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This article proposes a theoretical contribution to critical health psychology. Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics provide health psychology and related fields with an analytic that centers interest at the intersection where the co-constitution of reified categories occurs. I begin with the terms symptom and sign as used in medical contexts. Symptoms and signs can be reinterpreted, drawing on the Heideggerian notion of 'attunement', and upon Peirce's semiotics. Next, I present Peirce's concept of sign, with its triadic structure of object-representamen-interpretant. An understanding of pain as a sign in this sense is developed on this basis. The value of Peircian semiotics for a critical health psychology is illustrated with some examples drawn from a qualitative study. Pain is not only something of concern and the bearer of meanings, but a way of interpreting one's situation. This semiotics of pain furthers the project, common to phenomenological and discursive approaches in health psychology and related fields, of studying the upsurge of meaning in speech and in other acts that co-constitute it.

In this study of psychology and Catholicism, Kugelmann aims to provide clarity in an area filled with emotion and opinion. From the beginnings of modern psychology to the mid-1960s, this complicated relationship between science and religion is methodically investigated. Conflicts such as the boundary of 'person' versus 'soul', contested between psychology and the Church, are debated thoroughly. Kugelmann goes on to examine topics such as the role of the subconscious in explaining spiritualism and miracles; psychoanalysis and the sacrament of confession; myth and symbol in psychology and religious experience; cognition and will in psychology and in religious life; humanistic psychology as a spiritual movement. This fascinating study will be of great interest to scholars and students of both psychology and religious studies but will also appeal to all of those who have an interest in the way modern science and traditional religion coexist in our ever-changing society.

A hermeneuticalphenomenological analysis of 42 narratives of pain in everyday life leads to the conclusion that psychological pain is pain. Psychological and physical pain have similar phenomenological structures. Both are felt bodily performances that entail at least temporarily a disabling of a potentiality for action. Pain is a performance of affliction of a person in a social situation. The category of psychological and physical pains arises from cultural conceptions of the nature of the person. This category reveals that pain can afflict the person in any aspect of existence. A categorization closer to the phenomena differentiates pains on the basis of what aspect of existence is afflicted. In conclusion, differences between pain and suffering are explored.

Willpower has returned to contemporary psychology, drawing on ordinary speech, but the status of the will in psychology is not settled. Avoiding this antinomy of the will by proposing that willpower is an interactive kind (Hacking, 1999), this paper examines the significations of willpower as it developed in American culture and appeared in American newspapers from the 1850s to 1970. Willpower has diverse significations: self-control, resoluteness, and effort; testing of the limits of endurance; ability to influence and lead others; a visible sign of character; a measurable trait; a goal of education and training. Willpower was questioned, subordinated to other traits, and denied existence. Two conclusions arise: Qualitative research will enrich our understanding of willpower; and the history of willpower is essential to psychology’s understanding of it, showing willpower to be a category appropriate to societies where individual effort, despite circumstances and conventions, is a cultural good.