Dissertation Abstracts

Availability

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Jonathon Erlen* has provided the following annotated list of dissertations relevant to our field, based on his review of Dissertation Abstracts.† Entries are in alphabetical order of author; each entry gives title, author, year, doctorate, institution, number of pages (if known) and unique identifier/order number. Note that in titles, no accents are used in Dissertation Abstracts.

Does Riverside Mental Health Court reduce re-arrest among mentally ill offenders?

Bagwell, Melissa, PsyD, 2013, Alliant International University, CA, 108 pp., 3602439.

Since the late 1990s there has been a growth in the emergence of Mental Health Courts (MHC) to reduce the criminalization of the mentally ill and provide treatment in lieu of incarceration. MHC is based on therapeutic jurisdiction with a focus on the providing mental health services to reduce further commission of criminal acts. The current study used Riverside Mental Health Court archival data collected from an Excel spreadsheet maintained by RMHC staff and RMHC clinical records. Trauma history was found to increase the predictive probability of graduating from RMHC; however, witnessing domestic violence prior to age 18 was found to increase the predictive probability of not graduating from RMHC resulting in re-arrest or additional legal sanctions.

Objects of daily life: Materiality in North American institutions for the insane.

Bazar, Jennifer L., PhD, 2014, York University [Canada], 322 pp., NS00168.

This work examines the daily practices of asylums and state hospitals for the insane in Canada and the USA during the second half of the 19th century. The author attempts to probe the ways different social influences impacted the application and development of treatment practices. Patient employment and recreation, the clothing of patients and employees, furniture, and fire protection are each considered. This analysis provides an expanded discussion of known connections – hygiene concerns, impact of industrialization and technological advances, safety concerns, and shifting gender roles – and also introduces new influences including the Arts and Crafts, the New Sanitarian, Rational Dress, and the Muscular Christianity movements.

American literary madness: Life writing and the nineteenth-century female patient from Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Keckley to Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Blumental, Rachel Anna, PhD, 2013, Northwestern University, IL, 214 pp., 3605688.

The author argues that life writing by American mental health patients and their allies challenges our traditions of medical epistemology. Nineteenth-century authors replaced shorthand diagnostic classifications with long-form life narrative. As an archival alternative to physician-authored case studies, the patient’s autobiography reveals how pre-Freudian literary form has more to do with diagnostic illness and treatment than has yet been uncovered. This study analyses the life writing by authors including the authors in the title, and Elizabeth Packard and Lydia Smith, alongside the psychological treatises of physicians from Founding Father Benjamin Rush to psychologist and philosopher William James. Each chapter is a case study that moves between archival research and careful close-readings to show how 19th-century literature unfolds four popular diagnoses originating in psychology: derangement, mania, hysteria, and nervousness.

Psychological dimensions of Socratic protreptic.

Bradizza, Roberto, PhD, 2013, Queen’s University [Canada], 211 pp., NS28136.

The main goal in the present work is to add to our understanding of Socratic protreptic. The author does this by focusing on some of the psychological traits and qualities of character in Socrates’ young associates. There are a number of candidates throughout the dialogues whose colourful depiction and careful psychological rendering offer ample material for this work. Special attention is given to the psychological traits of Alcibiades in the final scene of Symposium, Theaetetus as presented in the eponymously named dialogue, and Eros in Phaedrus.

Seduction is not yet betrayal: Trust and the essence of truth for Heidegger and Freud.

Britt, William G., IV, PhD, 2014, Boston College, MA, 552 pp., 3613574.

This project takes up the old question of the nature of truth by seeking to say, at one stroke, both what enables truth and falsity and what lets them matter to us so centrally. The author argues that the source of vulnerable unity must be a contingent event in which one finds oneself disposed trustingly towards the world, and therein finds the world disclosed as trust worthy. Such primitive trust is phenomenally related to trusting a person, and Freudian psychoanalysis shows us that it develops psychologically through relation to a person. By attending to the meaningful phenomena of psychosis, this study defends the thesis that our relation to the world is instead opened up and sustained by a fundamental affective attunement (trust) that can dramatically fail, thus thoroughly overwhelming us.

Le diable a Kusnacht. Psychanalyse jungienne des possessions.

Charrier-Adams, Denis, PhD, 2013, Université de Montréal, Canada, 246 pp., NR98753.

The slow erosion of the place of religion in our modern society is leading to an increasing amount of individualistic faith and self-created religious practices. This research is a Jungian psychoanalytic reading of evil possessions as potential signs of religious erring. The Jungian reading of such phenomena might help us discover the central role of psychological dissociation and the influence this variable plays in our comprehension of possessions. This research starts with the presentation of two cases of possessions in the office of a clinician. It is followed by an exploration of different aspects of possessions: historical, psychiatric, sociological and finally a more specific Jungian approach of the problematic.

Answer to “Dream”: On the relation of archetypal psychology to image: Jung, Hillman, and Sor Juana.

Conway de Prieto, Deborah, PhD, 2014, Pacifica Graduate Institute, CA, 257 pp., 3612145.

A revisionist image of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Dream (El Sueño) from a depth psychological reader response sees the text as amplification of dream, and the Novohispana poet as a source of inspiration. Sor Juana, if seen as image of heroine and her art as a Jungian, ‘living thing’, takes a reader into a personal space, into archetypes of imaginal areas as place – between sleep and wakeful states. Hers are verses of silent, hieroglyphic, somnolent places on voyages to sleep, or in twilight places lit upon waking from sleep, where thoughts and images are elemental. Maybe, it was for the dreamer a place of discovery, like seeing in a much later Jungian mirror, that all gods are within.

Reclaiming memory: Literature, science, and the rise of memory as property, 1860–1945.

Covington, Elizabeth Reeves, PhD, 2011, Vanderbilt University, TN, 241 pp., 3576602.

The overall goal of this work is not only to illustrate the differences between scientific and literary theories of memory, but also to demonstrate that the uncertainty over memory ushered in by experimental psychologists was artistically productive. The rise of the fictionalized autobiography, the focus on the present moment in the modernist novel, the turn to collectivity before World War II, or the infinite ways that writers insisted that memory belonged to the rememberer were due solely to the emerging memory sciences. They are an unexamined, and significant, influence on the literary developments of the period. Scientists and literary writers alike turned to memory, hoping that it might provide, in the words of Frederic Bartlett, ‘complete release from the narrowness of presented time and place’.

Philosophical commentaries on the preface to the “Guide of the Perplexed,” c.1250–1362.

De Souza, Igor Holand, PhD, 2014, University of Chicago, IL, 598 pp., 3615642.

In the Preface to the Guide of the Perplexed (c.1190), Islamic medicine’s greatest contribution to the origins of psychiatry, Maimonides asks his readers not to write commentaries on the text. In spite of his request, formal commentaries and glosses began to appear in the 13th century and continued to be written until the early 19th century. The general purpose of this work is to describe the ways in which the commentaries embody three distinct interpretative tasks. They explain arguments and concepts in light of sources from the Graeco-Arabic, Scholastic or Jewish philosophical canons. They examine Maimonides’ exegesis of the Bible within the Guide and illustrate his hermeneutical principles with the help of philosophical examples. They correct, rewrite and build upon the Hebrew translation of the Guide finished by Samuel Ibn Tibbon in 1204 and revised in 1213

Post-Jungian psychoanalysis and images of the black queer Other in selected works by Wallace Henry Thurman and Richard Bruce Nugent.

DuBose, Carraza L., PhD, 2013, Morgan State University, MD, 280 pp., 3613880.

This study evaluates black queer images in the works of these authors and suggests that many of their critiques, novels, and short stories, such as Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929) and Infants of the Spring (1932) and Nugent’s Gentleman Jigger (1928) and ‘Smoke, Lilies, and Jade’ (1926), show a serious preoccupation with images of the black queer Other. The author examines connections between images in Thurman’s and Nugent’s work and the primordial images Carl Jung calls archetypes. It is suggested that Thurman’s and Nugent’s personally and culturally defined uses of the persona, the shadow figure and the Self examine images about the black queer Other, explore the relationship between images and black queer complexes, and investigate the construction of positive black queer images within these texts.

The 14-year-old Sigmund Freud recites from Schiller’s “The Robbers”: An exploration of literature and the unconscious.

Gleringer, Brian, PhD, 2013, Pacifica Graduate Institute, CA, 224 pp., 3603330.

This hermeneutic study explores the ramifications of the day when the 14-year-old Freud and his nephew John performed an excerpt from Schiller’s drama The Robbers in the family’s living room. Freud’s own writings on art and literature contained the idea that the fantasies artists and poets create are born out of current conflicts that resemble an earlier conflict in that person’s life. This basic formula of Freud is applied to his selection of the text and suggests that the play provided an outlet for conflicted feelings that Freud and Schiller felt towards their individual fathers. Overall, the research illustrates the ways literature and psychoanalysis can inform each other and underscores Freud’s point that artists, especially poets, provide important insights into the unconscious.

MMPI-2-RF scales as predictors of psychiatric diagnoses.

Haber, Jonathan C., PsyD, 2014, Regent University, VA, 125 pp., 3579641.

The MMPI-2-RF is an alternative version of the MMPI-2 and is useful for the differential diagnosis of psychiatric disorders. This study examines the relationship between MMPI-2 scale scores and psychiatric diagnoses, and attempts to identify the scales that best predicted that a diagnosis would be assigned. The sample used by the author includes participants who were administered the MMPI-2 in 2001-10 at a university-based psychological services centre; and subjects are divided into diagnostic categories based on DSM-IV–R diagnoses. This study offers important information regarding scales that best predict psychiatric disorders and adds to the research that suggests that the MMPI-2-RF can aid clinicians in the differentiation of psychiatric disorders.

The language of Scientia: Ockham’s mental language as the subject matter of Aristotelian science.

Hagerdorn, Eric William, PhD, 2013, University of Notre Dame, IN, 247 pp., 3578935.

William of Ockham’s theory of mental language is among the most studied aspects of his thought; yet, surprisingly, there is little scholarly consensus on just what it is supposed to be a theory of. The most widely held view today is that Ockham’s mental language is intended to be an account of human cognitive operations. The author raises a series of objections to this interpretation, both philosophical and textual. Ockham refrains from endorsing the key doctrines this interpretation attributes to him, and his actual discussions of mental language seem disconnected from the theory of cognition he does indeed hold. This study sketches an alternative interpretation, which takes as its starting point the sole argument that Ockham provides for positing mental language. On this interpretation, he does so in order to provide a collection of entities which are both compatible with his nominalist ontology and sufficient to fulfil the strictures of the Aristotelian account of scientific practice that he endorses.

September 11th, 2001: Acute stress and coping in a New York City metropolitan college sample.

Holmes, Julie A., PhD, 2013, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 130 pp., 3586009.

The events of 9/11 provided a unique opportunity to investigate the psychological effects of terrorism in the USA. This study uses an archived data set, some of the immediate psychological effects of 9/11 in a New York City metropolitan college sample investigated 10-30 days after the attacks and a self-report survey. The study includes demographic questions, physical and social proximities to the attacks, trauma symptoms as measured by the Impact of Events Scale, the Posttraumatic Check List, and stressful information coping strategies. Based on prior research, this sample scored high on two widely used stress measurements. Consistent with prior PTSD terror research, Hispanic ethnicity and using a Monitoring coping style appeared to increase risk for higher scores on the IES and PCL.

Hume’s functionalistic theory of the self.

Hosseini, Sardar, PhD, 2013, University of Ottawa, Canada, 302 pp., NR98614.

The main claim of this study is that Hume’s theory of the self can be interpreted in terms of a causal or functional theory of mind. It is a thesis about Hume’s identification of mental particulars – impressions and ideas – in terms of the kind of roles that each plays in the cognitive system of which it is a member. The true Humean idea of the human mind is to understand it as a system of different mental states and processes, which are linked together by the relation of cause and effect. The central idea is that if Hume is right to say that something like functional continuity would suffice for persons to persist through time, then he must show that we can have a complete account of how one’s mental states produce the idea of a persisting self without making assumptions about the identity condition of their subject or bearer.

“Robbed of their minds”: Madness, medicine and society in southeastern Germany from 1350 to 1500.

Koenig, Anne Moran, PhD, 2013, Northwestern University, IL, 572 pp., 3605732.

This study uses a variety of sources to uncover a picture of late-medieval society in which ideas about mental distress were multi-layered and in which the mad themselves were far more integrated into society than previously suspected. The first section engages with medical writings which conducted the most sustained medieval intellectual conversation about madness. Medieval medicine developed a clear theory of psychological function centred in the brain but closely bound to other areas of bodily and emotional health. The second section looks at the intersection of madness and miracles, and argues that in narratives of miraculously-healed madness it is found that the sustained belief that madness was not otherworldly, but was, rather, a natural misfortune related to physical health. Finally, by examining the municipal financial records in the archives of Munich and Nuremberg, the author argues that city leaders were routinely confronted with the need to manage the mad in their midst.

The psychoanalytic state of mind: 100 years of Freudian thinking about technique.

Malitzky, Max Samuel, PsyD, 2013, Rutgers The State University of New Jersey, Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, 121 pp., 3602905.

This theoretical study explores the evolution of psychoanalytic technique from Freud to the contemporary Freudian school, through the lens of implicit and explicit recommendations about the optimal state of the analyst’s mind at work, in particular the use of the analyst’s subjective experience. Freud’s writing on this topic presented paradoxical ideas about the analyst’s state of mind that were dealt with differently by different thinkers within the classical Freudian tradition in North American psychoanalysis. The contemporary Freudian school has integrated Loewaldian, theoretical ideas into explicit, clinical writing about technique, and can be seen as both a continuation of the Freudian tradition and an important intellectual force in contemporary psychoanalysis.

Effects of colonialism on present day client: Therapist relationship in Northern New Mexico.

May, Jon, PhD, 2013, Pacifica Graduate Institute, CA, 153 pp., 3605913.

Research had documented the barriers that the mental health field faces in rural, geographically isolated areas of the USA. This dissertation looks at how the historic oppression of Northern New Mexican residents, or Nuevomexicanos, adds further complexity to mental health services in a rural area. It was shown that the response to colonialism was highly individual. The awareness of historical oppression and the expression thereof also differed between individuals and must be processed on an individual level.

Re-institutionalizing America: The politics of mental health and incarceration, 1945–1985.

Parsons, Anne E, PhD, 2013, University of Illinois at Chicago, 222 pp., 3604101.

This study tracks a peculiar ‘re-institutionalization’ between 1945 and 1990, showing how involuntary confinement in psychiatric hospitals and prisons transformed in both significance and scope. The author focuses on these changes in Pennsylvania and argues that during the post-war era, the public sector relied primarily on custodial psychiatric hospitals rather than prisons to handle social problems. In subsequent decades, the state government increasingly sought rehabilitative alternatives to custodial institutions such as community mental health centres and work-release prison programmes. This anti-institutionalism came to a halt in the 1970s as conservative politicians rejected alternatives to prisons and transferred supervision of people in the mental health system to the criminal system. The new conservative policies shifted priorities away from welfare and medical authority and towards security and punishment, dramatically altering the state’s relationships to its citizens in ways determined by notions of race, gender and class.

Clinical implications of historical development of the DSM through examining two main disorders.

Sanders, James Ladell, PhD, 2013, University of Alberta, Canada, 160 pp., NS27684.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) is a dominant diagnostic classification used throughout the world. By understanding the history and development of the DSM within a clinical backdrop, diagnosticians can better understand the fundamental strengths and limitations of this hegemonic manual. In addition, understanding the history and development of specific mental disorders can help diagnosticians to understand the conditions they diagnose and can facilitate a more rigorous and careful diagnostic process. The author reviews the historical developments of autism and Asperger’s Disorder, developmental disorders within the current edition of the DSM, and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, a developmental disorder that is not in the current edition of the DSM but has been proposed for a future edition.

Paying attention: Imagining and measuring a psychological subject in American culture, 1886–1960.

Schmidt, Benjamin McDonald, PhD, 2013, Princeton University, NJ, 192 pp., 3604503.

This is a study of changes in the concept of ‘attention’ in the USA in the early 20th century. Between 1886 and 1960, new sets of experts, inspired by new techniques from fields including academic psychology, redefined what it meant to pay attention. Attention grew increasingly important in the public’s eye as something that could be cultivated, controlled, and – above all – measured. New ways of describing attention – an idea of mental ‘focus’, and the invention of the concept of the ‘attention span’ – cast the notion of attention as a personal responsibility. Americans came to believe they could and ought to work to increase their attention, but they also knew that outsiders had the tools to manipulate attention without their knowing.

Insanity on the move: The “alien insane” in modern America, 1882–1930.

Shin, Ji-Hye, PhD, 2013, Rutgers The State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick, 353 pp., 3606557.

This study examines the ‘alien insane’ – allegedly insane immigrants, who were at once objects of medical surveillance and candidates for deportation, hospital commitment, and citizenship – and their place in America between 1882 and 1930. It makes original contributions using the ‘alien insane’ as an analytical tool to examine how ‘insanity’, a diagnostic category, became understood as a bureaucratic and racial construction. It also sheds light on the contested interpretations of insanity, the development of American immigration policy and federal powers, and the involvement of state and medical bureaucracies in defining American citizenship. Moving beyond the immigration stations where historians most commonly encounter immigrant subjects, this study employs neglected and previously unavailable sources, including immigrant patient files of state mental hospitals, to investigate racialization and institutionalization of the ‘alien insane’. Narratives by American authors and by immigrants also help re-examine immigrants’ perspectives of insanity, assimilation and American life.

Postmodernist literature and schizophrenia.

Stone-Mediator, John, PhD, 2014, University of Chicago, IL, 239 pp., 3615680.

The author argues that novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo provide illuminating insights into the nature of schizophrenia, as well as valuable critical perspectives on several postmodern theories of schizophrenia. The study lays a theoretical foundation for the literary analyses with an overview of the most influential post-war theories of schizophrenia, ranging from the work of R.D. Laing to Jean Baudrillard. Special attention is paid to how Pynchon’s conception of schizophrenia bears striking affinities with the theories of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, while at the same time casting critical light on these thinkers’ views of desire, mental illness, and the theoretical enterprise itself. What is most valuable about the visions of schizophrenia in the novels is the manner in which they provide a deeper understanding of the phenomenology of postmodern schizophrenia.

Facing facts about ‘Information’ in psychology.

Susswein, Noah, PhD, 2013, Simon Fraser University, Canada, 207 pp., NS24141.

This work compares and contrasts two distinct approaches to ‘information theory’: Claude Shannon’s (1948) statistical theory of signal transmission and the incoherent, ‘information’-laden speculations of Norbert Wiener (1950) and Warren Weaver (1949). It is demonstrated that some of pioneering information-processing psychologist George Miller’s (1951, 1953, 1956) most celebrated works involve gross distortions of Shannon’s concepts, and conflation of Shannon’s (1948) mathematics with Wiener’s (1950) and Weaver’s (1949) respective metaphysics. The widespread misperception that information-processing psychology is substantively related to Shannon’s (1948) information theory is demonstrated to be false Subsequently, the suggestion that it is reasonable for psychologists to employ ‘information’ and/or ‘information-processing’ as core concepts without defining these terms of art is sharply criticized.

The American identity formed and reflected in children’s literature: An analysis of Dr. Seuss through the lens of Erik Erikson.

Thielbar-Birch, Anika, PsyD, 2015, Alliant International University, CA, 101 pp., 3613794.

Reading connects us to our children; through the stories we read as a child, we connect the world we learned and understood to their world. This study explores Erikson’s ideas of identity development and how he understands the American identity. His three main themes are then applied to three popular books by Dr Seuss to examine the ways in which the American identity is reflected in American children’s literature. It was confirmed that the three books used for this analysis did contain the ideals of the American identity identified by Erikson, within his book.

Self-realization and popular culture: An analysis of the most popular movie of each of the last four decades.

von Loesch, Julian, PhD, 2013, Pacifica Graduate Institute, CA, 284 pp., 3604566.

The author argues that the main theme of each of the most popular films of the last four decades is self-realization. This study presents the self-realization models of individuation by C.G. Jung, the hero’s journey as outlined by Joseph Campbell, and James Hillman’s metaphorical human. Examples of film analyses based on the thoughts of each of these authors are presented, in addition to elaboration on the significance of movies serving as the creators of modern myths. Subsequently, it is demonstrated how Star Wars (1977), E.T. (1982), Titanic (1997), and The Dark Knight (2008) are illustrations of self-realization according to one of the three authors’ schools of thought.

Cultural trauma and signifying practices: A case study of effigy-like female characters in American and European war related films.

Wang, Yiyi, PhD, 2013, Florida State University, 211 pp., 3596734.

This case study is on films featuring effigy-like female characters. The repertoire of films is investigated as a cinematic making of cultural trauma in a cyclical response to a series of catastrophic wars and to the advancement of women in the leading Western societies. The methodological approach adopted in this investigation is an interdisciplinary one. It is derived from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s study of the ‘deep logic’ of myth-narratives, Carl Jung’s notion of ‘a contra-sexual figure’ in the production of an inverted self-image, and Erwin Panofsky’s iconographic study of the visual form.

In sickness and in health: Americans and psychiatry in Korea, 1950–1962.

Yum, Jennifer, PhD, 2014, Harvard University, 233 pp., 3627321.

This study begins with a simple set of questions: how and why did the Western discipline of psychiatry gain traction in the Republic of Korea? The author’s answers point to the Korean War and the US-ROK alliance as the two most important factors enabling this phenomenon. The number of psychiatrists in Korea hovered below a dozen on the eve of the Korean War. The mental health crisis on the peninsula reached a new level of urgency with the outbreak of war as psychiatric casualties mounted in the ROK Army. Confronting the problem of mental breakdown among soldiers for the first time, Korean medical corps officers sought the help of psychiatrists in the Eighth US Army. This cross-cultural partnership revolutionized psychiatry’s trajectory in Korea in two ways. First, training by the US military psychiatry program yielded a new generation of Korean psychiatrists who would play a pivotal role in steering the discipline for several decades. Second, psychiatry was Americanized institutionally and culturally by the wartime encounter. Primary sources used for this study include official records from the National Archives of the USA and South Korea, mental hospital records, newspaper accounts, interviews, and materials maintained in private collections of South Korea’s first psychiatrists.