The Pique Technique: Overcoming Mindlessness or Shifting Heuristics?

An unusual request can increase compliance in situations in which the typical response to the request is refusal. This procedure, called the pique technique, is said to be effective because the unusual request causes people to give mindful consideration to it. We tested this explanation in 2 studies. Passersby were asked for either a common amount of change or 37 cents. Participants who inquired about the unusual amount were given either a specific or an uninformative reason. The pique technique increased compliance, but only when participants stopped to ask about the request. These participants gave more money, regardless of the reason provided. The findings failed to support the notion that an unusual request leads to a mindful consideration of it.     

Bibliometric Review of the Repertory Grid Technique: 1998–2007

This bibliometric review covers the scientific production with or about the repertory grid technique (RGT; Kelly, 1955/1991) between 1998 and 2007. An analysis of previous reviews suggests the need for a more careful and broad process of bibliographic research. With this aim, 24 bibliographic sources were used to cover a wide range of specialties. We began by drawing up an explicit protocol in which the research terms were detailed. Then we consulted the bibliographic sources, taking into account a specification of inclusion and exclusion criteria. As a result of this process, 973 references were obtained: 468 journal papers, 335 book chapters, 108 doctoral theses, and 62 books. The review also evaluates the types of documents found, the evolution of the number of works published, the repertory grid's fields of application, and the degree of openness to other disciplines. The most relevant authors, their affiliations, countries, and the publication language are also revealed in this article, as well as the major journals contributing to dissemination of the work done with this technique.     

Sport,Craft Or Technique? The Case of competitive aeromodelling

This essay takes competitive aeromodelling as a test case for certain contentious issues in philosophy of sport. More specifically, I look at the challenge it presents to prevailing ideas of what properly counts as ‘sport’, which in turn have their source in other, more basic or deep-rooted preconceptions. Among them are a range of ‘common-sense’ beliefs about the properly (naturally) human, the mind/body relationship, the role (if any) of scientific-technological innovation as a means of performance enhancement, and – most fundamentally – the distinction between nature and culture in so far as it bears on these questions. My approach is broadly deconstructionist in taking them as genuine questions and in pressing hard on those unresolved problems thrown up by any attempt to secure a definition of ‘sport’ that would pre-emptively exclude any kind of advanced technological adjunct (or Derridean ‘supplement’) that seemed to lead outside and beyond the realm of ‘natural’ human powers, capacities and skills. On the other hand I acknowledge – as against ‘strong’-conventionalist (e.g. Wittgensteinian) approaches – that the category ‘sport’ cannot be relativised or culturally contextualised to the point where it loses all determinate sense or normative significance. My main purpose here is to assess various claims and counter-claims by running them past a fairly detailed account of competitive aeromodelling – or one particular branch thereof – and the kinds of difficulty it creates not only for conservative, essentialist or naturalising definitions but also for that other reactive trend towards all-out cultural-relativist or social-constructivist doctrines. In addition, though far from incidentally, I want to make the case that this is indeed a sport on any reasonable, fair, or adequately informed reckoning and that its recognition as such might help to clarify certain obscure corners of current philosophical thinking about these issues.     

Hey Buddy,Can You Spare Seventeen Cents? Mindful Persuasion and the Pique Technique1

According to the pique technique, a target is more likely to comply if mindless refusal is disrupted by a strange or unusual request. We demonstrated the use of this technique in two experiments. In Experiment 1, passersby on a local municipal wharf were approached by a confederate panhandler who made either one of two strange requests: “Can you spare 17¢ (or 37¢)?” or made either one of two typical requests “Can you spare a quarter (or any change)?” Subjects in the strange conditions were almost 60% more likely to give money than those receiving the typical plea. In addition, a strange request piqued interest as evidenced by increased verbal inquiries about the request. Experiment 2 replicated the first experiment in a laboratory setting and provides additional evidence (via a cognitive response analysis) that strange requests piqued subjects' interest in the appeal as well as increased liking for the panhandler.     

Changes in Inkblot Perception with Presentation of the Holtzman Inkblot Technique as an “Intelligence Test”

The Holtzman Inkblot Technique (HIT) was administered by the Group Method to 180 college students. Half the Ss received the standardized HIT instructional set; the other 90 Ss had the HIT represented as a test of intellectual ability. The difference in instructional set caused a significant decrease in HIT variables, Penetration, Hostility, Animal, and Pathognomic Verbalization. The results are interpreted as representing a “tightening up” of the cognitive-perceptual process, but without any accompanying increase in constriction or stereotopy of responses.     

What is “Good” Technique? How to Teach it? Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training

There is an intense interest in the interactional process across the varying psychoanalytic schools of thought. The analytic relationship itself, in all of its complexity, is the vehicle for our work. These advances raise the question of what we mean by technique these days, a question that has implications for analytic training and supervision. In this paper, the author reflects back on his analytic training experience, specifically at how two of his supervisors regarded technique, how it was taught, and the various ways in which it was communicated. In looking back at these supervisory experiences, the author examines how these teaching analysts embodied some of what they had to teach. The author shows what was mutative across these training experiences in terms of what was needed in order to grow—what facilitated his own development as an analyst and contributed towards the cultivation of his own style.     

Inside the Revolution: Power,Sex, and Technique in Freud’s “‘Wild’ Analysis”

This essay situates Freud’s “‘Wild’ Analysis” in its local and global histories, even while reading it for what it can tell us about psychoanalysis now. Even as it is taken on its own terms, this essay serves also as a means to consider psychoanalysis as host to crucial tensions, its ideas and their relation to technique, its traffic in power, and sexuality and the primal crime. Using a clinical vignette, the essay argues the heterogeneity and multiplicity inherent to psychoanalysis are a gift to later generations, even if they made trouble for Freud. In celebration and critique, it examines, in effect, where Freud was and where psychoanalysis is now.     

Should Analytic Patients Be “Created”? Reflections on Arnold Rothstein's Psychoanalytic Technique and the Creation of Analytic Patients

Abstract

The five points of Arnold Rothstein's interesting monograph are each discussed and critiqued in this article. In particular, Rothstein is commended for his commitment to expanding the availability of an intensive, psychoanalytic treatment for a broad spectrum of patients who may often be very difficult to engage. Rothstein also accounts for difficulties in engaging analytic patients from obstacles in the attitudes of analysts such as a latent lack of conviction about the efficacy of psychoanalysis and from overly restricted stereotypes about the spectrum of appropriate patients. He recommends a flexibility of technique and accommodation to the needs of patients with which this author agrees.

Others of Rothstein's observations and recommendations seem more problematic. Specifically, issue is taken with his suggestion that analysts attempt to provide a trial of psychoanalysis for all nonpsychotic patients and to begin on a less intensive basis only within the frame or interpreting prospective patients' objections as a resistance. This author also disagrees with Rothstein's interpretation that patients resist the offer of a psychoanalysis out of a self-defeating masochistic enactment that needs interpretation. Case examples are provided that belie this overly generalized interpretation. Additionally, this author critiques the metapsychological assumptions underlying this particular mode of interpreting a reluctance to begin psychoanalysis.

While commending Rothstein's therapeutic goals and recommended flexibility of technique, this author would also stress a fundamental concern about the patient's conscious and unconscious experience of the analyst's agenda. In other words, rather than working toward the analyst's goal of establishing a psychoanalytic situation, emphasis is placed instead on the basic right of patients to proceed in a manner that respects their sovereignty over how intensively they may choose to work. Therefore, in contradistinction to Rothstein's suggestions, it is recommended that the analyst's primary focus should be to provide an availability to work on the patient's conflicts and developmental needs with a respect for the timing of their emergence and expression within a treatment frame that invites but does not prematurely elicit and confront. By proceeding in this way a patient's salient dynamics will be allowed to emerge “organically” instead of being hastened prematurely in reaction to the analyst's insistence on the Tightness of a particular schedule or manner of proceeding. This author believes that with this approach more, rather than fewer, patients will be able to accept the recommendation of an intensive psychoanalytic treatment.     

What are the Origins of Shamanic Journeying Imagery? The Modification of a Hypnoanalytic Technique to Address an Enduring Methodological Problem

Shamanic journeying imagery arguably transcends geographical space and historical time. However, to what extent is the content of the journeying imagery a construction of the shaman's cultural cosmology, belief systems, autobiographical memories, etc? It is suggested that attempts to answer this question are hampered by a fundamental methodological obstacle: how to detect contextual influences on imagery that the shaman cannot report on because they are outside his/her present awareness and memory. A partial solution is presented: Watkins' (1971) Watkins, J. G. 1971. The affect bridge: A hypnoanalytic technique.. The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 19: 21–27. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] Affect Bridge, a hypnoanalytic technique used to uncover the origin of an affect. A nonhypnotic version of the technique developed for inquiry into shamanic journeying imagery is then explicated. Two recent empirical studies conducted by Rock (2006) Rock, A. J. 2006. Phenomenological analysis of experimentally induced visual mental imagery associated with shamanic journeying to the lower world.. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 25: 45–55.  [Google Scholar] and Rock, Casey and Baynes (2006) Rock, A. J., Casey, P. J. and Baynes, P. B. 2006. Experimental study of ostensibly shamanic journeying imagery in naive participants II: Phenomenological mapping and modified affect bridge.. Anthropology of Consciousness, 17(1): 65–83. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], illustrating the utility of the Modified Affect Bridge with regards to investigating experimentally the origin of ostensibly shamanic journeying imagery reported by naive participants, are summarized. A tentative ostensibly shamanic journeying imagery origin typology is formulated and suggestions for future research are advanced.     

The Analytic Moment Doesn't Fit Analytic “Technique”: Commentary on Tony Bass's “When the Frame Doesn't Fit the Picture”

Tony Bass in his groundbreaking contribution to the analytic literature argues cogently that the frame remains an essential reference point throughout any psychoanalysis, a statement about which he and I are in agreement. He also argues that for a frame to be therapeutically useful it must be flexible enough to allow negotiation of enactments and their working through in an intersubjective field, another point about which we are in complete accord. He and I each hold a self-state perspective that informs and enriches our clinical work. Where we diverge slightly is in how this perspective shapes the way we think about the nature of the “frame” as it applies to the dissociated self-states of patient and analyst that emerge and engage each other subsymbolically as an ongoing aspect of the work, often in quite bewildering and sometimes confounding ways. This paper speaks to a number of issues that I hope will bring into relief some of the points of contrast that do exist, while underlining the core commonality in our thinking and clinical sensibility that unites us.     

Even More Than the “Something More”: Tronick’s Dyadic Expansion of Consciousness Model and the Expansion of Child Psychoanalytic Technique

Contemporary psychoanalysis considers itself to be a discipline fundamentally concerned with meaning and meaning-making processes. Ed Tronick’s research provides scientific support for the theoretical position that meaning making is a central process in psychological development and in mental health/illness. His work collaborating with psychoanalysts has made major contributions to the psychoanalytic literature on therapeutic action, with a special emphasis on the means by which implicit meanings are activated and modified in analytic treatment—the something more than interpretation. This article is about a different something more, the even more that psychoanalytic theory and technique can evolve through further incorporating Tronick’s important findings. Tronick’s Dyadic Expansion of Consciousness Model will be briefly reviewed—emphasizing his conceptualization of meanings as being composed of multiple commingling layers (biological, psychological, relational, and social) coming together in a nonlinear “messy” mixture of mutually influencing (both bottom-up and top-down) currents. This multilayered model of meaning opens up the reconsideration of an exciting array of technical options—traditionally considered nonanalytic—to be reunderstood as truly psychoanalytic in that they address one or more of the implicit or explicit levels of meaning that a patient makes of his or her self and world. Examples of these interventions include parent work, work with teachers and schools, as well as interventions adapted from other disciplines such as Occupational Therapy. These technical possibilities are illustrated using case material from the psychoanalytic treatment of a nine-year-old boy.     

The Attention Training Technique as an Attempt to Decrease Intrusive Thoughts in Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder (OCD): From Cognitive Theory to Practice and Back

The attention training technique (ATT) is a cognitive treatment method that is aimed at ameliorating intrusive thoughts in anxiety disorders. To the best of our knowledge, no randomized controlled study has yet been conducted on individuals with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). For the present study, we recruited 80 participants with OCD over the internet and allocated them to an experimental (ATT implemented as bibliotherapy) or a wait-list condition. Assessments were made at baseline and four weeks later. Groups performed similar at both time points on the self-report version of the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) and the Obsessive Compulsive Inventory-revised (OCI-R). The present study speaks against the effectiveness of ATT as a stand-alone bibliotherapeutical approach for OCD. From our data and increasing evidence that OCD patients do not suffer from severe attention or executive deficits we consider an approach targeting attentional biases for certain OCD-related events more useful than a generic (i.e., OCD-unspecific) cognitive remediation approach.