Much research relating to reading has neglected to examine the attitudes and beliefs of teachers themselves. This study seeks to redress this imbalance by articulating and exploring teachers' personal theories in their own words. The pilot work compared the viability of using semi-structured interviews, repertory grid techniques and standardised questionnaires to achieve this aim. The results revealed the theoretical eclecticism and child centred pragmatism of participating teachers. Considering the feedback from the pilot studies it was decided the main study should be undertaken within the theoretical framework of Personal Construct Psychology (Kelly, 1955). The participants were twenty KS1 and KS2 teachers drawn from eight Leicestershire Primary Schools. The main study followed these teachers over a 12 month period. At three points, approximately 6 months apart, the participants were interviewed in depth using an adapted form of Kelly's repertory grid technique. Analysis of repertory grid structure revealed that the pattern of construct relationships for individual teachers remained stable over time as the mean Coefficient of Convergence was 0.77 over a 12 month interval. Intensity and the percentage variance accounted for by the first factor (PVAFF) of principal component analysis were highly correlated with values ranging between 0.89 and 0.95 at different phases of the study, confirming that they are both measures of cognitive complexity. They also proved to be stable characteristics of the individual with test-retest reliability for Intensity of 0.87, and 0.73 for PVAFF over a 12 month interval. Thus this thesis makes a contribution to the study of reliability and validity of repertory grid techniques in a limited domain. The reliability of structural measures derived from the grid was shown to be comparable to most psychometric tests, and feedback interviews with teachers demonstrated validity in the recognition by teachers of the cluster analysis computed from their repertory grids. Directions for future research are discussed.

Focusing in particular on a psychoanalytic understanding of terrorism and adversarial political leaders, this thesis undertakes the textual analyses of significant individual profiles and the key texts reflecting psychoanalytic personality pathology profiling. The thesis situates the methodology of this normative, clinically oriented paradigm within the psychobiographic tradition of applied psychoanalysis and critiques the medico-scientific validity of ‘at a distance’ pathologising profiles. The thesis presents its own analytic tools such as ‘clinical parallelism’, where a determinist ahistorical schema of a parallel clinical case is superimposed onto the psychobiographical subject. Arguing that it represents a paradigm shift in psychobiography, a methodological distinction is made between the characterological, traditionally Freudian subject of psychobiography, who is developed by the speculative reconstruction of childhood relationships. This is in contradistinction from a more object relational personological subject who is mainly inferred from adult behaviour. The distinction is emphasised throughout the thesis, and introduced through the wartime psychoanalytic profiles of Hitler. The origins and early history of the overarching discipline of psychobiography including a critique of Freud’s only dedicated psychobiography of Leonardo Da Vinci are explored. This demonstrates that the flaws which surfaced early on in the psychobiographic project are still apparent in modern personality pathology profiling. Political personality profiling is then situated within the context of post War American psychoanalysis and its relationship to American political culture, and there is an exploration of the ethical dilemmas particularly in respect of the Barry Goldwater affair, which have ensued. Predicated in particular, on the notion of early disturbed or traumatogenic object relating leading to narcissistic and paranoid functioning in adult life, the thesis examines how psychoanalytic theories are adapted in the pathologising discourse. There is a critique of the way psychoanalytic conceptualisations are integrated with ideological imperatives most notably by the principal protagonist of the thesis, Jerrold Post and the personality pathology theorists’ analysis of terrorist ‘pathology’. The thesis concludes by arguing that the elision of psychoanalysis with the Western hegemonic and normative ideological position of the personality pathology paradigm represents an inherent bias. This risks through for example Nancy Kobrin’s cultural psychobiographic analysis of suicide terrorism, alienating in particular Islam, and undermines the perception of psychoanalysis as a universal discipline.

Sequence learning is a fundamental brain function that allows for the acquisition of a wide range of skills. Unlearned movements become faster and more accurate with repetition, due to a process called prediction. Predictive behaviour observed in the eye and hand compensates for the inherent temporal delays in the sensorimotor system and allows for the generation of motor actions prior to visual guidance. We investigated predictive behaviour and the brain areas associated with this processing in (i) the oculomotor system (Eye Only (EO): saccade vs. pursuit) and (ii) during eye and hand coordination (EH). Participants were asked to track a continuous moving target in predictable or random sequence conditions. EO and EH experiments were divided into 1) EO behavioural and 2) EO fMRI findings, and 3) EH behavioural and 4) EH fMRI findings. Results provide new insights into how individuals predict when learning a sequence of target movements, which is not limited to short--‐term memory capacities and that forms a link between shorter and longer--‐term motor skill learning. Furthermore, brain imaging results revealed distinct levels of activation within and between brain areas for repeated and randomized sequences that reflect the distinct timing threshold and adaptation levels needed for the two oculomotor systems. EH results revealed similar predictive behaviour in the eye and the hand, but also demonstrated enhanced coupling between the two motor systems during sequence learning. EH brain imaging findings have provided novel insights into the brain areas involved in coordination, and those areas more associated with sequence learning. Results show evidence of common predictive networks used for the eye and hand during learning.

No description available.

This thesis examines ways in which the writings of Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) and George Eliot (1819-1880) anticipate aspects of the works of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). It argues that psychoanalytic theories were a product of their time, finding their ancestry in Victorian psychological, philosophical, scientific and social thought, aspects of which also informed the work of Le Fanu, Collins and Eliot. I foreground Freud's work of the 1890s, especially his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1950; written in 1895), the forerunner of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Unconscious (1915), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and The Ego and the Id (1923). The energy-filled psychical system the Project outlines is informed by nineteenth-century ideas on force. I discuss systemic equilibrium in Le Fanu's short stories, the tendency to inertia in Eliot's Romola (1862-3) and the mechanics of satisfaction in Middlemarch (1871-2) and Daniel Deronda (1876); all these concepts find roots in nineteenth-or pre-nineteenth-century spiritual or scientific thought, and prefigure Freud's Project. The association of ideas, a basic foundation of psychoanalysis, is discussed with reference to Collins's Basil (1852), The Woman in White (1860), No Name (1862) and Armadale (1866). I suggest how Collins's knowledge of the work of W. B. Carpenter (1813-1885) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904), and Eliot's engagement with the ideas of George Henry Lewes (1817-1878) and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) are evident in their fictions. Throughout, I show that unconscious mental processes were discussed decades before Freud.

Throughout history the study of chance has largely been either neglected or dismissed as futile. This changed around the end of the 19th century and since then interest in chance phenomena has exponentially grown up to this day. This thesis addresses the question what influenced this increase in interest occurring around the turn of the last century. The approach is interdisciplinary and takes three main theories of chance from the subject areas of philosophy, analytical psychology and avant-garde art, mainly literature, as its starting point. The theories are Charles Sanders Peirce's tychism, Carl Gustav Jung's synchronicity and André Breton's objective chance. From these theories it can be deduced that the growing interest in chance arose as an expression of the ‘epistemological uncertainty’ marking the age. Besides the exploration of what chance in itself could be, all three were also keen to investigate its impact on man. Furthermore, by acknowledging the significance of the irregular and unpredictable they, in their own ways, employed chance as a tool of cultural subversion, namely to counteract the dominance of rationality prevailing since the Enlightenment. As part of the analysis of chance’s impact on man, it emerged that they all either explicitly or implicitly deal with the relationship of chance and creativity and how chance can affect the creation of the new and original.

It is a familiar tenet that desires and beliefs have opposite directions of fit. Our beliefs, according to this view, should be changed to fit the world – if necessary – because they are for saying how things are. Our desires give us reasons to change the world, because they are for saying what to do, or how things should be. I argue that like beliefs, desires have only the mind-to-world direction of fit. In arguing for this conclusion, I present new accounts of both desire and direction of fit. Desires are inputs to the goal-directed system – a system for behavioural control studied in psychology and neuroscience – with the function of tracking the reward values of outcomes. In the goal-directed system these states are combined with further states representing contingencies between actions and outcomes, in order to select the actions which offer greatest reward. According to this account, desires come in occurrent and standing forms, are likely to have a wide range of outcomes as their objects, and interact with habits, emotions and intentions in familiar ways. My account of direction of fit uses a teleosemantic framework. Teleosemantics is a family of theories of representation that aim to identify the characteristic functions of representations and the systems in which they operate, and focus on representation as a biological phenomenon. It is particularly suited to thinking about direction of fit, because representations have their directions of fit in virtue of what they are for – that is, their functions. I claim that representations have the mind-toworld direction of fit when the systems that produce them have the function of doing so under specific conditions, and the world-to-mind direction of fit when the systems that consume them have the function of behaving in specific ways, whenever the representations occur. Desires do not have the world-to-mind direction of fit, because what the goal-directed system should do when any given desire is occurrent also depends on what other desires are occurrent at the time, and on the agent’s beliefs. It does not follow that we have no reason to try to make the world fit our desires; instead, this conclusion shows that the place of desires in rational motivation is less closely tied to their properties as representations than some philosophers have thought.

Research procedures can create emotional distance between researchers and participants, thereby rendering inaccessible the information which the research seeks to elicit. Qualitative researchers look to psychoanalysis for solutions. The thesis falls into three parts. The first traces an intellectual journey establishing the notion of 'relational reverie'. In Bion's theory of maternal reverie inner awareness becomes the pathway to relational understanding. Ogden developed the notion of reverie as a co-created intersubjective phenomenon, distinct from both analyst and patient. The thesis turns to consider reverie can be used in qualitative research. Reverie - preconscious waking dreaming - is ineffable and spontaneous, and could be seen as inherently antithetical to the defined and systematic ethos of research. Conceptualising the interview as an emotional entanglement of personalities, leads to the idea of it as an arena for 'reverie conversations' (both verbal and imagic). The third aspect of the thesis is empirical. The data start from the author's own reverie. Two studies are presented. First, in two face-to-face interviews with adolescents who had received therapy for depression, reverie is shown to help overcome impasse, and instigate hypotheses about the origins of the depression. Second, in analysis of interview scripts, visualised reverie introduced symbolism into impoverished narratives. These experiences raise the question of whether reverie as a research adjunct can be taught and used by researchers. The third study looked at 'reverie teaching groups', exploring how researchers understand, and attempt to bring reverie into their research repertoire. Using reverie in this way tapped into intersubjective communication, giving voice to unspoken narratives. This provided data for further conceptualising the nature of adolescent depression. Theoretically, the thesis develops the concept of 'relational reverie', and suggests a methodology for the enrichment of qualitative research which stays close to clinical realities.

This research recognized that being other was an experience we all endure at varying times. Rooting itself within post-colonial theories, this research sought to expand the understanding of this experience into the worlds of relational psychotherapy and the transpersonal. With a phenomenological epistemology, this research therefore utilized creative techniques such as visualizations, drawing, and sand tray work, to understand the unconscious experience of being other, and what the other is. It also explored the unconscious impact of othering, and why the other is drawn to the subject. This research also undertook a heuristic study recognizing that a connection to our own sense of otherness was a route towards psychological wholeness.

This thesis introduces and explores Jacques Lacan's controversial topologisation of psychoanalysis and attempts to establish whether or not it was necessary, successful or important by providing readings of texts that have been largely ignored by the Anglo-American reception of Lacan (such as ‘L'étourdit' and Seminar XXII). In Part I, Lacan's efforts to present the topological architecture of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary are introduced as inextricably linked with less hermetic topics such as his concerns regarding the future of (institutional) psychoanalysis and his own legacy. Two particular figures (the infinite straight line and the knot) are looked at as exemplifying some of the theoretical impasses that Lacan hoped the writing of topological structure would formalise rather than resolve. Part II explains the purpose of each of the figures of Lacan's ‘surface' topology (the Möbius strip, the torus and the cross-cap). In Part III, his ‘topological turn' is given context by being examined alongside some of the more well-known and well-regarded elements of the Lacanian bricolage such as linguistics and logic. The role topology played in the ‘return to Freud' is also examined and some key principles of topological reading and interpretation are established. The question of how the shift from an unconscious ‘structured like a language' to an unconscious that is structured topologically (and thus not entirely reducible to linguistic mechanisms) might affect psychoanalytic literary criticism is addressed in Part IV. The thesis concludes in Part V by returning to some of the issues and questions raised in Part I, concentrating particularly on the validity and consequences of Lacan's provocative contention that, with the Borromean knot, he produced writings that ‘support a real.' We will also see how it is that with these nodal writings Lacan finally distinguished psychoanalysis from science, philosophy and religion.