The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. III: The Last Phase by Ernest Jones

This paper describes the ward group, a modified version of group psychotherapy, designed for use in conjunction with comprehensive long-term treatment for severely disturbed adolescents and young adults. The authors examine the structural features of the ward group and discuss the group in relation to the unit and the hospital regarding such issues as membership, confidentiality, space, time, and ward group identity. The complex issues of task boundaries, the ward group as both an administrative unit and as a therapy group, are given special attention. The ward group transmits unit and hospital values and expectations, maintains behavioral controls over patients, exercises administrative decision-making authority, operates as a reflective–explorational therapy group, and represents an important means through which patients can achieve a sense of significance within the institutional setting.     

Sigmund Freud: Four Centenary Addresses by Ernest Jones

Group psychotherapists, primarily members of the American Group Psychotherapy Association, were surveyed to determine their practice and attitude toward inclusion of patients receiving psychotropic medication in their “typical” outpatient psychotherapy groups. One hundred forty-three questionnaire responses were received from 258 contacted practitioners (55.4% return rate). More than two-thirds of the physicians, social workers, and psychologists reported including medicated members, and the professions did not significantly differ. Mood disordered patients were most frequently and schizophrenic and manic patients were least frequently reported to receive medication.

Overall, clinicians' attitudes favored including medicated patients in the group. Indeed, therapists did not view inclusion of drugs as a detriment to the treatment process. Clinicians having only one medicated patient in their group felt more strongly that such individuals did not interfere with the treatment process when compared with those having none or more than one medicated patient. The one difference by discipline was that social workers and psychologists did not endorse the idea that medicated patients needed to be in groups led by psychiatrists.     

Discussion of Sigmund Freud.

Between the years 1928 and 1932, Sigmund Freud occasionally assembled a small group of members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society for scientific discussions. These informal meetings took place on Wednesday evenings at Freud's home. The author reports what he was able to preserve of Freud's remarks on some of these occasions.     

William James and Sigmund Freud: "The Future of Psychology Belongs to Your Work"

Although James and Freud are generally not considered scientific by experimental psychologists, both wrote about their view of what a scientific psychology should look like. Their radically different philosophical epistemologies and historical origins are reviewed, to provide an understanding of their respective visions for psychology. James took his stand on a new metaphysical foundation for the way experiments should be conducted with his formulation of radical empiricism. Freud attempted a neurological explanation of the unconscious in his "Project for a Scientific Psychology." Remarkably, their definitions of psychology as a science had a similar ring. Likely, this is because both took a phenomenological position with regard to how they defined science, which is also probably the primary reason their ideas on the subject have always been rejected by experimentalists. The humanistic implications of the neuroscience revolution, however, have caused a reassessment of their respective positions, as philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness have brought both Freud and James back into vogue, but in new and unexpected ways.     

Sigmund Freud and the diagram-maker school of aphasiology.

Published 100 years ago, Freud's monograph on aphasia, Zur Auffassung der Aphasien, is an incisive analysis of the so-called diagram-makers, those aphasiologists who would reduce brain and language to simple schemes of circumscribed cortical centers linked by unidirectional subcortical pathways. Chief architects of the diagram-maker school were Wernicke and Lichtheim, and their formulations of conduction aphasia and the transcortical aphasias were particular targets of Freud's trenchant criticism. Freud argued against functional differentiation within left hemisphere perisylvian language regions, and he suggested that traditional aphasic syndromes were artifacts of lesions that included cortical language regions and deeper white matter pathways not directly involved with language. He provided an innovative classification of aphasia based on types of associations presumed to be affected. Freud, however, failed to adduce new clinical or pathological observations; he was perhaps unnecessarily harsh in challenging authorities in the field of aphasia; and his theory had to compete with a straightforward and already entrenched anatomical view of language representation. Despite Freud's lucid argumentation, his carefully crafted monograph was never widely noted.