Author: Andrew Marshall

Founder & Editor of the BootCampMilitaryFitnessInstitute.com, MilitaryGogglebox.com, and Mental-Health-Matters.org.

Who was James Ward (1843-1925)?

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Introduction

James Ward FBA (27 January 1843 to 04 March 1925) was an English psychologist and philosopher. He was a Cambridge Apostle.

Life

Ward was born in Kingston upon Hull, the eldest of nine children. His father was an unsuccessful merchant. Ward was educated at the Liverpool Institute and Mostyn House, but his formal schooling ended when his father became bankrupt.

Apprenticed to a Liverpool architect for four years, Ward studied Greek and logic and was a Sunday school teacher. In 1863, he entered Spring Hill College, near Birmingham, to train for the Congregationalist ministry. An eccentric and impoverished student, he remained at Spring Hill until 1869, completing his theological studies as well as gaining a University of London BA degree.

In 1869–1870, Ward won a scholarship to Germany, where he attended the lectures of Isaac Dormer in Berlin before moving to Göttingen to study under Hermann Lotze. On his return to Britain Ward became minister at Emmanuel Congregational Church in Cambridge, where his theological liberalism unhappily antagonised his congregation. Sympathetic to Ward’s predicament, Henry Sidgwick encouraged Ward to enter Cambridge University. Initially a non-collegiate student, Ward won a scholarship to Trinity College in 1873, and achieved a first class in the moral sciences tripos in 1874.

With a dissertation entitled The Relation of Physiology to Psychology, Ward won a Trinity fellowship in 1875. Some of this work, An Interpretation of Fechner’s Law, was published in the first volume of the new journal Mind (1876).

For the rest of his life, the Dictionary of National Biography reports that he:

…held himself aloof from all institutional religion; but he did not tend towards secularism or even agnosticism; his early belief in spiritual values and his respect for all sincere religion never left him.

During 1876–1877 he returned to Germany, studying in Carl Ludwig’s Leipzig physiological institute. Back in Cambridge, Ward continued physiological research under Michael Foster, publishing a pair of physiological papers in 1879 and 1880.

From 1880 onwards Ward moved away from physiology to psychology. His article Psychology for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica – criticising associationist psychology with an emphasis upon the mind’s active attention to the world – became enormously influential.

Ward was a strong supporter of women’s education, and met his Irish-born suffragist wife-to-be, Mary (née Martin), when she attended one of his series of lectures. The couple married in Nottingham on 31 July 1884, and settled in Cambridge in a house built for them by J.J. Stevenson. She went on to become a lecturer in moral sciences at Newnham College, and a member of the Ladies Dining Society. They had two daughters and a son.

Ward was elected to the new Chair of Mental Philosophy and Logic in 1897, his students including G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Mohammed Iqbal and George Stout. He served as president of the Aristotelian Society from 1919 to 1920.

Ward died in Cambridge, and was cremated at Cambridge Crematorium.

Philosophical Work

Ward defended a philosophy of panpsychism based on his research in physiology and psychology which he defined as a “spiritualistic monism”. In his Gifford Lectures and his book Naturalism and Agnosticism (1899) he argued against materialism and dualism and supported a form of panpsychism where reality consists in a plurality of centres of activity. Ward’s philosophical views have a close affinity to the pluralistic idealism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Ward had believed that the universe is composed of “psychic monads” of different levels, interacting for mutual self- betterment. His theological views have been described by some as a “personal panentheism”.

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Who was Ignacio Matte Blanco (1908-1995)?

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Introduction

Ignacio Matte Blanco (03 October 1908 to 11 January 1995) was a Chilean psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who developed a logic-based explanation for the operation of the unconscious, and for the non-logical aspects of experience. In applying the complexity and paradoxes of mathematical logic to psychoanalysis, he pioneered a coherent way of understanding the clinical situation. He has an international following that includes physicists, mathematicians, cyber-scientists, psychologists, mathematical philosophers, neuroscientists, theologians, linguistics and literary scholars.

Life

Matte Blanco was born in Santiago, Chile. He was educated in Chile and qualified there as a medical doctor. He entered psychoanalysis with Fernando Allende Navarro, Latin America’s first qualified psychoanalyst. Having moved to London in 1933, he trained in psychiatry at South London’s Maudsley Hospital and in psychoanalysis at the British Psychoanalytical Society where he was supervised by Anna Freud and James Strachey, becoming a member of the British Society in 1938. He subsequently worked in the United States, from 1940. He returned to Chile in 1943 where he co-founded the Psychoanalytic Society. In 1966 he travelled to Italy, never to return to his homeland. He settled in Rome with his family. He died there at the age of 86.

The Unconscious

Matte Blanco argues that in the unconscious “a part can represent the whole” and that “past, present, and future are all the same”‘. He set out to examine the five characteristics of the unconscious that Freud had outlined: timelessness, displacement, condensation, replacement of external by internal reality, and absence of mutual contradiction. Matte Blanco hypothesized the nature of unconscious logic, as opposed to conscious logic. He deduced that if the unconscious has consistent characteristics it must follow rules, or there would be chaos. However the nature of these hypothetical characteristics indicates that their rules differ from conventional logic.

In his work The Unconscious as Infinite Sets, Matte Blanco proposes that the structure of the unconscious can be summarised by the principles of Generalisation and of Symmetry:

  1. The principle of Generalization: here logic does not take account of individuals as such, it deals with them only as members of classes, and of classes of classes.
  2. The principle of Symmetry: here the logic treats the converse of any relation as identical to it; that is, it deals with relationships as symmetrical’.

While the principle of Generalisation might be compatible with conventional logic, discontinuity is introduced by the principle of Symmetry under which relationships are treated as symmetrical, or reversible. Whereas asymmetrical thinking distinguishes individuals from one another by the relationship between them, reality testing, symmetrical thinking, by contrast, sees relations as holding indiscriminately across a field of individuals. For example, an asymmetrical relationship, X is greater than Y, becomes reversible so that Y is simultaneously greater and smaller than X. Matte Blanco draws here on Klein’s understanding that “I am angry (with a person or thing)” as very close to “Someone or something is very angry with me”; and indeed he suggests that Klein was the most creative and original of all those who have drawn inspiration from Freud, highlighting in particular her famous concept of projective identification.

For Matte Blanco, “unconsciousness” is marked by symmetry, where there is a tendency towards ‘sameness’ and likewise, an implicit aversion to ‘difference’, while the quality of ego-functioning registers and bears difference, in a sense he called asymmetry.

The Symmetrical and The Asymmetrical

Matte Blanco divided the unconscious into two modes of being: the symmetrical and the asymmetrical. Asymmetrical relations are relations that are non reversible. For example, “Jack reads the newspaper” cannot be reversed to the newspaper reading Jack. In this way, asymmetrical relations are logical relations and underlie everyday logic and common sense. They govern the conscious sphere of the human mind. Symmetrical relations, on the other hand, move in both directions simultaneously. For example, ‘Daniel sits on a stone’ can be reversed as, ‘a stone sits on Daniel’, without being untrue. Symmetrical relations, govern the unconscious mind. Matte Blanco states that the symmetrical, unconscious realm is the natural state of man and is a massive and infinite presence while the asymmetrical, conscious realm is a small product of it. This is why the principle of symmetry is all-encompassing and can dissolve all logic, leading to the asymmetrical relations perfectly symmetrical.

To show the illogical nature of symmetry, Matte Blanco said: “In the thought system of symmetry, time does not exist. An event that occurred yesterday can also occur today or tomorrow. Traumatic events of the past are not only seen in the unconscious as ever present and permanently happening but also about to happen.” He said that “We are always, in a given mental product, confronted by a mixture of the logic of the unconscious with that of the preconscious and consciousness”. Matte Blanco gives this mixture of two logics the name bi-logic and points out that our thinking is usually bi-logical, expressing the both types of logic to differing extents.

Strata

Matte Blanco saw in-depth analysis of the mind as falling into five broad strata: in which there is a particular combination of symmetrical and asymmetrical logic appropriate to each one. In what he terms the first stratum, experience is characterised by the conscious awareness of separate objects. At this level thinking is mostly delimited and asymmetrical — closest to “normal”, everyday life, to what W.R. Bion termed the mind of the “work group”…anchored to a sophisticated and rational level of behaviour. A second stratum can be defined by the appearance of a significant amount of symmetrisation within otherwise asymmetrical thinking, so that for example a man in love will attribute to the beloved young woman…all the characteristics of the class of beloved woman, but (bi-logically) he will realise that his young woman also has limitations and defects.

The next deeper, third stratum is one where different classes are identified (thus containing a fair amount of asymmetrical thinking) but in which…parts of a class are always taken as the whole class — symmetrisation (plus a degree of timelessness). The fourth stratum is defined by the fact that there is formation of wider classes which are also symmetrized, while asymmetry becomes less and less. Thus because “being a man” is a wider class than ones men, women and children, being a man is also equivalent to being a woman and a child. In this fourth and rather deep stratum, a number of the features of the Freudian unconscious are also characteristic. There is an absence of contradiction, also an identity of psychical and external reality. Finally, the deepest, fifth stratum is that in which processes of symmetrisation tend towards the mathematical limit of indivisibility thinking, which requires asymmetrical relations, is greatly impaired and becomes the realm of psychotic functioning: without asymmetrical logic, play breaks down into delusion.

Normal human development for Matte Blanco, involved gradual familiarity with all five strata, including the capacity both to differentiate and to move between them all; in abnormal states, this continuity of differentiation between the strata becomes fractured or confused.

Thus, asymmetrical thoughts are said to be at the surface, while the symmetrical relations make up multiple lower strata that go deeper until an “invisible mode” or total symmetry is reached. In the deeper, completely unconscious levels, a statement such as “Jane is the mother of Jasmine” is equally valid as “Jasmine is the mother of Jane”. This statement reversal sounds preposterous to logical, asymmetrical, conscious thought, but the depth of the unconscious has its own rules. There, such a statement is true and incontestable. In this way, the principle of symmetry changes the asymmetrical to symmetrical or, put another way, the logical into the illogical.

Influence

Matte Blanco hoped that his logical underpinning of the unconscious would contribute to development in other areas of knowledge, apart from psychoanalysis. There are applications in theology. Other applications can be found in art and literature. A number of writers have explored parallels between the work of Matte Blanco and of Gregory Bateson including Margaret Arden, Horacio Etchegoyen and Jorge L. Ahumada. Papers by Arden, Etchegoyen and Ahumada are summarised in Rayner. More contemporary applications may be found in the area of Cognitive informatics.

An International Bi-logic Conference was held every other year: in August 2016 it was held in London.

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Who was Hanns Sachs (1881-1947)?

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Introduction

Hanns Sachs (10 January 1881, in Vienna to 10 January 1947, in Boston) was one of the earliest psychoanalysts, and a close personal friend of Sigmund Freud. He became a member of Freud’s Secret Committee of six in 1912, Freud describing him as one “in whom my confidence is unlimited in spite of the shortness of our acquaintance”.

In 1939, he founded American Imago. an academic journal.

Life and Career

Born into a Jewish family, the son of a lawyer, Sachs was himself practicing as a lawyer in the early twentieth century when he began following Freud’s lectures at the University of Vienna: he finally made himself known to Freud and joined the Wednesday Psychological Society by 1910. He presented a paper to the Congress of 1911, and in 1912 began co-editing the journal Imago on non-medical applications of psychoanalysis.

Refused for army service due to short-sightedness, Sachs spent much of the war helping Freud continue to produce psychoanalytic journals, and in 1919 he decided to change from law to (lay) analysis, practicing in Berlin from 1920 onwards. Among the analysts he helped train were Nina Searl and Erich Fromm, Rudolf Loewenstein and Michael Balint.

With the rise of Hitler, Sachs moved from Berlin to Boston in 1932, but remained in close contact with Freud himself: at the latter’s deathbed in 1939, he said to Sachs that “I know I have at least one friend in America”. He published an affectionate memoir of Freud (which Freud’s biographer Peter Gay deemed indispensable) in 1945.

Ernest Jones, who considered Sachs his closest friend among the Viennese, adjudged him both the wittiest and the most apolitical of Freud’s inner circle.

Theoretical Contributions

Sachs’ first analytic publication, on the subject of dreams (1912) was cited by Freud in his study of group psychology, as was his later study of 1920 on ‘The Community of Daydreams’. In the latter, Sachs explored the role of relieving guilt feelings provided by the sharing of daydreams in children, and of art experiences in adults.

His study of Caligula emphasised the shifting characters of those dominated by fleeting and unstable identifications; his work on the female superego stressed the importance/difficulty of desexualising the superego incorporation of the father.

Sachs was also interested in film and psychoanalysis, and published on their connection in Close Up.

English Publications

  • Hanns Sachs, ‘The Community of Daydreams’, in The Creative Unconscious (1942)
  • Hanns Sachs, ‘One of the Motive Factors in the Formation of the Superego in Women’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis X 1929
  • Hanns Sachs, Caligula (1930)
  • Hanns Sachs, Freud, Master and Friend (1945)
  • Hanns Sachs, Masks of Love and Life (1948)

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Who was Gardner Murphy (1895-1979)?

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Introduction

Gardner Murphy (08 July 1895 to 18 March 1979) was an American psychologist who specialized in social and personality psychology and parapsychology. His career highlights include serving as president of the American Psychological Association and the British Society for Psychical Research.

Biography

Family Life and Education

Murphy was born on 08 July 1895, in Chillicothe, Ohio, US. He was the son of Edgar Gardner Murphy, an Episcopal minister and activist. Upon graduating with a BA from Yale University in 1916, Murphy attended Harvard University, working with L.T. Troland in a telepathy experiment, and achieving his MA in 1917. Murphy succeeded Troland as holder of the Hodgson Fellowship in Psychical Research at Harvard University. After the first world war, in 1919, Murphy continued his studies at Columbia University, working towards his PhD, which he was awarded in 1923. During this time he was also working under the Hodgson Fellowship. He later married Lois Barclay and had two children, Al and Margaret.

Murphy was recognised for being generous and kind, such as by offering assistance or loans if a student or colleague was in trouble. He also spoke out against racial conflicts and advocated for peaceful relations.

Inspiration

Murphy was inspired by the work of psychologists and scientists such as Herbert Spencer, Sigmund Freud, William James, and Charles Darwin. Most of his works integrated aspects of each of these previous scientists. Murphy was a strong admirer of Freud, often drawing from his psychoanalytic theories. He considered Freud a true artistic genius while also remaining capable of taking a critical view. Murphy was especially interested in Freud’s perspective of the self, including regression and needs. The world was sceptical of Freud at the time, yet Murphy still embraced his ideas, even when encountering ridicule.

While researching William James, Murphy took interest in James’ philosophical perspective. He admired how James easily defined the boundaries between man, the world, and consciousness. Along with James and Freud, Murphy also took to Darwin, specifically his theory of evolution. Murphy became particularly focused on the theory of behavioural adaption in organisms, which posits that animals adapt to their environments for their own survival. This particular theory of evolutionary adaption was woven into multiple personality theories later presented by Murphy.

Career

Murphy studied the medium Leonora Piper and collaborated with French chemist René Warcollier on a transatlantic telepathy experiment. From 1921 to 1925, he lectured in psychology at Columbia University. In 1925, at a psychical research symposium at Clark University, Murphy and Harvard psychologist William McDougall advocated for the academic study of telepathy, while acknowledging scientific scepticism due to past debunking efforts. From 1925 to 1929, Murphy was an instructor and assistant professor at Columbia. He became the Hodgson Fellow at Harvard in 1937 and served as professor and chairman of psychology at City College, New York, from 1940 to 1942. In 1952, he became director of research at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas.

Murphy was elected to the presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1944. He subsequently served as the President of the British Society for Psychical Research in 1949 (which he joined in 1917) and was Director of the Parapsychology Foundation in 1951. Murphy authored several texts in psychology, including, Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology (1928; 1949), Personality (1947), and Human Potentialities (1958). He was a contributor to personality, social and clinical psychology and an early exponent of humanistic psychology.[9] During these years, Murphy continued his association with psychical research, including sitting on the council of the American Society for Psychical Research, and serving as chair of its research committee; serving as an editor of the Journal of Parapsychology (1939–1941), speaking at professional symposium on psychical research; writing reports, reviews, and critical articles in general scientific, psychological, as well as parapsychological journals. He also supported (through his own book royalties) experimental studies by J.G. Pratt at Columbia (1935–1937); authoring an introductory review to the field, The Challenge of Psychical Research (1961), as well as William James and Psychical Research (1973) (with R. Ballou), and a 20-page article on parapsychology for the Encyclopaedia of Psychology (1946); editing an English-language publication of Warcollier’s reports (1938) and writing forewords for several parapsychological monographs.

Murphy died on 18 March 1979 in Washington, D.C.

Contributions to Psychology

Social Psychology

Murphy proposed the biosocial personality theory, in which personality is understood as both biological and social in nature. At the centre of the theory is the term “canalization.” Murphy used “canalization” to indicate that human needs may be impacted or changed by what, when and how they are satisfied. In Murphy’s model, two primary mechanisms impact human need: regularity, and relevance. The theory was presented in his book Personality published in 1947.

In Personality, Murphy proposed three main components to personality. First, personality acts within a larger structure, and second, has its own inner workings. Third, personality is shaped by its environment. Other parts of the book discuss his biosocial theory canalisation and autism. Autism, as Murphy depicts it, is actions designed by the satisfaction of needs while placing special emphasis on the self.

Murphy also studied parapsychology, which at the time was not taken seriously. Many thought it was a joke and should not be considered a real science. Murphy thought differently. He believed that it is the scientist’s job to expand the known science and push beyond the set boundaries. He produced numerous studies on the paranormal, specifically about telekinesis, psychokinesis, and despite constant ridicule.

Humanistic Psychology

The humanistic psychology movement did not occur until the 1960s. However, much of Murphy’s writings were an early component of the movement and really set the stage for its beginnings. Generally, Murphy believed in the good of humanity, often producing works on the problems and solutions of societies, human nature, and individualism. These particular works were so inspiring that, at the time, many European refugee psychologists referenced his ideas in their arguments for peace in their countries.

Murphy’s book Human Potentialities (1958) covered a wide range of topics about the welfare of the human being. In general, Murphy rejected the idea of human nature being predetermined and unable to change. Instead he proposed three distinct human natures.

  • First, because of the theory of evolution, human nature is in a constant state of flux, and therefore, always changing.
  • Second, man’s various cultures were brought about by the instability of human nature. Finally, man has an essential artistic view of the world that allows for the expansion of its boundaries.

These human natures were essential to his idea of human potentiality and prejudices. Prejudices are formed because of man’s constant state of flux. Researching these ideas, Murphy concluded that prejudices did not exist because of logical reasoning. Rather, prejudices come about through natural spontaneous reactions. With that in mind, Murphy suggested three principles when researching human potential. Firstly, the environment plays a role in the individuals’ ideas of gaining experience. Second potentialities are created through new experiences of the self rather than through cultural experience. He concludes that there is no limit to the number of new potentialities that can be created.

He also published papers focusing on the boundaries between the individual, society, and world order. Murphy identified what he believed to be the source of conflict: individualism. He believed too much emphasis was placed on the definition of individualism; so much so that the true definition has been replaced by the idea of competition. In other words, the idea of winning and losing. Individualism only allows the person to view what is in their direct view, not the big picture. The idea of competition is non societal; it takes care of the individual and their needs, but not the needs of society.

Murphy wrote Science and World Order (1962) in an effort to address societal problems. He proposed ten ideas that he considered beneficial, despite their radical nature. First, he proposed the idea of disarmament. Instead of weaponry, he suggested using common knowledge to come to an understanding. Second, he proposed that newer technology would enable less reliability on weapons. In recommendations three, four, and five, Murphy suggested using different research methods to study the paths, decisions, and predictions that lead to war. In his last four recommendations, Murphy suggested studying politicians’ personalities to better handle situational crises. He also suggested updating the educational system to fully include a firm understanding of the world and what is at stake; while also promoting more communication techniques to better understand adversaries.

Later within his career he served as a consultant to the Indian Government researching solutions to the Hindu-Muslim conflict. During this time, he gained knowledge of the local cultures and personalities of the native people. His time there led him to collect numerous data of Indian cultures and life incorporating the data into solutions for western problems. This work became known as Asian Psychology.

Other Notable Works and Theories

Murphy had many prominent theories and ideas throughout his lifetime. Before his ideas of social psychology, Murphy bounced around different learning theories and ideas, building off of what was already known. His learning theories are a good example. Murphy believed that perception is learned the same way as behaviours, through reward and punishment. Murphy believed that perception fulfils multiple roles beyond relaying the sensory information to the brain. It was a way of fulfilling needs as well. This satisfaction of needs is displayed in many of his other publications.

Reception

Murphy’s Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology (1929) received a positive review in the British Medical Journal which stated “no purely objective record could be as successful as Dr. Gardner Murphy’s presentation of the history, which bears evidence everywhere of a judicious choice of material and of such emphasis as is free from any prepossession.” Edwin Boring described it as “an exceptionally good book”. The 1949 revised edition received a mixed review by Alphonse Chapanis in The Quarterly Review of Biology who wrote the book did not present a balanced synopsis of research but recommended it as a “useful addition to the psychologist’s library”. However, Ralph H. Turner wrote Murphy maintained an “exceptional order of objectivity through most of his presentation” and described it as “a very useful text”.

Murphy’s introductory psychological textbook An Introduction to Psychology (1951) received positive reviews. Alastair Heron described it as a:

“textbook for the interested and not-too-sophisticated reader who hopes to become more interested without becoming at the same time more sophisticated.”

In his book Challenge of Psychical Research (1961), Murphy documented research into clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, and telepathy. John L. Kennedy wrote there was inadequate information about the role of the experimenter during psychical research experiments. Ralph W. Gerard gave the book a positive review but stated the results from the experiments may be explainable by alternative factors such as misinterpretation or unintended cues without recourse to the paranormal.

Psychologist L. Börje Löfgren heavily criticised the Challenge of Psychical Research stating that Murphy hardly ever considered the “possibility that spontaneous occurrences might actually be memory falsifications (conscious or unconscious), simple lies, or similar phenomena.” He concluded his review by suggesting the book is “especially apt to do much damage and seduce people into believing in things for which there is extremely scant evidence.”

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Who is Eric Kandel (1929 to Present)?

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Introduction

Eric Richard Kandel (born Erich Richard Kandel, 07 November 1929) is an Austrian-born American medical doctor who specialised in psychiatry, a neuroscientist and a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. He was a recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. He shared the prize with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard.

Kandel was from 1984 to 2022 a Senior Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He was in 1975 the founding director of the Centre for Neurobiology and Behaviour, which is now the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University. He served on the Scientific Council of the Brain & Behaviour Research Foundation. Kandel’s popularised account chronicling his life and research, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, was awarded the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.

Early Years

Eric’s mother, Charlotte Zimels, was born in 1897 in Kolomyia, Pokuttya (modern Ukraine). She came from an Ashkenazi Jewish family. At that time Kolomyya was part of Austria-Hungary. His father, Hermann Kandel, was born in 1898 in Olesko, Galicia (then part of Austria-Hungary). At the beginning of World War I, his parents moved to Vienna, Austria, where they met and married in 1923.

Eric Kandel was born on 07 November 1929, in Vienna. Shortly after, Eric’s father established a toy store. Although thoroughly assimilated and acculturated, the family sensed the Nazi danger and, unlike others, left Austria after the country had been annexed by Germany in March 1938 at great expense. As a result of Aryanisation (Arisierung), attacks on Jews had escalated and Jewish property was being confiscated. When Eric was 9, he and his brother Ludwig, 14, boarded the Gerolstein at Antwerp, Belgium, and joined their uncle in Brooklyn on 11 May 1939, to be followed later by his parents.

After arriving in the United States and settling in Brooklyn, Kandel was tutored by his grandfather in Judaic studies and was accepted at the Yeshiva of Flatbush, from which he graduated in 1944. He attended Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High School in the New York City school system.

Kandel’s undergraduate major at Harvard was History and Literature. He wrote an undergraduate honours thesis on “The Attitude Toward National Socialism of Three German Writers: Carl Zuckmayer, Hans Carossa, and Ernst Jünger”. While at Harvard, a place where psychology was dominated by the work of B.F. Skinner, Kandel became interested in learning and memory. However, while Skinner championed a strict separation of psychology, as its own level of discourse, from biological considerations such as neurology, Kandel’s work is essentially centred on an explanation of the relationships between psychology and neurology.

The world of neuroscience was opened up to Kandel as a consequence of his favourite literature teacher at the time, Karl Viëtor’s, sudden passing in 1951 and leaving Kandel’s next term schedule at Harvard, besides feeling “deep personal loss” over Viëtor’s death, unexpectedly empty. Around that time Kandel had met Anna Kris, whose parents Ernst Kris and Marianne Rie were psychoanalysts from Sigmund Freud’s Vienna-based circle. Freud was a pioneer in revealing the importance of unconscious neural processes, and his lines of thought are at the root of Kandel’s interest in the biology of motivation and unconscious and conscious memory. Kandel changed his course to pursue and began his M.D. program at New York University in 1952.

Medical School and Early Research

In 1952 he started at the New York University Medical School. By graduation he was firmly interested in the biological basis of the mind. During this time he met his future wife, Denise Bystryn. Kandel was first exposed to research in Harry Grundfest’s laboratory, for six months in 1955-56, at Columbia University. Grundfest was known for using the oscilloscope to demonstrate that conduction velocity during an action potential depends on axon diameter. The researchers Kandel interacted with were contemplating the technical challenges of intracellular recordings of the electrical activity of the relatively small neurons of the vertebrate brain.

After starting his neurobiological work in the difficult thicket of the electrophysiology of the cerebral cortex, Kandel was impressed by the progress that had been made by Stephen Kuffler using a much more experimentally accessible system: neurons isolated from marine invertebrates. After becoming aware of Kuffler’s work in 1955, Kandel graduated from medical school and learned from Stanley Crain how to make microelectrodes that could be used for intracellular recordings of crayfish giant axons.

Karl Lashley, a well-known American neuropsychologist, had tried but failed to identify an anatomical locus for memory storage in the cortex of the brain. When Kandel joined the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the US National Institutes of Health in 1957, William Beecher Scoville and Brenda Milner had recently described the patient HM, who had lost the ability to form new memories after removal of his hippocampus. Kandel took on the task of performing electrophysiological recordings from hippocampal pyramidal neurons. Working with Alden Spencer, he found electrophysiological evidence for action potentials in the dendritic trees of hippocampal neurons. The team also noticed the spontaneous pacemaker-like activity of these neurons, as well as a robust recurrent inhibition in the hippocampus. They provided the first intracellular records of the electrical activity that underlies the epileptic spike (the intracellular paroxysmal depolarising shift) and the epileptic runs of spikes (the intracellular sustained depolarisation). But, with respect to memory, there was nothing in the general electrophysiological properties of hippocampal neurons that suggested why the hippocampus was special for explicit memory storage.

Kandel began to realize that memory storage must rely on modifications in the synaptic connections between neurons and that the complex connectivity of the hippocampus did not provide the best system for study of the detailed function of synapses. Kandel was aware that comparative studies of behaviour, such as those by Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch had revealed that simple forms of learning were found even in very simple animals. Kandel felt it would be productive to select a simple animal model that would facilitate electrophysiological analysis of the synaptic changes involved in learning and memory storage. He believed that, ultimately, the results would be found to be applicable to humans. This decision was not without risk: many senior biologists and psychologists believed that nothing useful could be learned about human memory by studying invertebrate physiology.

In 1962, after completing his residency in psychiatry, Kandel went to Paris to learn about the marine mollusk Aplysia californica from Ladislav Tauc. Kandel had realised that simple forms of learning such as habituation, sensitisation, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning could readily be studied with ganglia isolated from Aplysia.

“While recording the behavior of a single cell in a ganglion, one nerve axon pathway to the ganglion could be stimulated weakly electrically as a conditioned [tactile] stimulus, while another pathway was stimulated as an unconditioned [pain] stimulus, following the exact protocol used for classical conditioning with natural stimuli in intact animals.”

Electrophysiological changes resulting from the combined stimuli could then be traced to specific synapses. In 1965 Kandel published his initial results, including a form of presynaptic potentiation that seemed to correspond to a simple form of learning.

Faculty Member at New York University Medical School

Kandel took a position in the Departments of Physiology and Psychiatry at the New York University Medical School, eventually forming the Division of Neurobiology and Behaviour. Working with Irving Kupferman and Harold Pinsker, he developed protocols for demonstrating simple forms of learning by intact Aplysia. In particular, the researchers showed that the now famous gill-withdrawal reflex, by which the slug protects its tender gill tissue from danger, was sensitive to both habituation and sensitisation. By 1971 Tom Carew had joined the research group and helped extend the work from studies restricted to short-term memory to experiments that included physiological processes required for long-term memory.

By 1981, laboratory members including Terry Walters, Tom Abrams, and Robert Hawkins had been able to extend the Aplysia system into the study of classical conditioning, a finding that helped close the apparent gap between the simple forms of learning often associated with invertebrates and more complex types of learning more often recognised in vertebrates. Along with the fundamental behavioural studies, other work in the lab traced the neuronal circuits of sensory neurons, interneurons, and motor neurons involved in the learned behaviours. This allowed analysis of the specific synaptic connections that are modified by learning in the intact animals. The results from Kandel’s laboratory provided solid evidence for the mechanistic basis of learning as “a change in the functional effectiveness of previously existing excitatory connections.” Kandel’s winning of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was a result of his work with Aplysia on the biological mechanisms of memory storage.

Molecular Changes during Learning

Starting in 1966 James Schwartz collaborated with Kandel on a biochemical analysis of changes in neurons associated with learning and memory storage. By this time it was known that long-term memory, unlike short-term memory, involved the synthesis of new proteins. By 1972 they had evidence that the second messenger molecule cyclic AMP (cAMP) was produced in Aplysia ganglia under conditions that cause short-term memory formation (sensitisation). In 1974 Kandel moved his lab to Columbia University and became founding director of the Centre for Neurobiology and Behaviour. It was soon found that the neurotransmitter serotonin, acting to produce the second messenger cAMP, is involved in the molecular basis of sensitisation of the gill-withdrawal reflex. By 1980, collaboration with Paul Greengard resulted in demonstration that cAMP-dependent protein kinase, also known as protein kinase A (PKA), acted in this biochemical pathway in response to elevated levels of cAMP. Steven Siegelbaum identified a potassium channel that could be regulated by PKA, coupling serotonin’s effects to altered synaptic electrophysiology.

In 1983 Kandel helped form the Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute at Columbia devoted to molecular neural science. The Kandel lab then sought to identify proteins that had to be synthesized to convert short-term memories into long-lasting memories. One of the nuclear targets for PKA is the transcriptional control protein CREB (cAMP response element binding protein). In collaboration with David Glanzman and Craig Bailey, Kandel identified CREB as being a protein involved in long-term memory storage. One result of CREB activation is an increase in the number of synaptic connections. Thus, short-term memory had been linked to functional changes in existing synapses, while long-term memory was associated with a change in the number of synaptic connections.

Experimental Support for Hebbian Learning

Some of the synaptic changes observed by Kandel’s laboratory provide examples of Hebbian theory. One article describes the role of Hebbian learning in the Aplysia siphon-withdrawal reflex.

The Kandel lab has also performed important experiments using transgenic mice as a system for investigating the molecular basis of memory storage in the vertebrate hippocampus. Kandel’s original idea that learning mechanisms would be conserved between all animals has been confirmed. Neurotransmitters, second messenger systems, protein kinases, ion channels, and transcription factors like CREB have been confirmed to function in both vertebrate and invertebrate learning and memory storage.

Continuing Work at Columbia University

Since 1974, Kandel actively contributes to science as a member of the Division of Neurobiology and Behaviour at the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. In 2008, he and Daniela Pollak discovered that conditioning mice to associate a specific noise with protection from harm, a behaviour called “learned safety”, produces a behavioural antidepressant effect comparable to that of medications. This finding, reported in Neuron, may inform further studies of the cellular interactions between antidepressants and behavioural treatments.

Kandel is also well known for the textbooks he has helped write, such as Principles of Neural Science. First published in 1981 and now in its sixth edition, the book is often used as a teaching and reference text in medical schools and undergraduate and graduate programmes. Kandel has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1974.

He has also been at Columbia University since 1974 and lives in New York City.

Notable Former Members of his Lab

  • James H. Schwartz 1964–1972: Co-author of the influential textbook Principles of Neural Science.
  • John H. (Jack) Byrne 1970–1975: Professor and Director of the Neuroscience Research Centre at UT Health Science Centre (Mcgovern Medical School); founder and editor of the research journal Learning and Memory.
  • Tom Carew 1970–1983: Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at New York University, Centre for Neural Science. Past President of the Society for Neuroscience.
  • Edgar T. Walters 1974–1980: Professor at the Medical School of the University of Texas Health Science Centre at Houston.
  • Kelsey C. Martin 1992–1999: Dean of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and Professor in the Departments of Biological Chemistry, Psychiatry, and Biobehavioural Sciences.

Current Views about Vienna

When Kandel won the Nobel Prize in 2000, initially the media reported of an “Austrian” Nobel Prize winner, phrasing that Kandel found “typically Viennese: very opportunistic, very disingenuous, somewhat hypocritical”. He also said it was “certainly not an Austrian Nobel, it was a Jewish-American Nobel”. After that, he got a call from then Austrian president Thomas Klestil asking him, “How can we make things right?” Kandel said that first, Doktor-Karl-Lueger-Ring should be renamed; Karl Lueger was an anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, cited by Hitler in Mein Kampf. The street was ultimately renamed in 2012 into Universitätsring. Second, he wanted the Jewish intellectual community to be brought back to Vienna, with scholarships for Jewish students and researchers. He also proposed a symposium on the response of Austria to Nazism, which at that time had been wanting greatly. Kandel has since accepted an honorary citizenship of Vienna and participates in the academic and cultural life of his native city, similar to Carl Djerassi. Kandel’s 2012 book, The Age of Insight—as expressed in its subtitle, The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present – represents a wide-ranging historical attempt to place Vienna at the root of cultural modernism by focussing on the personal interconnections between doctors such as Carl von Rokitansky, Emil Zuckerkandl, Sigmund Freud, with artists such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka and the writer Arthur Schnitzler, all of whom engaged with the “unconscious” in one way or another and influenced, Kandel claims, one another in the tight-knit salon of Berta Zuckerkandl and related occasions.

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Who was Emile Coue (1857-1926)?

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Introduction

Émile Coué de la Châtaigneraie (26 February 1857 to 02 July 1926) was a French psychologist, pharmacist, and hypnotist who introduced a popular method of psychotherapy and self-improvement based on optimistic autosuggestion.

“It was in no small measure [Coué’s] wholehearted devotion to a self-imposed task that enabled him, in less than a quarter of a century, to rise from obscurity to the position of the world’s most famous psychological exponent. Indeed, one might truly say that Coué sidetracked inefficient hypnotism [mistakenly based upon supposed operator dominance over a subject], and paved the way for the efficient, and truly scientific.” (Orton, 1935).

“Coué’s method was disarmingly non-complex—needing few instructions for on-going competence, based on rational principles, easily understood, demanding no intellectual sophistication, simply explained, simply taught, performed in private, using a subject’s own resources, requiring no elaborate preparation, and no expenditure.” (Yeates, 2016a).

“Most of us are so accustomed … to an elaborate medical ritual … in the treatment of our ills … [that] anything so simple as Coué’s autosuggestion is inclined to arouse misgivings, antagonism and a feeling of scepticism.” (Duckworth, 1922).

Coué’s method was based upon the view that, operating deep below our conscious awareness, a complex arrangement of ‘ideas’, especially when those ideas are dominant, continuously and spontaneously suggest things to us; and, from this, significantly influence one’s overall health and wellbeing.

“We possess within us a force of incalculable power, which, when we handle it unconsciously is often prejudicial to us. If on the contrary we direct it in a conscious and wise manner, it gives us the mastery of ourselves and allows us not only to escape … from physical and mental ills, but also to live in relative happiness, whatever the conditions in which we may find ourselves.” (Coué, 1922b, p.35).

“As long as we look on autosuggestion as a remedy we miss its true significance. Primarily it is a means of self-culture, and one far more potent than any we have hitherto possessed. It enables us to develop the mental qualities we lack: efficiency, judgment, creative imagination, all that will help us to bring our life’s enterprise to a successful end. Most of us are aware of thwarted abilities, powers undeveloped, impulses checked in their growth. These are present in our Unconscious like trees in a forest, which, overshadowed by their neighbours, are stunted for lack of air and sunshine. By means of autosuggestion we can supply them with the power needed for growth and bring them to fruition in our conscious lives. However old, however infirm, however selfish, weak or vicious we may be, autosuggestion will do something for us. It gives us a new means of culture and discipline by which the “accents immature”, the “purposes unsure” can be nursed into strength, and the evil impulses attacked at the root. It is essentially an individual practice, an individual attitude of mind.” (Brooks, 1922, p.116).

Life and Career

Coué’s family, from the Brittany region of France and with origins in French nobility, had only modest means. A brilliant pupil in school, he initially intended to become an analytical chemist. However, he eventually abandoned these studies, as his father, who was a railroad worker, was in a precarious financial state. Coué then decided to become a pharmacist and graduated with a degree in pharmacology in 1876.

Working as an apothecary at Troyes from 1882 to 1910, Coué quickly discovered what later came to be known as the placebo effect. He became known for reassuring his clients by praising each remedy’s efficiency and leaving a small positive notice with each given medication. In 1886 and 1887, he studied with Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and Hippolyte Bernheim, two leading exponents of hypnotism, in Nancy.

In 1910, Coué sold his business and retired to Nancy, where he opened a clinic that continuously delivered some 40,000 treatment-units per annum (Baudouin, 1920, p.14) to local, regional, and overseas patients over the next sixteen years. In 1913, Coué and his wife founded The Lorraine Society of Applied Psychology (French: La Société Lorraine de Psychologie appliquée). His book Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion was published in England (1920), and in the United States (1922). Although Coué’s teachings were, during his lifetime, more popular in Europe than in the United States, many Americans who adopted his ideas and methods, such as Elsie Lincoln Benedict, Maxwell Maltz, Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, Robert H. Schuller, and W. Clement Stone, became famous in their own right by spreading his words.

Considered by Charles Baudouin to represent a second Nancy School, Coué treated many patients in groups and free of charge.

The Coué Method: General

The Coué Method

“Continuously, unjustly, and mistakenly trivialised as just a hand-clasp, some unwarranted optimism, and a ‘mantra’, Coué’s method evolved over several decades of meticulous observation, theoretical speculation, in-the-field testing, incremental adjustment, and step-by-step transformation. It tentatively began (c.1901) with very directive one-to-one hypnotic interventions, based upon the approaches and techniques that Coué had acquired from an American correspondence course. As his theoretical knowledge, clinical experience, understanding of suggestion and autosuggestion, and hypnotic skills expanded, it gradually developed into its final subject-centred version—an intricate complex of (group) education, (group) hypnotherapy, (group) ego-strengthening, and (group) training in self-suggested pain control; and, following instruction in performing the prescribed self-administration ritual, the twice daily intentional and deliberate (individual) application of its unique formula, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better”. (Yeates, 2016c, p.55).

The application of his mantra-like conscious autosuggestion, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” (French: Tous les jours à tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux) is called Couéism or the Coué method. Some American newspapers quoted it differently, “Day by day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” The Coué method centred on a routine repetition of this particular expression according to a specified ritual—preferably as many as twenty times a day, and especially at the beginning and at the end of each day. When asked whether or not he thought of himself as a healer, Coué often stated that “I have never cured anyone in my life. All I do is show people how they can cure themselves.” Unlike a commonly held belief that a strong conscious will constitutes the best path to success, Coué maintained that curing some of our troubles requires a change in our unconscious thought, which can be achieved only by using our imagination.

Although stressing that he was not primarily a healer but one who taught others to heal themselves, Coué claimed to have effected organic changes through autosuggestion.

Self-Suggestion

Coué identified two types of self-suggestion: (i) the intentional, “reflective suggestion” made by deliberate and conscious effort, and (ii) the involuntary “spontaneous suggestion”, that is a “natural phenomenon of our mental life … which takes place without conscious effort [and has its effect] with an intensity proportional to the keenness of [our] attention”. Baudouin identified three different sources of spontaneous suggestion:

A. Instances belonging to the representative domain (sensations, mental images, dreams, visions, memories, opinions, and all intellectual phenomena);
B. Instances belonging to the affective domain (joy or sorrow, emotions, sentiments, tendencies, passions);
C. Instances belonging to the active or motor domain (actions, volitions, desires, gestures, movements at the periphery or in the interior of the body, functional or organic modifications).

Two Minds

According to Yeates, Coué shared the theoretical position that Thomson Jay Hudson had expressed in his Law of Psychic Phenomena (1893): namely, that our “mental organization” was such that it seemed as if we had “two minds, each endowed with separate and distinct attributes and powers; [with] each capable, under certain conditions, of independent action”.

Further, argued Hudson, it was entirely irrelevant, for explanatory purposes, whether we actually had “two distinct minds”, whether we only seemed to be “endowed with a dual mental organization”, or whether we actually had “one mind [possessed of] certain attributes and powers under some conditions, and certain other attributes and powers under other conditions”.

The Coué Method: Development and Origins

Coué noticed that in certain cases he could improve the efficacy of a given medicine by praising its effectiveness to the patient. He realised that those patients to whom he praised the medicine had a noticeable improvement when compared to patients to whom he said nothing. This began Coué’s exploration of the use of hypnosis and the power of the imagination.

Coué’s initial method for treating patients relied on hypnosis. He discovered that subjects could not be hypnotised against their will and, more importantly, that the effects of hypnosis waned when the subjects regained consciousness. He thus eventually turned to autosuggestion, which he describes as

… an instrument that we possess at birth, and with which we play unconsciously all our life, as a baby plays with its rattle. It is however a dangerous instrument; it can wound or even kill you if you handle it imprudently and unconsciously. It can on the contrary save your life when you know how to employ it consciously.

Coué believed in the effects of medication. But he also believed that our mental state is able to affect and even amplify the action of these medications. Coué recommended that patients take medicines with the confidence that they would be completely cured very soon, and healing would be optimal. Conversely, he contended, patients who are sceptical of a medicine would find it least effective. By consciously using autosuggestion, he observed that his patients could cure themselves more efficiently by replacing their “thought of illness” with a new “thought of cure”. According to Coué, repeating words or images enough times causes the subconscious to absorb them. The cures were the result of using imagination or “positive autosuggestion” to the exclusion of one’s own willpower.

The Coué Method: Underlying Principles

Coué thus developed a method which relied on the principle that any idea exclusively occupying the mind turns into reality,[citation needed] although only to the extent that the idea is within the realm of possibility. For instance, a person without hands will not be able to make them grow back. However, if a person firmly believes that his or her asthma is disappearing, then this may actually happen, as far as the body is actually able physically to overcome or control the illness. On the other hand, thinking negatively about the illness (ex. “I am not feeling well”) will encourage both mind and body to accept this thought. Likewise, when someone cannot remember a name, they will probably not be able to recall it as long as they hold onto this idea (i.e. “I can’t remember”) in their mind. Coué realised that it is better to focus on and imagine the desired, positive results (i.e. “I feel healthy and energetic” and “I can remember clearly”).

Willpower

Coué observed that the main obstacle to autosuggestion was willpower. For the method to work, the patient must refrain from making any independent judgment, meaning that he must not let his will impose its own views on positive ideas. Everything must thus be done to ensure that the positive “autosuggestive” idea is consciously accepted by the patient; otherwise, one may end up getting the opposite effect of what is desired.

For example, when a student has forgotten an answer to a question in an exam, he will likely think something such as “I have forgotten the answer”. The more they try to think of it, the more the answer becomes blurred and obscured. However, if this negative thought is replaced with a more positive one (“No need to worry, it will come back to me”), the chances that the student will come to remember the answer will increase.

Coué noted that young children always applied his method perfectly, as they lacked the willpower that remained present among adults. When he instructed a child by saying “clasp your hands and you can’t open them”, the child would thus immediately follow.

Self-Conflict

A patient’s problems are likely to increase when his willpower and imagination (or mental ideas) are opposing each other, something Coué would refer to as “self-conflict”. In the student’s case, the will to succeed is clearly incompatible with his thought of being incapable of remembering his answers. As the conflict intensifies, so does the problem: the more the patient tries to sleep, the more he becomes awake. The more a patient tries to stop smoking, the more he smokes. The patient must thus abandon his willpower and instead put more focus on his imaginative power in order to succeed fully with his cure.

The Coué Method: Efficacy

Thanks to his method, which Coué once called his “trick”, patients of all sorts would come to visit him. The list of ailments included kidney problems, diabetes, memory loss, stammering, weakness, atrophy and all sorts of physical and mental illnesses. According to one of his journal entries (1916), he apparently cured a patient of a uterus prolapse as well as “violent pains in the head” (migraine).

C. (Cyrus) Harry Brooks (1890–1951), author of various books on Coué, claimed the success rate of his method was around 93%. The remaining 7% of people would include those who were too sceptical of Coué’s approach and those who refused to recognise it.

Criticism

“That Coué’s formula could be applied with a minimum of instruction was challenging; and the accounts of Coué’s method curing organic disease were just as threatening to the conventional medicine of the day, as they were inspiring to Coué’s devotees.”

Some critics, such as Barrucand and Paille (1986), argue that the astonishing results widely attributed to Coué were due to his charisma, rather than his method. In contrast, Barcs-Masson (1962, p. 368), observes that Coué was the complete opposite of Jules Romains’ character, Dr. Knock – “whose exceptional commercial success came from his ability to convince healthy individuals that they had a heretofore-unrecognised ailment” – and rather than, as Knock did, find unrecognised disease within the healthy, Coué activated dormant health within the ailing.

Although Coué never produced any empirical evidence for the efficacy of his formula (and, therefore, his claims have not been scientifically evaluated), three subsequent experimental studies, conducted more than half a century later, by Paulhus (1993), “seem to offer some unexpected support for Coué’s claims”.

The Psycho-Medical Establishment

According to Yeates (2016a, p. 19), the protests routinely made by those within the psychomedical establishment (e.g., Moxon, 1923; Abraham, 1926) were on one or more of the following grounds:

(1) “Healing of organic disease by ‘self-mastery’ was impossible! Aside from ‘spontaneous remissions’ of authentic disease (efficacious vis medicatrix naturæ!), reported ‘cures’ were either due to mistaken diagnosis (it was never that disease!), or mistaken prognosis (it was always going to get better!). Anyway, even if it had been diagnosed correctly, there was no compelling evidence to suggest that Coué’s approach had been in any way responsible for the cure.”
(2) “Even if it was true that, in some extraordinary circumstances, healing by ‘self-mastery’ was possible, Coué’s failure to immediately eliminate those with counterproductive limitations — such as, for example, those lacking the required dedication, mind-set, talent, diligence, persistence, patience, etc. — resulted in many (clearly unsuited) individuals mistakenly postponing (otherwise) life-saving operations and delaying (otherwise) radical medical treatment far beyond any prospect of recovery or cure.”
(3) “Despite the obvious fact that each ‘disease’ had a unique cause, a unique history, and a unique (and idiosyncratic) personal impact, Coué treated a wide range of disparate individuals in the same, single group session, in the same way; and, moreover, he treated them without any sort of detailed examination or differential diagnosis.”
(4) “The method’s central ‘magical incantation’ — a specific formula, uttered a specific number of times, in a special way, using a knotted string — aroused strong opposition, as it reeked of outmoded superstitious practices and beliefs.”

The Press

While most American reporters of his day seemed dazzled by Coué’s accomplishments, and did not question the results attributed to his method, a handful of journalists and a few educators were sceptical. After Coué had left Boston, the Boston Herald waited six months, revisited the patients he had “cured”, and found most had initially felt better but soon returned to whatever ailments they previously had. Few of the patients would criticise Coué, saying he did seem very sincere in what he tried to do, but the Herald reporter concluded that any benefit from Coué’s method seemed to be temporary and might be explained by being caught up in the moment during one of Coué’s events. Whilst a number of academic psychologists looked upon his work favourably, others did not. Coué was also criticised by exponents of psychoanalysis, with Otto Fenichel concluding: “A climax of dependence masked as independent power is achieved by the methods of autosuggestion where a weak and passive ego is controlled by an immense superego with magical powers. This power is, however, borrowed and even usurped”.

Memorials

On 28 June 1936, a monument erected to the memory of Coué, funded by worldwide subscription, and featuring a bust of Coué created by French sculptor Eugène Gatelet, was dedicated in St Mary’s Park, in Nancy. The bust was stored for safe-keeping during World War II and, post-war, was restored to its former position in 1947.

In Popular Culture

  • 1922: In the same year as the English translation of Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion is published, the song I’m Getting Better Every Day (words by Percy Edgar, music by Mark Strong) is released.
  • 1923: A Swedish translation of Strong’s “I’m Getting Better Every Day” is released by entertainer Ernst Rolf, Bättre och bättre dag för dag (Better and better day by day). It is still a popular refrain in Sweden almost a century later.
  • 1923: The Coué Method is taught in Elsie Lincoln Benedict’s How to Get Anything You Want to train the subconscious mind.
  • 1924: In the Broadway musical “Sitting Pretty” (music by Jerome Kern), in the song “Tulip Time in Sing-Sing”, P.G. Wodehouse’s lyrics include “I’d sit discussing Coué With my old pal Bat-eared Louie”.
  • 1926: The Coué Method is mentioned in P.G. Wodehouse’s short story, “Mr. Potter Takes a Rest Cure”.
  • 1928: Coué and Couéism are referred to frequently in John Galsworthy’s novel The White Monkey from his Modern Comedy trilogy. Fleur Mont (née Forsyte), expecting what her husband (the tenth baronet) keeps referring to as the eleventh, repeats daily “every day in every way my baby’s becoming more and more male”. Other characters in the novel are also Coué followers, including, rather improbably, the strait-laced and sensible Soames (although he remains sceptical).
  • 1930: Miss Milsome, in The Documents in the Case, written by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace, dabbles in all sorts of self-improvement schemes, including using “In every day …”
  • 1934: in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night The protagonist Bardamu thinks “In her despair I sniffed vestiges of the Coue method”.
  • 1946: In Josephine Tey’s novel Miss Pym Disposes, the title character, herself a psychologist, refers to Coué with apparent scepticism.
  • 1948: In Graham Greene’s novel, The Heart of the Matter, the narrator dismisses the Indian fortune teller’s reading of Inspector Wilson’s hand: “Of course the whole thing was Couéism: if one believed in it enough, it would come true.”
  • 1969: In the film The Bed Sitting Room Room (1969), the character “Mate”, played by Spike Milligan, repeatedly utters the phrase “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” while delivering a pie.
  • 1970: Brief mention in Robertson Davies’ book Fifth Business; the passage ends with a criticism of Couéism:
  • “So Dr. Coué failed for her, as he did for many others, for which I lay no blame on him. His system was really a form of secularized, self-seeking prayer, without the human dignity that even the most modest prayer evokes. And like all attempts to command success for the chronically unsuccessful, it petered out.”
  • 1973: The leading character, Frank Spencer (played by Michael Crawford), in the BBC’s situation comedy Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, often recites the mantra, on occasion when trying to impress the instructor during a public relations training course.
  • 1976: In the film The Pink Panther Strikes Again, the mentally-ill Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus, repeatedly uses the phrase “Every day and in every way, I am getting better, and better” as directed by his psychiatrist.
  • 1980: The chorus in the song “Beautiful Boy” — which John Lennon wrote for his son, Sean — makes a reference to Coué’s mantra:
    • Before you go to sleep
    • Say a little prayer
    • Every day in every way
    • It’s getting better and better.
  • 1981: The protagonist in Emir Kusturica’s 1981 film Do You Remember Dolly Bell? often recites the mantra as a result of studying hypnotherapy and autosuggestion.
  • 1992: In Kerry Greenwood’s novel, Death at Victoria Dock, investigative detective Phryne Fisher recites the mantra during a particularly trying case.
  • 1994: In the film Barcelona, Fred Boynton, making light of his cousin Ted’s commitment to various business-efficiency techniques, recites the mantra. Ted quickly dismisses Fred’s quote stating that Coué and autosuggestion is today considered “unserious”.
  • 1998: In Nest Family Entertainment’s animated children’s film The Swan Princess III and the Mystery of the Enchanted Treasure, a character uses the mantra while training for a competition.
  • 2005: In the HBO drama Six Feet Under (Season 5, episode 4), George Sibley repeats the mantra to Billy Chenowith in discussing the effectiveness of the former’s treatment.
  • 2012: In Boardwalk Empire (season 3, episode 1) the fugitive Nelson Van Alden (played by Michael Shannon), now a salesman, looks into a mirror and repeats to himself the mantra: “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better”.

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An Overview of Emotional Isolation

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Introduction

Emotional isolation is a state of isolation where one may have a well-functioning social network but still feels emotionally separated from others.

Population-based research indicates that one in five middle-aged and elderly men (50–80 years) in Sweden are emotionally isolated (defined as having no one in whom one can confide). Of those who do have someone in whom they can confide, eight out of ten confide only in their partner. People who have no one in whom they can confide are less likely to feel alert and strong, calm, energetic and happy. Instead, they are more likely to feel depressed, sad, tired and worn out. Many people suffering from this kind of isolation have strong social networks, but lack a significant bond with their friends. While they can build superficial friendships, they are often not able to confide in many people. People who are isolated emotionally usually feel lonely and unable to relate to others.

In Relationships

Emotional isolation can occur as a result of social isolation, or when a person lacks any close confidant or intimate partner. Even though social relationships are necessary for emotional well-being, they can trigger negative feelings and thoughts and emotional isolation can act as a defence mechanism to protect a person from emotional distress. When people are emotionally isolated, they keep their feelings completely to themselves, are unable to receive emotional support from others, feel “shut down” or numb, and are reluctant or unwilling to communicate with others, except perhaps for the most superficial matters. Emotional isolation can occur within an intimate relationship, particularly as a result of infidelity, abuse, or other trust issues. One or both partners may feel alone within the relationship, rather than supported and fulfilled. Identifying the source of the distress and working with a therapist to improve communication and rebuild trust can help couples re-establish their emotional bond.

Effects on the Mind

Cacioppo and his team have found that the brains of lonely people react differently than those with strong social networks. The University of Chicago researchers showed lonely and non-lonely subjects photographs of people in both pleasant settings and unpleasant settings. When viewing the pleasant pictures, non-lonely subjects showed much more activity in a section of the brain known as the ventral striatum than the lonely subjects. The ventral striatum plays an important role in learning. It is also part of the brain’s reward centre, and can be stimulated by rewards like food and love. The lonely subjects displayed far less activity in this region while viewing pleasant pictures, and they also had less brain activity when shown the unpleasant pictures. When non-lonely subjects viewed the unpleasant pictures, they demonstrated activity in the temporoparietal junction, an area of the brain associated with empathy; the lonely subjects had a lesser response.

Social withdrawal is avoiding people and activities one would usually enjoy. For some people, this can progress to a point of social isolation, where people may even want to avoid contact with family and close friends most of the time. They may want to be alone because they feel it is tiring or upsetting to be with other people. Sometimes a cycle can develop where the more time they spend alone, the less they feel like people understand them. When people withdraw themselves from social interaction they tend to stay inside a set place (like a bedroom).

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_isolation >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

An Overview of Emotional Labour

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Introduction

Emotional labour is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfil the emotional requirements of a job. More specifically, workers are expected to regulate their personas during interactions with customers, co-workers, clients, and managers. This includes analysis and decision-making in terms of the expression of emotion, whether actually felt or not, as well as its opposite: the suppression of emotions that are felt but not expressed. This is done so as to produce a certain feeling in the customer or client that will allow the company or organisation to succeed.

Plutchik Wheel
Plutchik Dyads

Roles that have been identified as requiring emotional labour include those involved in education, public administration, law, childcare, health care, social work, hospitality, media, advocacy, aviation and espionage. As particular economies move from a manufacturing to a service-based economy, more workers in a variety of occupational fields are expected to manage their emotions according to employer demands when compared to sixty years ago.

Definition

The sociologist Arlie Hochschild provided the first definition of emotional labour, which is displaying certain emotions to meet the requirements of a job. The related term emotion work (also called “emotion management”) refers to displaying certain emotions for personal purposes, such as within the private sphere of one’s home or interactions with family and friends. Hochschild identified three emotion regulation strategies: cognitive, bodily, and expressive. Within cognitive emotion work, one attempts to change images, ideas, or thoughts in hopes of changing the feelings associated with them. For example, one may associate a family picture with feeling happy and think about said picture whenever attempting to feel happy. Within bodily emotion work, one attempts to change physical symptoms in order to create a desired emotion. For example, one may attempt deep breathing in order to reduce anger. Within expressive emotion work, one attempts to change expressive gestures to change inner feelings, such as smiling when trying to feel happy.

While emotion work happens within the private sphere, emotional labour is emotion management within the workplace according to employer expectations. Jobs involving emotional labour are defined as those that:

  • Require face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public.
  • Require the worker to produce an emotional state in another person.
  • Allow the employer, through training and supervision, to exercise a degree of control over the emotional activities of employees.

Hochschild (1983) argues that within this commodification process, service workers are estranged from their own feelings in the workplace.

Alternative Usage

The term has been applied in modern contexts to refer to household tasks, specifically unpaid labour that is often expected of women, e.g. having to remind their partner of chores. The term can also refer to informal counselling, such as providing advice to a friend or helping someone through a breakup. When Hochschild was interviewed about this shifting usage, she described it having undergone concept creep, expressing that it made the concept blurrier and was sometimes being applied to things that were simply just labour, although how carrying out this labour made a person feel could make it emotional labour as well.

Determinants

  1. Societal, occupational, and organizational norms. For example, empirical evidence indicates that in typically “busy” stores there is more legitimacy to express negative emotions than there is in typically “slow” stores, in which employees are expected to behave in accordance with the display rules. Hence, the emotional culture to which one belongs influences the employee’s commitment to those rules.
  2. Dispositional traits and inner feeling on the job; such as employees’ emotional expressiveness, which refers to the capability to use facial expressions, voice, gestures, and body movements to transmit emotions; or employees’ level of career identity (the importance of the career role to self-identity), which allows them to express the organizationally-desired emotions more easily (because there is less discrepancy between expressed behaviour and emotional experience when engaged in their work).
  3. Supervisory regulation of display rules; Supervisors are likely to be important definers of display rules at the job level, given their direct influence on workers’ beliefs about high-performance expectations. Moreover, supervisors’ impressions of the need to suppress negative emotions on the job influence the employees’ impressions of that display rule.

Surface and Deep Acting

Arlie Hochschild’s foundational text divided emotional labour into two components: surface acting and deep acting. Surface acting occurs when employees display the emotions required for a job without changing how they actually feel. Deep acting is an effortful process through which employees change their internal feelings to align with organisational expectations, producing more natural and genuine emotional displays. Although the underlying processes differ, the objective of both is typically to show positive emotions, which are presumed to impact the feelings of customers and bottom-line outcomes (e.g. sales, positive recommendations, and repeat business). However, research generally has shown surface acting is more harmful to employee health. Without a consideration of ethical values, the consequences of emotional work on employees can easily become negative. Business ethics can be used as a guide for employees on how to present feelings that are consistent with ethical values, and can show them how to regulate their feelings more easily and comfortably while working.

Careers

In the past, emotional labour demands and display rules were viewed as a characteristic of particular occupations, such as restaurant workers, cashiers, hospital workers, bill collectors, counsellors, secretaries, and nurses. However, display rules have been conceptualised not only as role requirements of particular occupational groups, but also as interpersonal job demands, which are shared by many kinds of occupations.

Teachers

Zhang et al. (2019) looked at teachers in China, using questionnaires the researchers asked about their teaching experience and their interaction with the children and their families. According to numerous studies, early childhood education is important to a child’s development, which can have an effect on the teachers emotional labour, along with their emotional labour having an effect on the children. A big focus in this study was the use of surface acting in early childhood teacher. Zhang et al. (2019) found that surface acting was used significantly less than deep and natural acting in kindergarten teachers, along with early childhood teacher are less likely to fake or suppress their feelings. They also found that more experienced teachers had higher levels of emotional labour, because they either have more skills to suppress their emotions, or they are less driven to use surface acting.

Bill Collectors

In 1991, Sutton did an in-depth qualitative study into bill collectors at a collection agency. He found that unlike the other jobs described here where employees need to act cheerful and concerned, bill collectors are selected and socialized to show irritation to most debtors. Specifically, the collection agency hired agents who seemed to be easily aroused. The newly hired agents were then trained on when and how to show varying emotions to different types of debtors. As they worked at the collection agency, they were closely monitored by their supervisors to make sure that they frequently conveyed urgency to debtors.

Bill collectors’ emotional labour consists of not letting angry and hostile debtors make them angry and to not feel guilty about pressuring friendly debtors for money. They coped with angry debtors by publicly showing their anger or making jokes when they got off the phone. They minimised the guilt they felt by staying emotionally detached from the debtors.

Childcare Workers

The skills involved in childcare are often viewed as innate to women, making the components of childcare invisible. However, a number of scholars have not only studied the difficulty and skill required for childcare, but also suggested that the emotional labour of childcare is unique and needs to be studied differently. Performing emotional labour requires the development of emotional capital, and that can only be developed through experience and reflection. Through semi-structured interviews, Edwards (2016) found that there were two components of emotional labour in childcare in addition to Hochschild’s original two: emotional consonance and suppression. Edwards (2016) defined suppression as hiding emotion and emotional consonance as naturally experiencing the same emotion that one is expected to feel for the job.

Food-Industry Workers

Wait Staff

In her 1991 study of waitresses in Philadelphia, Paules examines how these workers assert control and protect their self identity during interactions with customers. In restaurant work, Paules argues, workers’ subordination to customers is reinforced through “cultural symbols that originate from deeply rooted assumptions about service work.” Because the waitresses were not strictly regulated by their employers, waitresses’ interactions with customers were controlled by the waitresses themselves. Although they are stigmatised by the stereotypes and assumptions of servitude surrounding restaurant work, the waitresses studied were not negatively affected by their interactions with customers. To the contrary, they viewed their ability to manage their emotions as a valuable skill that could be used to gain control over customers. Thus, the Philadelphia waitresses took advantage of the lack of employer-regulated emotional labour in order to avoid the potentially negative consequences of emotional labour.

Though Paules highlights the positive consequences of emotional labour for a specific population of waitresses, other scholars have also found negative consequences of emotional labour within the waitressing industry. Through eighteen months of participant observation research, Bayard De Volo (2003) found that casino waitresses are highly monitored and monetarily bribed to perform emotional labour in the workplace. Specifically, Bayard De Volo (2003) argues that through a sexualised environment and a generous tipping system, both casino owners and customers control waitresses’ behaviour and appearance for their own benefit and pleasure. Even though the waitresses have their own forms of individual and collective resistance mechanisms, intense and consistent monitoring of their actions by casino management makes it difficult to change the power dynamics of the casino workplace.

Fast-Food Employees

By using participant observation and interviews, Leidner (1993) examines how employers in fast food restaurants regulate workers’ interactions with customers. According to Leidner (1993), employers attempt to regulate workers’ interactions with customers only under certain conditions. Specifically, when employers attempt to regulate worker–customer interactions, employers believe that “the quality of the interaction is important to the success of the enterprise”, that workers are “unable or unwilling to conduct the interactions appropriately on their own”, and that the “tasks themselves are not too complex or context-dependent.” According to Leidner (1993), regulating employee interactions with customers involves standardizing workers’ personal interactions with customers. At the McDonald’s fast food restaurants in Leidner’s (1993) study, these interactions are strictly scripted, and workers’ compliance with the scripts and regulations are closely monitored.

Along with examining employers’ attempts to regulate employee–customer interactions, Leidner (1993) examines how fast-food workers’ respond to these regulations. According to Leidner (1993), meeting employers’ expectations requires workers to engage in some form of emotional labour. For example, McDonald’s workers are expected to greet customers with a smile and friendly attitude independent of their own mood or temperament at the time. Leidner (1993) suggests that rigid compliance with these expectations is at least potentially damaging to workers’ sense of self and identity. However, Leidner (1993) did not see the negative consequences of emotional labour in the workers she studied. Instead, McDonald’s workers attempted to individualise their responses to customers in small ways. Specifically, they used humour or exaggeration to demonstrate their rebellion against the strict regulation of their employee–customer interactions.

Physicians

According to Larson and Yao (2005), empathy should characterize physicians’ interactions with their patients because, despite advancement in medical technology, the interpersonal relationship between physicians and patients remains essential to quality healthcare. Larson and Yao (2005) argue that physicians consider empathy a form of emotional labour. Specifically, according to Larson and Yao (2005), physicians engage in emotional labour through deep acting by feeling sincere empathy before, during, and after interactions with patients. On the other hand, Larson and Yao (2005) argue that physicians engage in surface acting when they fake empathic behaviours toward the patient. Although Larson and Yao (2005) argue that deep acting is preferred, physicians may rely on surface acting when sincere empathy for patients is impossible. Overall, Larson and Yao (2005) argue that physicians are more effective and enjoy more professional satisfaction when they engage in empathy through deep acting due to emotional labour.

Police Work

According to Martin (1999), police work involves substantial amounts of emotional labour by officers, who must control their own facial and bodily displays of emotion in the presence of other officers and citizens. Although policing is often viewed as stereotypically masculine work that focuses on fighting crime, policing also requires officers to maintain order and provide a variety of interpersonal services. For example, police must have a commanding presence that allows them to act decisively and maintain control in unpredictable situations while having the ability to actively listen and talk to citizens. According to Martin (1999), a police officer who displays too much anger, sympathy, or other emotion while dealing with danger on the job will be viewed by other officers as someone unable to withstand the pressures of police work, due to the sexist views of many police officers. While being able to balance this self-management of emotions in front of other officers, police must also assertively restore order and use effective interpersonal skills to gain citizen trust and compliance. Ultimately, the ability of police officers to effectively engage in emotional labour affects how other officers and citizens view them.

Public Administration

Many scholars argue that the amount of emotional work required between all levels of government is greatest on the local level. It is at the level of cities and counties that the responsibility lies for day to day emergency preparedness, firefighters, law enforcement, public education, public health, and family and children’s services. Citizens in a community expect the same level of satisfaction from their government, as they receive in a customer service-oriented job. This takes a considerate amount of work for both employees and employers in the field of public administration. Mastracci and Adams (2017) looks at public servants and how they may be at risk of being alienated because of their unsupported emotional labour demands from their jobs. This can cause surface acting and distrust in management. There are two comparisons that represent emotional labour within public administration, “Rational Work versus Emotion Work”, and “Emotional Labour versus Emotional Intelligence.”

Performance

Many scholars argue that when public administrators perform emotional labour, they are dealing with significantly more sensitive situations than employees in the service industry. The reason for this is because they are on the front lines of the government, and are expected by citizens to serve them quickly and efficiently. When confronted by a citizen or a co-worker, public administrators use emotional sensing to size up the emotional state of the citizen in need. Workers then take stock of their own emotional state in order to make sure that the emotion they are expressing is appropriate to their roles. Simultaneously, they have to determine how to act in order to elicit the desired response from the citizen as well as from co-workers. Public Administrators perform emotional labour through five different strategies: Psychological First Aid, Compartments and Closets, Crazy Calm, Humour, and Common Sense.

Definition: Rational Work vs. Emotion Work

According to Mary Guy, Public administration does not only focus on the business side of administration but on the personal side as well. It is not just about collecting the water bill or land ordinances to construct a new property, it is also about the quality of life and sense of community that is allotted to individuals by their city officials. Rational work is the ability to think cognitively and analytically, while emotional work means to think more practically and with more reason.

Definition: Intelligence vs. Emotional Intelligence

Knowing how to suppress and manage one’s own feelings is known as emotional intelligence. The ability to control one’s emotions and to be able to do this at a high level guarantees one’s own ability to serve those in need. Emotional intelligence is performed while performing emotional labour, and without one the other can not be there.

Sex Work

Emotional labour is an essential part of many service jobs, including many types of sex work. Through emotional labour sex workers engage in different levels of acting known as surface acting and deep acting. These levels reflect a sex worker’s engagement with the emotional labour. Surface acting occurs when the sex worker is aware of the dissonance between their authentic experience of emotion and their managed emotional display. In contrast deep acting occurs when the sex worker can no longer differentiate between what is authentic and what is acting; acting becomes authentic.

Sex workers engage in emotional labour for many different reasons. First, sex workers often engage in emotional labour to construct performances of gender and sexuality. These performances frequently reflect the desires of a clientele which is mostly composed of heterosexual men. In the majority of cases, clients value women who they perceive as normatively feminine. For women sex workers, achieving this perception necessitates a performance of gender and sexuality that involves deference to clients and affirmation of their masculinity, as well as physical embodiment of traditional femininity. The emotional labour involved in sex work may be of a greater significance when race differences are involved. For instance Mistress Velvet, a black, femme dominatrix, advertises herself using her most fetishised attributes. She makes her clients, who are mostly white heterosexual men, read Black feminist theory before their sessions. This allows the clients to see why their participation, as white heterosexual men, contributes to the fetishization of black women.

Both within sex work and in other types of work, emotional labour is gendered in that women are expected to use it to construct performances of normative femininity, whereas men are expected to use it to construct performances of normative masculinity. In both cases, these expectations are often met because this labour is necessary to maximising monetary gain and potentially to job retention. Indeed, emotional labour is often used as a means to maximise income. It fosters a better experience for the client and protects the worker thus enabling the worker to make the most profit.

In addition, sex workers often engage in emotional labour as a self-protection strategy, distancing themselves from the sometimes emotionally volatile work. Finally, clients often value perceived authenticity in their transactions with sex workers; thus, sex workers may attempt to foster a sense of authentic intimacy.

Gender

Macdonald and Sirianni (1996) use the term “emotional proletariat” to describe service jobs in which “workers exercise emotional labor wherein they are required to display friendliness and deference to customers.” Because of deference, these occupations tend to be stereotyped as female jobs, independent of the actual number of women working the job. According to Macdonald and Sirianni (1996), because deference is a characteristic demanded of all those in disadvantaged structural positions, especially women, when deference is made a job requirement, women are likely to be overrepresented in these jobs. Macdonald and Sirianni (1996) claim that “[i]n no other area of wage labor are the personal characteristics of the workers so strongly associated with the nature of the work.” Thus, according to Macdonald and Sirianna (1996), although all workers employed within the service economy may have a difficult time maintaining their dignity and self-identity due to the demands of emotional labour, such an issue may be especially problematic for women workers.

Emotional labour also affects women by perpetuating occupational segregation and the gender wage gap. Job segregation, which is the systematic tendency for men and women to work in different occupations, is often cited as the reason why women lack equal pay when compared to men. According to Guy and Newman (2004), occupational segregation and ultimately the gender wage gap can at least be partially attributed to emotional labour. Specifically, work-related tasks that require emotional work thought to be natural for women, such as caring and empathizing are requirements of many female-dominated occupations. However, according to Guy and Newman (2004), these feminised work tasks are not a part of formal job descriptions and performance evaluations:

“Excluded from job descriptions and performance evaluations, the work is invisible and uncompensated. Public service relies heavily on such skills, yet civil service systems, which are designed on the assumptions of a bygone era, fail to acknowledge and compensate emotional labor.”

According to Guy and Newman (2004), women working in positions that require emotional labour in addition to regular work are not compensated for this additional labour because of the sexist notion that the additional labour is to be expected of them by the fact of being a woman. Guy and Azhar (2018) found that emotive expressions between sexes is affected by culture. This study found that there is variability to how women and men interpret emotive words, and specifically results showed that culture played a huge role in these gender differences.

Disability

People with disability are increasingly part of the labour force, due to societal attitudes about inclusion and neoliberal pressures around reducing welfare. Roles that require emotional labour may be more difficult for people with certain kinds of disabilities to perform. People with disabilities also may have to use more of their own time and energy to perform a task than a non-disabled person. For instance when they routinely encounter prejudice and stigma (as would be the case for many groups experiencing prejudice), including disability-unfriendly structures (Accessibility, administrative or social). On the other hand due to routine experience of navigating unhelpful structures and prejudice, disabled people can have dual advantages of: better skills in finding ways round problems without expending emotional energy being surprised for example, and easier sympathetic or empathetic understanding of other individuals and groups experiences with these problems. Inclusive or unfriendly organizational culture also has an impact, and workplaces may require workers with disability to downplay their impairments in order to ‘fit in’, an extra burden of emotional labour. Most individuals will experience complex affects of how their disability influences their emotional labour in a given job role at a specified organisation.

Implications

Positive affective display in service interactions, such as smiling and conveying friendliness, are positively associated with customer positive feelings, and important outcomes, such as intention to return, intention to recommend a store to others, and perception of overall service quality. There is evidence that emotional labour may lead to employees’ emotional exhaustion and burnout over time, and may also reduce employees’ job satisfaction. That is, higher degree of using emotion regulation on the job is related to higher levels of employees’ emotional exhaustion, and lower levels of employees’ job satisfaction.

There is empirical evidence that higher levels of emotional labour demands are not uniformly rewarded with higher wages. Rather, the reward is dependent on the level of general cognitive demands required by the job. That is, occupations with high cognitive demands evidence wage returns with increasing emotional labour demands; whereas occupations low in cognitive demands evidence a wage “penalty” with increasing emotional labour demands. Additionally, innovations that increase employee empowerment — such as conversion into worker cooperatives, co-managing schemes, or flattened workplace structures — have been found to increase workers’ levels of emotional labour as they take on more workplace responsibilities.

Coping Skills

Coping occurs in response to psychological stress—usually triggered by changes—in an effort to maintain mental health and emotional well-being. Life stressors are often described as negative events (loss of a job). However, positive changes in life (a new job) can also constitute life stressors, thus requiring the use of coping skills to adapt. Coping strategies are the behaviours, thoughts, and emotions that you use to adjust to the changes that occur in your life. The use of coping skills will help a person better themselves in the work place and perform to the best of their ability to achieve success. There are many ways to cope and adapt to changes. Some ways include: sharing emotions with peers, having a healthy social life outside of work, being humorous, and adjusting expectations of self and work. These coping skills will help turn negative emotion to positive and allow for more focus on the public in contrast to oneself.

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Who was Eric Berne (1910-1970)?

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Introduction

Eric Berne (10 May 1910 to 15 July 1970) was a Canadian-born psychiatrist who created the theory of transactional analysis as a way of explaining human behaviour.

Berne’s theory of transactional analysis was based on the ideas of Freud and Carl Jung but was distinctly different. Freudian psychotherapists focused on talk therapy as a way of gaining insight to their patient’s personalities. Berne believed that insight could be better discovered by analysing patients’ social transactions.

Background and Education (1927–1938)

Eric Berne was born on 10 May 1910, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, as Eric Lennard Bernstein. He was the son of David Hillel Bernstein, MD, a general practitioner, and Sarah Gordon Bernstein, a professional writer and editor. His only sibling, his sister Grace, was born five years later. The family immigrated to Canada from Poland and Russia. Both parents graduated from McGill University in Montreal. Eric was close to his father and spoke fondly of how he accompanied his father on rounds, travelling by horse-pulled sleigh on cold Montreal winters to visit patients.

Berne’s father died of tuberculosis when Berne was 11. His mother then supported herself and her two children working as an editor and writer. She encouraged her son to follow in his father’s footsteps and to study medicine. Berne received his baccalaureate degree in 1931 and an M.D. and C.M. (Master of Surgery) from McGill University Medical School in 1935.

Berne came to the United States in 1935 when he began an internship at Englewood Hospital in New Jersey. After completing his one-year internship in 1936, he began his psychiatric residency at the Psychiatric Clinic of Yale University School of Medicine, where he worked for two years.

In 1939, Berne became an American citizen and shortened his name from Eric Lennard Bernstein to Eric Berne.

In 1949, he was admitted as a Fellow in the American Psychiatric Association.

Career (1938–1970)

From 1938 to 1940, Berne was an assistant physician at Ring Sanitarium, Arlington Heights, Massachusetts.

From 1940 to 1943 he was employed as a psychiatrist in a sanitarium in Connecticut, and concurrently as a clinical assistant in psychiatry at Mt Sinai Hospital in New York. He also maintained a private practice.

In 1943, during World War II, Berne joined the United States Army Medical Corps and served as a psychiatrist. He rose from the rank of Lieutenant, to Captain, and then to Major. His assignments included Spokane, Washington, Ft. Ord, California and Brigham City, Utah.

After his discharge in 1946, Berne settled in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. He lived in a four-bedroom, three bath Victorian house on the eastern side of Carpenter Street, in the second house located south from 2nd Avenue. The house dates back to 1888, originally built for surveyor Davenport Bromfield while he mapped the streets of Carmel City. It is one of the oldest structures in town, now listed on the Carmel Inventory Of Historic Resources as the “Eric Berne House.” From 1949 to 1964, Berne had a private practices in both Carmel and San Francisco and kept up a demanding pace of research, teaching in addition.

Berne resumed his psychoanalytic training that he had begun in New York City, prior to the War, at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. During 1947–1949 Berne studied under Erik Erikson. He took an appointment in 1950 as Assistant Psychiatrist at Mt. Zion Hospital, San Francisco, and simultaneously began serving as a Consultant to the Surgeon General of the US Army. In 1951, he accepted a position of Adjunct and Attending Psychiatrist at the Veterans Administration and Mental Hygiene Clinic, San Francisco.

The years from 1964 to 1970 were restless ones for Berne. His personal life became chaotic and he concentrated on his writing.

Transactional Analysis

Berne created the theory of transactional analysis as a way to explain human behaviour. Berne’s theory was based on the ideas of Freud but his were distinctly different. Freudian psychotherapists focused on patient’s personalities. Berne believed that insight could be better discovered by analysing patients’ social transactions. Berne mapped interpersonal relationships to three ego-states of the individuals involved: the Parent, Adult, and Child state. He then investigated communications between individuals based on the current state of each. He called these interpersonal interactions transactions and used the label games to refer to certain patterns of transactions which popped up repeatedly in everyday life.

The origins of transactional analysis can be traced to the first five of Berne’s six articles on intuition, which he began writing in 1949. Even at this early juncture and while still working to become a psychoanalyst, his writings challenged Freudian concepts of the unconscious.

In 1956, after 15 years of psychoanalytic training, Berne was refused admission to the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute as a fully-fledged psychoanalyst. He interpreted the request for several more years of training as a rejection and decided to walk away from psychoanalysis. Before the end of the year, he had written two seminal papers, both published in 1957.

  • In the first article, Intuition V: The Ego Image, Berne referenced P. Federn, E. Kahn, and H. Silberer, and indicated how he arrived at the concept of ego states, including his idea of separating “adult” from “child”.
  • The second paper, Ego States in Psychotherapy, was based on material presented earlier that year at the Psychiatric Clinic, Mt. Zion Hospital, San Francisco, and at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Clinic, U.C. Medical School. In that second article, he developed the tripartite scheme used today (Parent, Adult, and Child), introduced the three-circle method of diagramming it, showed how to sketch contaminations, labelled the theory, “structural analysis”, and termed it “a new psychotherapeutic approach”.

A few months later, he wrote a third article, titled Transactional Analysis: A New and Effective Method of Group Therapy, which was presented by invitation at the 1957 Western Regional Meeting of the American Group Psychotherapy Association of Los Angeles. With the publication of this paper in the 1958 issue of the American Journal of Psychotherapy, Berne’s new method of diagnosis and treatment, transactional analysis, became a permanent part of the psychotherapeutic literature. In addition to restating his concepts of ego states and structural analysis, the 1958 paper added the important new features of transactional analysis proper (i.e. the analysis of transactions), games, and scripts.

His seminar group from the 1950s developed the term transactional analysis (TA) to describe therapies based on his work. By 1964, this expanded into the International Transactional Analysis Association. While still largely ignored by the psychoanalytic community, many therapists have put his ideas in practice.

In the early 1960s he published both technical and popular accounts of his conclusions. His first full-length book on TA was published in 1961, titled Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy. Structures and Dynamics of Organisations and Groups (1963) examined the same analysis in a broader context than one-on-one interaction.

Games People Play

Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships is a bestselling 1964 book by Berne that has sold more than five million copies. The book describes both functional and dysfunctional social interactions.

The essence of games described by Berne are that they are not zero-sum games (i.e. one must win at the other’s expense), where the person who benefits from a transaction wins the game. On the contrary, the “games people play” usually pay all of the players off, even those who ostensibly are the losers, since they are about psychic equilibrium or promoting adopted self-damaging social roles instead of rational benefits. These payoffs are not consciously sought by the players but they are leading to the ultimate unconscious life script of each as set by their parental family interactions and favoured emotions.

Despite having been written for professional therapists, the book became a New York Times bestseller and made Berne famous. The book clearly presented everyday examples of the ways in which human beings are caught up in the games they play. Berne gave these games memorable titles such as “Now I’ve Got You, You Son of a Bitch”, “Wooden Leg”, “Why Don’t You… / Yes, But…”, and “Let’s You and Him Fight”.

Berne said that “any social intercourse (…) has a biological advantage over no intercourse at all”, so, people need any form of “stroking” (a physical contact, e.g., exchange) to live.

Name and Pseudonyms

In 1943 he changed his legal name from Eric Lennard Bernstein to Eric Berne.

Berne had an irrepressible sense of humour, which was particularly evident in his writing. For example, in his article entitled Who was condom? Berne wrote about the contraceptive, the condom, and whether a man named Condom ever existed. While at McGill he wrote for several student newspapers using pseudonyms. He continued to write under pseudonyms such as Cyprian St. Cyr (“Cyprian Sincere”) in whimsical articles in the Transactional Analysis Bulletin.

Personal Life

Berne was married three times. His first wife was Ruth Harvey (the Jorgensen biography used the pseudonyms of “Elinor” and “McRae” to protect the privacy of Berne’s first wife). They married in 1942, had two children, and divorced acrimoniously in 1945. In 1949 he married Dorothy DeMass Way, with whom he also had two children before their divorce in 1964. After his popular success, Eric married a third time, to Torre Peterson in 1967. The couple took up residence in Carmel, California, where he wrote, but he continued some clinical work in San Francisco. This marriage also ended in divorce, in early 1970.

Death

Berne died of a heart attack in Carmel on 15 July 1970. He was 60 years old.

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Who is Elliot Hirshman (1961-Present)?

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Introduction

Elliot Lee Hirshman (born 21 February 1961) is an American psychologist and academic who is the president of Stevenson University in Owings Mills, Maryland since 03 July 2017. Prior to Stevenson University he served as president at San Diego State University and served as the provost and senior vice president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Education

Hirshman earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and mathematics from Yale University in 1983. He received a master’s degree (1984) and a PhD in cognitive psychology (1987) from UCLA. While at UCLA he was a member of the Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab and Cogfog. He then took a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at New York University.

Career

He taught in the psychology department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1989 to 2000. He chaired the psychology departments at the University of Colorado at Denver (2000–2002) and at George Washington University (2002–2005), where he later served as chief research officer (2005–2008). From 2008 to 2011 he was provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He became the eighth president of SDSU in 2011. SDSU, founded in 1897, is a part of the California State University system; it has 36,000 students and a faculty and staff of 7,000. It offers undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degrees through eight academic colleges and is an NCAA Division One school offering 19 sports. During his tenure he is credited with greatly improving the university’s reputation and rankings, fundraising, and graduation rates. In March 2017 he announced his intention to resign from SDSU, effective June 2017, to become president of Stevenson University in Maryland.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliot_Hirshman >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.