: The bystander is defined as an active and involved participant in the social architecture of school violence, rather than a passive witness. Bullying is redefined from a triadic ...(bully‐victim‐bystander) rather than dyadic (bully‐victim) perspective. Teachers, including administrators, and students can promote or ameliorate bullying and other forms of violence when in this social role. Cases are used to illustrate this phenomenon, including one in which a teacher is murdered. Data are presented from a study of teachers' perceptions of other teachers who bully students, suggesting that bullying of students by teachers and bullying of teachers by students is a factor in the aggravation of school bullying and violence that needs to be more openly discussed. An intervention in nine elementary schools involving 3,600 students is outlined to illustrate how a focus on reflective mentalizing and awareness of the importance of the helpful bystander role can promote a peaceful school‐learning environment for students and teachers. The paper concludes with an outline for research into how communities and schools adopt bystanding roles when faced with complex problems like youth violence, and how they may avoid facing the problems by blaming law enforcement and educators.
This article addresses the issue of why it is that United States of America glorifies violence and, at the same time, is scared of it, out of proportion to the country's overwhelming world strength ...and influence. The article focuses initially on the need to own weapons of mass destruction beyond those needed for sports, including hunting. My psychoanalytic hypothesis suggests that there is a displacement of a fear of being seen by the world as altruistic and, therefore, feminine (castrated and weak); and a hypermasculine defensive façade is often adopted. A history of altruism as reflected in community attitudes is given together with several examples of how altruistic interventions can be very helpful both in schools and in community-wide interventions. The article is the first in a series that will explore altruism as a drive and important in individual analysis beyond its role as an ego defense.
To examine how involvement in aggressor-victim interactions is linked to somatic complaints, illnesses, and physical injuries among elementary school-aged children.
This study was composed of a ...school-based sample of 590 children in grades 3 through 5. Independent sources were used to assess victimization (self-report) and aggression (peer report) in the fall semester. School nursing logs for the entire school year were collected in May and coded for the number of times each child presented with a somatic complaint, illness, or injury.
Both aggression and victimization were significantly related to all 3 reasons for nurse visits, controlling for demographic variables. Higher levels of aggression and victimization each were independently associated with more frequent visits to the school nurse for somatic complaints, illnesses, and injuries. A significant victimization-times-aggression interaction was found for illnesses, with nonaggressive victimized children presenting most frequently for illness visits.
Involvement in aggressor-victim interactions, as either aggressor, victim, or both, is associated with more frequent health complaints, based on school nursing logs. Prevention, early identification, and treatment of problems with victimization and aggression may have important health implications for children.
This is the fourth paper in a series proposing a psychoanalytic concept of community. The third paper of the series centered on the unconscious psychological tasks involved in creating and sustaining ...a community and in it achieving its reason for existence; tasks such as the formation of bonds, identity and boundary. In this fourth paper we propose that the effectiveness with which a community can carry out these tasks determines how well that community is able to function. The successful performance of the tasks is dependent on: (1) a community's capacity for psychic function, that is, its capacity to process internal tension and conflict, and both everyday and adverse experiences; (2) the effectiveness of its social defense against anxiety; and (3) its adaptability to changes and challenges in its environment.
A case is made for community-based psychoanalysis as part of usual psychoanalytic practice. A safe community is first defined psychodynamically, after which three variations are presented on the ...community-based style and qualities and modes of practice compared with individual psychoanalytic therapy and psychoanalysis. Three community case studies, from Jamaica and the U.S., are then presented to illustrate and lend depth and aliveness to the theory. Finally, a plea is made for a community-based initiative in preventive physical and mental health care that uses schools as a basic site for addressing the causes and cure of socially and economically costly community problems, creating healthy individuals through each turn of the pre-K through twelfth grade school cycle.
Background: While school‐based anti‐bullying programs are widely used, there have been few controlled trials of effectiveness. This study compared the effect of manualized School Psychiatric ...Consultation (SPC), CAPSLE (a systems and mentalization focused whole school intervention), and treatment‐as‐usual (TAU) in reducing aggression and victimization among elementary school children.
Method: Participants were 1,345 third to fifth graders in nine elementary schools in a medium‐sized Midwestern city who took part in a cluster‐level randomized controlled trial with stratified restricted allocation, to assess efficacy after two years of active intervention and effectiveness after one year of minimal input maintenance intervention. Outcome measures included peer and self‐reports of bullying, bystanding, and mentalizing behavior and classroom behavioral observations of disruptive and off‐task behavior.
Results: CAPSLE moderated the developmental trend of increasing peer‐reported victimization (p < .01), aggression (p < .05), self‐reported aggression (p < .05) and aggressive bystanding (p < .05), compared to TAU schools. CAPSLE also moderated a decline in empathy and an increase in the percent of children victimized compared to SPC (p < .01) and TAU conditions (p < .01). Results for self‐reported victimization, helpful bystanding, and beliefs in the legitimacy of aggression did not suggest significantly different changes among the study conditions over time. CAPSLE produced a significant decrease in off‐task (p < .001) and disruptive classroom behaviors (p < .01), while behavioral change was not observed in SPC and TAU schools. Superiority with respect to TAU for victimization (p < .05), aggression (p < .01), and helpful (p < .05) and aggressive bystanding (p < .01) were maintained in the follow‐up year.
Conclusions: A teacher‐implemented school‐wide intervention that does not focus on disturbed children substantially reduced aggression and improved classroom behavior.
A new concept of community is proposed in this third paper of the series, “Towards a psychoanalytic concept of community”. This concept emphasizes the unconscious, collective, psychological tasks ...involved in creating and sustaining a community, as well as the tasks undertaken by the community in achieving its reason for being. One of the core psychological tasks is the creation of bonding among its members. When a community is being formed it experiences itself subjectively as “us”, and needs to come to terms with what is “not us”. A set of psychological tasks comes into play and they relate to the formation and maintenance of its boundary and identity. Each of these psychological tasks is underpinned by unconscious psychic processes; such as symbolization to create boundary, projective and introjective identifications to create bonds and identity.
Using descriptions of inner-city adolescents being seen at a community-based mental health clinic, the authors demonstrate how the use of altruism enabled the adolescents to alter their inner lives ...and their behavior. The trajectory of development toward relatedness, creativity, and fulfillment was reestablished.
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