Research on the history of psychiatry *

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A phenomenological psychological study of Muslim leaders’ attitudes toward connection with the Prophet Muhammad.

Applebaum, Marc H, 2009, PhD, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, CA, 209 pp. 3368989.

In this study three participants described their connection with the Prophet in the context of their leadership roles as traditionally authorized Sufi guides. The data were analysed using the phenomenological psychological method of Amedeo Giorgi. The findings contribute to a psychological understanding of both the meanings of the Prophet for Muslim leaders and of an Islamic envisioning of leadership as a relationship of simultaneous servant-hood to the Divine and to a community of others.

Modernizing madness: Doctors, patients and asylums in nineteenth-century Mexico City.

Ballenger, Stephanie Sharon, 2009, PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 382 pp. 3382834.

This work seeks to add nuance to the prevailing view of the evolution of mental health care in 19th-century Mexico City as one driven by secular elites seeking greater control of mental health institutions and the public they served. The author argues that the ordinary public had interest in the reshaping of these institutions, and effectively leveraged that interest as they helped shape the evolving system of asylums and hospitals; considerations of race, gender and ethnic identity were felt throughout the diagnostic process, including in defining mental illness itself

Stigmatizing the supernatural: Social and intellectual acts of othering paranormal events in British and American literature of the long nineteenth century.

Blum, Christian M, 2009, PhD, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 454 pp. 3372591.

Using a Marxist, cultural, psychoanalytic and linguistic theory to consider how human relationships interact with supernaturalism, the author examines tendencies by structuring agencies like religion and society to other supernatural phenomena that do not conform to accepted systems during the long 19th century and into the New Millennial period. Artists included in this study who support this overall thesis include J.M. Barrie, Christina Rossetti, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Horace Walpole, Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, R.L. Stevenson, Matthew Arnold, Edmund Burke, Martin Scorsese, Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling.

Psilocybin and spiritual experience.

Bunch, Kevin Sean, 2009, PsyD, Alliant International University, San Francisco Bay, CA, 141 pp. 3377437.

Numerous reports indicate that psychedelic drugs can induce spiritual states of consciousness (De Rios and Janiger, 2003; Harner, 1973; La Barre, 1972). Early hallucinogenic research did not account for the influences of set and setting, and research was nearly dormant after the hallucinogen abuse of the 1960s. Human psychedelic research has recently been renewed, and experimental models have confirmed that psilocybin mushrooms can facilitate mystical experiences that have lasting personal meaning and spiritual significance in religious or spiritually-inclined individuals. Expanding on previous studies, the author explores set and setting variables associated with these experiences.

This is insanity. Offender mental diagnosis on trial.

Crutchfield, Courtney P, 2009, PhD, Tennessee State University, 74 pp. 3369438.

The purpose of this study was to examine the prevalence of diagnoses among individuals who have pleaded the insanity defence. The sample included 210 inmates who were housed on the jail unit at Middle Tennessee Mental Health Institute in 2004–7. Results indicated that criminal history, current diagnosis, and ethnicity were significant predictors that may influence the successful use of the insanity defence.

Alteration of mental health services due to the closure of mental health hospitals.

Drummond, Rebecca Lynn, 2009, PhD, University of Illinois at Chicago, Health Sciences Center, 66 pp. 3364810.

The author presents a review of general hospital utilization for mental illness in the USA from 2001 to 2005 using data from the National Hospital Discharge Survey. This study focuses on the greater concern that fewer severely mentally ill patients are being treated in the general hospital setting when compared with discharge rates of the decade before. This drop in the discharge rate raises concern that a growing number of severely mentally-ill patients are not getting the treatment they need and are simply getting lost in the system.

The psychology and epistemology of (mostly moral) intuitions.

Fedyk, Mark William, 2009, PhD, Cornell University, NY, 193 pp. 3376545.

This work is comprised of four chapters making up the author’s examination of moral reasoning and inquiry. Essentially, the work begins by examining intuitive judgment and proposing a framework by which to estimate the reliability of intuitions. Subsequent chapters go on to consider and then reject the linguistic analogy and the social intuitionist model of moral judgment, recently popular theories of moral psychology and epistemology. Finally, the author argues against the current privileged place given to moral institutions in favor of a more broadly-based model of moral inquiry.

The machinery of madness: Psychosis, technology and modernist narrative.

Gaedtke, Andrew, 2009, PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 266 pp. 3381611.

This author argues that the increasing conflation of mind and machine in 20th-century fiction blurs distinctions between human and non-human, undermining the sovereignty of mental life. This dissonance induces a ‘cultural delirium’ which is recorded in re-imagined forms of the novel during this period. Selected works are explicated through comparisons with memoirs of mental illness; these memoirs incorporate similar themes concerning the need for narrative order and the failure of that order.

On the intersubjective in psychoanalysis: Theory as pretense.

Garfinkle, Michael Stuart, 2009, PhD, Adelphi University, The Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies, NY, 195 pp. 3370012.

Psychoanalysis depends on the capacity of one person to understand another. The author explicates psychoanalytic epistemology through a careful examination of its philosophical antecedents, the scholarship of Sigmund Freud and those who immediately followed him in England and the USA, and through a review of contemporary psychoanalysis.

A body made of nerves. Reflexes, body maps and the limits of the self in modern German medicine.

Guenther, Katja, 2009, PhD, Harvard University, MA, 247 pp. 3365268.

This study discusses the history of sensory-motor, or reflex, physiology in 19th- and early 20th-century German neuroscience. The author examines how the reflex was employed in medical practice, citing the work of Carl Wernicke and Otfrid Foerster. Secondly, this work brings to light the subtle theoretical understanding of the reflex that corresponded to its clinical use. Finally, the author discusses how American neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield drew on the sensory-motor model in his figure of the ‘homunculus’.

Mind Cure, meditation, and medicine: Hidden histories of mental healing in the United States.

Hickey, Wakoh Shannon, 2008, PhD, Duke University, NC, 238 pp. 3373516.

This is an interdisciplinary study of the relationships between two American movements which both promote meditation for therapeutic purposes: 19th-century Mind Cure, and 20th-century Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. The work draws upon primary and secondary sources in American religious history, including feminist and African American studies; histories of medicine and psychology; Buddhist and Hindu studies; and post-colonial theory. The author highlights the imperatives of doing interdisciplinary research, including race and gender as categories of analysis, and looking beyond the geographic boundaries of the USA to understand these ostensibly ‘American’ religious/healing movements.

A Jungian framework for understanding psychedelic-induced psychotic states.

Hill, Scott J, 2009, PhD, California Institute of Integral Studies, 324 pp. 3367158.

The paucity of in-depth theoretical treatments of the relationship between Jungian psychology and psychedelics can be attributed to a variety of reasons, most notably Jung’s own criticism of the use of psychedelics. This study is based on an in-depth examination of Jung’s theoretical and clinical approach to the structure and dynamics of the psyche in general and his approach to trauma, psychosis, psychotherapy and integration in particular.

Symbols mediate gendered oppression in nushu and hanzi versions of a folktale: a Jungian analysis.

Hvingelby, Henriette Eva Marie S, 2009, PhD, Fielding Graduate University, CA, 166 pp. 3371264.

According to C.G. Jung, conflict provides an opportunity to individuate and develop consciousness. The opportunity to study Jung’s theory presents itself in two Chinese folk tales. In this study the author answers the question: do oppressor and oppressed in a collective desire the same or different psychological resolution to shared social inequity as expressed through symbols in their folktales?

Domina-Virgin-Mater-Trix.

Johnson, Christel Dawn, 2009, PhD, University of South Carolina, 197 pp. 3366784.

This study discusses the manner in which four stereotypes, Domina-Virgin-Mater (Matrona)-Meretrix, are stretched, consumed and ultimately recycled in Classical and Renaissance literature and art. The author focuses on the issues of gender and power found in these early writings.

An empirical validation of Viktor Frankl’s logotherapeutic model.

Joshi, Chetan Arvind, 2009, PhD, University of Missouri – Kansas City, 144 pp. 3374257.

The purpose of this study is to validate the Logotherapeutic model elucidating the relationships among the constructs of will-to-meaning, meaning-in-life, existential-frustration, and the symptoms of existential-frustration derived from Frankl’s description of Logotheory in his 1984 publication. The author uses a sample of college students from a large Mid-Atlantic university who completed paper-and-pencil instruments for the variables included in the model.

Reading for (the) real: Between Jacques Lacan and narrative plot.

Ko, Jungchun Roslyn, 2009, PhD, City University of New York, 356 pp. 3369091.

The author uses Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to dialogue with narrative theory: it investigates, on the global level, the raison d’être of narrative and questions and, in particular, the existing narratological framework wherein the workings of plot have been discussed and apprehended. This focuses on the interconnection between human psychical dynamics and literary textual dynamics.

Perversions of the street: Capitalism and the enjoyment of urban violence.

LeBlanc, Michael Edward, 2009, PhD, University of California, Riverside, 310 pp. 3374403.

This work uses psychoanalysis to examine how urban violence in the USA is as much a product of social fantasy as it is of concrete economic and spatial factors. The author draws from the work of ‘New Lacanians’ such as Slavoj Zizek, J.F. Maccannell and Joan Copjec, and argues that fantasy functions as the very ideological support that allows ‘material’ spaces like the urban street to have consistency and substance for subjects.

Motivation in sport: Bridging historical and contemporary theory through a qualitative approach.

Leidl, Daniel J, 2008, PhD, West Virginia University, 130 pp. 3376433.

The author acknowledges the multitude of theoretical constructs that address the issue of motivation in sport, but suggests that broader work on motivational frameworks by Adler, Frankl and Maslow have been underutilized in this area. Through qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with lacrosse coaches, this work highlights motivational constructs that are not sufficiently treated by contemporary theory, suggesting that further work in this area may be required.

The Proteus of the mind: Creative imagination in psychology and literature at the fin de siecle.

McCormick, Elizabeth Harris, 2009, PhD, City University of New York, 241 pp. 3378598.

This study examines both depictions of ‘scenes of creative action’ in fin-de-siècle fiction, and characterizations of the 19th-century artist, as found in biography of selected contemporary authors and poets. The author localizes a new discourse of creativity in the post-Darwinian primacy of the language of biology in discussions of psychology and models of the imagination.

On the subject of masochism.

Musser, Amber Jamilla, 2009, PhD, Harvard University, MA, 303 pp. 3365367.

The changing meanings of masochism in late 19th- and 20th-century psychiatric and philosophical discourses are interrogated. The author merges queer theory, feminist theory and the history of psychiatry by historicizing the valorization of passivity, shame and negativity, probing the liberal subject’s naturalized desire for freedom and uncovering relationships between gender, race, psychiatry and theory.

Culture of recovery? Schizophrenia, the United States’ mental health system, and the American ethos of the self-made man.

Myers, Neely Laurenzo, 2009, PhD, The University of Chicago, IL, 341 pp. 3369456.

At the turn of the 21st century, the American Recovery Movement, a group of concerned consumers, researchers, policymakers, and family members of people with psychiatric disabilities, demanded changes be made to the institutional culture and treatment processes of the USA mental health care system. The Movement aimed to guide Americans with schizophrenia away from their role as a ‘crazy’ person with a ‘chronic’ psychiatric disability and towards the role of a ‘healthy’ citizen who demonstrated civic virtue to gain access to the rights and interconnectedness of valued citizens. The study examines attempts to enact such a journey for members of Horizons, a psychosocial rehabilitation organization in the USA that was attempting to become more ‘recovery-oriented’ by changing its organizational policies and offering peer services.

The cultural construction of war and mental trouble: World War I veterans, masculinity and psychiatry at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.

O’Neil, Moira Eileen, 2009, PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara, 315 pp. 3371671.

This is an analysis of the ways in which military medicine, the US government and the American public understood and attempted to contain the practical and symbolic threats posed by mental illness among veterans during World War I. Through an examination of veterans’ medical files at St Elizabeth’s Hospital, the author argues that the medical classification and treatment of psychological injury in war, systems of welfare provision for psychologically disabled veterans, and the ways in which servicemen understood their injuries cannot be extricated from how various sets of social actors conceptualized, idealized and imagined how masculinity should be enacted in warfare and from moral mandates regarding how servicemen should respond to the terrors of the battlefield. St Elizabeth’s was one institution among many where psychiatrists furthered their vision of healthy masculinity in warfare, ideas which centred on the exercise of ‘self-control’ in the face of difficult and extreme circumstances.

The architecture of the poetic image [–] the visible and the invisible in the sacred architecture of Sigurd Lewerentz.

Patterson, Paula Anne, 2009, PhD, University of Washington, 239 pp. 3377329.

This study, situated at the nexus of phenomenology and architecture, examines the relationship between architectural phenomena and the meanings that animate. It takes the genealogy of meaning presented in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible (1964) as a framework for examining the cemeteries, chapels and churches designed by Sigurd Lewerentz between 1914 and 1966. Through a close reading and comparative study of Merleau-Ponty’s text with Jean-Paul Sartre’s Psychology of Imagination (1940), the author proposes an expanded model of meaning that asserts imagination as the hermeneutic agent between percept (the visible) and concept (the invisible).

Plurality and perspective: On the nature and status of psychoanalytic knowledge.

Rosen-Carole, Adam, 2009, PhD, New York: New School University, 437 pp. 3365833.

The author attempts to deal with two broad questions related to psychoanalytic knowledge: to understand what it means to be committed to psychoanalysis, thus involving owning up to psychoanalysis’ irreducible pluralism; and to give an account of the authority of psychoanalytic knowledge and practice. This study seeks to demonstrate that psychoanalysis is a historical discourse of suffering and healing under conditions of modernity rather than a metaphysical discourse of universal truth, and it must be so, due to the ontological indeterminacy of the psychic.

Nothing to look at: Art as situation and its neuropsychological implications.

Schuld, Dawna, 2009, PhD, The University of Chicago, IL, 248 pp. 3369504.

This study examines situational form as a means of analysing art in terms of its perceptual and emotional properties. The author discusses how Los Angeles-based ‘light and space’ artists understood the material of their work to consist of embodied states in specific contexts. This viewpoint coincides with, and arises from, developments in psychology in the 1960s and early 1970s in which behaviourism was supplanted by neuropsychology.

“No sacrifice is too great, save that of honor”: Honor, death, and psychological combat trauma in the American Civil War.

Sheffer, Debra J, 2009, PhD, University of Kansas, 307 pp. 3365880.

Examination of honour culture and attitudes towards death and dying found in letters, diaries and newspapers – from the colonial and revolutionary period through the Civil War era – strongly suggests that Civil War soldiers did not suffer from psychological combat trauma. These soldiers, however, lived in a time of expectations and beliefs about honour, death and dying that were different from those of modern US troops. Expectations for psychiatric trauma for Civil War soldiers did not exist. The author uses research in honour culture, masculinity studies and attitudes toward death and dying to illustrate the idea that 19th-century cultural ideals of honour and death reduced or prevented psychological consequences of combat in Civil War soldiers.

The pleasures of mimetic sympathy in Robert Burton’s “The Anatomy of Melancholy”.

Shirilan, Stephanie, 2009, PhD, 310 pp. Brandeis University, MA, 310 pp. 3369230.

Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy remains one of the most under read and underappreciated classics of Late-Renaissance English prose. The author offers a reading of the Anatomy as a deft rhetorical performance that imitates and celebrates the body’s ability to transmit somatic experience via the powers of the imagination, or through what she calls ‘mimetic sympathy’. She demonstrates how Burton revises debates over the relationship between melancholia and genius, and the physiological roles of the imagination, to offer a view of study as a cure, not cause, of scholarly melancholia.

Sarah Kofman as philosopher of the uncanny double: Sarah Kofman’s appropriation of Nietzsche and Freud.

Tan, Jean Emily P, 2009, PhD, Loyola University Chicago, IL, 325 pp. 3367125.

Kofman, known primarily as a reader of Nietzsche and Freud, as well as for her autobiographical writings about her childhood in Paris during the German occupation in the 1940s, has written on a broad range of subjects. This study develops key themes and questions that define Kofman’s thought, namely: aporia, the uncanny double, metaphoricity, transmutation and convertibility, and saving the mother.

The other Zarathustra: Madness, Schreber and the making of religion in 19th century Germany.

van der Haven, Alexander, 2009, PhD, The University of Chicago, IL, 268 pp. 3369432.

The religious experiences and religious cosmology that the psychiatric patient Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911) described in his memoirs have, since their publication in 1903, been interpreted by psychiatrists such as Freud and Lacan as pathological symptoms of an individual mental illness. This study follows other attempts to place Schreber’s Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken in the context of its time, by presenting it as the product of a clash of two worldviews. As a result, it emerges as another Zarathustra, as an unusual religious revelatory document engaged with and representative of central religious issues of its time.

Fallen subjects: American pragmatism and the color line, 1880–1920.

Wells, Hannah, 2009, PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 210 pp. 3381881.

This study follows the model of the self that gave birth to the pragmatist movement of William James through a variety of works, with particular attention to the relationship between this model and contemporary theories of race. The author is interested in the historical and philosophical underpinnings of pragmatism in the light of this relationship, as well as countervailing models of the self as depicted in the work of Henry James and W.E.B. Du Bois.

Scientific psychiatry in Stalin’s Soviet Union: The politics of modern medicine and the struggle to define ‘Pavlovian’ psychiatry, 1939–1953.

Zajicek, Benjamin, 2009, PhD, The University of Chicago, IL, 508 pp. 3369465.

Pavlov’s ‘theory of higher nervous activity’ provided a language that both Soviet psychiatrists and non-psychiatrists could use to discuss the nature of the mind. The period that lasted from the late 1930s to the early 1950s was a time of particularly intense debate because new technologies coming from Europe were incorporated into Soviet psychiatric practice. Some used Pavlov’s theories to argue for more fundamental study of the brain. Other psychiatrists argued that the proper object of psychiatry was society, not the brain.