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Biomedical subjects

L S Berger

Publications and source records attributed to L S Berger.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Psychotherapy, biological psychiatry, and the nature of matter: a view from physics.

Biological psychiatry has marginalized psychotherapy, and it is difficult for psychotherapists to counter its hegemony. The reductionist/materialist position seems incontrovertible and self-evident. An important factor in maintaining this stance is the belief that the physical world is understandable, solid, unproblematic, especially when compared to the realm of the psychological. Developments in quantum and relativity theories, however, cast doubt on that belief. They show the fundamental nature of the material world to be problematic, enigmatic, paradoxical, impossible to understand or conceptualize in terms of everyday experience. This insight weakens the prima facie case for privileging the material over the psychological, and alternative (i.e., nonneurobiological) approaches to mental health matters should, therefore, be able to compete on an equal footing. However, the materialist-reductionist stance is kept in place by powerful forces and is well defended; rational arguments alone are unlikely to have an impact. This pervasive ideological resistance to rational, often well-founded critiques of physical reductionism continues to be a major impediment to changing the present materialist climate. That resistance has to be addressed before any significant shift in orientation can be expected to occur.

Biological Psychiatry↗
PubMed2000

Praxis as a radical alternative to scientific frameworks for psychotherapy.

This article propounds that formal clinical frameworks do not provide answers to the significant technical problems that typically confront certain types of psychotherapists in their daily work. Specifically, it is claimed that for a certain class of therapies "normal science's" theoretical frameworks cannot logically entail (i.e., lead deductively to) therapeutic technique and clinical practices. Earlier publications explained this failure of formalized theories as stemming from structural features, i.e., from the impoverished representational capacity inherent in mathematization. Now a second kind of explanation focuses on functional limitations inherent in theories of the "behavioral objectives" type. Such models do not address the issue of values inherent in process and in goal selection, focusing instead on quantifying predetermined goals and measuring outcomes to assess whether the goals had been reached; process is reduced to an instrumental function. To counter both kinds of limitations--structural and functional--a radical and still largely unfamiliar framework, praxis, is proposed and introduced as an alternative to conventional theorizing.

Goals↗
PubMed1996

Cultural psychopathology and the "false memory syndrome" debates: a view from psychoanalysis.

An unquestioned assumption underlying the false memory syndrome debates is that for therapeutic and certain other practical reasons it is necessary to establish whether a memory of abuse recalled in psychotherapy by a patient is true-the veridicality question. This assumption was challenged; an analytic persepective was brought to bear on the issues it raises, to demonstrate that question's fallacies and weaknesses. First, three different analytic views pertaining to recalled memories were outlined. Subsequently, the notion of an ubiquitous cultural psychopathology, a pathology of the "normal," was introduced and its relevance for the debates was explored. It was then argued that a psychoanalytic perspective can illuminate the pathological aspects of the veridicality question. Examples were given to illustrate how the narrow, often fanatical focus on veridicality supports simplistic conceptions of psychopathology and of psychotherapy, leads to impoverished ideas about the nature of the relationship to one's self and to others, and obscures less obvious but nevertheless equally destructive other kinds of family or parental pathology.

Child↗
PubMed1994

Torsades de pointes induced by erythromycin.

We describe two patients who develop torsades de pointes in a temporal relationship to the intravenous administration of erythromycin lactobionate in the absence of other drugs or metabolic abnormalities known to cause the arrhythmia. We also review the current literature regarding this topic, including other case histories and the evidence for erythromycin's effect on cardiac tissue. Due to the increasing use of erythromycin in clinical practice, we believe it is important that all physicians be made aware of this potential complication, which was not recognized at our institutions until these patients were seen by one of us (B.G.).

Aged↗