Abstract not available

This project represents a descriptive study of 35 chronically mentally ill (CMI) adults enrolled in a community-based vocational rehabilitation program during the 1981 calendar year. As part of their first month in the program, subjects were administered a screening battery consisting of the Trail Making Test, Reitan-Indiana Aphasia Screening Test, Reitan-Klove Sensory Perceptual Examination, Valpar Independent Problem Solving Work Sample (IPSWS) and Wide Range Interest Opinion Test (WRIOT). Correlations were derived among these and with other variables, including the Work Adjustment Rating Form, schizophrenic versus nonschizophrenic psychiatric diagnosis, time in program and period of competitive employment resulting from program involvement. The issue of medication and its potential for impacting on subjects' performance in the program was also addressed. The neuropsychological measures in the battery were significantly correlated among themselves and discriminated between schizophrenic and nonschizophrenic CMI subjects in the sample with 100% accuracy. However, results on neuropsychological tests did not predict whether or not a subject would realize competitive employment during the year of the study. Both schizophrenic and nonschizophrenic subjects produced average performances in the impaired range of functioning according to published criteria for the neuropsychological instruments, although schizophrenic subjects consistently performed closer to the normal population. Vocational instruments included in the battery appeared to measure a more heterogeneous set of functions than the neuropsychological tests, and did not appear to represent a vocational factor. Two scores from these vocational instruments, Valpar IPSWS and WRIOT Negative Bias, were combined with Trail Making Test (Part A) scores in a discriminant function that classified subjects with 81% accuracy on attainment of competitive employment status. Over half (56%) of the people who participated for three months or more experienced some competitive employment, and 39% of those who completed three months or more were able to maintain full-time or part-time competitive employment for longer than 60 days. These results supported the effectiveness of Fountain House Model programs in achieving vocational rehabilitation goals with the difficult CMI population. Support was also provided for community-based research to study both social programs and their clientele.

The concept of Psychic Energy holds a very important position in the field of Psychoanalysis, particularly within the theories of Sigmund Freud. These ideas, including the notion of a constancy of excitation, or the ‘pleasure principle’, as well as energy transfer and ‘cathexis’, are important not only historically in terms of the subsequent development of Psychoanalytic theory, but also remain a core conceptual assumption of a number of concepts in contemporary use. However, the central ideas related to psychic energy have undergone little substantial revision or development since the end of Freud’s career, despite a number of compelling critiques that call into question the central definitions and assumptions of these concepts, particularly the principles defining their governance. Grobbelaar (1989) has suggested that a number of problems within Psychoanalytic theory can be powerfully addressed through recourse to central propositions from the field of systems theory, and the case is made in the present thesis that some of the core problems with the energic theory may indeed be the result of a pre-systems epistemology. The present study proposes that psychic energy be defined as recursively constituted through three levels of the human system (inorganic, organic and informational), and that the core principles of regulation at the informational level is not constancy, or pleasure, but rather the necessity of maintaining organisation. In line with this proposition, the study reviews a number of theoretical propositions from systems theory and cybernetics (including the notions of energy defined as ‘information’ or ‘free energy’) and how they may be usefully deployed as principles of organisation of psychic energy within the psychoanalytic framework. Examples of how these principles may be used to explain Freud’s core observations of ego functioning are presented as well. / Psychology / Ph. D. (Psychology)