Bernie Neville

Creating a Research Community

This article describes one academic’s approach to creating a research community among a diverse group of higher degree students within an individualistic research culture. The approach is characterised by acceptance of a wide range of interests and methodologies, attention to the relational and emotional needs of students, the collaborative sharing of information, ideas and problems, and a recognition that imagination and intuition are essential elements of a meaningful scientific investigation. Particular techniques for facilitating this process are described.

Surviving a postmodern pathology

Abstract Carl Jung decided fairly early in his career that pathology was not merely individual but collective. His experience of Nazi Germany gave some impetus to this idea, and his attempts to understand the phenomenon led him into a mode of thinking which has come to be called archetypal psychology.

When One of the Teachers Smiles at Me

Until fairly recently, research on school dropout or failure focused on the reasons why many students do not complete their schooling: e.g. young people drop out or fail because they are not motivated, are not committed, have no self-esteem, have no ambition or, have no skills.

Anxiously congruent: congruently anxious

Søren Kierkegaard proposed that it is our capacity for despair and anxiety that makes us human. He suggested that despair is an indication of our capacity to be more than we currently are. We feel anxiety and despair because our potentiality is always greater than our actuality, when our living process is blocked or frustrated. As long as we are not all that we can be we are anxious, whether we are aware of it or not. Even without our existential anxiety we have reason enough to be anxious. We experience cosmic anxiety, political-social anxiety, environmental anxiety. The world is not in a good way. We may try to separate our awareness from our experience, through our various techniques of denial, but our organism knows better, and our denial only increases our stress. Congruence involves coming out of denial, and being open to our organismic anxiety

The Heart of Advocacy

In this chapter we synthesise the sets of knowledge and understandings about teaching and learning developed through the school-based advocacy programs described in this collection. Within a competitive educational climate of outcome – driven performance assessment, the centrality of emotional and interpersonal relationships in good teaching and learning is too often ignored.

Setting therapy free

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has listed ten dogmas of modern science which, he alleges, are based not on facts but on assumptions. He argues that there is no evidential substantiation of these assumptions and they should be abandoned to set science free. Carl Rogers work from the beginning challenged these assumptions, which were the basis of the reductionist, mechanistic and deterministic psychological science which provided the background on his own theory and practice. He was engaged not only in setting science free but in setting therapy free from both the deterministic and individualistic theory and practice which have shaped mainstream counselling. His notion of the formative tendency aligns the person-centred approach not only with the contemporary re-imagining of the cosmos but also with the radical ecopsychology of Arne Naess and the deep ecologists.

Carkhuff, Maslow, and Interpersonal Perception in Small Groups.

With consideration of Carkhuffs and Maslows models of effective functioning, two studies examine contrasts between high functioning (HF) and low functioning (LF) persons in small groups. HF persons show closer association for a set of relevant variables than do LFpersans, suggesting the presence of a general effectiveness factor. HF persons tend to perceive interpersonal effectiveness as a gestalt, while LF persons perceive interpersonal dimensions as operating independently.