G. Karlsson

Stockholm University | SU · Department of Education

To follow up an original research project of persons 11-13 years after stroke, in order to describe and understand the impact of stroke on everyday life experienced during these years. Eleven persons who had had a stroke were interviewed 11-13 years after the original research project. Data were collected and analysed using the empirical phenomenol...

From a psychoanalytic point of view it is well established that an early development of a sense of self is crucial to a person’s healthy development. At the same time, the psychoanalytic process can to a large extent be described as a deconstruction of narcissistic and illusionary apprehensions of oneself. With this as a background, I want to discu...

In this article the question of phallic masculinity is discussed from a subjective perspective, more specifically from a psychoanalytic perspective supplemented with phenomenological reflections. A vantage point for this discussion is the distinction between sex/being a male and gender/masculinity. The focus is on the boy's/man's striving for a pha...

What kind of a science is psychoanalysis? What constitutes its domain? What truth claims does it maintain? In this unique and scholarly work concerning the nature of psychoanalysis, Gunnar Karlsson guides his arguments through phenomenological thinking which, he claims, can be seen as an alternative to the recent attempts to cite neuropsychoanalysi...

Six individuals with experience of psychosis were interviewed about their psychotic experiences. The material was analyzed using the empirical phenomenological psychological method. The results consist of a whole meaning structure, a gestalt, entailing the following characteristics: The feeling of estrangement in relationship to the world; the diss...

This study aims at discovering the essential constituents involved in the experiences of guilt and shame. Guilt concerns a subject’s action or omission of action and has a clear temporal unfolding entailing a moment in which the subject lives in a care-free way. Afterwards, this moment undergoes a reconstruction, in the moment of guilt, which const...

It is argued that mainstream psychological research has prioritized observable facts over meaning. The theoretical foundation in psychology, according to mainstream psychology, is such that meaningful experience is considered to be less primordial than natural scientific constructions about the world. The methodological procedure of mainstream psyc...

This report presents an introduction to phenomenological psychological research. A brief theoretical section on Husserl's phenomenological philosophy is followed by a comparison between phenomenological psychology and traditional psychology and a tutorial example of the phenomenological method in psychological research. The authors argue for the ne...

The body expressions of adults who are blind have been relatively unexplored. The aim of this study was therefore to deepen the understanding of different forms of body expression, or “body language”, in adults who are blind. More specifically the study aimed at answering the following questions: What forms of body expression do adults who are blin...

The objective of this study was to identify what characterized the lived experience of memory impairment in daily occupations during the first year after acquired brain injury. Four participants were interviewed on four occasions during the year after the brain injury. The data were collected and analyzed using the Empirical Phenomenological Psycho...

Two different epistemological projects within medical research are presented and compared in this article. One project is the statistical approach that has long occupied a dominant position in medical science. The other project deals with the interpretation of meaning. The authors contend that these projects are different, but not contradictory. Th...

The objective of this study was to investigate how persons with acquired brain damage experienced their 1-week stay in an apartment fitted with electronic aids to daily living (EADL). The study focused on how the individuals adapted to this artificial environment in their performance of daily activities and how their occupational experiences influe...

This article aims to clarify the psychoanalytic conceptualisation of the psychical, which includes a discussion of the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. The unconscious is conceived of as being on the border between the so-called 'ego's conscious intending' and a rudimentary body-ego experiencing. Phenomenological ideas on the...

This article discusses the question of truth claims in psychoanalysis, revolving around the concepts “construction”, “reconstruction”, “historical truth” and “narrative truth”. In Part I of the article, these concepts are discussed in an historical context, in particular, Freud's view, the narrative tradition and some of Bion's ideas. In Part II, a...

To describe the way in which the fibromyalgia patients understand the meaning of their illness. Qualitative, empirical phenomenological psychological method. A collaborative transdisciplinary interview study of patients' described experiences of living with fibromyalgia. No therapeutic relationships existed between patients and researchers. Eightee...

Besides specific technical skills, successful encounters with patients require an understanding of the many ways in which patients may express themselves. This qualitative study reports on the clinical experiences of doctors when meeting patients with fibromyalgia (FM). Ten strategically chosen rheumatologists and 10 GPs in central Sweden were inte...

Freud's concept of the death instinct has given rise to many different interpretations which have often been contradictory. It is in fact already possible to discern two diametrically opposite meanings of this concept in Freud's work from 1920—Beyond the Pleasure Principle—in which he first introduced the concept of the death instinct. In this pape...

The aim of this qualitative-interpretive, phenomenological- psychological study was to discover the essential dimensions (distinctive features) of the body experiences of congenitally blind people. The information was obtained through semistructured interviews, consisting of open-ended questions, to which the subjects could reply freely and at leng...

This phenomenological-psychological study aims at discovering the essential constituents involved in congenitally blind people's spatial experiences. Nine congenitally blind persons took part in this study. The data were made up of half structured (thorough) interviews. The analysis of the data yielded the following three comprehension forms of spa...

The purpose of this article is to provide an understanding of how psychological research can be grounded in phenomenological epistemology, as it has been articulated in particular by Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. This article begins by establishing that mainstream academic psychology has placed subjective, meaningful experience seco...

Some decisions made today have far-reaching consequences as exemplified by those concerning nuclear power and spent nuclear fuel. The investigation presented here uses a decision theoretic framework in which time horizons and the discounting of negative consequences play significant roles. The results indicated wide variations in the lengths of the...

The aim of this study was to investigate the structure of the experience of decision and choice making, with the use of an empirical phenomenological psychological method.A phenomenological psychological approach to research yields structural descriptions of phenomena. The results then describe the what and how of a specific phenomenon rather than...

Subjects judged the attractiveness of student apartments characterized by the attributes of size, standard and travelling time to the university. The information describing the apartments was given either in numerical (e.g., 21 m2) or verbal form (e.g., small). In the first experiment the verbal descriptions were scaled numerically to ensure compar...

Thesis (doctoral)--University of Stockholm, 1987. Appendices in Swedish. Bibliography: p. 176-192.