Ch. 4: Death and Psychopathology

Question 1

Assumption of the chapter

Answer 1

Psychopathology is a graceless, inefficient mode of coping with anxiety.

Question 2

Psychopathology, by definition

Kierkegaard

Rank

Tillich

Becker

Lifton

Answer 2

Psychopathology, by definition, is an ineffective defensive mode

• Even defensive maneuvers that successfully ward off severe anxiety can prevent growth and result in a constricted and unsatisfying life
• Kierkegaard knew: “Man limits and diminishes himself in order to avoid perception of the terror, perdition, and annihilation that dwell next door to any man”
• Rank: “Neurotic is one who refused the loan (life) in order to avoid the payment of the debt (death).”
• Paul Tillich: “Neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being.”
• Ernest Becker: “The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”
• R. J. Lifton used the term “psychic numbing” to describe how the neurotic individual shields himself from death anxiety

Question 3

Naked death anxiety

Answer 3

• Shouldn’t be a surprise by now, as we’ve rarely seen it visible in it’s pristine form
• The defensive structures exist for the purpose of internal camouflage
• Eventually the core conflict is deeply buried and can be inferred only after laborious analysis of these maneuvers

Question 4

Process of developing secondary anxiety

Answer 4

E.g.: an individual may guard themselves against death anxiety by maintaining a symbiotic tie to their mother

• This may succeed short-term, but later will itself become a source of secondary anxiety
• These challenges may lead to social anxiety and self-contempt
• New defenses may arise that temper dysphoria but retard growth and generate additional layers of anxiety and defense
• Soon the core conflict deep under layers of defenses and the excavation of the primary anxiety becomes exceedingly difficult
• Death anxiety is not evident, it is discovered through a study of dreams, fantasies, psychotic utterances or through a painstaking analysis of the onset of neurotic symptoms
• Loesser & Bry report that first phobic attacks that are analyzed carefully are invariably characterized by a breakthrough of death anxiety
• Later attacks are confounded by the presence of elaborations, substitutions, and displacements

The secondary forms of anxiety are nonetheless “real” anxiety, e.g. social anxiety!

Question 5

Level of patient concerns

Answer 5

The therapist begins the therapy on the level of patient concerns:

• Assisting patient by offering support
• Propping up adaptive defenses
• Helping to correct constructive interpersonal modes of interaction

Question 6

Why specialness and ultimate rescuer?

Answer 6

Yalom finds it useful to base a clinical paradigm on the beliefs of specialness and of the ultimate rescuer. These two beliefs are particularly powerful, because they receive reinforcement from two sources:

• From the circumstances of early life
• From widespread culturally sanctioned myths involving immortality systems and the existence of a personal, observing deity

Question 7

Mike & Sam

Answer 7

Mike had a highly malignant lymphoma at 25 and though a new form of chemotherapy offered his only chance of survival he refused to cooperate in treatment

• After high school he went into contracting and soon he had mastered all trades - carpentry, electrical work, plumbing, masonry
• He built several houses, sold them at substantial profits, bought a boat, married, and sailed with his wife around the world
• He was attracted to the self-sufficient individualistic culture that he had found in an underdeveloped country and was preparing to emigrate until his cancer was discovered
• Mike had a strikingly irrational attitude toward chemo
• Couldn’t sleep the night before therapy
• Developed severe anxiety
• Obsessed about methods of avoiding treatment
• He did know it had something to do with immobility and helplessness

Sam was approximately same age as Mike, but otherwise nothing like him

• He came to see Yalom after wife left him, he was not literally confronted by death but Sam’s situation was similar on a symbolic level
• Sam, as opposed to Mike’s “individuation” existed in a state of “fusion”
• After the losses of his father and his mother, he formed close, intense ties
• He was everyone’s handyman and perpetual babysitter (to cousins etc.) and an inveterate gift giver, bestowing money and time on a large number of adults
• Nothing seemed more important than to be loved and cared for
• After his wife left him, he felt he only existed if someone loved him
• Alone, he only took care of his most primitive needs - no washing, no reading, no cleaning. “Pointless to expend energy unless I am certain it will be returned to me by another”
• He did not exist unless there was someone there to validate his existence
• Despite loneliness, he did not take steps to alleviate it
• Yalom made a number of practical suggestions to meet friends: singles’ events, church social activities, Sierra Club events, adult education courses etc. - sam didn’t take any of it, he was afraid of missing a phone call!
• Gradually I understood: it was not important for Sam to be with others, it was to confirm his faith in an ultimate rescuer
• Eventually, he became more comfortable thanks to Yalom’s support and “fusion” with another woman and lost interest in psychotherapy

Question 8

What do we learn from Mike & Sam?

Answer 8

Two fundamentally different coping modes:

• Mike believed deeply in his specialness and personal inviolability
• His sense of self-sufficiency was hypertrophied

Sam believed deeply in the existence of an ultimate rescuer

• Sam did not exist alone but strove to fuse with another
• These two modes are not mutually exclusive! They do constitute a useful dialectic which permits the clinician to understand a wide variety of situations

Question 9

Alternatives to the existential paradigm to Mike & Sam’s situations

Answer 9

Mike: schizoid, rebellious conflict with parents, counterdependency, oedipal struggle, homosexual panic (?!)

Sam: passive-dependent, identification with Mother and unresolved grief, castration anxiety

Question 10

raison d’être of the Existential Paradigm

Answer 10

The existential is one paradigm among many and it’s raison d’être is its clinical usefulness
The therapist may understand why Mike and Sam responded so powerfully to their painful situations, why Sam balked the situations by avoiding taking responsibility for himself
- It permits the therapist to engage patient at the deepest levels
- It is based on an understanding of primary anxiety that exists in the immediate present: symptoms as a response to current death anxiety and not past trauma
- Thus it enhances awareness, immediacy, and choice

Question 11

Specialness & Ivan Ilyich

Answer 11

Noone has ever described the deep irrational belief in our own specialness more powerfully than Tolstoy through the lips of Ivan Ilyich:

The syllogism he had learnt from Kiezewetter’s Logic:

“Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,” had always seemed correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. /…/ He was not Caius, an abstract man, but a creature quite separate from all others. /…/ What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of? Had Caius kissed his mother’s hand like that, and did the like of her dress rustle so for Caius? Had he rioted like that at school when the pastry was bad? Had Caius been in love like that? /…/ “Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my thoughts and emotions, it’s altogether a different matter. It cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible.”

Question 12

Yalom & Optometrist

Answer 12

No one at a conscious level denies that we are no different to others in the basic boundaries of existence. Yet deep down each of us believes that mortality applies to others.
Sometimes we are surprised by our own irrationality on this matter.

Yalom:
I had to complain to my optometrist that my glasses don’t work as well anymore, and he asked my age. “Forty-eight”. Optometrist: “Yep. Right on schedule.” Yalom thought inside: “What schedule? Who’s on schedule? You or others may be on a schedule, but certainly not I.”

Question 13

Varying responses in Yalom’s cancer patients

Answer 13

• Many patients for some time do not hear their physician tell them their prognosis
• Some become aware in staccato fashion: brief moment of awareness, brief terror, denial, internal processing, preparedness for more information
• For others the associated anxiety flood in with a terrible rush
• One patient had performed all the mechanical tasks of dying - will, burial plot etc. - mechanically, but only realized that she’s going to die after writing a letter to children and realizing that she can’t be there to see their reactions, to guide them
• Another parent talked to teenage sons about her cancer, they were sad but took it well. This frightened her, because although she was proud about having raised them well, she was also troubled that they will thrive without her

Question 14

Adaptiveness of Specialness

Answer 14

The belief in personal specialness is extraordinarily adaptive and permits us to emerge from nature and tolerate the accompanying dysphoria

Question 15

COMPULSIVE HEROISM

Answer 15

For many, heroic individuation represents the best that man can do in light of his existential situation.
Greek writer Kazantzakis through the lips of Ulysses: “live life so completely that we leave death nothing but a burned out castle”

Push it a bit too far and the defense becomes overextended: the hero becomes a compulsive hero who like Mike is driven to face danger in order to escape a greater danger within

Hemingway, the prototypical compulsive hero, searched for danger throughout life to conquer it to prove there is no danger

Yalom: “Hemingway was ironically afraid of nothing because he was afraid of nothingness” - Hemingway represents a runaway of the emergent, individualistic solution to the human situation

Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea approaches death as any other basic life threat - by going out alone to search for the great fish

As Hemingway grew older and it became more evident to him that he will die like all others, he became depressed and even a paranoic psychotic, eventually committing suicide

Many suicide committers: “I so fear death I am driven to suicide.”

Question 16

THE WORKAHOLIC

Answer 16

A commonplace example of a compulsively heroic individualist - “getting ahead”, “progressing”.

• Time is an enemy not only because it is cousin to finitude but because it threatens one of the supports of the delusion of specialness: the belief that one is eternally advancing
• Leisure time is a time of anxiety and often frantically filled with some activity that conveys an illusion of accomplishment
• A frantic fight with time may be indicative of a powerful death fear

Getting ahead of what? How? And why? Lulling ourselves info a death-deafening delusion by continually projecting myself forward into the future

Question 17

Florence Kluckholm three vategories of value orientations

Answer 17

1. Being: Emphasises activity rather than the goal
2. Being-in-becoming: Emphasizes development, activity toward the goal of the development of all aspects of the self
   3: Doing: Emphasises accomplishments measureable by standards outside of the acting individual

The western culture is obviously focused on the “doing”, “getting things done”.

Question 18

Keynes & kittens

Answer 18

John Maynard Keynes: “What the ‘purposeful’ man is always trying to secure is a spurious and illusive immortality, immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward in time. He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor, in truth the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of catdom.”

Question 19

Tolstoy in Anna Karenina

Answer 19

Tolstoy in Anna Karenina: “That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived.” The defense, if successful, shields the individual from the knowledge of the chasm. The broken bridge, the failed defense, exposes one to a truth and a dread that an individual in midlife following decades of self-deception is ill equipped to confront.

Question 20

NARCISSISM

Answer 20

The person who copes with basic anxiety with a prepotent belief in his or her specialness will often encounter major difficulties in interpersonal relationships - if it corresponds with a diminished recognition of the specialness of the other.

Question 21

Group therapy for narcissism

Answer 21

Narcissism comes out more easily in group therapy than in individual therapy.

• Sharing time is hard
• Some patients feel they may offend others but are exempt from personal criticism
• Anyone with whom they fall in love with will reciprocate in kind
• They should not have to wait for others
• They expect gifts, surprises even though they give none
• They expect to be loved and admired simply for being there
• The therapist has to point out over and over again that these aspects are only valid once in life: when one is an infant and can demand unconditional love from mother without any question of reciprocation

Question 22

Hal the incredible physicist

Answer 22

Hal was an incredible physicist, sharp-tongued, and took 40% of the time in an 8-person group. The group got tired of it, he got more angry and also more angry outside of the group with his wife and his students.
- The group asked “What are you so angry about?”
“I’m angry because I’m better than everyone here, and nobody recognises me for it. I’m smarter, I’m quicker, I’m better and, goddammit, nobody appreciates me. I should be rich - Arabian rich - I should be recognized as a Renaissance man, but I’m treated just like everybody else.”
- Airing these feelings helped to consider them rationally and he also practiced empathy with the group by going around and trying to guess the feelings of each person
- Over time he learned that other people are not there just to draw support from for his own solipsism
- Another patient only realized his own self-centeredness when he saw a videotape of a previous group session and realized that he had only remembered parts that were about him

Question 23

AGGRESSION & CONTROL

Answer 23

One’s own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one’s sphere of control.

• Could apply to some jobs (soldiers, doctors, priests) - Feifel has shown that although physicians have less conscious death concern than patients or the general population, they have fear of death at deeper levels (couldn’t access reference :()
• In other words, conscious fears are avoided by assuming power, but deeper fears operate still

Rank: “death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying”

• Refers to more than literal killing, also domination, exploitation, “soul murder”
• Absolute power corrupts absolutely because it does not do the trick for the individual - reality always creeps in: everyone has to face death

Question 24

THE DEFENSE OF THE SPECIALNESS: FALTERING & ANXIETY

Answer 24

The person who “emerges from embeddedness” must pay a price - there is something frightening about individuation, about separating oneself from the whole.

Question 25

Success neurosis

Answer 25

Success neurosis”, “Wrecked by success syndrome” (Freud), “life anxiety” (Rank), and Maslow: “Jonah complex” because Jonah like all of us could not bear his personal greatness and sought to avoid his destiny

How to explain this self-negating human tendency?

Perhaps some people use achievement as a method of vindictively surpassing others; they fear that others will become aware of their motives and retaliate when success becomes too great.

Freud: fear of surpassing one’s father and thereby exposing oneself to castration xD

Becker: it’s not being afraid of castration but being afraid of becoming one’s own father
- This means to relinquish the comforting but magical parental buttress against the pain inherent in one’s awareness of personal finiteness

The individual who plunges into life is doomed to anxiety - being “one’s own god” means utter isolation.

Question 26

The Ultimate Rescuer

Answer 26

When our belief in personal specialness fails to provide the surcease from pain that we require, we seek the other major alternative: the belief in a personal ultimate rescuer.

In both the physical and the social development of the individual, the development of the species is mirrored. In nowhere else is this more clear than in our belief in the existence of a personal force that eternally observes, loves, and protects us.
Fromm: “magic helper”
Masserman: “omnipotent servant”
No early culture has ever believed that humans were alone in an indifferent world

Question 27

Rostov in “War and Peace”

Answer 27

Some individuals discover their rescuer not in a supernatural being but in their earthly surroundings, either in a leader or in some higher cause. Tolstoy’s Rostov in War and Peace:

“He was entirely absorbed in the feeling of happiness at the Tsar being near. /…/ … as the Tsar came nearer, everything grew brighter, more joyful and significant, and more festive. /…/ And Rostov got up and went out to wander about the campfires, dreaming of what happiness it would be to die - not saving the Emperor’s life - (of that he did not dare to dream), but simply to die before the Emperor’s eyes. He really was in love with the Tsar and the glory of the Russian arms and the hope of victory.”

Question 28

Effectiveness of Ultimate Rescuer

Answer 28

Overall the ultimate rescuer defense is less effective than the belief in personal specialness.

• More likely to break down
• More intrinsically restrictive

Question 29

Kierkegaard’s venturing

Answer 29

Kierkegaard contrasts “venturing” (specialness) and not venturing (fusion):

… it is dangerous to venture. And why? Because one may lose. Not to venture is shrewd. And yet, by not venturing, it is so dreadfully easy to lose that which it would be difficult to lose in even the most venturesome venture, … one’s self.

Question 30

Case of Lena

Answer 30

To lose oneself means the failure to have explored or developed the manifold potentials within oneself.

• Lena was a patient who had lost her mum at 5 and dad at 12. He became clingy to grandparents, and as an adult an isolated 30 year old in group therapy
• Everything about her looked like she was a girl stuck in midadolescence
• She only talked about bad things that have happened to her and accordingly the other group members took it as a task to keep her alive (eating, no suicide etc.)
• During one session she talked about a car crash when she had to drive 150 miles to visit a friend
• Therapist: “150 miles for a friend? What friend?”
• Turned out that she had a boyfriend for a long time that she was visiting every weekend
• She had not shared that with the group to keep eliciting concern and care
• She also exhibited more transference to the therapist, e.g. when he had made mistakes or took vacation

Question 31

THE COLLAPSE OF THE RESCUER: Fatal illnesses

Answer 31

Many patients are angry at the doctor failing them - not medically but failing to incarnate the patient’s personal myth of an ultimate deliverer

Sidenote: Doctor’s often become the ultimate rescuers for the patient and thus confirm their own specialness by doing so as well. Sometimes it’s so important for a patient that the doctor retains their powerful position that they conceal information from them, thus the doctor becomes the last to know about the patient’s despair. Consequently, physicians are notoriously reluctant to refer terminally ill patients for psychological treatment

Question 32

THE COLLAPSE OF THE RESCUER: Depression

Answer 32

When depressed individuals live their life for a “dominant other” and the other is lost from life - because of death, leaving, withdrawal of affection - then the individual’s belief system falls apart.
- Restructuring a life ideology is beyond comprehension, and many patients conclude they are too worthless or bad to warrant the love and protection of the ultimate rescuer

Question 33

THE COLLAPSE OF THE RESCUER: Masochism

Answer 33

Karen was a 42-year-old patient, who Yalom treated for 2 years
Got powerful transference towards Yalom too, but not the main point imo (visited his lectures, stayed longer, got his signatures on notes, had masturbatory fantasies of her getting sick and him cradling her
- Interestingly, sexual masochism: to be punished was to be protected - it meant that limits were being set and that some powerful figure was setting them
- Yalom saw that working together would start limiting Karen and set an end date. Karen wrote amazingly scary poems and threatened with suicide:

Death is no pretense.
It is as stark as reality,
as complete a presence as life itself,
the other ultimate choice.

I feel myself running into shadows,
clothing myself in cobwebs,
hiding from the reality you thrust at me.
I want to hold up my dark cloak, death,
and threaten you with it.

Do you understand?
I will wrap myself in this if you persist.

Yalom maintained his position and Karen began to improve during the last sessions, allowing to use them constructively and exploring her strengths and growth. She rapidly found a full-time job and kept it (they had contact two years later).

Question 34

THE COLLAPSE OF THE RESCUER: The Rescuer Defense and Interpersonal Difficulties

Bonnie

Delores

Martha

Irene

Answer 34

Bonnie was not able to leave a man who he married 22 years ago, but 10 years ago, after Bonnie got ill and couldn’t keep up with the outdoorsy man’s fishing expeditions, the man only came home twice a week to wash laundry and other times was doing business and sleeping with other women. Bonnie was not able to divorce him. Even though she was enraged by him, at other times she enamored him.

Delores was so desperate for marriage that after several broken relationships at 31 she married, but to a person who controlled every aspect of her life, setting strict schedules for the day (9:00-10:15 gardening). Delores’s anxiety before the relationship was like bliss compared to the prison she lived in now. Yet she couldn’t leave her, Yalom’s questions in that direction were enough to elicit anxious hyperventilation.

Martha had a relationship with a member of a mysterious religious group who believed that the less commitments a person has the freeer they are. The person was barely available but Martha became obsessed with the idea of marrying specifically to that person. Couldn’t move on

All ultimate rescuer examples of people looking for the comfort they had from their parents in childhood instead of confronting the void

Similarly, Irene had a bitch of an old mother but she still invited the mother to live with herself, because at least when she had this bitch around then she had assurance that someone is looking out for her

Question 35

Rank’s “fear of life” & “fear of death”

Answer 35

Rank reflected on these two states by calling them “fear of life” and “fear of death”

“Fear of life” is the original trauma, fear of individuation and separating from others, the whole

“Fear of death” is the fear of extinction, loss of individuality, being dissolved again to the whole

Rank: “Individuals are thrown back and forth all their life”. Yalom: “One goes in one direction until the anxiety outweighs the relief of the defense, and then one moves in the other direction.”

Question 36

Lena & Karen & Rob & Don & Tim

Answer 36

Yalom refers back to Lena who was very high on life anxiety and always looking for comfort but also when she got it from others then she got death anxiety and did things like driving aimlessly all night.

Karen’s poem:

I want to shake, like a dog out of water,
to free myself from your influence.
I was too free with you,
let you too near my heart
and got stuck like flesh to icy metal.
Warm to me, and let me go.
To free myself, I must tear flesh,
make wounds that will not heal.

Is that what you want from me?

Example of Don, a 19-year-old who wanted to be more free, but everytime freedom was offered he didn’t take it (e.g. asked parents not to interrupt with college selection, but then was too late to get into any of the ones he wanted to).

Example of Rob, a 30 year old business executive, who cross-dressed in private. His mother died when he was young. His cross-dressing fantasies were never sexual, rather he wanted to be part of the women because he felt so stressed from being an achieving man. Yalom thinks that he wanted to fuse with his mother, seek the ultimate rescuer because he had gone too far with specialness through his achievements and got “fear of life”

Sexual activity to avoid death anxiety: Tim became extremely promiscuous when his wife got leukemia. Started masturbating twice a day, watching pornography, visiting singles’ bars and sought out a prostitute on the night of the funeral.

Question 37

THE COST OF NEUROTIC ADAPTATION

Answer 37

Behavior becomes “neurotic” when it is extreme and rigid; hypertrophy of either of the major defenses results in neurotic adaptation.

What Rank meant with neurotic refuses the loan of life to escape the debt of death: he buys himself free from the fear of death by daily partial self-destruction.

Also guilt: “When we protect ourselves… from a too intensive or too quick living out or living up, we feel ourselves guilty on account of the unused life, the unlived life in us.”

Question 38

Schizophrenia and the Fear of Death

Answer 38

Though biochemical component, schizophrenia can be apprehended also from a longitudinal (historical) and a cross-sectional (phenomenological) perspective.

Question 39

Harold Searles on schizophrenia

Answer 39

“The ostensibly prosaic fact of the inevitability of death is one of the supremely potent sources of man’s anxiety. /…/ The responses to this aspect are one of the most intense experiences… /…/ The oftentimes exotic-appearing defenses found in schizophrenia are designed to keep out the simple fact of life’s finitude.”

Of course, the schizophrenic responses are more extreme than neurotic’s and also probably the early life experiences are more extreme. However, Searles: “these defense-mechanisms are also to cope with present-day sources of anxiety.” - none is bigger than death anxiety

Question 40

Searles’s example with female patient

Answer 40

• She believed that her deceased parents are alive
• She gathered old leaves and magazines and birds and animals and attempted to bring these to life through alchemic process
• After 3,5 years of therapy Searles got to a point with her where she started realizing that things are finite and will die, he also extended it to humans.
• She realized that she was not God and that we humans are mortal. The very foundation of her paranoid schizophrenic illness was now crumbling, an illness which had involved her years-long conviction that both her deceased parents were still living.

Question 41

Symptoms of schizophrenic and neurotic patients differ (3)

Answer 41

Although symptoms of schizophrenic and neurotic patients differ, they stem from similar aspects.

The delusions of grandeur stem from specialness.

1. Many if not all schizophrenic patients are unable to experience themselves as fully alive - thus they don’t have to fear death.
   - Searles: “A person cannot bear to face the prospect of inevitable death until he has had the experience of fully living, and the schizophrenic has not yet fully lived.”
2. A second reason that the schizophrenic is overwhelmed by death anxiety is because the patient has suffered enormous losses early in development that he or she has not been able to integrate them.
3. Third source of intense death anxiety emanates from the relationship to the mother: the patient (nor the mother) never develops the sense of wholeness necessary to experience life fully.
   - Patient perceives that the symbiotic relationship is absolutely necessary to survival. /…/ Sense of profound helplessness in feeling hate toward the person he or she most loves, and similarly, from knowing that this same person loves him or her with great intensity. - This requires a continued maintenance of fantasy.

Question 42

Believers of ultimate rescuer vs specialness

Answer 42

Ultimate rescuer believer:

• Will look for strength outside himself,
• Will take a dependent and supplicant pose towards others,
• will repress aggression,
• may show masochistic trends,
• and may become deeply depressed at the loss of a dominant other.

Specialness believer:

• May be narcissistic,
• Often a compulsive achiever
• Likely to direct aggression outward
• Self-reliant to the point of rejecting necessary help
• Harshly unaccepting of own personal limits
• Sometimes grandiose trends

These are not empirical - just like the ideas of Fromm, Freud, Sullivan, Horney, Jung - and like other clinical ideas are evaluated by their usefulness. However there are analogous personality constructs that have been studied along to avenues of inquiry: cognitive styles and personality research on locus of control.

Question 43

Field dependence and field independence

Answer 43

Witkin, 1949, field dependence and field independence - analogous to ultimate rescuer and specialness.

Field dependent: parts of the field are experiences as part of the background, global organization
Field independent: parts of the field are experienced as discrete from the background

Question 44

Embedded figures test

Answer 44

Think of the “simple form” (i.e. the triangle) that is hidden into the more complex figure - it’s a high box, and the top side basically has a cross on it. The triangle is the same form as half of the top of the high box.

Question 45

Differences between field dependent and field independent people

Answer 45

Intellectual activities: field-independent better at solving problems that require the isolation of a central element from its context

Body image: field-dependent demonstrate little detail, and unrealistic representation of proportion and body parts

Identity: field-independent have an awareness of needs, feelings, attributes that they recognize as their own. Field-dependent are better at recognizing faces of those who they have seen earlier

Death denial: field-dependent tends towards ultimate rescuer and field-independent towards specialness

Psychopathology (PS! Yalom: “Field-dependence and field-independence are derived entirely from empirical studies of perceptual and cognitive function but are devoid of subjective content.” Here he adds that.):

• Field dependent has severe identity problems, passivity, helplessness; Lack of development of a “sense of separate identity”, such as alcoholism, obesity, depression, hallucinations (vs delusions in field dependent), transference
• Field-independent likely aggression, delusion, expansive and euphoric, paranoid, depressive compulsive, no transference

Psychotherapy: field-independent favor either directive or passive, observational approach; field-dependent favor personal and mutual relationships

Question 46

LOCUS OF CONTROL

Answer 46

Rotter and Phares were the first, but later many researchers interested in this field. Does one feel that one controls the events of their life, or does one feel that these events occur independently of one’s actions?

Question 47

Internal-External scale

Answer 47

Measured with the I.E. (Internal-External scale)
E.g. Choose a or b: A - people are lonely because they don’t try to be friendly; B - there’s not much use in trying too hard to please people, if they like you they like you.

“Internals” have an internal locus of control and feel they control their personal destiny (more power seeking, more achieving, more politically active); “externals” place control externally and look outside for answers, support, guidance (suggestible, smokers, high risks at gambling, lower in achievement).

We may integrate these findings on a continuum with field dependency, locus of external control and ultimate rescuer belief on one side and field independency, locus of internal control and specialness belief on the other side.
Externals are more likely to have psychopathology