Posts in Category: english

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)

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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)

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Edith Jacobson Biography

Edith Jacobson

Edith Jacobson

Biography of Edith Jacobson

Edith Jacobson (1897-1978) was a German psychoanalyst doctor who was born into a Jewish family of doctors from Lower Silesia. She was part of the first generation of women with university education after the First World War.

This psychoanalyst was a very politically committed person. The Gestapo stopped her in October 1935. Fleeing from the Nazi threat she settled in the United States of America, where she died in 1978 (Rochester, New York). In America, Jacobson was a member of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in New York. In that institute he worked as a psychoanalyst for many years.

But back to its beginnings, Edith Jacobson, who had graduated as a doctor and worked as a pediatrician in a hospital in the German city of Heidelberg, began to be interested in Psychoanalysis as a result of knowing sexuality of the kids through his work as a pediatrician.

In 1925 Edith Jacobson entered the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin where he had as teachers Sándor Rado, Franz Alexander and Otto Fenichel. Jacobson performed with the latter his Didactic Analysis.

In his early work Edith Jacobson included extensive and detailed clinical material of his experience in the treatment of children with psychic problems. In these studies on child psychic pathology we can be seen a clear influence of the two great founders of psychoanalysis of children, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein.

Among the most important contributions made by Edith Jacobson deserve to mention their interesting studies on the Depression, Psychosis and the Freudian psychic instances of the Self, Id and the Super-ego.

The theories of Edith Jacobson are framed within the current developed by Marxist psychoanalysts of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Among these psychoanalysts were Wilhelm Reich and his wife Annie (the latter became a great friend of Edith), Otto Fenichel, Erich Fromm, etc. This group of psychoanalysts, we could say “from the left“, emphasized the importance of external reality for psychological development and the social influence in the development of neuroses.

In this line, Edith Jacobson argued that the environmental factor of reality was as important as the internal world of

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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)

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The Hospitalism and Rene Spitz

beloved mother

beloved mother

The american psychoanalyst Rene Spitz (1887-1974) described the Hospitalism Syndrome in 1945. This syndrome occurs in babies when they are separated from a loving mother for a period of more than three months.
Hospitalism is caused by not being attended children in their emotional needs (hugs, caresses, talking to them, smiling, etc.), even if they had been given exquisite care in their physical needs (food, medical care, proper clothing, etc.).

This Rene Spitz discovery, hospitalism, made it necessary to take into account the emotional and affective needs of babies admitted to institutions. And so, mothers were allowed to stay with their children when they were admitted to a hospital. The presence of the mother with the child reduces anxiety and helps a faster recovery; that is why currently in children’s hospitals, mothers are allowed to stay with their sick children.

But a sick child should not be overprotected, and it will be treated, as far as possible, not too different from the rest of the children of their age. Most children’s hospitals have teachers and a “school” where children can go every day to perform different tasks. This is especially important for children who have to be hospitalized for a long time.

The family will give the sick children affection and attention. Family must help and facilitate proper activities for his sick childrem. But family will take special care that the child does not obtain certain “secondary earnings” on account of his sick status.

In summary, the Hospitalism Syndrome will be avoided with the presence with of their beloved mother.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

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Skinner and Sigmund Freud

Burrhus Frederic Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner

Did you know…..

that Skinner, the father of Behaviorism, quotes Sigmund Freud more than ten times in one of his books?

Perhaps many behaviorists do not know that Burrhus Frederic Skinner in his book “Science and Human Behavior“, published in 1953, speaks in very flattering terms about Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis.

Among these quotes is the following:

Skinner recognizes the importance of Freud in relating childhood events to behaviors in adult life.

He also says verbatim: “Perhaps prudent men have always known that we are predisposed to see things as we want to see them instead of how they are, but thanks to Sigmund Freud we are much more aware today of the “thought of desire”.

To explain certain aspects of the “positive reinforcement” of certain behaviors, he resorts to the Freudian concept of “Sublimation“. And he adds: “For example, A marriage without children can sublimate their paternal instinct treating their puppy as a son”.

In the chapter on punishment he says: “The fact that punishment does not permanently reduce a tendency to respond, agrees with Freud’s discovery of the survival of the activity of what he called repressed desires”.

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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)

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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)

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