LITERATURE REVIEW > Page 2

Most of the substantive literature concerning the effects of imprisonment is decidedly psychological in orientation. A problem with this method has been identified by Hacking (1989). Writing about multiple personality Hacking says, "I think that there are sometimes fairly sharp mutations in systems of thought and that these redistributions of ideas establish what later seems inevitable, unquestionable, necessary. I hold that whatever made possible the most up-to-the- moment events in the little saga of multiple personality is strongly connected to fundamental and long term aspects of the great field of knowledge about memory that emerged in the last half of the nineteenth century."(p.4)

  What Hacking seems to be saying is that existing psychological thought has set up a paradigm that is hard to break out of and that all subsequent psychological thought seems to flow out of what has gone before. Perhaps this should be kept in mind with regard to the psychologically oriented evidence..

  Rose (1989, 1999) attests to the same phenomenon when he says, "that knowledge practices are suffused with cultural presuppositions and presumptions, are the subject of tacit agreements and conventions of particular communities of knowledge producers, are supported by the rhetorical use of claims about evidence and facts, draw upon the results of all kinds of discretionary decisions made in the course of experiments and investigations, and manifest a certain 'will to power'."

  And as long ago as 1963 Becker cautioned, "To the degree that the common-sense view of deviance and the scientific theories that begin with its premise assume that acts that break rules are inherently deviant and thus take for granted the situations and processes of judgement, they may leave out an important variable. If scientists ignore the variable character of the process of judgement, they may by that omission limit the kinds of theories that can be developed and the kind of understanding that can be acheived"(p.4). This is still very relevant.

  The discipline of environmental psychology has long sought to establish a dynamic relationship between man and his environment.  Ittelson, Rivlin, Proshansky and Winkel (1974) argue for a "dynamic interchange between man and his milieu" (p.5), where man is a goal-directed individual who acts upon his environment and who is in turn acted upon by it. Here, man is not merely a passive recipient of stimuli, nor is he psychologically independent. Rather, he is in " dialectical tension with his milieu, interacting with it, shaping it and being shaped by it." (p.12)

  Selye's work (1950) strongly supports the general conviction that social and psychological factors are important to health and illness.

  Lazarus and Folkman (1984) have defined psychological stress as "a relationship between a person and the environment that is appraised by the person as taxing or exceeding his or her resources or endangering his or her well-being."(p.21)

  Menninger (1963) identifies five orders of regulatory devices which are strategies for reducing tensions caused by stressful events. At the top of the heirarchy are coping devices for ordinary living, including "self-control, humour, crying, swearing, weeping, boasting, talking it out, thinking it through and working off energy."(p.119 in Lazarus)