Monologs,Dialogues, Bodies,Words, Silence,Photographs, Death

ABSTRACT

An examination of a clinical case in which severe demands on the analyst were made to bear silence and trauma unprocessable by the analysand. This discussion draws on the work of Coltart and Ferenczi to consider the demands of such work on the analyst. Intergenerational transmissions of trauma are also considered in the understanding of this case.     

Contrast, induction, facilitation, suppression, and conservation

Ten rats received all of their water in daily 1-hr sessions. Following a baseline phase in which lever and water spout were freely available throughout each session, subjects were trained to press the lever for water on mixed schedules composed of two alternating components. Each component gave access to water for a fixed cumulation of drinking time every time the rat cumulated a fixed amount of lever-pressing time. Changes in one component produced contrast and induction effects, both positive and negative, with respect to both lever pressing and drinking in the unchanged component. All schedules facilitated lever pressing relative to baseline. All schedules suppressed drinking relative to baseline, even though contingency sessions allowed ample time to perform the baseline amount of drinking. The entire pattern of results was predicted in quantitative detail by assuming that the total amount of a dimension apportioned to lever pressing and drinking is conserved between baseline and contingency sessions. Conservation theory was shown to predict several effects produced by simple fixed-ratio schedules, and was compared favorably with probability-differential (Premack, 1971) and response-deprivation (Timberlake and Allison, 1974) theory.     

Skill, strength, handedness, and fatigue

Thirty male subjects, 20 of whom were self-classified left-handers and 10 right-handers, were tested on a grip-strength task and a handwriting task with each hand, both under normal conditions and in a situation of induced experimental fatigue. On the basis of questionnaire scores, the left-handers were sub-divided into two groups comprising the 10 most left-handed and the 10 least left-handed subjects. The test of grip strength showed a small but significant deterioration in performance of both hands from fatigue. With the handwriting task, a similar significantly adverse effect of fatigue was recorded for all groups as well as a large significant difference in performance between the preferred and nonpreferred hands under normal conditions, which decreased under fatigue. An explanation of these differential effects is discussed in terms of the greater efficiency of the preferred hand in the highly developed skill of handwriting.     

Narrow-band 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 16, 24, 32, 48, 64, and 96 cycles/360 degrees angular frequency filters

We measured human frequency response functions for eleven angular frequency filters using a forced-choice procedure in a supra-threshold summation paradigm. Each of the eleven functions of 17 experimental conditions was measured 4-9 times among 12 observers. Results show that, for the arbitrarily selected filter phases, maximum summation effect occurred at test frequency for all filters. These results lead to the conclusion that there are narrow-band angular frequency filters operating in human visual system mostly through summation surrounded by inhibition at the specific test frequency ranges. Our previous suggestion (Simas and Santos, 2002), arguing that summation for the higher angular frequency filters should occur if background angular frequency contrast were set to a maximum of 5 times the test frequency threshold, was supported.     

Vocabulary,Grammar, Sex,and Aging

Understanding the changes in our language abilities along the lifespan is a crucial step for understanding the aging process both in normal and in abnormal circumstances. Besides controlled experimental tasks, it is equally crucial to investigate language in unconstrained conversation. I present an information‐theoretical analysis of a corpus of dyadic conversations investigating how the richness of the vocabulary, the word‐internal structure (inflectional morphology), and the syntax of the utterances evolves as a function of the speaker's age and sex. Although vocabulary diversity increases throughout the lifetime, grammatical diversities follow a different pattern, which also differs between women and men. Women use increasingly diverse syntactic structures at least up to their late fifties, and they do not deteriorate in terms of fluency through their lifespan. However, from age 45 onward, men exhibit a decrease in the diversity of the syntactic structures they use, coupled with an increased number of speech disfluencies.     

Organism,normativity, plasticity: Canguilhem,Kant, Malabou

Some of Catherine Malabou’s recent work has developed her conception of plasticity (originally deployed in a reading of Hegelian Aufhebung) in relation to neuroscience. This development clarifies and advances her attempt to bring contemporary theory into dialogue with the natural sciences, while indirectly indicating her engagement with the French tradition in philosophy of science and philosophy of medicine, especially the work of Georges Canguilhem. I argue that we can see her development of plasticity as an answer to some specific shortcomings in Canguilhem’s conception of organic or biological normativity as advanced in The Normal and the Pathological. Such a view of plasticity shows its potential to provide the basis for a powerful critical engagement with contemporary conceptions of selfhood, self-transformation, subjectivation, and the general theory of norms.     

Philosophy,Logic, Science,History

Analytic philosophy is sometimes said to have particularly close connections to logic and to science, and no particularly interesting or close relation to its own history. It is argued here that although the connections to logic and science have been important in the development of analytic philosophy, these connections do not come close to characterizing the nature of analytic philosophy, either as a body of doctrines or as a philosophical method. We will do better to understand analytic philosophy—and its relationship to continental philosophy—if we see it as a historically constructed collection of texts, which define its key problems and concerns. It is true, however, that analytic philosophy has paid little attention to the history of the subject. This is both its strength—since it allows for a distinctive kind of creativity—and its weakness—since ignoring history can encourage a philosophical variety of “normal science.”     

Speak, memory, or goodbye, Columbus

This article describes the vicissitudes in the career of a psychologist who entered graduate school almost immediately after the end of World War II at a time when the standards and definitions of appropriate training in clinical psychology were still being determined. Looking back at the developments in this career, a pattern of interests, unseen at the time, can now be detected. From investigating the influence of the subject-examiner relationship in the testing situation to the experimental study of psychoanalytic propositions, first using the Rorschach test and later by means of subliminal stimulation procedures, one central theme was the uncovering of disguises and hidden motives. A second major theme, much more explicit than the first, was the primacy of data over speculation.     

Grouping, chunking, memory, and learning

An example of grouping is dividing a long series of digits into two or more smaller units by, for example, pausing for a short time between items within groups but for a longer time between groups. Grouping, virtually neglected in animal learning, was examined in each of five rat investigations reported here in which a series of two or more runway trials was either grouped together with or apart from a terminal large reward trial. It was found that running speed on early small reward trials in the series was greater when prior trials were grouped together with rather than apart from the terminal large reward trial and this when the intertrial interval was short, 20 sec, or long, 20 to 40 min. Three possible explanations of the present findings were examined: a reward schedule view, a rule-learning view, and an anticipation view based on memory. The most feasible of these explanations, it was suggested, was the anticipation view. According to this view, when prior trials are grouped together with a terminal large reward, there is a tendency for the rat to anticipate the terminal large reward well before its scheduled occurrence, elevating running speed on earlier small reward trials. Such anticipation occurs, it was suggested, because when trials are grouped together the memory of each reward event in the series is retrieved on each subsequent trial, including the remote terminal large reward trial, where it becomes a signal for large reward. Thus the present results implicate not merely adjacent associations—associations between adjacent events—but also the highly controversial remote associations—associations between two events separated not only in time but by one or more intervening events as well.     

Age,sex, education,religion, and perception of tattoos

Tattooing has become more acceptable in the mainstream American culture in recent years. Based on a survey with face-to-face interviews of 335 nontattooed adults randomly selected from a city with a population of 444,000, this study explored the relationship of individuals' demographic variables, attitudes toward religion, and their perceptions of tattoos. The hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed that age and attitude toward religion were associated with individuals' perception of tattoos.     

Youth and Trauma: Terror,War, Murder,Incest, Rape,and Suicide

College students in the United States post-9/11 face a different world than did their predecessors. In short vignettes this article reveals some of the numerous traumas that have been reported in a full-service counseling center at a small state university. Exploration of the impact of traumas past and present is interwoven with commentary on the impact of systems dynamics. A brief theoretical exploration is included of post-trauma resilience and the ongoing sense of threat that many traumatized persons experience.     

Autopoiesis,Adaptivity, Teleology,Agency

A proposal for the biological grounding of intrinsic teleology and sense-making through the theory of autopoiesis is critically evaluated. Autopoiesis provides a systemic language for speaking about intrinsic teleology but its original formulation needs to be elaborated further in order to explain sense-making. This is done by introducing adaptivity, a many-layered property that allows organisms to regulate themselves with respect to their conditions of viability. Adaptivity leads to more articulated concepts of behaviour, agency, sense-construction, health, and temporality than those given so far by autopoiesis and enaction. These and other implications for understanding the organismic generation of values are explored.     

Data, model, conclusion, doing it again

This paper explores the robustness of conclusions from a statistical model against variations in model choice (rather than variations in random sampling and random assignment to treatments, which are the usual variations covered by inferential statistics). After the problem formulation in section 1, section 2 presents an example from Box and Tiao in which variation in parent distribution is modeled for a one sample location problem. An adaptive Bayesian procedure permits to use a weighted mixture of parent distributions rather than choosing just one, such as a normal or a uniform distribution.In section 3 similar considerations are applied to an event history model for the influence of education and gender on age at first marriage, but here the conclusions are hardly influenced by the choice of the duration distribution. In section 4 a brief discussion of model choice in factor analysis and structural equation models is followed by a more elaborate treatment of the choice of integer valued slopes for item response functions in the OPLM model which is an extension of the Rasch model. A modest simulation study suggests that Adaptive Bayesian Modeling with a mixture of sets of slopes works better than fixing one set of postulated slopes.The paper concludes with some remarks on the roles and sources of prior distributions followed by a short epilogue which argues that simultaneous consideration of a class of models for the same data is sometimes superior to exclusively analyzing the data under one specific model chosen from such a class.This article is based on the Presidential Address Ivo W. Molenaar gave on June 20, 1998 at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the Psychometric Society held at the University of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois. Thanks is given to John Wiley & Sons and George C. Tiao for granting permission to reprint three figures from the book George C. Tiao wrote with George E. P. Box titled Bayesian Inference in Statistical Analysis.—EditorThanks are due to Anne Boomsma, Jeffrey Hoogland, Mark Huisman, Tom Snijders, Marijtje Van Duijn, and Norman Verhelst for suggesting improvements and/or assisting with data analyses.     

Traits,states, situations,and uncertainty

The shift of paradigm from psychodynamic therapy to behavior modification has changed the views of assessment and challenged traditional broad trait concepts. Behavioral assessment has used narrow, situation-specific trait tests, state self-report tests given in situations, and behavioral observations and performance ratings. Comparison of these types of measures are reported from a study of fear reactions in three situations. Narrow trait measures are generally more predictive of behavior than broad trait measures. State measures are even more predictive when given just before the performance. But only a sampling of such state measures can be used to define a trait because of the lower reliability of states. It is argued that behavior in situations is only predictable when an adequate number of behavioral samples is used.     

Ethology,ethogeny, etics,emics, biology,culture: On the limitations of dichotomies

Ethogeny, supposedly patterned on ethology, differs as an approach to human social behaviour in obvious respects. Ethogenists follow an emic research strategy, whereas human ethologists have strongly favoured etic research options. However, recent trends to a broader, evolutionary approach in human ethology suggest that an avoidance or rejection of verbal reports and ethogenic methods merits reconsideration, The distinctions involved in the eticlemic contrast are examined, and compared to Richer's distinction between D- and N-type agreements. It is argued that none of the distinctions are dichotomous. The useful aspects of the distinctions refer to the generality of findings, and the validity of evidence. Bearing these in mind, ethogenic methods have a place in a broader human ethology. So far as validity is concerned, the value of a comparison of information from different sources, such as verbal and non-verbal data, is stressed. So far as generality is concerned, ethogenists may consider this to be very limited because of idiosyncratic cultural factors in the causation of human social action. A reconsideration of the biology/culture dimension in terms of function rather than causation may lead to more optimism in this respect, and be more productive scientifically.     

Depth,Perception, and Action: Past,Present, and Future

This paper examines how images of depth are employed in the psychoanalytic literature and how they illuminate or obfuscate. It examines as well the price of using familiar terminologies to introduce new ideas, a practice more common in psychoanalysis than in many other disciplines. By obscuring the differences between old ideas and new through using the same terminology for both, the sense of adherence and belonging to the psychoanalytic community is enhanced but the ability to see fully the new possibilities for theory and practice to which these new ideas point is constrained. In elaborating on this point, the paper also considers the differences between a past-centered, archaeological model and a model in which older patterns are perpetuated through their repeated consequences, both intended and unintended. In such a model both action and perception are taken into account, as the aim of analysis becomes not just the patient’s internal world but her lived life.     

Truth-ratios,process, task,and knowledge

In this paper, I delineate two major problems facing reliabilist approaches in epistemology. I argue that Alvin Goodman's (1986) position fails to solve either problem. I then suggest an alternative reliabilist approach that ties truth-ratio assessments to particular, well-specified cognitive tasks. I claim that a well-specified cognitive task is an empirical hypothesis about a system that involves the specification of input and output types and nomic correlations (including statistical correlations) that underlie the system's performance. On my approach, one characterizes processes by reference to the system's dispositions across the situations consistent with the task. Characterization is best understood as revealing a strategy or a set of strategies for generating outputs from inputs relying on certain nomic correlations associated with the task.     

Goodness, Values, Reasons

Contemporary value theory has been characterized by a renewed interest in the analysis of concepts like “good” or “valuable”, the most prominent pattern of analysis in recent years being the socalled buck-passing or fitting-attitude analysis which reduces goodness to a matter of having properties that provide reasons for pro-attitudes. Here I argue that such analyses are best understood as metaphysical rather than linguistic and that while the buck-passing analysis has some virtues, it still fails to provide a suitably wide-ranging pattern of analysis for conceptualizing evaluative properties. Instead, a better alternative can be found in a metaphysical version of the Geachean view that goodness is always attributive and never predicative, namely that goodness is always a matter of relative placement in certain kinds of comparison classes. It is then suggested that the good and the valuable need to be separated from each other and that the latter is a species of the former.     

Harmful dysfunction, disorder, disease, illness, and evolution.

Can psychiatric disorders be conceptualized as "harmful dysfunctions" (J. C. Wakefield, 1992a, 1992b, 1999; S. O. Lilienfeld & L. Marino, 1995)? Wakefield's (1992a) central concept of disorder as "harmful dysfunction" is discussed by placing it in the context of a complementary discussion of disease, illness, the sick role, and evolution (D. F. Klein, 1978). S. O. Lilienfeld and L. Marino (1995) contended that proper biological function cannot be determined. This argument obscures the key significance of involuntary impairment of evolved functions. The claim that the Roschian concept has no counterpart in reality is incorrect and does not support the conclusion that dysfunctions are irreducibly evaluative and therefore arbitrary. J. C. Wakefield's (1999) views in this area are supplemented. The role of monothetic and polythetic categorization, extremal terms, and the concept of normality in nosology is considered. This analysis refutes the implication that deviance and illness are equivalent. The resolution of this debate is practically relevant to emphasizing areas of research investment, such as therapeutics.