Marilyn Charles

Microprocess examination of therapeutic immediacy during a dynamic research interview.

This study examines the interviewers use of immediacy during a dynamic interview to enhance the patients ability to process affective material and deepen personal exploration. Using a microprocess design, immediacy events were identified and rated using the Consensual Qualitative Rating method. Moment-to-moment in-session activity was rated by trained observers with a focus on measuring patient process using the Therapist-Patient Interaction Rating Scale and interviewer process using the Therapeutic Environment Scale. Five immediacy events were identified and were found to range in depth from mundane exchanges to more active exchanges with affective depth. Mundane events were characterized by little attention to the affective component of the here-and-now relationship, dismissive and unsupportive comments, and had either no effect, or a negative effect on patient process. In contrast, immediacy events characterized by even limited affect and acknowledging engagement between patient and interviewer were followed by greater patient disclosure and increased capacity to process emotional information. Thus, attention to the quality of the immediacy intervention in future research appears warranted.

The complex subject of psychosis

Psychological resilience is built on the capacity accurately to reflect on ones thoughts and feelings in relation to the thoughts and feelings of others. The strong link between bullying and psychosis highlights ways in which social isolation inhibits the development of these capacities. Prevailing ideas about psychosis tend further to marginalize individuals already struggling with social isolation. We present interview data that show ways in which identified patients may stumble over diagnoses, thereby exacerbating extant cognitive or perceptual difficulties. In striking contrast, a Lacanian perspective marks the importance of recognizing the Subject in the context of experienced difficulties. Such a view is supported by outcome data that highlight the importance of attending to the psychosocial contexts in which psychosis arises, and the human connections through which such distress might be moderated.

Pattern as Inspiration and Mode of Communication in the Works of Van Gogh

A close study of specific patterning in Van Goghs drawings (revelatory because of their absence of his celebratory color) provides new insight into pattern as a direct expression of nonverbal meaning. A study of his articulation of pattern through form, plus a close reading of his writings about difficulties he encountered because of his unique vision, show how Van Goghs creativity reflects a need to express the inexpressible that derives from an idiosyncratic way of perceiving self and the world. We apply critical theories of modern art as a manifestation of unconsciously expressed meaning and explications of differences between the experience of color versus form, and indices of how nonverbal meanings are noted and anchored. We conclude that Van Goghs unique and personal perceptual style both served his developmental needs and exacerbated his distress, contributing both to his mental instability and his artistic greatness.

Patterns: Basic Units of Emotional Memory

In psychoanalysis, we attempt to engage with one another in ways that enhance understanding. We tend to valorize the verbal domains, yet much of the information we seek may be relatively inaccessible to conscious awareness, obscured by trauma or by the early age at which the information was encoded. These types of information are stored within the body as sensory memories, in which it is through the patterns of the communications that meanings are derived. Affect, most particularly, is known through its patterns of prosody and intensity. Greater appreciation of the patterned forms that underlie emotional memory can help us to better locate ourselves within this infinitely complex and fertile realm of nonverbal understandings, and to learn to communicate these understandings in constructive ways.

Monogamy and its discontents: on winning the oedipal war.

This paper explores how idealized notions of “the beloved” constrain views of love and impede efforts to build satisfying relationships. The author begins by looking at psychoanalytic depictions of love. The effect of culture on beliefs about love is considered, exploring how cultural prescriptions, ideology, and group pressure (including psychoanalytic depictions of mature love) constrain and define views and values. Case vignettes and an example from literature illustrate ways in which cultural prescriptions obfuscate individual needs and impede self-definition, thereby interfering with real intimacy and satisfaction in love relationships.

The Hours: Between Safety and Servitude

This paper explores the issue of how character is created and re-created in the context of relationships. This theme, salient in the recent film The Hours, has been particularly problematic for creative women, who are often caught in tensions between self-development and relationship. Two case examples are given, in counterpoint to the film and to illustrations from Woolfs life and work. Through these various lenses, we can consider the complex interplays between our conjectures as to the expected price of relationship, and the actual price exacted as our various dramas unfold.

RACE AND RECOGNITION: THE TIME OF OUR SINGING

Literature affords the opportunity to consider the racial fear, hatred and hostility that can flare in moments when the otherness in the human face occludes the common bonds that join us together. Richard Powers’ (2003) compelling novel, The Time of Our Singing, highlights ways in which racial tensions continue to haunt us, impeding the efforts of successive generations to heal the wounds and move forward. In the novel, the parents’ efforts to move “beyond race” leave their children utterly unprepared for the ways in which race informs and obstruct their experience, as what has been denied returns to haunt them.

Closing the gap: Narrating the prose of severe psychic suffering

In seeking to characterize “the prose of suffering,” complex considerations surface in regard to our own understanding of suffering, our motives for engaging in such inquiry and our capacity to understand the social production of suffering – a production abetted in part by the regimes society puts in place ostensibly to mitigate suffering. How is it possible, then, “to do justice to the way others experience the world and whatever is at stake for them”? In this field note we give a preliminary account of an attempt to engage in ethically grounded collaborative inquiry with persons with chronic psychiatric impairments – a group that experiences significant marginalization in many societies.

Introduction to special issue on psychosis

Psychosis is often thought of as an intrapersonal disorder. Increasingly, however, research points to psychosis as a marker for psychosocial problems that can only be understood within the social, cultural and political contexts in which they arise. In this special issue, we consider from various perspectives ways in which a psychoanalytic lens can illuminate our ideas about psychosis.

The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis by Jamieson Webster Karnac, London, 2011; 176 pp;

ways” (p. 200). The author follows the sequence of 11 of Freud’s dreams, self-analysed during the year following his father’s death, that provided ‘stepping stones’ to his discovery of the Oedipal complex during that year of mourning. “Mourning seems to insist on a brutal confrontation with reality,” Mahon writes in sum, “dreaming seems to need to disguise truth in an elaborate finery of self-deception. Working together they seem to churn the mind, by appealing to reality and fantasy all at once, an ambiguous state of affairs that genius . . . exploited with extraordinary results” (p. 209). Mahon finishes with an epilogue in which he stresses his sense of the workings of mind as “an odyssey, each individual mind, possessed of its own unique consciousness, on a journey of self-discovery” (p. 211). For this author, each analysis, each odyssey, is a vast one, characterized by work on the multiple levels delineated in the book.