Wissenschaft als Emanzipation?

Journal for General Philosophy of Science - Der Wissenschaftskonzeption der ?kritischen Theorie“ der zu verändernden Gesellschaft (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas) wird im...     

Mehr als Intersubjektivit?t

Erich Fromm (1900?C1980) was one of the forerunners of the intersubjective tradition in psychoanalysis. Trained at the Berlin Institute and emigrated to the US he started in the 1930s to reformulate psychoanalytic theory by focusing on man??s need to be related on reality, on others and on himself and herself. Similar to Sullivan, Fromm looked at man primarily as a social being but in contrast to Sullivan, Fromm much more stressed man??s being molded by societal requirements and by an intersubjectivity that is determined by strivings originating in his social character structure. The impact the respective social character orientation has on the patient??s being related to others and to himself and herself is to be recognized in the analysis of the therapeutic processes between analyst and analysand. In principle sociality plays a much bigger role for changing intrapsychic processes. Because of Fromm??s ??societal?? orientation his approach to psychoanalysis is still of relevance to understand how the intersubjective and intrapsychic is interwoven in each individual. Beyond that his approach enables insights into what is going on psychically in society and how these changes are influential to the individual??s welfare or suffering.     

Psychotherapie als Weg zum Seelen-Enhancement?

Self-optimization is a widespread trend. Psychotherapists often attempt to psychologically explain self-optimization as a manifestation of narcissism. In reality the fact that self-optimization has become a contemporary imperative is only comprehensible against the background of the individualization of living conditions (Beck). In psychotherapy the boundaries between medical treatment of mental illnesses and enhancement of the psyche are increasingly becoming more flexible. By promising to be able to help on the road to a happier and more productive life, to mental well-being or more life satisfaction, psychotherapy joins the self-optimization chorus. Not all attempts at optimization are limited to wanting to improve those features which are inherent to a person: others, such as the transhumanists want to overcome the imperfections of man via technologically upgrading the human nature.     

Psychotherapie und soziale Unterstützung

Relations between social support as an informal helping system on one hand and psychological intervention on the other are outlined. Starting from an overview of approaches to define and conceptualize social support, common aspects of informal and professional help are derived. These are then illustrated by two intervention contexts which mark the transition between support and psychological intervention. Furthermore, effects of the individuals’ support network on utilization, maintenance, and outcome of psychotherapy are summarized. Finally, interventions to optimize the individual support situation are discussed.     

?Symbolisierung�� als intersubjektive und intrapsychische Dynamik

Igor A. Caruso (1914?C1981), one of the founders of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) in 1962, began to discuss questions of the interplay of biological, social and evolutional realities and intrapsychic development in the early 1950s with the early Vienna Circle of Depth Psychology. Caruso understood that the specific human ability to transcend the overdetermined biological constitution into a development of consciousness, care and self-awareness is basic for the need and lifelong activity of intersubjective relationship. Sexual and survival drives as the biological basis contain their own transformation as cultural potency within the subject-object relationship. Each act of relationship to things and living objects creates a new reality which is a meaningful symbol for both parts of the relationship in their own individual reality. This new, third, reality gains full effectiveness for both actors as ??symbolic realism?? and initiates the ongoing development. In this understanding psychic development is a process of changing interactive creation and effectiveness, following biological drive dynamics as well as its inherent future transformations by attachment. Symbolization is therefore the main intrapsychic and intersubjective activity of development of object-awareness and self-awareness. Caruso emphasized the meaning of symbol and symbolization as an act of relationship to and within the world and consequently understood psychoanalytical theories as well as a changing symbolization of relationship.     

Minderwertigkeitsgefühl und Machtstreben als Koproduktion?

At least analysts consider our own therapeutic approach as the preferable method, even if seen as very difficult. These difficulties are easier to understand from the viewpoint of intersubjectivity and interaction when looking at the origins of the problems as well as at the therapeutic process. Therapists seem with such patients to be more quickly tangled up in the field of the own ambivalence in relating, of omnipotence phantasies, illusions of independency and the striving for recognition as it is the case with other patients. Organising the practice along their own needs, the often devaluative diagnostics, the superior role of the therapist and the economic dependence of the analyst, even if covered up by the health care system, all that is a provocation for narcissistic patients, just as their seeming unrelatedness and lack of motivation, their pseudo-autonomy and the hardly bearable devaluations amount also to a provocation for the analyst. He/she is irritated about his/her usual role. From our theoretical point of view, we consider the narcissistic disturbance as a coproduction with the contribution of the therapist beyond his/her own idiosyncratic parts on the basis of the disawoed dimensions of grandiosity in our profession. Such narcissistic “interaction figures” are unavoidable and even necessary in practice. Relational experiences made in a presymbolic phase should become verbalizable through the entangled acting-out (unconscious communication) of both participants. The analysis of coproductions then, the recognition of the respective contributions, the patient‘s experience of equality and difference pave the way for developments in direction of more workable compromises in the narcissistic conflict area between being oneself and relating to others.     

Standardisierte Dokumentation als Methode der Qualit?tssicherung

Quality assurance is one of the recurrent topics in forensic psychiatry and the first methods used were systematic documentation and the development of structured assessment and documentation instruments. In German speaking countries the forensic psychiatric documentation system (FPDS) was derived essentially from the AMDP (working group for methods and documentation in psychiatry) system used in clinical psychiatry and consisted of a modular instrument with a basic module and additional ones for the assessment of violent offenders or of sex offenders for risk assessment etc. The development of comparable instruments became especially popular for risk assessment in different settings and for different offender populations. Even more important was that it initiated a platform for scientific exchange, producing a reliable data base, structured training in forensic psychiatry and evaluation of expert reports. Systematic documentation using instruments was often criticized for reducing information and overlooking the complexity of the problems encountered in forensic psychiatry. The critics, however, often do not seem to be aware of the real quality of forensic assessments and reports, of the variety or of the minimal information they often contain. Systematic documentation serves to find a common language among the experts and the courts to improve the assessment of reliability and validity of the information provided, to establish minimal requirements for the formulation of reports and to prove professionally correct handling of cases in litigation against an expert.     

Die deduktiv-nomologische Erkl?rung als hauptmotiv empirisch-wissenschaftlicher t?tigkeit

In this paper an attempt is made at developing the notion of a real and complete empirical explanation as excluding all forms of potential or incomplete explanations. This explanation is, however, no longer conceived as the proper aim of empirical science, for it can certainly be gleaned from recent epistemological publications that no comprehensive notion of a real and complete scientific explanation is likely to be constructed from within empirical science. Contrary to common understanding the empirical explanation, deductive-nomological as well as statistical explanation, is considered here only as motive of scientific activities, i.e., as common aim of a transcending cooperation of scientific and non-scientific social practice. Following from this the proper aim of empirical science now consists in the development of practically relevant explanatory theories.This redetermination of the aim of scientific activities of empirical science also means criticism of the unification of deductive-nomological and statistical explanations, as it has been proposed by Wolfgang Stegmüller in his pragmatisch-epistemische Wende. For both forms of empirical explanation must be referred to fundamentally different kinds of practical relevance, the former playing a more important role in the advancement of social practice. Stegmüller's development of a comprehensive probabilistic notion of empirical explanation, as tied up to pragmatic knowledge-situations, in a way already transcends a scientifically immanent determination of it, but he seems to have stopped halfway on the road to practically relevant empirical explanations. Several insufficiencies with his probabilistic notion of empirical explanation are shown up in this paper as a consequence of his abiding by pragmatic, and not penetrating to practical, knowledge-situations. The final result of it, however, consists in a clarification and a modification of the concept of deductive-nomological explanation, originally developed by Hempel and Oppenheim.     

Wahrheitsähnlichkeit als Regulativ der Intentionalität?

Is there still any importance of Husserl's Phenomenology for contemporary forms of philosophy of science? A comparison between Phenomenology and a prominent form of such modern philosophy of science, the so-called Critical Rationalism of Karl Popper, may help to answer this question. Therefore, the different levels of argumentation have to be worked out to make the respective arguments applicable to one another. We are arguing for the following thesis: the strategy of corroboration in Critical Rationalism can be justified by means of the phenomenological conception of intentioality of consciousness. A typical example may illustrate how Popper's conception of taking the degree of corroboration as an indicator of the degree of verisimilitude can find its deeper foundation in Husserl's genetic interpretation of ordinary kinds of experience.     

Kognitive St?rungen als führendes Symptom einer Multiplen Sklerose

Die multiple Sklerose (MS) ist eine chronisch entzündliche zumeist schubhaft, seltener auch prim?r progredient verlaufende Erkrankung des Gehirns und des Rückenmarks auf vermutlich autoimmuner Genese. Sie beginnt meist im jungen Erwachsenenalter und verl?uft über viele Jahrzehnte. Pr?sentierende Symptome und Symptome der ersten Erkrankungsjahre sind meist Sehnerventzündungen, motorische St?rungen, Gleichgewichtsprobleme und sensible Ausf?lle. Gelegentlich kann es in den frühen Phasen der Erkrankung auch zu Blasenst?rungen kommen. Auch subtile kognitive Beeintr?chtigungen und Fatigue k?nnen nicht selten bereits nach relativ kurzer Erkrankungsdauer nachgewiesen werden. Zu im Alltag beeintr?chtigenden kognitiven St?rungen kommt es allerdings typischerweise erst nach langem Krankheitsverlauf. Ein ausgepr?gtes Demenzsyndrom ist bei Multipler Sklerose allerdings untypisch und wenn es bereits früh und ohne sonstige wesentliche neurologische Ausf?lle auftritt, extrem ungew?hnlich. Allerdings sind in der Literatur einzelne F?lle mit zumeist prim?r progredienten Verl?ufen beschrieben, deren führendes Symptom bereits früh in der Erkrankung eine Demenz war. Im folgenden soll ein Fall mit Demenz ohne sonstige wesentliche neurologische Ausf?lle vorgestellt werden.     

Krankheitsverhalten als Überlebensstrategie

Somatoforme St?rungen stellen in den westlichen Industriegesellschaften ein erhebliches Problem für Behandlung, Begutachtung und Sozialversicherungswesen dar. Anders als bei sch?rfer umschriebenen psychiatrischen Krankheitsbildern, deren klinisches Erscheinungsbild gut bekannt und deren St?rungswert unbestritten ist, erfolgt hier die Symptompr?sentation durch verbale, mimische und gestische Darstellung. Insofern k?nnen sowohl Form als auch Schweregrad der Beschwerden durch willentliche Einflu?nahme gestaltet werden, was die M?glichkeit der Zweckgerichtetheit aufgrund sekund?rer Motivbildung zumindest mit einschlie?t.     

Krankheitsverhalten als Überlebensstrategie

Somatoforme St?rungen stellen in den westlichen Industriegesellschaften ein erhebliches Problem für Behandlung, Begutachtung und Sozialversicherungswesen dar. Anders als bei sch?rfer umschriebenen psychiatrischen Krankheitsbildern, deren klinisches Erscheinungsbild gut bekannt und deren St?rungswert unbestritten ist, erfolgt hier die Symptompr?sentation durch verbale, mimische und gestische Darstellung. Insofern k?nnen sowohl Form als auch Schweregrad der Beschwerden durch willentliche Einflu?nahme gestaltet werden, was die M?glichkeit der Zweckgerichtetheit aufgrund sekund?rer Motivbildung zumindest mit einschlie?t. Der Autor analysiert die typischen Ph?nomene im Verhalten dieser Patienten vor dem Hintergrund der etablierten Konzepte ,,Krankenrolle“ und ,,(abnormes) Krankheitsverhalten“. Dabei wird deutlich, dass diese Ausgestaltungsformen der Krankenrolle keinen durchwegs dysfunktionalen Charakter haben, sondern unter den gegebenen Umst?nden durchaus eine adaptive überlebensstrategie bilden k?nnen.     

Johannes Daubert als Ästhetiker

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Jugendgewalt als Lebensbewältigungsprozess

Aggression und Gewalt bei Jugendlichen stilisieren sich zum Sinnbild für unsere „kranke Gesellschaft“. Was sich bei jüngeren Jugendlichen noch – oft als Lausbuben-Verhalten bagatellisiertes – Herumschubsen und Rangeln im Pausenhof ?u?ert, tritt in Form von Bullying und Mobbing immer st?rker zutage. Jugendliche, die trinken, stehlen, Drogen zu sich nehmen, Mitschüler oder Gruppenmitglieder bedrohen und Gegenst?nde ?ffentlichen Gutes besch?digen etc., stehen auf der Tagesordnung. Selbst Erpressung von Mitschülern ist kein Einzeldelikt mehr.