological processes and they are a ubiquitous presence that gives meaning to experience in infant and adult during daily life and therapy. In this first part of a two-part paper I will address the normal development of moods; in the second part I will to address issues related to psychopathology and therapy, especially depression and the intergenerational transfer of mood. I argue that moods are dyadic phenomena--something that develops out of the chronic co-creative interactions of two individuals--rather than solely being an intrapsychic process. I will also argue, especially when one considers the development of moods in infants, that moods make sense of the world as components of states of consciousness that give unique meaning to the individual's engagement with the world and further that moods function to bring the past into the present.

Cause and Country: The Politics of Ambivalence and the American Vietnam War Resistance in Canada

Neil Smelser's (1998) Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association is a critique of rational choice theory that seeks to shift the focus from reason and opportunity to ambivalence, for example, in studies of social change processes involving migration and social movements. Smelser emphasizes that ambivalence is an intrapsychic process that operates beyond reason and opportunity. I critique and reconceive Smelser's ideas about ambivalence in considering the largest political exodus from the United States since the American Revolution, the migration of more than 50,000 young Americans to Canada during the Vietnam War. The concepts of reconstructed identity and residual ties, and the reduction and persistence of ambivalence they respectively imply, help to mediate responses to political opportunity and opposition encountered by American Vietnam War resisters in Canada. These concepts can be used to rearticulate the meaning of ambivalence in ways that are consistent with Stryker's structured symbolic interactionist theory of identity and role choice. Census and interview data confirm the reconceived mediating role of ambivalence: Although most of the young Americans who came to Canada stayed, and most of those who stayed reconstructed their identities as unambivalent Canadians, those who came during the imposition of the Canadian War Measures Act were most likely to return to the United States, or if they settled in Canada, to remain less reconstructed in identity and more residually tied to the United States. The latter more ambivalent war resisters who settled in Canada are still today less likely to participate politically by voting in Canadian federal elections.

A Social Constructivism Model of Ethical Decision Making in Counseling

Social constructivism is defined as an intellectual movement in the mental health field that directs a social consensual interpretation of reality. A social constructivism approach redefines the ethical decision‐making process as an interactive rather than an individual or intrapsychic process. The process involves negotiating, consensualizing, and, when necessary, arbitrating. Counselors are guided by social and cultural factors in defining what is acceptable ethical practice.

(627) Treating the Addicted Chronic Pain Patient: An Alternative Approach to Pain Management

Authors: Daniel Skenderian, Mark Carter, Joseph Galleta, Peter Yuen, Jim Rhoads, Steve Collier; Pacifica Medical Rehabilitation Associates A subset of patients within the chronic pain population who go unnoticed are those who also have underlying addictive disorders. The literature in chronic pain management suggests that these patients comprise anywhere from 3% to 18% of the chronic pain population and place heavy demands on the health care system. Compared to most pain patients, the addicted pain patient has multiple pharmacies and doctors, more frequent emergency room and office visits per month, coexisting chemical dependency, other alcohol or street drugs, and a chaotic life-style. The Addiction-Pain Syndrome is characterized by 7 signs that are chronic and repetitive: 1) repetitive pattern of failed treatments and hospitalizations, 2) abnormally high tolerance for pain medications with minimal or no relief, 3) genetic link to addiction with premorbid addictive disorders, 4) history of sexual, physical, or emotional abuse, 5) intrapsychic process of incorporation, internalization, and emotional isolation, 6) somatic preoccupation and obsession with chemical relief leading to demanding behavior and belligerence with care givers, and 7) secondary gains in the family system reinforcing the patient role. A program is described to treat pain patient's addiction to prescription medications. Program goals include the following: 1) alleviate medication addiction and dependency, 2) reduce utilization of medical services, 3) reduce sensory, cognitive, and affective pain, 4) develop independence, wellness, and spiritual identity. Phases of medical detoxification, stabilization, and rehabilitation on both inpatient and outpatient bases are illustrated along with treatment team composition. Alternative treatments to analgesics, including non-narcotic pain medications, physical therapy, behavior modification, acupuncture/acupressure, group therapy, biofeedback, and 12-step involvement are described as well. Two case studies will illustrate patient type, treatment strategies, and barriers to treatment. Program evaluation data will show positive outcomes on a Medicare sample.

The Modern Freudians: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Technique

The Modern Freudians: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Technique

Forgiveness as an intrapsychic process.

Forgiveness as an intrapsychic process.

Profile of a Latency Woman: Development for Biographers

Profile of A Latency Woman: Development for Biographers Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Introduction: Methodological Lacks Since Studies in Hysteria, psychoanalytic case studies and biographies have grown up together. They have been related like step-siblings, from the same father. And they both show his parenting influence, but not in the same way. Case writing has grown with psychoanalysis, becoming more and more sophisticated while incorporating—as Freud’s own practice forecast—complex understandings of clinical perspectives, complex theoretical debates, and attention to the historical and social contexts of cases, the environments of diseases. But biography writing has never had a rich tradition of psychoanalytic reflection and methodological sophistication. Its practice still chiefly depends on “content analysis” as the Studies in Hysteria did; intricacy comparable to that of the Wolf Man case has largely eluded it. On the model of Freud’s case writing practice, which he applied to subjects like Leonardo to produce “pathography,” his early followers wrote a rich library of case-like biography writing, an achievement that compelled the whole art of biography in the twentieth century toward psychoanalysis, if not directly or doctrinairely, then indirectly, as a matter of cultural osmosis or absorption of the psychoanalytic “climate of opinion.’” On the other hand, the genre influence did not flow so strongly in the other direction, and psychoanalysis itself has only recently become biographical—in two senses. First and most obviously, in the late 1950s the history of psychoanalysis began to be written as a biographical history, a history of clinicians and the depth psychological sources of their [End Page 235] theories and practices. Launched officially and monumentally by Ernest Jones, this history was a history of Freud biographies, but now it is a burgeoning biographical archive of books, oral histories, and memoirs of Freudians, former Freudians, and anti-Freudians. Second, within psychoanalysis, clinicians have stepped into their case studies: there they are, telling what they said and did, exploring their countertransferences, setting themselves in the history of psychoanalysis, becoming subjects for biography as they explore their countertransferences. Over the decades of this uneven joint development of psychoanalysis and biography, it seems to me that three methodological roads have appeared and been considered, if not taken. The first road is the most widely acknowledged and the most consistently taken. It is understood that different people looking at or imagining the same subject will see different beginnings of a life narrative and attribute different significances to childhood events and experiences. Appropriators of Freud’s theories line up along lines of faction within the fold: some, for example, looking at an infant subject see the primary narcissistic baby Freud saw, and some see a baby programmed for relatedness; some think that what can be observed can be read as the manifest content of intrapsychic process, some think that such readings are the readers’ fantasies. And everyone is in a quandary because it is obvious that the materials with which a childhood—some version of a childhood—could be thoroughly or deeply reconstructed are never available to biographers. Biographers always deal with little fragments, little bases of inference and are tempted to “content analysis” because they do not have a psychoanalytic situation, a transferential process, to work in and with. Such divisions of opinion and problems of material have had an impact on psychoanalytic biography writing, and particularly on biographical—or autobiographical—writing about psychoanalysts. But there is not yet a literature that approaches multidirectionally the methodological and technical issues raised by complex interplays of subject, biographer, biographer’s biography, theory, and theoretician’s biography over the question of how to reconstruct and determine the significance of childhood. The second methodological road can be pointed by noting that all modern biographers work with a developmental [End Page 236] line in mind that extends over the course of a life. Each has ideas about stages or phases, key junctures or forks, processes of identity formation, anxieties of influence, meanings of identifications, and, generally, developmental norms and deviations. For most, these ideas are sketchy and full of blanks because they have been acquired piecemeal from a culture in which developmental theory in some form is as taken for granted and as unexamined as evolutionary...

Perceptions of Family Differentiation, Individuation, and Self-Esteem among Korean Adolescents

The relationships between family differentiation and adolescent individuation and between adolescent individuation and self-esteem were tested with 170 adolescents in Korea. To measure family differentiation, three dyadic interaction patterns were examined (i.e., parents' marital, fatheradolescent, and mother-adolescent). Results revealed significant relationships between adolescent individuation and differentiation in adolescent and same-sex parent pairs. For male adolescents, father-adolescent differentiation was the strongest predictor of individuation, and for female adolescents, mother-adolescent differentiation was most strongly related to individuation. Also, for both male and female adolescents, individuation was negatively associated with selfesteem, a finding that is not consistent with research in the U.S. Key Words: adolescents, differentiation, gender, individuation, Korea, self-esteem. SHELLEY M. MACDERMID Purdue University* Adolescence is a period when individuals are greatly concerned about self. Adolescents struggle to individuate themselves from their families of origin and expand their network of intimate relationships with the outside world. From the point of view of family development, the task of the family during adolescence is to provide an environment that facilitates the individuation process of the adolescent, which, in turn, is positively related to individual psychological adjustment. Individuation has been defined as the intrapsychic process by which one comes to see oneself as separate and distinct within one's relational context (Anderson & Sabatelli, 1990). It has most often been explored in the context of family systems theories and theories of individual personality development (Bray & Harvey, 1987). Research based on family systems theories has contended that adolescent individuation is influenced primarily by family patterns of interaction, particularly between parents and children. The influence of parents' behaviors on adolescents, however, has been given disproportionate emphasis (Bartle, Anderson, & Sabatelli, 1989; Demo, Small, & Savin-Willams, 1987; Gecas & Seff, 1991; Robertson & Simons, 1989), relative to the influence of adolescents on parents. The influence of other family relationships (e.g., the impact of the marital relationship on parent-adolescent relationships) also has been underemphasized (Anderson & Sabatelli, 1992). Personality developmentalists, meanwhile, have argued that adolescent individuation is closely related to aspects of psychological wellbeing such as self-esteem, depression, and anxiety. For example, Flemming and Anderson (1986) found that adolescents' perceptions of fusion with their parents were related to lower selfesteem and mastery and poorer health and college adjustment. They argued that much of human dysfunction occurs due to lack of individuation from and unresolved emotional attachment to the family of origin. Most studies done in the United States have supported this view. A significant positive relationship between parent-adolescent separation and adolescent psychosocial wellbeing has been found in several studies (Hoffman, 1983; Moore, 1987; Rice, Cole, & Lapsley, 1990). Some scholars question, however, the notion that individuation and emotional autonomy have uniformly positive implications for adjustment. They point out that emotional autonomy may be positively related to adjustment only in less supportive family environments (Fuhrman & Holmbeck, 1995). In this study, we examine the relationships among individuation, self-esteem, and motheradolescent, father-adolescent, and mother-father differentiation. We operationalize differentiation bi-directionally-both in terms of adolescents' perceptions of their behavior toward their parents and their parents' behavior toward them. Finally, we do this using a sample of male and female adolescents from Korea, where the cultural emphasis on collectivism is stronger than it is in the dominant culture in the U. …

Multi-Dimensional Family Treatment of Agoraphobia

The literature on individual and family treatment of agoraphobia is briefly reviewed, whereupon a multidimensional treatment model is presented which integrates interactional and individual interventions. The treatments of five agoraphobics are described and the interventions are analyzed with respect to the following dimensions: (a) Target of treatment (intrapschic versus interactional); (b) Functionality (whether the agoraphobic symptoms protect others in the family and/or have a function in maintaining the equilibrium in the family; (c) Time (interventions focused at traumaic experiences in the past versus interventions aimed at changing the present situation); and (d) Physiological versus psychological. In each case, interventions aimed at the intrapsychic process seemed to be necessary, but in most of the cases this was found to be insufficient to induce clinically relevant improvement. Special attention is given to the timing of interventions. A research design is proposed to test the effectiveness of the suggested multidimensional treatment model for agoraphobia in comparison to the effectiveness of the traditional exposure programs.

An object relations view of creative process and group process

This article describes a unique writing group experience. Members of the writing group undergo an intensive object relations working-through process. They experience the individual dynamics of their internal editors. They work on conflicts over shame,guilt,and envy that reinforce hostile reactions of the internal editor. In this way,they resolve blocks to the creative process,produce writing,get feedback, give expression to the internal voice,and find the format or formats most appropriate for their unique modes of self-expression. They also help each other mourn the internal parents who constitute the internal editor composite. The mutual grieving process enlarges the inner space for creative self-expression. In sum,this article illustrates the interaction of group process with object relations intrapsychic process.

Object Relations and the Development of Values

Values acquisition as a part of the therapeutic interaction that occurs between client and therapist is a clear and focused representation of what naturally occurs between people who influence one another. As the relationship develops in therapy, and the client begins to trust the therapist, he or she also becomes inclined to emulate that therapist in greater or lesser degrees. From an object relations point of view, a developmental process unfolds between these two people, which reflects the means by which a person realizes his or her value system. The discussion begins with the etiology of identification, because according to this viewpoint, the process described above begins, and is supported by, the dynamics of identification. Referring specifically to the ideas of Heinz Kohut, the authors describe the mechanisms of idealization as the intrapsychic process most basic to the final formation of values.

A Core Process in Psychoanalytic Treatment

A core mechanism of the psychoanalytic process is described. This involves the effects of treatment on an ongoing "unconscious intrapsychic process," which has specific points of vulnerability to pathology. The concept of an intrapsychic process described by the author in previous publications is an expanded formulation of the idea of thought as trial action and of the signal theory of anxiety. The psychoanalytic method alters the functioning of the ego astride this unconscious process, strengthening its control over anxiety, defense, trauma, and symptom formation. This is mutative in the psychoanalytic method.

"Ex-Gays": Religiously mediated change in homosexuals.

The authors evaluated 11 white men who claimed to have changed sexual orientation from exclusive homosexuality to exclusive heterosexuality through participation in a pentecostal church fellowship. Religious ideology and a religious community offered the subjects "folk therapy" experience that was paramount in producing their change. On the average their self-identification as homosexual occurred at age 11, their change to heterosexual identification occurred at age 23, and their period of heterosexual identification at the time of this study was 4 years. The authors report 8 men became emotionally detached from homosexual identity in both behavior and intrapsychic process; 3 men were functionally heterosexual with some evidence of neurotic conflict. On the Kinsey 7-point sexual orientation scale all subjects manifested major before-after changes. Corollary evidence suggests that the phenomenon of substantiated changed in sexual orientation without explicit treatment and/or long-term psychotherapy may be more more common than previously thought.

Individual psychotherapy of schizophrenia.

The work of the author and others in the field of psychotherapy of schizophrenia is said to have demonstrated that understanding the patient requires a special therapeutic relationship which is different from that in the psychoanalysis of neurosis because it implies an intrapsychic process that can be described as follows: Parts of the ill personality are introjected by the psychotherapist and parts of his personality are adopted by the patient, as shown by the fact that the dreams and the unconscious fantasies and striving of the therapist reflect the anxieties of the patient, and the dreams of the latter are structured by the inner movements of the former, as if there were a partially shared identity between them both. This phenomenon is called "identification." The psychotherapy of schizophrenia reveals realms of existence in which understanding is not only a function of personality, but also a transformation of personality by the act of being near the patient.

The Etiology of the Neuroses.

The era in psychiatry which has been referred to by some as "The Second Psychiatric Revolution" or alternatively, as "The Psychoanalytic Revolution" reached its height in the late 1940's and early 1950's. Although many of the neofreudians—Horney, Sullivan, Fromm, Fromm-Reichmann, etc—had already made their important contributions to psychiatric learning, the major emphasis in the psychiatric thought at the time was based overwhelmingly on Freudian theory and the importance of intrapsychic process. In the ensuing years, as more and more evidence of the importance of interpersonal, familial, social, economic, learning, and communication factors in the determination of mental health and illness was uncovered, and neurophysiological, biochemical, and anatomical research progressed apace, a progressively greater need for integration and reconciliation of disparate and frequently apparently oppositional concepts and theories became clear. Obviously, the symposium conducted by the Society of Medical Psychoanalysts in New York, March

Environmental factors in creative function. A study of gifted children.

We are reporting here a psychiatric and psychological study of gifted children, which attempts to elicit significant and relevant factors in family life contributing to functional creativity. Application of the principles of dynamic psychiatry to the area of creative functioning has, in the past, been limited in scope. Kubie's recent book¹⁰on the subject, for instance, is still basically addressed to the question that has been embarrassing psychiatrists for half a century: Does analysis, in modifying the conflict areas of the personality, quell inner tensions that are necessary to the creative act? Some interest has been expressed in the nature of creativity as an intrapsychic process, but there has been little agreement and no clear formulation.^1,2,7 One implicit assumption that has been shared by many psychologists and psychiatrists working with creativity has been that creative function is a constitutional variable, much as is

The Psychology of Jung; An Introduction with Illustrations

Dr. Jung never took time out from his pioneering work in psychology to make a concise presentation of the elements of his psychological theories. Dr. Jacobi's synthesis, which Jung applauds in his Foreword, offers the reader a comprehensive review of the central content of his system by a student and colleague who worked closely with him for many years. For this definitive, new edition, Jolande Jacobi has written a new introduction and revised the footnotes to refer to the complete works of C.G. Jung. The book also includes the complete bibliography of the many journal articles and books written by Jung during his long and productive lifetime. There are eight color plates among the pictures from the unconscious and other illustrations which give a better idea of the intrapsychic process than can be conveyed in words.