Lady Acheson’s Privy for Two

This chapter offers a new view of Jonathan Swift's “excremental vision” by approaching it not as a personal quirk or neurotic symptom but as a perceptive critique of the excretory autonomy that flushable water closets would soon come to embody. It talks about the country-house poets that had traditionally celebrated abundant fields and communal feasts in the great hall as signs of Swift's generosity. It confirms that in Swift's mock country-house poem “Panegyric on the Dean,” he imagined the pair of his-and-hers privies built on Lord and Lady Acheson's country estate. The chapter also analyzes why the poem is at odds with the natural cycles of regeneration and feudal hospitality that it sent the mind away from the earth, the cosmos, and other people in a burlesque of closet prayer. It mentions that Swift tried to preempt Lady Acheson's desire to circulate the poem by casting her as the speaker in his first scatological poem.

The Wolf Man’s Glückshaube: Rereading Sergei Pankejeff’s Memoir

A comparative reading of Freud’s canonical case study “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1918) and the memoir written by the protagonist of that study, Sergei Pankejeff, known as the Wolf Man (1971a), centers on the complex matrix of meanings embodied in the act of lifting the veil. The neurotic symptom of a veil seemingly in front of the analysand’s eyes is interpreted by Freud as a repetition of his birth in a Glückshaube (German for “caul,” literally a “lucky hood”). The veil is represented as an ambivalent object both for Freud and for Pankejeff, who are enticed by the sense of a final truth behind the veil yet constantly doubt the possibility of grasping it. For Freud, psychoanalysis is the very process of lifting the veil, yet his analysand remained for him an unsolved riddle. Pankejeff, in a volume dedicated to his identity as the Wolf Man (Gardiner 1971a), created an autobiographical text that deliberately avoids telling the story of the analysand, thus drawing a veil over his story. The paradox embodied in lifting the veil is discussed in relation to Walter Benjamin’s distinction between materiality and truth and his notion of the inherent unity of the veil and the veiled (1925).

A clinical guide to assessing level of ego development using psychological testing

This article presents a clinical guide for relating psychological test findings from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 and Rorschach Technique to various levels of ego development. The original three validity and 10 clinical scales from the MMPI and a selected group of traditional determinants from the Rorschach are employed. Expected testing results from these instruments are derived from both the authors' clinical experience and the research literature. These results are presented along a continuum of nine levels of ego development and their associated disorders. The nine levels of ego development are “normal” neurotic, neurotic trait, and neurotic symptom organization; high-, mid-, and low-level borderline organization; and affective, cognitive-affective, and cognitive psychotic organization. The relationships between typical testing responses and indices of personality functioning at each level of ego development would hopefully facilitate accurate diagnosis, which in turn would result in more effective treatment planning.

CORRIGENDUM

Brugha, T. S., Morgan, Z., Bebbington, P., Jenkins, R., Lewis, G., Farrell, M. & Meltzer, H. (2003). Social support networks and type of neurotic symptom among adults in British households. Psychological Medicine33, 307–318.The authors have informed us that in this paper the 95% confidence interval for each odds ratio was miscalculated in analyses, the published estimates being wider than they should be. The terms Perceived Social Support and Primary Support Group 3 or Less, were reversed in Table 5 and in the Results section text. The main conclusion is substantially unaltered, which is that there is a higher risk of depression, depressive ideas and panic symptoms, than of any other neurotic symptom, in subjects with a Primary Support Group of three or less and in subjects with low perceived social support in all six logistic models. The revised Table 5 is published overleaf.

Social support networks and type of neurotic symptom among adults in British households

Background. Current knowledge about associations between psychosocial factors and non-psychotic symptoms provide little information about their relationship to specific types of neurotic symptoms such as symptoms of fatigue, worry, phobic anxiety and obsessional symptoms.Method. The British National Survey of Psychiatric Morbidity was based on a cross-sectional random sample of 10108 householders. Neurotic symptoms were established by lay interviewers using the revised fully structured Clinical Interview Schedule (CIS-R). Subjects were asked about perceived social support, the size of their close primary social network and sociodemographic attributes. To assess possible associations between specific types of neurotic symptoms and psychosocial risk factors multivariate Huber logistic models (a modified form of repeated measures design modelling) was used taking account of correlation between symptom types and sampling design including clustering.Results. After controlling for sociodemographic factors the risk of having a high total CIS-R score ([ges ]12) was approximately doubled for both types of poor social functioning. Specific types of neurotic symptoms were associated both with a small primary group and with inadequate perceived social support. Depression, depressive ideas and panic symptoms had a higher prevalence in multivariate models. Poverty was associated with low support.Conclusions. Associations with deficiencies in social support and self-reported neurotic symptoms are better explained by symptom type and in particular by depression than by the total number of symptoms. If confirmed by longitudinal study findings this knowledge could be used to inform the development of interventions to improve social support in order to reduce specific neurotic symptom types.

Common mental disorder symptom counts in populations: are there distinct case groups above epidemiological cut-offs?

Background. At the lower end of IQ distributions in general populations, there is a clear excess of cases, representing the distinct pathology of severe learning disability. This study aimed to establish whether such a subpopulation exists in distributions of common mental disorder and depression symptom scores, above epidemiological ‘case’ cut-offs.Method. Data from 9556 non-psychotic respondents to the 1993 OPCS (Office of Population Censuses and Surveys) National Household Psychiatric Morbidity Survey were analysed. The distribution of total neurotic symptom and depression scores from the revised Clinical Interview Schedule were examined. Automated least squares methods were used to fit the best single statistical distribution to the data.Results. A single exponential curve provided the best fit for the whole population, but floor effects produced deviations at symptom counts of 0–3. After truncation, exponential distributions fitted excellently. Proportions of the population above conventional cut-offs of [ges ]12 symptoms differed by <12% from expected for a range of low and high prevalence groups. The single exponential model also fitted the depression score.Conclusions. Symptom counts for the common mental disorders fall within single population distributions, with little apparent numerical excess in the case range. High and low prevalences of these disorders appear to be population characteristics, with shifts in exponential means predicting proportions above case cut-offs.