Thomas Verner Moore and the electronic road to the unconscious: A reminiscence

A number of contemporary commentators and observers have urged a rapprochement between customary methods of psychoanalytic treatment and other modalities in order to shorten the traditional duration of “standard” psychoanalysis. In particular, adoption or adaptation of treatment modalities drawn from the repertoire of behavior therapy has been advocated. This note recalls that nearly 50 years ago the remarkable priest-psychologist-psychiatrist Thomas Verner Moore proposed in The Driving Forces of Human Nature and Their Adjustment, his capstone work, an “electronic road” to the unconscious via the psychogalvanometer as an alternate to the “royal road” of dream analysis and free association, attributing its development to von Stauffenberg, who demonstrated the technique in Munich between 1913-1915. By such reckoning, the union between psychoanalysis and the psychogalvanometer may be nearing its 85th anniversary.     

Florian Znaniecki: A short reminiscence

This brief account of the author's interactions with Florian Znaniecki centers on the scholarly impact of Thomas and Znaniecki's five-volume Polish Peasant in Europe and America and on Znaniecki's early contributions to the sociology of science.     

A novel study: Forgetting curves and the reminiscence bump

This study examined the forgetting curves for information read in a novel. People read a 10-chapter novel where each chapter covered an approximately 10-year period in the life of the protagonist. After reading the entire novel, participants completed various memory tests in which they summarised the novel, provided associated information from cues, and answered specific questions. Performance was plotted as the amount of information or the accuracy of question answering for each chapter. All of the memory tests revealed similar patterns: (a) better performance for early information (a primacy effect), (b) a bump in performance when the protagonist was approximately 20 years old, and (c) a smaller bump in performance when the protagonist began a career later in life. These results are considered in the context of theories of forgetting, autobiographical memory, and situation models.     

Kane and the Physical Indeterminism Luck Objection: A Reply to Moore

Philosophia - Dwayne Moore (2021) argues that libertarians about free will who are reductive physicalists cannot make proper sense of free will. In doing so, he presents what he calls “the...     

Substantive unconscious and adjective unconscious: the contribution of Wilfred Bion

The author first provides her readers with a brief summary of some of Freud's ideas, as found throughout his work, on the notion of 'unconscious'. The notion of unconscious as noun is contrasted to the idea of unconscious as adjective, this latter being proposed as a quality, or a state, ever temporary, dynamic, and subject to the constant changes going on in the individual's internal psychic world, as well as to external conditions. After presenting some considerations, the author then contrasts the Kleinian model of the mind to the Freudian, and Wilfred Bion's contribution is discussed at some length. Within Bion's conception of psychic functioning, the model of 'dream' is highlighted and, in this regard, clarifications are sought regarding Bion's view of the unconscious. To conclude, a brief and superficial approximation to the work of Carl Jung is touched upon, although the author admits to knowing little of Jung's positions.     

Thomas vs. Thomas: A New Approach to Nagel's Bat Argument

In this paper I examine Thomas Nagel's familiar challenge to physicalism. Nagel famously uses his vivid example about the sensory apparatus of bats to illustrate the difficulty of providing a purely physical characterization of phenomenal experience. Adapting Thomas Aquinas's principle regarding the nature of divine omnipotence, I argue that the fact that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat does not threaten physicalism.     

Evolution and Providence: A Response to Thomas Tracy

The role of chance in evolutionary process need not negate belief in the purposes of the Creator. The nature of causality is not determined by science alone, for it requires also acts of metaphysical decision. Moreover, science's accounts of physical reality are notably patchy, with relationships between different regimes often ill-understood An honest science cannot exclude the exercise of agency, either human or divine. Evolutionary insight can offer some help with the problems of theodicy.     

Armstrong was a Cheat: A Reply to Eric Moore

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we reply to Eric Moore’s argument that Lance Armstrong did not cheat, at least according to one, standard account of cheating. If that is the case, we argue, so much the worse for the standard account of cheating, since Armstrong was a cheat. We argue that the standard account of cheating fails on several counts: it specifies conditions that are not necessary for cheating: that cheating involves trying to secure an unfair advantage and that cheating depends on fair application of the rules. We dispute Moore’s claim that doping in the peloton was a convention that had normative force, and reject his anti-formalist analogy between doping in the peloton and bodily contact in basketball.     

Making conscious the unconscious in order to modify unconscious processing: Some mechanisms of therapeutic change1

This paper examines some of the mechanisms through which interpretation aimed primarily at increasing conscious awareness can nonetheless produce unconscious changes, the latter being deemed the basic aim of psychoanalysis. The concept of valency or motivational weight of the interpretation is proposed to assess which forces of the various motivational systems the interpretation mobilizes (hetero/self‐preservation, sensual/sexual, attachment, narcissistic, psychobiological regulation etc.), on which of the above‐mentioned systems interpretation relies, and which would oppose therapeutic intervention and why. Certain conditions are also analyzed that could explain the so‐called ‘change through the analytic relationship’, pointing out that, despite the major differences between this form of change and change through interpretation, both of them would share certain mechanisms. This conclusion leads to the need to qualify the idea that interpretation would be exclusively aimed at declarative memory, with no effects upon procedural memory. The paper examines the potential consequences for therapeutic techniques derived from recent fi ndings in neuroscience on so‐called labile state memory, and proposes the coupling of experiences as one of the analytical instruments used for therapeutic change. A clinical vignette is included to illustrate some of the theoretical and technical aspects considered.     

Self-centered memories: The reminiscence bump and the self

The self-memory relationship is thought to be bidirectional, in such a way that memories provide context for the self, and equally, the self exercises control over retrieval (Conway, 2005). Autobiographical memories are not distributed equally across the life span; instead, memories peak between ages 10 and 30. This reminiscence bump has been suggested to support the emergence of a stable and enduring self. In the present study, the relationship between memory accessibility and self was explored with a novel methodology that used generation of self images in the form of I am statements. Memories generated from I am cues clustered around the time of emergence for that particular self image. We argue that, when a new self-image is formed, it is associated with the encoding of memories that are relevant to that self and that remain highly accessible to the rememberer later in life. This study offers a new methodology for academics and clinicians interested in the relationship between memory and identity.     

More thoughts on the unconscious: reply to Brody and to Lewicki and Hill

Brody (1989) and Lewicki and Hill (1989) present commentaries on my central thesis (Reber, 1989) that there exist powerful induction routines that operate largely independently of awareness and yield rich and complex tacit knowledge that resists attempts to make it conscious, although these commentaries are of dramatically different kinds. Because there is a fairly clear basis of agreement between Lewicki and Hill and the points that I made, this reply deals almost entirely with the issues raised by Brody. The focus is on two classes of issues: (a) those of a methodological nature that surround the general problem of doing experiments on unconscious cognition and (b) those that derive from considerations of evolutionary biology that provide a basis for arguing that implicit operations are primary and form the foundation for conscious processes.