Hallucination was always the ghost story's elephant in the room. Even before the vogue for psychical research and spiritualism began to influence writers at the end of the nineteenth century, tales of horror and the supernatural, of ghosts and demons, had been haunted by the possibility of some grand deception by the senses. Edgar Allan Poe's stories were full of mad narrators, conscience-stricken criminals and sinners, and protagonists who doubted their very eyes and ears. Writers such as Dickens and Le Fanu continued this idea of the cheat of the senses. But what is certainly true is that, towards the end of the century, hallucination took on a new force and significance in ghostly and horror fiction. Now, its presence was not the dominion of a handful of experimental thinkers but the province of popular authors writing very different kinds of stories. The approaches had become many and diverse, from Arthur Machen's ambivalent interest in occultism to Vernon Lee's passion for art and antiquity. Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) is the most famous text to pose a question that was, in fact, being asked by many writers of the time: reality or delusion? Other writers, too, were forcing their readers to assess whether the ghostly had its origins in some supernatural phenomenon from beyond the grave, or from some deception within our own minds. This thesis explores the many factors which contributed to this rise in the interest in hallucination and visionary experience, during the period 1880-1914. From the time when psychical research became hugely popular, up until the First World War often considered a watershed in the history of the ghost story and literature in general something happened to the ghost story and related fiction. Through a close analysis of stories and novels written by Robert Louis Stevenson, Vernon Lee, Henry James, Arthur Machen, and Oliver Onions, I attempt to find out what happened, and even more importantly why it happened at all.

This research illustrates the experience of living with hallucinations from the perspective of being, and sought to answer the questions: what is the meaning of hallucinations and how do hallucinations connect to one's sense of self?A phenomenological Heideggerian hermeneutic approach was used to guide data collection and analysis. In this study, 12 individuals with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorders were asked to describe their experience of hallucinations within the context of being. An overarching constitutive pattern emerged with four themes. The constitutive pattern, "A Life disrupted: Still lived," described a pattern of survival and perseverance on one's own terms; a common thread that emanated throughout the other themes. For these participants the four themes that epitomized living a life with hallucinations were:(a) Are they who they are? (b) A not so certain life, (c) Finding strength in the broken places, and (d) I am still me. Are they who they are described both a cognitive search and emotional appraisal of the structure of the hallucinatory experience. Who and what is it? The confusion and fear participants articulated, and attempting to make some sense out of the experience bore a close resemblance to the mechanism of order emerging from chaos. A not so certain life illustrated a picture of living with a chronic illness. Participants described the same waxing and waning of the disease, the lifelong picture of living with a disease, and the same ambiguous perspective of treatment. Participants also spoke of living a life of loss. This loss and subsequent grief in the face of stigma and self-perceived stigma were analogous to disenfranchised loss. Nonetheless, participants referred to making small and daily gains as a way of deriving meaning from this experience. Finding strength in the broken places was this process of lending a different kind of meaning to this experience as integral to surviving mental illness. There was some disparity with the literature concerning the usefulness of language that emphasized mastery and self-empowerment. This language served to be more overwhelming than helpful and clients visualized "getting better'' in small ways with small daily gains. Heidegger's language of care as leaping in and leaping ahead more closely depicted nursing's goal of intervening in the day-to-day needs, as well as the long-range goal of self-empowerment. Additionally, despite literature that conceptualizes a lost or disintegrating self, almost all participants agreed that hallucinations were not expressive of their intrinsic being, rather, "who they were" their "being" remained separate from their hallucinations. I am still me described a persistent sense of self defined as a sense of being that remained consistent throughout.

This thesis investigated the management of conflict between reality and suggestion during hypnosis. The eight experiments conducted for this thesis investigated the social, motivational, and cognitive factors that mediate participants? response to conflict during a negative visual hallucination. Chapter 1 reviews the relevant literature and presents the rationale for the program of research. Chapter 2 presents Experiments 1 and 2, which explored hypnotic participants? capacity to manage conflict under different conditions. The findings indicated that cognitive and behavioural strategies that allow participants to avoid conflict are useful, but not essential, in managing hypnotic conflict. Chapter 3 presents Experiment 3, which developed a paradigm that allowed conflict to be manipulated in a way that minimised response cues. The findings indicated that gradually and unobtrusively modifying a stimulus influenced participants? responses even though participants did not indicate any knowledge that the stimulus was manipulated. Chapter 4 presents Experiment 4, which investigated the relevance of hypnotisability and hypnosis to conflict management. The findings indicated that hypnosis provides a context in which hypnotisable participants are able to maintain their belief despite demanding levels of conflict. Chapter 5 presents Experiments 5 and 6, which focused on the role of social demands in participants? response to hypnotic conflict. The findings indicated that demand characteristics shape participants? interpretation of the appropriate response to conflict during an hypnotic suggestion. Chapter 6 presents Experiments 7 and 8, which addressed the relevance of cognitive processes to hypnotic conflict management. The findings indicated that participants used cognitive strategies to manage conflict that were appropriate to the suggestion, degree of conflict, and their individual abilities. Overall, the findings indicated that hypnotic participants? management of conflict involves motivated, strategic responding so as to maintain a belief that events are as communicated by the hypnotist. These issues are discussed within a theoretical perspective that is presented in Chapter 7. This perspective emphasises the hypnotisability of participants, the role of hypnotic induction, participants? interpretation of the desired response, the belief that participants develop in the reality of the suggested events, and the readiness of participants to employ conflict management strategies that produce the appropriate outcome.

Le présent mémoire s'intéresse à la problématique écriture-folie dans L'Homme-Jasmin, de l'auteure et artiste allemande Unica Zürn. Ce texte, sous-titré Impressions d'une malade mentale, consiste en le compte rendu de la réelle expérience de la folie de l'auteure. En prenant appui sur les liens établis dans le texte entre ces deux sphères, nous voulons démontrer en quoi, et surtout de quelle façon, la maladie mentale non seulement alimente, mais aussi conditionne et oriente l'écriture. Notre premier chapitre se consacre aux représentations de l'enfermement et de la folie. Deux constats principaux sont dégagés de cette réflexion. D'abord, l'enfermement constitue essentiellement une forme négative de l'expérience de la folie: le fonctionnement de la vie asilaire, les traitements qu'on y dispense, les gestes et les attitudes des médecins el infirmières sont ressentis comme des attaques, des agressions. Ensuite, nous constatons qu'en dehors des murs de l'asile, la folie apparaît sous un tout autre jour: elle est considérée comme un don, un privilège, une occasion unique de réaliser l'improbable et l'impensable. Le second chapitre s'attarde à l'imaginaire et l'onirique, plus particulièrement au fantasme, aux rêves et aux hallucinations. L'imaginaire fantasmatique est abordé par le biais du personnage de l' Homme-Jasmin. Ce dernier, fantasme tout droit sorti de l'enfance, se transforme, des années plus tard, en la figure centrale de la folie de Zürn. Les rêves et les hallucinations seront considérés sous l'angle de leur mise en récit. L'analyse des récits de rêves et des épisodes hallucinatoires permettra de déterminer la position de l'auteure relativement à ces deux expériences oniriques. Le tout dernier chapitre s'attache de façon plus particulière aux rapports entre écriture et folie. Nous réfléchirons sur cette problématique en abordant tout d'abord la question des signes. Puis, nous nous attarderons aux anagrammes présentées dans L 'Homme-Jasmin. Notre étude des anagrammes, qui clôt le mémoire, établit une ultime corrélation entre folie et écriture, en démontrant que la folie est tout entière comprise dans et par le jeu de langage. Ce dernier, espace libérateur, répond à l'enfermement subi par l'auteure. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Folie, Enfermement, Écriture, Onirique, Anagrammes.

Dale Allison refers to the historical question pertaining to Jesus’ resurrection as “the prize puzzle of New Testament research.” More than 2,500 journal articles and books have been written on the subject since 1975. In this dissertation, I investigate the question while providing unprecedented interaction with the literature of professional historians outside of the community of biblical scholars on both hermeneutical and methodological considerations. Chapter one is devoted to discussions pertaining to the philosophy of history and historical method, such as the extent to which the past is knowable, how historians gain a knowledge of it, the impact biases have on investigations and steps that may assist historians in minimizing their biases, the role a consensus should or should not play in historical investigations, who shoulders the burden of proof, and the point at which a historian is warranted in declaring that a historical question has been solved. I seek to determine how historians outside of the community of biblical scholars generally proceed in their investigations involving non-religious matters and establish a similar approach for proceeding in my investigation of the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. In chapter two, I address objections to the investigation of miracle-claims by historians from a number of prominent scholars. My conclusion is that their objections warrant that extra caution should be taken by historians investigating miracle claims but are ill-founded in terms of prohibiting a historical investigation of Jesus’ resurrection. Historians must identify the relevant sources from which they will mine data for their investigations. In chapter three, I survey the primary literature relevant to our investigation and rate them according to their value to an investigation pertaining to Jesus’ resurrection. I limit this survey to sources that mention the death and resurrection of Jesus and that were written within two hundred years of Jesus’ death. I then rate each according to the likelihood that it contains data pertaining to Jesus’ death and resurrection that go back to the earliest Christians, and identify the sources most promising for the present investigation. In chapter four, I mine through this most promising material and form a collection of relevant facts that are so strongly evidenced that they enjoy a heterogeneous and nearly universal consensus granting them. These comprise our historical bedrock upon which all hypotheses pertaining to Jesus’ fate must be built. In chapter five, I apply the methodological considerations discussed in chapter one and weigh six hypotheses largely representative of those being offered in the beginning of the twenty-first century pertaining to the question of the resurrection of Jesus. I conclude that the hypothesis that Jesus rose from the dead is not only the best explanation of the relevant historical bedrock, it outdistances its competitors by a significant margin and meets the criteria for awarding historicity. Of course, this conclusion is provisional, since future discoveries may require its revision or abandonment. It also makes no assertions pertaining to the nature of Jesus’ resurrection body nor claims to address the question of the cause of Jesus’ resurrection. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / New Testament Studies / unrestricted

Experiences of presence are common in bereavement. The bereaved person may see the deceased, hear their familiar voice, or otherwise feel they are close at hand. But although common, they are experiences not without controversy. They have come under a variety of descriptions, from 'hallucinations', lacking in meaning and even essentially meaningless, to 'continuing relationships', of rich personal significance. The current thesis represents the first systematic investigation of the properties and meaning of experiences of presence. Narrative biographic interviews with bereaved informants were analysed using Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. Analytical focus was on the ways in which participants made such experiences meaningful. As a novel approach, this thesis reports several new findings about these phenomena. Firstly, the experiences happened in a variety of bonds (including spouses, parents, grandparents, children, siblings and others), and in a variety of circumstances of the bereavement (including sudden and expected deaths). In all cases, they were described as richly meaningful experiences and as relying on several sources for this meaning. The personal histories of participants were of particular importance in making sense of experiences of presence. Within this context, the experience acquired sense as a continuation of some aspect of the relationship with the deceased. The experiences also had diverse functions, from soothing to destructive. Sometimes, the experiences helped the bereaved to resolve unfinished business with the deceased; at other times, the help was with a much more ordinary problem. On some occasions the experiences of presence caused the bereaved more problems; they simply pronounced the grief or continued a fraught relationship. Participants showed that they had many cultural resources available to them in making sense of their experiences but they did not use all of them. Many informants used some spiritual and psychological ideas to make sense of their experiences. The thesis concludes that many of the most popular theories for these experiences impoverish them by stripping them of their diversity and important aspects of their meaning. The thesis also makes recommendations for psychotherapy for those who have problems of living as a result of their experiences of presence. The study also has implications for psychological research as none of these findings could have been observed through the use of an experimental methodology.

Cette étude clinique qui est une approche psychopathologique du symptôme acouphènique est parmi les premières recherches qui s'intéressent à ce symptôme peu étudié par la psychanalyse. / This clinical study which is a psychological approach of the tinnitus symptom is among the first studies to be interested in thus symptom poorly studied with psychanalysis.

abstract: Autonomous systems that are out in the real world today deal with a slew of different data modalities to perform effectively in tasks ranging from robot navigation in complex maneuverable robots to identity verification in simpler static systems. The performance of the system heavily banks on the continuous supply of data from all modalities. These systems can face drastically increased risk with the loss of one or multiple modalities due to an adverse scenario like that of hardware malfunction, inimical environmental conditions, etc. This thesis investigates modality hallucination and its efficacy in mitigating the risks posed to the autonomous system. Modality hallucination is proposed as one effective way to ensure consistent modality availability thereby reducing unfavorable consequences. While there has been a significant research effort in high-to-low dimensional modality hallucination, like that of RGB to depth, there is considerably lesser interest in the other direction( low-to-high dimensional modality prediction). This thesis serves to demonstrate the effectiveness of this low-to-high modality hallucination in reducing the uncertainty in the affected system while also ensuring that the method remains task agnostic. A deep neural network based encoder-decoder architecture that aggregates multiple fields of view in its encoder blocks to recover the lost information of the affected modality from the extant modality is presented with evidence of its efficacy. The hallucination process is implemented by capturing a non-linear mapping between the data modalities and the learned mapping is used to aid the extant modality to mitigate the risk posed to the system in the adverse scenarios which involve modality loss. The results are compared with a well known generative model built for the task of image translation, as well as an off-the-shelf semantic segmentation architecture re-purposed for hallucination. To validate the practicality of hallucinated modality, extensive classification and segmentation experiments are conducted on the University of Washington's depth image database (UWRGBD) database and the New York University database (NYUD) and demonstrate that hallucination indeed lessens the negative effects of the modality loss. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Engineering 2019

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