How Jung's concept of the wounded healer can guide learning and teaching in social work and human services

The concept of the “wounded healer” has been used to explain why those with adverse childhood histories often enter helping professions such as social work and human services (SWHS). Psychotherapist Carl Jung (1875–1961) believed wounded healers developed insight and resilience from their own experiences, enabling transformative interventions to occur with clients. Concerns exist that students with adverse childhood histories in SWHS may display unresolved emotional issues. This journal article explores how Jung’s interpretation of the wounded healer can be critically applied to understanding the learning needs of SWHS students with histories of abuse, neglect or other childhood adversity. The relevance of the wounded healer to SWHS education is explored in three key areas: - 1) the increased possibility of the occurrence of countertransference; - 2) the potential for vicarious traumatisation and burnout, and; - 3) personal and professional resilience displayed by SWHS students with a history of childhood adversity. The wounded healer metaphor allows for a more nuanced understanding of SWHS students with these histories. It also provides insight into the pedagogical considerations associated with teaching this student cohort.

Caring for the wounded healer - nurturing the self

Health professionals have to deal with a “wounded society”, for example, violence, natural disasters and displaced people. Shortage of health professional groups and the high use of complementary therapies may reflect professional wounds, such as stress and burnout. Self-care is an important aspect of health professionals’ lives, given modern-day work stressors that can affect an individual's physical, mental and spiritual health. Often people become healers through personal suffering. Each person wounded or not, needs to understand his or her own need to be nurtured, and develop and implement a self-care health programme. Personal and professional reflection are important to understanding the nature of events that lead to “wounds” and how they can be transcended and the experiences used in holistic care. Aromatherapy can be a useful addition to self-care especially in managing stress and minor self-limiting conditions.

helbrunn, fritz. orderly; unidentified military personel; unidentified wounded; unidentified children; field hospital Military; Portraits

Digital Image

Blessed be the Healer Commemorative Medal

Obverse: In the center, a stylized design of the sun shining on a young branch. Reverse: Stylized inscription.

Gendered Spaces and Wounded Bodies: Yamina Benguigui's 'Inch'Allah Dimanche'

Yamina Benguigui is a pioneer in the representation of Maghrebi immigration to France, and has produced a number of works of documentary and fictional film on the subject. This article discusses her fictional film Inch'Allah dimanche (2001). The film portrays the trajectory of a young woman, Zouina, who takes her children and mother-in-law to join her husband in France. The film is unique for its close focus on the space of the home, and the negotiation of gendered spaces within the strict confines set by Zouina's husband. In this article, I consider Zouina's tentative steps towards emancipation from these confines, focusing on preconceived notions of gendered spaces across different cultures. I consider possible interpretations of the final moment of wounding in the film, in which Zouina breaks through a window with her bare hands, destroying the barrier between the interior, private space of the home and the exterior, public space of the street.

Wounded Spaces: When Planning Degraded Cairo’s Urban Memory

This paper examines the position of planning practices operated under precise guidelines for displaying modernity. Cultivating the spatial qualities of Cairo since the 1970s has unveiled centralised ideologies and systems of governance and economic incentives. I present a discussion of the wounds that result from the inadequate upgrading ventures in Cairo, which I argue, created scars as enduring evidence of unattainable planning methods and processes that undermined its locales. In this process, the paper focuses on the consequences of eviction rather than the planning methods in one of the city’s traditional districts. Empirical work is based on interdisciplinary research, public media reports and archival maps that document actions and procedures put in place to alter the visual, urban, and demographic characteristics of Cairo’s older neighbourhoods against a backdrop of decay to shift towards a global spectacular. The paper builds a conversation about the power and fate these spaces were subject to during hostile transformations that ended with their being disused. Their existence became associated with sores on the souls of its ex-inhabitants, as outward signs of inward scars showcasing a lack of equality and social justice in a context where it was much needed.

Battles of Mexico : Containing an authentic account of all the Battles fought in that Republic : including the treaty of peace : with list of the killed and wounded, toger with a Brief Sketch of the Lives of Generals Scott and Taylor.

UANL