Walter E. O'Connell

A Human Relations Laboratory Approach to Death and Dying

In response to a request from the hospital nursing service, the authors devised a one day human relations laboratory experience focused on death and the dying patient. The lab consisted of four exercises, two that dealt with personal feelings about death and two that dealt with professional responses to the dying patient. Details of these exercises and reactions of the participants are presented.

Thanatology for everyone: Developmental labs and workshops

Abstract In an effort to “treat” the growing death concerns of many medical staffs, an experiential death and dying lab was created. Its evolution to meet changing needs is discussed, as well as future potential for work in this area.

Types of "Negative Nonsense"

HE concept of Humanistic Identification (O’Connell, 1965) posits three types of Tnegative nonsense (Ellis, 1962) or rejecting overgeneralisations which lead to misery, mental illness, or problems in living. The &dquo;depth&dquo; factors, which have a distinct Adlerian tenor, are self-esteem (feelings of significance or personal worth) and social interest (empathy or understanding of others). Habitual self-lowering of feelings of worth and a narrowing of identification with others, the hallmark of the discouraged life style result in hyperdependent and/or competitive demands upon others. When such arbitrary and often unconscious impositions are frustrated, blame follows. Once blame reaches chronicity it becomes part of one’s way of finding significance. &dquo;Proof&dquo; of the &dquo;reality&dquo; of such blame is easy to discover since people are creative in finding what they unwittingly look for. In this schema then, three common objects of the negatively-overgeneralised, internalised sentence (e.g., combinations of &dquo;all

Social Interest and Humor

IN spite of the fact that psychotherapy can be regarded as a tutoring process centred on actualizing meanings and relevant behaviors, psychology as a whole has been loath to study evaluative attitudes as entities in their own right. Perhaps this ignorance has been motivated by the rebellion against the conventional concepts of religion and philosophy or a fixation upon behavioristic premises,15 The past preoccupation with pseudo-social theories of personality development, which has relegated morality and ethics to the status of epiphenomena of psychopathology, has also resulted in considerable inactivity in the