Managing Countertransference in the Treatment of Personality Disorders

The clinical and technical difficulties presented by patients with personality disorders are well documented. This article focuses on the challenges faced by therapists when managing their emotional reactions, that is, their countertransferences, to patients with personality disorders. While leaving room for therapists' unique and idiosyncratic countertransferences to the patient with personality pathology, Kernberg emphasized the role of a more general form of countertransference, one reflective largely of the patient's conflicts and defenses, in the treatments of personality disordered individuals. Here, the nature of the patient's internal and external functioning can be seen to lead to similar reactions among different therapists, opening the possibility of utilizing countertransference to better understand the patient's difficulties. In transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP), countertransferences arising in the patient–therapist interaction are first identified and contained by the therapist and then utilized to clarify and explore how the patient's internal object relations are being enacted in the clinical process. This article describes this process and how TFP therapists work with their countertransference to help illuminate the patient's split representational world, paving the way for interpretation and integration.

A world-involving theory of agency: review of Sensorimotor Life: An Enactive Proposal by Ezequiel Di Paolo, Thomas Buhrmann, and Xabier Barandiaran. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017

Sensorimotor theory of perception has been criticized for its ambiguity about the need for internal representations and the lack of a proper account of agency and subjective experience. The book under review offers a compelling non-representational, world-involving interpretation, and operationalization of this theory, showing that alternatives to representationalism are viable. It also provides a thought-provoking theory of sensorimotor agency and the pre-reflective experience of action that builds on the enactive notions of autonomy and sense-making. The account provided in this book fits into a radically embodied, enactive, and extended cognitive science. However, the notion of the environment requires further conceptual clarification by the enactive camp.

Samuel Beckett and the Death of Representation: Rockaby, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho

The article explores not only the link between Samuel Beckett’s final two novellas and the late drama but also seeks to demonstrate the author’s intent on stripping away the symbolism and imagery within his work in order to expose a life lived through the prism of representation; and, finally, to use his art to suggest something of the ‘real’ beneath the representational world. In this way the article demonstrates that the apotheosis of Beckett’s entire oeuvre is to reduce his narrative and dramas to a single work which finds its most comprehensive embodiment in his final novella: Worstward Ho.

Consumed Consumer Within the Framework of New Communication Technologies

“New media,” refers to a wide range of common practices and phenomena and expressed as new textual forms, culture of entertainment, consumption patterns, new self and identity presentations, community building paths, and representational world conception. With the virtual environments offered by new communication technologies, the leisure time of individuals is captured easily and in real life, hierarchies in social structure are measured by consumption-based performance of the individual. Companies had to add consumer management to their strategies at the end of the 20th century when the new media began to shape life and life practices. These companies, instead of producing for an uncertain market now produces according to the customer's desire and individual production. In addition, they supply specific niche markets to create the consumer they need. In this context, in the study marketing and advertising strategies and consumer behaviors that are transformed with new communication technologies will be discussed in detail.

The sense of agency

It has been recognized that the sensorimotor approach needs to be extended to account for not only the pragmatic aspects of perception but also the subjective phenomenology that characterizes experiences of the world and the self. In this chapter, the notion is proposed that sensorimotor agency can serve as the basis for a non-representational, world-involving theory of how agents perceive themselves as being the authors and in control of their actions. Both intentional and movement-related aspects in the phenomenology of agency experience are linked to processes of sensorimotor scheme selection and enactment in a self-sustaining network of interdependent sensorimotor schemes. The proposal is contrasted with traditional computational models in the context of various cases of pathological agency experience, and the ontological status of the sense of agency it implies is clarified in comparison with philosophical alternatives that deny its distinct experiential character.

Role-confusion in parent-child relationships: Assessing mother's representations and its implications for counselling and psychotherapy practice

The representational world of the mother has long been at the center of clinical discussions regarding the quality of parenting. However, assessing mother’s representation of role-confusion in her relation with her child has yet to be investigated, even if parent-child role-confusion can lead to maladaptive pathways. As part of a larger study we developed the Maternal Role-Confusion Scale (PARC) to assess role-confusion in the way a parent talks about her relationship with the child on the Experience of Caregiving Interview (ECI). The ECI, a semi structured interview probing the mothers’ representations of her relationship with her child (Solomon, J., & George, C. (1996). Defining the caregiving system: Toward a theory of caregiving. Infant Mental Health Journal, 17(3), 183-197), is very clinically relevant and parts of the interview can easily be adapted for use in counselling and psychotherapy settings. Here, we first define role-confusion, its socio-economic and family dynamic aspects, and its impact on child development and adulthood. We then present our Parental Role-Confusion coding Scale (PARC). Next we describe two profiles of role-confused mothers from our sample, as well as evidence validating these maternal responses as predictors of role-confused distortions in observed interactions with the child. We call attention to the dimension of sexualisation in the relationship, a high indicator of Role-Confusion. This emerging body of work points to the importance of being alert to indicators of role-confusion in the clinical setting. The findings can inform and enrich counselling and psychology practice by familiarizing clinicians with how to listen for indicators of role-confusion while talking with parents about their relationship with the child.

Trauma and the Father Image: Fantasies and Complexes in the Rorschach Test

In the interpretation of the Rorschach test, the features of the table IV inkblot evoke a dimension of authority, morals and related emotions. Interestingly, the father figure is related to ego development and also guides towards maturity via more evolved emotions such as feelings of shame and guilt. In some cases these feelings are found to be lacking in adults experiencing depression. The aim of this work is to analyze the relationship between the representational world in relation to the father figure and depressive mood disorders. The group of subjects is composed of 25 patients who had a psychiatric diagnosis of “Depressive episode”. The presence of specific phenomena brings out the complexes, the uneasy and conflictual relationship with the father figure submerged in the unconscious thus emerges. Shock is thereby manifested in relation to the black in which the large, dark, and blurred stimulus is perceived as sinister, threatening and dangerous. The trauma emerges in the result of a relationship with a father who has not allowed the child to manage similarities and differences. From the nature of the answers of the Rorschach protocols, it emerges that the symbolic abilities of subjects are not fully developed or have been attacked by an early trauma.