Remembering Donald G. Paterson: Before the separation between industrial-organizational and vocational psychology

This article discusses the disconnect between industrial-organizational (I-O) and vocational psychology in the context of Donald Paterson’s career, an applied psychologist who bridged both disciplines. Paterson’s interests in both vocational guidance and personnel selection suggest that these fields are interwoven, despite the prevailing gap separating them in science and practice. Current trends in I-O psychology are discussed that suggest the field is beginning to reconsider the importance of vocational psychology in the modern workplace. We argue that I-O psychology would benefit from such a reconnection by acknowledging its ethical responsibility to improve the workplace for both management and the worker.     

Remembering and Remembering to Forget

To navigate our lives we all need to find ways both to remember and sometimes to forget aspects of our experiences that threaten us or cause us anxiety. Often patients need help in developing a capacity to hold in some dialectical tension, both remembering and forgetting. Some people are so frightened by the harsher realities of their lives that they turn to us to take on the remembering side of this dialectic, and, sometimes, to take on the forgetting side. Part of the work of their therapy is to help them develop the capacity to do more of both for themselves. Other patients come better prepared to take on this challenge and use us to witness and support their own efforts. This paper considers how patients use their hours with us to remember and to forget and ways in which psychoanalysts might participate in this undertaking.     

Remembering remembering

We developed a laboratory analogue of the "forgot-it-all-along" effect that J. W. Schooler, M. Bendiksen, and Z. Ambadar (1997) proposed for cases of "recovered memories" in which individuals had forgotten episodes of talking about the abuse when they were supposedly amnestic for it. In Experiment 1, participants studied homographs with disambiguating context words; in Test 1 they received studied- or other-context words as cues; and in Test 2 they received studied-context cues and judged whether they had recalled each item during Test 1. In Experiment 2, retrieval cues were manipulated on both tests. In Experiment 3, both the studied- and other-context cues corresponded to the same meaning of each homograph. In Experiment 4, Test 1 was free recall, and studied- versus other-context cues were presented in Test 2. Participants more often forgot that they had previously recalled an item if they were cued to think of it differently on the two tests.     

Remembering operations

Two commonplace assumptions about encoding are that sentences are encoded and recognized on the basis of their semantic features primarily and that information regarding form features such as typography is typically ignored or discarded. These assumptions were tested m the present experiment where, within a signal-detection paradigm, S sorted sentences according to whether he had seen them before or not (old vs new) and, if they were old, whether their reappearance was in the same typography as on the first occurrence or a different one. Of the two typographies, one was familiar and the other unfamiliar. Results show that a considerable amount of information regarding surface features is stored for many minutes and that ease of initial encoding is inversely related to likelihood of subsequent recognition: sentences in the unfamiliar typography were remembered better. The results are probably not due to time spent encoding; control tests suggest that time spent encoding a difficult typography does not by itself increase recognition of the semantic content embodied in the typography. Other control tests show that pictorial features or images of the sentences play no significant role in their subsequent recognition. One interpretation of the results is that the analytic activities or cognitive operations that characterize initial acquisition play a significant role in subsequent recognition.     

Remembering democracy

A proper sense of history and the past is often held to be essential to democracy. Current attitudes to history and the past in the United Kingdom, particularly but not only in the context of formal education, show signs of strain, just as many other aspects of democracy do. Conceptions of history as heritage or as a site for the exercise of skills deserve critical examination. We need to look for a fresh basis for the relationship of democracies with their past. Perhaps this can be found in the essentially oppositional or ironical structure that both democracy and remembering require for their full flourishing.     

Remembering War: Fabre on Remembrance

Following wars, what requirements, if any, of remembrance do we – those who live in peacetime – have? On whom do they fall? Who must be remembered? How should they be remembered? Fabre offers us an account of remembrance that answers some of those questions and provides a helpful framework for working through the others. It is philosophically nuanced as well as attuned to the complexity of war and informed by actual commemorative practices. In this article, however, I expand Fabre's list of desiderata that a good account of war remembrance must meet. I argue that Fabre's account needs to be refined and, at least in one respect, revised in light of these new desiderata.     

Remembering Herb

Abstract

This paper discusses treatment of an incest survivor who suffered a crippling sense of guilt. The work of discovering and understanding the unconscious fantasies that accompanied the patient's early traumatic experiences led to the alleviation of her misplaced guilt and to more adaptive compromise formations. It is necessary to understand and address the unconscious fantasies attached to the incest, as intellectual awareness of inappropriate guilt does not suffice to diminish it.