Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Sex and marital status in relation to the treatment and outcome of alcoholic patients

This article focuses on gender and marital status differences in the treatment process, posttreatment experiences, and outcome of 332 alcoholic patients and explores the utility of several sex-role models in explaining the observed findings. Among men patients, being married is related to better treatment outcome, but the marital status difference is negligible among women patients. Participation in group therapy is related to better outcome for men relative to women; exposure to educational materials on alcoholism is associated with better outcome of women relative to men. Men and women patients also differ in the way in which their perceptions of the treatment environment are related to outcome. After discharge, unmarried women and married men are most likely to receive aftercare outpatient treatment, which is also related to better outcome among men patients. The findings underscore the importance of gender and marital status factors and of patient-program congruence effects in the treatment outcome of alcoholic patients.This research was supported in part by NIAAA Grant AAO2863 and by Vetrans Administration Medical Research Funds. The authors wish to thank Ruth Lederman for her valuable assistance with data analyses, and John Finney and Deborah Shields for helpful comments on earlier drafts.     

Characteristics of the Group Process in Long-Term Psychodynamic Group Psychotherapy for Patients with Psychosis

This study aimed to investigate the development of the group process through group climate parameter dynamics during long-term psychodynamic group psychotherapy for 30 outpatients with psychosis. The group process in four groups was monitored using MacKenzie’s Group Climate Questionnaire-Short Form (GCQ-S) that was completed by the therapist after each session over the two-year period. The trends of engagement, avoidance and conflict parameters differed between groups, and no clear indicators of the development phases were found. The results suggested that these groups remained in the first developmental phase during the observation period, and highlighted the characteristics of resistance and difficulties in establishing social relations in patients with psychosis.     

Die physikalische Sprache als Universalsprache der Wissenschaft

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Recognition deficits resulting from focussed attention in aphasia

Summary Two nonverbal short-term memory tasks, a Picture Recognition and a Paired Association Task, were performed by matched groups of aphasics and brain-damaged controls (N=52 each). For both tasks the alternatives on the answer forms differed systematically on three dimensions, one of which had been highlighted experimentally for each item before the target picture was indicated. In both tasks aphasics made more errors than braindamaged controls only with respect to those features that had been stressed beforehand; they were less able than controls to take advantage of focussed attention. The number of these errors was correlated with performance in the Token Test, a picture naming and a word comprehension task.There were no differences between the groups in response to variations in the semantic saliency of the discriminating features or in the semantic and phonetic relationship between words denoting the reference stimuli. The lack of interactions might have been due to a strong ceiling effect in both tasks.     

Emotions outside the box��the new phenomenology of feeling and corporeality

The following text is the first ever translation into English of a writing by German phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz (*1928). In it, Schmitz outlines and defends a non-mentalistic view of emotions as phenomena in interpersonal space in conjunction with a theory of the felt body’s constitutive involvement in human experience. In the first part of the text, Schmitz gives an overview covering some central pieces of his theory as developed, for the most part, in his massive System of Philosophy, published in German in a series of volumes between 1964 and 1980. Schmitz’s System is centred on the claim that the contemporary view of the human subject is the result of a consequential historical process: A reductionist and ‘introjectionist’ objectification of lived experience culminating in the ‘invention’ of the mind (or ‘soul’) as a private, inner realm of subjective experience and in a corresponding ‘grinding down’ of the world of lived experienced to a meagre, value-neutral ‘objective reality’. To counter this intellectualist trend, Schmitz puts to use his approach to phenomenology with the aim of regaining a sensibility for the nuanced realities of lived experience—hoping to make up for what was lost during the development of Western intellectual culture. Since both this text and the overall style of Schmitz’s philosophising are in several ways unusual for a contemporary readership, a brief introduction is provided by philosophers Jan Slaby and Rudolf Owen Müllan, the latter of whom translated Schmitz’s text into English. The introduction emphasises aspects of Schmitz’s philosophy that are likely to be of relevance to contemporary scholars of phenomenological philosophy and to its potential applications in science and society.