The student counselling service of the University of Papua New Guinea is examined in terms of its roles, staff, and clients. Counsellors were interviewed and the problems of the 1989 cohort of student clients were categorised. The catalyst for seeking professional help was student concern over academic performance rather than the “underlying problems” causing academic difficulty. The most commonly cited problems related to immediate family and close relatives. The counsellors reported that conflicting role demands imposed by the university administration were likely to impede their counselling work and the potential value of the service. Ways of overcoming this conflict are considered.

This paper aims to clarify certain assumptions, methods and conclusions which have tended to divide philosophy and psychology. In order to demonstrate these diffenees, I have selected certain issues and developments within the philosophy of language which are relevant to behaviourism and cognitive theory. What I will demonstrate is that the assumptions, methods, and conclusions of an enquiry are often related to beliefs about the duality of the human subject. I also point out that philosophers are not unanimous about the existence of this alleged duality. Accordingly, I show that when philosophers abandon the dualistic interpretation, they also reject the idea that philosophy and psychology are fundamentally irreconcilable disciplines. In demonstrating this point, I refer to the work of Noam Chomsky on linguistic structure and cognitive capacity.

This article describes the case of a 56 year old man with no previous history of psychological disorder who became depressed following neurosurgery to remove a benign subapendenoma. The patient was unresponsive to 20 months of treatment with, successively, desipramine, amitriptyline, and doxepin before showing good response to standard cognitive therapy alone. Complete remission of symptoms was achieved at 15 sessions (15 weeks) of treatment. One and five month follow-ups indicate that treatment gains were maintained.

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born on the 20th March 1904 in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania; he died on the 18th August 1990 at Auburn Hospital, Cambridge Massachussetts.

The man whose name is synonymous with behaviourism became interested in the subject through the works of the American behavioural psychologist John B. Watson and the Russian physiologist Ivan P. Pavlov. But after graduating from Hamilton College in 1926, his first interest was not psychology. He first tried his hand at fiction and poetry before eventually concluding that his talents lay elsewhere.

Skinner earned his doctorate from Harvard University in 1931 and remained at that university as a researcher until 1936, investigating the adaptive behaviour of organisms to environmental stimuli. In 1937 he joined the University of Minnesota as an Assistant Professor; it was in Minnesota that he wrote his first major work, The Behavior of Organisms (1938), in which he presented the principles of operant conditioning. In 1945 he was appointed Professor at Indiana University; there he wrote Walden Two (1948), a utopian treatment of how society might be based on learning principles--simultaneously fulfilling his earlier ambitions in the field of literature. In 1948 Skinner returned to Harvard, where he remained until his death--some 16 years past his “retirement” in 1974.