From Freud to Gehrig to Rapaport to DiMaggio

Lacking the size, talent, and speed to play shortstop for the New York Yankees, I chose instead to become a psychologist/psychoanalyst. Yet, baseball and psychoanalysis share much in common. Each is played in the inner diamonds of one's mind, values the past and what is passing, and requires a strong work ethic. Both are timeless and involve an almost boring leisureliness between occasional moments of crisis. Then too, each calls for an attitude of consistency and patience and a responsibility to do one's best. From my parents and brother to my wife and son and his family, from my teachers and supervisors to my colleagues, and from Menninger to the Society for Personality Assessment (SPA), I feel deeply grateful for the partners and teammates I have and have had.     

From Biology to Consciousness to Morality

Abstract. Social animals are provisioned with prosocial orientations that operate to transcend self‐interest. Morality, as used here, describes human versions of such orientations. We explore the evolutionary antecedents of morality in the context of emergentism, giving considerable attention to the biological traits that undergird awareness and our emergent human forms of mind. We suggest that our moral frames of mind emerge from our primate prosocial capacities, transfigured and valenced by our symbolic languages, cultures, and religions.     

How Not to Apply to College

Samples of letters written by college students are excerpted to demonstrate the deterioration of students' writing skills. The relative unimportance many college students and graduates attach to the art of writing letters of inquiry is emphasized. A checklist is provided to assist students in preparing letters requesting information from colleges and universities.     

From object to image to object

Images are mental representations accommodated by grammatical structures. These structures order sensori-input of information as well as provide for articulated ways of expressing motor sequences associated with images. The psychological process of perception is reflected in the development of paradigmatic structures. The psychological process of action (behavior and its mental representations) is reflected in the development of syntagmatic structures. Forming and expressing imagery requires both paradigmatic and syntagmatic structuring. The former relates to logical issues of identity of objects and to the formation of concepts. The latter relates to the solution of psycho-logical questions of causality through articulation of grammatical roles in sentences. Two issues affecting the formation of a model to account for imagery are examined: (1) The tendency to explain imagery as a result of motor sequences and to utilize performance grammar. (2) The impact of ontogenesis on social processes affecting the logical and psycho-logical concerns facing the person at different stages of development. The grammar of imagery is seen as broader than one of performance. The epistemology of imagemaking does not reflect a linear ontogenetic development which precludes attention to problems of creating the logical structures of an object.     

Minors' competence to consent to abortion

In the light of legal restrictions in some states, the psychological evidence for whether adolescents are competent to give informed consent to abortion is reviewed. It would be important to know whether competence to decide on pregnancy outcome reflects maturity to be a parent; further, whether degrees of maturity can be traced throughout adolescence. Research shows that parents, not peers, are major sources of advice for minors' abortion decisions. Younger and less competent minors are more likely to consult parents than older, mature minors. There is no evidence that adolescent issues or developmental tasks influence pregnancy decisions. Decision making competence does not differ from that of adults, except as affected by the living situation of the adolescent. Decision performance does differ: minors are more likely to consider their present family's opinion, and not consider future risks, than are adults. The sparse research available on this problem provides no basis for restricting minors' decision making on the ground of competence alone.     

Reply to Letter to the Editor

The current policy of the National Institute of Health designed to increase the participation of women and minorities is radically different from previous policies designed to protect minorities from abuses in research studies. The principal arguments to support this policy are twofold: 1) Increased representation of minorities and women in research would increase the generalizability of research data and allow for valid analyses of differences in subpopulations; and 2) being in a clinical research study is advantageous to participants regardless of the final research study results. It remains unclear whether minorities find these arguments compelling. Instead of telling minorities that participation in research is good for them, the research community should focus on understanding what minority communities want from clinical research and then tailoring the message to meet this need. Persuasive arguments to promote long-term increased representation of minorities in clinical research must come from within minority communities.     

Limitations to the capacity to love

This paper is a meditation on the potential and problems of establishing and maintaining loving and passionate relationships, drawn from a lifetime of struggling with these issues in the course of doing analysis. It describes interferences with the capacity for mature sexual love as reflecting various psychopathological conditions. These limitations include a variety of psychological restrictions determined most frequently by masochistic, narcissistic and paranoid personality features. Clinical case material illustrates both mature and disturbed capability for love relations.     

Relating mindfulness and self-control to harm to the self and to others

Aggression to others and harm to the self (self-harm) have both been associated with similar possible antecedents; however, literatures on aggression and self-harm are commonly separated. This web-based study (N = 241) aimed to explore the dynamics of self-reported mindfulness and self-control towards aggression and self-harm. As predicted, those who were more mindful and more self-controlled reported being less aggressive and self-harmless typically. Bootstrap analyses suggested that self-control mediated the link between mindfulness and general trait aggression, physical aggression, anger, hostility, and self-harm, but not verbal aggression. With the inclusion of self-control, the direct effect of mindfulness on trait aggression, anger, and hostility, but not on physical aggression and self-harm, remained significant. Self-control, therefore, may be a pertinent individual difference on the link between mindfulness and behaviours that are physically harmful to the self and to others.