Rorschachbound: a 50-year memoir

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Personality Assessment evokes memories of years past when I participated in its birth. Therefore, in recording what I consider significant events in Rorschach's stormy history, I am placing them within an autobiographical framework. Originally introduced into America by David Levy in the early 1920s, the Rorschach attracted students from many disciplines who revolted against the "trait" psychology that pervaded the psychological scene at the time. For 30 years, we accepted Rorschach enthusiastically as a global method that could study the human personality as a whole and in depth. In the late 1960s, we were challenged because of repeated failures in validating research. Interest declined in its development and application. Since 1970, however, it has emerged with more strength and vigor on firmer theoretical foundations and sounder methodology. Although the method is one of the most frequently required, requested, needed, recommended, and used in many clinical settings, it is still challenged today, chiefly because of overemphasis on the nomothetic approaches in research and failure to consider interactions between personality dynamics, behavior, and situational and sociocultural variables. Those of us whose lives have long been entwined with the history of the Rorschach should step back from the contemporary canvas and contemplate the future of our method, t suggest that we develop alternative conceptual models and greater diversity of research methods and modes of thought. The Journal of Personality Assessment can enhance the future of the Rorschach by giving greater prominence to clinically oriented research, notably to the idiographic and interactional aspects of the method. In so doing, the journal can help the Rorschach reach its real goal of complete scientific validity.     

A short personal memoir

The history of the formation of the different analytical psychology groups in Britain is briefly described to illustrate the recurring splitting that has taken place throughout the development of the profession of analytical psychology. The author discusses her role as editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology.     

Dave Eggers's a heartbreaking work of staggering genius: memoir as a "pain-relief device"

Dave Eggers's memoir is an important addition to the tradition of autobiography in America, and offers significant contributions to our understanding of creativity, sublimation, and the psychology of the memoir-writing process. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is really two books--an autobiographical narrative about unbearable suffering, and a book of psychoanalytic commentary on the challenges of writing a memoir about catastrophic loss and trauma. The main narrative suggests the psychological resilience it takes to contain unbearable suffering. The metanarrative renders transparent the mind of someone who is both remembering his losses and constantly reflecting upon the process of writing about them. Eggers's identification with authorship, rather than bereavement or traumatization, may have played an important role in containing his affect and his sense of self when the heartbreaking events were originally unfolding. But a price is paid when a son uses his art to construct a new identity as an author--unconscious conflicts, primitive affect, anxieties about failing, as well as guilt about succeeding--consequences often missed by readers. Heartbreaking is a palimpsest, a story about story-telling superimposed on tales of death and survival, but its messages will be missed unless all its parts are preserved when being read or studied.     

Karl Schmitz-Moormann: Our Intellectual Legacy From a Great Mind

Karl Schmitz-Moormann's thought as expressed in his last book exemplifies Catholic theology based on realism, flow, evolution, and free will. Categories of creation are reviewed: from nothing, continuous, called forth, informed, and free.     

Autography as auto-therapy: psychic pain and the graphic memoir

Over the last three decades, the graphic novel has developed both in sophistication and cultural importance, now being widely accepted as a unique form of literature (Versaci 2007). Autobiography has proved to be a successful genre within comics (the word is used in the plural to denote both the medium and the philosophy of the graphic form) and within this area a sub-genre, the memoir of the artist's own disease or suffering, sometimes known as the graphic pathology, has arisen (Green and Myers 2010). Storytelling and healing have been linked since ancient times, and the disclosure of ones story forms part of the psychotherapeutic treatment of trauma (Herman 1997). This paper will examine, in both graphic and textual form, whether, among the myriad reasons that one might embark upon the labour intensive work of making a graphic memoir, some artists might be seeking some form of healing or catharsis through their work.     

Karl menninger: A centennial tribute

This tribute primarily focuses on Karl Menninger's literary skills as a preacher. His last two books,Sparks and Whatever Became of Sin? are used as examples of what Reinhold Niebuhr called “vital prophetic Christianity.” They clearly illustrate Dr. Menninger's homiletical style. These evaluations are augmented by personal conversations with him during which he strongly encouraged pastoral counselors to refocus their attention on the sermon as a basic resource for prevention and hope.     

From cybernetics to brain theory,and more: A memoir

While structured as an autobiography, this memoir exemplifies ways in which classic contributions to cybernetics (e.g., by Wiener, McCulloch & Pitts, and von Neumann) have fed into a diversity of current research areas, including the mathematical theory of systems and computation, artificial intelligence and robotics, computational neuroscience, linguistics, and cognitive science. The challenges of brain theory receive special emphasis. Action-oriented perception and schema theory complement neural network modeling in analyzing cerebral cortex, cerebellum, hippocampus, and basal ganglia. Comparative studies of frog, rat, monkey, ape and human not only deepen insights into the human brain but also ground an EvoDevoSocio view of “how the brain got language.” The rapprochement between neuroscience and architecture provides a recent challenge. The essay also assesses some of the social and theological implications of this broad perspective.