A further footnote to Freud's "fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria".

While ther is no evidence that Freud ever had in analysis a leading political figure, he did analyze the sister of one, and made her the basis of an important case study. Dora's brother, Otto Bauer, was an influential Marxist theoretician and leader of the Austrian Socialist Party from 1918 to 1934. Freud's Dora case illuminates the psychodynamics of Otto Bauer's life and career, and a re-examination of the case together with recent research also provides us with new information about Freud's analysis of Dora and the milieu in which they both lived.     

Visiting Santa: a further look

An informal enquiry of the facial expressions of children as they queued up to meet Santa Claus during the 2003 Yuletide season showed that about 8 out of 10 children appeared to be indifferent to seeing Santa. This replication of the study in 2004 resulted in an approximately similar finding. A repeat of these enquiries, in 2005, suggested that the indifference rate appeared to lessen (being somewhat more cheerful) the closer was Christmas.     

A legal look at the retention-promotion controversy

The authors find that courts generally defer to the promotion-retention decisions of school officials. However, courts may demand officials to provide additional justification for retention decisions based on a single criteria and are likely to overturn school retention decisions based on a single criteria that have a disproportionate impact on minority students.     

A fresh look at perversion

The history of ideas about perversion is considered, along with an examination of whether the concept is clinically useful. Three cases of varying degrees of severity are presented, illustrating the clinical value of the concept in the analytic situation. All three cases are women, and the particular usefulness of the concept of perversion for women is noted. The place of aggression and the pleasure resulting from its expression are highlighted.     

A fresh look at the retention-promotion controversy

This article provides an overview of several issues relative to retention of school children. Included is a historical perspective on the present retention-promotion controversy, information on retention policies and retention prevalence rates, a review of research on the effectiveness of retention, and a discussion of several factors that should be considered by psychologists faced with the problem of making retention and promotion recommendations.     

A Strawsonian look at desert

P.F. Strawson famously argued that reactive attitudes and ordinary moral practices justify moral assessments of blame, praise, and punishment. Here we consider whether Strawson's approach can illuminate the concept of desert. After reviewing standard attempts to analyze this concept and finding them lacking, we suggest that to deserve something is to justifiably receive a moral assessment in light of certain criteria – in particular, eligibility criteria (a subject's properties that make the subject principally eligible for moral assessments) and assignment criteria (particulars about the subject, act, and circumstances that justify assessments such as blame in a particular case). Strawson's analysis of the ordinary attitudes and practices of moral assessment hints at these criteria but does not unequivocally ground a notion of desert. Following Strawson's general naturalistic approach, we show that recent psychological research on folk concepts and practices regarding freedom, moral responsibility, and blame illuminates how people actually arrive at moral assessments, thus revealing the very eligibility criteria and assignment criteria we suggest ground a concept of desert. By pushing the Strawsonian line even further than Strawson did, by empirically investigating actual moral practice and folk understandings, we can illuminate desert and lend credence to Strawson's general anti-metaphysical position.     

The name of the helper: a new look at "Rumpelstiltskin"

The fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin is studied in conjunction with related tales to provide a fuller understanding of its meaning than previous studies have done. The content of these tales depicts ambivalence about childhood magic and ambivalence about adult reality, which are uneasily resolved by eliminating magic and dwelling in a disenchanted world. Enchantment is retained formally in the telling of the story. To the extent that transference is enchantment, similar conflicts occur during psychoanalysis: is the patient better off adhering to transference or relinquishing it--or can it be integrated with day-to-day experience?