Therapeutic neglect omission of individual treatment of secondary defective developments

The increasing application of group psychotherapy involves the danger that secondary defective developments which cannot be cured within the group, will be neglected. For these, a specific psychotherapy is necessary and particularly urgent since these cases show a tendency towards becoming chronic. Such cases include obsessional neurosis, situation phobia, nosophobia, occupation neurosis, expectation neurosis, psychogenic impotence, anorexia nervosa, and compulsive vomiting. Secondary defective developments in the majority part of patients who consult a psychotherapist. As fear neuroses, they have to be separated from wishful neurosis (hysterical neurosis). There is an urgent need for psychotherapists to be trained and given continued training in the treatment of secondary defective developments so as to be able to treat such patients.     

Correctly responding to reasons while being means-end incoherent

This paper argues that Reason Responsiveness (RR) accounts of rationality, proposed for example by Benjamin Kiesewetter and Error Lord, fail to explain structural irrationality (i.e., the irrationality involved in holding incoherent attitudes). Proponents of RR hold that rationality consists in correctly responding to available reasons. Structural irrationality, they argue, is just a “by-product” of incorrect reason-responding. Applying this idea to cases of means–end incoherence, this paper shows that RR accounts must rely on a certain transmission principle. Roughly, this amounts to the principle that necessarily, if (1) A has decisive available reason to intend to E and (2) A has decisive available reason to believe that intending to M is necessary for E-ing, it follows that (3) A has decisive available reason to intend to M. By considering an example, this paper argues that even the most plausible version of this transmission principle does not hold true. It follows that one can correctly respond to one's available reasons while being means–end incoherent.     

“Making it explicit” makes a difference: Evidence for a dissociation of spontaneous and intentional level 1 perspective taking in high-functioning autism

The ability of perspective taking is a fundamental aspect of social cognition. The ability to decide, what another person can or cannot see is referred to as “level 1 perspective taking.” This is thought to be a process that we can make use of intentionally, but which also takes place spontaneously. Autism is characterized by impairments of social interaction, which are thought to be related to deficits in implicit rather than explicit perspective taking. In order to assess both levels of processing with regard to perspective taking, we employed an established task in patients and controls. Our results demonstrate that both groups engage in spontaneous level 1 perspective taking. In contrast to controls, however, patients reacted more slowly if they had to verify the other’s as compared to their own perspective, which shows that participants with high-functioning autism have selective difficulties in explicit, but not implicit, level 1 perspective taking. These findings demonstrate that while spontaneous level 1 perspective taking appears to be intact in autism, this ability is impaired in patients when used explicitly.