Category: Mental Health History

Who was M. Scott Peck (1936-2005)?

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Introduction

Morgan Scott Peck (1936–2005) was an American psychiatrist and best-selling author who wrote the book The Road Less Traveled (see below), published in 1978.

Early Life

Peck was born on May 22, 1936, in New York City, the son of Zabeth (née Saville) and David Warner Peck, an attorney and judge. His parents were Quakers. Peck was raised a Protestant (his paternal grandmother was from a Jewish family, but Peck’s father identified himself as a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) and not as Jewish).

His parents sent him to the prestigious boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, when he was 13. In his book, The Road Less Traveled, he confides the story of his brief stay at Exeter, and admits that it was a most miserable time. Finally, at age 15, during the spring holiday of his third year, he came home and refused to return to the school, whereupon his parents sought psychiatric help for him and he was (much to his amusement in later life) diagnosed with depression and recommended for a month’s stay in a psychiatric hospital (unless he chose to return to school). He then transferred to Friends Seminary (a private K–12 school) in late 1952, and graduated in 1954, after which he received a BA from Harvard in 1958, and an MD degree from Case Western Reserve University in 1963.

Career

Peck served in administrative posts in the government during his career as a psychiatrist. He also served in the US Army and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. His army assignments included stints as chief of psychology at the Army Medical Centre in Okinawa, Japan, and assistant chief of psychiatry and neurology in the office of the surgeon general in Washington, DC. He was the medical director of the New Milford Hospital Mental Health Clinic and a psychiatrist in private practice in New Milford, Connecticut. His first and best-known book, The Road Less Traveled, sold more than 10 million copies.

Peck’s works combined his experiences from his private psychiatric practice with a distinctly religious point of view. In his second book, People of the Lie, he wrote, “After many years of vague identification with Buddhist and Islamic mysticism, I ultimately made a firm Christian commitment – signified by my non-denominational baptism on the ninth of March 1980…” (Peck, 1983/1988, p11). One of his views was that people who are evil attack others rather than face their own failures.

In December 1984, Peck co-founded the Foundation for Community Encouragement (FCE), a tax-exempt, non-profit, public educational foundation, whose stated mission is “to teach the principles of community to individuals and organizations.” FCE ceased day-to-day operations from 2002 to 2009. In late 2009, almost 25 years after FCE was first founded, the organisation resumed functioning, and began offering community building and training events in 2010.

Personal Life

Peck married Lily Ho in 1959, and they had three children. In 1994, they jointly received the Community of Christ International Peace Award.

While Peck’s writings emphasized the virtues of a disciplined life and delayed gratification, his personal life was far more turbulent. For example, in his book In Search of Stones, Peck acknowledged having extramarital affairs and being estranged from two of his children. In 2004, just a year before his death, Peck was divorced by Lily and married Kathleen Kline Yeates.

Death

Peck died at his home in Connecticut on 25 September 2005. He had had Parkinson’s disease and pancreatic and liver duct cancer. Fuller Theological Seminary houses the archives of his publications, awards, and correspondence.

The Road Less Traveled

The Road Less Traveled, published in 1978, is Peck’s best-known work, and the one that made his reputation. It is, in short, a description of the attributes that make for a fulfilled human being, based largely on his experiences as a psychiatrist and a person.

The book consists of four parts. In the first part Peck examines the notion of discipline, which he considers essential for emotional, spiritual, and psychological health, and which he describes as “the means of spiritual evolution”. The elements of discipline that make for such health include the ability to delay gratification, accepting responsibility for oneself and one’s actions, a dedication to truth, and “balancing”. “Balancing” refers to the problem of reconciling multiple, complex, possibly conflicting factors that impact an important decision—on one’s own behalf or on behalf of another.

In the second part, Peck addresses the nature of love, which he considers the driving force behind spiritual growth. He contrasts his own views on the nature of love against a number of common misconceptions about love, including:

  • That love is identified with romantic love (he considers it a very destructive myth when it is solely relying on “falling in love”),
  • That love is related to dependency,
  • That true love is linked with the feeling of “falling in love”.

Peck argues that “true” love is rather an action that one undertakes consciously to extend one’s ego boundaries by including others or humanity, and is therefore the spiritual nurturing—which can be directed toward oneself, as well as toward one’s beloved.

In the third part Peck deals with religion, and the commonly accepted views and misconceptions concerning religion. He recounts experiences from several patient case histories, and the evolution of the patients’ notion of God, religion, atheism—especially of their own “religiosity” or atheism—as their therapy with Peck progressed.

The fourth and final part concerns “grace”, the powerful force originating outside human consciousness that nurtures spiritual growth in human beings. To focus on the topic, he describes the miracles of health, the unconscious, and serendipity—phenomena which Peck says:

  • Nurture human life and spiritual growth,
  • Are incompletely understood by scientific thinking,
  • Are commonplace among humanity,
  • Originate outside the conscious human will.

He concludes that “the miracles described indicate that our growth as human beings is being assisted by a force other than our conscious will”. (Peck, 1978/1992, p.281)

Random House, where the then little-known psychiatrist first tried to publish his original manuscript, turned him down, saying the final section was “too Christ-y.” Thereafter, Simon & Schuster published the work for $7,500 and printed a modest hardback run of 5,000 copies. The book took off only after Peck hit the lecture circuit and personally sought reviews in key publications. Later reprinted in paperback in 1980, The Road first made best-seller lists in 1984 – six years after its initial publication.

People of the Lie

First published in 1983, People of the Lie: Toward a Psychology of Evil [subsequent vols subtitled The Hope For Healing Human Evil and Possession and Group Evil] (ISBN 0 7126 1857 0) followed on from Peck’s first book. Peck describes the stories of several people who came to him whom he found particularly resistant to any form of help. He came to think of them as evil and goes on to describe the characteristics of evil in psychological terms, proposing that it could become a psychiatric diagnosis. Peck points to narcissism as a type of evil in this context.

Theories

Love

His perspective on love (in The Road Less Traveled) is that love is not a feeling, it is an activity and an investment. He defines love as, “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” (Peck, 1978/1992, p.85). Peck expands on the work of Thomas Aquinas over 700 years ago, that love is primarily actions towards nurturing the spiritual growth of another.

Peck seeks to differentiate between love and cathexis. Cathexis is what explains sexual attraction, the instinct for cuddling pets and pinching babies’ cheeks. However, cathexis is not love. All the same, love cannot begin in isolation; a certain amount of cathexis is necessary to get sufficiently close to be able to love.

Once through the cathexis stage, the work of love begins. It is not a feeling. It consists of what you do for another person. As Peck says in The Road Less Traveled, “Love is as love does.” It is about giving yourself and the other person what they need to grow.

Discipline

The Road Less Traveled begins with the statement “Life is difficult”.  Life was never meant to be easy and is essentially a series of problems which can either be solved or ignored. Peck wrote of the importance of discipline, describing four aspects of it:

  • Delaying gratification: Sacrificing present comfort for future gains.
  • Acceptance of responsibility: Accepting responsibility for one’s own decisions.
  • Dedication to truth: Honesty, both in word and deed.
  • Balancing: Handling conflicting requirements.

Peck argues that these are techniques of suffering, that enable the pain of problems to be worked through and systematically solved, producing growth. He argues that most people avoid the pain of dealing with their problems and suggests that it is through facing the pain of problem-solving that life becomes more meaningful.

Neurotic and Legitimate Suffering

Peck believes that it is only through suffering and agonizing using the four aspects of discipline (delaying gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing) that we can resolve the many puzzles and conflicts that we face. This is what he calls undertaking legitimate suffering. Peck argues that by trying to avoid legitimate suffering, people actually ultimately end up suffering more. This extra unnecessary suffering is what Scott Peck terms neurotic suffering. He references Carl Jung ‘Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering’. Peck says that our aim must be to eliminate neurotic suffering and to work through our legitimate suffering to achieve our individual goals.

Evil

Peck discusses evil in his three-volume book People of the Lie, as well as in a chapter of The Road Less Traveled. Peck characterises evil as a malignant type of self-righteousness in which there is an active rather than passive refusal to tolerate imperfection (sin) and its consequent guilt. This syndrome results in a projection of evil onto selected specific innocent victims (often children), which is the paradoxical mechanism by which the People of the Lie commit their evil. Peck argues that these people are the most difficult of all to deal with, and extremely hard to identify. He describes in some detail several individual cases involving his patients. In one case which Peck considers as the most typical because of its subtlety, he describes Roger, a depressed teenage son of respected, well-off parents. In a series of parental decisions justified by often subtle distortions of the truth, they exhibit a consistent disregard for their son’s feelings, and a consistent willingness to destroy his growth. With false rationality and normality, they aggressively refuse to consider that they are in any way responsible for his resultant depression, eventually suggesting his condition must be incurable and genetic.

Peck makes a distinction between those who are on their way to becoming evil and those who have already crossed the line and are irretrievably evil. In the first instance, he describes George. Peck says, “Basically, George, you’re a kind of a coward. Whenever the going gets a little bit rough, you sell out.” Of note, this is the kind of evil that inspired the film Session 9. When asked where evil lives, Simon concludes, “I live in the weak and the wounded.” On the other hand, those who have crossed the line and are irretrievably evil are described as having malignant narcissism.

Some of Peck’s conclusions about the psychiatric condition that he designates as “evil” are derived from his close study of one patient he names Charlene. Although Charlene is not dangerous, she is ultimately unable to have empathy for others in any way. According to Peck, people like her see others as playthings or tools to be manipulated for their own uses or entertainment. Peck states that these people are rarely seen by psychiatrists, and have never been treated successfully.

Evil is described by Peck as “militant ignorance”. The original Judeo-Christian concept of “sin” is as a process that leads us to “miss the mark” and fall short of perfection. Peck argues that while most people are conscious of this, at least on some level, those who are evil actively and militantly refuse this consciousness. Peck considers those he calls evil to be attempting to escape and hide from their own conscience (through self-deception), and views this as being quite distinct from the apparent absence of conscience evident in sociopathy.

According to Peck, an evil person:

  • is consistently self-deceiving, with the intent of avoiding guilt and maintaining a self-image of perfection
  • deceives others as a consequence of their own self-deception
  • projects his or her evils and sins onto very specific targets (scapegoats) while being apparently normal with everyone else (“their insensitivity toward him was selective” (Peck, 1983/1988, p.105))
  • commonly hates with the pretence of love, for the purposes of self-deception as much as deception of others
  • abuses political (emotional) power (“the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion” (Peck, 1978/1992, p.298))
  • maintains a high level of respectability, and lies incessantly to do so
  • is consistent in his or her sins. Evil persons are characterised not so much by the magnitude of their sins, but by their consistency (of destructiveness)
  • is unable to think from the viewpoint of their victim (scapegoating)
  • has a covert intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury

Most evil people realise the evil deep within themselves, but are unable to tolerate the pain of introspection, or admit to themselves that they are evil. Thus, they constantly run away from their evil by putting themselves in a position of moral superiority and putting the focus of evil on others. Evil is an extreme form of what Peck, in The Road Less Traveled, calls a character and personality disorder.

Using the My Lai massacre as a case study, Peck also examines group evil, discussing how human group morality is strikingly less than individual morality. Partly, he considers this to be a result of specialization, which allows people to avoid individual responsibility and pass the buck, resulting in a reduction of group conscience.

Though the topic of evil has historically been the domain of religion, Peck makes great efforts to keep much of his discussion on a scientific basis, explaining the specific psychological mechanisms by which evil operates. He was also particularly conscious of the danger of a psychology of evil being misused for personal or political ends. Peck considered that such a psychology should be used with great care, as falsely labelling people as evil is one of the very characteristics of evil. He argued that a diagnosis of evil should come from the standpoint of healing and safety for its victims, but also with the possibility even if remote, that the evil themselves may be cured.

Ultimately, Peck says that evil arises out of free choice. He describes it thus: Every person stands at a crossroads, with one path leading to God, and the other path leading to the devil. The path of God is the right path, and accepting this path is akin to submission to a higher power. However, if a person wants to convince himself and others that he has free choice, he would rather take a path which cannot be attributed to its being the right path. Thus, he chooses the path of evil.

Peck also discussed the question of the devil. Initially he believed, as with “99% of psychiatrists and the majority of clergy” (Peck, 1983/1988, p.182), that the devil did not exist; but, after starting to believe in the reality of human evil, he then began to contemplate the reality of spiritual evil. Eventually, after having been referred several possible cases of possession and being involved in two exorcisms, he was converted to a belief in the existence of Satan. Peck considered people who are possessed as being victims of evil, but of not being evil themselves. Peck, however, considered possession to be rare, and human evil common. He did believe there was some relationship between Satan and human evil, but was unsure of its exact nature. Peck’s writings and views on possession and exorcism are to some extent influenced and based on specific accounts by Malachi Martin; however, the veracity of these accounts and Peck’s own diagnostic approach to possession have both since been questioned by a Catholic priest who is a professor of theology. It has been argued that it is not possible to find formal records to establish the veracity of Father Malachi Martin’s described cases of possession, as all exorcism files are sealed by the Archdiocese of New York, where all but one of the cases took place.

The Four Stages of Spiritual Development

Peck postulates that there are four stages of human spiritual development:

  • Stage I is chaotic, disordered, and reckless. Very young children are in Stage I. They may defy and disobey and are unwilling to accept a will greater than their own. They are egoistical and lack empathy for others. Criminals are often people who have never grown out of Stage I.
  • Stage II is the stage at which a person has blind faith in authority figures and sees the world as divided simply into good and evil, right and wrong, us and them. Once children learn to obey their parents and other authority figures (often out of fear or shame), they reach Stage II. Many religious people are Stage II. With blind faith comes humility and a willingness to obey and serve. The majority of conventionally moralistic, law-abiding citizens never move out of Stage II.
  • Stage III is the stage of scientific scepticism and questioning. A Stage III person does not accept claims based on faith, but is only convinced with logic. Many people working in scientific and technological research are in Stage III. Often they reject the existence of spiritual or supernatural forces, since these are difficult to measure or prove scientifically. Those who do retain their spiritual beliefs move away from the simple, official doctrines of fundamentalism.
  • Stage IV is the stage at which an individual enjoys the mystery and beauty of nature and existence. While retaining scepticism, s/he starts perceiving grand patterns in nature and develops a deeper understanding of good and evil, forgiveness and mercy, compassion and love. His/her religiousness and spirituality differ from that of a Stage II person, in the sense that s/he does not accept things through blind faith or out of fear, but from genuine belief. S/he does not judge people harshly or seek to inflict punishment on them for their transgressions. This is the stage of loving others as yourself, losing your attachment to your ego, and forgiving your enemies. Stage IV people are labelled mystics.

Peck argues that while transitions from Stage I to Stage II are sharp, transitions from Stage III to Stage IV are gradual. Nonetheless, these changes are noticeable and mark a significant difference in the personality of the individual.

Community Building

In his book The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, Peck says that community has three essential ingredients:

  • Inclusivity
  • Commitment
  • Consensus

Based on his experience with community building workshops, Peck says that community building typically goes through four stages:

  1. Pseudocommunity: In the first stage, well-intentioned people try to demonstrate their ability to be friendly and sociable, but they do not really delve beneath the surface of each other’s ideas or emotions. They use obvious generalities and mutually established stereotypes in speech. Instead of conflict resolution, pseudocommunity involves conflict avoidance, which maintains the appearance or facade of true community. It also serves only to maintain positive emotions, instead of creating a safe space for honesty and love through bad emotions as well. While they still remain in this phase, members will never really obtain evolution or change, as individuals or as a bunch.
  2. Chaos: The first step towards real positivity is, paradoxically, a period of negativity. Once the mutually sustained façade of bonhomie is shed, negative emotions flood through: members start to vent their mutual frustrations, annoyances, and differences. It is a chaotic stage, but Peck describes it as a “beautiful chaos” because it is a sign of healthy growth (this relates closely to Dabrowski’s concept of disintegration).
  3. Emptiness: To transcend the stage of “Chaos”, members are forced to shed that which prevents real communication. Biases and prejudices, need for power and control, self-superiority, and other similar motives which are only mechanisms of self-validation and/or ego-protection, must yield to empathy, openness to vulnerability, attention, and trust. Hence, this stage does not mean people should be “empty” of thoughts, desires, ideas or opinions. Rather, it refers to emptiness of all mental and emotional distortions which reduce one’s ability to really share, listen to, and build on those thoughts, ideas, etc. It is often the hardest step in the four-level process, as it necessitates the release of patterns which people develop over time in a subconscious attempt to maintain self-worth and positive emotion. While this is therefore a stage of “Fana (Sufism)” in a certain sense, it should be viewed not merely as a “death”, but as a rebirth—of one’s true self at the individual level, and at the social level of the genuine and True community.
  4. True community: Having worked through emptiness, the people in the community enter a place of complete empathy with one another. There is a great level of tacit understanding. People are able to relate to each other’s feelings. Discussions, even when heated, never get sour, and motives are not questioned. A deeper and more sustainable level of happiness obtains between the members, which does not have to be forced. Even, and perhaps especially, when conflicts arise, it is understood that they are part of positive change.

The four stages of community formation are somewhat related to a model in organization theory for the five stages that a team goes through during development. These five stages are:

  1. Forming where the team members have some initial discomfort with each other, but nothing comes out in the open. They are insecure about their role and position with respect to the team. This corresponds to the initial stage of pseudocommunity.
  2. Storming where the team members start arguing heatedly, and differences and insecurities come out in the open. This corresponds to the second stage given by Scott Peck, namely chaos.
  3. Norming where the team members lay out rules and guidelines for interaction that help define the roles and responsibilities of each person. This corresponds to emptiness, where the community members think within and empty themselves of their obsessions to be able to accept and listen to others.
  4. Performing where the team finally starts working as a cohesive whole, and to effectively achieve the tasks set of themselves. In this stage individuals are aided by the group as a whole, where necessary, to move further collectively than they could achieve as a group of separated individuals.
  5. Transforming This corresponds to the stage of true community. This represents the stage of celebration, and when individuals leave, as they invariably must, there is a genuine feeling of grief, and a desire to meet again. Traditionally, this stage was often called “Mourning”.

It is in this third stage that Peck’s community-building methods differ in principle from team development. While teams in business organisations need to develop explicit rules, guidelines and protocols during the norming stage, the emptiness stage of community building is characterised, not by laying down the rules explicitly, but by shedding the resistance within the minds of the individuals.

Peck started the Foundation for Community Encouragement (FCE) to promote the formation of communities, which, he argues, are a first step towards uniting humanity and saving us from self-destruction.

The Blue Heron Farm is an intentional community in central North Carolina, whose founders stated that they were inspired by Peck’s writings on community. Peck himself had no involvement with this project, however.

The Exosphere Academy of Science & the Arts uses community building in their teaching methodology to help students practice deeper communication, remove their “masks”, and feel more comfortable collaborating and building innovative projects and startups.

Based on research by Robert E. Roberts (1943–2013), Chattanooga Endeavors has used Community Building since 1996 as a group intervention to improve the learning experience of former offenders participating in work-readiness training. Roberts’ research demonstrates that groups that are exposed to Community Building achieve significantly better training outcomes.

Characteristics of True Community

Peck describes what he considers to be the most salient characteristics of a true community:

  • Inclusivity, commitment, and consensus: members accept and embrace each other, celebrating their individuality and transcending their differences. They commit themselves to the effort and the people involved. They make decisions and reconcile their differences through consensus.
  • Realism: members bring together multiple perspectives to better understand the whole context of the situation. Decisions are more well-rounded and humble, rather than one-sided and arrogant.
  • Contemplation: members examine themselves. They are individually and collectively self-aware of the world outside themselves, the world inside themselves, and the relationship between the two.
  • A safe place: members allow others to share their vulnerability, heal themselves, and express who they truly are.
  • A laboratory for personal disarmament: members experientially discover the rules for peacemaking and embrace its virtues. They feel and express compassion and respect for each other as fellow human beings.
  • A group that can fight gracefully: members resolve conflicts with wisdom and grace. They listen and understand, respect each other’s gifts, accept each other’s limitations, celebrate their differences, bind each other’s wounds, and commit to a struggle together rather than against each other.
  • A group of all leaders: members harness the “flow of leadership” to make decisions and set a course of action. It is the spirit of community itself that leads, and not any single individual.
  • A spirit: The true spirit of community is the spirit of peace, love, wisdom and power. Members may view the source of this spirit as an outgrowth of the collective self or as the manifestation of a Higher Will.

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Who is Lyn Yvonne Abramson (1950-Present)?

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Introduction

Lyn Yvonne Abramson (born 07 February 1950) is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was born in Benson, Minnesota. She took her undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1972 before attaining her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at University of Pennsylvania in 1978.

Refer to Depressive Realism.

Achievements

As a clinical psychologist, her main areas of research interest have been exploring vulnerability to major depressive disorder and psychobiological and cognitive approaches to depression, bipolar disorder, and eating disorders. She was the senior author of the paper “Learned Helplessness in Humans: Critique and Reformulation” published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1978, proposing a link between a particular explanatory style and depression.

With her co-authors William T.L. Cox, Patricia Devine, and Steven D. Hollon, she proposed the integrated perspective on prejudice and depression, which combines cognitive theories of depression with cognitive theories of prejudice. Lyn and her co-authors propose that many cases of depression may be caused by prejudice from the self or from another person.

“This depression caused by prejudice – which the researchers call deprejudice — can occur at many levels. In the classic case, prejudice causes depression at the societal level (e.g., Nazis’ prejudice causing Jews’ depression), but this causal chain can also occur at the interpersonal level (e.g., an abuser’s prejudice causing an abusee’s depression), or even at the intrapersonal level, within a single person (e.g., a man’s prejudice against himself causing his depression).”

Along with her frequent collaborator Lauren Alloy, Abramson was awarded the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award for 2008–2009 by the Association for Psychological Science. She is on the Institute for Scientific Information list of highly cited researchers.

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What is Depressive Realism?

Published on by Andrew Marshall2 Comments

Introduction

Depressive realism is the hypothesis developed by Lauren Alloy and Lyn Yvonne Abramson that depressed individuals make more realistic inferences than non-depressed individuals. Although depressed individuals are thought to have a negative cognitive bias that results in recurrent, negative automatic thoughts, maladaptive behaviours, and dysfunctional world beliefs, depressive realism argues not only that this negativity may reflect a more accurate appraisal of the world but also that non-depressed individuals’ appraisals are positively biased.

Evidence

For

When participants were asked to press a button and rate the control they perceived they had over whether or not a light turned on, depressed individuals made more accurate ratings of control than non-depressed individuals. Among participants asked to complete a task and rate their performance without any feedback, depressed individuals made more accurate self-ratings than non-depressed individuals. For participants asked to complete a series of tasks, given feedback on their performance after each task, and who self-rated their overall performance after completing all the tasks, depressed individuals were again more likely to give an accurate self-rating than non-depressed individuals. When asked to evaluate their performance both immediately and some time after completing a task, depressed individuals made accurate appraisals both immediately before and after time had passed.

In a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of the brain, depressed patients were shown to be more accurate in their causal attributions of positive and negative social events than non-depressed participants, who demonstrated a positive bias. This difference was also reflected in the differential activation of the fronto-temporal network, higher activation for non self-serving attributions in non-depressed participants and for self-serving attributions in depressed patients, and reduced coupling of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex seed region and the limbic areas when depressed patients made self-serving attributions.

Against

When asked to rate both their performance and the performance of others, non-depressed individuals demonstrated positive bias when rating themselves but no bias when rating others. Depressed individuals conversely showed no bias when rating themselves but a positive bias when rating others.

When assessing participant thoughts in public versus private settings, the thoughts of non-depressed individuals were more optimistic in public than private, while depressed individuals were less optimistic in public.

When asked to rate their performance immediately after a task and after some time had passed, depressed individuals were more accurate when they rated themselves immediately after the task but were more negative after time had passed whereas non-depressed individuals were positive immediately after and some time after.

Although depressed individuals make accurate judgments about having no control in situations where they in fact have no control, this appraisal also carries over to situations where they do have control, suggesting that the depressed perspective is not more accurate overall.

One study suggested that in real-world settings, depressed individuals are actually less accurate and more overconfident in their predictions than their non-depressed peers. Participants’ attributional accuracy may also be more related to their overall attributional style rather than the presence and severity of their depressive symptoms.

Criticism of the Evidence

Some have argued that the evidence is not more conclusive because no standard for reality exists, the diagnoses are dubious, and the results may not apply to the real world. Because many studies rely on self-report of depressive symptoms and self-reports are known to be biased, the diagnosis of depression in these studies may not be valid, necessitating the use of other objective measures. Due to most of these studies using designs that do not necessarily approximate real-world phenomena, the external validity of the depressive realism hypothesis is unclear. There is also concern that the depressive realism effect is merely a byproduct of the depressed person being in a situation that agrees with their negative bias.

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Who is Lauren B. Alloy (1953-Present)?

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Introduction

Lauren B. Alloy (born Lauren Helene Bersh; 22 November 1953) is an American psychologist, recognised for her research on mood disorders. Along with colleagues Lyn Abramson and Gerald Metalsky, she developed the hopelessness theory of depression. With Abramson, she also developed the depressive realism hypothesis. Alloy is a professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Biography

Alloy was born in Philadelphia in 1953. She earned her B.A. in Psychology in 1974 and her Ph.D. in experimental and clinical psychology in 1979, both from the University of Pennsylvania. Her graduate school mentors were psychologists Martin Seligman and Richard Solomon.

Alloy was a faculty member at Northwestern University from 1979 to 1989. She has been a professor of psychology in the Department of Psychology at Temple University since 1989. Her research focuses on cognitive, interpersonal, and biopsychosocial processes in the onset and maintenance of depression and bipolar disorder. She is the author of over 250 scholarly publications.

In the late 1970s, Alloy and her long-time collaborator Abramson demonstrated that depressed individuals held a more accurate view than their non-depressed counterparts in a test which measured illusion of control. This finding, termed “depressive realism”, held true even when the depression was manipulated experimentally.

Selected Awards

  • 2014 – Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Lifetime Achievement Award (jointly with Lyn Abramson)
  • 2014 – Society for Research in Psychopathology Joseph Zubin Award
  • 2009 – Association for Psychological Science James McKeen Cattell Award for Lifetime Achievement in Applied Psychological Research (jointly with Lyn Abramson)
  • 2003 – Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology Distinguished Scientist Award (jointly with Lyn Abramson)
  • 2002 – American Psychological Association Master Lecturer Award in Psychopathology (jointly with Lyn Abramson)
  • 1984 – American Psychological Association Young Psychologist Award

Selected Works

  • Alloy, L.B., & Abramson, L.Y. (2007). Depressive realism. In R. Baumeister & K. Vohs (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Social Psychology (pp. 242–243). New York: Sage Publications.
  • Alloy, L. B., Kelly, K. A., Mineka, S., & Clements, C. M. (1990). Comorbidity of anxiety and depressive disorders: a helplessness-hopelessness perspective.
  • Abramson, L. Y., Metalsky, G. I., & Alloy, L. B. (1989). Hopelessness depression: A theory-based subtype of depression. Psychological review, 96(2), 358.
  • Alloy, L.B., & Abramson, L.Y. (1988). Depressive realism: Four theoretical perspectives. In L.B. Alloy (Ed.), Cognitive processes in depression. New York: Guilford.
  • Alloy, L. B., & Tabachnik, N. (1984). Assessment of covariation by humans and animals: the joint influence of prior expectations and current situational information. Psychological review, 91(1), 112.
  • Alloy, L. B., & Abramson, L. Y. (1979). Judgment of contingency in depressed and nondepressed students: Sadder but wiser?. Journal of experimental psychology: General, 108(4), 441.

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Who was Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)?

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Introduction

Karl Theodor Jaspers (23 February 1883 to 26 February 1969) was a German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry, and philosophy. His 1913 work General Psychopathology influenced many later diagnostic criteria, and argued for a distinction between “primary” and “secondary” delusions.

After being trained in and practising psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to develop an innovative philosophical system. He was often viewed as a major exponent of existentialism in Germany, though he did not accept the label.

Life

Jaspers was born in Oldenburg in 1883 to a mother from a local farming community, and a jurist father. He showed an early interest in philosophy, but his father’s experience with the legal system influenced his decision to study law at Heidelberg University. Jaspers first studied law in Heidelberg and later in Munich for three semesters. It soon became clear that Jaspers did not particularly enjoy law, and he switched to studying medicine in 1902 with a thesis about criminology. In 1910 he married Gertrud Mayer (1879–1974), the sister of his close friends Gustav Mayer and Ernst Mayer.

Jaspers earned his medical doctorate from the Heidelberg University medical school in 1908 and began work at a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg under Franz Nissl, the successor of Emil Kraepelin and Karl Bonhoeffer, and Karl Wilmans. Jaspers became dissatisfied with the way the medical community of the time approached the study of mental illness and gave himself the task of improving the psychiatric approach. In 1913 Jaspers habilitated at the philosophical faculty of the Heidelberg University and gained there in 1914 a post as a psychology teacher. The post later became a permanent philosophical one, and Jaspers never returned to clinical practice. During this time Jaspers was a close friend of the Weber family (Max Weber also having held a professorship at Heidelberg).

In 1921, at the age of 38, Jaspers turned from psychology to philosophy, expanding on themes he had developed in his psychiatric works. He became a well-known philosopher across Germany and Europe.

After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Jaspers was considered to have a “Jewish taint” (jüdische Versippung, in the jargon of the time) due to his Jewish wife, Gertrude Mayer, and was forced to retire from teaching in 1937. In 1938 he fell under a publication ban as well. Many of his long-time friends stood by him, however, and he was able to continue his studies and research without being totally isolated. But he and his wife were under constant threat of removal to a concentration camp until 30 March 1945, when Heidelberg was occupied by American troops.

In 1948 Jaspers moved to the University of Basel in Switzerland. In 1963 he was awarded the honorary citizenship of the city of Oldenburg in recognition of his outstanding scientific achievements and services to occidental culture. He remained prominent in the philosophical community and became a naturalised citizen of Switzerland living in Basel until his death on his wife’s 90th birthday in 1969.

Contributions to Psychiatry

Jaspers’s dissatisfaction with the popular understanding of mental illness led him to question both the diagnostic criteria and the methods of clinical psychiatry. He published a paper in 1910 in which he addressed the problem of whether paranoia was an aspect of personality or the result of biological changes. Although it did not broach new ideas, this article introduced a rather unusual method of study, at least according to the norms then prevalent. Not unlike Freud, Jaspers studied patients in detail, giving biographical information about the patients as well as notes on how the patients themselves felt about their symptoms. This has become known as the biographical method and now forms a mainstay of psychiatric and above all psychotherapeutic practice.

Jaspers set down his views on mental illness in a book which he published in 1913, General Psychopathology. This work has become a classic in the psychiatric literature and many modern diagnostic criteria stem from ideas found within it. One of Jaspers’s central tenets was that psychiatrists should diagnose symptoms of mental illness (particularly of psychosis) by their form rather than by their content. For example, in diagnosing a hallucination, it is more important to note that a person experiences visual phenomena when no sensory stimuli account for them than to note what the patient sees. What the patient sees is the “content”, but the discrepancy between visual perception and objective reality is the “form”.

Jaspers thought that psychiatrists could diagnose delusions in the same way. He argued that clinicians should not consider a belief delusional based on the content of the belief, but only based on the way in which a patient holds such a belief. (See delusion for further discussion.) Jaspers also distinguished between primary and secondary delusions. He defined primary delusions as autochthonous, meaning that they arise without apparent cause, appearing incomprehensible in terms of a normal mental process. (This is a slightly different use of the word autochthonous than the ordinary medical or sociological use as a synonym for indigenous.) Secondary delusions, on the other hand, he defined as those influenced by the person’s background, current situation or mental state.

Jaspers considered primary delusions to be ultimately “un-understandable” since he believed no coherent reasoning process existed behind their formation. This view has caused some controversy, and the likes of R.D. Laing and Richard Bentall (1999, p.133–135) have criticised it, stressing that this stance can lead therapists into the complacency of assuming that because they do not understand a patient, the patient is deluded and further investigation on the part of the therapist will have no effect. For instance, Huub Engels (2009) argues that schizophrenic disordered speech may be understandable, just as Emil Kraepelin’s dream speech is understandable.

Contributions to Philosophy and Theology

Most commentators associate Jaspers with the philosophy of existentialism, in part because he draws largely upon the existentialist roots of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and in part because the theme of individual freedom permeates his work. In Philosophy (3 vols, 1932), Jaspers gave his view of the history of philosophy and introduced his major themes. Beginning with modern science and empiricism, Jaspers points out that as people question reality, they confront borders that an empirical (or scientific) method simply cannot transcend. At this point, the individual faces a choice: sink into despair and resignation, or take a leap of faith toward what Jaspers calls Transcendence. In making this leap, individuals confront their own limitless freedom, which Jaspers calls Existenz, and can finally experience authentic existence.

Transcendence (paired with the term The Encompassing in later works) is, for Jaspers, that which exists beyond the world of time and space. Jaspers’s formulation of Transcendence as ultimate non-objectivity (or no-thing-ness) has led many philosophers to argue that ultimately, Jaspers became a monist, though Jaspers himself continually stressed the necessity of recognising the validity of the concepts both of subjectivity and of objectivity.

Although he rejected explicit religious doctrines, including the notion of a personal God, Jaspers influenced contemporary theology through his philosophy of transcendence and the limits of human experience. Mystic Christian traditions influenced Jaspers himself tremendously, particularly those of Meister Eckhart and of Nicholas of Cusa. He also took an active interest in Eastern philosophies, particularly Buddhism, and developed the theory of an Axial Age, a period of substantial philosophical and religious development. Jaspers also entered public debates with Rudolf Bultmann, wherein Jaspers roundly criticized Bultmann’s “demythologizing” of Christianity.

Jaspers wrote extensively on the threat to human freedom posed by modern science and modern economic and political institutions. During World War II, he had to abandon his teaching post because his wife was Jewish. After the war, he resumed his teaching position, and in his work The Question of German Guilt he unabashedly examined the culpability of Germany as a whole in the atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich.

The following quote about the Second World War and its atrocities was used at the end of the sixth episode of the BBC documentary series The Nazis: A Warning from History: “That which has happened is a warning. To forget it is guilt. It must be continually remembered. It was possible for this to happen, and it remains possible for it to happen again at any minute. Only in knowledge can it be prevented.”

Jaspers’s major works, lengthy and detailed, can seem daunting in their complexity. His last great attempt at a systematic philosophy of Existenz – Von der Wahrheit (On Truth) – has not yet appeared in English. However, he also wrote shorter works, most notably Philosophy Is for Everyman. The two major proponents of phenomenological hermeneutics, namely Paul Ricœur (a student of Jaspers) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (Jaspers’s successor at Heidelberg), both display Jaspers’s influence in their works.

Political Views

Jaspers identified with the liberal political philosophy of Max Weber, although he rejected Weber’s nationalism. He valued humanism and cosmopolitanism and, influenced by Immanuel Kant, advocated an international federation of states with shared constitutions, laws, and international courts. He strongly opposed totalitarian despotism and warned about the increasing tendency towards technocracy, or a regime that regards humans as mere instruments of science or of ideological goals. He was also sceptical of majoritarian democracy. Thus, he supported a form of governance that guaranteed individual freedom and limited government, and shared Weber’s belief that democracy needed to be guided by an intellectual elite. His views were seen as anti-communist.

Influences

Jaspers held Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to be two of the most important figures in post-Kantian philosophy. In his compilation, The Great Philosophers (Die großen Philosophen), he wrote: “I approach the presentation of Kierkegaard with some trepidation. Next to Nietzsche, or rather, prior to Nietzsche, I consider him to be the most important thinker of our post-Kantian age. With Goethe and Hegel, an epoch had reached its conclusion, and our prevalent way of thinking – that is, the positivistic, natural-scientific one – cannot really be considered as philosophy.” Jaspers also questions whether the two philosophers could be taught. For Kierkegaard, at least, Jaspers felt that Kierkegaard’s whole method of indirect communication precludes any attempts to properly expound his thought into any sort of systematic teaching.

Though Jaspers was certainly indebted to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, he also owes much to Kant and Plato. Walter Kaufmann argues in From Shakespeare to Existentialism that, though Jaspers was certainly indebted to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, he was closest to Kant’s philosophy:

Jaspers is too often seen as the heir of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard to whom he is in many ways less close than to Kant … the Kantian antinomies and Kant’s concern with the realm of decision, freedom, and faith have become exemplary for Jaspers. And even as Kant “had to do away with knowledge to make room for faith,” Jaspers values Nietzsche in large measure because he thinks that Nietzsche did away with knowledge, thus making room for Jaspers’ “philosophic faith”.

In his essay “On My Philosophy”, Jaspers states: “While I was still at school Spinoza was the first. Kant then became the philosopher for me and has remained so … Nietzsche gained importance for me only late as the magnificent revelation of nihilism and the task of overcoming it.” Jaspers is also indebted to his contemporaries, such as Heinrich Blücher, from whom he borrowed the term, “the anti-political principle” to describe totalitarianism’s destruction of a space of resistance.

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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.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Kandel >; 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.