Van Gogh and the life chart

Adolf Meyer originally devised the life chart in order to chronologically document a person’s major life events and significant illness experiences over his or her life span. It is the purpose of this report to update Meyer’s life chart through the presentation of the life events and illnesses of the famous artist Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh’s life illustrates significant early (predisposing) life stresses, as well as clusterings of stressful (precipitating) life events occurring proximal to the occurrence of his several illnesses. Through the use of a life chart an understanding of why an individual becomes ill at a particular time in their life is enlarged. In addition, a systematic basis for formulating prognosis becomes available.     

Life events can trigger depressive exacerbation in the early course of schizophrenia

Previous studies have linked life events with depression in chronic schizophrenia, but those studies had methodological limitations. Using a prospective research design and examining events that were clearly independent of the patients' illnesses, the authors sought to determine whether stressful life events could trigger depressive symptoms in the early course of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia patients (n = 99) were followed for 1 year from a point of outpatient stabilization. Life event interviews were conducted every 4 weeks and symptom assessments every 2 weeks. Survival analyses showed a significantly increased risk for an exacerbation of significant depressive symptoms following an independent life event. Of interest is that an analysis of competing risk showed that the odds of psychotic exacerbation following a major independent life event were not significantly greater than the odds of depressive exacerbation. The risk of depression and of psychosis after experiencing a stressful life event is significantly increased for the first month, but the risk period can extend to 3 months.     

Assessment of life events during adolescence: the use of self-report inventories

The assessment of stressful life events during adolescence is important to both research and clinical practice. Stressful events are studied to determine their etiological significance in physical and mental illnesses, and also their relevance in the clinical assessment of individual patients. In recent years, a number of self-report inventories of life events for adolescents have been developed, some very carefully, others as one-time endeavors. This article reviews these measures, with an emphasis on the conceptual and methodological issues which created problems in earlier inventories. These issues need to be considered when choosing an instrument to study or assess stressful life events in adolescents.     

Pattern as Inspiration and Mode of Communication in the Works of Van Gogh

A close study of specific patterning in Van Gogh's drawings (revelatory because of their absence of his celebratory color) provides new insight into pattern as a direct expression of nonverbal meaning. A study of his articulation of pattern through form, plus a close reading of his writings about difficulties he encountered because of his unique vision, show how Van Gogh's creativity reflects a need to express the inexpressible that derives from an idiosyncratic way of perceiving self and the world. We apply critical theories of modern art as a manifestation of unconsciously expressed meaning and explications of differences between the experience of color versus form, and indices of how nonverbal meanings are noted and anchored. We conclude that Van Gogh's unique and personal perceptual style both served his developmental needs and exacerbated his distress, contributing both to his mental instability and his artistic greatness.     

A response to Penrose’s “Sandel on enhancement: A response to Van Niekerk”

In this article the author responds to Brian Penrose’s critical response to his (Van Niekerk’s) article “Biomedical enhancement and the pursuit of mastery and perfection: a critique of the views of Michael Sandel” that appeared in the PSSA conference edition of the SAJP 33(2), 2014. While Van Niekerk is appreciative of the opportunity for spirited dialogue that Penrose’s response provides, he nevertheless takes issue with several charges Penrose raises. He responds to Penrose’s claims that Van Niekerk does not fully understand “the Sandel project” and thus that Van Niekerk creates and shoots down a straw man in his argument against Sandel. Van Niekerk argues that Penrose’s claims are indicative of significant methodological differences between their respective approaches. Penrose acknowledges the “fuzziness” of Sandel’s arguments with regards to biomedical enhancement. He then develops an interpretation of Sandel’s views that claims to have “filled in the complete picture” of what Sandel attempts to do, and then reproaches Van Niekerk for not responding to that “completed picture”, i.e. the “Sandel project”. Van Niekerk finds this to be an unreasonable and methodologically highly problematic demand on him. Van Niekerk responds to a number of Penrose’s arguments, and then concludes that while there are, of course, good reasons to exercise caution at the prospect of biomedical enhancement with regard to its risks, the possibilities offered by enhancement need not elicit a prima facie reaction of pessimism. Rather, such prospects can also be regarded in a positive light as an exciting opportunity to take our own evolution in hand.     

Being popular can be healthy or unhealthy: stress, social network diversity, and incidence of upper respiratory infection.

Diverse social contacts are generally associated with better health. However, diverse contacts can increase exposure to infectious agents. This should increase risk for disease, particularly among those whose host resistance is otherwise compromised (e.g., stressed individuals). In this prospective study, healthy college students who completed questionnaires assessing social network diversity and stressful life events were subsequently interviewed weekly for 12 weeks to track incidence of upper respiratory infections (URIs). URI episodes were defined by a symptom criterion and by clinically verified self-reported illness. Stress and diversity of social contacts interacted; diversity was associated with more illnesses among those with more stressful life events and slightly fewer illnesses among those with fewer stressful life events. Associations remained after controlling for neuroticism.     

Response biases and the relation between negative life events and psychological symptoms

This research was an investigation of whether reporting biases can account for the correlation between negative life events (as measured via life events questionnaires) and subclinical psychological symptoms. Subjects completed two life events scales, a measure of psychological symptoms, a measure of depression, and a measure of social desirability. Friends were asked to report about life events experienced by the subjects. No evidence was found for a subject reporting bias associated with social desirability, depression, or symptoms. In fact, for one of the life events scales, depression was significantly associated with a higher rate of agreement between subjects and friends as to which negative events occurred to subjects. Moreover, there were significant correlations between symptom and depression measures and life events measures that were free of subject-reporting biases (subjects' negative life events reported by both subjects and their significant others, as well as subjects' negative life events as reported by significant others alone). These data suggest that response biases may not be able to account for the relation between negative events and psychological symptoms. Thus the hypothesis that negative life events play a significant role in symptom development remains plausible.     

On the origins of naming and other symbolic behavior

We identify naming as the basic unit of verbal behavior, describe the conditions under which it is learned, and outline its crucial role in the development of stimulus classes and, hence, of symbolic behavior. Drawing upon B. F. Skinner's functional analysis and the theoretical work of G. H. Mead and L. S. Vygotsky, we chart how a child, through learning listener behavior and then echoic responding, learns bidirectional relations between classes of objects or events and his or her own speaker-listener behavior, thus acquiring naming-a higher order behavioral relation. Once established, the bidirectionality incorporated in naming extends across behavior classes such as those identified by Skinner as the mand, tact, and intraverbal so that each becomes a variant of the name relation. We indicate how our account informs the specification of rule-governed behavior and provides the basis for an experimental analysis of symbolic behavior. Furthermore, because naming is both evoked by, and itself evokes, classes of events it brings about new or emergent behavior such as that reported in studies of stimulus equivalence. This account is supported by data from a wide range of match-to-sample studies that also provide evidence that stimulus equivalence in humans is not a unitary phenomenon but the outcome of a number of different types of naming behavior.     

Traumatic origins of intimate rage

I posit that a triad of childhood events found retrospectively in populations of batterers constitutes a powerful trauma source and that many aspects of the personality structure and function of intimately abusive men are best understood from a trauma- response framework. The trauma stressors include witnessing violence directed toward the self or the mother, shaming, and insecure attachment (cf. Dutton; Dutton; Dutton and Dutton). Bowlby (1973) considered insecure attachment itself both a source and consequence of trauma. Since the infant turns to the attachment-object during periods of distress seeking soothing, a failure to obtain soothing maintains high arousal and endocrine secretion. Van der Kolk (1987) considered child abuse an “overwhelming life experience” and reviewed the defenses that children use to deal with parental abuse: hypervigilance, projection, splitting, and denial. Terr (1979) also described driven, compulsive repetitions, and reenactments that permeate dreams, play, fantasies, and object relations of traumatized children. Shaming, conceptualized as verbal or behavioral attacks on the global self, has been found to generate life long shame-proneness or defenses involving rage. A combination of all three early experiences is traumatizing, and evidence exists in adult batterers both for the presence of trauma symptoms and the childhood experiences described above. Conceptualizing the affective, cognitive, and behavioral features of intimate abusiveness from a trauma perspective has many advantages over social learning models. A basis for the internally driven and cyclical aspect of the behavior becomes clearer as does the problems with modulation of arousal, anger, and the high levels of trauma symptoms found in populations of abuse perpetrators. The narrow social learning definition of aggression as a reaction to an appraisal of controllable threat is broadened to include reactions to trauma: uncontrollable-unbluntable-inescapable aversive stimuli.     

Diagnose „Gesundheit“

In the early days of psychotherapy diagnoses were seen as unnecessary and even not helpful. After psychotherapy has become a method of medical treatment diagnoses are necessary in order to justify reimbursement of treatment by health insurance. Diagnoses are also useful to guide treatment, help communication between professionals and morbidity statistics. Diagnoses can have negative effects, such as simplification of complex problems, aggravation of normal life experiences or stigmatization and labelling. Therefore, diagnoses should be made when a person is suffering from an illness in order to avoid underrecognition and undertreatment. Similarly, the diagnosis “healthy” is important when no disease is present but only a normal problem in everyday life. To say that a person is healthy is an important and difficult task in all areas in medicine. Therapists must not only know the criteria for illnesses but also those for the spectrum of healthy problems in normal life. This can be done when the psychopathological assessment is professionally precise and makes a differentiation between signs of illness and other negative feelings. Also, normal life events must not be directly translated into illness states. Furthermore, therapists must be aware of their diagnostic preferences and bias. In the training of psychotherapists recognition of healthy states should get as much attention as the diagnosis of illnesses.     

GUICO: a synthesized group approach

The guico (guidance and counseling) approach synthesizes various elements of group guidance and group counseling in order to achieve developmental-social and remedial problem-solving goals in group settings. Co-counselors share responsibility for group leadership, provide structure for group events, and act as models in role-playing situations. Group members carry out assignments based on hierarchically ordered events and chart their progress throughout the group's life cycle.     

Fear of breakdown and the unlived life

Winnicott's Fear of breakdown is an unfinished work that requires that the reader be not only a reader, but also a writer of this work which often gestures toward meaning as opposed to presenting fully developed ideas. The author's understanding of the often confusing, sometimes opaque, argument of Winnicott's paper is as follows. In infancy there occurs a breakdown in the mother–infant tie that forces the infant to take on, by himself, emotional events that he is unable to manage. He short‐circuits his experience of primitive agony by generating defense organizations that are psychotic in nature, i.e. they substitute self‐created inner reality for external reality, thus foreclosing his actually experiencing critical life events. By not experiencing the breakdown of the mother–infant tie when it occurred in infancy, the individual creates a psychological state in which he lives in fear of a breakdown that has already happened, but which he did not experience. The author extends Winnicott's thinking by suggesting that the driving force of the patient's need to find the source of his fear is his feeling that parts of himself are missing and that he must find them if he is to become whole. What remains of his life feels to him like a life that is mostly an unlived life.     

Separate features versus one principle: comment on Shimaya (1997)

In his article "Perception of Complex Line Drawings," A. Shimaya (1997) proposed a quantitative theory that was designed to predict perceived segmentations and amodal completions of line drawings. Shimaya further evaluated the integrative approach of structural information theory (SIT; R. Van Lier, P. Van der Helm, & E. Leeuwenberg, 1994) to pattern interpretation. It is argued in this comment that Shimaya's evaluation of the SIT approach is based on a misconception of SITs basic assumptions and an inappropriate data analysis.     

高中生自杀意念的素质-应激模型：多时段追踪研究

目的：探讨神经质人格和负性生活事件的跨层相互作用对自杀意念的影响。方法：采用自杀意念问卷、青少年生活事件问卷和大五人格量表-神经质分量表等自评量表对618名高中生进行评估,每三个月追踪1次,共追踪7次,历时21个月,用多层线性模型分析数据。结果：在控制了第一次自杀意念和性别的影响后,负性生活事件的主效应（b = 0.08, F(1, 2963) = 37.93, p < 0.001）、负性生活事件与神经质人格的相互作用（b = 0.03, F(1, 2963) = 4.35, p < 0.001）显著,而神经质人格的主效应不显著（b = 0.59, F(1, 557)= 3.05, p > 0.05）。结论：神经质人格和负性生活事件的跨层相互作用可以预测自杀意念的变化,支持素质-应激模型。     

Wundt's laboratory at Leipzig in 1891

This article describes Wundt's laboratory at Leipzig in 1891 as viewed by a Belgian psychologist, J.J. Van Biervliet (1859-1945). Although few French-speaking psychologists worked in Wundt's laboratory, several of those who did reports wrote on how students were trained there. Van Biervliet decided to visit Wundt's laboratory at Leipzig in order to strengthen the foundation of his own laboratory at the University of Ghent and to become familiar with Wundt's experimental techniques. A translation of J.J. Van Biervliet's (1892) article "Experimental Psychology. Wundt's Institute at Leipzig" is presented here as one of the first and most complete articles in French describing the functioning of Wundt's laboratory.     

Freud über Krankheit

The history of Freud??s illnesses shows us how he tried to circumvent the confrontation with his health disorders and consider them as unimportant. Similarly, in his personal letters, he left his ill body ??out there?? as if it were another person, Konrad, not himself. He avoids understanding it from the inside. In his correspondence, especially with Ferenczi, depressive symptoms were considered as somatic and were excluded from his reflexions. Important insights, e.g. about a relationship between cancer with hate do not change his basic attitude. Disavowel and masochism become important in his life and writings. In the post-Freudian literature these themes will be integrated in the dialogue, i.e. between analyst and analysand.