In Search of Psychoanalytic Pluralism: An Inquiry into Time, Money, and Love

This essay examines religious studies scholarship that has relied heavily upon the work of Sigmund Freud and attempts to show its weakness by offering a self psychological reading to complement each text. In doing this, I inquire into the scholarly tendency to avoid pluralistic use of meta-psychologies, arguing that the well-being of the field is weakened by such scholarly fixations. The essay draws its concluding observations largely on trends in scholarly literature, inquiring into the nature and quality of the use of multiple meta-psychologies in scholarly monographs.     

A Clinician's View of Attachment Theory and Research: A Discussion of the Papers in Three Issues of Psychoanalytic Inquiry

In this essay, I take up concepts raised in papers in the three issues of Psychoanalytic Inquiry edited by Diana Diamond and Sidney Blatt. To give coherence to my discussion, I consider the many subjects covered (often several in one paper) under the headings of Mothering, Representation, Trauma and Pathology, and Therapeutic Change and Its Measurement. I focus throughout on the relevance of findings to the outlook of a clinician, at times providing examples based on my experience as an analyst to further elucidate my conceptualizations.     

Inhibition of action, thought, and emotion: A selective neurobiological review

The neural bases of inhibitory function are reviewed, covering data from paradigms assessing inhibition of motor responses (antisaccade, go/nogo, stop-signal), cognitive sets (e.g., Wisconsin Card Sort Test), and emotion (fear extinction). The frontal cortex supports performance on these paradigms, but the specific neural circuitry varies: response inhibition depends upon fronto-basal ganglia networks, inhibition of cognitive sets is supported by orbitofrontal cortex, and retention of fear extinction reflects ventromedial prefrontal cortex–amygdala interactions. Inhibition is thus neurobiologically heterogeneous, although right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex may support a general inhibitory process. Dysfunctions in these circuits may contribute to psychopathological conditions marked by inhibitory deficits.