John Chambers Christopher

Positive Psychology, Ethnocentrism, and the Disguised Ideology of Individualism

This article aims to examine critically the attempts by positive psychologists to develop a science of happiness and positive human functioning that transcends temporal and cultural boundaries. Current efforts in positive psychology are deconstructed to reveal an adherence to the dominant Western conception of self and its accompanying vision of the good life as personal fulfillment. It is argued that in failing to recognize the tacit cultural and moral assumptions underlying their investigations, positive psychologists not only distort the outlooks of cultures that do not subscribe to an individualistic framework, they also insulate themselves from reflecting critically on their work. Alternative forms of inquiry are offered to assist positive psychology in overcoming these limitations.

Teaching Self-Care Through Mindfulness Practices: The Application of Yoga, Meditation, and Qigong to Counselor Training

Faculty in counseling training programs often give voice to the importance of self-care for students during the training period and into practice after training is completed. However, few programs specifically address this issue in their curricula. To address this perceived need, a course was developed to provide students with (a) personal growth opportunities through self-care practices and (b) professional growth through mindfulness practices in counseling that can help prevent burnout. A focus group assessed course impact on students who reported significant changes in their personal lives, stress levels, and clinical training.

Integrating mindfulness as self-care into counselling and psychotherapy training

Aim: Within the last 10 years, mindfulness has quickly moved into the mainstream of behavioural medicine, psychotherapy, and counselling. This article examines the potential of applying mindfulness practices to the training of counsellors and psychotherapists. Method: Several qualitative research projects conducted over the past nine years are summarised. Findings: Mindfulness training can enhance the physical and psychological wellbeing of trainees. Implications for training: Mindfulness training is a specific way that training programmes can teach students strategies of self-care that can help prevent burnout, compassion fatigue, and vicarious traumatisation.

Culture, Self and Identity: Interactivist Contributions to a Metatheory for Cultural Psychology

A complete and thorough grasp of culture eludes psychology because of the pervasive dualism that pervades psychology and Western thought more broadly. Drawing on interactivism, a process model for human phenomena, we make two main points: first, culture cannot be reified, seen as distinct from the self, nor can it be treated as something objective or subjective; and, second, agency and culture are intertwined and distributed across levels of knowing. We explore how interactivism provides powerful resources for modeling the relationship between culture and the person and indicate how interactivism is generally compatible with social practice, hermeneutic, dialogical and narrative insights but situates them within a developmental ontology. We consider implications of interactivism for existing theories like internalization, self-construal theory and individualism—collectivism.

Perceptions of the Long-Term Influence of Mindfulness Training on Counselors and Psychotherapists A Qualitative Inquiry

Although self-care is often touted as being important to counselors and psychotherapists, historically little has been done within graduate school to provide future therapists with self-care strategies. This article proposes that mindfulness training offers a promising approach to therapist self-care and introduces qualitative research on the long-term impact of mindfulness training to substantiate this claim. Sixteen former students who are now practicing counselors were interviewed. Thirteen of them reported continuing to practice mindfulness techniques. Participants indicated that mindfulness continued to influence both their personal lives and self-care practices leading to positive influences in physical, emotional, cognitive, and interpersonal well-being. In their professional lives, participants described ways of incorporating mindfulness into their way of being a therapist, their interventions, and how they conceptualize their clients’ issues.

Self and Values An Interactivist Foundation for Moral Development

The standard research programs in moral development have been criticized for adopting a narrow and restrictive view of the moral domain. There has been a dearth of alternative theories that account for the diversity of mature moral viewpoints both within and outside Western culture. We present an interactivist framework that takes into account the plurality of moral perspectives. It does so by addressing fundamental issues of psychological ontology and providing an account of values and the self based on the interactivist conception of knowledge and the knowing-levels treatment of consciousness and developmental stages. We discuss foundational questions such as the nature of the self, how it develops and the relationship between the self and values or morals, with special attention to the nature and source of value conflicts.

Thinking through Positive Psychology

Positive psychology offers a needed corrective to deficiencies in mainstream psychology. However, there have been relatively few attempts to systematically analyze and assess this movement. This special issue examines the conceptual underpinnings and guiding ideals of positive psychology. Generally, these articles conclude that positive psychologists have not dealt adequately with the challenge of rendering credible and illuminating accounts of human flourishing in a post-positivist era and in a pluralistic society. The authors suggest ways we might better meet this challenge, allowing us to discuss questions of human agency, character, and the good life despite quite different views of them across historical eras and cultures. We hope this will help fulfill some of the aims of positive psychology.

CULTURE AND PSYCHOTHERAPY: TOWARD A HERMENEUTIC APPROACH

Despite the growing awareness of cultural differences and the challenges of multicultural counseling, critics have noted that understandings of culture within psychology remain largely cursory. Philosophical hermeneutics help to remedy this situation by offering a comprehensive theory of culture that (a) details how the self is embedded in culture, (b) highlights cultures inherently moral nature, and (c) shows how cultural conflict be can be mediated through dialogue. Hermeneutics provides a means of thinking interpretively about cultural meanings and discerning their specific manifestations. It can be utilized by psychotherapists not only to help understand clients from different cultural backgrounds but also to better recognize how the dominant Western cultural outlook—individualism—influences psychotherapy theory, research, and practice.

Qigong as a Mindfulness Practice for Counseling Students: A Qualitative Study

This qualitative study explores the effects of qigong, an ancient Chinese mindfulness practice involving movement, on masters-level counseling students. Students responded in writing both after an initial experience of qigong and after practicing the movements for 15 weeks during a mindfulness-based course in self-care. Themes of physical, emotional, and mental changes were present in both sets of responses. Additional themes of familiarity with the practice as well as group consciousness and interdependence emerged in the final experience of qigong. The results of this study indicate qigong is a contemplative practice that could have positive outcomes for counseling students. Because of its accessible nature, immediate results, and ability to foster connectedness, qigong is currently underutilized as a form of teaching mindfulness.

The influence of early experience on personality development

Abstract It is argued that theoretical approaches to the nature of the influence of early experience on personality development have been vitiated by incorrect metaphysical assumptions, of a sort historically characteristic of immature sciences. In particular, mind and mental phenomena are construed in terms of various sorts of substances and structures, instead of in terms of process ontologies. We show that these underlying metaphysical assumptions have prevented the most central problems of the influence of early experience from being addressed, and, therefore, from being answered as well. These aporia seriously infect such contemporary approaches as object relations theory, attachment theory, and cognitive behavioral theory. We outline an alternative process ontology of mind and intentionality—specifically, a process-functional ontology for representation—and explore the form of early influence offered within this new perspective.