Abstract
Availability
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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.
Trends in secondary mathematics in relation to psychological theories: 1893-1970.
Bell, James A., Educat. D., 1971, University of Oklahoma, 191 pp., 7126540.
The purpose of this study is to determine the influence of psychology on the secondary mathematics curriculum from 1893 to 1970. The various aims and recommendations for secondary mathematics have been examined, and the psychological background, if any, of these recommendations have been considered. Along with the direct influence on the curriculum, the author relates the broad trends in psychology and the resulting changes to the mathematics curriculum.
Playing with lives: Theatricality, self-staging, and the problem of agency in Renaissance English revenge tragedy.
Condon, James Joseph, PhD, 2009, University of California, Riverside, 210 pp., 3389711.
This project explores Renaissance revenge tragedy’s conspicuous theatricality in light of the genre’s primary concerns of personal transformation and the place of the self within an increasingly prescriptive society and cosmology. Specifically, its goal is to assert the essential dramaturgical role of theatricality in the early modern revenge play. Focusing primarily on the Kydian tradition of revenge begun with The Spanish Tragedy and continued in the work of William Shakespeare, John Marston and Thomas Middleton, this study investigates the genre’s treatment of subjectivity and how the characters’ attempts at self-fashioning are mitigated – and at times, utterly thwarted – by the pre-existing interpretive systems within which these characters move.
From ‘moron’ to ‘maladjusted’: Eugenics, psychiatry, and the regulation of women, Ontario, 1930s-1960s.
de la Cour, Lykke, PhD, 2013, University of Toronto, Canada, 451 pp., 10158248.
In the early 1900s, the eugenics movement spurred a number of major developments in Ontario, among them the committal of large numbers of women to the Ontario Hospital, Cobourg, under diagnoses of mental defect. A tool of reproductive control, institutionalization was meant to inhibit ‘feebleminded’ women’s procreative capacities. Drawing on the detailed patient case files of women confined to the Cobourg facility from the mid-1930s to mid-1960s, this dissertation re-examines the history of eugenics in Ontario to demonstrate not only its profound impact in the decades prior to World War II, but also its enduring effects in the post-war era. Examining disability as both a category of analysis and a discursive construct, the author argues that eugenicists re-scripted the notion of mentally ‘unfit’ into a concept of ‘maladjustment’ in the post-war years, and then applied it more broadly to justify and advance inequitable social relations across a range of social identities.
Modernity and the scientific study of emotions, 1880-1950.
Dror, Otniel Elboim Yizhak, PhD, 1998, Princeton University, NJ, 313 pp., 9920431.
This work studies the transformation of emotions into modern biomedical objects of knowledge in late nineteenth through mid-twentieth century Anglo-American science. It examines the tensions, meanings and contexts of encounters between experimental physiologists, scientific clinicians and their conceptions of emotions. The new science of emotions began when physiologists and clinicians took emotions and transformed them into modern objects of biomedical knowledge. They generated, isolated, purified, quantified and recorded emotions; produced new instruments for visualizing and representing emotions in curves and numeric tables; compared emotions across time and space; and propagated these practices and instruments outside of the laboratory and clinic. New relationships between the body, technology, science and emotions emerged from laboratory and clinical encounters and coincided with larger transformations and tensions in post-Victorian society.
Coming full circle: The development, rise, fall, and return of the concept of anticipation in hereditary disease.
Friedman, Judith Ellen, PhD, 2008, University of Victoria, Australia, 348 pp., NR52946.
The author examines the history of the creation and development of the concept of anticipation, a pattern of heredity found in several diseases (e.g. Huntington’s disease and myotonic dystrophy), in which an illness manifests itself earlier and often more severely in successive generations. This study traces precursor notions in psychiatric and hereditarian thought from 1840 to the coining of the term ‘anticipation’ by the ophthalmologist Edward Nettleship in 1905. Special attention is given to the work of F.W. Mott, Karl Pearson, Ernst Rüdin and Lionel Penrose.
Existential psychoanalysis and the nature of mental disorder: Between the medical model and antipsychiatry.
Krgovic, Jelena, PhD, 2016, State University of New York at Buffalo, 224 pp., 10127753.
This study develops a Sartrean framework for understanding mental disorders. The author’s goal is to explain how we can use Sartre’s philosophy in order to better understand mental disorders and to bridge the gap between the anti-psychiatrists on the one hand and the medical model on the other. This analysis of Sartre’s philosophy and his existential psychoanalysis shows the following, in brief: first, that psychiatry should focus on the person as a whole, thus incorporating both the objective and the subjective dimension; second, that definitions of mental disorder should start with defining mental health; and third, that phenomenology is indispensable in determining which structures underlie our experience of the world.
Trends in the history of contemporary social psychology: A quantitative analysis.
Loy, Pamela Hewitt, PhD, 1976, University of New Hampshire, 263 pp., 7710261.
The field of social psychology is generally considered an infant of dual parentage, i.e. the product of an historical theoretical marriage between psychology and sociology. The notion that social psychology was or is currently a unified area with a specific orientation and object of study is a minimally tenable position usually based upon optimistically opinionated conjecture rather than factually supported evidence. It is proposed that the field of social psychology is in actuality a rubric under which two different disciplinary branches are subsumed: sociological social psychology and psychological social psychology. It is further maintained that these two co-disciplines are separable in terms of historical antecedents, philosophical assumptions, levels of analysis, methods of analysis, theoretical and methodological approaches, research tools, conceptual frameworks, and causal assumptions.
Competent to counsel? The history of a conservative Protestant anti-psychiatry movement.
Powlison, David Arthur, PhD, 1996, University of Pennsylvania, 461 pp., 9712988.
In 1970 Jay Adams, a Presbyterian minister, launched an anti-psychiatry movement among American, conservative Protestants. Partly inspired by O. H. Mowrer and Thomas Szasz, Adams made a three-fold claim. First, modern psychological theories were bad theology, misinterpreting functional problems in living. Second, psychotherapeutic professions were a false pastorate, interlopers on tasks that properly belonged to pastors. Third, the Bible, as interpreted by Reformed Protestants, taught pastors the matters necessary to counsel competently. A conflict over professional jurisdiction ensued between Adams and evangelical psychotherapists. In the 1980s evangelical psychotherapists successfully asserted their claim to cultural authority over problems in living, extending their institutional power in higher education, publishing, and the provision of care. The nouthetic counseling movement became isolated from the mainstream of conservative Protestantism; its institutions languished; fault lines emerged internally. However in the 1990s, nouthetic counseling began to prosper again.
Psychotherapy, religion and spirituality: An introductory guide for mental health professionals providing psychotherapy to Orthodox Jews.
Sateei, Shirine H., PsyD, 2014, Alliant International University, CA, 146 pp., 3624658.
This clinical study explores the integration of religion and spirituality in psychotherapy, specifically focusing on Orthodox Judaism. It provides an introduction to Judaism for mental health professionals providing psychotherapy to the Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jewish population. A history of Judaism, statistics of Jews around the world, and a thorough explanation of basic Jewish laws are discussed to provide increased cultural competency and awareness for mental health professionals.
Disordered eating as a Leitfaden through late eighteenth-century psychiatry.
Segesser, Kathryn, PhD, 2016, University of Toronto, Canada, 259 pp., 10140559.
This study expands the histories of insanity, psychiatry and eating disorders. It explores the myriad intersections between the diagnoses of ‘insanity’ and ‘disordered eating’, using the latter as a guide to changing conceptualizations about the former. The parallels between the re-labelling of disordered eating as a manifestation of psychological disorder and the reimagining of insanity as mental illness are complex but illuminative. The author argues that psychiatry evolved when geographic, cultural and intellectual groups adopted that position. This thesis treats medical knowledge and practice as independent but interdependent. The years 1750-1830 were seminal, transitory years. Hospitals and asylums reshaped not only the basic dynamics between practitioners and patients and the rate at which practitioners encountered the poor and the insane. Finally, this work presents the American medical world as, in essence, a subset of English culture. This is qualified in four ways: asylum strategies; (re)publications of medical texts; newspapers reports; and legal decisions.
The concept of the therapeutic community in British institutional psychiatry.
Thompson, Richard Denzil, PhD, 1976, University of Bath, UK, 436 pp., U416109.
This sociological study examines the origins, development and uses of the concept of ‘therapeutic community’ in institutional psychiatry. It is divided into four parts: the first two contain a survey of all the available literature referring to the use of ‘milieu therapy’ and ‘therapeutic community’ strategies in the treatment of (functional) mental disorders; and the last two contain a description of the author’s fieldwork, followed by a detailed analysis of the operational use of the concept of ‘therapeutic community’ in selected British psychiatric institutions. The origins of the concept of the ‘therapeutic community’ are traced through a review of social medicine since 1790. It is the author’s contention that the concept of the therapeutic community is seen to be progressive because it is ideologically opposed to traditional psychiatry.