UK Research Council PhD scholarship

Submitted by Greta on Oct 11, 2017 in Research development

One of the SCA's contributing researchers, Greta Kaluzeviciute, has recently received full funding from CHASE (Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England) for her PhD project “Knowledge generation and “scientific management” in the field of psychotherapy”. This project focuses on how and to what degree the knowledge generated in psychotherapy leads to coercive human understanding, and as a consequence, whether the science of the individual in this case is possible at all. In this research, she argues that whilst it is very easy for psychological sciences to become forms of “scientific management”, knowledge generated in psychotherapy can not only be the opposite of coercive, but is crucial in understanding the variability of the human mind. The research also aims to refer to psychotherapy cases which seek to reshape the universal or “normative” psychological practices by questioning straightforward diagnostics and binary systems of “insiders” and “outsiders”. The main focus of this project, however, will be on the case study method and its uniqueness: it does not seek to understand human behaviour via statistical norms and universals per se, but, rather, context–dependent human affairs, and the ways they have been successfully handled or mishandled. As such, this research will aim to address the dangers of pathologising the human condition and to provide the insight of how the case study method can bring us closer to perceiving the variability and complexity of human mind.

The project is jointly supervised by one of SCA's Board members, Dr. Jochem Willemsen (University of Essex, Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies) and Prof. Wayne Martin (University of Essex, School of Philosophy and Art History). 

Greta was part of the SCA team from January to July 2016 as a Research Assistant Frontrunner at the University of Essex. During her placement, she was responsible for the expansion of the archive, as well as conducing a call for cases on gender issues and a reflective report on transgender and transsexual case studies. 

More information on this PhD project can be found here.

Psychotherapy research, Clinical Case Studies, PhD,