Extraordinary Resilience

[joshwriting]

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/issues/2006/december/hauser.php?page=1

I talked a bit ago about a lecture I attended on the subject of resilience. Well, Smithsonian has an interview with the author of a new book. From the page I linked:

Psychiatrist Stuart Hauser answers questions about his new book, Out of the Woods, which chronicles four emotionally disturbed teenagers

I can tell you that I will be getting the book and that just the interview has given me plenty to think about. And it makes an interesting companion piece for this, from the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/22/health/22KIDS.html?em&ex=1166936400&en=dc70978d39d5fa8e&ei=5087%0A

Troubled Children:
Parenting as Therapy for Child’s Mental Disorders

And this, also from the times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/health/psychology/19essa.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin

It's an essay, entitled Sometimes, the Why Really Isn’t Crucial, about the issues and difficulties of causation in therapeutic work.

Comments

[siderea]

1) The last of those links is a... I need a term for this. Perhaps that term is "propaganda". That author is a member of a certain psychotherapeutic faction. The purpose of that article is to make another faction look bad by implication, in the eyes of a lay public who don't actually understand what the fight is.

The two dogs in that fight are psychoanalytics and CBT. The author is a CBTer and he's trying to sway lay people to thinking ill of psychoanalysis.

Basically, the point of the article is to be prejudicial, not to inform. Of course, it's presented as informing; she's not forthright about just what she wants to convince you of, which is that you should prefer the (generally younger) CBT-trained clinicians over the (generally older) psychoanalysts.

Frankly, it's kinda embarrassing. Not only is she being disingenuous, but, sheesh, psychoanalytics? Talk about beating a dead horse. In the CBT vs. psychoanalytics fight, basically CBT has won. Not as much on its merits as CBT partisans would like to think: HMOs are willing to pay for CBT and generally not for psychoanalysis, so guess what most people are trained in these days?

2) This essay, however, neatly illuminates the (previously alluded to) veiled dig on my review form from my practicum. My clincial supervisor, under "Clinical Strengths" wrote "Siderea is very insightful." (Yeah, she's a CBTer. Ha, ha, very funny.)

3) Re: Resilience: What I wouldn't give for an MBTI assessment...