Important medical decisions: Using brief motivational interviewing to enhance patients' autonomous decision-making.

Goals: The use of motivational interviewing (MI) when the goals of patient and physician are not aligned is examined. A clinical example is presented of a patient who, partly due to anxiety and fear, wants to opt out of further evaluation of his hematuria while the physician believes that the patient must follow up on the finding of hematuria.

Background: As patients struggle in making decisions about their medical care, physician interactions can become strained and medical care may become compromised.

Is there a reciprocal relationship between symptoms and affect in asthma?

This is a hypothesis-seeking case study. It is the product of naturalistic research on one asthmatic patient seen 212 times in individual psychotherapy over a period of 32 months. Both retrospective and prospective data were gathered, the prospective phase beginning about halfway into the therapy.

Sartre's contribution to the understanding of narcissism.

As a means for presenting Sartre's insights into the narcissistic problems of the self, we have used his phenomenological system as articulated in Being and Nothingness (1943) to illuminate these issues in the personality of Roquentin, the hero of his novel Nausea (1938). Roquentin attempts to stabilize his fragmenting self and to avoid "nausea" by using three mechanisms which Sartre argues maintain the self from drowning in the objects of the self. These are "reflection," "temporality" (continuity through time), and "being-for-others" (how we experience another's view of ourselves).