Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis of the Spiritual Characteristics of Recovery Experiences in the Context of the Brain Disease Model of Addiction

Spirituality persists as a mechanism of behavior change for addiction recovery. The aim of this project was to carefully attend to how those in recovery construct meaning of their experience of addiction, regardless of the addiction treatment modality or ideological framework. Participant accounts reflected the increased public interest in and research funding based on the brain disease model of addiction (BDMA). The qualitative study used interpretive phenomenological analysis to investigate the experiences of six adults (age range from 24 to 72) with at least three years of sustained recovery from substance use disorders. In-depth key informant interviews tracked their construction of their experiences and their understanding of addiction. Participants who entered recovery after 2010 sought to integrate BDMA-related constructs into their understanding of addiction and recovery. Addiction recovery narratives featuring BDMA-related constructs integrated neuroscience-related ideas with spirituality-related constructs rather than completely replacing the latter. Notable innovations and paradoxical tensions were found within participant accounts. Such features echo the insights on secularity of Harvard philosopher Charles Taylor, particularly his notion of the “buffered self,” which offers a theoretical framework for understanding these shifts in meaning-making. For persons entering recovery in the twenty-first century, the brain disease model of addiction carries more explanatory authority than it does for previous generations, despite the lack of agreement across addiction-related neuroscientific findings. As a model, it engenders more mechanistic, agential, brain-centered (“buffered”) senses of self, ostensibly making it less compatible with spiritual understandings of addiction than other medical models of addiction. However, this study’s findings indicate that those in recovery are likely to devise complex narratives of the etiology of addiction that combine elements from various models.     

How scientific models can explain

Scientific models invariably involve some degree of idealization, abstraction, or fictionalization of their target system. Nonetheless, I argue that there are circumstances under which such false models can offer genuine scientific explanations. After reviewing three different proposals in the literature for how models can explain, I shall introduce a more general account of what I call model explanations, which specify the conditions under which models can be counted as explanatory. I shall illustrate this new framework by applying it to the case of Bohr’s model of the atom, and conclude by drawing some distinctions between phenomenological models, explanatory models, and fictional models.     

Can I Be Ill and Happy?

Can one be ill and happy? I use a phenomenological approach to provide an answer to this question, using Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the biological and the lived body. I begin by discussing the rift between the biological body and the ill person’s lived experience, which occurs in illness. The transparent and taken for granted biological body is problematised by illness, which exposes it as different from the lived experience of this body. I argue that because of this rift, the experience of illness cannot be captured within a naturalistic view and propose to supplant this view with a phenomenological approach. The latter approach accounts for changes in the ill person’s relationship to her social and physical world. These changes, I argue, cannot be captured by a naturalistic perspective. I then propose the notion of health within illness as a useful concept for capturing the experience of well-being reported by some ill people. I present empirical evidence for this phenomenon and assess its philosophical significance. Finally, I suggest that adaptability and creativity are two common positive responses to illness, demonstrating that health within illness is possible. The three elements combined – the transformed body, health within illness and adaptability and creativity – serve as the basis for a positive answer to the question posed above.     

Attitudinal and Phenomenological Theories of Pleasure

On phenomenological theories of pleasure, what makes an experience a pleasure is the way it feels. On attitudinal theories, what makes an experience a pleasure is its relationship to the favorable attitudes of the subject who is having it. I advance the debate between these theories in two ways. First, I argue that the main objection to phenomenological theories, the heterogeneity problem, is not compelling. While others have argued for this before, I identify an especially serious version of this problem that resists existing solutions, and I explain why even this version of the problem does not undermine phenomenological theories. Second, I argue that a grand reconciliation can be effected between the two types of theory: it can be true both that pleasures are pleasures in virtue of the way they feel and that they are pleasures in virtue of how they are related to their subjects' favorable attitudes, so long as the attitudes that are constitutively related to pleasures are ones that feel a certain way. Hybrid views of this sort have significant advantages over pure attitudinal or phenomenological views.     

Experience and self-consciousness

Does all conscious experience essentially involve self-consciousness? In his Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person, Dan Zahavi answers “yes”. I criticize three core arguments offered in support of this answer—a well-known regress argument, what I call the “interview argument,” and a phenomenological argument. Drawing on Sartre, I introduce a phenomenological contrast between plain experience and self-conscious experience. The contrast challenges the thesis that conscious experience entails self-consciousness.     

Social Media,Work and Nonwork Interface: A Qualitative Inquiry

Flourishing social media, easy access to smartphones and tablets, and ready availability of the internet in the past decade have made it possible for people to be connected to social media almost anywhere at any time. In this qualitative study, we interviewed 41 individuals in multiple professions in the United Kingdom to examine the role of social media in how they navigate their personal and professional lives. We find social media to be a virtual domain that has boundaries with nonvirtual personal and professional domains. Focusing on spatial and temporal boundaries, our findings revealed four boundary transition modes employees used to switch between the social media domain and their work and nonwork domains: boundary switch avoidance; disciplined boundary switch; integrated boundary switch; and boundary switch addiction. We also describe 15 mechanisms through which engaging with social media platforms enriches or conflicts with individuals’ personal and professional lives. Our findings extend work-nonwork scholarship and boundary theory to include virtual as well as nonvirtual domains.     

成瘾的生物心理社会模型

成瘾的易感因素和维持因素是一个复杂的因果网络系统．有三种研究取向。生物学取向综述了成瘾的脑机制和遗传基因观。心理学模式主要介绍成瘾人格的研究现状,以及成瘾的强化观。社会因素则阐述了创伤性事件、父母及同伴压力对成瘾的影响。本文支持三个因素的相互作用导致了成瘾行为的发生,以期从成瘾易感和维持因素的探析上为生物心理社会模型(BPS)提供依据。     

Hypnotic experience and the autism spectrum disorder. A phenomenological investigation

In recent decades, the focus in autism research progressively expanded. It presently offers extensive material on sensorimotor disturbances as well as on perceptive-cognitive preferences of people with autism. The present article proposes not only a critical interpretation of the common theoretical framework in autism research but also focuses on certain experiences common to some people with autism and which can be appropriately understood by phenomenology. What I will call “hypnotic experiences” in autism are moments in which some individuals withdraw into intense sensorial and perceptive experiences. Following their examples, I use the term “hypnosis” primarily to describe a trance state in which the individuals become highly alert to and awake for an experience of a totally new kind. Through a close analysis of autobiographical writings from people with autism I defend the idea that the particularity of hypnotic experiences in autism consists in a certain qualitative shift within experience itself: what changes, in the hypnotic moments, is the way a person with autism relates to his/her own bodily experiences. If this qualitative shift is indeed difficult to account for within a reifying and intellectualist research perspective, phenomenology offers a large conceptual framework for understanding it. Phenomenology, and precisely, phenomenological psychopathology, will thus emerge as a major device in accounting for such “hypnotic experiences”. The argument mainly draws on the twofold structure of experience which is traditionally used in phenomenological research: it claims that in hypnotic experience people with autism are inclined to focus on non-reified “sensings”, “perceivings” and “movings”, and thus leave aside the object itself and any intentional reification of it. Finally, I will claim that this restriction to mere non-reified sensings might lead to a completely new conception of self and world. In the hypnotic experiences of autism, neither the subject nor the object come to a full-blown and independent existence. A thorough phenomenological analysis of hypnotic experience in autism therefore also has to face the question of a corresponding ontology of these experiences.     

Self‐Esteem and Ethics: A Phenomenological View

This paper aims to provide an account of the relationship between self‐esteem and moral experience. In particular, drawing on feminist and phenomenological accounts of affectivity and ethics, I argue that self‐esteem has a primary role in moral epistemology and moral action. I start by providing a characterization of self‐esteem, suggesting in particular that it can be best understood through the phenomenological notion of “existential feeling.” Examining the dynamics characteristic of the so‐called “impostor phenomenon” and the experience of women who are involved in abusive relationships, I then claim that self‐esteem fundamentally shapes the way in which self and others are conceived, and the ethical demands and obligations to which they are considered to be subjected. More specifically, I argue that low self‐esteem—which in the experience of women may be rooted in particular assumptions regarding gender roles and stereotyping—can hinder autonomy, make it difficult to question other people's evaluative perspectives and behaviors, and attribute to others responsibility for their actions.     

The body maledict: Understanding the method of standpoint phenomenology through the work of Frantz Fanon

In this article, I examine the phenomenological methodology at work in Fanon's revision of the body schema. I argue that he implicitly utilizes a methodology I call standpoint phenomenology and show how this methodology emphasizes experiences that are not “universal” but specific to certain social groups in order to uncover shared ontological structures of experience. Fanon's work illustrates two key theses of standpoint phenomenology: (1) the thesis of situated phenomenology and (2) the thesis of inverted phenomenological privilege. I also draw a deep connection between classical and standpoint phenomenology by showing that it is the phenomenological analysis of breakdown experiences (e.g., corporeal malediction) that enables a standpoint approach to phenomenology. This breakdown methodology is explicitly developed by Heidegger and utilized implicitly by Merleau-Ponty. If I am right, standpoint phenomenology is both a natural development of and a considerable advance on the traditional methodology. This article, then, provides a better understanding of Fanon's place in the phenomenological tradition and, more broadly, makes explicit a new methodology for advancing phenomenological research.     

自闭症儿童是心灵盲吗?——Gallagher的互动理论述评

在自闭症研究领域占主导地位的心灵盲理论是建立在心灵主义假设和普遍性假设基础上的。这两个假设将他人的心理视为封闭的、隐藏在行为后面的,且我们主要使用读心的方式理解他人。互动理论拒绝这两个基本假设,并整合来自发展心理学和现象学的研究证据将人类社会互动的形式划分为三个层次:原初交互主体性、次级交互主体性与叙事能力。在个体发生学层面上三者前后相继,在成熟个体的社会互动层面上,三者互为补益,但基于感觉-运动的直觉式社会互动是理解他人心理的主要方式。自闭症儿童在原初与次级交互主体性上存在障碍。目前,互动理论既面临诸多挑战,也具有较大的发展与完善空间。     

'It's as if PBC didn't exist': the illness experience of women affected by primary biliary cirrhosis

This study investigates the illness experience of women who are affected by primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC), a rare chronic liver disease which mostly affects women. Despite the fact that PBC is medically recognised, it shares many characteristics with other chronic and controversial conditions which may lead to delegitimation of the patient's experience of illness, impacting on the construction of the patient's self-identity. Twenty three women took part in semi-structured interviews. Data were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis and the analysis identified three themes that are interrelated and characterised by a dynamic of normalisation. The first theme, the delegitimation of women's experience, implies denial of patients' sick-role, trivialisation of fatigue and lack of consideration of patients' needs. The second theme, PBC as a challenge to women's social identity refers to how patients face delegitimation and manage the illness's consequences for relationships and social roles. The third theme, the need for biographical continuity, focuses on how patients construct their ill identities as a consequence of both the delegitimation and the challenges posed by PBC. Results are discussed in a gender perspective, highlighting how delegitimation and identity construction processes are influenced by women's social roles and conditions.     

The Phenomenological Life-World Analysis and the Methodology of the Social Sciences

This Alfred Schutz Memorial Lecture discusses the relationship between the phenomenological life-world analysis and the methodology of the social sciences, which was the central motive of Schutz’s work. I have set two major goals in this lecture. The first is to scrutinize the postulate of adequacy, as this postulate is the most crucial of Schutz’s methodological postulates. Max Weber devised the postulate ‘adequacy of meaning’ in analogy to the postulate of ‘causal adequacy’ (a concept used in jurisprudence) and regarded both as complementary and, in the context of sociological analysis, critical. Schutz extracted the two postulates from the Neokantian epistemology, dismissed the concept of causality, and reduced Weber’s two postulates of adequacy into one, namely, the adequacy of meaning. I discuss the benefits and shortcomings of this reduction. A major problem, in my view, is that Schutz’s reformulation lost the empirical concern that was inherent in Weber’s ‘causal adequacy’. As a result, the models of economics (which shaped Schutz’s conception of social science) are considered to be adequate if they are ‘understandable’ to an everyday actor, even when they are based on the most unrealistic assumptions. To recapture Weber’s empirical orientation I recommend a more restrictive interpretation of the postulate of adequacy that links it to qualitative research and unfolds the critical potential of Schutz’s phenomenological life-world analysis. My second goal is to report on some current developments in German sociology in which a number of approaches explicitly refer to Schutz’s analysis of the life-world and attempt to pursue ‘adequate’ empirical research. This lecture focuses on three approaches: ethnophenomenology, life-world analytic ethnography, and social scientific hermeneutics.     

青少年网络游戏体验与网络游戏成瘾的交叉滞后分析

该研究采用青少年网络游戏体验量表和网络游戏成瘾量表,对北京某中学初一、初二、初三和高二年级247名中学生进行为期四个月的追踪研究,考察被试在追踪期间网络游戏成瘾倾向的变化,以及网络游戏体验与网络游戏成瘾的因果关系及其内在心理机制。结果表明:(1)青少年的网络游戏成瘾倾向在追踪研究期间保持相对稳定。(2)网络游戏体验与网络游戏成瘾相关显著。(3)交叉滞后分析结果表明,网络游戏体验是网络游戏成瘾的预测变量。进一步的回归分析表明,网络游戏体验对青少年网络游戏成瘾为同时性的预测。     

Neuroticism and Facebook Addiction: How Social Media can Affect Mood?

Abstract

Individuals high in neuroticism experience negative affect and social anxiety, therefore, they may prefer online communications where they are able to portray an idealized image of themselves to attract social support, seek validation, and enhance mood. These motivations may lead to greater social media use and addiction. In this study of Facebook users (N?=?742; 474 females, 268 males) who mostly resided in the United States, we explored the association between neuroticism, Facebook addiction, and negative affect. Our mediation model showed a partial mediating effect of Facebook addiction in predicting negative affect in individuals who were high in neuroticism. In theory, individuals who use Facebook as a tool to improve their mood may actually experience more negative affect due to social overload, jealousy, and envy. Individuals high in neuroticism, who already maintain a higher negative affect than those low in neuroticism, might be particularly inclined towards increased Facebook use, which could deteriorate their mood further. Consequently, individuals and therapists should be aware of the personality traits that could lead to greater Facebook addiction and a higher negative mood. Therapists could encourage users to engage in activities, other than social media use, that can improve mood without leading to addiction.     

大学新生网络使用时间与网络成瘾的关系：有中介的调节模型

通过整群取样的方法选取北京市某所高校2250名大一新生为测查对象, 采用问卷方式探讨了大学新生网络使用时间、网络社交使用占网络使用总时间的比重、网络使用的背景性渴求以及网络成瘾程度之间的关系。基于网络使用满足的相关理论以及渴求的条件反射理论, 本研究构建了一个有中介的调节模型, 即网络社交使用比重在网络使用时间与网络成瘾之间起调节作用, 而且这一调节作用通过网络使用的背景性渴求这一中介变量得以实现。结果显示：(1)大学新生每周上网时间为13.58 ± 8.94小时, 网络社交使用占全部上网时间的比重为27.18 ± 18.15%; (2)网络使用时间、网络社交使用比重、网络使用背景性渴求与网络成瘾的五个维度及总分呈显著正相关; (3)网络使用时间以及网络社交使用比重均能够直接正向预测网络成瘾, 同时网络社交比重在网络使用时间预测网络成瘾这一关系中起调节作用, 即相比较少使用网络社交的被试, 较多使用网络社交的群体表现出更高的网络成瘾程度, 且网络使用时间对网络成瘾程度的预测作用相对较低; 而且网络社交比重的调节作用部分通过网络使用的背景性渴求这一中介变量实现。     

Saudi therapists' lived experience of self-awareness

Self-awareness and self-reflection in psychotherapeutic processes have been critical components for effective counselling and psychotherapy. However, little qualitative research in Saudi Arabia has been conducted that aims to explore the therapist's subjective experiences of the self in their professional work. Therefore, the purpose of this phenomenological study was to understand the therapist's self-awareness within psychotherapy, by focusing on the therapist's lived experience of self-awareness and exploring how therapists recognise themselves as an integral component of the therapeutic relationship. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six experienced and accredited psychologists with at least three years of clinical experience, and the qualitative data were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Five superordinate themes emerged from the data; that is, development of the professional self, use of self, self-oriented, supervision and experience. This study provides an understanding of the therapist's self in psychotherapy, as it shows that self-awareness is important for therapists to manage their feelings, thoughts and behaviours in meeting with clients and that it is a valuable resource for a therapist to become aware of and reflect upon the process within oneself. This understanding is integrated into the training programmes in counselling psychology, especially in the areas of self-awareness and personal development.