Mirror masturbation

A case is presented of an analytic patient who reported adolescent and adult mirror masturbation in the context of a struggle for psychic differentiation and separation from his mother. A model is elaborated in which magical manipulation and transformation of the self- and object images are facilitated by masturbatory mirror play. The role of impersonation and transformation as another man or woman is explored. Visual hunger, traumatic overstimulation, incestuous games, and fear of actually committing incest with a seductive parent are proposed as genetic contributants . Mirror masturbation is understood as a dramatic play which defends against castration anxiety and attempts to master childhood sexual overstimulation by active repetition and re-creation.     

Twentieth-century attitudes toward masturbation

This article demonstrates the progress that medicine, psychiatry, religion, and anthropology have made toward a variant perspective, of masturbation. Researchers documented the suffering and damage caused by classically ingrained religious and medical distortions.The secret sin of Judeo-Christianity and the social disease of nineteenth-century medicine has paradoxially become the therapy for various forms of psychosexual dysfunction. Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish denominations polarize opinions from rigorous orthodoxy to unconditional acceptance of this psychosexual behavior as a source of emotional homeostasis.Michael S. Patton, Ph.D., is an anthropologist concerned with sex research in society, history, and religion. He lives in Mansfield, OH 44903.     

Encopresis and anal masturbation

Current pediatric and psychiatric studies on encopresis and its treatment are heavily influenced by mechanical, physiological, and behavioral considerations. Although psychodynamic treatment has generally been considered to be of little benefit, and its findings suspect, the authors suggest that a psychodynamic approach adds substantially to the understanding of some cases of encopresis; that the anal sensations and anal erotic feelings reported by a number of encopretic children are intense, and that the encopretic symptom, soiling, in these children is the result of a conscious form of anal masturbation in which the fecal mass is used for stimulation; and that any study of encopresis is incomplete that does not include what encopretic children, engaged in a sound therapeutic relationship, know and say about their soiling. The authors further suggest that physical treatments of those children whose encopresis is psychologically driven may be contraindicated. The presence of a large stool does not in itself substantiate a physical illness. Further research is needed to elucidate the prevalence of anal masturbation in encopretic children.     

The therapeutic effects of the free-associative state of consciousness

Free association is therapeutically helpful in the regulation of states of consciousness. A person who free-associates enters a particular state of consciousness characterized by increased subjective self-awareness and disregard for reality, together with implicit pulls for objective self-awareness and reality adherence. Free association facilitates the patient's learning to integrate and to shift flexibly among points on these dimensions. Tensions existing in the free-associative state are embedded in a similar tension between free associating and reacting to the analyst's interventions, so interplay between free association and intervention also facilitates regulation of states of consciousness.     

The symmetry of rational requirements

Some irrational states can be avoided in more than one way. For example, if you believe that you ought to A you can avoid akrasia by intending to A or by dropping the belief that you ought to A. This supports the claim that some rational requirements are wide-scope. For instance, the requirement against akrasia is a requirement to intend to A or not believe that you ought to A. But some writers object that this Wide-Scope view ignores asymmetries between the different ways of avoiding irrationality. In this paper I defend the Wide-Scope view against recent objections of this sort from Mark Schroeder and Niko Kolodny. I argue that once we are clear about what the Wide-Scope view is committed to—and, importantly, what it is not—we can see that Schroeder and Kolodny’s objections fail.     

The effects of rational and experiential information processing of expert testimony in death penalty cases

Past research examining the effects of actuarial and clinical expert testimony on defendants' dangerousness in Texas death penalty sentencing has found that jurors are more influenced by less scientific pure clinical expert testimony and less influenced by more scientific actuarial expert testimony (Krauss & Lee, 2003; Krauss & Sales, 2001). By applying cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST) to juror decision-making, the present study was undertaken in an attempt to offer a theoretical rationale for these findings. Based on past CEST research, 163 mock jurors were either directed into a rational mode or experiential mode of processing. Consistent with CEST and inconsistent with previous research using the same stimulus materials, results demonstrate that jurors in a rational mode of processing more heavily weighted actuarial expert testimony in their dangerousness assessments, while those jurors in the experiential condition were more influenced by clinical expert testimony. The policy implications of these findings are discussed.     

The preventive and therapeutic effects of two school mental health programs

In 30 classrooms randomly assigned to experimental conditions, effects on mothers' reports of behavior symptoms were compared for (a) a parent education program; (b) an in-school program of consultation, counseling, training, and referral; and (c) control classrooms. A sample of 426 families were followed for 30 months from the child's entry into third grade. A simple unweighted count of the number of symptoms reported in a home interview had adequate validity, good reliability, low reactivity, and intrinsic significance. Both programs had significant preventive and therapeutic effects on boys but not on girls. Effects were immediate in the upper middle class families, delayed in the lower class families.The larger study on which this article is based was initiated some years ago by Professor Glidewell and his colleagues, and represents a pioneering research effort in the field of community psychology. The present article was prepared by the authors in response to an invitation from the Editor to report important and still timely aspects of the original study that were not previously published in archival sources. We are grateful to Professor Glidewell and his colleagues for giving us this opportunity to make their findings more generally available to community psychology researchers.This work was supported by research grant M-592 from the National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. Public Health Service, and the St. Louis County Health Department.     

The cognitive attitude of rational trust

I provide an account of the cognitive attitude of trust that explains the role trust plays in the planning of rational agents. Many authors have dismissed choosing to trust as either impossible or irrational; however, this fails to account for the role of trust in practical reasoning. A can have therapeutic, coping, or corrective reasons to trust B to ${\phi}$ , even in the absence of evidence that B will ${\phi}$ . One can choose to engage in therapeutic trust to inspire trustworthiness, coping trust to simplify one’s planning, or corrective trust to avoid doing a testimonial injustice. To accommodate such types of trust, without accepting doxastic voluntarism, requires an account of the cognitive attitude of trust broader than belief alone. I argue that trust involves taking the proposition that someone will do something as a premise in one’s practical reasoning, which can be a matter of believing or accepting the proposition. I defend this account against objections that it (i) provides insufficient rational constraints on trust, (ii) conflates trust and pretense of trust, and (iii) cannot account for the rationality of back-up planning.     

The nature of irrational and rational beliefs: Progress in rational emotive behavior theory

This paper discusses some limitations of Ellis's Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. It is suggested that the present definition of irrational and rational beliefs is inadequate. The present theory is unclear whether irrational beliefs are exaggerated negative evaluations or empirical distortions of reality. It is proposed that irrational beliefs are core schemes, and that the concept of schema replace the present definition of beliefs. Ellis's position that demandingness is at the center of irrational thinking and emotional disturbance is examined. Research has failed to support this theory. It is proposed that demandingness and self-downing may be separate types of core irrational schemes. Research strategies are suggested that could test Ellis's position on the centrality of demandingness and on the nature of irrational beliefs in general.It is also suggested that irrational beliefs differ on their level of abstraction. The present REBT theory fails to identify which level of abstraction is necessary to cause disturbance, at which level of abstraction therapists should seek change, and whether a therapist should intervene first at higher or lower levels of abstract beliefs. It is suggested that a therapist only seek change to the level of abstraction that matches the client's concerns and that therapists begin to intervene at lower levels of abstraction and move up to more abstract cognitions as therapy progresses.The Institute for Rational Emotive Therapy     

A rational analysis of the effects of memory biases on serial reproduction

Many human interactions involve pieces of information being passed from one person to another, raising the question of how this process of information transmission is affected by the cognitive capacities of the agents involved. Bartlett (1932) explored the influence of memory biases on the “serial reproduction” of information, in which one person’s reconstruction of a stimulus from memory becomes the stimulus seen by the next person. These experiments were done using relatively uncontrolled stimuli, but suggested that serial reproduction could transform information in a way that reflected the biases inherent in memory. We formally analyze serial reproduction using a Bayesian model of reconstruction from memory, giving a general result characterizing the effect of memory biases on information transmission. We then test the predictions of this account in four experiments using simple one-dimensional stimuli. Our results provide theoretical and empirical justification for the idea that serial reproduction reflects memory biases.     

A rational model of the effects of distributional information on feature learning

Most psychological theories treat the features of objects as being fixed and immediately available to observers. However, novel objects have an infinite array of properties that could potentially be encoded as features, raising the question of how people learn which features to use in representing those objects. We focus on the effects of distributional information on feature learning, considering how a rational agent should use statistical information about the properties of objects in identifying features. Inspired by previous behavioral results on human feature learning, we present an ideal observer model based on nonparametric Bayesian statistics. This model balances the idea that objects have potentially infinitely many features with the goal of using a relatively small number of features to represent any finite set of objects. We then explore the predictions of this ideal observer model. In particular, we investigate whether people are sensitive to how parts co-vary over objects they observe. In a series of four behavioral experiments (three using visual stimuli, one using conceptual stimuli), we demonstrate that people infer different features to represent the same four objects depending on the distribution of parts over the objects they observe. Additionally in all four experiments, the features people infer have consequences for how they generalize properties to novel objects. We also show that simple models that use the raw sensory data as inputs and standard dimensionality reduction techniques (principal component analysis and independent component analysis) are insufficient to explain our results.