The Mentor’s Role From the Perspective of Marginalized Young Women Becoming Mentors: Photovoice-Based Research

This paper examines the perspective of marginalized young women, training to become mentors for marginalized girls, with respect to the role of the mentor. Taking a critical feminist perspective, this article gives expression to the research participants’ unique knowledge, based on life experience as marginalized girls and their lived experiences. Based on a photovoice research project with 13 participants, all marginalized young women, the findings of this paper identify three main narratives regarding the mentoring role: (1) Mentoring as a relationship; (2) Mentoring as an action for the future; and (3) Organizational belongness—the organization hosting the participants serving as an ideological, value-based, and professional home, enabling the growth of the mentor in her role. The conclusions of the article argue that marginalized young women experience mentoring as a practice that expands beyond its rational aspects, embodying within it a corrective experience of relationships and an opportunity for social change.

How Marcel Proust Can Change Your Life—For Better or for Worse

This article turns around the role that Proust’s novel played—for better or worse—in my formation as a medievalist and as a full human being. In the curé’s obsession with genealogy and etymology, I recognized in the 1970s a deep medieval mental structure that coincided with contemporaneous work by historians of the Annales School on lineage and by structuralists on the linguistic patterns underpinning kinship. This led to a book, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages. But other strong strains of the Proustian sentimental orbit, doomed love, aligned chronologically and conceptually with the articulation in the 1890s of courtly love and made for dire consequences in a life lived along those lines. My wife, Ellen Handler Spitz, provides an emotionally corrective experience via the question, Was Swann in Love? Using the psychoanalytic concept of the partial object, she shows how limited Proust’s notion of love really is. We end on a note of wild admiration for Proust’s description of what it feels like to be in what he calls “love” but with a dose of skepticism with regard to his framing of the project of love itself.

El caso "Pierre". Comentarios al tratamiento de un paciente narcisista

We present here a case of a patient with a narcissistic personality disorder. We must take narcissism, like the rest of the personality patterns, as the response of an individual to a context, as the result of a relational matrix (Mitchell). The origin of pathological narcissism is to be found in caregivers who emotionally neglected the child, victim of isolation, on the one hand, and who share and promote narcissistic fantasies of the child, confused with their own fantasies. Dysregulation of narcissism occurs when the child's needs have been ignored, causing severe disturbances in self-esteem or the creation of a great defensive shield (Morrison). At first, our patient could not accept any fault in himself, assuming that the therapist would not accept his faults either. The challenge as therapists is to assume the disability that the patient attributes to us, the incompetence that the patient pursues, without us falling into disaster or in the most absolute hell, which is ultimately what he fears the most. Accepting the faults that the patient displaces in the therapist is a surprise for the patient, it was even a corrective experience in the encounter with himself.

Erasing Problematic Emotional Learnings

This chapter examines how the effectiveness and unification of psychotherapy are advanced by neuroscientists’ findings on memory reconsolidation, the brain’s innate mechanism for profound unlearning. Research relevant to psychotherapy is reviewed and mapped unambiguously into a clinical methodology of transformational change, the therapeutic reconsolidation process (TRP), applicable to all symptoms arising from memory contents. The TRP is defined as a set of experiences required by the brain, allowing implementation by any suitable experiential techniques, without dictating particular forms of therapy. Detection of TRP fulfillment in published case studies from diverse therapy systems suggests that the TRP provides psychotherapy unification and, functioning as both a specific and a common factor, may be responsible for transformational change occurring in any therapy sessions, which would confirm and advance the “corrective experience” paradigm. A coherence therapy case example serves to demonstrate TRP implementation, and research priorities are suggested.

Using Creative Arts in Trauma Therapy: The Neuroscience of Healing

Knowledge about the brain and the impact of trauma has increased significantly in recent years. Counselors must understand brain functioning and the effects of trauma in order to choose the most effective methods for working with clients. Creative arts therapies offer a nonthreatening way for clients to access and express their trauma, creating a corrective experience in the brain. Activities that incorporate body movement can be particularly helpful by providing a corrective emotional experience for those clients with an immobilized response to a traumatic event. This article offers a model for the assessment and treatment of trauma through the use of creative arts.

Resolution of alliance ruptures: The special case of animal-assisted psychotherapy

Many therapists regard alliance ruptures as one of the greatest challenges therapists face in the therapy room. Alliance ruptures has been previously defined as breakdowns in the process of negotiation of treatment tasks and goals and a deterioration in the affective bond between patient and therapist. Alliance ruptures have been found to predict premature termination of treatment and poor treatment outcomes. But ruptures can also present important opportunities for gaining insight and awareness and for facilitating therapeutic change. A process of rupture resolution may lead to beneficial outcomes and serve as a corrective emotional experience. The article describes unique processes of alliance rupture resolution inherent in animal-assisted psychotherapy (AAP). Building on Safran and Muran’s model and on clinical examples, the article describes strategies for identifying ruptures in AAP and techniques for repairing them to facilitate a corrective experience in treatment. Implications for clinical practice and future research are discussed.