Reflections on the idea of personal fate and its psychopathology: Helene Deutsch's "Hysterical Fate Neurosis" revisited

The idea of a psychopathology of fate or what had come to be called a fate neurosis has failed to retain any established place in the structure of psychoanalytic thought. The clinical observations and theoretical formulations, to which the idea of a fate neurosis answered, have been subsumed in the course of things by more fundamental and systematic conceptualizations. A review of Helene Deutsch's (1930) paper, "Hysterical Fate Neurosis," is therefore bound to be largely an excursion into an area of intellectual history. However, such history never fails to shed light on certain ongoing clinical and theoretical problems that may have lost too much to current developments in psychoanalytic thought. It is with this historical purpose that the present study of Deutsch's classic paper on a fate neurosis is undertaken.     

On tests for correlated proportions in the presence of incomplete data

This paper proposes test statistics based on the likelihood ratio principle for testing equality of proportions in correlated data with additional incomplete samples. Powers of these tests are compared through Monte Carlo simulation with those of tests proposed recently by Ekbohm (based on an unbiased estimator) and Campbell (based on a Pearson-Chi-squared type statistic). Even though tests based on the maximum likelihood principle are theoretically expected to be superior to others, at least asymptotically, results from our simulations show that the gain in power could only be slight.     

Smoking and pain--a method of limits and sensory decision theory analysis

The effects of tobacco smoking on responses to electrical stimulation were studied according to a Method of Limits (ML) threshold analysis and a Sensory Decision Theory (SDT) analysis. For the ML procedure, Detection Threshold (DT), Pain Threshold (PT) and Tolerance Level (TL) measures were obtained. For the SDT procedure, nonparametric estimates of capacity to discriminate between stimulus intensities (P(A)) and response criterion (B) were calculated. There was no main effect of tobacco smoking on responses to electrical stimulation. Males had consistently higher ML thresholds than females in both the NS and S condition. Males also tended to increase in DT and PT after smoking. From a comparison between the effects of smoking on ML and SDT measures it was suggested that PT is related mainly to sensory factors and TL to response factors.     

The St. Pauls' riot: An explanation of the limits of crowd action in terms of a social identity model

The paper contains a detailed study of the St. Pauls' riots of April 1980. Particular attention is paid to the limits of participation in the event and the limits of crowd action. It is argued that these limits show clear social form and cannot be explained in terms of the individualistic theories that dominate crowd psychology. Instead a model of crowd behaviour based on the social identity model is advanced to account for the observations. It is concluded that crowd behaviour is more sophisticated and creative than hitherto allowed and that the neglect of this field should be remedied.     

The right to a decent minimum of health care

Buchanan examines, and finds inadequate, several philosophical approaches to justifying and specifying the content of a universal right to a decent minimum of health care: utilitarian arguments, Rawlsian ideal contract arguments, and Norman Daniels' equality of opportunity argument. Also rejecting the libertarian hypothesis that there is no right to a decent minimum of care, he contends that the claim that society should guarantee certain health care services can be supported by a pluralistic approach encompassing special right-claims, harm prevention, prudential arguments emphasizing public health benefits, and beneficence.