The patient's private construction of meaning and canons of science: Freud's case studies noch einmal1

Starting from Freud's classical case studies, the author highlights the tension between the psychoanalytical starting point in the subject's own meaning construction and the claims of the professional expert to objectivity, privileged knowledge and interpretative precedence. Psychoanalytic investigation of subjective phenomena came into existence parallel with Freud's magnifi cent project to furnish ‘a psychology that shall be a natural science’. The privileged knowledge of the specialist was substituted by the explicit intention to listen to the individual's own stories and private explanatory constructions. In order to investigate the territory of the unconscious, Freud had to develop various strategies for uncovering and correcting errors, and for testing clinically anchored hypotheses. However, Freud regularly failed to follow his own intentions. The thesis the author presents here is that departures from the explicit ambition to follow the subject's own meaning construction, and departures from the scientifi c attitude, easy to trace in Freud's case studies, accompany each other. These departures have had far‐reaching consequences for the present status of the psychoanalytic knowledge.     

Training the Unemployed Manager: Some Aspects of the United Kingdom Experience

Presently, in the United Kingdom there are more than 100,000 business executives unemployed as a result of the economic recession. This article describes the educational assistance being offered to these executives by government agencies and focuses on the ways in which colleges and universities responsible for the training have approached their task. The freedom exercised by these educational institutions in the matter of course design meant that initially little uniformity existed among them with respect to program objectives and content. More recently, four themes have become evident, which the author has termed situational adaption, job-finding skills, management knowledge, and directional self-analysis. The view is rejected that in terms of personal and training objectives, unemployed executives constitute a homogeneous group. Experience suggests that at least four different ‘types’ of unemployed executives can be distinguished on the basis of their personal and work characteristics. The author has identified these as distressants, businessmen, opportunists, and realists. It is argued that the future development of training programs for unemployed businessmen in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, must acknowledge the diverse needs of participants and be flexibly organized in order to meet them.     

On the Role of Intuition in Decision Making and Some Ways of Multicriteria Aid of Intuition

Practical experiences in decision-making—including the experience in the reform of the system of funding of scientific research in Poland—lead to the conclusion that it is important to understand better the role of intuition in decision-making processes. For this purpose a more specific definition of intuition is proposed. One of the conclusions from this definition is that multicriteria aid for decisions should concentrate more on supporting earlier stages of decision processes that precede choice. The role of and possible tools for multicriteria aid for model simulation and analysis are presented. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

EMILE,OR ON DEVASTATION: WHEN VIRTUAL BOUNDLESSNESS MEETS INNER EMPTINESS

The author's starting point is a psychoanalysis conducted with Emile, a teenager who was unable to form close relationships and was living in a virtual world, planning a school massacre. For him, virtual reality functioned as a bottomless container in which he was no longer a victim of bullying but rather a god. When the boundlessness of cyberspace encounters a “black hole” in the psyche, any fantasies can be put into virtual realization and actions. By recounting his wickedness, violence, destructiveness, and perversion, Emile could start restoring his self boundaries and create his own autobiographical narrative. Unable to sustain the pain of mourning his envelope of invulnerability and omnipotence, however, he prematurely terminated analysis.