How does anybody live in this strange place? A reply to Samantha Vice

Abstract

Samantha Vice has argued that ‘white’ South Africans are so tainted by the history of racial oppression in their country that they are incapable of attaining a great degree of moral virtue. She recommends that they should live in humility and political silence. There are a number of flaws in her argument. First, none of the characteristics of ‘white’ South Africans that she says provides the basis for these conclusions can distinguish (almost) all ‘white’ South Africans from (almost) all ‘black’ South Africans. Second, because it is not only ‘white’ South Africans but everybody in the world who either perpetrates serious injustice or is tainted by others’ perpetration of it, her argument, if sound, would imply that nobody is capable of great virtue and that everybody ought to be politically silent. Finally, her recommendation that ‘white’ South Africans should be politically silent is a very dangerous one.     

Psychoticism and response to treatment in neurotic patients

A study is reported of neurotic patients at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, who were given the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and who were rated by their doctors for prognosis and final assessment after treatment. The results indicated that those patients who had elevated psychoticism scores took longer to improve and that doctors rated them harder to treat at final assessment. It is suggested that early knowledge of patients with a poor prognosis, in the form of their Psychoticism score, might prove helpful to psychiatrists and psychologists, both for diagnosis and (primarily) for choice of appropriate treatment.     

The cybernetic approach to the treatment of neurotic disorders

This work is an attempt at a cybernetic analysis of the process of treatment of neurotic disorders. This approach is based on the consideration of a patient as an object of control. Assuming that the neurosis is an expression of some imbalance in an organism, the process of treatment is reduced to the exertion of influence on the system thrown out of balance (i.e., the patient) so that its homeostasis with the environment is restored. Thus the treatment of neurotic disorders consists of the use of negative feedback, both internal (those within the patients organism) and external (those within the system created by the interaction of patient and environment).     

Using music to decrease disruptive vocalizations in a man with dementia

Music played through headphones was noted to reduce the disruptive chanting and speech‐like vocalizations of a 68‐year‐old man who lived in a secure dementia unit. We conducted a variety of assessment procedures, including a functional analysis ‘alone’ condition, to identify why this simple intervention may have been effective for this individual. The data suggest that music provided an alternative source of auditory stimulation to that produced by automatically reinforced vocal behavior. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Pain-provoking behaviour as a driven reaction to psychological distress: the bio-psycho-social neurotic loop model

In clinical psychology and psychiatry, different complaints are generally perceived as problems with a different ethiology, despite the fact that it can also be hypothesised that they share the same dimension. We believe that many clinicians share the heuristic insight that a pure categorical approach to psychopathology underscores the potential value of a dimensional approach. The neurotic loop model attempts to explain how pain-provoking behaviour develops and how it persists, increases and expands in spite of continuing negative consequences. Pain-producing behaviour is postulated as a neurobiologically rooted reaction to the activation of distressing representations. In biologically vulnerable people, pain-provoking behaviour channels stress resulting from disturbing emotions. This behaviour will initially be very rudimentary and may become more sophisticated according to the operant history. In this way, the neurotic loop model postulates pain-provoking behaviour on a continuum from simple muscle contractions to more complex self-injurious behaviour. Negative consequences of pain-provoking behaviour will reactivate the distressing representations, resulting in a driven vicious circle: the neurotic loop. The model integrates the most influential models of learning theory with neurobiology and developmental aspects. The neurotic loop model attempts to provide insight into the dynamics of dysfunctional pain-provoking behaviour and yields implications for therapy.     

How to operationalize a person

The notion of operationally defining a person is absurd, but no more so than other uses of “operationalization”. ‘Persons’ make that absurdity particularly clear because there is no sense in which persons can be directly observed, nor defined in terms of what might be observable, and thereby exposes the emptiness of the idea of operationalization more broadly.On the other hand, persons can be modeled, and their ontology investigated, within frameworks that can address the processes and organizations that actually constitute persons.