A Goal Systems–Self-Regulatory Perspective on Personality, Psychopathology, and Change

A motivational framework is presented linking personal goals and self-regulatory functions to normal personality, psychopathology, and the processes of change. First, the utility of goals as a “final common analytic pathway” or integrative unit is considered. Next, the premises of an emerging, goal-centered conception of adaptive functioning are discussed as a prelude to the author's outlining of a multidimensional working model of “goal systems.” Reactive depression is reconceptualized in terms of specific self-regulatory dysfunctions under the influence of goal systems to illustrate how dysfunctional goal systems can serve as the central organizing component of psychopathology. A set of 10 propositions pinpoints goal-based sources of vulnerability to self-regulatory dysfunction in depression. A set of 5 propositions details the potential goal-based sources of maintenance of self-regulatory deficits. Finally, 14 theory-based principles of psychotherapeutic change are proposed.

An Ecological and Phenomenological Perspective on Consciousness and Perception: Contact with the World at the Very Heart of the Being of Consciousness

Owing to the intentional nature of consciousness, people possess a special kind of contact with the real world. They apprehend part of it in a qualitative and cognitive manner at the ontological level suitably described as corresponding to the psychological. At the core of the visual system's molar activities, a stream of visual awareness flows and is the very form wherein direct visual reference to the world is accomplished. Also a function of the visual system, when it is operating in the mode called “viewing” or “reflective seeing,” is one's immediate apprehension of visual perceptual experience per se. Using an approach that draws on both ecological and phenomenological thought, the author seeks to make progress toward a conceptual structure for consciousness.