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Biomedical subjects

Ivan Leudar

Publications and source records attributed to Ivan Leudar.

5 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

When psychotherapists disclose personal information about themselves to clients.

Psychotherapists sometimes disclose personal information to their clients during therapeutic sessions. We report here our analysis of how these 'therapist self-disclosures' are done. In a sample of 15 sessions involving four therapists, we find that all therapists use them sparingly and some not at all. When they do, they 'match' something in the client's preceding turn. Vehicles for the match can range from comparatively simple agreements to more complicated 'second stories', which use analogies from the therapists' own current life. We find that these 'personal' disclosures are invariably rather ordinary but are made to bear visibly on the therapeutic business at hand, though not always in obvious ways. The ordinariness of therapist's self-disclosures underpins what seems to be one of their main actions-to 'normalize', for a number of disparate local interactional contingencies, the clients' experience. We discuss the practice of using one's own life experiences to bear on one's client's troubles, noting the recurrent features of extreme case formulations and explicit recipient design. We conclude with a brief discussion of the relation between our analyses and those which might be offered by members of the therapeutic community.

Communication↗
PubMed2005

Self-disclosure as a situated interactional practice.

Self-disclosure has long been a site of research in clinical and social psychology, where it suffers the fate of many interactional phenomena. It is operationalized (typically, into a set of bald statements of varying intimacy), and measured as a dependent variable (subject to the operation of factors like the age or gender of the discloser, the degree of acquaintance with the disclosed-to recipient, the expectation of reciprocity and so on), or manipulated as a causative independent variable (which affects such things as the perception of the discloser, the effectiveness of therapy, and so on). This treatment of self-disclosure, embedded in a research culture of a-contextual, experimenter-defined phenomena, risks missing the point that in ordinary life, self-disclosure is a social performance which must be brought off in interaction, and has its interactional context and its interactional consequences. When we examine examples of such brought-off disclosures, we start to see patterns in their design as voluntary revelations of personal data, and patterns in their social function, which are invisible to the standard factors and measures paradigm of experimental social psychology.

Humans↗
PubMed2002

The cases of John Bunyan, Part 1.: Taine and Royce.

John Bunyan was a seventeenth-century religious reformer who is nowadays widely known for his Pilgrim's Progress and also for his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. In the nineteenth century he was diagnosed, on the basis of his revelations in that autobiography, as suffering from a variety of mental pathologies. In this study we track his 'psychiatric career' through the work of H. Taine and J. Royce (Part 1), and W. James and P. Janet (Part 2). The examination of these authors' practices of 'retrospective psychiatry' allows us to bring to light some changes in psychiatric concepts in the late nineteenth century, and to investigate both the use of cases in psychological reasoning, and translations from religious to psychiatric idioms.

Autobiographies as Topic↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Hearing voices: A phenomenological-hermeneutic approach.

The word "phenomenology" has a number of meanings. In this paper we briefly contrast the different meanings of the word in psychiatry and philosophy. We then consider the work of the philosophers Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as examples of what Hubert Dreyfus calls ontological phenomenology, in contrast to an epistemological approach. We present a brief outline of Merleau-Ponty's theory of embodiment, and contrast this with the dominant, epistemological (or Cartesian) view of experience. Through the example of a woman who experienced bereavement hallucinations, we try to show how this approach can open up a hermeneutic approach to the experience of hearing voices. An understanding of embodiment can help to counter reductionism, whether biological or social, and dualism (body/mind and mind/society). It is only when we consider the totality of human experience that we can understand its meaning. This has two main benefits. First, it legitimates the claims made by those who hear voices that their experiences are intrinsically meaningful. Second, it can provide a framework for those who work with voice hearers and who are interested in understanding these experiences. In this sense, phenomenology can become a valuable clinical tool.

Journal Article↗