Posts Tagged Under: María Moya Guirao

Anxiety in cancer

lazo rosa del cáncer

lazo rosa del Cáncer

Did you know that…..

According to the World Health Organization each year more than 10 million new cases are diagnosed of cancer?

In addition, the WHO foresees that by 2020 the figure of 16 million new cancer cases per year will have been reached.

It is common for people diagnosed with some type of cancer to have anxiety problems. This anxiety is usually experienced both, at the time of cancer diagnosis and throughout the treatment. There are many moments of stress because of the harshness of cancer treatment and the uncertain outcome.

It is also very important to take care of the form and amount of information that is given to the cancer patients, because the degree of anxiety is closely related to it. The more and better information is given to the patients, the better they will face their illness.

We must also point out that not only cancer patients are affected by anxiety, they can also suffer from their closest relatives who will accompany them throughout the process.

Depression can also appear in some patients at any time during treatment, be it surgical, chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

A psychotherapeutic or psychological support is advisable in almost all cases.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

Read More

Orthorexia nervosa

healthy food

healthy food

What is Orthorexia?

Ortorexia or Orthorexia nervosa is an eating disorder that consists of a pathological obsession with eating food considered healthy.

The person suffering from this disorder lives obsessed with eating food considered “pure” or uncontaminated. He spends a lot of time and spends a lot of energy and money to obtain what is supposed to be more “healthy”, but his obsession leads him to such extremes that he even rejects food that is totally healthy and nutritious if he considers that it is not adequate enough.

Subjects with orthorexia are dogmatic, and in many cases very eccentric. It is advisable to eat healthy and exercise to have a healthy life and avoid many diseases, but these people take it to an extreme that sometimes end up being poorly nourished, by unjustifiably rejecting certain foods that the human body needs.

Etymologically the word Orthorexia comes from the Greek prefix “ortho” which means correct, straight, according to the norm, and from the Greek word “oregsia” which means to desire.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

Read More

Sigmund Freud and Georg Groddeck

Georg Groddeck

Georg Groddeck

Did you know…..

In a letter to Sigmund Freud the German doctor Georg Groddeck wrote him the following?

“In 1912 I published a book in which there is a premature judment, whose text alone shows that at that time I did not know of the psychoanalysis more than by hearsay, it would not require an explicit confirmation that my unforgivable error was not based but in ignorance, which does not mitigate in any way .. “

Georg Groddeck was referring to the fierce and unjust criticism he had made to Psychoanalysis years earlier in his book entitled Nasamecu.

Many times have we heard or read critiques of psychoanalysis or Freud by people who, like Groddeck confessed, knew about psychoanalysis only by hearsay or had not read a single book by Freud.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

Read More

Harlow and the monkeys

mona con su cría

mona con su cría

Did you know…..

that Harry Harlow (1905-1981) carried out interesting experiments in the sixties on the psychological effects on the offspring of rhesus monkeys isolated from their mothers?

What this American psychologist, companion of Abraham Maslow in the University of Wisconsin, saw is that the physical contact with the mother in the pups of rhesus monkeys is tremendously important for the normal psychological development of these monkeys.

In one of his experiments Harlow put some monkey pups with a “mother” made of soft towel cloth, which did not give the monkey any food. There was another “mother” made of wire next to which was a bottle from which the baby could eat. The cubs had been kept away from their real mothers a few hours after birth. Well, the result was that the babies spent more time with the rag mother than with the wire mother, although this one could “feed them” and the other did not.

The psychoanalyst John Bowlby had already demonstrated the importance of contact with the mother, “Theory of attachment,” in human babies. The American psychoanalyst René Spitz had also reached similar conclusions by studying children far from their mothers.

On the other hand, somehow the experiments of Harlow and the studies of the psychoanalysts cited contradicted the assertion of the first behaviorists who underestimated the role of emotions and focused solely on the study of behavior. These behaviorists considered that only measurable behaviors should be studied or investigated, and what was not so, they did not consider it scientific. Behavioral psychologist John Watson said the following: “When tempted to caress your child, remember that mother’s love is a dangerous instrument.”

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

Read More

Wallon development stages

Henry Wallon

Henry Wallon

According to the French physician and psychologist Henry Wallon ((1879-1963), the human being goes through a series of stages in his psychological development, this development in the child would be as follows:

1.- First stage or pure impulsive stage. This stage of child development, which begins with birth, is characterized by motor activity that reflects different stimuli.

2.- Second stage or emotional stage. This stage begins at six months and is characterized by the affective symbiosis with the mother.

3.- Third space or sensitive motor stage. This stage begins at the end of the first year or at the beginning of the second. It is the moment of the acquisition of walking and spoken language.

4.- Fourth stage or stadium of the project. Wallon thought that in this stage the child is projected onto things to be perceived as well.

5.- Fifth stage or stadium of personalism. Now, between two and a half years and three years, it is important for the child to perceive himself as an autonomous individual, that is, he will acquire “ego consciousness“. It is the stage of negativism and opposition.

6.- Sixth stage or stage of thought. It begins around six years of age and marks the beginning of the development of logical thinking and socialization. School life allows you to establish new relationships outside of your family.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

Read More

Maria Montessori Biography

Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori Biography

Maria Montessori (1870-1952) was an intelligent feminist, psychiatrist and Italian pedagogue, who stood out especially in she studied medicinethe field of Pedagogy, and not so much in that of Psychiatry. The most important contribution in Psychiatry was his classification of mental illnesses, curiously realized shortly after Sigmund Freud, the creator of Psychoanalysis, made his famous Classification of Neuroses.

Maria Montessori was born in Chiaraballe, a village in Ancona, (Italy) and died in Noordwjek (Holland). Montessori was the first woman to graduate as a doctor in Italy. María Montessori was the daughter of Alessandro Montessori, a conservative soldier, who initially opposed she studied medicine, and Renilde Stoppani.

Before studying Medicine, María Montessori studied Engineering. Subsequently he also studied Philosophy at the University of Rome, Experimental Psychology, Anthropology, etc. With regard to the latter  subject She even became a professor at the Faculty of Anthropology, and also wrote a book entitled “Pedagogical Anthropology“.

After the unification of Italy, Maria Montessori, a deeply Catholic woman, became interested in the problems of women and children. In 1898 Montessori attended a Pedagogical Congress in Turin In that congress she affirmed that the child with intellectual delay could be

Read More

What do you need to be happy?

happiness

happiness

What do you need to be happy?

According to a recent study conducted in the United Kingdom, safety, good humor and leisure is what it takes to be happy.

British researchers conducted an investigation in 1938 to find out what makes people happy. In that year an ad was placed in a local newspaper asking its readers “What is happiness?“. Responded 226 people, who said that security, knowledge and religion was the most important thing to be happy.

Recently, the same study has been carried out in the same city. The psychologists Sandie McHugh and Jerome Carson, directors of the study, say that currently, although safety is at the top, good humor and leisure are in a better position in this new survey. Religion is considered in the current study as one of the least important factors to be happy.

They were also asked if they were happier in the city they lived in (Bolton, United Kingdom) or, on the contrary, far from it. In the old survey the majority of the subjects affirmed that he was happier in Bolton, whereas the current study 63% affirmed that he was happier far from his city.

They were also asked if they thought that the luck factor was important for happiness. In this case the results were similar in both surveys, 40%.

Regarding the question of whether they considered that money was important for happiness, in both surveys most people answered negatively.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

Read More

The Future of Psychoanalysis

Eric Kandel

Eric Kandel

Did you know…..

Eric Kandel, Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, published in The American Journal of Psychiatry an interesting article entitled “Biology and the future of psychoanalysis: A new intellectual framework for psychiatry revisited”?

In that article he said, among other things, the following:

1- Psychoanalysis still represents the most coherent and intellectually satisfying vision of the mind.

2- Freud taught us to listen carefully to patients and in a new way, in a way that nobody had used before.

3- Sigmund Freud and his students made important contributions to the knowledge of unconscious mental processes and motivations.

4- Freud is the great modern thinker on human motivations.

5- The twentieth century has been marked by Freud’s deep understanding of the psychological problems that have historically occupied the Western mind.

– The strengths of psychoanalysis are its scope and the complexity of the issues it addresses.

Eric R. Kandel was born in Austria in 1929, but has developed his entire career in the United States of America where he has been a professor at the Universities of Columbia and New York. Kandel is a neuropsychiatrist who has made important contributions to the knowledge of the Physiology of memory and learning.

Among his numerous publications, it is worth quoting “Neuroscience Principles” and “Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and the New Biology of the Mind“.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

Read More