Voices in History

Experiences of “hearing voices” nowadays usually count as verbal hallucinations and they indicate serious mental illness. Some are first rank symptoms of schizophrenia, and the mass media, at least in Britain, tend to present them as antecedents of impulsive violence. They are, however, also found in other psychiatric conditions and epidemiological surveys reveal that even individuals with no need of psychiatric help can hear voices, sometimes following bereavement or abuse, but sometimes for no discernible reason. So do these experiences necessarily mean insanity and violence, and must they be thought of as pathogenic hallucinations; or are there other ways to understand them and live with them, and with what consequences?One way to make our thinking more flexible is to turn to history. We find that hearing voices was always an enigmatic experience, and the people who had it were rare. The gallery of voice hearers is, though, distinguished and it includes Galilei, Bunyan and St Teresa. Socrates heard a daemon who guided his actions, but in his time this did not signify madness, nor was it described as a hallucination. Yet in 19th century French psychological medicine the daemon became a hallucination and Socrates was retrospectively diagnosed as mentally ill. This paper examines the controversies which surrounded the experience at different points in history as well as the practice of retrospective psychiatry. The conclusion reached on the basis of the historical materials is that the experience and the ontological status it is ascribed are not trans-cultural or trans-historic but situated both in history and in the contemporary conflicts

On the Emergence of Political Identity in the Czech Mass Media: The Case of the Democratic Party of Sudetenland

On 12 Jan 1993, 6 days after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, an article appeared in the Czech national daily Rude pravo reporting two events - a meeting of the preparatory committee of the Democratic Party of Sudetenland (DPS) & a subsequent news conference given by its chairman, Jaroslav Bluhmel. The party & its chairman were almost unknown to the public. The two events, however, turned out to be politically significant. What Bluhmel had said was reported in most of the mass media & elicited public reactions from major politicians. Here, focus is on how the political identity of the DPS was established & contested in the mass media, using articles in national newspapers & on a TV program. The DPS began with an almost empty intersubjectivity; how this was fleshed out by binding to it the views, intentions, & actions of incumbents & opponents is demonstrated. This fleshing out was by no means a consensual matter; Bluhmel & his political opponents never converged on a common definition of the DPS

Understanding Detective Stories

In this paper, we illustrate a general approach to psychological inference by considering its application to a simple detective story. Detective stories provide a fertile ground for the investigation of psychological inference, because their plots so often hinge on the mental states of the characters involved. Although our analysis contains several, logically independent suggestions for h o w to tackle some of the different problems that arise in understanding the story, one guiding principle underlies our approach: the re-use thesis. According to the re-use thesis, certain inferential mechanisms whose primary function has nothing in particular to do with psychological inference cam be re-used for psychological inference tasks. In the course of the paper, w e present several examples of the re-use thesis in action. Finally, w e sketch how these applications of the re-use thesis can contribute to an understanding of our detective story

Analysing psychotherapy in practice

Peer reviewe

Sekvenční struktury v mediálních dialogických sítích

'Dialogical networks' are communications that occur in mass media. One of their characteristics is that contributions of individual actors - politicians, journalists, representatives of pressure groups, etc - are distributed in time & space. (A politician can, for instance, react in the media to what another politician expressed publicly elsewhere). Another central property of dialogical networks is that an individual's contribution to a network can be duplicated, or even multiplicated (eg, what is said in a TV studio may be reproduced in several newspapers). Working in a broadly ethnomethodological & conversation analytical framework, we focus on two aspects of sequential organization - adjacency pair structures & repair structures - with the aim to clarify the respects in which they differ in dialogical networks & in everyday conversations

A review of conversational practices in psychotherapy

Peer reviewe

Diagnostic formulations in psychotherapy

Conversation analysts have noted that, in psychotherapy, formulations of the client’s talk can be a vehicle for offering a psychological interpretation of the client’s circumstances. But we notice that not all formulations in psychotherapy offer interpretations. We offer an analysis of formulations (both of the gist of the client’s words and of their implications) that are diagnostic: that is, used by the professional to sharpen, clarify or refine the client’s account and make it better able to provide what the professional needs to know about the client’s history and symptoms. In doing so, these formulations also have the effect of shepherding the client’s account towards subsequent therapeutic interpretation. In a coda, we notice that sometimes the formulations are designed discreetly. We examine one such discreet formulation in detail, and show how its very ambiguity can lead to its failure as a diagnostic probe

Experiencing the presence of the deceased : symptoms, spirits, or ordinary life?

Experiences of presence are common in bereavement. The bereaved person may see the deceased, hear their familiar voice, or otherwise feel they are close at hand. But although common, they are experiences not without controversy. They have come under a variety of descriptions, from 'hallucinations', lacking in meaning and even essentially meaningless, to 'continuing relationships', of rich personal significance. The current thesis represents the first systematic investigation of the properties and meaning of experiences of presence. Narrative biographic interviews with bereaved informants were analysed using Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. Analytical focus was on the ways in which participants made such experiences meaningful. As a novel approach, this thesis reports several new findings about these phenomena. Firstly, the experiences happened in a variety of bonds (including spouses, parents, grandparents, children, siblings and others), and in a variety of circumstances of the bereavement (including sudden and expected deaths). In all cases, they were described as richly meaningful experiences and as relying on several sources for this meaning. The personal histories of participants were of particular importance in making sense of experiences of presence. Within this context, the experience acquired sense as a continuation of some aspect of the relationship with the deceased. The experiences also had diverse functions, from soothing to destructive. Sometimes, the experiences helped the bereaved to resolve unfinished business with the deceased; at other times, the help was with a much more ordinary problem. On some occasions the experiences of presence caused the bereaved more problems; they simply pronounced the grief or continued a fraught relationship. Participants showed that they had many cultural resources available to them in making sense of their experiences but they did not use all of them. Many informants used some spiritual and psychological ideas to make sense of their experiences. The thesis concludes that many of the most popular theories for these experiences impoverish them by stripping them of their diversity and important aspects of their meaning. The thesis also makes recommendations for psychotherapy for those who have problems of living as a result of their experiences of presence. The study also has implications for psychological research as none of these findings could have been observed through the use of an experimental methodology.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceAHRCGBUnited Kingdo