Multiattribute Choice for the Lazy Decision Maker: Let the Alternatives Decide!

In this article we present a method of multi-attribute choice, based on an application of linear programming called Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The first part of the method, which is straightforward DEA, can be thought of as an idealized process of self-evaluation in which each alternative weights the attributes in order to maximize its own desirability relative to the other alternatives. These weights are taken as defining the preferences of a fragment of the market. The second step is to use each alternative′s optimal weights to reconstruct the entire market and thus to infer the preferences of an average decision maker (DM) who needs to choose from among these alternatives. We show how this process is equivalent to an idealized peer evaluation; each alternative applies its own DEA-derived best weights to each of the other alternatives (alternative cross-evaluation, or AXE), then the average of the cross-evaluations that get placed on an alternative is taken as an index of its overall desirability (i.e., we are "letting the alternatives decide"). We use a large data set to examine the workings of the method and to compare our results with the published results of the data set′s compiler. AXE is also able to make use of partial information about the ordering of importance of the attributes specific to a particular DM. Taking an ecological perspective we argue that the method is sensitive to cues already in the data and uses them to amplify helpful bias and attenuate unhelpful bias. We also show how different kinds sensitivity analysis may be performed to check the robustness of the results.     

The Analyst in the Pharmacy

The merging of medication and analysis has been more widely endorsed in recent years. However, the issue of the analyst needing pharmacotherapy and how its use presses on the analytic frame has not been considered. This essay will look at how the analyst's need for medication threads into the structure of treatment. Issues of stigma and shame triggered by medication use are discussed, as well as the treatment consideration of self-disclosure as an intervention. The author offers both objective and subjective data on this subject, and includes a clinical case example to illustrate how self-disclosure of medication status can offer greater degrees of freedom in a patient's analysis.     

The Writer and the Analyst on and in Time

The paper reflects on the metaphors of time that Dr. Seligman’s piece make available to us, specifically on his deep and inspiring account of the role of time in the analytic process.     

The Analyst as Comic and the Comic in Analysis: Reply to Commentary

This discussion elaborates aspects of the use of humor and jokes in clinical psychoanalysis. The use of humor, like dreams or other symmetrical processes, facilitates the patient's development of the capacity to symbolize unconscious experience and mitigates the need to evacuate unconscious experiences and fantasies into the external world. In focusing on specific clinical interventions I highlight three dimensions of the process: the concept of coconstruction in the emergence of humor in the psychoanalytic relationship, the authority of the patient's psychopathology and affective and cognitive development, and the analyst's willingness to take the risks of self-exposure and possibly hurting the patient implicit in the use of humor and jokes in the analytic relationship. Different forms of humor are described in relation to the different clinical situations, including mutually created jokes, caricatured enactments, cartoonlike images, and self-depreciating commentary on the analytic process. In using jokes and humor in psychoanalysis we introduce the possibility of pleasure within an intense, intimate moment which allows for the transformation of unacceptable aspects of both patient and analyst as they become joined within a broader human experience.     

The Analyst as Catalyst: Cultivating Mind in the Shadow of Neglect

I describe an effort to cultivate mind and deepen relatedness in patients who exhibit rudimentary thought and constricted forms of object contact, due to the effects of certain neglect or serious disturbance. Some of these patients require the analyst to serve as a catalyst, who takes proactive steps to summon a psychic realm to the patient’s experience and to forge components of the dyadic bonds that promote such function. The insights of the object relations tradition into foreclosed development are noted. I argue that such insights can be optimally applied with the benefit of the relational school’s emphasis on forms of dyadic engagement and use of the analyst’s subjectivity. In some cases of neglect, and others in which serious developmental challenge is the result of disturbance, priority is placed on the patient’s growth. Similarly, in my case illustration, my goal in using my subjectivity, as a catalyst, is for my patient to take his own emerging mind and psychic self with interest.     

A Crisis in the Subjectivity of the Analyst: The Trauma of Morality

This paper explores the dilemmas that arise when treatment is offered in circumstances when spiritual and ethical survival comes into conflict with physical survival and material well-being. Through an exploration of the author's experience in South Africa's war of liberation, this conflict is explicated. Although these experiences are now historical, it is argued that they are pertinent at the current time as the West, following 9/11, finds itself encouraged to think in terms of war, as notions of both a war against the West and a war against terrorism have become part of many public discourses. Questions that may arise for us as relational analysts and as individuals as a result of this are flagged, and although no easy answers are proposed, the importance of this exploration is highlighted.     

The European school of MCDA: Emergence,basic features and current works

Multiple-criteria decision analysis has evolved considerably since its birth during the 1960s. As part of this evolution, several schools of thought have developed emphasizing different techniques and, more generally, different attitudes as to the way of supporting or aiding decision making. One of these schools is now commonly referred to as the ‘European School’, its members being part of a European Working Group entitled ‘Multicriteria Aid for Decisions’. In the first part of this paper (Section 1) we follow a historical perspective in order to trace the emergence of the European School. Its distinctive features and main ideas are then outlined in Section 2. Finally we provide a general review of the current major research topics developed within this framework (Section 3).     

Inside Out: The State of the Analyst and the State of the Patient

This paper presents my work with a man before and after my undergoing an emergency, life-threatening surgical episode, and subsequent experience of living with a temporary colostomy, that shifted me to a more ungrounded, bodily aware, vulnerable, nonlinear, spontaneous and risk-taking, and affectively intensified “right brain” state. My story represents one instance of how the contingent nature of the analyst's life and existential exposure, and the various chancy life circumstances governing the analyst's self-state, may constitute an impingement on clinical process with potential for inadvertent positive or negative impact on the therapeutic relationship and work. Much has been written about the causes and consequences of shifts in the analyst's self-state induced within the relational dynamics of the transference-countertransference matrix. Here I specifically consider that side of the intersubjective therapeutic equation generated by the effects of the analyst's own state on the patient and the dyad's interactive process.     

The Analyst's Uses of Theory and the Theory the Analyst Uses: Reply to Commentary

Where Slochower focuses her discussion on the analyst's multiform uses of theory, I focus my response on how the theory we each use informs a quite different way of understanding what is at issue for my patient in the apparent disengagement that marks her quest for help. More broadly, I consider how the theoretical perspective Slochower brings to her rendering of my clinical understanding and position makes for a reading that diverges significantly from my own view of what transpired in the treatment process I present.