Volney Gay

Deliberate practice exercises help trainees achieve competence in essential psychodynamic therapy skills and apply them in a range of clinical situations while honing their own personal style and language. These exercises present role-playing scenarios in which two trainees act as a patient and a therapist, switching back and forth under the guidance of a supervisor. The therapist improvises appropriate and authentic responses to patient statements organized into two difficulty levels-intermediate and advanced-that reflect common patient questions and concerns. Each of the first 2 exercises focuses on a single skill, such as engaging in a therapeutic inquiry, deepening emotional experience, pointing out defenses, making transference interpretations, and providing corrective emotional experiences. Two comprehensive exercises follow in which trainees integrate these essential skills into a single psychodynamic therapy session. Step-by-step instructions guide participants through the exercises, identify criteria for mastering each skill, and explain how to monitor and adjust difficulty. Guidelines to help trainers and trainees get the most out of training are also provided.

The real reason Americans owned slaves was not just financial. They did it because they liked it. For the first two centuries of American history, starting with the colonists, slavery was a part of the social, economic, and governmental order. Looking back, many of us find it more comfortable to view slave owners as evil or sociopathic. The startling truth is that many were otherwise admirable. To understand America's struggles with race relations, we must take an uncensored look at our country's involvement with slavery. We examine three questions: - What were the pleasures of owning slaves? - How did freedom-loving, American Christians explain ownership to themselves? - How did they defend themselves against this double contradiction?Answering those questions will help us face our future with greater clarity.From the Preface to On The Pleasures of Owning Persons: The Hidden Face of American Slavery: This book is a study of the pleasures that slavery gives to owners. This is a demanding, if not an unfathomable topic that rests upon a simple, self-evident truth. The unfathomable part is because slavery seems remote from us now in the 21st century we struggle to imagine its workings from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The self-evident truth is that millions of Americans, over a span of nearly four centuries, owned slaves because they wished to. They actively chose and maintained a way of life which they felt merited protection and permanency. A small number of these people were sociopathic, most likely between 2 and 4 percent, the usual norm for large populations. i] Most were not. Indeed, outstanding persons, among them undoubted geniuses like Thomas Jefferson, engaged in slavery all their lives. It is difficult to understand sociopathic persons, but the vast majority of owners were like you and me, normal. Great men who laid the foundations of American freedom defended to their graves the institution of slavery. This book addresses three questions: what were these pleasures; how did freedom-loving, American Christians explain ownership to themselves; how did they defend themselves against this double contradiction? i] Buckels, Erin E., Paul D. Trapnell, and Delroy L. Paulhus. "Trolls just want to have fun." Personality and individual Differences 67 (2014): 97-102. They conclude, "Thus cyber-trolling appears to be an Internet manifestation of everyday sadism" p. 97.

Money and support tend to flow in the direction of economics, science, and other academic departments that demonstrate measurable "progress." The humanities, on the other hand, offer more abstract and uncertain outcomes. A humanist's objects of study are more obscure in certain ways than pathogens and cells. Consequently, it seems as if the humanities never truly progress. Is this a fair assessment? By comparing objects of science, such as the brain, the galaxy, the amoeba, and the quark, with objects of humanistic inquiry, such as the poem, the photograph, the belief, and the philosophical concept, Volney Gay reestablishes a fundamental distinction between science and the humanities. He frees the latter from its pursuit of material-based progress and restores its disciplines to a place of privilege and respect. Using the metaphor of magnification, Gay shows that, while we can investigate natural objects to the limits of imaging capacity, magnifying cultural objects dissolves them into noise. In other words, cultural objects can be studied only within their contexts and through the prism of metaphor and narrative. Gathering examples from literature, art, film, philosophy, religion, science, and psychoanalysis, Gay builds a new justification for the humanities. By revealing the unseen and making abstract ideas tangible, the arts create meaningful wholes, which itself is a form of progress.