Where did that come from? Countertransference and the Oedipal triangle in family therapy

Family systems therapists are uncomfortable using psychoanalytic terms. This reluctance restricts discussion of therapeutic process. How does one describe, for example, the therapist’s subjective experiences of the patient or family? Psychoanalysts call this countertransference yet there is no equivalent word commonly used in systemic practice. Therapists who avoid the word may also avoid the experience and thereby risk losing sight of fundamental clinical events

Where is our humanity?

Consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr Sebastian Kraemer challenges assumptions and prejudices about claimants

Large-Scale Disasters and the Insurance Industry

We investigate the impact of the 20 largest – in terms of insured losses – man-made or natural disasters on various insurance industry stock indices. We show via an event study that insurance sectors worldwide are quite resilient, in a market–value sense, to unexpected losses to capital: our data provide evidence that equity market investors believe that insurance companies will on average be able to make losses back over the foreseeable future, i.e. that the adverse shocks to equity which have resulted from these catastrophes will be compensated by either an outward shift of the demand curve or an ability to raise premiums, or both.disaster, insurance industry, event-study

The infant citizen: Mean societies produce mean people. Though often disappointed a baby is born to expect some kind – a rather conservative kind – of socialism

Babies haven’t changed much for millennia. Give or take a few enzymes this perfectly designed little bundle of desires and interests has not needed to evolve. Of all primates, the human is the most immature at birth, after which brain growth accelerates and is ‘wired’ according to the kinds of experience the infant has. Provided there are a few familiar and affectionate people there to care continuously for him or her, baby will be fine. If not, evolution has taken care of that too. You live in a cruel world and treat him roughly? He will develop into a compulsively self-reliant and ruthless individual with little concern for others. Mean societies produce mean people. Through attentive care in the early years we may hope to produce thoughtful, curious and confident young people1 but our social arrangements are essentially hostile and competitive. Having a baby is regarded as an expensive undertaking rather than as a contribution to the future of society. Encouraged by successive governments our world is geared to markets. "It's the economy,stupid" means you can't do anything without considering the immediate cost. The more this idea takes hold the stupider we become. The current government’s dedication to continuous welfare cuts hits children disproportionately. Neoliberalism is the enemy of children

Dr Bowlby: a psychiatrist for our times

Inspired by his experience as a teacher in a special school, John Bowlby became a doctor in order to give psychological treatment to children and their families. His debt to psychoanalysis is evident, while his determination to give external life events at least equal weight with mental states led him towards attachment theory. This pathway is well known, but Bowlby's parallel career as a child psychiatrist doggedly independent of psychoanalysis or medical practice, is not. His intelligent curiosity about human relationships took him beyond the prevailing scientific and clinical fixation with diagnosis, which persists to this day. Dr Bowlby's clinical approach is a model for modern child and adolescent psychiatrists

After the riots. Survival or development? The infant policy maker

Sebastian Kraemer looks at the evidence from developmental psychology to show the vital importance of a society which supports the infant to develop secure attachments

The Reflection Effect in Memory-Based Decisions

Previous research has indicated a bias in memory-based decision-making, with people preferring options that they remember better. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying this memory bias remain elusive. Here, we propose that choosing poorly remembered options is conceptually similar to choosing options with uncertain outcomes. We predicted that the memory bias would be reduced when options had negative subjective value, analogous to the reflection effect, according to which uncertainty aversion is stronger in gains than in losses. In two preregistered experiments ( N = 36 each), participants made memory-based decisions between appetitive and aversive stimuli. People preferred better-remembered options in the gain domain, but this behavioral pattern reversed in the loss domain. This effect was not related to participants' ambiguity or risk attitudes, as measured in a separate task. Our results increase the understanding of memory-based decision-making and connect this emerging field to well-established research on decisions under uncertainty