31 resultados para Working Context
em Helda - Digital Repository of University of Helsinki
Resumo:
The point of departure in this dissertation was the practical safety problem of unanticipated, unfamiliar events and unexpected changes in the environment, the demanding situations which the operators should take care of in the complex socio-technical systems. The aim of this thesis was to increase the understanding of demanding situations and of the resources for coping with these situations by presenting a new construct, a conceptual model called Expert Identity (ExId) as a way to open up new solutions to the problem of demanding situations and by testing the model in empirical studies on operator work. The premises of the Core-Task Analysis (CTA) framework were adopted as a starting point: core-task oriented working practices promote the system efficiency (incl. safety, productivity and well-being targets) and that should be supported. The negative effects of stress were summarised and the possible countermeasures related to the operators' personal resources such as experience, expertise, sense of control, conceptions of work and self etc. were considered. ExId was proposed as a way to bring emotional-energetic depth into the work analysis and to supplement CTA-based practical methods to discover development challenges and to contribute to the development of complex socio-technical systems. The potential of ExId to promote understanding of operator work was demonstrated in the context of the six empirical studies on operator work. Each of these studies had its own practical objectives within the corresponding quite broad focuses of the studies. The concluding research questions were: 1) Are the assumptions made in ExId on the basis of the different theories and previous studies supported by the empirical findings? 2) Does the ExId construct promote understanding of the operator work in empirical studies? 3) What are the strengths and weaknesses of the ExId construct? The layers and the assumptions of the development of expert identity appeared to gain evidence. The new conceptual model worked as a part of an analysis of different kinds of data, as a part of different methods used for different purposes, in different work contexts. The results showed that the operators had problems in taking care of the core task resulting from the discrepancy between the demands and resources (either personal or external). The changes of work, the difficulties in reaching the real content of work in the organisation and the limits of the practical means of support had complicated the problem and limited the possibilities of the development actions within the case organisations. Personal resources seemed to be sensitive to the changes, adaptation is taking place, but not deeply or quickly enough. Furthermore, the results showed several characteristics of the studied contexts that complicated the operators' possibilities to grow into or with the demands and to develop practices, expertise and expert identity matching the core task. They were: discontinuation of the work demands, discrepancy between conceptions of work held in the other parts of organisation, visions and the reality faced by the operators, emphasis on the individual efforts and situational solutions. The potential of ExId to open up new paths to solving the problem of the demanding situations and its ability to enable studies on practices in the field was considered in the discussion. The results were interpreted as promising enough to encourage the conduction of further studies on ExId. This dissertation proposes especially contribution to supporting the workers in recognising the changing demands and their possibilities for growing with them when aiming to support human performance in complex socio-technical systems, both in designing the systems and solving the existing problems.
Resumo:
Service researchers and practitioners have repeatedly claimed that customer service experiences are essential to all businesses. Therefore comprehension of how service experience is characterised in research is an essential element for its further development through research. The importance of greater in-depth understanding of the phenomenon of service experience has been acknowledged by several researchers, such as Carú and Cova and Vargo and Lusch. Furthermore, Service-Dominant (S-D) logic has integrated service experience to value by emphasising in its foundational premises that value is phenomenologically (experientially) determined. The present study analyses how the concept of service experience has been characterised in previous research. As such, it puts forward three ways to characterise it in relation to that research: 1) phenomenological service experience relates to the value discussion in S-D logic and interpretative consumer research, 2) process-based service experience relates to understanding service as a process, and 3) outcome-based service experience relates to understanding service experience as one element in models linking a number of variables or attributes to various outcomes. Focusing on the phenomenological service experience, the theoretical purpose of the study is to characterise service experience based on the phenomenological approach. In order to do so, an additional methodological purpose was formulated: to find a suitable methodology for analysing service experience based on the phenomenological approach. The study relates phenomenology to a philosophical Husserlian and social constructionist tradition studying phenomena as they appear in our experience in a social context. The study introduces Event-Based Narrative Inquiry Technique (EBNIT), which combines critical events with narratives and metaphors. EBNIT enabled the analysis of lived and imaginary service experiences as expressed in individual narratives. The study presents findings of eight case studies within service innovation of Web 2.0, mobile service, location aware service and public service in the municipal sector. Customers’ and service managers’ stories about their lived private and working lifeworld were the foundation for their ideal service experiences. In general, the thesis finds that service experiences are (1) subjective, (2) context-specific, (3) cumulative, (4) partially socially constructed, (5) both lived and imaginary, (6) temporally multiple-dimensional, and (7) iteratively related to perceived value. In addition to customer service experience, the thesis brings empirical evidence of managerial service experience of front-line managers experiencing the service they manage and develop in their working lifeworld. The study contributes to S-D logic, service innovation and service marketing and management in general by characterising service experience based on the phenomenological approach and integrating it to the value discussion. Additionally, the study offers a methodological approach for further exploration of service experiences. The study discusses managerial implications in conjunction with the case studies and discusses them in relation to service innovation.
Resumo:
Researchers within the fields of economic geography and organizational management have extensively studied learning and the prerequisites and impediments for knowledge transfer. This paper combines two discourses within the two subjects: the-communities-of-practice and the learning region approaches, merging them through the so-called ecology of knowledge-approach, which is used to examine the knowledge transfer from the House of Fabergé to the Finnish jewellery industry. We examine the pre-revolution St Petersburg jewellery cluster and the post-revolution Helsinki, and the transfer of knowledge between these two locations through the components of communities of people, institutions and industry. The paper shows that the industrial dynamics of the Finnish modern-day goldsmith industry was inherently shaped both through the transfer and the non-transfer of knowledge. It also contends that the “knowledge-economy” is not anchored in and exclusive for the high technology sector of the late 20th century.
Resumo:
Activity systems are the cognitively linked groups of activities that consumers carry out as a part of their daily life. The aim of this paper is to investigate how consumers experience value through their activities, and how services fit into the context of activity systems. A new technique for illustrating consumers’ activity systems is introduced. The technique consists of identifying a consumer’s activities through an interview, then quantitatively measuring how the consumer evaluates the identified activities on three dimensions: Experienced benefits, sacrifices and frequency. This information is used to create a graphical representation of the consumer’s activity system, an “activityscape map”. Activity systems work as infrastructure for the individual consumer’s value experience. The paper contributes to value and service literature, where there currently are no clearly described standardized techniques for visually mapping out individual consumer activity. Existing approaches are service- or relationship focused, and are mostly used to identify activities, not to understand them. The activityscape representation provides an overview of consumers’ perceptions of their activity patterns and the position of one or several services in this pattern. Comparing different consumers’ activityscapes, it shows the differences between consumers' activity structures, and provides insight into how services are used to create value within them. The paper is conceptual; an empirical illustration is used to indicate the potential in further empirical studies. The technique can be used by businesses to understand contexts for service use, which may uncover potential for business reconfiguration and customer segmentation.
Resumo:
This study in EU law analyses the reasoning of the Court of Justice (the Court of Justice of the European Union) in a set of its preliminary rulings. Preliminary rulings are answers to national courts questions on the interpretation (and validity) of EU law called preliminary references. These questions concern specific legal issues that have arisen in legal disputes before the national courts. The Court of Justice alone has the ultimate authority to interpret EU law. The preliminary rulings bind the national courts in the cases giving rise to the preliminary reference, and the interpretations of EU law offered in the preliminary rulings are considered generally binding on all instances applying EU law. EU law is often described as a dynamic legal order and the Court of Justice as at the vanguard of developing it. It is generally assumed that the Court of Justice is striving to realise the EU s meta-level purpose (telos): integration. Against this backdrop one can understand the criticism the Court of Justice is often faced with in certain fields of EU law that can be described as developing. This criticism concerns the Court s (negatively) activist way of not just stating the law but developing or even making law. It is difficult to analyse or prove wrong this accusation as it is not in methodological terms clearly established what constitutes judicial activism, or more exactly where the threshold of negative activism lies. Moreover, one popular approach to assessing the role of the Court of Justice described as integration through law has become fairly political, neglecting to take into consideration the special nature of law as both facilitating and constraining action, not merely a medium for furthering integration. This study offers a legal reasoning approach of a more legalist nature, in order to balance the existing mix of approaches to explaining what the Court of Justice does and how. Reliance on legal reasoning is found to offer a working framework for analysis, whereas the tools for an analysis based on activism are found lacking. The legal reasoning approach enables one to assess whether or not the Court of Justice is pertaining to its own established criteria of interpretation of EU law, and if it is not, one should look more in detail at how the interpretation fits with earlier case-law and doctrines of EU law. This study examines the reasoning of the Court of Justice in a set of objectively chosen cases. The emphasis of the study is on analysing how the Court of Justice applies the established criteria of interpretation it has assumed for itself. Moreover, the judgments are assessed not only in terms of reasoning but also for meaningful silences they contain. The analysis is furthermore contextualised by taking into consideration how the cases were commented by legal scholars, their substantive EU law context, and also their larger politico-historical context. In this study, the analysis largely shows that the Court of Justice is interpreting EU law in accordance with its previous practice. Its reasoning retains connection with the linguistic or semiotic criteria of interpretation, while emphasis lies on systemic reasoning. Moreover, although there are a few judgments where the Court of Justice offers clearly dynamic reasoning or what can be considered as substantive reasoning stemming from, for example, common sense or reasonableness, such reasons are most often given in addition to systemic ones. In this sense and even when considered in its broader context, the case-law analysed in this study does not portray a specifically activist image of the Court of Justice. The legal reasoning approach is a valid alternative for explaining how and why the Court of Justice interprets EU law as it does.
Resumo:
Work/family reconciliation is a crucial question for both personal well-being and on societal level for productivity and re-production throughout the Western world. This thesis examines work/family reconciliation on societal and organisational level in the Finnish context. The study is based on an initial framework, developing it further and analysing the results with help of it. The methodology of the study is plural, including varying epistemological emphasis and both quantitative and qualitative methods. Policy analysis from two different sectors is followed by a survey answered by 113 HR-managers, and then, based on quantitative analyses, interviews in four chosen case companies. The central findings of the thesis are that there indeed are written corporate level policies for reconciling work and family in companies operating in Finland, in spite of the strong state level involvement in creating a policy context in work/family reconciliation. Also, the existing policies vary in accessibility and use. The most frequently used work/family policies still are the statutory state level policies for family leave, taking place when a baby is born and during his or her first years. Still, there are new policies arising, such as a nurse for an employee’s child who has fallen ill, that are based on company activity only, which shows in both accessibility and use of the policy. Reasons for developing corporate level work/family policies vary among the so-called pro-active and re-active companies. In general, family law has a substantial effect for developing corporate level policies. Also headquarter gender equality strategies as well as employee demands are important. In regression analyses, it was found that corporate image and importance in recruitment are the foremost reasons for companies to develop policies, not for example the amount of female employees in the company. The reasons for policy development can be summarized into normative pressures, coercive pressures and mimetic pressures, in line with findings from institutional theory. This research, however, includes awareness of different stakeholder interests and recognizes that institutional theory needs to be complemented with notions of gender and family, which seem to play a part in perceived work/family conflict and need for further work/family policies both in managers’ personal lives and on the organisational level. A very central finding, demanding more attention, is the by HR managers perceived change in values towards work and commitment towards organisation at the youngest working generation, Generation Y. This combined with the need for key personnel has brought new challenges to companies especially in knowledge business and will presumably lead to further development of flexible practices in organisations. The accessibility to this flexibility seems to, however, be even more dependent on the specific knowledge and skills of the employee. How this generation will change the organisations remains to be seen in further research.
Resumo:
This doctoral dissertation examines the description of the North as it appears in the Old English Orosius (OE Or.) in the form of the travel accounts by Ohthere and Wulfstan and a catalogue of peoples of Germania. The description is discussed in the context of ancient and early medieval textual and cartographic descriptions of the North, with a special emphasis on Anglo-Saxon sources and the intellectual context of the reign of King Alfred (871-899). This is the first time that these sources, a multidisciplinary approach and secondary literature, also from Scandinavia and Finland, have been brought together. The discussion is source-based, and archaeological theories and geographical ideas are used to support the primary evidence. This study belongs to the disciplines of early medieval literature and (cultural) history, Anglo-Saxon studies, English philology, and historical geography. The OE Or. was probably part of Alfred s educational campaign, which conveyed royal ideology to the contemporary elite. The accounts and catalogue are original interpolations which represent a unique historical source for the Viking Age. They contain unparalleled information about peoples and places in Fennoscandia and the southern Baltic and sailing voyages to the White Sea, the Danish lands, and the Lower Vistula. The historical-philological analysis reveals an emphasis on wealth and property, rank, luxury goods, settlement patterns, and territorial divisions. Trade is strongly implied by the mentions of central places and northern products, such as walrus ivory. The references to such peoples as the Finnas, the Cwenas, and the Beormas appear in connection with information about geography and subsistence in the far North. Many of the topics in the accounts relate to Anglo-Saxon aristocratic culture and interests. The accounts focus on the areas associated with the Northmen, the Danes and the Este. These areas resonated in the Anglo-Saxon geographical imagination: they were curious about the northern margin of the world, their own continental ancestry and the geography of their homeland of Angeln, and they had an interest in the Goths and their connection with the southern Baltic in mythogeography. The non-judgemental representation of the North as generally peaceful and relatively normal place is related to Alfredian and Orosian ideas about the unity and spreading of Christendom, and to desires for unity among the Germani and for peace with the Vikings, who were settling in England. These intellectual contexts reflect the innovative and organizational forces of Alfred s reign. The description of the North in the OE Or. can be located in the context of the Anglo-Saxon worldview and geographical mindset. It mirrors the geographical curiosity expressed in other Anglo-Saxon sources, such as the poem Widsith and the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi. The northern section of this early eleventh-century world map is analyzed in detail here for the first time. It is suggested that the section depicts the North Atlantic and the Scandinavian Peninsula. The survey of ancient and early medieval sources provides a comparative context for the OE Or. In this material, produced by such authors as Strabo, Pliny, Tacitus, Jordanes, and Rimbert, the significance of the North was related to the search for and definition of the northern edge of the world, universal accounts of the world, the northern homeland in the origin stories of the gentes, and Carolingian expansion and missionary activity. These frameworks were transmitted to Anglo-Saxon literary culture, where the North occurs in the context of the definition of Britain s place in the world.
Resumo:
Bertrand Russell (1872 1970) introduced the English-speaking philosophical world to modern, mathematical logic and foundational study of mathematics. The present study concerns the conception of logic that underlies his early logicist philosophy of mathematics, formulated in The Principles of Mathematics (1903). In 1967, Jean van Heijenoort published a paper, Logic as Language and Logic as Calculus, in which he argued that the early development of modern logic (roughly the period 1879 1930) can be understood, when considered in the light of a distinction between two essentially different perspectives on logic. According to the view of logic as language, logic constitutes the general framework for all rational discourse, or meaningful use of language, whereas the conception of logic as calculus regards logic more as a symbolism which is subject to reinterpretation. The calculus-view paves the way for systematic metatheory, where logic itself becomes a subject of mathematical study (model-theory). Several scholars have interpreted Russell s views on logic with the help of the interpretative tool introduced by van Heijenoort,. They have commonly argued that Russell s is a clear-cut case of the view of logic as language. In the present study a detailed reconstruction of the view and its implications is provided, and it is argued that the interpretation is seriously misleading as to what he really thought about logic. I argue that Russell s conception is best understood by setting it in its proper philosophical context. This is constituted by Immanuel Kant s theory of mathematics. Kant had argued that purely conceptual thought basically, the logical forms recognised in Aristotelian logic cannot capture the content of mathematical judgments and reasonings. Mathematical cognition is not grounded in logic but in space and time as the pure forms of intuition. As against this view, Russell argued that once logic is developed into a proper tool which can be applied to mathematical theories, Kant s views turn out to be completely wrong. In the present work the view is defended that Russell s logicist philosophy of mathematics, or the view that mathematics is really only logic, is based on what I term the Bolzanian account of logic . According to this conception, (i) the distinction between form and content is not explanatory in logic; (ii) the propositions of logic have genuine content; (iii) this content is conferred upon them by special entities, logical constants . The Bolzanian account, it is argued, is both historically important and throws genuine light on Russell s conception of logic.
Resumo:
My doctoral dissertation is on Johan Jakob Tikkanen (1857 1930), the first professor of art history in Finland, and his significance and methods in the context of late 19th and early 20th-century European art history. Tikkanen was one of the pioneering scholars in the field of medieval art research, and, along with Anton Springer, Heinrich Wölfflin, Aloïs Riegl, Adolfo Venturi, Franz Wickhoff, Julius von Schlosser, Aby Warburg, Emile Mâle and others, one of the scholars who defined art history as an independent academic discipline. Tikkanen s scholarly interests and his methods resemble those of many formalistically oriented German and Austrian art historians of his time. He became well known throughout Europe, mainly for his studies on illustrated medieval manuscripts. Tikkanen s dissertation, Der Malerische Styl Giotto s Versuch zu einer Characteristik Desselben, from 1884 was regarded in its day as the best form-analytical study on the painter. It has a central position in the present thesis, as it already included nearly all the methods that Tikkanen used and elaborated upon throughout his career. Giotto also gives a good perspective for comparing Tikkanen s ideas with a long art-historical tradition. Tikkanen was profoundly interested in artistic creativity. In his own words, he wanted to study das künstlerische Können , artistic ability, instead of das künstlerische Wollen or artistic will, which was an important theoretical issue in art history in the late 19th century. This starting point led him to the history of style and iconographical research. Along with the Danish art historian, Julius Lange, he was one of the first scholars who began to study the meaning of gestures and postures in art. In my dissertation I have emphasized the importance of Tikkanen s personal art education. I regard it as having influenced both his scholarly argumentation and his working methods. I have also written a short overview of the situation of art history in Finland and in Northern Countries before Tikkanen s time in order to give an idea of his scientific background. My thesis is a critical and historiographical study on J. J. Tikkanen s role in the development of art history and its methodology.
Resumo:
Modern ryijys, fabric by the yard and handicrafts. Finnish textile art and modernizing applied art during the inter-war years Textile art was in the 1920s and 1930s in the front rank of Finnish applied art and design. Modern ryijys, tapestries and fabrics by the yard by contemporary textile artists were on show in Finland and abroad. Textile art had also become interesting commercially, especially in interior textiles of modern homes. The research uses sources of the Ornamo Association of Decorative Artists, for example the Ornamo year books published from 1927, the Finnish Society of Crafts and Design and the country s only school of applied arts, the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Museum of Applied Arts maintained by the society and also the national specialist organisation the Friends of Finnish Handicraft. It also refers to the magazines Käsiteollisuus and Kotiliesi. The art historical dissertation studies the renaissance of weaving art of the inter-war years in Finland. It problematizes the relation of the succesfull and appreciated textile art to the concept of breakthrough of Modernism (Functionalism). With the material from textile artists activities it questions the prevailing idea of slow modernization of Finnish applied art and design and challenges the polarization of craft and industry in the discourses of Modernisms of design. The public discussions about modernization of design and applied art where textile art and especially the ryijy got sometimes into difficult positions are interpreted as power struggles. After taking independence in 1917 the Finnish tradition of ryijy rugs was set as a symbol of the original culture of the young nation. The research studies the development of the so called art ryijy and the notions and meanings of hand weaving in the national context and also in relation to contemporary events in international applied art and design. It highlights the continuity of hand crafted production of textiles and the strong position of textile artists working in this field. The research opens new perspectives to Finnish textile artists by showing their activities as entrepreneurs in their own weaving studios or design studios and referring to their many relations and functions as pattern designers and educators in the growing handicraft industries.
Resumo:
Under the power of passion. The age of nervousness in Minna Canth s works This research contemplates the psychology of Minna Canth s characters through the historical image of man in late 19th century Europe. The central operative term of the study is passion , understood as a twofold philosophical concept that includes both desire and suffering. The method of this study is historical and contextual. The study interprets the passions and the psychology of Canth s characters as they were understood in their own time. The indicator of the relevant contexts is the realist and naturalist genre of Canth s works. New research on the genre of the time is also the basis of a new kind of psychological approach to Canth s works. The most important context of passion in Canth s works is the positivistic and pathological image of man at the end of the 19th century. Then, passion was widely discussed, and was perceived as a physiological phenomenon that influenced humans neurologically and caused different kinds of physiological symptoms and nervous disorders. But at the same time, passion was understood as a manifestation of human instincts and drives. The naturalistic literature of the day aimed at creating deterministic studies of human morality and psychology following Émile Zola s application of experimental science methods in his writing. The pathological image of man is most explicitly manifested in Canth s formerly unknown short story Lääkäri (Doctor, 1891), in which a doctor who is interested in psychology visits a jail to meet a peculiar criminal, a girl who feels no remorse for her multiple crimes. In other works of Canth the medically motivated viewpoint is more hidden in the deterministic narrative and depiction of the characters. The present study approaches the passion in Minna Canth s works through five thematic chapters, in witch characters are interpreted suffering from blind love, ennui, crippling romantic idealism, melancholy, guilt and nostalgia, and their stories can be prescribed as medical histories which depict the born of the passion and its development towards ruin. All protagonists are also manifestations of their own time. Canth criticises the modern life and its demands as well as social defects through the tragic stories of individuals. The study demonstrates that Canth did not, like previous research has suggested, wait until the 1890s before writing works of a psychological nature but had already written according to the psychological paradigm of her time in Työmiehen vaimo (1885). The social and psychological interests intertwine in Canth s works and are not exclusionary as has formerly been interpreted. Canth is also critical of the medical power implicit in the naturalist experimental method and this shows itself especially in her depiction of working class women.
Resumo:
Distraction in the workplace is increasingly more common in the information age. Several tasks and sources of information compete for a worker's limited cognitive capacities in human-computer interaction (HCI). In some situations even very brief interruptions can have detrimental effects on memory. Nevertheless, in other situations where persons are continuously interrupted, virtually no interruption costs emerge. This dissertation attempts to reveal the mental conditions and causalities differentiating the two outcomes. The explanation, building on the theory of long-term working memory (LTWM; Ericsson and Kintsch, 1995), focuses on the active, skillful aspects of human cognition that enable the storage of task information beyond the temporary and unstable storage provided by short-term working memory (STWM). Its key postulate is called a retrieval structure an abstract, hierarchical knowledge representation built into long-term memory that can be utilized to encode, update, and retrieve products of cognitive processes carried out during skilled task performance. If certain criteria of practice and task processing are met, LTWM allows for the storage of large representations for long time periods, yet these representations can be accessed with the accuracy, reliability, and speed typical of STWM. The main thesis of the dissertation is that the ability to endure interruptions depends on the efficiency in which LTWM can be recruited for maintaing information. An observational study and a field experiment provide ecological evidence for this thesis. Mobile users were found to be able to carry out heavy interleaving and sequencing of tasks while interacting, and they exhibited several intricate time-sharing strategies to orchestrate interruptions in a way sensitive to both external and internal demands. Interruptions are inevitable, because they arise as natural consequences of the top-down and bottom-up control of multitasking. In this process the function of LTWM is to keep some representations ready for reactivation and others in a more passive state to prevent interference. The psychological reality of the main thesis received confirmatory evidence in a series of laboratory experiments. They indicate that after encoding into LTWM, task representations are safeguarded from interruptions, regardless of their intensity, complexity, or pacing. However, when LTWM cannot be deployed, the problems posed by interference in long-term memory and the limited capacity of the STWM surface. A major contribution of the dissertation is the analysis of when users must resort to poorer maintenance strategies, like temporal cues and STWM-based rehearsal. First, one experiment showed that task orientations can be associated with radically different patterns of retrieval cue encodings. Thus the nature of the processing of the interface determines which features will be available as retrieval cues and which must be maintained by other means. In another study it was demonstrated that if the speed of encoding into LTWM, a skill-dependent parameter, is slower than the processing speed allowed for by the task, interruption costs emerge. Contrary to the predictions of competing theories, these costs turned out to involve intrusions in addition to omissions. Finally, it was learned that in rapid visually oriented interaction, perceptual-procedural expectations guide task resumption, and neither STWM nor LTWM are utilized due to the fact that access is too slow. These findings imply a change in thinking about the design of interfaces. Several novel principles of design are presented, basing on the idea of supporting the deployment of LTWM in the main task.
Resumo:
For decades psychoanalysis was the discipline studying the unconscious, and other branches of study lacked competence to take a stand on the issues concerning the unconscious. From 1980s onwards intense study of the unconscious has been taken place in the scope of cognitive orientation. Thus, nowadays it is talked about both pyschoanalytic and cognitive unconscious. The aim of this thesis is to integrate psychoanalytic and cognitive views. When the "Freudian" conception of the unconscious is considered, there are four entangled issues: 1) what is the unconscious like, 2) how does the unconsciuos give rise to psychic disorders 3) why and how certain contents are missing from consciousness (repression of contents), 4) the emergence of those contents (becoming conscious of the repressed). The conventional psychoanalytic answer to the first question - and "the cornerstone of psychoanalysis" - is "the unconscious is mental". The issues 2)-4) depend radically on the answer given to the 1): "psychoanalytic" conceptualizations on them rest on the "cornerstone". That ground was challended in study I: it was argued that it has never been clear what does it mean that the unconscious is mental. Thus, it was stated that in the current state of art psychoanalysis should drop out the ephitet "mental" before the term unconscious. That claim creates a pressure to reappraise the convential "psychoanalytic" answers to the other questions, and that reappraisal was the aim of studies II and III. In study II the question 2) is approached in terms of implicit knowledge. Study III focuses on mechanisms, which determine which contents appear in the scope of consciousness, and also cause missing of contents from there (the questions 3) and 4)). In the core of study III there are distinctions concerning the processess occuring in the levels of the brain, consciousness, self-consciousness, and narrative self-consciousness. Studies I-III set "psychoanalytic" topics in the frames of cognitive view. The picture emerging from those studies is not especially useful for a clinican (psychotherapist). Studies IV and V focused that issue. Study IV is a rather serious critique toward neuropsychoanalysis. In it it was claimed that repressive functions of conscious states are in the core of clinical psychoanalysis, and functions in general cannot be reduced to neurophysiological terminology. Thus, the limits of neuropsychoanalysis are more strict than it has been realized: crucial clinical issues remain outside its scope. In study V it was focused on the confusing state of things that although unconscious fantasies do not exist, the idea on them has been an important conceptual tool for clinicans. When put in a larger context, the aim of study V is similar to that of study IV: to determine the relation between psychotherapists' and neuroscientists' terminologies. Studies III, IV and V apply the philosopher Daniel Dennett's model on different levels of explanation.