Thesis (Ph.D.)--Lehigh University, 2010. / Adviser: Arpana G. Inman.

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<p>The top five sources of stress for graduate school students include academic responsibilities, fiscal issues, anxiety caused by stress, work-life balance issues, and familial issues. This research explored the perceptions of marriage and family therapists regarding stress management in these areas for graduate students. Five female therapists were purposefully interviewed in the Riverside County region of California. The interview included five open ended questions and five closed ended questions, totaling 10 questions. The top five stressors were addressed using two questions for each. The research resulted in five themes regarding stress management: (a) realistic expectations, (b) proper budgeting, (c) self-care, (d) healthy perspectives, and (e) effective communication. </p>

<p> Over the centuries, the meaning of wonder has decayed substantially. An immense distance and complex history lie between Socrates' declaration that wisdom begins in wonder and the commercialism of today's Wonder Bread, Wonderbra and Wonderful World of Disney. Since few have considered wonder to be a psychologically significant experience, scholarship in this area has been negligible. Yet, amidst the travails of living, experiences of wonder can constitute transformational epiphanies and unlatch the flow of life through deepening subjectivity; magnifying perceptions; amplifying sensitivity to beauty; expanding horizons; recognizing the extraordinary in the ordinary; intuiting the sacred in the secular; and promoting possibility, delight, reverence, and gratefulness for the gift of life. </p><p> This dissertation contemplates the dimensions of the experience of wonder; wonder's connection to soul; and how we might attune to wonder. Since wonder is both the condition and the primary principle of the phenomenological reduction (van Manen, 1990, p. 185), several scholars concur that no adequate method exists for researching wonder, for it entails a recursive paradox of wondering about the wonderment of wonder, with wonder having the first and last word. Therefore, this work adopts a mixed method, combining depth psychological and phenomenological approaches with hermeneutically amplified heuristic inquiry. The researcher's experience of wonder provides the primary data, and multi-disciplinary texts serve to unfold this data. </p><p> The findings identify wonder's key themes, characteristics, valences, and nuances, and ways to attune and attend to wonder's presence, both inside and outside the consulting room. Ultimately, the study personifies wonder as a feminine voice of soul, and advocates her inclusion in depth psychotherapy as integral to its honoring of tending the soul, the etymological root of psychotherapy itself. Wonder reveals herself as an ineffable encounter with existence and the world, an epiphany of embodied, archetypal resonance between the individual's soul and the soul of the world, when "the universe shivers in the depths of the human" (Swimme, 1985, p. 32). This study, embracing knowledge as beginning and ending in wonder, grants her the final word. </p><p> Key words: Wonder, soul, resonance, epiphany, ineffability, attunement, attentiveness, unknowing, <i>aesthesis,</i> intuition. </p>

<p> Having worked with individuals suffering from eating disorders, I began to wonder what the psyche of a person with this affliction might look like. Could it be represented in a tangible form? Using a heuristic/artistic-creative methodological research approach, I went back to my personal journals, dreams, and artwork from the time I suffered from bulimia. I searched for recurring images from my own psyche that reflected the distorted relationship between persona, shadow, and Self. The inspiration for the costume design to create an imaginal representation of the psyche originated from a client, who made a remark in appreciation of the way a costume could make a statement about the inner world of a character in a play. This brought me to imagine an eating disorder as a character in a play. The exterior would exhibit the persona of perfection, but the interior world would contain the shadow with all of its conflicts and sorrows.</p>

<p> This thesis is a heuristic, hermeneutic investigation into regression using the author's experience as a case study. Regressive play and the desire for deeper regression within the analytic container are explored, guided by the question: What is the experience of following one's impulse to regress to more and more primordial states, and what kind of psychological container is needed to facilitate that deepening both inter- and intrapersonally? The author details a history of regression beginning with Sigmund Freud and continuing to psychoanalyst Michael Balint's <i>basic fault,</i> object relations therapist Donald Winnicott's <i>regression to dependence, </i> and Jungian analyst Brian Feldman's <i>psychic skin.</i> The therapeutic role of play is explored. The analyst's response to regression and how it facilitates or hinders the client's ability to regress are presented. This thesis challenges the notion that regression should be discouraged within a psychoanalytic frame, instead suggesting ways the analyst may hold the regression elementally.</p><p>