The story of Isaac

Pastoral Psychology -     

The story of a ghost

SUMMARY

This paper is concerned with the relationship between psychotherapy and general psychiatry. This relationship is examined from historical, clinical and theoretical perspectives. Psychotherapy is an integral part of psychiatric practice imparting to it a means of participating in, as well as observing, the patient's subjective experiences. Mental illnesses, whatever their nature have fundamental elements in common. This common ground is most apparent when mental illnesses are conceptualised in psychological terms. Such an approach in no way undervalues the importance of the hereditary and somatic influences which contribute to the predisposition to mental illnesses. Viewed in this psychobiological way it is not difficult to discern what is common to neuroses, psychoses and disturbances of the personality. The clinical phenomena provide the basis for a developmental theory which portrays the essential unity of mental illnesses. The paper concludes with a discussion of why psychotherapy is being gradually divorced from clinical psychiatry. The dangers which this separation hold for the clinical tradition in psychiatry are emphasised.     

A re-evaluation of story grammars

Black and Wilensky (1979) have made serious methodological errors in analyzing story grammars, and in the process they have committed additional errors in applying formal language theory. Our arguments involve clarifying certain aspects of knowledge representation crucial to a proper treatment of story understanding. Particular criticisms focus on the following shortcomings of their presentation: 1) an erroneous statement from formal language theory, 2) misapplication of formal language theory to story grammars, 3) unsubstantiated and doubtful analogies with English grammar, 4) various non sequiturs concerning the generation of non-stories, 5) a false claim based on the artificial distinction between syntax and semantics, and 6) misinterpretation of the role of story grammars in story understanding. We conclude by suggesting appropriate criteria for the evaluation of story grammars.     

Transference perspectives of story telling

Every story teller tells his stories to an imagined reader who is his transference imago. The evident validity of this proposition in the psychoanalytic process is paralleled in the literary process. Disjunctures between process or form and content and the uses of active and passive voices in the grammatical sense reveal the workings of transference in the writer's attempts, through his narrative voice, to influence the imagined reader or imago. Clinical and literary examples are employed to demonstrate these issues.     

An evaluation of story grammars

We evaluate the “story grammar” approach to story understanding from three perspectives. We first examine the formal properties of the grammars and find only one to be formally adequate. We next evaluate the grammars empirically by asking whether they generate all simple stories and whether they generate only stories. We find many stories that they do not generate and one major class of nonstory that they do generate. We also evaluate the grammars' potential as comprehension models and find that they would add nothing to semantic models that focus on the story content. Hence we advocate a story content oriented approach to studying story understanding instead of the structural story grammar approach.     

Understanding anaphors in story dialogue

Previous research has identified two processes that play an important role in anaphor resolution. An activation process increases the accessibility of an anaphor’s referent; a suppression process diminishes the accessibility of its nonreferents. In this study, we examined how these processes operate when reference to two story characters shifts rapidly, as it does in story dialogue. Dialogue raises interesting questions about how the antecedent of an anaphor becomes the most activated entity in the reader’s discourse model. Do readers suppress an anaphor’s nonreferent even though that same entity is likely to be the referent of a subsequent anaphor? Are activation and suppression processes triggered by the anaphor itself or by cues that signal a change of speaker? We found that an anaphor’s antecedent is activated differently in dialogue than it is elsewhere in a narrative. Our results suggest that readers use knowledge about the structure of dialogue to anticipate the referent of an upcoming anaphor.     

What makes a good story

Three different ways have been selected for analyzing a story's structure, each focusing on different types of information. (a) Episodic or story grammar approaches stories as problem-solving episodes, emphasizing goals and activities to achieve them. (b) Labov's high point structure emphasizes affective information and sees stories as organized around emotional high points or crisis events. (c) Deese's dependency analysis emphasizes linguistic complexity and, in particular, the way propositions are related to each other through a relationship of either coordination or subordination. Stories were scored according to how well they realized good structure in each system, and the three scoring systems were relatively independent of each other. Adults were asked to rate 3-to 9-year old children's personal narratives in terms of how good a story each was, and their ratings were compared to how the stories were scored in terms of all three systems. None of the systems completely explained the subjective quality ratings; rather, all three seemed to contribute in different ways to subjects' ratings, with the best narratives generally deemed sophisticated and complex in at least two of the three systems.The authors wish to acknowledge their great debt to James Deese and Christine Glenn. This research was supported by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Grant A-7911 to Carole Peterson.     

谢宗信道长生平

原中国道教协会副会长、湖北省道教协会会长、安徽省道教协会会长、湖北省政协第五、六、七、八届委员,现任中国道教协会顾问、湖北省道教协会顾问、北京白云观方丈、道教全真龙门派第二十三代玄裔弟子谢宗信道长因病于2005年5月5日13时57分在黄冈市仙逝,享年92岁。谢宗信道长,     

Surrogacy: the parents' story

This qualitative study explored the experiences of 26 parents who were involved in surrogate parenting arrangements in a California-based surrogacy program. Participants were mostly white (n = 23). married (n = 25), females (n = 24), with high levels of education and income. The mean age at the time of the first child's birth was 39 yr. (SD = 5.06). The majority of parents reported having one (n = 10) or two (n = 8) children. All subjects reported infertility as their reason to explore surrogacy as a method of building a family. 18 participants chose in vitro fertilization as heir method of conception. Telephone interviews explored their decision-making, ethod of fertilization, their relationship with their surrogate, and the support that they received during the surrogacy process. Results indicate that parents were able to nticipate some potential pitfalls prior to their experience but did not realize the imortance of other potential difficulties. A conceptual model is presented with implications for helping professionals.