Existential Matters and Quality of Dying: A Model of Maturation Processes.

How people face mortality is a crucial matter for medicine. Yet, there is not a coherent and comprehensive understanding of how people can process the experience such that it is not traumatic. This article offers a "logic model" of how existential maturation occurs, using analogies from cell biology to explain the process.

Taking outside in, turning inside out: Exploring social dimensions and psychotherapeutic process in the play therapy of a young girl in foster care.

This paper, a collaborative effort, describes the work of A Home Within (AHW), a volunteer community-based organization providing pro-bono long term psychotherapy to current and former foster youth. We provide a brief description of the treatment model, present a report of treatment conducted by an AHW volunteer, and discuss further reflections on the societal context of our psychoanalytically-informed work. In-depth psychotherapeutic process from the treatment of a young girl in a pre-adoptive foster placement elucidates the psychotherapeutic possibilities when a psychoanalytic treatment model is accessible to current and former foster youth, usually deprived of this form of treatment due to overburdened, underfunded community mental health systems in the U.

Psychotherapy for Functional Neurological (Conversion) Disorder: A Case Bridging Mind, Brain, and Body.

Functional neurologic (conversion) disorder (FND) is a core neuropsychiatric condition directly at the intersection of psychiatry and neurology. Over the past several decades, renewed interest in FND has been catalyzed by use of a "rule-in" diagnostic approach leveraging positive clinical signs specific for the diagnosis. In parallel, advances have occurred in identifying mechanisms, etiologic factors, and evidence-based treatments for this population.

A theory of the setting: The transformation of unrepresented experience and play.

The psychoanalytic setting can be defined in part by its functions. The setting operates as an auxiliary function for the analyst's capacities, which include containment, interpretation, as a participant in play, and supervisor of the setting. The setting houses the transition from unrepresented to represented experience.

Play in the analytic setting: The development and communication of meaning in child analysis.

Child analysts increasingly appreciate that play can stand on its own as a mutative process. When the analyst shares a child's "play state," her participation creates a transitional space in which a therapeutic process is enhanced. During play, children experiment with new, improvisational ways of sharing and negotiating meaning between themselves and another.

Chronic fatigue syndrome and the somatic expression of emotional distress: Applying the concept of illusory mental health to address the controversy.

Objective: The process of somatization in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) was investigated using the concept of illusory mental health (IMH). IMH involves self-reporting low emotional distress alongside performance-based assessment of distress.

Method: We studied IHM and physical symptoms in 175 women across four groups: (a) CFS plus depression; (b) CFS with no depression (CFS-ND); (c) depressive disorder without CFS; and (d) healthy controls (HC).

Reviving and Refining Psychodynamic Interpretation of the Wechsler Intelligence Tests: The Verbal Comprehension Subtests.

The Wechsler intelligence tests (currently Wechsler, 2008 , 2014) have traditionally been part of the multimethod test battery favored by psychodynamically oriented assessors. In this tradition, assessors have used Wechsler data to make inferences about personality that transcend cognition. Recent trends in clinical psychology, however, have deemphasized this psychodynamic way of working.

A developmental perspective on early-life exposure to neurotoxicants.

Background: Studies of early-life neurotoxicant exposure have not been designed, analyzed, or interpreted in the context of a fully developmental perspective.

Objectives: The goal of this paper is to describe the key principles of a developmental perspective and to use examples from the literature to illustrate the relevance of these principles to early-life neurotoxicant exposures.

Methods: Four principles are discussed: 1) the effects of early-life neurotoxicant exposure depend on a child's developmental context; 2) deficits caused by early-life exposure initiate developmental cascades that can lead to pathologies that differ from those observed initially; 3) early-life neurotoxicant exposure has intra-familial and intergenerational impacts; 4) the impacts of early-life neurotoxicant exposure influence a child's ability to respond to future insults.

Mortality, integrity, and psychoanalysis (who are you to me? Who am I to you?).

The author narrates her experience of mourning her therapist's sudden death. The profession has neglected implications of the analyst's mortality: what is lost or vulnerable to loss? What is that vulnerability's function? The author's process of mourning included her writing and her becoming an analyst. Both pursuits inspired reflections on mortality in two overlapping senses: bodily (the analyst is mortal and can die) and character (the analyst is mortal and can err).

Play technique in psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Imaginary play is often a child's best way of communicating affects, fantasies, and internal states. In play children are freer to express their forbidden and conflicted thoughts. Consequently, one of the best ways for the therapist to enter the child's world is to do so from within the displacement of the play process.

Core issues in the treatment of personality-disordered patients.

I have offered my understanding of the primary psychological problem for personality-disordered patients. They lack some or all of the selfmaintenance capacities that are required for basic self-stability and survival. That is, they cannot sufficiently provide themselves the experience of being real, warmly secure, worthy, and self-loving, and of having a genuine identity.

Treating children with affect dysregulation. Discussion of Dr. Wendy Olesker's analysis of Matt.

This paper is a discussion of Dr. Wendy Olesker's sensitive analytic treatment of an impulsive, affectively dysregulated, preschool child. Drawing on her knowledge and understanding of developmental interference, trauma, and conflict, Dr.

"The noise monitor": a developmental perspective on verbal and nonverbal meaning-making in psychoanalysis.

This paper discusses a contribution of developmental theory to the psychoanalytic concept of "the talking cure." The developmental theory presented is the dyadic expansion of consciousness model (Tronick 2007), a model consistent with the principles of nonlinear systems theory. The concept of "polysemic bundles" as a way of understanding the multiple simultaneous meaning-making processes occurring in dyadic communication is introduced.