Dissertation abstracts

Availability

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.

A printed version of a dissertation can be purchased from ProQuest Company, 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346, USA (tel. 800-5210600). Prices, as of April 2017, for University Affiliated Persons: unbound $39.00, soft $56.00, hard $72.00, PDF (when available) $38.00, microfilm $49.00; microfiche $55.00.

Jonathon Erlen ¹ has provided the following annotated list of dissertations relevant to our field, based on his review of Dissertation Abstracts. ² 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.

The wisdom of tragedy: Contemporary American psychology and the Ancient Greek tragedians.

Carroll, Tracey Lynne, DLitt, 2015, Drew University, NJ, 178 pp., 3689389.

Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides interspersed lines of commentary about the human condition throughout their tragedies. These lines take the form of advice, lament or aphorism, but a common word unifies them: wisdom. They offer guidance on how to accept the tragedy that human life invariably brings. In contemporary America, 2,500 years later, psychologists are conducting research on similar topics: What helps people recover from personal tragedy? How can overcoming tragedy lead to a ‘better’ life? Also, what is a better life? The tragedians’ and psychologists’ methods of answering these questions may differ vastly, but they arrive at similar conclusions.

‘Walk among us’: Moral panics and the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in popular culture.

Cooke, Anthony Carlton, PhD, 2015, Emory University, GA, 289 pp., 3736831.

The ubiquitous presence of the ‘madperson’ within postwar American fiction and film at the same cultural moment that conflicts emerge over mental health care presents a strong case for the necessity of reading the social text within popular culture. The author’s project argues that popular fascination with the ‘madperson’ stems from a more material social referent: the contemporaneous increase of chronically mentally ill persons in public life due to the deinstitutionalization movement. Deinstitutionalization began with the introduction of psychotropic drugs into the asylum during the 1950s and subsequently led to the release of thousands of patients by the mid-1970s. This study explores connections between deinstutionalization, representations of the ‘murderous, mentally ill individual’ in the horror, crime and thriller genres, and public perceptions of mental illness from the postwar era to the present.

‘The Seven Sermons to the Dead’ and the transcendent function: The Gnostic roots of Jungian psychology.

Douglas, Clyde Stuart, PhD, 2015, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, CA, 271 pp., 3709209.

This hybrid hermeneutic-heuristic study examines the influence of Gnostic thought on Jungian psychology as indicated by connections between Carl G. Jung’s essay, ‘The Transcendent Function’ (1916), and his Gnostic-inspired treatise, The Seven Sermons to the Dead (1916). The hypothesis of this work is that the Seven Sermons is the metaphysical twin of ‘The Transcendent Function’ and that these texts can be considered to be two sides of the same coin. Given that Gnostic philosophy appears to be the inspiration for both texts and is the crucial link that confirms their relationship, the author also highlights correspondences between both of Jung’s works and the classic Gnostic texts of the Nag Hammadi Library.

Secrecy and safety: A cultural history of seizures in mid-twentieth century America.

Elder, Rachel, PhD, 2015, University of Pennsylvania, 286 pp., 3709455.

The author explores a major change in the modes of managing epilepsy in the USA between 1930 and 1960. At a time when seizure disorders were increasingly considered controllable and even curable, it examines the way in which rising expectations about medical control and treatability transformed popular constructions of ‘the epileptic’ from a ‘diseased’ to a ‘normal’ individual. The subject of seizures – and equally, the ‘asymptomatic’ seizure-prone individual – provides insight into broader changes in attitudes about personal information and disclosure, the dynamics of invisible disability, as well as complex values regarding the loss and maintenance of physical control. In effect, they reveal embodied practices of secrecy and safety – what this dissertation suggests were crucial strategies for maintaining control and its appearances – practices, which collectively, illuminate key dimensions of the body and identity, and how they were mutually constituted in the middle of the twentieth century.

The trauma thesis: Medical and literary representations of psychological trauma in the twentieth century.

Eilefson, Sarah, PhD, 2015, Loyola University Chicago, 290 pp., 3722582.

During World War I, soldiers and civilians struggled to comprehend the war’s devastation and the changes it produced, while medical practitioners and artists examined the war as a site of extraordinary trauma. The author explores two of the many archives of this trauma: the medical discourse through which trauma was defined; and representations of trauma in a variety of English-language novels from the early and mid-twentieth century. This study proposes alternatives to the ways in which trauma is used in literature and the way trauma theory is used in literary analysis, focusing on the relationship among combatants, non-combatants, and civilians in order to show that trauma is not the only response to combat and that combat is not the only source of trauma – even war-related trauma.

Our fathers, our brothers, ourselves: Illusory pattern perception and the progression of trauma theory.

Field, Christopher B., PhD, 2015, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 257 pp., 3733136.

This study argues that depictions of cultural trauma in literature are a natural progression from depictions of individual trauma, by tracing the development of trauma studies from their roots in Freudian psychoanalysis to their current position as an interdisciplinary field of study. It accomplishes this by focusing on one symptom of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: a tendency to perceive illusory patterns – patterns that do not really exist, such as conspiracy theories – in response to feelings of helplessness that stem from a traumatic event. Through the use of poetry, fiction, film and graphic novels from three lingering national crises – the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, and 9/11 – the author demonstrates that the perception of an illusory pattern is a simplistic attempt to deal with the ramifications of a traumatic event which must be dismissed in favour of embracing the complexities of the trauma in order to move beyond it.

Vision of creation: A Jungian view of Hildegard’s ‘On the Origin of Life’ vision.

Hudson, Brenda K., PhD, 2011, Pacifica Graduate Institute, CA, 195 pp., 3716788.

Hildegard von Bingen, a visionary abbess living in the tumultuous 12th century, recorded and interpreted three very powerful visions pertaining to Christianity. This study is limited to the first image of Hildegard’s last vision called De Operatione Dei, the Works of God, a cosmological vision about creation. Special attention is paid to Jung’s individuation process describing the soul’s journey back towards Spirit. Then, using Jungian and alchemical symbols, the images of this vision are further elaborated upon. Finally, the parallel between Hildegard’s vision and Jung’s individuation process is explained in detail.

Timeknots: Science and reform at a French asylum, circa 1900.

Nelson, Elizabeth, PhD, 2015, Indiana University, 276 pp., 3716448.

From the point of view of the traditional historiography, the Belle Époque (1890–1914) was a time when little of importance happened in French psychiatry; the asylum had been set in place by mid-century, and all that was left was for this totalizing system to run. However, at the Villejuif asylum near Paris circa 1900, asylum administration, patient care and scientific research were all undergoing significant renovation, making the institution the epicentre of an energetic reform movement. Drawing on theoretical insights from Science and Technology Studies and concepts like the ‘timeknot’ from postcolonial history, this analysis of reforming activity at the Villejuif asylum reveals tensions between progress and stasis in the context of the peculiar texture of institutional time. Far from being a story of successive paradigms, psychiatry in France was temporally knotted, comprised of loops, repetitions, and residues of other eras.

Alchemical hermeneutics: Re-visioning the Yoga Sūtras, Dark Night, and heart center in the Upanisadsand Eastern Christian prayer through a Jungian lens.

Odorisio, David M., PhD, 2015, California Institute of Integral Studies, 184 pp., 1707689791.

The alchemical hermeneutic methodology utilizes a depth psychological understanding of alchemical operations as an interpretive lens. These processes, viewed from a depth psychological perspective, become the hermeneutical foci through which to interpret select spiritual texts. Following Jung and Romanyshyn, this work further develops an alchemical hermeneutic, and uses this textual approach in the interpretation of four texts/traditions in order to create new horizons of meaning, and to expand the reader’s relationship to text and self at personal and transpersonal levels, as well as broaden, deepen and define a more psychologically sophisticated approach to certain spiritual texts.

Cultivated madness: Aesthetics, psychology and the value of the author in early 20th-century Japan.

Pitarch Fernandez, Pau, PhD, 2015, Columbia University, NY, 268 pp., 3716588.

This study analyses how the motif of the ‘morbid genius’ became a central concept for the formation of the literary field in 1910s and 1920s Japan. Writers deployed the idea that artistic creativity is a form of mental abnormality, in order to carve a privileged space for themselves as ‘modern authors’, at a time when literary writing was becoming professionalized. Psychological abnormality offered both a mark of modernity, and a set of aesthetic, medical and political discourses to legitimize a notion of literary value based on the artist’s unique experience of the world.

Dynamic social perceptions of mental illness over the centuries: A historical case study.

Robey-Hooper, Arvyzena, PsyD, 2015, University of the Rockies, CO, 212 pp., 3735137.

A qualitative historical case study examines the factors leading to the development of the policy of deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in the USA, along with its consequences. The historical case study investigated the growth of the institutional or asylum system from the 16th century to the present, with particular emphasis on the USA. The research also discussed the changes in societal perceptions leading to deinstitutionalization. The specific problem under investigation involved the de facto criminalization of mental illness that has been occurring because of the use of the criminal justice system to control individuals who suffer from severe mental illnesses. To provide effective community care for the mentally ill within the community care model and to reduce the incarceration rate of the mentally ill, substantial changes in social policy are necessary.

A historical analysis of the pioneers and advocates of Autism Spectrum Disorder (1980–2013): Examining the evolution of the diagnosis and the influences that have shaped what the diagnosis is today.

Sikora, Cynthia, PhD, 2015, Loyola University Chicago, 211 pp., 3709658.

During the 1980s, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) was categorized as a developmental disorder separate from other developmental disorders, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III (DSM-III). Various pioneers and advocates have helped the evolution of the ASD diagnosis from the period 1980–2013. The central research questions are: during this period, who were the pioneers and advocates for the medical field, assessments, therapies and educational treatments, regulations, rights, funding and societal acceptance for ASD? By what means did they advocate, and what role did their advocacy play in the evolution of diagnosis? How did the changes in each of the above-mentioned areas impact those with ASD? What are the implications for today’s educational leaders as advocates for educational programming, societal acceptance, care and respect for those with ASD?