Browsing by Subject "Self"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Alzheimer's Disease Narratives and the Myth of Human Being
    (2012-12-11) Rieske, Tegan Echo; Schultz, Jane E.; Johnson, Karen Ramsay; Tilley, John J.
    The ‘loss of self’ trope is a pervasive shorthand for the prototypical process of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the popular imagination. Turned into an effect of disease, the disappearance of the self accommodates a biomedical story of progressive deterioration and the further medicalization of AD, a process which has been storied as an organic pathology affecting the brain or, more recently, a matter of genetic calamity. This biomedical discourse of AD provides a generic framework for the disease and is reproduced in its illness narratives. The disappearance of self is a mythic element in AD narratives; it necessarily assumes the existence of a singular and coherent entity which, from the outside, can be counted as both belonging to and representing an individual person. The loss of self, as the rhetorical locus of AD narrative, limits the privatization of the experience and reinscribes cultural storylines---storylines about what it means to be a human person. The loss of self as it occurs in AD narratives functions most effectively in reasserting the presence of the human self, in contrast to an anonymous, inhuman nonself; as AD discourse details a loss of self, it necessarily follows that the thing which is lost (the self) always already existed. The private, narrative self of individual experience thus functions as proxy to a collective human identity predicated upon exceptionalism: an escape from nature and the conditions of the corporeal environment.
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    Mangled Bodies, Mangled Selves: Hurston, A. Walker and Morrison
    (2008-06-16T11:13:30Z) Raab, Angela R.; Kubitschek, Missy Dehn; Thorington, Jennifer; Marvin, Tom
    Broken bodies litter the landscape of African American women’s literature. Missing limbs and teeth, paralyzed appendages, lost hair, and deformities appear frequently in the works of authors like Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Pearl Cleage, and Octavia Butler. While many white authors also include broken bodies in their works, Hemingway’s preoccupation with synecdoche in terms of body parts perhaps being the most notable example, the motif permeates the tradition of African American women’s fiction like no other genre, appearing in the work of almost every major African American woman author. In the case of some authors, Morrison and Walker for example, broken bodies appear in every novel of their corpuses. In fact, every story in Walker’s first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, features a broken body. Several questions arise from the ubiquity of this motif in the texts of African American women authors: Where did the motif originate? Why does the motif persist? Do the authors use the motif in the same way? What does the trail of broken bodies reveal about how African American women authors interpret the relationship between body and self? Surprisingly, given the prevalence of the motif and the number of critical comments on one or another text, no critic has essayed a comprehensive examination of the motif in African American literature. While this paper does not have the scope to cover the African American canon as a whole, it will discuss the motif across the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.
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    Marks of a Neurotic
    (2013-05) Ferguson, Brittany; Setser, Meredith
    To know one’s self, the “real self”, without the distortion of an “idealized self” is quite a challenge in today’s society. Based on personal beliefs, social values, childhood experiences, and learned cultural values, individuals are forced to navigate through life abiding by certain stipulations while also being encouraged to be an individual. Do we really know and understand who we are? Can we truly be comfortable with who we are as individuals? How does this affect our ability to interact with others? As a visual artist, my work has become a public display of internal conflicts due to past experiences that result in emotional traumas to the personal psyche. This emotional build up has led me to develop a body of work that not only expresses me as an artist, but it becomes a therapeutic tool in my characteristic makeup.
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    Metacognition, social cognition, and mentalizing in psychosis: are these distinct constructs when it comes to subjective experience or are we just splitting hairs?
    (BMC, 2021-07-02) Lysaker, P. H.; Cheli, S.; Dimaggio, G.; Buck, B.; Bonfils, K.A.; Huling, K.; Wiesepape, C.; Lysaker, J.T.; Psychiatry, School of Medicine
    Research using the integrated model of metacognition has suggested that the construct of metacognition could quantify the spectrum of activities that, if impaired, might cause many of the subjective disturbances found in psychosis. Research on social cognition and mentalizing in psychosis, however, has also pointed to underlying deficits in how persons make sense of their experience of themselves and others. To explore the question of whether metacognitive research in psychosis offers unique insight in the midst of these other two emerging fields, we have offered a review of the constructs and research from each field. Following that summary, we discuss ways in which research on metacognition may be distinguished from research on social cognition and mentalizing in three broad categories: (1) experimental procedures, (2) theoretical advances, and (3) clinical applications or indicated interventions. In terms of its research methods, we will describe how metacognition makes a unique contribution to understanding disturbances in how persons make sense of and interpret their own experiences within the flow of life. We will next discuss how metacognitive research in psychosis uniquely describes an architecture which when compromised - as often occurs in psychosis - results in the loss of persons' sense of purpose, possibilities, place in the world and cohesiveness of self. Turning to clinical issues, we explore how metacognitive research offers an operational model of the architecture which if repaired or restored should promote the recovery of a coherent sense of self and others in psychosis. Finally, we discuss the concrete implications of this for recovery-oriented treatment for psychosis as well as the need for further research on the commonalities of these approaches.
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    Social Dysfunction in Psychosis Is More Than a Matter of Misperception: Advances From the Study of Metacognition
    (Frontiers Media, 2021-10-14) Lysaker, Paul H.; Hasson-Ohayon, Ilanit; Wiesepape, Courtney; Huling, Kelsey; Musselman, Aubrie; Lysaker, John T.; Psychiatry, School of Medicine
    Many with psychosis experience substantial difficulties forming and maintaining social bonds leading to persistent social alienation and a lack of a sense of membership in a larger community. While it is clear that social impairments in psychosis cannot be fully explained by symptoms or other traditional features of psychosis, the antecedents of disturbances in social function remain poorly understood. One recent model has proposed that deficits in social cognition may be a root cause of social dysfunction. In this model social relationships become untenable among persons diagnosed with psychosis when deficits in social cognition result in inaccurate ideas of what others feel, think or desire. While there is evidence to support the influence of social cognition upon social function, there are substantial limitations to this point of view. Many with psychosis have social impairments but not significant deficits in social cognition. First person and clinical accounts of the phenomenology of psychosis also do not suggest that persons with psychosis commonly experience making mistakes when trying to understand others. They report instead that intersubjectivity, or the formation of an intimate shared understanding of thoughts and emotions with others, has become extraordinarily difficult. In this paper we explore how research in metacognition in psychosis can transcend these limitations and address some of the ways in which intersubjectivity and more broadly social function is compromised in psychosis. Specifically, research will be reviewed on the relationship between social cognitive abilities and social function in psychosis, including measurement strategies and limits to its explanatory power, in particular with regard to challenges to intersubjectivity. Next, we present research on the integrated model of metacognition in psychosis and its relation to social function. We then discuss how this model might go beyond social cognitive models of social dysfunction in psychosis by describing how compromises in intersubjectivity occur as metacognitive deficits leave persons without an integrated sense of others' purposes, relative positions in the world, possibilities and personal complexities. We suggest that while social cognitive deficits may leave persons with inaccurate ideas about others, metacognitive deficits leave persons ill equipped to make broader sense of the situations in which people interact and this is what leaves them without a holistic sense of the other and what makes it difficult to know others, share experiences, and sustain relationships. The potential of developing clinical interventions focused on metacognition for promoting social recovery will finally be explored.