Extraordinary Person Research Articles

Restitutional Functions of Symbol and Myth in Strindberg's Inferno

We are here together to honor the memory of Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, to try to assure that the vast good she did in her lifetime continues to live after her. Frieda was an extraordinary and memorable person. Among my many cherished memories of her is an indelible image of her climbing the podium steps carrying her notes and several pictures almost larger than herself. These were to illustrate her lectures in a course she called “The Assets of the Mentally Handicapped.” They included, for instance, prints of paintings by van Gogh. A principal purpose of this course was to present her staunch conviction that it was a grievous error to view severe mental illness, particularly schizophrenia, only as a loss, defect, or deficiency of mind as suggested by the earlier diagnostic term dementia praecox. She contended with great cogency that it was not simply a matter of the schizophrenic person's lacking normal mental capacities but that he often possessed qualities of mind not available to the so-called normal, average person. She pointed to the schizophrenic person's special sensitivity to nuances of meaning, his freedom to deviate from conventional stereotyped views of reality, and his openness to new perceptions of similarities and connections overlooked by others. She emphasized a striving to discover and to create fresh patterns of meaning.

CancerScope

CancerScope

Narrative House: A Metaphor For Narrative Therapy: Tribute To Michael White

This article is a tribute to Michael White, co-founder of narrative therapy, who passed away on 5 April 2008. Michael White and David Epston founded a substantial and ground-breaking psychological movement based on narrative therapy. Michael touched with dignity and changed for the better the lives of thousands. Michael White was an extraordinary person: philosopher, scientist and psychologist, who has opened alternative opportunities of hope to individuals through narrative therapy. Michael will be mourned by many; his teachings will be celebrated by many more. May the richness of his legacy flourish. A discussion follows concerning the theory of narrative therapy. This is illustrated by picture, depicting the main constructs of narrative therapy (figure 1), representing a metaphor of narrative therapy. This picture is in line with the therapeutic method of drawing pictures of metaphors in the counselling process, as propagated by White and Epston, and illustrated on DVD by David Epston: Narrative therapy with a young boy (Epston, 2002). The aim of the paper is not to give a linear representation of what narrative therapy should be, but rather to illustrate the main facets of narrative therapy. IFE PsychologIA Vol. 16 (2) 2008: pp. 255-274

Divine Right: Mark Twain's Joan of Arc

Most readers have not agreed with Mark Twain in liking Joan of Arc best of all his novels, particularly because his hand is almost invisible in it. He presents the story as a translation by “Jean Francois Alden” of the remembrances of “Sieur Louis de Conte.” He did not think readers would take a work by “Mark Twain” seriously. Only the initials S. L. C. indicate the connection between the actual and the presumed author. Twain considered Joan to be “the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.” She was a woman—and a general. She genuinely believed that she was acting on the basis of commands from God. In relating her story, Twain nevertheless shows that nothing human, and certainly no government and no ruler, is entitled to divine honors or right.

Good Country People from Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina

Commemoration Linda Flowers (November 8, 1944-January 21, 2000), child of tenant farmers in Duplin County, North Carolina, came into this world with a powerful native intelligence and wit that carried her successfully through youthful public education in her hometown of Faison, on to an undergraduate degree from University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and then to post-graduate degrees from Ohio State University (M.A.) and University of Rochester (M.A., Ph.D.). A fellow at Folger Library in Washington, D.C., in 1977, she arrived at North Carolina Wesleyan College in Rocky Mount in 1980, where she became professor of English, served as chairman of English department, chairman of faculty, and ran Visiting Writers' Series, among much other service and leadership she gave to both college and community. She was on executive committee of North Carolina Humanities Council, and she was also a member of Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. Professor Flowers's funeral and burial were in Faison on January 23, and she was further eulogized in Russell Chapel at North Carolina Wesleyan on January 31. Everything about her reflected and expressed her tenacious grasp upon this truth: that telling truth matters, said one colleague at her funeral, adding, being polite, but telling truth. At Wesleyan service, another called her the woman who loved felicitously written word. That we lost her too soon is a certainty, yet it is no less certain that her life was in every way exemplary, a triumph. Out of deep respect for this extraordinary person and in remembrance of her and her work, we offer here Good Country People, epilogue from her much-admired Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina, which was published in 1993, and which is reprinted here courtesy of her publisher, University of Tennessee Press. You don't see them much anymore. Not in Rocky Mount and Goldsboro, Wilson, Smithfield and Clinton; in Faison, yes, in little towns like that, sometimes. Especially if on Saturday you buy your groceries at one of less-than-grand supermarkets, your clothes, when you have to have them, at dry-goods store. They stay out of shopping malls, away from stores dazzling as operating rooms. At Christmas nine, everybody sees them (but tries not to); they stumble along, slower than other people, more uncertain, as if they're not quite sure where they are. As for men, you can spot them without too much trouble. At tractor places, filling stations where they go to pass time of day, run-down ones; they're driving battered pickup trucks and looking out across land, poking along at forty and forty-five. But they're not as common as they used to be, these old farmers in faded overalls, in khaki shirts washed thin and almost white, brogans, hats usually: dusty as a March field. And women, country women of my childhood are as scarce now almost as hen's teeth. Oh, but they were something! The beauty they'd had as girls wrung out of them, and in its place another: faces composed, purposeful as iron. A look that went right through you, bottomless and sad. People my mother's age, blacks who had known her all her life, would stop me on street sometimes and after getting it right (Ain'cha Miss Geneva's gift? Ain'cha now? Ain'cha?), they'd tell me what a fine-looking woman my mama had been; how in fields chopping, picking cotton maybe, she could outwork anybody, them too, and did. They said she hasn't need for conversation (all sech as that), and suffered no fools, gladly or otherwise, that she was all business, as good as her word and meant what she said. They'd tell me they knew my people. Sho' do! Mist'Jim ... Miss Annie, all of em! And they did. To have stood there on sidewalk with these people, six or seven or eight years old, year 1950, 1951, 1952, on a Saturday more than likely, and Faison full to beat band, old black women congregated in doorways, come to town. …

Lexical Agraphia in the Writing of George Fox

Lexical Agraphia in the Writing of George Fox by Raymond Ayoub and David Roeltgen* Introduction and purpose George Fox (1 624-1 691) was an extraordinary person in many ways, yet there is an aspect of his life and works which, we feel, requires some clarification and explanation. That aspect deals with his writing and written expression, in contrast to his reported verbal skills. Virtually all of the writings attributed to him are the result of dictations to scribes or are transcriptions from various sources. While these works are very extensive, there is but a negligible amount (about 30 samples) in his own handwriting and these typically are lacking in syntactic, linguistic and grammatical structure. These deficiencies have been recognized by writers, but no compelling explanation has been proposed. To account for these shortcomings, we suggest, in this essay, that Fox was afflicted with congenital or acquired agraphia of the type called lexical. Agraphia is a neurological condition which can severely inhibit the victim's ability to transfer thoughts into written form. Several forms of agraphia have been identified and these are rooted in distinct cerebral pathology. It is only recently, however, that some insight into the neurological basis of the various forms has been proposed and studied. One of the authors (Roeltgen) has studied this phenomenon for a number of years and has developed objective criteria as a diagnostic tool. While the semantic and syntactic deficiencies in Fox's writing are striking and substantial, there are at present no objective criteria for measuring these; we must therefore base ourcase onhis spelling. Roeltgen's objective procedure for identifying lexical agraphia is through spelling errors. In practice, the subject is evaluated with the help of 'non-words' and the subject's phonological abilities are systematically tested. In the case of Fox, however, we must necessarily rely on the limited amount of material that is available, but we are confident that this material is sufficient to support our conclusion. It is well-known that the spelling of words has varied over the centuries and that there was no uniformity of spelling in the 16th and 17th centuries. ?Raymond Ayoub, Ph.D. is emeritus professor of mathematics at Penn State University. His interest in Fox's writing arises from a project to construct a mathematical model of writing that characterizes authorship. David Roeltgen, M.D., practices neurology in Williamsport, PA. His research in Agraphia has been supported by the National Institutes ofHealth. He has collateral interest in neurological pathology of historical figures. Lexical Agraphia39 Certain spellings, different from contemporary ones, were common and the strictures were much more permissive than they are today. In Fox's case, we are not alarmed when he writes the target word "augmentation" as "ogmentashon" or "disciples" as "disípeles," for these spellings arephonologically sound. When, however, he writes "condemnation" as two words "cond menshon" or "minds" as "imdes" or "persecute" as "perut" or Ephes. (abbreviation of Ephesians) as "fies", our suspicions are aroused, for these errors are characteristic of the type of aberration found in current investigations into agraphia. Roeltgen's technique is to characterize errors as proximate or distant, the distinction being based on the phonemic structure of the word.1 The Setting For the most part, Fox's autographs can be characterized as lacking in organization, in some cases to the point of incoherence.2 Several manuscripts are pure narratives and are readable but all manuscripts exhibit distant spelling errors. On the other hand, some publications are attributed to Fox but are in the hand of a scrivener. The syntax is greatly improved but some features remain which we call Foxian. We have verified in several cases that the same scriveners, writing independently, do so with organization and clarity. Although one can cite examples oferratic writing from thatenvironment, the deficiencies exhibited by Fox are far from being characteristic of the period. Indeed, the examination of about 50 documents, from the "Swarthmore Manuscripts" (see note 25), written by Quaker contemporaries of Fox, failed to reveal a single example of this lack of structure. More significantly, the spelling "errors" are never of the type we have called distant. Nor does Fox's problem stem from an inability...

THE CHOICE OF NOTHING

I cannot say when I was chosen by the word, 'nothing', but I felt it first in Phuket, southern Thailand. It was in the New Year of 1990 and I was visiting the abbot of a Buddhist monastery called Wat Mongkolnimit. I had been taken there by my friend, Stephen Fahey, a disciple of the abbot's. According to Stephen, the abbot was an extraordinary person: wise, compassionate, detached, unpretentious and humorous. I can remember going up the stairs to the monk's room clutching my spiritual insights, hoping that I would not say anything too banal and that I might receive at least one little nod of approval. And the abbot gave us tea and never spoke tome.

Second-Annual Phillips Lecture

[27] Second-Annual Phillips Lecture: The Private Prayers of Erasmus and Vives: A View of Lay Piety in the Northern Renaissance 1 by Alice Tobriner, S.N.J.M. his survey of lay piety in sixteenth-century northern Europe bears a double responsibility. The first is to honor the memory of the scholar in whose name this lecture has been instituted. Margaret Mann Phillips was an extraordinary person: an insightful scholar of seven tumultuous decades, a crafter of narrative with an inbred ability to instill excitement, and an Eras- mian who may have made some writings of Erasmus clearer to us than did Erasmus himself.

A Visitor from an Unknown Planet: Music in the Eyes of Filipp Herschkowitz

I have never in my life met such an extraordinary person as Filipp Moiseyevich Herschkowitz, nor am I likely to ever again. He was a man of sharp intellect and great learning; and he combined a deep love of true art with a merciless irony, which was directed at everything and everyone around him. His clever remarks, serious as well as humorous, would instantly become anecdotes that would go round the whole of Moscow. He lived in a minute oneroom flat with his young wife Lena and their cat Kisik, and could barely make ends meet. They refused to make him a member of the Union of Composers, Muzfond would have nothing to do with him, and those who could have helped to support him, or even just lend him some money steadily, became fewer and fewer in number. He would spend days poring over a volume of Beethoven sonatas, a Mahler or Schoenberg score, making ever more unique discoveries, which would one day, he thought, go to make up a book – his life's work.

Michel M.J. Lavoipierre. 1920-1984.

One could not come away from a conversation with Michel Lavoipierre without knowing that he was an extraordinary person. He was truly a Renaissance man, a rara avis in an age of stifling overspecialization. He was most notably a gentle and loyal man, faithful to his religion, devoted to his children and students, and steadfast in his pursuit of scientific truth.

Progress in the development of a formal lexicon for the social sciences

I would like, first, to say a few words about Dick Rudner. Dick was an extraordinary person. In his intelligence and wit, his warmth, his utter decency and his outrage at immorality, he epitomized the notion of humaneness. To have been able to know him, and to work and play with him for so many years as I did, was a great stroke of good fortune. I am going to tell you of a job of dictionary construction one about which I think there are grounds for optimism as to its feasibility and utility. What is of particular interest here is that it is a project which was begun by Dick Rudner and myself in 1958, in which we were joined by Bob Barrett six years later, and on which the three of us worked, albeit rather sporadically, until Dick's death. Barrett and I expect, within the next few years, to complete this work. Dick and I met toward the end of 1956, shortly after we had both come to Michigan State University as young faculty members he in Philosophy and I in Economics. When we met we realized that we shared many intellectual attitudes and concerns. Over the course of a year or so we began to appreciate that our complementary abilities, along with these shared interests and attitudes, offered a basis for some interesting work together.

Faith or Fact?

In 1825, while still at Oriel, Newman brought out his Life of Apollonius of Tyana which he had first written as an article in the now forgotten Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. In it he examined the claims made on behalf of a remarkable first-century contemporary of Jesus whose birth was accompanied by portents of various kinds, who quickly achieved great fame as an ascetic and philosopher, to whom many miracles and exorcisms were attributed and who, after a holy death at an advanced age, ascended, so it was claimed, bodily into heaven and was afterwards seen by certain persons who had entertained doubts about the future life. The first full account of this extraordinary person was written by a certain Philostratos, one of the smart literary set which foregathered in the salon of the Empress Julia Domna whose husband, one recalls, had trouble with the Scots and died at York. This accomplished woman had got hold somehow of the Memoirs of a disciple of Apollonius called Damis. She handed them over to Philostratos inviting him to write up a biography, making use as occasion demanded of any other sources available. This he did and his work is still extant. Newman’s study, as also his Essay on Miracles which appeared in the same year, was given over to a large extent to refuting the claims made on behalf of Apollonius. This was a perfectly legitimate undertaking but it raises the question: here you have two contemporary figures of whose existence we can have no reasonable doubt and about whom certain writings have come down to us (Justin also calls the Gospels Memoirs).

Obituary: Hans Cory, O.B.E. 1889-1962

HANS CORY was an extraordinary person in so many ways. Born in Vienna and an early student of Freud, he came to Africa at Freud's request to study the dreams of Africans in what was then German East Africa. Caught up by the 1914-1918 war, Hans Cory spent several years in a prison camp in Palestine but returned to Tanganyika to grow sisal. This was not his true vocation and it was not long before his outstanding capacity tor understanding the special and particular mentality of African communities led him into sociology. Hans Cory was one of the first, if not the first, to make a collection of Sukuma and Nyamwezi songs and he always regretted not having more time to devote to their music.

J. FRANCIS AITKEN

This paper does not pretend to be a biography, an obituary or a eulogy. My sole reason for its presentation is my deep affection for Aitken, which has extended over many years, and I hope that I may make him seem real to those who did not know him and refresh the memories of those who knew him well. In many respects Aitken was an extraordinary person. He was a member of no dermatologic society other than the Section of Dermatology and Syphilis of the New York Academy of Medicine, the sessions of which he attended irregularly and only as a listener. He refused all offices and did little, if any, writing; yet he was considered one of the most eminent clinicians in New York and second to none in diagnostic ability. In my opinion, based on intimate contact with him for twenty years, this seeming neglect of