Greg Miller
Biographic Data
| ID | 81474 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Greg Miller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Greg |
| FAMILY NAME | Miller |
| SIGNATURE | MILLER G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Glasgow |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3144-8233 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 30 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1889 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Disruption, transformation and silos
To disrupt, to transform and to break through silos are common sense aims for the medical humanities and other interdisciplinary endeavours. These keywords arise because of the influence upon the academy of management and business gurus, reputed experts who arose in response to the economic crises of the 1980s. Despite the noted analytic deficiencies in the concept of disruption, and its association with product innovation, the term has been exte…
The book history of Rona M. Fields's A Society on the Run (1973)
The US psychologist Rona M. Field's book A Society on the Run (1973) offered a psychological account of the nature and effects of the Northern Irish Troubles at their peak in the early 1970s. The book was withdrawn shortly after publication by its publisher, Penguin Books Limited, and never reissued. Fields alleged publicly that the book had been suppressed by the British state, a claim that has often been treated uncritically. Local Northern Iri…
A highly sensitive multiplex immunoassay for inflammatory cytokines in dried blood spots
OBJECTIVES: Inflammatory cytokines are key regulators of inflammation, but current measurement approaches require venous blood to quantify low circulating concentrations associated with chronic, low-grade inflammation. This article describes a highly sensitive multiplex immunoassay protocol for the measurement of IL6, IL8, IL10, and TNFα in finger stick dried blood spot (DBS) samples. METHODS: The protocol uses a multiplex electrochemiluminescent…
Other psychotherapies
This article introduces the special issue of Transcultural Psychiatry entitled 'Other Psychotherapies': Healing Interactions across Time, Geographies, and Cultures. This special issue is intended to highlight that, rather than being exclusively a modern phenomenon, variants of psychotherapeutic practice have existed for millennia in diverse sociocultural contexts. This article explores the historical development of Western psychotherapy and point…
Madness Decolonized
The US psychologist Gail Hornstein's monograph, Agnes's Jacket: A Psychologist's Search for the Meanings of Madness (2009), is an important intervention in the identity politics of the mad movement. Hornstein offers a resignified vision of mad identity that embroiders the central trope of an "anti-colonial" struggle to reclaim the experiential world "colonized" by psychiatry. A series of literal and figurative appeals makes recourse to the inner …
Science fiction and the medical humanities
Research on science fiction within the medical humanities should articulate interpretative frameworks that do justice to medical themes within the genre. This means challenging modes of reading that encourage unduly narrow accounts of science fiction. Admittedly, science studies has moved away from reading science fiction as a variety of scientific popularisation and instead understands science fiction as an intervention in the technoscientific i…
Winifred Rushforth and the Davidson Clinic for Medical Psychotherapy
The activities of both Winifred Rushforth (1885–1983), and the Edinburgh-based Davidson Clinic for Medical Psychotherapy (1941–73) which she directed, exemplify and elaborate the overlap in Scotland of religious discourses and practices with psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Even as post-war secularization began to affect Scottish culture and society, Rushforth and the Davidson Clinic attempted to renew the biographical discourses of Christianity usi…
Psychiatric Penguins
The British mass-market publisher Penguin produced a number of texts on psychiatric topics in the period c.1950– c.1980. Investigation of editorial files relating to a sample of these volumes reveals that they were shaped as much by the commercial imperatives and changing aspirations of the publisher as by developments and debates in psychiatry itself. A number of economic imperatives influenced the publishing process, including the perennial dif…
Is the agenda for global mental health a form of cultural imperialism
The contemporary agenda for global mental health has met with sustained criticism from some commentators. This article evaluates one important strand of such appraisal: that in which the dissemination of Western mental health expertise is disparaged as a form of cultural imperialism. Derek Summerfield has vigorously criticised the contemporary global mental health agenda—a manifesto exemplified by WHO's 2008 document mhGAP , an ‘action programme …
Jonathan Toms, Mental Hygiene and Psychiatry in Modern Britain
Jonathan Toms's monograph examines the twentieth-century mental hygiene movement in Britain. Central to his thesis is a spirited, and admirably forthright debate with Foucault and Foucauldians. Toms provides a counter-narrative to the Foucauldian story of anonymous power/knowledge configurations observing, cataloguing, disciplining and producing modern subjects. What Toms emphasises is not the construction of modern privatised individuals by powe…
Urban vegetation and income segregation in drylands
To better understand how urbanization affects the amount and timing of urban vegetation in drylands we investigated remotely sensed vegetation patterns across seven large metropolitan regions in the southwestern United States. We asked (1) how low density urban land cover differed from adjacent wildland grass, herb, and shrub land covers in both the amount of vegetation and the length of the growing season, (2) how neighborhood income affected pa…
Resisting Self-spirituality
In the 1980s, a short series of dialogues on counselling between Hans Schauder (1911–2001), a medically trained counsellor, and Marcus Lefébure (1933–2012), a Roman Catholic monk, were published in the UK. These dialogues present counselling as a form of contemporary spirituality, arguing that counselling facilitates spiritual experience and that psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic concepts can be understood in spiritual terms. However, the dial…
R.D. Laing’s theological hinterland
Contrasting elements in R.D. Laing’s psychiatry can be traced to two kinds of Christian theology: mystical theology and corporate theology. On one hand, Laing’s mystical theology combined with psychoanalytic theory, to provide a New Age psychotherapeutic account of the recovery of authentic selfhood via metanoia. On the other, his incarnational, corporate theology promoted social inclusion of the mentally ill, particularly via therapeutic communi…
Are We Seeking Pimatisiwin or Creating Pomewin? Implications for Water Policy
The purpose of this discussion is to describe the worldview and sacred relationship of the Cree people in Alberta, as well as how colonial policy has created despair (pomewin) in Aboriginal communities and a state of disconnectedness from the water. It concludes with the presentation of a framework for the development of policies that seek to repair the relationship between Aboriginal people and mainstream society – with the potential to create t…
How Scottish was R. D. Laing
R. D. Laing was indebted, although not exclusively or uncritically, to his early Scottish intellectual context. He engaged, for instance, throughout his life with the ideas of the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray. Despite the relative lack of scholarship on twentieth-century Scottish thought, it is possible to trace Laing's participation in a tradition of the importation and translation of Continental ideas (exemplified by scholars such as the…
R. D. Laing and theology
The radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing's first book, "The Divided Self" (1960), is informed by the work of Christian thinkers on scriptural interpretation -- an intellectual genealogy apparent in Laing's comparison of Karl Jaspers's symptomatology with the theological tradition of "form criticism." Rudolf Bultmann's theology, which was being enthusiastically promoted in 1950s Scotland, is particularly influential upon Laing. It furnishes him with th…
Why Scottish ‘Personal Relations Theory’ Matters Politically
Recent British public policy has been substantially informed by a tradition of 'attachment theory' that sees the human psyche as innately disposed to intimate personal relationships. Some commentators have argued that the welfare state has found a new legitimation in such ideas: the family must be protected from the capitalist market so that it can foster the loving attachments essential to human well-being (and also, co-incidentally or not, to s…
Animals, Empathy, and Care in Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman
Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) represents the adventures of Mary, a female explorer who uses her highly developed capacity for empathy to communicate with animals. Mary’s attentive sympathy plays a vital role in the ethical relations which she maintains with both Terran and extra-terrestrial animal life. Her animal encounters also foreground the embodiment of her own rationality, and particularly the potential for an ethic of ca…
Faith, Theology, and Psychoanalysis
Faith, Theology, and Psychoanalysis: The Life and Thought of Harry S. Guntrip by Trevor M. Dobbs Pickwick Publications , Eugene, OR , 2007 ; 190 pp; $22.00 Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st C
Scottish psychoanalysis
The ambition to rationally preserve a Christian religious inheritance distinctively informs Scottish psychoanalytic ideas. Scottish psychoanalysis presents the human personality as born into communion with others. The aim of therapy is to restore, preserve, and promote genuinely interpersonal relations. The Scottish psychoanalysis apparent in the work of W. R. D. Fairbairn, Ian Suttie, Hugh Crichton-Miller, and in the philosophy of John Macmurray…
The Legacy of Fairbairn and Sutherland
Reviewed by: The Legacy of Fairbairn and Sutherland: Psychotherapeutic Applications Gavin Miller The Legacy of Fairbairn and Sutherland: Psychotherapeutic Applications. Jill Savege Scharff and David E. Scharff, eds. New York: Routledge, 2005. xvi + 295 pp. $90.00 (hb), $34.95 (pb). Jill and David Scharff's edited collection, The Legacy of Fairbairn and Sutherland, reminds the wider intellectual world of Scotland's contribution to object relations…
A Reply to Robert R. Calder
Robert R. Calder's review of my book, R.D. Laing (Calder 2006), is a startling contribution to Scottish history of ideas. The book, published as part of the series Edinburgh Review Introductions to Scottish Culture, is 'rubbish' because its author is complacent - 'patting himself on the back'; a rabble-rouser - 'His method throughout is demagogic'; intellectually dependent - 'parasitical on [Daniel] Burston'; and incapable of rational thought - '…
Psychiatry as Hermeneutics
R. D. Laing's work on the origins of schizophrenia in family contexts has often been dismissed as unscientific because it failed to show any reliable correlation between disordered communication and schizoid breakdown. However, Laing's method is closer to that of sociological or historical investigation and is therefore largely independent of questions of natural-scientific etiology. His work must use two kinds of understanding: first, the actual…
A Wall of Ideas
The dominant psychoanalytic theories in the humanities promote a myth of origins in which the infant is originally asocial, and motivated only by selfish hedonism, or by a desire to return to a state of syncretic merger with its environment. Developmental psychology, however, has demonstrated that infants are social agents, rather than selfish narcissists. Psychoanalytic theory of culture must therefore recognise the masculine "taboo on tendernes…
Aesthetic Depersonalization in Louise Welsh's The Cutting Room
Aesthetic Depersonalization in Louise Welsh's The Cutting Room Gavin Miller (bio) The Scottish author Louise Welsh's crime novel, The Cutting Room, was published in 2002 to immediate critical claim and commercial success. 1 The Cutting Room is part of a strand of post-war Scottish writing that focuses on the phenomenology of personal relations, and on how, in particular, other people may be depersonalized, rather than encountered in an "I-thou" r…
Scottish psychoanalysis
The ambition to rationally preserve a Christian religious inheritance distinctively informs Scottish psychoanalytic ideas. Scottish psychoanalysis presents the human personality as born into communion with others. The aim of therapy is to restore, preserve, and promote genuinely interpersonal relations. The Scottish psychoanalysis apparent in the work of W. R. D. Fairbairn, Ian Suttie, Hugh Crichton-Miller, and in the philosophy of John Macmurray…
Science fiction and the medical humanities
Research on science fiction within the medical humanities should articulate interpretative frameworks that do justice to medical themes within the genre. This means challenging modes of reading that encourage unduly narrow accounts of science fiction. Admittedly, science studies has moved away from reading science fiction as a variety of scientific popularisation and instead understands science fiction as an intervention in the technoscientific i…
Psychiatric Penguins
The British mass-market publisher Penguin produced a number of texts on psychiatric topics in the period c.1950– c.1980. Investigation of editorial files relating to a sample of these volumes reveals that they were shaped as much by the commercial imperatives and changing aspirations of the publisher as by developments and debates in psychiatry itself. A number of economic imperatives influenced the publishing process, including the perennial dif…
R. D. Laing and theology
The radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing's first book, "The Divided Self" (1960), is informed by the work of Christian thinkers on scriptural interpretation -- an intellectual genealogy apparent in Laing's comparison of Karl Jaspers's symptomatology with the theological tradition of "form criticism." Rudolf Bultmann's theology, which was being enthusiastically promoted in 1950s Scotland, is particularly influential upon Laing. It furnishes him with th…
Why Scottish ‘Personal Relations Theory’ Matters Politically
Recent British public policy has been substantially informed by a tradition of 'attachment theory' that sees the human psyche as innately disposed to intimate personal relationships. Some commentators have argued that the welfare state has found a new legitimation in such ideas: the family must be protected from the capitalist market so that it can foster the loving attachments essential to human well-being (and also, co-incidentally or not, to s…
Is the agenda for global mental health a form of cultural imperialism
The contemporary agenda for global mental health has met with sustained criticism from some commentators. This article evaluates one important strand of such appraisal: that in which the dissemination of Western mental health expertise is disparaged as a form of cultural imperialism. Derek Summerfield has vigorously criticised the contemporary global mental health agenda—a manifesto exemplified by WHO's 2008 document mhGAP , an ‘action programme …
Psychiatry as Hermeneutics
R. D. Laing's work on the origins of schizophrenia in family contexts has often been dismissed as unscientific because it failed to show any reliable correlation between disordered communication and schizoid breakdown. However, Laing's method is closer to that of sociological or historical investigation and is therefore largely independent of questions of natural-scientific etiology. His work must use two kinds of understanding: first, the actual…
A Wall of Ideas
The dominant psychoanalytic theories in the humanities promote a myth of origins in which the infant is originally asocial, and motivated only by selfish hedonism, or by a desire to return to a state of syncretic merger with its environment. Developmental psychology, however, has demonstrated that infants are social agents, rather than selfish narcissists. Psychoanalytic theory of culture must therefore recognise the masculine "taboo on tendernes…
R. D. Laing
The Battle of Edgehill
It was on the evening of the 22nd of October that Charles arrived at Edgecot, a little village in Northamptonshire, about four miles from Banbury, which town was garrisoned by the Parliamentary troops. A council of war was summoned, at which, as there were no tidings of Essex's army, it was determined that Sir Nicholas Byron should, with his brigade, storm the castle of Banbury, on the morrow, while the rest of the army continued their march towa…
Prevalence of sickle cell trait and HbC-trait in Blacks from low socioeconomic conditions
In the present investigation we did not observe age or sex differentials in the prevalence of sickle cell or HbC-traits in Black males or females of low socioeconomic status. When our data were compared to those of others, we found no evidence for a socioeconomic differential in the prevalence of these traits
Literary Narrative as Soteriology in the Work of Kurt Vonnegut and Alasdair Gray
Literary Narrative as Soteriology in the Work of Kurt Vonnegut and Alasdair Gray Gavin Miller This essay argues for a particular understanding of some of the narrative techniques used by Kurt Vonnegut and Alasdair Gray. I contend that these two authors resist the modernist use of narrative form as a means by which to represent a world in which moral and natural evil are annulled. The motive of this resistance is common to both authors: the narrat…
How Not to ‘Question Scotland’
There have recently emerged a number of strongly-worded critiques of a malaise which is allegedly widespread amongst those who pronounce on Scottish culture. The sickness is called 'essentialism', and its symptoms are many, even though the pathogen is identical. The doctors who have diagnosed this disease have found it in the work of (amongst others) Tom Nairn, Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull, and Cairns Craig. A striking recent diagnosis is …
Aesthetic Depersonalization in Louise Welsh's The Cutting Room
Aesthetic Depersonalization in Louise Welsh's The Cutting Room Gavin Miller (bio) The Scottish author Louise Welsh's crime novel, The Cutting Room, was published in 2002 to immediate critical claim and commercial success. 1 The Cutting Room is part of a strand of post-war Scottish writing that focuses on the phenomenology of personal relations, and on how, in particular, other people may be depersonalized, rather than encountered in an "I-thou" r…
R. D. Laing
The Legacy of Fairbairn and Sutherland
Reviewed by: The Legacy of Fairbairn and Sutherland: Psychotherapeutic Applications Gavin Miller The Legacy of Fairbairn and Sutherland: Psychotherapeutic Applications. Jill Savege Scharff and David E. Scharff, eds. New York: Routledge, 2005. xvi + 295 pp. $90.00 (hb), $34.95 (pb). Jill and David Scharff's edited collection, The Legacy of Fairbairn and Sutherland, reminds the wider intellectual world of Scotland's contribution to object relations…
A Reply to Robert R. Calder
Robert R. Calder's review of my book, R.D. Laing (Calder 2006), is a startling contribution to Scottish history of ideas. The book, published as part of the series Edinburgh Review Introductions to Scottish Culture, is 'rubbish' because its author is complacent - 'patting himself on the back'; a rabble-rouser - 'His method throughout is demagogic'; intellectually dependent - 'parasitical on [Daniel] Burston'; and incapable of rational thought - '…
Psychiatry as Hermeneutics
R. D. Laing's work on the origins of schizophrenia in family contexts has often been dismissed as unscientific because it failed to show any reliable correlation between disordered communication and schizoid breakdown. However, Laing's method is closer to that of sociological or historical investigation and is therefore largely independent of questions of natural-scientific etiology. His work must use two kinds of understanding: first, the actual…
A Wall of Ideas
The dominant psychoanalytic theories in the humanities promote a myth of origins in which the infant is originally asocial, and motivated only by selfish hedonism, or by a desire to return to a state of syncretic merger with its environment. Developmental psychology, however, has demonstrated that infants are social agents, rather than selfish narcissists. Psychoanalytic theory of culture must therefore recognise the masculine "taboo on tendernes…
Why Scottish ‘Personal Relations Theory’ Matters Politically
Recent British public policy has been substantially informed by a tradition of 'attachment theory' that sees the human psyche as innately disposed to intimate personal relationships. Some commentators have argued that the welfare state has found a new legitimation in such ideas: the family must be protected from the capitalist market so that it can foster the loving attachments essential to human well-being (and also, co-incidentally or not, to s…
Animals, Empathy, and Care in Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman
Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) represents the adventures of Mary, a female explorer who uses her highly developed capacity for empathy to communicate with animals. Mary’s attentive sympathy plays a vital role in the ethical relations which she maintains with both Terran and extra-terrestrial animal life. Her animal encounters also foreground the embodiment of her own rationality, and particularly the potential for an ethic of ca…
Faith, Theology, and Psychoanalysis
Faith, Theology, and Psychoanalysis: The Life and Thought of Harry S. Guntrip by Trevor M. Dobbs Pickwick Publications , Eugene, OR , 2007 ; 190 pp; $22.00 Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st C
Scottish psychoanalysis
The ambition to rationally preserve a Christian religious inheritance distinctively informs Scottish psychoanalytic ideas. Scottish psychoanalysis presents the human personality as born into communion with others. The aim of therapy is to restore, preserve, and promote genuinely interpersonal relations. The Scottish psychoanalysis apparent in the work of W. R. D. Fairbairn, Ian Suttie, Hugh Crichton-Miller, and in the philosophy of John Macmurray…
How Scottish was R. D. Laing
R. D. Laing was indebted, although not exclusively or uncritically, to his early Scottish intellectual context. He engaged, for instance, throughout his life with the ideas of the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray. Despite the relative lack of scholarship on twentieth-century Scottish thought, it is possible to trace Laing's participation in a tradition of the importation and translation of Continental ideas (exemplified by scholars such as the…
R. D. Laing and theology
The radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing's first book, "The Divided Self" (1960), is informed by the work of Christian thinkers on scriptural interpretation -- an intellectual genealogy apparent in Laing's comparison of Karl Jaspers's symptomatology with the theological tradition of "form criticism." Rudolf Bultmann's theology, which was being enthusiastically promoted in 1950s Scotland, is particularly influential upon Laing. It furnishes him with th…
R.D. Laing’s theological hinterland
Contrasting elements in R.D. Laing’s psychiatry can be traced to two kinds of Christian theology: mystical theology and corporate theology. On one hand, Laing’s mystical theology combined with psychoanalytic theory, to provide a New Age psychotherapeutic account of the recovery of authentic selfhood via metanoia. On the other, his incarnational, corporate theology promoted social inclusion of the mentally ill, particularly via therapeutic communi…
Are We Seeking Pimatisiwin or Creating Pomewin? Implications for Water Policy
The purpose of this discussion is to describe the worldview and sacred relationship of the Cree people in Alberta, as well as how colonial policy has created despair (pomewin) in Aboriginal communities and a state of disconnectedness from the water. It concludes with the presentation of a framework for the development of policies that seek to repair the relationship between Aboriginal people and mainstream society – with the potential to create t…
Urban vegetation and income segregation in drylands
To better understand how urbanization affects the amount and timing of urban vegetation in drylands we investigated remotely sensed vegetation patterns across seven large metropolitan regions in the southwestern United States. We asked (1) how low density urban land cover differed from adjacent wildland grass, herb, and shrub land covers in both the amount of vegetation and the length of the growing season, (2) how neighborhood income affected pa…
Resisting Self-spirituality
In the 1980s, a short series of dialogues on counselling between Hans Schauder (1911–2001), a medically trained counsellor, and Marcus Lefébure (1933–2012), a Roman Catholic monk, were published in the UK. These dialogues present counselling as a form of contemporary spirituality, arguing that counselling facilitates spiritual experience and that psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic concepts can be understood in spiritual terms. However, the dial…
Is the agenda for global mental health a form of cultural imperialism
The contemporary agenda for global mental health has met with sustained criticism from some commentators. This article evaluates one important strand of such appraisal: that in which the dissemination of Western mental health expertise is disparaged as a form of cultural imperialism. Derek Summerfield has vigorously criticised the contemporary global mental health agenda—a manifesto exemplified by WHO's 2008 document mhGAP , an ‘action programme …
Jonathan Toms, Mental Hygiene and Psychiatry in Modern Britain
Jonathan Toms's monograph examines the twentieth-century mental hygiene movement in Britain. Central to his thesis is a spirited, and admirably forthright debate with Foucault and Foucauldians. Toms provides a counter-narrative to the Foucauldian story of anonymous power/knowledge configurations observing, cataloguing, disciplining and producing modern subjects. What Toms emphasises is not the construction of modern privatised individuals by powe…
Winifred Rushforth and the Davidson Clinic for Medical Psychotherapy
The activities of both Winifred Rushforth (1885–1983), and the Edinburgh-based Davidson Clinic for Medical Psychotherapy (1941–73) which she directed, exemplify and elaborate the overlap in Scotland of religious discourses and practices with psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Even as post-war secularization began to affect Scottish culture and society, Rushforth and the Davidson Clinic attempted to renew the biographical discourses of Christianity usi…
Psychiatric Penguins
The British mass-market publisher Penguin produced a number of texts on psychiatric topics in the period c.1950– c.1980. Investigation of editorial files relating to a sample of these volumes reveals that they were shaped as much by the commercial imperatives and changing aspirations of the publisher as by developments and debates in psychiatry itself. A number of economic imperatives influenced the publishing process, including the perennial dif…
Science fiction and the medical humanities
Research on science fiction within the medical humanities should articulate interpretative frameworks that do justice to medical themes within the genre. This means challenging modes of reading that encourage unduly narrow accounts of science fiction. Admittedly, science studies has moved away from reading science fiction as a variety of scientific popularisation and instead understands science fiction as an intervention in the technoscientific i…
Philosophy (18 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Psychoanalysis (14 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices (7 works)