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Biomedical subjects

S A Appelbaum

Publications and source records attributed to S A Appelbaum.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

Dermatitis artefacta. Case reports.

Patients who seek care for foot problems may present to the podiatrist with concurrent problems, such as anxiety, depression, phobias, personality disorders, and psychoses. These may or may not have any direct relationship to the pathogenesis of the foot problem. The podiatrist may learn of the presence of an emotional problem directly from the patient or from a family member. In many cases, the patient may be unaware or deny the presence of an emotional problem, leaving the podiatric physician in the dark about the patient's mental health state or its implications for the management of the skin problem. In a review of the psychosomatic aspects of dermatology, Koblenzer offered a working classification of the psychodermatoses. This is helpful to the podiatrist in recognizing those dermatologic disease states in which the various aspects of the individual participate in the disease, signs and symptoms of the disease, and the potential psychological value of the disease for the patient. It is also helpful to the podiatrist for recognizing those dermatoses in which psychiatric consultation may be useful so that recognition, treatment, improvement, and perhaps cure may be effected quickly.

Adolescent

Evils in the private practice of psychotherapy.

The private, and especially solo, practice of psychotherapy often poses conflicts of interest between patient and therapist, which, because of the field's ambiguities and equivocal guidelines, may tend to be resolved in favor of the therapist and to the detriment of the treatment. The author delineates these potential conflicts so that awareness and training can minimize their pernicious effects.

Ethics, Professional

Self-help with diagnosis (a self-administered semi-projective device).

Studied the validity of a self-administered semi-projective packet of tests and questionnaires developed to provide quick, inexpensive information preparatory, or ancillary, to further diagnostic examinations. Brief writeups of inferences derived from the packet of tests were compared to diagnostic inferences based on from one to three psychiatric interviews, and with full examinations, which included psychiatric and social work interviews and extensive psychological testing. Generally, high comparability between the packet and both criteria were shown on questions of global diagnostic impression, character and defense, central conflicts, and basic ego functions; and significant information was often added by the packet to the data collected in diagnostic interviews. The patients filled out the packet forms conscientiously, and their written self-reports indicated that some patients could learn and otherwise benefit just from performing this task.

Evaluation Studies as Topic

The idealization of insight.

Psychoanalysts tend to idealize the classic model of technique, central to which is the development of insight through interpretation. This is so even though from Freud onward they have realized the inapplicability of this model to many kinds of people and clinical exigencies. As a consequence of this idealization, other factors which plausibly contribute to change, and other elements in the psychotherapeutic situation within and outside of the mainstream of psychoanalytic technique, have been inadequately exploited theoretically and clinically. These include the roles of affect, action, and will; the meaning of insight to the patient and insight as a defense against change; some dangers of insight; factors common to all psychotherapy; and the interpersonal relationship. In this paper I discuss these variables and issues, with reference to case examples, suggest that this sociopsychological problems for psychoanalysis can be understood with reference to some aspects of history of psychoanalysis, and suggest some options and opportunities.

Affect