Embodied Imagination and Metaphor Use in Autism Spectrum Disorder

This paper discusses different frameworks for understanding imagination and metaphor in the context of research on the imaginative skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In contrast to a standard linguistic framework, it advances an embodied and enactive account of imagination and metaphor. The paper describes a case study from a systemic therapeutic session with a child with ASD that makes use of metaphors. It concludes by outlining some theoretical insights into the imaginative skills of children with ASD that follow from taking the embodied-enactive perspective and proposes suggestions for interactive interventions to further enhance imaginative skills and metaphor understanding in children with ASD.

The Art of Fielding

Bion created different theoretical tools to observe emotional transformations during a therapeutic session. In the relational field, these tools are particularly useful to observe how emotions create representations as steps in the transformation of further emotional experiences. Describing the complex unfolding of this process, Bion used the word “truth” to highlight the tension towards the unknown, the absolute unachievable named “O”. The word ‘authenticity’ is close to the theoretical concept of ‘truth’, but it better describes and includes something pertaining to relational experience. Authenticity especially appears as a broader concept, which includes something about style and the ability to reach a sense of contentment and sharing together. The author explores as authenticity goes through the form, not just the content, of language; a form capable of arousing surprise, wonder and transformation of the gaze. The optimal regulation of the intensity of feeling and the subjective quality of the words allow the latter to cross the relational field and to be received by the other subject. The goal for therapy that strives to reach the patient and allow a creative, subjective and full relational experience can be described (or summarized) with the word ‘authenticity’.

The Links: What is Produced in the Space Between Others

Argentine psychoanalysts have been working on a link approach to psychoanalysis for more than forty years, inspired by Isidoro Berenstein's and Janine Puget's theoretical–clinical developments. It proposed an additional perspective of psychoanalytic theory with ideas that had not been previously developed or included. Bridges were built with other disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, and the history of contemporary subjectivity. This task has required the deconstruction, rethinking, and invention of some conceptualisations, not only of family and couple bonds or links, but of what was called "lo vincular" (the link) itself. The term lo vincular describes the work carried out by subjects in the context of links, for in order to create a link with others we must do something with the changes brought about by their presence. Such "doing" cannot be anticipated; it is always about to happen despite having happened often before. The same is true of each therapeutic session, no matter whether it is the first, second, or third. We cannot foresee what will happen in this session or in the next, or even what our patient's next idea might be.

Rating the outcomes of psychotherapy or psychoanalysis using the Change After Psychotherapy (CHAP) scales. Manual and commentary

In what follows we shall describe the model for rating a kind of psychotherapy change that has been developed at the Institute of Psychotherapy in Stockholm. It has been inspired by American studies with follow-up interviews after psychoanalysis by Pfeffer (1959) and Schlessinger and Robbins (1974), among others. The model has two parts, one (or more) interviews and a set of ratings on the basis of this or these interviews. The interviews are basically focused on the patient’s subjective experience of the state of having changed or not. The patients are encouraged to tell about the way they feel now, compared to what they used to feel, and how their situation in life is at present, compared to what it used to be, and how their life has changed since they began or ter-minated therapy. The interviews are quite informal, unstructured from the point of view of the patient, roughly as in a therapeutic session, but they are also different in the sense that the interview has a defined focus and that there is also an interviewing guide, on paper or in the interviewer’s mind. It is also possible to use regular therapy sessions, on tape or in the form of process notes or similar documents, for the same purpose of rating the experience of change. The method may not only be used for research or more formal evaluation; it may also be important for the therapist once in a while systematically to judge for himself/herself how a therapy is developing. Reliability, norms and psychometric properties are reported.

What to Do When You Don't Know What to Do: Dealing With Challenging Behaviors in a Therapeutic Session

Many speech-language pathologists experience students who demonstrate challenging behaviors during sessions both in the classroom and in the therapy room. Positive reinforcement and other traditional supports can ameliorate these behaviors. However, when students become used to these methods, speech-language pathologists are often at a loss and must look to other methods to work through the challenging behaviors. Themes explored in this article include changing perspectives on “behavior,” building relationships, constructing the treatment environment, and reinforcement schedules.

Emotional discourse in psychotherapy

The article explores the different types of discourse from the perspective of the emotional atmosphere's substrate on the therapeutic session. The author selects some of the emotional discourses and describes their connection with the experience of early childhood relationships with significant adults. This concept of the emotional discourse allows not to determine the type of the client personality, but to deal with the relations the client establishes. So the therapist focuses on the process of therapeutic communication and, moreover, in the "language's" characteristics of the contact between the partiсipants.