Editorial
István Tiringer
ARTICLES
Questions of practice
Judit Havelka: On the characteristics of post-traumatic disorders, on the difficulties in working through traumatic experiences, and on new approaches in the therapy of working with trauma
Questions of practice
Tibor Cece Kiss: Acting out in dance therapy
Essay study
John Salvendy: Why group therapy in the 21st century
Theoretical study
Katalin Varga S.: Interactive emotional attunement — openness and boundaries.
Theoretical relevance in practice
PROFESSIONAL LIFE
News and reports
In memoriam “Faludi utca” (1968-2008) — Klára Ajkay • Veronika Kökény• Iván Lust†
Conferences — Szilvia Bata • Edit Czimmermann • Zsolt Deák • Anita Mogyoróssy (Kathyné) • Gyöngyvér Kárpáti • Judit Krasznai • Ágnes Matolcsi • Márta Merényi • Anna Mérei • Péter Ozsváth • István Sal • Eszter Thaly • Zsuzsanna Tanyi • Erzsébet Erika Vass
Lists of professional books — Animula • Lélekben Otthon• Medicina• Ursus Libris
Preliminary to the 5th Conference of this journal
Book reviews — Béla Buda • Dóra Perczel-Forintos • Tényi Tamás
Professional programs
Questions of practice
Judit Havelka: On the characteristics of post-traumatic disorders, on the difficulties in working through traumatic experiences, and on new approaches in the therapy of working with trauma
- Clinicians treating individuals with PTSD are confronted with a number of issues that complicate the capacity to provide effective psychotherapy. Clinical dilemmas facing the therapist are:
- Traumatized individuals often lack the capacity to communicate verbally the essence of what has happened to them.
- When they recall a trauma, many people with PTSD become so emotionally distressed that the recollection of the trauma itself feels to them like re-traumatization.
- Even if traumatized people seem to have been able to construct a narrative of their trauma they continue to be vulnerable to react physiologically to reminders of the trauma as if they were back in the past.
- Frequent disruptions of trust, intense transference dilemmas make the therapeutic relationship extremely fragile.
The author describes some neuro-physiological, psychophysical and attachment resources regarding the reasons of those phenomena. For most important source she uses the work of Bessel van der Kolk.
Questions of practice
Tibor Cece Kiss: Acting out in dance therapy
“Acting out” has been regarded mostly in a negative light. It is almost equivalent to the patient “behaving badly” which is disapproved of by the professionals, even when they sympathise with it. Or better, not disapproved of, but understood as a form of resistance provoking counter-transference, a mechanism of defence leading to instant gratification of existing tension — and so not counted among the processes that further therapeutic change and healing.
Is it really that problematic if we express something through action, movement — i.e. nonverbally? Professionals working with action — such as psychodrama or dance therapy — think otherwise. In this respect changes have occurred in recent self and attachment theories as well. More and more they treat “acting out” as an important phenomenon, manifesting itself in the domain of “implicit relational knowing”, understanding of which is productive for the therapeutic process.
In my paper I would like to examine how expressions through action, i.e. literally “Agieren” (Freud’s original German term) or “acting out” can become a valid means for therapeutic processing, reworking and also what its limitations are. I will elaborate on how to understand “acting out” in therapies working with action.
We conclude that in general “acting out” can be understood as violation of the framework, but —depending on the applied therapeutic framework — there are differences. For example action in psychoanalysis is “out of bounds”, therefore it is called “acting out”, whereas in methods like psychodrama or dance therapy it is an essential tool. Finally, some examples serve to illustrate violation of the framework, i.e. “acting out” in dance therapy.
Essay study
John Salvendy: Why group therapy in the 21st century
Over the past two decades thriving of group psychotherapy has been threatened both by quasi-scientific developments in the evaluation of treatment methods and by a prevailing culture of narcissism and entitlement. The author discusses critically the impact of empirically based treatment and its counterpart — the common factors hypothesis- based therapies — on the theory and practice of (group) psychotherapy. The reasoning behind this development and the compounding repercussions of it and of the narcissistic culture of entitlement are analyzed. Stereotypical misperceptions regarding individuals’ life experiences and their expressions in and outside of therapy are pointed out. The often overlooked and hard to quantify advantages that group psychotherapy offers in exactly such a hurried and stressful atmosphere of anomie are recounted along with useful hints both for therapists and the teachers in the various training programs.
Theoretical study
Katalin Varga S.: Interactive emotional attunement — openness and boundaries
Theoretical relevance in practice
More and more patients seek psychotherapeutic help in order to assimilate life experiences from the past that have an elementary seminal effect on their lives. Beyond the somatic and psychic symptoms, the just found or lost partner, the constantly altering moral standards, religion as a self probing factor, are all able to initiate dynamics that enable the patient to become susceptible towards everyday events that have either destructive or constructive effects. This emotional functioning can also be revealed during hypnosis, where as part of the interactive emotional accordance, frankness, and the boundaries play a determining role in the development of therapy. In the article the complex processes of this interactive emotional attunement are illustrated through hypnotherapeutic cases as examples. Safety and interactional synchrony both feature in the relationship where the interactive partners find and exercise comprising a mutually comfortable balance in their honesty, approach towards or even getting away from the other. The article deals with the theoretic frame of trauma-processing, the openness depending on the separation of me-and-the-other, the model of posttraumatic growth, the development of social-moral emotions, the issue of moral disgust and spirituality. The theory is connected to the life events of patients, their emotional functioning following the experiences of the hypnotherapy sessions, which sometimes are in harmonious accordance with the therapist’s experiences, and to the processes detected in me as a therapist.
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