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

Sociogenesis, Coordination and Mutualism

Journalfor lhe Theory of Social Behauiour z I :z 002 1-8308 $2. 50 Sociogenesis, Coordination and Mutualism IVAN LEUDAR COORDINATION AND SOCIOGENESIS One of the pervasive contemporary problems is to account for the coordination of individuals and social entities. My aim in this paper is to discuss some approaches in psychology which are said partly to explain such coordination. One approach is the sociogenic theory of thinking. This focuses on relationships between thinking and social interaction and asserts that concepts and intellectual skills are in fact internalized language, discourse or other social structures and processes. The approach explains individual cognitive structures in terms of their genesis from the social structures. It foregrounds the commonality of cognitive structures of members of a culture and partly accounts for it. In this sense, the approach can be said to coordinate social and individual structures. I will refer to this coordination as diachronic. The other approach discussed here addresses a different coordination problem. Some, if not most, human activities are collective in the sense that (a) their component activities are inter-dependent, and (b) these components are behaviours of different agents. One problem for cognitive science models of activity is to give an account of how participants manage to coordinate their individual actions so that they mesh coherently. This is the second aspect of coordination -that of individuals in social events. This will be referred to as synchronic coordination. Thus both the theory of sociogenesis and cognitive science focus on different but clearly complementary aspects of the relationship between the social and the individual processes. I will argue that the sociogenic approach to thinking, at least as put forward originally by Vygotsky, does not pay enough attention to how individuals coordinate in actual joint activities. It could be argued that the I 98 Ivan Leudar commonality of individuals' cognitive structures, established through sociogenesis, is sufficient to explain their coordination in joint activities. I will argue that this is not the case and that in fact the theory of sociogenesis pre-supposes an account of how individuals with incommensurable cognitive systems coordinate their activities. This is an everyday occurrence and clearly happens in the social events involving adults and children, people from different cultures, people and animals and people and machines, In this paper I argue that both cognitive science and theories of sociogenesis are based on a sharp individual/environment dualism and that what is required to solve the coordination problem and hence to clarify the issues in sociogenesis of thinking is a mutualist approach to interaction which side by side deals with how individuals are constructed in joint social activities and how they coordinate with each other. SOCIOGENESIS AND INDIVIDUAL/ENVIRONMENT DUALISM Thinking and discourse are usually studied apart. We have ethnomethodology, pragmatics and linguistics on the one hand, and cognitive science, cognitive psychology, and logic on the other. The modularity thesis codifies this division of expertise and asserts that there are natural structural differences between cognition, language and communication, and conceptualizes them in terms of distinct individual competences. Chomsky takes the extreme position and argues that in phylogenesis and ontogenesis the pragmatic and linguistic competences do not interact, merely providing contexts and contents for each other (Chomsky, 1980). The modularity position is influential, and the separation of cognition and communication has been recently reiterated in, for example, Fodor ( I 983) and Sperber and Wilson ( I 986). The allocation of social discourse and individual thinking into different scientific disciplines discourages the discussion of their relationship and there is no forum to integrate the findings. But of course there is a problem because social action involves both thinking and discourse and so the arguments about their relationship are inevitable. Vygotsky and his followers have focused on their relationship and argue that the child's system of concepts and intellectual skills resonates systems of social interactions -they cannot be accused of Balkanization of the problem. I will summarize some of their position but argue that in general the sociogenic debates confound two problems. The first concerns the relationship between the structures of thought and language, and the second concerns the nature of the distinction between individuals and environments. The first problem is the one usually addressed. Vygotsky ( 1986) takes the position that the origins of thinking and speaking in evolution are distinct, and (only) in this respect his view is like the modularity thesis. The crucial difference is that he allows an interplay between thinking Sociogenesis, Coordination and Mutualism '99 and speaking, in individual ontogenesis (which Chomsky, for example, does not). According to him a child's conceptual system is constructed and restructured in communication; and speech which is initially egocentric is socialized. So Vygotsky's thesis is that cognitive structures are partly social in origin: Any function in the child's cultural [or higher mental] development appears twice, or on two planes. First it appears on the social plane and then on the psychologicalplane. First it appears between people as an interpsychological category, and then within the child as an intrapsychological category. Dewey and Bentley, I 964, p. 340, see below)). As long as the transformation of tools into signs is the same for different individuals, the position provides a basis for the diachronic social coordination -the individuals will come from socialization with the same cognitive structures. It is interesting to notice, however, that Vygotsky actually reinforces the individual/environment dualism by contrasting properties ofinternal and external activities. This is very clear in the following quote: 2 0 0 Ivan Leudar Equating psychological and nonpsychological phenomena is possible only if one ignores the essence ofeach form ofactivity, as well as the differences between their historical roles and nature. (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 53

Analysing psychotherapy in practice

Peer reviewe

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

Directing and requesting: two interactive uses of the mental state terms want and need

This article is focused on the uses of the terms want and need to build directives and requests in family interaction. The study is located within the theoretical framework of discursive psychology, using the methods of conversation analysis. Within social cognitive research, mental state terms are analyzed as references to inner mental experiences. In contrast, this article analyzes the selection of want and need as sequential phenomena. The use of I want to deliver directives increases the likelihood of compliance when one cannot monitor or control whether a projected action will be carried out. Requests built using I need are recurrently delivered following a request from an interlocutor and delay the granting of the request while maintaining alignment. Thus rather than simply expressing an internal mental experience, the verbs want and need have specific practical uses in their normative sequential environments

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

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