Pyschotherapy

This chapter provides a synthetic overview of the ethics of paternalism in psychotherapy with a focus on involuntary hospitalization to protect patients from self-harm. Paternalism entails the intentional overriding of someone's preferences or actions on grounds of beneficence and nonmaleficence. After the emergence of autonomy in medical ethics, paternalism is generally considered prima facie wrong, as it infringes on patient autonomy, trust, and right to informed consent. In particular, the use of paternalism in psychotherapy raises a host of complex and delicate ethical issues due to the nature of the therapeutic relationship and the difficulty to assess the autonomy of the person who will supposedly benefit from the paternalistic intervention.

Years ago when I was casting around for a dissertation topic, I chose to focus on shame and guilt, because these emotions were often linked in the literature (and merged and confused); but they did seem like different emotions to me. I began studying these emotions by interviewing people. ("Tell me about one time you felt ashamed.") (I've given you a few excerpts from two of these interviews as handouts that you can take with you.) Then I used various methods of qualitative analysis to identify the characteristic markers of shame vs. guilt. Subsequent studies involved statistical analysis and empirical validation of these characteristics (Lindsay-Hartz, 1995). Today, I am going to focus here on the clinical applications of these findings, rather than on the research per se. As I interviewed people, I quickly discovered that shame and guilt were quite different emotions. People did fairly easily talk about guilt. However, when the same people switched to talk about shame, they often had a hard time continuing the interviews. They needed more bathroom breaks. One interviewee told me about moving and giving no one his new address or phone number, in an attempt to hide following his experience of shame. People who had had good eye contact with me suddenly were looking down and avoiding eye contact with me. I thought, "What's going on here?" I began to feel-and see before my eyes-striking differences between these two emotions of shame and guilt-differences that also seemed important in terms of how any therapist or doctor might respond to these emotions in a therapeutic or even a medical context.  I am going to summarize some of these differences and move on to explore the whole shame field of emotions, including shame, humiliation, inferiority, and embarrassment.  I will also focus on relevant therapeutic interventions for working with patients experiencing these emotions in psychotherapy.

This paper aims to trace analogies between Eastern Buddhism and Modern Science with regards to the concept of No Mindedness of Zen. Zen Buddhism describes the entity of ‘No Mind’ as the prelude to ‘Satori’ or the spiritual awakening. According to Zen philosophy this state cannot be intellectually explained as it is ‘beyond the intellect’ and it defies rationale. Buddhism outlines meditative skills leading to a similar state of No Mindedness called ‘Sunyata’ meant to give insights into ‘Pragnya’ or wisdom just as No Mind is an avenue to ‘Kensho’ or deep insights into supreme knowledge of spirituality. In Chinese Chan, this No mind is comparable to the ‘Great Void’ of Lao Tzu’s Tao, which supposedly ‘includes everything and excludes nothing’. With modern scientific advances in allied fields of Psychology, Psychiatry and Psycho therapeutic sciences we cannot brush off understanding such an important concept of oriental wisdom – the No Mind. This paper is one more attempt to define what is seemingly obscure, in the light of the modern times.

This thesis demonstrates a series of procedures utilizing techniques from psychoanalytic, archetypal and shamanic psychotherapies for working with the archetypal spirit Cat. I will examine how it manifests in dream, active imagination, trance, and synchronicity in order to resolve and heal personality problems associated with the Toddler and Early Childhood level of self-development. My approach focuses on and explores the "spirit-psyche" connection in the soul. I will show how the Cat helps with working-through the reassurance (mirror) transference, Dependent, Oppositional-Defiant, Avoidant, and Histrionic personality traits, and an "anal compulsive" neurotic style.
The transformative and healing Cat bestows upon the soul the luxuriant power of flexibility and self-movement as well as a Dionysian capacity to experience pleasure in the unfolding of one's life including the enrichment of one's sense of self and joy in the exuberant and teeming life of all living things.

Narrative theory origins go back to Plato as an approach that tries to understand the story's abstract mechanism. After the separation of theory, mimetic, and diegetic elements, it continued its fundamental development until Aristotle, Finnish School, Saussure, Russian Formalists, Prague School, German Scholars, Anglo-Saxon Formalism and French Structuralism. Narratology has spread beyond the literary world, from visual narrative to artificial intelligence. -After a quarter of a century from named the field by Todorov in 1966.- In this context, Narrative Therapy is one of many fields of narrative that emerged in the 1990s. The approach that emerged with White and Epston has turned into a rich research field that feeds many disciplines. “Handbook of Research on Narrative and Therapy in the Post-Truth Era” aims to make a strong contribution to studies examining the interaction between narrative and therapy. The book focuses on the one hand on the structure of the narrative and the possibilities it offers for therapy; on the other hand, the Post-Modern sources of spiritual conflict and how to benefit from the possibilities of the narrative while healing them. In this context, the research to be carried out, new concepts, and models created are the study's basic expectations.

Strangely, as of yet, no scientific account explains how we can “see” and even “hear” mental imagery. This makes mental imagery a “hard problem,” rather than an “easy problem” in which certain aspects of psychological processes have been at least partially accounted for. A Jaynesian perspective at least offers us a clue to the nature of mental space and images, which are key features of conscious interiority. Mental imagery can be viewed as the descendant of hallucinations. In other words, hallucinatory visions and voices—that were believed in preconscious societies to be supernatural visitations—are the predecessors to introspectable mental images. Such watered-down “semi-hallucinations” perform an adaptive role in everyday life. Unlike full-blown hallucinations, modern mental imagery is controllable and less vivid.

Common sense tells us that psychological processes transpire “in” our heads; we are convinced of this spatiality because we can experience mental imagery. The images that are mentally evoked need a “place” to be witnessed. The space in which mental imagery transpires affords a simulated stage on which one can formulate goals and rehearse behaviors that require practice or are too risky if carried out in the physical world. And guided imagery is a basic technique utilized by many systems of psychotherapy for anxiety, stress management, pain, relaxation, cognitive restructuring, etc. Imaginal exposure, which allows one to “see” a traumatic event in mental space, allows the psyche to process painful experiences (e.g., for PTSD patients).

See podcast at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KVKNNkITYo&list=PLqpF1l8gdXlHzVrJjI2wDqMiA7qseJNew&index=1