Dissertation Abstracts

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At institutions which have purchased the ProQuest databases, abstracts of most of the dissertations can be downloaded, and many entire texts can also be downloaded free of charge.

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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.

Yearning: A Jungian perspective on creativity

Avery Clark, Constance, PhD, 2014, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, CA, 330 pp., 3635005.

Carl Jung suggested yearning is the psychological condition of all people. For what do we yearn? What are the resources we bring to bear on yearning? Can yearning be progressive and creative? The purposes of the author’s work are: (a) to explore Jung’s perspectives on yearning; (b) to relate these perspectives to his views on regressive and repressive defensiveness as opposed to progressive creativity; (c) to compare and integrate these perspectives with the findings of contemporary psychologists who study creativity, particularly as they relate to eminent and everyday creativity; and (d) to illustrate the integrated perspectives as they manifest in examples of eminent and everyday creativity, focusing on two of the most important subjects Jung explores: the visual image (representing eminent creativity through photography) and sexuality (representing everyday creativity through sex therapy).

California gold rush violence, 1849–1854: A psychological interpretation

Beck, Jason Robert, PhD, 1978, University of Southern California, 256 pp., DP28752.

This study examines California gold rush violence from a psychological and sociological perspective, limited to the period 1849–1854 because those were the years in which the individual miner was prominent in mining activities. Special illustrations of individual and collective violence inflicted upon people by gold rush miners have been selected from the numerous cases of violence that were studied. For the purposes of this inquiry, aggression has been defined as behavior which resulted or could result in personal injury. As Sigmund Freud began to delve into the dynamics of the human mind towards the close of the 19th century, he divested little time upon aggression. The author discusses various more recent theories attempting to explain human aggression, including an instinctual drive, environmental influences, the frustration–aggression theory, instrumental aggression, and the physiological model of human aggression.

There is a hole in holism

Davis, Marc H., PsyD, 2013, Adler School of Professional Psychology, IL, 215 pp., 3581655.

Adlerianism or Individual Psychology touts itself as a holistic psychology. However, the use of focused mindful approaches (FMAs), specifically hypnosis or guided mindfulness meditation (GMM), in conjunction with Adlerian therapy is generally not supported by the Adlerian community. Alfred Adler, Rudolph Dreikurs, as well as several other Adlerian scholars share the belief that the use of hypnosis is ‘un-democratic’ in that the client is subjected to the power and control of the clinician. Research in this study is focused on three primary areas: evidence-based practice in psychology (EBPP), FMAs, and Adlerian theory. The findings on EBPP research showed there were significant inconsistencies and shortcomings on the determination of existing evidenced-based practices. With respect to FMAs, the myth that one loses their self-control when in a hypnotized or meditative state was thoroughly debunked.

The Olive Schreiner/Havelock Ellis correspondence, February 24, 1884 through July 8, 1884: An annotated illustration of the historical editing of private letters

Drazniin, Yaffa, PhD, 1985, University of Southern California, 231 pp., DP28781.

The letters that Schreiner and Ellis wrote to each other in 1884 breathe with the immediacy of the Victorian universe, including conversations with William Gladstone/Herbert Spencer and Bret Harte, and talk of patent medicines laced with morphine. Olive Schreiner (24 Mar. 1855 to 11 Dec. 1920) was a South African novelist and anti-war crusader. Henry Havelock Ellis (1859–1949) was an English physician who was a pioneer in the study of human sexuality. Their correspondence at the end of the 19th century illustrates major trends in psychological thought of this era.

Writing from the periphery: W. G. Sebald and outsider art

Etzler, Melissa Starr, PhD, 2014, University of California, Berkeley, 171 pp., 3640423.

This study focuses on a major aspect of literature and culture in the later 20th century: the intersection of psychiatry, madness and art. Sebald’s fascination with psychopathology rapidly developed. While Sebald collected many materials on Outsider Artists and has several annotated books on psychiatry in his personal library, the author examines how Sebald’s thought and writings, both academic and literary, were particularly influenced by Ernst Herbeck’s poems. Sebald became familiar with Herbeck via the book Schizophrenie und Sprache (1966), in which Navratil analyzed his patients’ creative writings in order to illustrate commonalities between pathological artistic productions and canonical German literature, thereby blurring the lines between genius and madness. This study reveals how Sebald incorporated Herbeck within his works over a 30-year period in order to provide a social commentary.

Back to Ithaca

Frangione, Luke, PhD, 2014, Drew University, NJ, 225 pp., 3636956.

This dissertation, which is a novel by Frangione, considers both the external journey and the internal, and explores the growth necessary for the journey to succeed. It is preceded by a critical framework addressing why one hero fails in the myth of Orpheus but another is successful in his return home in The Odyssey. The framework discusses Jung’s ‘anima’ and ‘renovatio’ as lenses to aid psychological understanding of the inner growth of the hero in parallel with Joseph Campbell’s ‘hero’s journey’ which provides a structure for the exterior experiences.

Cognitive normativity and early American fiction

Grabowski, Lisa Z, PhD, 2014, Fordham University, NY, 224 pp., 3632723.

This study investigates how four early American fictional texts were engaged with emerging notions of the human mind wrought by medical, scientific, and philosophical discourses. The author argues that the four novels examined in this work – Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798) and Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (1799), Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee: Written by Himself (1836), and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851) – each incorporate and then dissect concurrent medicalized notions of the mind, brain, and intelligence. In doing so, these fictions resist the medical models of the mind beginning to emerge in the antebellum era, which would eventually rise to become the dominant model of the mind in the late 19th century.

The association between marital status and health: Variation across age groups and dimensions of psychological well-being

Hzu, Tze-Li, PhD, 2014, Florida State University, 122 pp., 3638008.

Marital status significantly shapes individuals’ psychological well-being, though more is known about its effect on negative than on positive dimensions. This study examines the association between marital status and psychological well-being across negative and positive dimensions, using data from two waves of the Midlife in the United States Survey (MIDUS 1995–96 and 2004–6). These findings of variation in the association between marital status and psychological well-being, across not only dimensions of well-being but also age groups, highlight the importance of further research examining sources of variation and explanations for them.

Narcissistic sensibilities: The erotics of an imagined self in eighteenth-century novels

Jennings, Kristine, PhD, 2014, State University of New York at Binghamton, 221 pp., 3632961.

This work is concerned with the creation of interiority and the conception of the self in the 18th century; the novel’s engagement in and negotiation of such constructions; and the relevance of psychoanalytic theory to 18th-century culture and novels. In offering a reinterpretation of Freud’s theory of narcissism, as it concerns the relationship of an inner self to the experience of the body, this study highlights the importance of this theory to understanding the repercussions of the modern sex-gender system on the individual’s experience of interiority. Freud not only conceived of narcissism as a normal and necessary libidinal process in all human beings, he also posited that the experience and expression of the imaginary inner self is intimately related to sexuality. The author offers close readings of novels by Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Sophie von La Roche, and Friederike Helene Unger, analyzing their heroines’ struggles to reconcile expectations of feminine identity with their own fantasies of themselves. Overall, these novels suggest that the modern conception of feminine identity and sexuality, as it emerged in the 18th century, provokes narcissistic injury in its suppression of the pleasurable female body.

Juvenile states: A genealogy of race, gender and delinquency in U.S. culture, 1899–1967

Kae, Heyang Julie, PhD, 2014, University of Washington, 235 pp., 3631855.

This study surveys the status of the juvenile delinquent in U.S. cultural production through a cross-disciplinary investigation of sociology, psychology, literature, and film. The cultural archive of this dissertation is organized around two important legal watersheds in juvenile justice. In 1899 the first juvenile court was established in Cook County, Illinois, and ushered in a wave of juvenile justice reform in courts across the nation. The Supreme Court decision In re Gault (1967) marks the second watershed. Within normative legal accounts, this decision is seen as ‘restoring’ the court’s impartial treatment of the juvenile based on the determination that juvenile court procedure failed to protect the juvenile’s right to due process. The author uses a genealogical method, as theorized by Michel Foucault, to expose the limits, obfuscations, and contradictions of dominant narratives of juvenile delinquency in order to denaturalize the authority of disciplinary knowledge by examining juvenile delinquency discourse as an assembly of historical entanglements and political contestations that were critically imagined in aesthetic representations of juvenile delinquency. This study offers sustained readings of literary and cinematic representations of the juvenile delinquent to explain the pathological definitions of delinquent behavior deployed by the state and social sciences and to animate the juvenile delinquent as a constitutively porous figure that has reinforced a state technology of selective incorporation.

The rise and fall of mentalism in experimental psychology

Kirsch, Irving, PhD, 1975, University of Southern California, 178 pp., DP30483.

Experimental psychology developed as a synthesis between philosophy and 19th-century physiology. The nature of the human psyche was a subject of speculative philosophical concern for centuries. In the 19th century, physiology, then a fledgling science itself, began to attend to the mechanisms underlying perception. But the specific impetus for the development of experimental psychology as an independent field came from the oldest and one of the most respected of the physical sciences, astronomy. It was a methodological problem in astronomy that convinced the scientific community that their knowledge of the physical world could not be complete without an understanding of the mental processes through which the scientist was able to make his observations.

Reading to the test: Character, method, and complicity in U.S. writing from Emerson to Adorno

Laville, Claire, PhD, 2014, Emory University, GA, 207 pp., 3639949.

The author demonstrates that recurrent literary figures and changing theories of reading drove the evolution of experimental psychology, and argues that the ubiquity of the test motif demands that we reconsider the priority granted to character and experience in recent critical theory and US intellectual history. Additionally, there is a focus on the pertinence of earlier debates surrounding human-subjects research to discussions of figure and personification in literary theory. Special attention is paid to the psychological experiments Gertrude Stein carried out as an undergraduate. She grappled with traditions, literary and scientific, that held repetition to be a characteristically feminine style of passivity or complicity. Her 900-page novel The Making of Americans reflects her ambivalence to studying human subjects and to her teachers’ all-encompassing theories of character, habit, and experience. Further work incorporates the writings of Henry A. Murray, who designed numerous personality tests for psychiatric and military and was also one of Herman Melville’s earliest biographers. Finally, this work examines the publications of Theodor Adorno and Vladimir Nabokov, émigré writers of conflicting ideologies, who mocked and reimaged the personality tests of previous scholars.

The psychology of the Supreme Court: Modeling judicial semantics from written opinions

Lippert, Anne, PhD, 2014, University of New Mexico, 202 pp., 3641228.

This work evaluates the application of knowledge networks to legal text. Results showed significant structural differences between SCOD networks and random networks. SCOD networks were also shown to have good face validity in representing scholarly characterizations of the Supreme Court, and in particular reflected known issues concerning the influence of ideology on Supreme Court decision-making. In general, this study demonstrates the potential in using knowledge networks to help answer a wide variety of questions concerning Supreme Court decision making.

Identification of classic studies in motor learning

Lyon, Rose Marie, PhD, 1977, University of Southern California, 130 pp., DP29724.

The purpose of this study was to determine those research studies that have been of major significance in the historical development of motor learning. This investigation was concerned with the identification of classic studies directly related to the development of motor learning. Included could be those early contributions of psychologists, philosophers, or physiologists who initiated the study of learning as an objective rather than introspective inquiry. The development of their experimental methods, as well as their inherent interest in learning, prompted and greatly influenced the study of motor learning.

The uses of adversity

Mounteer, Carlyle Albert, PhD, 1977, University of Southern California, 199 pp., DP28750.

This work began as a study of psychological depression in the early Middle Ages. But, as often happens, the story which the author had hoped to tell was altered by what the sources would permit. Thus, in spite of very intensive research into many possible sources which were expected to reveal something about psychological depression in the early Middle Ages, it was found that the available materials tells a very different, complex story. Particular focus is placed on a wide range of emotional events ranging from normal grief and sadness to suicide and despair. It should be noted that evidence for psychological depression, in its medical pathological manifestations, is very uncommon in the sources of this period. The primary sources examine the attitudes and approaches to different aspects of human unhappiness in this earlier era. During the 4th–9th centuries the best sources for attitudes and approaches to grief and sorrow were the sections in the sin literature referring to the sin of tristitia. Other excellent sources are biblical commentaries discussing these emotions.

Mental death: Slavery, madness and state violence in the United States

Reed, Adam Metcaffe, PhD, 2014, University of California, Santa Cruz, 287 pp., 3641703.

The author analyzes the relationship of slavery and madness as part of the political, medical, economic, legal, and literary institutions of the United States. This is a study of the racially-segregated mental asylums in pre-Civil War America. Further findings map the epistemic ground of race, mind, and nation in the Revolutionary-era United States. A specific case study traces the admission and treatment records of a 16-year-old slave interned in a mental asylum to the discourses and institutions surrounding the internal slave trade.

The Gemeinschaft der Eigenen and the cultural politics of homoeroticism in Germany, 1896–1933

Roper, John Herbert, Jr, PhD, 2014, University of Pennsylvania, 242 pp., 3635545.

The Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (the Society of the Self-Determined) was established in 1903 on the outskirts of Berlin to realize the social and political goals espoused by its leader: the author, photographer, and perennial activist, Adolf Brand (1874–1945). Inspired by anarchist political thought, Brand and the organization’s members used a rhetoric of personal liberation to advocate greater social acceptance of male bonding and intimacy and to promote a cult of youthful beauty. The group’s unwavering faith in the transformative power of culture was central to the realization of these objectives. A secondary goal was the elimination from the German penal code of Paragraph 175, the statute that prohibited ‘unnatural acts’ between men. Source material is largely drawn from the 13 volumes of the organization’s flagship publication, Der Eigene, published intermittently from 1896 until 1932 and now regarded as the world’s first homosexual journal. The author evaluates the collapse and failure of Brand’s political goals as well as his ill-fated project to ‘rescue’ German men and intimate male relationships from what he perceived to be the corrupting influences of femininity and scientific investigation.

Psychoanalysis, sexuality, and nationality in late Habsburg Austria

Rothe, Johanna, PhD, 2014, University of California, Santa Cruz, 265 pp., 3641705.

Sigmund Freud’s theories of sexuality and gender – especially the theories of castration, sexual difference, and Oedipus – form the core of a psychoanalytic understanding of the self. Despite, and in some cases precisely through, their alleged universal character, these theories participate in a battle over the meanings of Czech, European, German, Jewish, and Christian identities brought on by drastic changes in the social and political organization of late Habsburg Austria: industrialization, mass migrations, competing nationalisms, and the rise of the antisemitic movement. This study suggests that psychoanalytic accounts of gender and sexuality normalize and justify racialized notions of individuality during this time frame in Austria.

Marketing the female politician: An exploration of gender, appearance, and power

Sanghvi, Minita, PhD, 2014, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 269 pp., 3637557.

Since the founding of the United States of America, there have been just 34 female governors and, so far, no female president or vice president. Utilizing the theories of Freud, this work is the first to attempt to explain the impact of modern-day manifestations of power and gender dynamics within the lived experience of female politicians. Findings reveal the struggles specific to female politicians, such as impossible appearance standards, issues of self-doubt, trouble building credibility, and dealing with the old boys’ network, as well as subtle forms of discrimination, such as lack of access to critical resources. This interdisciplinary study reveals how appearance is used as a code to indicate deeply-held, unconscious biases that facilitate the ongoing objectification of female politicians, and points to the pressing need for further research on the topic of appearance and political marketing.

Affirming psychosis and trauma in psychoanalytic psychotherapy through Gilles Deleuze’s schizoanalysis

Shomron-Atar, Elion N., PhD, 2014, Adelphi University, NY, The Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies, 247 pp., 3581428.

Throughout his life work, Deleuze (1925–95) has offered a powerful critique of psychoanalysis and an amended model of psychoanalytic thought. In their collaborative work, Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1930–92) termed this system schizoanalysis. The author examines primarily the work of Freud, Klein, and Winnicott, alongside many later theorists and interspersed with his own life and clinical experience. By exploring the cross-fertilization of these discourses and influences, a model of therapeutic transformation is outlined which enables the appreciation of the unmediated connection between desire and social forces, especially in late capitalism. The study interweaves both a new philosophical framework for therapeutic affirmation and builds upon moments of affirmative, clinical practice, identifying key concepts salient for both schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis, and explores their reformulations, namely power dialectics, trauma, and psychosis.

Deliberating the science of madness: DSM-5 and the polytechtonic rhetorical economy of psychiatric nosological controversy

Strait, Lawrence Paul, PhD, 2014, University of Southern California, 663 pp., 3643183.

This study examines the rhetorical features of psychiatric nosological controversy. The locus of inquiry is the recent controversial revision of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now in its fifth edition (DSM-5). The work seeks to answer the following research question: When the field of psychiatry assembles to revise itself, how do previous rhetorical arrangements organize into new vectors, evolve, and cluster together into what becomes a new network consensus (or quasi-consensus)? The author contributes to debates in the social study of science and the rhetoric of inquiry about the development and evolution of scientific fields. It is contended that, as psychiatric knowledge advances, discursive forms embodying old institutional logics and theoretical paradigms leave residues that retain their persuasive character. This work argues that the inability of psychiatry to resolve a set of internal dilemmas combined with its temporizing can be understood in contemporary terms as a politics of the supplement.

Predictors of adjustment to September 11th, 2001 and the anthrax attacks

Swanson, Jeffrey Nathaniel, PhD, 2013, University of Texas at Arlington, 163 pp., 3596810.

While the effects of the September attacks have been heavily studied, effects of the anthrax attacks that directly followed have not been a widespread focus of research. This set of events, however, may be more representative of terrorism as it exists across the world, and there is both theoretical and empirical evidence indicating that responses to the anthrax attacks may be worse than to 9/11. The following secondary data analysis attempts to identify factors that predict adjustment to the anthrax attacks among individuals with only vicarious exposure. Mental health outcomes of adjustment included individual perceived stress, symptoms of posttraumatic stress, positive and negative change in outlook, worrying about themselves, and worrying about others. Overall, the perceived anthrax threat was a powerful indicator of mental and behavioral adjustment outcomes and should be an area of initial assessment to determine individuals at risk for more chronic mental health concerns.

Power and ecstasy: Race, religion, and psychology in America, 1890–1930

Trollinger, Rebekah, PhD, 2014, Indiana University, 194 pp., 3636205.

The author contends that in an era defined by Progressive discourse, Jim Crow laws, and disenchantment with the promises of modern life, religious ecstasy offered a dissolution of self that seemed both threatening and also potentially liberating for the individuals involved. Specifically, this work argues that at the turn of the 20th century ecstatic experience became a privileged site for thinking through the nexus of race, modernity, and personhood in American culture. This study is based on three seemingly disparate kinds of writing: literature, psychological writing, and religious narrative. This is a historical project, and it is grounded in sources that range from the unknown writings of the psychologist George Coe, to accounts of the Pentecostal Azusa Street revival, to the multidisciplinary writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and the fiction of Pauline Hopkins and Nella Larsen.

Concealed insanity: Protestant conceptions of mental maladies

Vacek, Heather Hartung, PhD, 2012, Duke University, NC, 353 pp., 3639388.

From the colonial era to the 20th century, American Protestants professed to care for the well-being of bodies, minds, and souls, but those living with mental illnesses often received minimal attention. Through a focus on five paradigmatic figures (Cotton Mather, Benjamin Rush, Dorothea Dix, Anton Boisen, Karl Menninger), this study first explores the history of the Protestant church and mental maladies in America. After tracing how social stigma and shifting professionalization inhibited Protestant responses to mental illness, the author reflects and explores the Christian hospitality as an antidote to these stymied reactions. It is asserted that the practice of hospitality – through acts of welcome, compassion, incorporation, and patience – counters stigma and clears the way for more faithful and attentive care for the suffering that results from mental maladies.

The meaning of a return to Freud: The French critique of logocentric psychology

Wayne, John David Alexander, PhD, 1990, University of Southern California, 174 pp., DP25373.

Sigmund Freud caused a scandal at the turn of the 20th century by pronouncing a marked skepticism about the prevailing philosophical and psychological beliefs in consciousness as center of meaning production. There is little, if any, debate as to the presence of a trend towards the debasement of the unconscious in psychological theory, research and practice. Most obvious in cognitive and behavioral psychologies (significant contributors to counseling psychology), there is concern among some psychologists, most notably those in the French school of psychoanalysis, that a change in emphasis regarding the unconscious is taking place within psychoanalysis itself, particularly in the school of ego psychology. Broadly stated, this study asks three questions: Is a psychology without an unconscious adequate to a philosophical and/or a clinical understanding of human being? What is the motivation for dispensing with or paying less attention to the unconscious? Is this exclusively an intellectual motivation, or is there an emotional component as well? What are the consequences for psychotherapy when is does not concern itself with the Freudian unconscious?

Behaviorism reconsidered: An analysis of B. F. Skinner’s science of behavior and its implications

Willcoxon, Ronald Lee, PhD, 1975, University of Southern California, 163 pp., DP24102.

The field of counseling in recent years has undergone the emergence of various psychological practices and underlying theories. One of the more prolific of these approaches has been the different types of therapy based on the behavioristic position. It has also produced considerable controversy and discussion. This work analyzes the ‘radical behaviorism’ espoused by Skinner, and also examines Skinner’s main books and their contributions to the emerging field of psychology.