Experiences of continued presence: On the practical consequences of 'hallucinations' in bereavement.

Objectives: We document the properties of experiences of continued presence (ECPs) helping to resolve controversies about their significance.

Method: We used qualitative methods in data collection and analysis. This enabled us to document the properties of ECPs.

On the use of formulations in person-centred, solution-focused short-term psychotherapy.

According to Carl Rogers, therapy must be non-directive in order to be effective. This means that the therapist needs to be trained to work within the clients' frame of reference and do so in their practice. Conversation analytic research, however, suggests that therapists who claim to practise non-directive, non-authoritarian therapy nevertheless exercise subtle means of influencing their clients (e.

Getting over "the problem of other minds": communication in context.

Theories of communication often assume that communication has a single, essential form or telos, the culmination of a one-track developmental process where precursors eventually give rise to the real thing. At one time, this essence of communication was identified with linguistic competence, whereas now it is largely defined in terms of "Theory of Mind." But the fundamental problem with "Theory of Mind" is the very problem it pretends to solve: "the problem of other minds.

When psychotherapists disclose personal information about themselves to clients.

Psychotherapists sometimes disclose personal information to their clients during therapeutic sessions. We report here our analysis of how these 'therapist self-disclosures' are done. In a sample of 15 sessions involving four therapists, we find that all therapists use them sparingly and some not at all.

Hearing voices: A phenomenological-hermeneutic approach.

The word "phenomenology" has a number of meanings. In this paper we briefly contrast the different meanings of the word in psychiatry and philosophy. We then consider the work of the philosophers Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as examples of what Hubert Dreyfus calls ontological phenomenology, in contrast to an epistemological approach.

Self-disclosure as a situated interactional practice.

Self-disclosure has long been a site of research in clinical and social psychology, where it suffers the fate of many interactional phenomena. It is operationalized (typically, into a set of bald statements of varying intimacy), and measured as a dependent variable (subject to the operation of factors like the age or gender of the discloser, the degree of acquaintance with the disclosed-to recipient, the expectation of reciprocity and so on), or manipulated as a causative independent variable (which affects such things as the perception of the discloser, the effectiveness of therapy, and so on). This treatment of self-disclosure, embedded in a research culture of a-contextual, experimenter-defined phenomena, risks missing the point that in ordinary life, self-disclosure is a social performance which must be brought off in interaction, and has its interactional context and its interactional consequences.

The cases of John Bunyan, Part 1.: Taine and Royce.

John Bunyan was a seventeenth-century religious reformer who is nowadays widely known for his Pilgrim's Progress and also for his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. In the nineteenth century he was diagnosed, on the basis of his revelations in that autobiography, as suffering from a variety of mental pathologies. In this study we track his 'psychiatric career' through the work of H.