Tag: Psychiatrist

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 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 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 is Eric Kandel (1929 to Present)?

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Introduction

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

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

Early Years

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

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

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

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

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

Medical School and Early Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faculty Member at New York University Medical School

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

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

Molecular Changes during Learning

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

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

Experimental Support for Hebbian Learning

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

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

Continuing Work at Columbia University

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

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

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

Notable Former Members of his Lab

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

Current Views about Vienna

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

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Who was Eric Berne (1910-1970)?

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Introduction

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

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

Background and Education (1927–1938)

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

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

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

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

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

Career (1938–1970)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transactional Analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Games People Play

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

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

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

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

Name and Pseudonyms

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

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

Personal Life

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

Death

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

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What is the British Journal of Psychiatry?

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Introduction

The British Journal of Psychiatry is a peer-reviewed medical journal covering all branches of psychiatry with a particular emphasis on the clinical aspects of each topic.

The journal is owned by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and published monthly by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the college. The journal publishes original research papers from around the world as well as editorials, review articles, commentaries on contentious articles, short reports, a comprehensive book review section and correspondence column. The complete archive of contents from 1855 to the present is available online. All content from January 2000 on is made freely available 1 year after publication.

Brief History

The journal was established in 1853 as the Asylum Journal, changing title in 1855 to the Asylum Journal of Mental Science and changing title again to Journal of Mental Science from 1858 to 1963, when it obtained its present name.

Reception

According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2018 impact factor of 7.233.

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Who was Conolly Norman (1853-1908)?

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Introduction

Conolly Norman (12 March 1853 to 23 February 1908) was an Irish alienist, or psychiatrist, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was the Resident Medical Superintendent of a number of district asylums, most notably Ireland’s largest asylum, the Richmond District Lunatic Asylum, now known as St. Brendan’s Hospital.

Early Life

Norman was born on 12 March 1853 at All Saints’ Glebe, Newtown Cunningham, County Donegal, Ireland. The fifth child of six boys, his father, Hugh Norman, was the rector of All Saints’ and later of Barnhill. His family were prominent and politically active in Derry with several members serving as mayor of Derry. Two members of his family were also elected to parliament.

Medical Education

Educated at home due to his fragile health as a child, at the age of seventeen Norman began his medical studies at Trinity College, Dublin, the Carmichael Medical School, and the Richmond Surgical Hospital, gaining a M.D. In 1874 he became a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1878 and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1890.

Early Career

After he graduated in 1874, Norman immediately took up a post as an assistant medical officer in the Monaghan District Lunatic Asylum. He remained in that post until 1880 when he joined the staff of the Bethlem Royal Hospital in London where he worked under the prominent English alienist Sir George Savage. Returning to Ireland in 1882 he was appointed the Resident Medical Superintendent of Castlebar District Lunatic Asylum in Co. Mayo. He remained there until 1885 when he was appointed Resident Medical Superintendent of the Monaghan Asylum. In 1886, he was appointed by the Lord Lieutenant as Resident Medical Superintendent to Ireland’s largest asylum, the Richmond District Lunatic Asylum. He would remain in this last post until his death in 1908 at the age of fifty-five.

Richmond District Lunatic Asylum

While the Richmond asylum prior to Norman’s arrival has been described as primitive and prisonlike this is perhaps to overlook the international praise that his predecessor, John Lalor had received, particularly in regard to his educational initiatives in establishing a national school for the patients in the grounds of the hospital. In any case, by 1904, Connolly could assert like a growing number of reforming alienists, that Emil Kraepelin‘s dementia praecox (a concept intimately linked with schizophrenia) was not incurable.

Publications

  • (1885). ‘On Insanity Alternating with Spasmodic Asthma’. Journal of Mental Science. 31: 1–12.
  • (1886). ‘Some Points in Irish Lunacy Law’. Journal of Mental Science. 31: 459–67.
  • (1886). ‘Two Cases of Larvated Insanity’. Journal of Mental Science. 32: 36–44.
  • (1887). ‘Cases Illustrating the Sedative Effects of Aceto-phenone (hypnone)’. Journal of Mental Science. 32: 519–25.
  • (1887). ‘Variations in form of mental affections in relation to the classification of insanity’. The Dublin Journal of Medical Science. 83: 228–35.
  • (1888). ‘A Rare Form of Mental Disease (Grübelsucht)’. Journal of Mental Science. 34: 400–08.
  • (1889). ‘On Sulphonal’. The Dublin Journal of Medical Science. 87: 19–27.
  • (1890). ‘Acute confusional insanity’. The Dublin Journal of Medical Science. 89: 506–18.
  • (1890). ‘Case of Intracranial Tumour’. Journal of Mental Science. 36: 361–67.
  • (1892). ‘A Note on Cocainism’. Journal of Mental Science. 38: 195–99.
  • (1894). ‘Presidential Address (Medico-Psychological Association), delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, Dublin, 12 June 1894’. Journal of Mental Science. 40: 487–99.
  • (1894). ‘A Case of Porencephaly’. Journal of Mental Science 40: 649–65.
  • (1896). ‘The domestic treatment of the insane’. The Dublin Journal of Medical Science. 101: 111–21.
  • (1899). ‘Considerations on the Mental State in Aphasia’. Journal of Mental Science.45: 326–37.
  • (1899). ‘A Brief Note on Beri-beri in Asylums’. Journal of Mental Science. 45: 503–12.
  • (1899). ‘Emphysema of the Subcutaneous Areolar Tissue Occurring in a Case of Acute Mania’. Journal of Mental Science. 45: 749–58.
  • (1899). ‘Reports on the Progress of Neurology and Psychiatry’. The Dublin Journal of Medical Science. 107: 209–21.
  • (1900). ‘The Clinical Features of Beri-Beri’. The Dublin Journal of Medical Science. 109(337): 1–16.
  • (1900). ‘Remarks on Senile Demenita’. The Dublin Journal of Medical Science. 110(346): 250–265.
  • (1902). ‘Notes on Hallucinations. I’. Journal of Mental Science. 48: 45–53.
  • (1903). ‘Notes on Hallucinations. II’. Journal of Mental Science. 49: 272–91.
  • (1903). ‘Notes on Hallucinations. III’. Journal of Mental Science. 49: 454–73.
  • (1904). ‘Gossip about Gheel’. Journal of Mental Science. 50: 53–64.
  • (1904). ‘Dementia Praecox’. The British Medical Journal. 2(2285): 972–76.
  • (1904). ‘On the Need for Family Care of Persons of Unsound Mind in Ireland’. Journal of Mental Science. 50: 461–73.
  • (1905). ‘Modern Witchcraft: a Study of a Phase of Paranoia’. Journal of Mental Science. (1905) 51: 116–25.
  • (1905). ‘The Family Care of the Insane’. Medical Press and Circular. 29 November – 6 December.
  • (1906). ‘Multiple Lipomata in General Paralysis’. Journal of Mental Science. 52: 62–9.

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Who was Eleanora Fleury (1867-1960)?

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Introduction

Eleonora Lilian Fleury (1867–1960) sometimes known as Norah Fleury was the first woman to graduate in medicine from the Royal University of Ireland (1890). She was also the first woman member of the Medico Psychological Association (now the Royal College of Psychiatrists), elected in 1894. After graduating medical school, she worked at the Homerton Fever Hospital in London for a year, and then worked at the Richmond Asylum (later called Grangegorman) in Ireland for 27 years, eventually becoming deputy medical director there. From 1921 until 1926 she worked at Portrane Asylum in Donabate, and then she retired. She was arrested in 1921 by Irish state forces for being involved in an assistance and escape programme for anti-treaty prisoners which was centred on the asylum at Portrane. After she was released she returned to her work at the asylum.

Early Life and Education

Eleonora Fleury was born in Manchester in 1867. Her father was Charles Robert Fleury, who was a doctor/surgeon. She was home schooled. She attended the Royal University of Ireland and in 1887 came first in the list of the examinations in medicine and was commended in the Dublin Medical Press. She became the first woman to graduate in medicine from the Royal University of Ireland, with MB first-class honours and a first-class exhibition in 1890 and then MD degree and a Gold Medal in 1893. There were a comparatively large number of women students at the University at this time because Trinity College Dublin did not accept women until 1904. After graduation she attended clinical instruction at the Richmond Hospital, in Dublin and the London School of Medicine for Women for a three-month course of clinical instruction in mental diseases.

Work

Fleury became a successful psychiatrist, as well as the first woman to join the Medico-Psychological Association (MPA), now known as the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Following qualification, she worked at the Homerton Fever Hospital in London for a year before returning to Ireland to work at the Richmond District Asylum at Grangegorman for 27 years. This was the largest asylum in Ireland. She was initially a clinical assistant and her promotion was slow with suggestions that she always ‘passed over for male colleagues’. However, her active involvement with Irish nationalism may also have been a factor. From 1921 she worked at its associated Portrane Asylum, Donabate, (now known as St. Ita’s Hospital) and she eventually rose to be the deputy resident medical superintendent. She retired in 1926.

In 1893, she was proposed for membership of the Medico-Psychological Association. Her proposer was Conolly Norman, director of the Richmond District Asylum where she worked and also the president of the Medico-Psychological Association in 1895, and editor of the Journal of Mental Science. Her application was declined on the grounds that the Association rules had to be changed to allow women to become members. In 1894 she was elected by 23 votes to 7. She remained a member until 1924. This made her the first woman psychiatrist in Ireland or Great Britain.

While at the Richmond Asylum she was not only involved in treating patients but she was also with teaching nurses and attendants who were studying for the new certificate of proficiency Mental Nursing. She published scientific papers including Agitated Melancholia in Women, which was read at the 1895 Irish Divisional meeting of the Medico-Psychological Association.

In 1923 she was arrested and imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin. While in prison she served as medical officer to the republican prisoners. She became concerned about the women inmates’ medical welfare and after her release she continued to advocate for improved conditions for women prisoners. On her release, she returned to her duties at Portrane.

Death

She lived in Upper Rathmines Road in Dublin and led an active life until her death in 1960. She is buried at Mount Jerome Cemetery in Harold’s Cross, Dublin.

Legacy

An exhibition on the Women of the Peninsula or “Mná Na Leithinse” celebrated Fleury’s work and achievements during the Bleeding Pig Cultural Festival at the Donabate and Portrane peninsula on 08 March 2017.

An Overview of the Royal College of Psychiatrists

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Introduction

The Royal College of Psychiatrists is the main professional organisation of psychiatrists in the United Kingdom, and is responsible for representing psychiatrists, for psychiatric research and for providing public information about mental health problems. The college provides advice to those responsible for training and certifying psychiatrists in the UK.

In addition to publishing many books and producing several journals, the college produces, for the public, information about mental health problems. Its offices are located at 21 Prescot Street in London, near Aldgate. The college’s previous address was Belgrave Square.

Brief History

The college has existed in various forms since 1841, having started as the Association of Medical Officers of Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane. In 1865 it became the Medico-Psychological Association. In 1926, the association received its royal charter, becoming the Royal Medico-Psychological Association. In 1971, a supplemental charter gave the association the name of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Eleanora Fleury, became the first female member of the Medico Psychological Association in 1894, when she was elected by 23 votes to 7. She remained a member until 1924. This made her the first woman psychiatrist in Ireland or Great Britain.

Coat of Arms

The coat of arms incorporates the traditional serpent-entwined Rod of Asclepius symbolic of medicine, and butterflies associated with Psyche. Previous to the grant of these arms, the Medico-Psychological Association had used a device showing the seated Psyche with butterfly’s wings. The arms were originally granted to the Royal Medico-Psychological Association in 1926, and were confirmed to the college on its formation in 1971 by the College of Arms. They were also registered in Scotland by the Court of the Lord Lyon.

Policy and Campaigns

The college runs campaigns, including Choose Psychiatry, which has helped increase the fill rate of posts from 78% in 2018 to 100% in 2020, as well as calling for parity in the funding of mental health services.

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Who was Samuel Slavson (1890-1981)?

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Introduction

Samuel Richard Slavson (25 December 1890 to 05 August 1981) was an American engineer, journalist and teacher, who began to engage in group analysis in 1919. He is considered one of the pioneers of group psychotherapy for his contributions to its recognition as a scientific discipline. Slavson wrote over 20 books and served as the founding president of the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA). He also established children’s group therapy and developed a specific small group model.

Life and Work

Slavson, born Amstislavski, came to New York in 1903 after escaping the Ukrainian pogroms. Early on, he became involved in self-culture clubs for children and young people. While studying to become a civil engineer, he developed youth support programmes, because he believed there was inherent creative potential in every human being. He sympathized with the ideas of progressive education and Freud’s theories, as well as the child guidance movement. He was also a part of the Jewish Board of Guardians in New York, a care centre for girls and boys with developmental disabilities, where he worked from 1934 to 1956. In 1934, he was able to start proving the efficacy of group work with emotional disorders.

In 1943, Slavson published An introduction to Group Therapy, the first and fundamental work on the use of group psychotherapy with children and youth. This work gained wide recognition and was for instance ranked by the Menninger Foundation among the 10 Classics of Psychotherapy. He was a founding member and the first President of the AGPA, which was keen to be well-recognised by psychiatrists; all of the 12 direct successors of the non-medical practitioner Slavson were in fact psychiatrists. Moreover, Slavson – who still exerted substantial influence in the organisation after the end of his presidency in 1940 – strictly ensured that the institution remained classically Freudian, orthodox and in a clear defensive position to Neo-Freudians, existentialists and transactional analysts. Slavson worked as a teacher, supervisor and de facto editor of the International Journal of Group Psychology, at both the national and international level. His was involved in a decades-long controversy and rivalry with Jacob L. Moreno, the founder of psychodrama.

According to Stumm et al. (1992):

“Slavson justified the recognition of group psychotherapy as a scientific discipline, provided fundamental theoretical contributions to this end and established a professional organization in the United States, which laid out binding guidelines for qualified training for the first time.”

Children’s Group Psychotherapy

Slavson is considered the founder of children’s group psychotherapy. He saw games as methods of therapy and used modelling clay, puppet theatres and building blocks. He believed that by these means, children would develop their social skills and strengthen their community spirit. He said that children can change their behaviour while in a group of peers, believing that an otherwise quiet child becomes more open and bold and that a loud child becomes more reserved. He believed children would be able to relate to each other’s problems. Through the group, according to Slavson, a feeling of unity can be created and a sense of identity can become strengthened. Developmentally, he thought this is particularly important for children aged 6 to 7 years.

Small Group Model

After decades of work with children and young people, in the late 1940s Slavson started working with adults as well. His small group model is designed for a maximum of 8 participants and is based on groups homogeneous in terms of age, sex and symptoms. Slavson developed several disorder-specific models, with exact descriptions for clinical use. Distinctions were made between counselling, guidance and psychotherapy. His parent groups around child welfare were particularly well known as well as vita-erg therapy with psychotic women.

In 1964, Slavson put forward a summary of his theoretical developments and practical experience in the volume A Textbook in Analytic Group Psychotherapy. He combined Freud’s theory of psychosexual development with terms from the field of sociology and recognized the human search for relationships and acceptance as a primary need. He saw the group as an “I (ego) therapy” within a collective “we-superego”, which opens up a path out of selfishness and psychological isolation. He is credited for synthesizing the principles of the founding generation of psychoanalytical theory with the requirements of American psychiatry.

Awards

1969 Award from the American Academy of Psychotherapists
1972 Father of group psychotherapy

In Popular Culture

  • A. Klein: He lets them grow. Survey 85 (1949): 75-80
  • Hyman Spotnitz: In tribute to S.R.Slavson. Intern’ Journal of Group Psychotherapy 21 (1971): 402-405
  • Scheidlinger/Schamess: Fifty years of AGPA 1942–1992: An overview. Intern’ Journal of Group Psychotherapy 42 (1992): 1-22

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