Volume 3, Number 1, Winter
Cognitive Therapies: A Comparison of Phenomenological and Mediational Models and their Origins
Howard Goldstein, Case Western Reserve University
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Winter 1982, Vol. 3, No. 1, Pages 1-16, ISSN 0271-0137
This article is a response to the rapidly growing interest in and practice of cognitive therapy. With the intent to place this approach in perspective, it is shown that cognitivism is neither revolutionary, the product of a particular innovator, nor a unitary system. Rather, cognitive therapy is the culmination of three centuries of thought and debate initiated by the opposing ideas of the British Empiricists and German Romanticists. The former provided the foundations for an objective and reactive or mediational conception of the mind; the latter set the premises for a subjective and proactive or phenomenological position. The history of these alternating views are traced and their modern counterparts in cognitive behaviorism, cognitive psychiatry, and cognitive phenomenology are compared relative to their differential therapeutic roles, procedures and objectives.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Howard Goldsten, DSW, Professor of Social Work, School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio 44106.
After Oedipus: Lauis, Medea, and Other Parental Myths
Nancy Datan, West Virginia University
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Winter 1982, Vol. 3, No. 1, Pages 17-26, ISSN 0271-0137
This paper is an effort to correct the child-centered bias of much of developmental theory, a bias which is itself a consequence of recent changes in social attitudes toward childhood. The present model adopts the historically older view of children as born into the world in the service of parental needs, as the consequence of a developmental process initiated by adults. The psychological themes in the drama of Oedipus Rex are reconsidered with special attention to the sexual and murderous passions of the parental figures in the drama: the tragic heroine of Medea is viewed as an illustration of the unconscious conflict between the needs of the self and the needs of the children, and the willingness of parents to sacrifice children in the service of the self. The contemporary value of this re-reading of ancient drama is underscored by reference to current research on incest and child abuse; the implications of this revisionist contribution to developmental theory include a recognition of the need to incorporate the dark passions of adults and the mastery of these conflicts into the study of individual and family development.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Nancy Datan, Department of Psychology, West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia 26506.
The Myth and Realities of Genital Herpes
Stanley M. Bierman, M.D., F.A.C.P., University of California at Los Angeles
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Winter 1982, Vol. 3, No. 1, Pages 27-46, ISSN 0271-0137
Genital Herpes simplex is a sexually transmitted disease which has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. The following paper reviews the pathophysiology of this disease as well as its medical managements. Various aspects of the psychosocial impact of genital Herpes will be discussed as well as holistic approaches to the disease. Finally, an epidemiologic survey will be reported addressing the critical issue concerning the duration of clinical infection and degree of infectious communicability.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Stanley M. Bierman, M.D., Bierman Century City Dermatology Group, Inc., 2080 Century Park East, Los Angeles, California 90067.
Models in Natural and Social Sciences
Manfred J. Holler, Ph.D., Department of Economics, University of Munich
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Winter 1982, Vol. 3, No. 1, Pages 47-54, ISSN 0271-0137
In this paper I will discuss the hypothesis that remoteness between subject and object of theorizing determines our attitude toward a particular theory. The closer subject and object are to identity, the more the subject hesitates to accept the hypothesized laws. It will be further argued that, in this sense, introspective acts serve as a permanent challenge to theories of human behavior.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Manfred J. Holler, Ph.D., Department of Economics, University of Munich, Ludwigstrasse 28/RG, 8000 Munich 22, F.R. Germany.
Reconstructing Accounts of Psychology’s Past
Bronwen Hyman, University of Toronto
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Winter 1982, Vol. 3, No. 1, Pages 55-66, ISSN 0271-0137
Histories of psychology have, up to the present, been largely narrative, and imbued with a positivist bias. Only recently have some historians recognized that the close identification of the discipline’s history with this perspective provides psychology with no more than a partial understanding of its history. Arguments are advanced in this paper to support the contention that historians of psychology must explore alternate ways of presenting historical accounts of their own discipline. Reference is made to the development of a procedure which could permit historical reconstructions by formulating arguments from contextual data gleaned from documents written by professional psychologists. It is further argued that psychologists could benefit from an application of their methodological rigor to questions related to the history of their discipline.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Bronwen Hyman, Trinity College, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1H8.
Technical Note: Earthworm Behavior in a Modified Running Wheel
Robert W. Marian and Charles I. Abramson, Department of Psychology, Boston University
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Winter 1982, Vol. 3, No. 1, Pages 67-74, ISSN 0271-0137
An apparatus which permits automated recording of earthworm wheel-turning response over many sessions is described. Data were obtained for three earthworms presented successively with five sessions of continuous darkness, five sessions of intermittent incandescent light, and five sessions of continuous darkness. Wheel-turning rates decreased during the first five sessions of darkness and remained at zero rates during the last five sessions of darkness. Furthermore, during intermittent incandescent light more responses were emitted during the dark phases than during light phases.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Robert W. Marian, Department of Psychology, Boston University, 64 Cummington Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02215.
From Coprolalia to Glossolalia: Structural Similarities Between Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome and Speaking in Tongues
Sheila A. Womack, Ph.D., University City Science Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Winter 1982, Vol. 3, No. 1, Pages 75-88, ISSN 0271-0137
Ethnographic observations of religious glossolalics and Tourette Syndrome victims found motor and vocal behavior similarities between them, even though the two sets of behavior are assigned opposite values by those experiencing them. Glossolalia is thought to be good, an expression of God, while Tourette Syndrome is considered evil and of the devil. This paper explains in neurological terms the disjunction in values assigned to similar behavior. Temporary hemisphere disjunction is offered as an explanation for belief in a supernatural cause for these behaviors. Labelling them as good and evil results from differential stimulation of the pain or pleasure system. The neurophysiolgocial relation of movement to affect further biases the oppositional labelling of their experience.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Sheila A. Womack, Ph.D., Route 1, Box 231, Decatur, Texas 76234.
Book Review ª Piaget’s Theory: A Primer
John L. Phillips, Jr. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1981
Reviewed by R.J. Russac, Department of Psychology, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, Florida 32216
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Winter 1982, Vol. 3, No. 1, Pages 89-90, ISSN 0271-0137
[Note: First paragraph, no abstract available.] Piaget once confessed that his theory is difficult to comprehend “not only because I have written too much in the course of tackling too many different problems… but above all because I am not an easy author.” Anyone who has attempted to summarize Piaget’s monumental epistemology cannot help but smile at such understatement. How does one condense a theory that has attempted to systematize nothing less than the acquisition of human knowledge, that is spread across hundreds of books and journal articles (many of which have yet to be translated into English), that is idiosyncratically developed with little sympathy for the reader, and that is founded upon a qualitative approach foreign to our American idea of science? Moreover, when summarization is attempted in a short volume dedicated to “people who have had no training in psychology,” the task become close to impossible. Yet such is Piaget’s current popularity that many authors are inspired to take up the challenge, with very uneven results.
Book Reviews
Bursting the Foundations: A Bibliographic Primer on the Criticism of Culture
Book Author: Tom Morris. Buffalo: State University of New York at Buffalo Press, 1980
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Winter 1982, Vol. 3, No. 1, Pages 91-98, ISSN 0271-0137
[Note: First paragraph, no abstract available.] The mushrooming of critical technologies and methodologies now stands as a sociological fact of the past two decades. During this time, “cultural criticism” itself has achieved a recognizable academic status as a relatively new and significant field of interdisciplinary studies encompassing a wide range of disciplines and materials including anthropological data, scientific inquiry, philosophy, literature, psychology, and historiography. Writers such as Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and Clifford Geertz have focused these sweeping interests around the general purpose of founding a theory of criticism responsive to the grounds and assumptions involved in our having knowledge of, as Hayden White says, “all the various dimensions of our specifically human being.” However, the institutionalization of a new field of inquiry ostensibly intended to criticize both institutions themselves and the basis of knowledge and authority which sustains them, raises some fundamental quastions about the status of cultural-criticism. Too often, it seems, as a new dimension of critical activity acquires professional status, it unwittingly falls victim to or realigns itself with the forces of alienation and oppression which it initially set out to criticize and transform. The immediacy of one’s personal experience grounded in felt need is then vitiated by the call for analytical rigor and technical expertise. It is in this context that Tom Morris’s Bursting the Foundations provides a unique resource and valuable introduction to those quite varied forms of criticism which, on the one hand, resist the impress of ritualized forms of communication and mass-oriented, institutional conformity, and on the other, champion the “necessarily self-critical and freer movements of thought.”
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