You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
John Kafka's main thesis is that the therapist must be aware that individuals (e.g., schizophrenics, ethnic group members, etc.) have different perceptions and ways of organizing reality, and that these perceptions vary during the history of the individual according to a time frame and environmental conditions. His theory cautions against the analyst who imposes a perceptual reality on the patient.
The author challenges the reader with many propositions as he attempts to build a mega-theory of reality perception by integrating numerous research findings and theories from perception, biology, psychology, and anthropology. At the same time he offers a criticism to what he sees as the oversimplified impositions of the therapist's reality in the quick psychiatry of the modern age. We all would find little argument with the points he raises repeatedly: “…commonsense reality and commonsense logic…are inadequate in…psychiatry” (p. 30); or “…human experience and interaction always involve more than one level of abstraction” (p. 48).
Kafka's premise of multiple realities is based on conclusions derived from his lifelong interests in perceptual research, LSD experiments, psychotherapy of schizophrenics, and his theoretical work on time. He offers several chapters, apparently revisions of papers published earlier, that encompass a broad range of complex human phenomena. He weaves into these chapters an elaborate tapestry of perceptual theory including the topics of temporality,