The Church and the Trinity I: The Church of the Spirit

We are commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of the outstanding young preacher Geoffrey Preston by publishing this trilogy. It was written not very long before he died and has not appeared in print before. Its other two parts, 'The Church of the Son' and 'The Church of the Father', we will be publishing in our July/August and September numbers.     

The Church and the Trinity II: The Church of the Son

The second part of the trilogy which we are publishing to mark the tenth anniversary of Geoffrey Preston's death.     

The consequences of engagement: The good,the bad,and the ugly

This commentary reflects on the nuanced nature of the consequences of engagement, focusing on the positive and negative impact of engagement on performance, family relationships, and job crafting. The goal of the commentary is to further stimulate research on these emerging topics.     

《长春真人西游记》的艺术特征

李志常所撰写的《长春真人西游记》是道教史上具有重要代表意义的一篇经典游记作品。本文在对其进行认真分析、研究的基础上,指出该游记具有“两种视角的独特写法”、“与政治同行的宗教游记”以及风俗人情的记载、科学不盲从的态度、语言简洁、优美,结构前后照应等艺术特征。     

The Holy See: The Individual and the Group-Intersubjective Meetings

The analytic group is a space where powerful meetings between the various selves of its members occur. These meetings have the potential to facilitate processes of mutual recognition and the development of multiple selves, on one hand, but may also lead to collapse of the potential space and experiences of destruction, on the other. Group and individual processes of recognition and destruction may be dramatic and require special coping on the part of the leader (mainly in situations of impasse), or they may be more subtle, almost unnoticeable. Both in the case of the big dramas and in the case of the little dramas, the possibility for surrender, for movement toward unfamiliar areas within one or more of the participants, is what furthers the group's development. In the current paper, I apply intersubjective concepts to group work and, more precisely, propose a way of looking at how the group and the group leader can act to expand the intersubjective space in order to enable processes of destruction and recognition to coexist without the potential space collapsing.     

The wisdom of the crowd playing The Price Is Right

In The Price Is Right game show, players compete to win a prize, by placing bids on its price. We ask whether it is possible to achieve a "wisdom of the crowd" effect, by combining the bids to produce an aggregate price estimate that is superior to the estimates of individual players. Using data from the game show, we show that a wisdom of the crowd effect is possible, especially by using models of the decision-making processes involved in bidding. The key insight is that, because of the competitive nature of the game, what people bid is not necessarily the same as what they know. This means better estimates are formed by aggregating latent knowledge than by aggregating observed bids. We use our results to highlight the usefulness of models of cognition and decision-making in studying the wisdom of the crowd, which are often approached only from non-psychological statistical perspectives.     

The Creative Tripod: The Stitching and the Unstitching Revisited

The Psychological Record - There are no undebated definitions of “creativity,” and any definition will reflect how this rich topic is treated. Nearly 20 years ago I discussed how...     

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

The Psychological Record -     

The Bully Inside Us: The Gang in the Mind

Bullying is a pervasive phenomenon in human relations, in groups, and in societies. It literally, figuratively, and psychologically, is a phenomenon both in the outside world and mentality of the leader as well as group member. Bully/bullied motifs prevail in our clinical theorizing, thinking, and behavior—interwoven into the fabric of psychoanalytic culture and process. I present 5 key ideas: (1) Bullying/bullied dynamics originates and remains in the domain of the paranoid–schizoid position, involving shifting, bipolar perceptions of self and others as good or bad. (2) Bullying–bullied dynamics emerge immediately and unmediated by thought in situations of emotional intensity, i.e., frustration, anxiety, threat, challenge, and competition. (3) These dynamics represent an aspect of our inheritance as a herd animal, which play out in all societies and groups, families and dyads, psychoanalytic and otherwise. (4) Bullying is linked, metapsychologically, to the creation and sustenance of the superego (Freud, 1921). (5) Each individual is both the bully and bullied, and an aspect of “mutual recognition” resides in acknowledging the pleasure as well as the pain in our co-participation.