Coping, Not Choking, Under the Pressure of a Terrorist Attack: A Crisis Leadership Coping Model

Organizational crises, especially those of an extreme nature that include threats to survival and mass casualties, are deeply psychologically challenging for leaders. Previous research has focused on the effectiveness of leaders’ crisis management without much consideration for how leaders manage their own crisis reactions. This study was carried out in the crisis management facilities at the headquarters of a multinational energy corporation while a terrorist attack was ongoing in one of its subsidiaries. The unique access and data provide insights into how leaders react to crises and seek support by using different coping strategies. We develop a three-phase model (acceptance, psychological flexibility, and commitment) that illustrates the in-situ creation of a holding environment to support leaders in coping, not choking, under the pressure of a life-threatening crisis.

The Racializing Womb: Surrogacy and Epigenetic Kinship

In gestational surrogacy arrangements, the womb is often figured as a holding environment that brings the child of commissioning parents to fruition but does not shape fetal identity. This article probes the racial imaginary of such a figuration—what I term the “nonracializing womb”—where gestation is seen as peripheral to racial transmission. Drawing on feminist science studies frameworks and data from interviews with parents who commissioned surrogates, this article traces the cultural politics of the nonracializing womb, positioning it as an index for broader understandings of race, reproductive labor, and kinship that hinge on nuclear and biogenetic forms. It then problematizes this figure of gestation by engaging emerging research on environmental epigenetics, which offers a lively model of pregnancy as shaping fetal biology, blurring the lines between surrogate and fetus. I argue that epigenetics offers a resource to reimagine gestation as a racializing process, by theorizing race not as solely genetic, but as relational, socio-environmental, and forged through distributed kinship lineages.

A Bridge between Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: An Overview of the Neurobiological Effects of Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy

This study sets out to investigate the mechanisms by which psychoanalytical psychotherapy can induce neurobiological changes. From Neuroscience which, in accordance with his thinking at the time, Freud never disregarded, the concepts of neuronal plasticity, enriched environment and the neurobiological aspects of the attachment process. From Psychoanalysis, the theory of transference, M. Mahler’s psychological evolution model, the concept of the regulating function of the self-objects and Winnicott’s holding environment concept. Together these provide a useful bridge toward the understanding of the neurobiological changes resulting from psychoanalytical psychotherapy. One concludes that psychoanalytical psychotherapy, through transference, acts as a new model of object relation and learning which furthers the development of certain brain areas, specifically, the right hemisphere, and the prefrontal and limbic cortices, which have a regulating function on affects.

A "space" created in psychoanalysis and Eastern thought: a discussion of holding environment, container, and wu-wei

In this article Winnicott, Bion, and Zhuangzi's three metaphorical concepts of psychological space are compared to understand the meaning of their respective use of space and unity, as well as the importance of the unity of space itself. This is carried out against the background of psychoanalysis and Eastern thought. This is not only a state that analysts need to be able to achieve in psychoanalytic therapy, but is also related to the quality of the mental state of each of us in our daily lives. An open and perceptive experience is responsible for the spontaneous presentation and for mental growth, and in Eastern thought, at its core is the wu-wei thought, defined as unconflicted personal harmony, inaction, or free-flowing spontaneity. Although psychoanalysis is a therapeutic method, it is not limited to this function. It is also a preparation for patients to approach their true self or "truth". Freud (1912e) described a way of approaching "an open mind, free from any presupposition" that could be achieved through analysis, and he promoted the development of mature interpersonal relations. Buddhist or Taoist practice, on the other hand, relies on correct breathing to calm oneself. Beyond all doubt, Winnicott, Bion, and the wise men of the East all knew that connecting with emotion or acquiring knowledge must be done in a calm state of mind.

The Tempering Frame

Ernie Gehr has worked in both film and digital media. This chapter examines several key works representative of both media. In contrast to critical approaches that see Gehr’s work as purely cognitive or structural exercises, the author argues that it has a deeply personal dimension, the sources of which can be traced to his childhood, and even earlier, to his parents’ experiences during the Second World War. Gehr’s incorrigible sense of play and fascination with magic are explored as essential to his love affair with motion picture media. His use of the frame in both media is particularly stressed as having a strong psychic function, not unlike that of the holding environment provided in psychoanalytic therapy.

Early career researchers’ identity threats in the field: The shelter and shadow of collective support

Based on an autoethnographic study of early career researchers’ field research experiences, we show how individuals deal with moments of discrimination that present identity threats. This is accomplished through participating in the construction of a shared holding environment to provide emotional shelter and resources for resultant identity work. We show how they collectively develop anticipatory responses to future identity threats and inadvertently how this allows the effects of discrimination to be both unchallenged and amplified. We draw implications for identity work theory, adding to current understandings of identity threats, tensions, and challenges and the dynamics through which these are addressed, avoided, or worked around, as well as the shadow side of such activities. We also offer practical implications about the business schools’ role in nurturing early career researchers’ identity work.

The school-to-prison pipeline: a failed holding environment

The deleterious impact of the school-to-prison pipeline (STPP) on minority youth in the United States, as well as the underlying sociocultural and political factors contributing to the pipeline, are well established. While the literature provides abundant evidence about the negative impact of secondary school punitive and exclusionary disciplinary policies on students’ behavioural and academic outcomes, consideration of the relational world of the school and its subjective impact is largely absent. This article contributes an examination of the relational world of schools to the analysis of the STPP and its developmental impact on youth of colour. By applying Diamond’s (2017; 2020) object relations approach to life in secondary schools, the article exposes how the STPP undermines schools’ capacity to provide a healthy holding environment. The article demonstrates how the school functions as a failed holding environment and concludes with case examples illustrating how psychodynamically informed school-based interventions are positioned to mitigate the toxic effects of the STPP on the identity development of adolescents of colour.