Friday, December 30, 2011

Healers Named Green(...)

I've been researching healers for Healers and Feelings.  My strategy is to print out a web page for people who are involved in the helping professions and/or who are doing research in this area.  It has helped me to sort out who is whom; there are a lot of us.  Here is a list of people whose last name is or starts with Green.  There are nearly fifty on the list, with links to information about them on the web.  There are some heavyweights.  Ross Greene and Joshua Greene are well known young researchers/practitioners.  Joanne Greenberg wrote a classic in the field.  Stanley Greenspan and Ralph Greenson were well known, during their time.  There is an intuitive counselor (Beth Green), a person who uses about ten descriptors for herself (Faith Green), a heavy duty schizophrenia researcher (Michael Green), and someone heavy into Positive Psychology (Suzy Green).  A few more corners of the fields represented are rapid resolution therapy (Tim Green), someone who directed the Minuchin Center (David Greenan), an object relations guy (Jan Greenberg), an Educational Psychologist (Jeffrey Greene), somebody at the University of Miami (Daryl Greenfield), and a school counselor (Felicsha Green).  It turns out to be a pretty good representation of the work being done.  Are you eligible for the list, or do you know of anyone who is?  If so, let me know.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Counselors/Therapists/Life Coaches

I've been tweeting the web page of a "randomly" selected counselor/therapist/life coach most days. A (the?) reader of my tweets responded with the idea that there are important differences between these types of people. So there are.  Here are some observations about that.  I'm rounding up information about people like these to decide who to include in my book which will be called Healers and Feelings.  Not all of the people who are counselors or therapists or life coaches would like being called healers.  There are plenty of healers who are not in any of those categories.  There is the category of helpers (as in Helping Professions), but I suppose most everyone wants to be thought of as a helper.  When I started out, everyone knew what a therapist was, but "counselor" and particularly "life coach" were less well known terms.  What we used to mean by, "you need therapy" is almost always said as. "you need counseling", now.  The issue of the difference between psychologist, psychiatrist, and social worker is also relevant, but somewhat dated.  I'd say that one important difference is the position of a helper on the dimension that has medical point of view on one end and a more varied end that includes humanistic, behavioral, pastoral, and cognitive points of view.  Another important difference is the amount of training and experience that the helper has, ranging from little training and a month of experience to an advanced degree and fifty years of experience.  Maybe you are best off in the middle of that bell shaped curve.  Beyond that, finding an interaction that will move you towards your goals is a function of your ability to judge the person you are interacting with, and probably some good luck.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

I'm in Charge

Michael Gazzaniga recently wrote a book called "Who's in Charge".  This book covers a number of issues.  The author's work on split brain individuals is covered, including his reaction to the first data to be gathered which spoke directly to what was going on. There is a lot of information about the ideas of modules in the brain, and the way in which they work and solve problems.  Consciousness is seen as constructed from theses modules, with an interpreter which fills in what needs to be filled in to make sense of what has happened.  A lot of information is presented which shows that our intentions and plans are put together after the relevant behaviors happen.  Levels of functioning, and emergent properties and processes at the various levels are part of the mix, as are applications to legal proceedings.  Five modules are presented relevant to moral decisions: reducing suffering, participating in give and take, respecting elders and authorities, being loyal to a group, and pursuing purity and the positive.  Evolutionary theory is relied upon quite a lot.  I got a lot out of this book.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Sybil Considered

The book "Sybil" came out just about when I started my career in psychology.  It is interesting to reflect on how it would be different to be starting out now,with "Sybil Exposed" to process as well.  It was a lot easier back then to know what to believe.  There is so much more information about people, the brain, and what has happened in the past, now.  What a job it is to know how to help people, and yourself, I guess.  "Sybil Exposed" tells a lot about the three women who worked together to produce the book "Sybil".  Personality theory is changing a lot, and DSM-V will treat it much differently than DSM-IV has.  The Healer to focus on here is Dr. Cornelia Wilbur.  She worked hard to help people.  I'm always concerned when a healer focuses too heavily on one diagnosis.  Breadth of experience and focus seems important to me.  It's worth the time to read this book, particularly if "Sybil" was an important book for you at the time it came out.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Seven Steeples and a "Peculiarly Saddened Life"

I just finished reading "From Under the Cloud at Seven Steeples."  It was published in 2002.  There are several important characters in the book, Anna Agnew herself, the author of this book (Lucy Jane King), and the hospitals in which Anna Agnew spent time. Anna Agnew's book, published in 1887 (From Under the Cloud) is available free on Google Books. It is an early example of a person's description of their psychological problems and treatment. There are some good descriptions that show her state of mind and reactions to the changes in treatments and hospital personnel. In this (King's) book, there is a summary near the end of the changes in psychiatric treatments, which is straightforward and clear. The various support groups and legislative supports for people with psychological problems are described. The differences between how men and women fare in the system are described. All in all, these books are worth reading.  Lucy Jane King has written a lot about the history of psychology.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

A Good First Hand Account of Schizophrenia

I've just read The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn Saks. I listened to this on Audible. It is very good. It is among the better first person accounts that I have read. It drives home the idea that serious psychological problems don't put you in a position of making a decision to do the wrong thing, but instead in a position of not having the power to make any kind of decision. This is when the thinking problems have you in their grip, of course. There is the idea of the shattered personality rather than the split personality. There is a good comparison of several healers and their styles (one of them Kleinian - I've just read a Melanie Klein biography by chance). There is the struggle to keep from taking medication despite many instances of going backwards when stopping taking it. There are good videos of the author on YouTube, so you can hear the author there. I wish she had recorded the book for Audible herself.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Healers' Basic Procedures

I've been thinking that there are about six basic procedures that I carry out in my work.  These are gathering and sharing informationmeasuring learning skillsmaking DSM diagnosesperforming psychotherapyfollowing ethical standards, and consultative problem solving.  Three additional basic procedures carried out by people in the mental health field might be teaching, managing organizations, and carrying out basic research.  This makes nine, and I love round numbers.  Can anyone add a tenth basic procedure, or it's also OK to completely revamp the list.  I'd love to hear what others think about the list of basic procedures that Healers carry out.

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Healers of Intelligence

Kurt Fischer and Todd Rose wrote the chapter in The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence about Intelligence in Childhood.  They present a theory of Dynamic Assessment and Dynamic Skill theory of intelligence.  The idea is that the way in which children solve problems is very influenced by the situation and the specific demands of the task.  They introduce other theories of intelligence, as well.  They are certainly of the opinion that there is a lot you can do to help students to be better problem solvers.  They give information about a study by Fischer and Catharine Knight that shows different routes a child might take to becoming a reader.  I quickly found a link to the article involved.  It is here.  That never would have happened in 1971.  I'd still be looking for the article.  Anyway, they also expand their theory to emotional problem solving in an interesting way.  Check this stuff out!

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Increasing Intelligence

Raymond S. Nickerson wrote the chapter about Developing Intelligence in the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence.  He believes that at least half of IQ is attributable to environment.  He discusses this issue, and programs developed to provide children with the opportunity to improve their "ability to learn, to reason well, to solve novel problems, and to deal effectively with the challenges - often unpredictable- that confront one in daily life."  Some of these are Head Start, The Carolina Abecedarian Project, and Project Intelligence.  He reviews the evidence for brain plasticity and other factors supporting improved functioning due to experience.  Some of the things that he thinks are helpful are: teaching domain specific knowledge, providing experience with at least informal (if not formal) logic, training in probability and statistics,  supporting executive functioning skills, modeling heuristics and other strategies to solve problems, teaching metacognitive skills (self-management), helping students to develop good habits, and managing students' beliefs about learning.  These all seem to be helpful skills, no matter what relationship that the have to measured IQ.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Nim, and Other Animals

The latest Planet of the Apes movie, and the documentary Project Nim (NPR story here) have brought research with animals into the spotlight.  The story is about 100 years old.  A Russian scientist raised a chimpanzee at home, and studied it extensively about that long ago.  She was impressed, among other things, by the empathy it showed.  Many studies of trying to teach language to animals have been carried out.  The books Nim Chimpsky and Silent Partners tell about some of the studies.  The late Alex, a parrot, was also studied and cared for.  Many of the scientists doing this work are controversial figures.  Sue Savage-Rumbaugh wrote a scientific paper about primates in captivity with three bonobos.  Janis Carter lived in Africa for several years with Lucy, to help her to adjust back to the semi-wild.  William Lemmon and Roger Fouts found it difficult to work together studying chimpanzees.  There are now a number of healers using animals in treating PTSD for people, and working with animals who have been research subjects.  There are many questions about whether and how animals should be used in research.  The trend is towards understanding the natural methods that the animals use to communicate and cope in their environment.

Monday, August 29, 2011

A Healer for Sure

If you define healers as people who carry out activities to help people, Kurt Lewin should be included.  His biography, The Practical Theorist, by Alfred Marrow, tells about his life and thought.  He worked at Iowa, where Julian Rotter was his student, and where my daughter lived, which is one of the reasons that I got interested.  It also rounds out the biographers of the early Gestalt Psychologists, for me.  Anyway, Lewin did studies of what could be done to help people meet their goals at work.  He did action research involving how groups made decisions and got along with each other.  He was active in the WWII efforts.  He used a Jordan Curve to represent a person in his or her environment.  I was never sure about how to pronounce his name.  It turns out that he always said "La Veen", but when his children were always asked why it wasn't "Lou In", he started saying it the latter way.  A saying is attributed to him - there is nothing so practical as a good theory.  I'd say read The Practical Theorist, and if you want to, get it now on line, because there aren't a lot of copies available!

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Pro-Oedipus

Since school is about to start, I'm going to shelve Anti-Oedipus and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari Intersecting Lives (no capital letters on the dust jacket) for now.  Anti-Oedipus was kind of a big deal when it first came out.  I've read just the first two sections.  They discuss schizophrenic individuals, although one wonders how the diagnoses would be different these days.  They talk about some use of medications at the Laborde Clinic, but things are so much different today in that regard.  An important idea in the book is the degree to which social/governmental/institutional factors influence behavior.  It is really hard to get used to the terminology they use, but probably worth it to get a picture of this point of view.  It is interesting to see how these authors, and the early Gestalt Psychologists bring in the ideas of philosophers.  Nietzsche comes up often in Anti-Oedipus.  Anyway, Felix Guattari and the people he worked with were important Healers around the 1960s in France.

Monday, August 15, 2011

A Talented Writer and Therapist

Your Voice in My Head by Emma Forrest is about a lot of things.  I'll focus on the insight it gives into the way in which Dr. R worked as a healer.  He both prescribed medication and carried out talk therapy.  The combination appeared to be an important part of what made it work.  A colleague described him to the author as not being a blank slate, but instead reacting as a person to the input given to him in therapy.  After he died, people he had worked with described his ongoing influence on their lives.  A letter by a patient other than than the author of the book described him as helping people by "lending his humanity, and leaving no doubt that they were understood."  The above link for the book's name is to the Goodreads page for the book.  Threre are about 75 reviews, many of which are from women.  The rationale for the one star rating makes me glad that nobody reads my book.  The link for the author is to her blog.  It's strange to have that much access and connection to an author.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

The Mentality of Gestalt Psychologists

The title for  the post is, of course, a knock off of Kohler's The Mentality of Apes.  I'm two thirds of the way through the book.  The descriptions of how the chimps got their food in the experiments are fun to read as well as educational.  You develop a liking for the "subjects" of the research, and can tell that the Kohlers liked them, too.  There is also the edge of the ethics of animal research, of course.  The main point of the book is that the chimps acted with "insight."  The question of individual differences between the chimps is interesting as well.  Some of the phrases used to describe what the chimps did were: "unhesitatingly pilfered", "was never uncertain as to where he had to put it", and "the expression of discouraged desire."  Principles of Gestalt Psychology by Koffka is also an interesting read, even after all this time.  Finally, I've got Productive Thinking by Wertheimer. When I'm finished with those, and books about the four major people involved, I'll be ready to write.  When I learned psychology, this way of thinking was not emphasized, so it is interesting to supplement it now.

Monday, August 8, 2011

APA Divisions and Division Presidents

I visited the web sites for all of the Divisions of the American Psychological Association, and also web pages associated with all of the presidents of the Divisions.  It gives you a good idea about what psychologists in the US are doing.  The newsletters for each division are available on the page describing the Division.  Here is the latest newsletter for clinical psychology.  I'm using this information for the Introduction for Healers and Feelings.  Here is the publication list for Nancy Eisenberg, President of the Developmental Psychology Division.  I see the Divisions as falling into three categories.  There are six which involve "housekeeping" issues such as teaching psychology, international psychology, state associations, and the history of psychology.  The other 48 seem to cover subareas of psychology and interests of psychologists in equal portion.  It is tough to classify some between these two groups, and you would get disagreement as to which category a particular Division falls into. Here is the list of Divisions, and here is my categorization:
Subareas of psychology: experimental, comparative, developmental, personality/social (dk why these are combined!), clinical, consulting, industrial/organizational, educational, school, counseling, engineering, rehabilitation, consumer, theoretical/philosophical, behavior analysis, community, psychopharmacology/substance abuse, humanistic, environmental, health, neuropsychology, media, sports, child/adolescent clinical
Interests/Practice Areas: measurement/statistics, social issues, aesthetics/arts, public service, military, aging, psychotherapy, hypnosis, intellectual/developmental disabilities, women, religion, child/family policy, psychoanalysis, law, families, LGBT, ethnic/minority, peace, group theory/psychotherapy, men, pediatrics, pharmacotherapy, disaster/trauma, addiction
If you are interested in psychology, investigate the APA; there are more resources there than you can imagine.

Friday, August 5, 2011

Gestaltism or Processism?

One thing that has held me back, I think, from appreciating Gestalt Psychology is the name.  Is it a whole separate psychology from traditional psychology?  What does gestalt mean, anyway?  Google Translate gives seven (!) options as translations for gestalt: form, shape, frame, build, figure, character, and person.  Although people use the word gestalt ("You've got to look at the whole gestalt!") it doesn't have an intrinsic meaning for me like a word in English does.  At the very least, I've got to translate it in my mind.  I have a love for words that end with -ism (see Peter Saint-Andre's Ism book).  The ideas of the Gestalt Psychologists make up an emphasis, a theory, and an approach.   Then, of course, there is the problem of Gestalt Therapy.  It is certainly influenced by Gestalt Psychology, but by other theories as well.  So, I'm going to think of Gestalt Psychology as similar to structuralism, functionalism, and behaviorism, and call it processism, in my own mind.  The word processism is used in Philosophy, but so are the other ones.  I know that process doesn't capture all of what Wertheimer, Lewin, Koffka, Kohler and the others were trying to say, but it is the best that I can come up with.  Does anyone have any other ideas?

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Dr. Rotter's Psychodynamics Class

I've got notes from a class called Psychodynamics, given by Julian Rotter at UCONN during the spring semester of 1973.  I assume that you weren't in the class, or have misplaced your notes in the last 38 years, so I'll share some of the information.  He talked about field theory ala Kurt Lewin, which he learned directly from the source.    He talked a lot about Alfred Adler's brand of therapy.  He talked a lot less than you would expect about Locus of Control, given how much play it has gotten in the field.  Three problems that he talked about leading to the need for therapy were using generalized expectancies rather than those relevant to the situation, valuing reinforcements that are inappropriate or not available in the situation, and lacking the skills needed to obtain the reinforcements which are available.  Here is a short summary of his Social Learning Theory.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Boy Feelings vs. Girl Feelings

Gender differences/similarities is one of the fascinating issues in psychology.  My general blog has an entry on gender differences in thinking, which you can access by clicking on these words.  When I was seeing people for counseling/therapy, it always seemed important to think about whether a male of female therapist would be best for any particular client/patient. As a school psychologist, one thinks a lot about the opportunities available for all students in the classroom.  This web site has biographies of early psychologists who were women.  It is interesting to see how they surpassed the issues of gender differences in education at the time.  I always think of Alice James in this context.  For the book Healers and Feelings I'm determined to include more women than the one (!) I included in Thinkers and Thinking (here's the Goodreads page for it).  Right now, I'm thinking of Psyche Cattell and Hedda Bolgar.  Any other suggestions?

Monday, August 1, 2011

Gestalt Psychology In Living Form

I am reading up on Gestalt Psychology for the Introduction to Healers and Feelings.  Here's an interesting fact about some of the founders.  Between 1880 and 1886, Drs. Kohler, Koffka and Wertheimer were born within 800 miles of each other in an array, north to south, from Tallinn, Estonia to Berlin, Germany, to Prague, Czechoslovakia.  They worked together and apart to learn how the form and relationship between objects and ideas makes a difference.  When Kohler died in 1967, in Enfield, NH, their places of death were aligned in the same way, within 300 miles in the eastern US.  Koffka died in Northampton, MA and Wertheimer in New Rochelle, NY.  Does anyone else think that this is remarkable?  I'd be happy to get comments that would point me towards important resources for Gestalt Psychology.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

DSM-X

In Healers and Feelings, the book, each chapter will highlight a certain condition or diagnosis.  I'll use those in DSM-IV, those that may be in DSM-V and those that were in the first DSM or even current before that time.  It is interesting to learn about the labels which have been used at different times and in different places.  DSM-V is in development.  The link to the page describing this is at this location.  There are strong feelings on the part of many people about the proposed changes, such as taking out the diagnosis for Asperger's Disorder.  The response of the British Psychological Society to the proposed changes can be found here.  Each diagnosis I include will be paired with a psychologist that I will profile, much in the style of my first book, Thinkers and Thinking.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Birth of a Blog

I'll put information on this blog about Healers (psychologists and other such people) and what they have to say about our emotions and helping people with their issues and problems.  The Healers and Feelings book is coming along.  So far, I have chapters about Carl Jung and William James.  I'm working on Gestalt Psychology for the Introduction.  My next chapter will be about Jonathan Kellerman.