Editorial: Seeking the Meeting
The seventh issue of the magazine Systemic thinking and psychotherapy refers to the concept of meeting, sometimes as a target and sometimes as a goal, or to the consequences of its lack.
The seventh issue of the magazine Systemic thinking and psychotherapy refers to the concept of meeting, sometimes as a target and sometimes as a goal, or to the consequences of its lack.
The first mirror one faces in life is the mother’s gaze, through which one establishes a sense of self. An inadequate mirroring through the mother’s eyes instills in a child feelings of rejection, abandonment and shame, thus transferring narcissistic and identity deficits that imprint as trauma, void, deadness, lack of meaning.
The paper presents a clinical case study of a psychotherapeutic intervention, based on the model developed by Romme & Escher (2000), with an adult man in acute psychotic crisis who hears voices. The aim of this intervention was to decode the meaning of the voices and link the voices to the person’s history. At the same time, the person was trained in the use of cognitive and behavioural coping strategies, in order to manage the hearing voices experience and gain control over it.
The clinical material presented in this article is about the sessions of a Large Group that took place within a one-year postgraduate program on group dynamics carried out in 2012-2013. The study of this material is associated with the effect of the individual’s intrapsychic organization on his relationships, and with interaction between individualsas a field of study per se.
Resonance is a common phenomenon that occurs during family sessions. In psychotherapy, the term was introduced by Foulkes in the field of group analysis. Then Elkaim brought the concept of resonance into human systems and used it as a supervision tool. Finally, Jensen investigated the phenomenon and added the concept of relational resonance.
At first there is an attempt to define crisis as well as its encounter with the individual. It is also attempted to connect crisis with the social evolution that preceded it and the development of cultural demands and conflicts. Western society’s crisis can be conceived on the basis of the collapse of the old value system and the prevalence of new tendencies such as extreme consumerism, avoidance of thinking, the denial of perishing, difference, lack. As a result we have loneliness, uncertainty, insecurity, lack of satisfaction, confusion of poles and identity.
It was the 80s when I first came across the writings of Dr. Sotiris Manolopoulos, when I read, as a trainee, his basic handbook of Child Psychiatry. Since then, S.M’s writings accompany the professional course of lots of colleagues and specialists working with children and adolescents in general.