The fate of the direct argument and the case for incompatibilism

In this paper, I distinguish causal from logical versions of the direct argument for incompatibilism. I argue that, contrary to appearances, causal versions are better equipped to withstand an important recent challenge to the direct-argument strategy. The challenge involves arguing that support for the argument’s pivotal inference principle falls short just when it is needed most, namely when a deterministic series runs through an agent’s unimpaired deliberations. I then argue that, while there are limits to what causal versions can accomplish, they can be used to buttress the ultimacy argument, another important argument for incompatibilism.     

Gender Dilemmas and Myth in the Construction of Marital Bargains: Issues for Marital Therapy

Marital therapists are regularly confronted with issues of equality and fairness when working with couples. This article examines the social-contextual factors that influence couples' negotations about these issues. A common solution for couples, "the myth of equality," is identified, together with the processes that maintain it. The role of the therapist in relation to gender equality is addressed.     

The fate of old memories

A questionnaire relating to past events, and a well-known faces recognition test, were devised to provide an objective and quantitative assessment of recent and remote memories. Normal subjects aged from 40 to 89 were tested on recall and recognition versions of each test. It was found that performance declined with increasing age for all time periods sampled. No evidence was obtained to support the widely held belief that memory is inversely related to the remoteness of event in older subjects.     

The fate of completed intentions

The goal of this research was to determine whether and how people deactivate prospective memory (PM) intentions after they have been completed. One view proposes that PM intentions can be deactivated after completion, such that they no longer come to mind and interfere with current tasks. Another view is that now irrelevant completed PM intentions exhibit persisting activation, and continue to be retrieved. In Experiment 1, participants were given a PM intention embedded within the ongoing task during Phase 1, after which participants were told either that the PM task had been completed or suspended until later. During Phase 2, participants were instructed to perform only the ongoing task and were periodically prompted to report their thoughts. Critically, the PM targets from Phase 1 reappeared in Phase 2. All of our measures, including thoughts reported about the PM task, supported the existence of persisting activation. In Experiment 2, we varied conditions that were expected to mitigate persisting activation. Despite our best attempts to promote deactivation, we found evidence for the persistence of spontaneous retrieval in all groups after intentions were completed. The theoretical and practical implications of this potential dark side to spontaneous retrieval are discussed.     

The fate of memory: comment on McCloskey and Zaragoza

McCloskey and Zaragoza (1985) argue that misleading postevent suggestions do not affect the availability of originally encoded information. Their hypothesis stems from empirical work using a modified paradigm in which no effect of postevent information is observed. Although their "no impairment" hypothesis is plausible, careful consideration of the predictions of their experimental test suggests that it may be insufficiently sensitive to reveal the impact of postevent information. A small effect of postevent information can be observed when their paradigm is repeated with a more sensitive recognition test. McCloskey and Zaragoza's no impairment hypothesis is also difficult to reconcile with numerous reports of "blend" memories that reflect a compromise between the original and postevent information.     

The fate of the oedipus complex: Dissolution or waning

Abstract

Fried R. Personal and Classical Myth; A Confrontation on the Acropolis. Int Forum Psychoanal 1997;6:715. Stockholm, ISSN 0803-706X.

On his only visit to Greece, Sigmund Freud experienced brief but unsettling feelings of alienation as he stood on the Acropolis. Haunted by this experience, Freud did not succeed in analyzing it to his own satisfaction until 32 years after the event, in 1936. His interpretation, that he had felt guilt about superseding his father, did not convince most of the critics who have commented on it. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate that while Freud's critics were right in sensing that his explanation was only partial, none were able to decipher his secret. Prominent among the reasons for these repeated failures was lack of acquaintance with the Acropolis itself. Anyone standing where Freud stood becomes enabled to understand otherwise incomprehensible details of his essay. Seeing what Freud saw, however, still is not enough unless one also attempts to acquire some of his knowledge of archaeology and mythology. His competence in these areas made him aware of contradictions (e.g. between classical and archaic architecture and myth) that do not trouble the casual tourist. But his knowledge also furnished him with the tools for mastering his anxiety, turning fear of death into confidence in immortality, and gratifying desires even more ambitious than that of superseding his father.     

The fate of a warrior culture

Jonathan Lear in Radical Hope tackles the idea of cultural devastation, in the specific case of the Crow Indians. What do we mean by “annihilation” of a culture? The moral point of view that he imagines as he reconstructs the eve and aftermath of this annihilation is not second personal, of obligation, but first personal, in the collective and singular, as told by the Crows, with Lear as “analyst.” Radical Hope is a study of representative character of a people—of virtue, courage, resilience, and hope in the face of cultural collapse. The leading questions are shaped by ancient Greek ethics, but with a twist: On the brink of cultural death, what counts for us as good living and what is the nature of the virtues or excellences that constitute it? How might a leader, a phronimos, exemplify it? This puts it too narrowly. The questions, also, are Wittgensteinian: How does a nation go on, when the concepts and way of life it has lived by for centuries are no more? What does it mean to go on? What does it mean to stop when the marks of going on are no longer?     

The fate of ear asymmetries in short-term memory

Recognition memory for word lists presented to left or right ears was tested after filled retention intervals of 0-to 60-sec duration. Experiment 1 showed that the right-ear advantage (REA) for immediate recognition in dichotic listening does not occur after 10 sec delay. In Experiment 2, monaural presentation produced a nonsignificant REA which did not appear to be affected by delay. These data suggest that the REA for immediate report usually observed in the dichotic listening situation is a transient phenomenon which is based on phonetic encoding. The left hemisphere seems to be specialized for the initial reception of verbal information, but not for the storage or retention of such information over time.     

The fate of the dream in contemporary psychoanalysis

Freud's metapsychology of dream formation has implicitly been discarded, as indicated in a brief review of trends in psychoanalytic thinking about dreams, with a focus on the relationship of the dream process to ego capacities. The current bias toward exclusive emphasis on the exploration of the analytic relationship and the transference has evolved at the expense of classical, in-depth dream interpretation, and, by extension, at the expense of strengthening the patient's capacity for self-inquiry. This trend is shown to be especially evident in the treatment of borderline patients, who today are believed by many analysts to misuse the dream in the analytic situation. An extended clinical example of a borderline patient with whom an unmodified Freudian associative technique of dream interpretation is used with good outcome illustrates the author's contrary conviction. In clinical practice, we should neglect neither the uniqueness of the dream as a central intrapsychic event nor the Freudian art of total dream analysis.     

Dealing with austerity measures within armed forces: The Dutch case

This article studies how Dutch military personnel respond to austerity-related discontent. Based on the online survey (N = 579) conducted among military personnel we investigate 4 response strategies to austerity measures applied in the Dutch armed forces: voice (collective protest), exit (leaving the organization), silence (deliberately deciding not to protest), and neglect (engaging in anti-organizational behavior). We focus on how personnel combine these strategies and apply cluster analysis to identify 6 typical response patterns that we label as protesters, escapers, quiescents, conformers, obstructionists and combaters. We investigate how personal characteristics and perception of unique military environment influence the response of military personnel. We conclude that clusters we described are not only distinct in their behavior—their personal characteristics and perceptions differ as well.     

The fate of unattended stimuli and emotional habituation: Behavioral interference and cortical changes

The interference produced by the viewing of emotional distractors has been interpreted as evidence that emotional cues are processed in a fairly mandatory fashion, and that they divert attention from the primary ongoing task. However, few studies have examined how behavioral emotional interference varies with repeated presentation of the same emotional distractors. In two experiments, while participants were engaged in a parity judgment task, we investigated the effects of repetition of task-irrelevant emotional pictures, as reflected in both behavioral interference (Experiments 1 and 2) and neural activity (Experiment 2). Both experiments showed that the slowing of reaction times that was observed when viewing emotional, compared to neutral, scenes disappeared after only a few repetitions, suggesting diminished attention allocation to repeated emotional pictures. Conversely, in Experiment 2, neural correlates of picture processing revealed that the late positive potential (LPP) amplitude continued to be enhanced for emotional, compared to neutral, distractors despite picture repetition and the presence of a concurrent task. Altogether, these findings suggest that while evaluative processes are mandatory, and continue to engage cortico-limbic appetitive and defensive systems even after massive repetition, as suggested by the affective modulation of the LPP, attentional processes are not necessary after several repetitions of the same stimulus, as indicated by the rapid decline of behavioral emotional interference.     

Discrete vs. continuous processing: The fate of an incompletely processed perceptual dimension

A relevant issue in the debate on continuous vs. discrete processing of information is whether incompletely processed information does or does not affect a subsequent reaction. Two stimuli (SL, SR) were presented on eye level, subtending a visual angle of 45 degrees. SL was always inspected first, followed by a saccade to SR and finally by a same/different response. The fixation time of SL (TL), the saccadic time (TM) and the time from fixating SR to the response (TR) were separately measured. SL and SR consisted of two-dimensional stimuli (size and letter shape) constructed in such a way that encoding size took longer for one group and encoding shape took longer for another group of 10 subjects. All subjects were tested in three conditions: Shape was relevant in one, size in the second, and both dimensions were relevant in the third condition.

TL was less when encoding the relevant dimension was fast. When both dimensions were relevant, TL was about as long as when only the slow dimension was relevant, suggesting parallel and interference-free processing during TL. When only the slow dimension was relevant, TR (same) was much longer when the fast dimension differed. When the fast dimension was relevant, TR (same) was slightly longer when the slow dimension differed, which can be handled by either model. The experiment was repeated with three well-practiced and less variable subjects who carried out sufficient trials to measure TR as a function of TL. The results of this study were in line with the discrete model: A different slow and irrelevant dimension did not affect the same response regardless of the duration of TL. Interestingly, subjects were capable of retrieving the slow dimension, suggesting a code which can be used for retrieval but which does not affect the same/different response.