Daydreaming, Consciousness, and Self-Representations: Empirical Approaches to Theories of William James and Sigmund Freud

In honor of Saul Rosenzweig's lifelong efforts to provide empirical tests of psychoanalytic theories, this paper has focused on a series of research approaches to examining the concepts of William James and Sigmund Freud relating to waking fantasy, ongoing thought, and beliefs about the self. Studies involving projective methods, psychometric analyses of self-report questionnaires, laboratory tests of daydreaming during signal-detection tasks, thought-sampling during natural daily activities and psychological correlates of actual-self and ideal-self discrepancies are described. Clinical applications of these methods are also presented. The findings in general point to the value of James's conception of conscious thought as an important basis along with cognitive unconscious processes for studying clinical phenomena, personality, and even the metaphors of dreams. Rosenzweig's emphasis on formal research testing of psychoanalytic processes is supported.     

The nature and varieties of felt presence experiences: A reply to Nielsen

Nielsen [Nielsen, T. (2007). Felt presence: Paranoid delusion or hallucinatory social imagery? Consciousness and Cognition, 16(4), 975–983.] raises a number of issues and presents several provocative arguments worthy of discussion regarding the experience of the felt presence (FP) during sleep paralysis (SP). We consider these issues beginning with the nature of FP and its relation to affective-motivational systems and provide an alternative to Nielsen’s reduction of FP to a purely spatial hallucination. We then consider implications of the “normal social imagery” model. We can find only one specific empirical hypothesis articulated within this framework and it turns out to be one that we explicitly addressed in our original paper. We also review our position regarding the possible relation of FP during SP to a number of related anomalous experiences and contrast FP to anomalous vestibular-motor (V-M) phenomena. We review our position that the neuromatrix concept, in the light of available evidence, is more appropriately applied to V-M experiences than FP. Finally, we pursue speculations, raised in Nielsen’s commentary, on the wider implications of FP.     

Capacity to Handle Unassimilable Material: Coping Strategies of Schizophrenics and Normals

With anxiety conceptualized as resulting from a backlog of unassimilable or incongruent material, two processes were postulated to reflect coping strategies, assimilation and accommodation. These were assessed by means of a “picture interpretation task.” The hypothesis that schizophrenics fail to cope with unassimilable material because they are unable to accommodate (the process of changing internal schemata) was supported. The second prediction that paranoids would increase assimilation while nonparanoids would suppress assimilation was not supported.     

Consciousness as a Process: From the Loneliness of William James to the Buzzing and Booming Voices of Contemporary Science

This Special Issue of IPBS brings the old metaphor of William James—consciousness as a “stream of thought”—to a contemporary critical inspection. It is demonstrated—based on materials of language (Panksepp 2008; Shanahan 2008), perception (Engelmann 2008) and dialogical self (Bertau 2008) that the classic river metaphor is an inadequate depiction of the multi-level psychological processes that are regulated by the affective systems of the brain and hierarchically integrated through dialogical and semiotic mechanisms.

The Particularities of Form: Reply to Commentary

In this brief reply to Bollas's commentary on our paper about his work, the cycles of intersubjective dialogue endlessly sustaining should be apparent. We begin with an example of the form—content distinction and attempt to use it as a springboard for further disentangling some of the nuances of Bollas's intersubjective theorizing. Bollas's emphasis on form over content as a means of conceptualizing the analyst's contribution to the analytic process is indeed compelling. We all know from both sides of the couch the profoundly different meanings and messages that an analyst's mien invites: whether she's abrupt, verbose, meditative, tranquil. Yes, the medium is the message, and, thus, whether the analyst conveys a message through the effects of form that Bollas points out, such as “We have all the time you need for the nuances of unconscious figuring” versus “This is hot—we hafta figure it out now” surely does have an effect on the psychic material produced in the analytic process. We go on to add to Bollas's discussion of form by considering the particularities of form and how these too affect the analytic process.     

The Scope of Deflationism: Reply to Gregory

Paul Gregory's careful and insightful response to "Carnap and Two Dogmas of Empiricism" highlights a number of points which were underdeveloped in that paper. I think that he has brought into relief a central issue between Camap and Quine by supplying a crucial distinction. However I still maintain that Quine's assault is less than successful and that Gregory's further analysis of the debate sheds light on why this is so.     

The Value in Equal Opportunity: Reply to Kershnar

abstract Stephen Kershnar (2004) recently argues that under its most plausible interpretation, equality of opportunity is simply not something worth pursuing; at least, not for itself. In this paper I try to show that even if we accept Kershnar's characterisation of equality of opportunity in terms of weighted aggregate chances, none of his objections succeed. Opportunities, not outcomes, are the appropriate focus of EO advocates; hedonic treadmills are irrelevant to the issue; we do not need to assume general equality in some attribute to ground equality of opportunity; finally, it is possible to show that it is permissible to promote EO at some cost to other independent values.     

Reply to William R. Ferrell's paper "Calibration of sensory and cognitive judgments: A single model for both"

William R. Ferrell's paper is a reply to our article "Calibration of sensory and cognitive judgments: Two different accounts", 1993, 34, 135–148 in this journal. Ferrell's critique centres around three issues: (1) The model of sensory discrimination proposed by Björkman et al. (1993) and discussed in Winman and Juslin (1993) is not new, (2) this model does not predict underconfidence, (3) there is no need for separate models of calibration of sensory and cognitive judgments. Below we respond to each of the three issues raised by Ferrell.