An interview with Michael Fordham. Interview by Paul Roazen

In the course of early interviews on the history of psychoanalysis, I saw Michael Fordham in the late summer of 1965. We concentrated primarily on the differences between Freud and Jung, as well as the characteristic distinctions between the two schools that they founded. Fordham also talked about some of his personal contacts with Jung.     

Fred Plaut in conversation with Andrew Samuels

Abstract :  This is a reprint of an interview of Fred Plaut (who died in June 2009) conducted by Andrew Samuels in mid-1988 and first published in April 1989 in the  Journal , 34, 2, pp. 159–83. The interview covers Plaut's early life, his career, and historical observations of the development of the Society of Analytical Psychology from its beginnings, and of the wider community of Jungian analysis. Plaut reflects uninhibitedly on such topics as the role of leadership in analytical psychology, discussing the parts played by Michael Fordham in London and Hannes Dieckmann in Berlin. Plaut explains his thinking concerning individuation.     

James Astor in conversation with Warren Colman

In this interview with Warren Colman, James Astor speaks about his development as a Jungian analyst from his own experience of personal analysis in the 1960s to his recent retirement from clinical practice. The discussion covers his long association with Michael Fordham, the child analytic training at the SAP, the infant observation seminars with Fordham and Gianna Henry through which Fordham was able to make new discoveries about infant development, his experience of supervision with Donald Meltzer and the development of his own thinking through a series of papers on the analytic process, supervision and the relation between language and truth. The interview concludes with reflections about the legacy of Michael Fordham and the future of analytic work.     

Invited commentary on the interview with Jan Stensson

Abstract

The potential of psychoanalysis as social criticism is explored in the context of the major social divides of gender, sexual orientation, race, social class, and ethnicity. It is argued that these divides play central roles in constructing individual psyches, and that their influence is inseparable from other social/ familial forces. Further, analyst and patient alike, inevitably enact the imperatives of class, race, gender, and sexuality in the analytic dyad. It is crucial that psychoanalytic theory be extended to account for the formative power of these cultural categories both in the construction of individual identity, and on the course of analytic work. Further, individual psychoanalysts must be aware of cultural countertransference in the analytic engagement. Finally, as a profession we have an obligation publicly to oppose the destructive imperatives of our economic, political, and social systems in the interest of individual and community psychic well-being.     

An evaluation of forced-choice and true-false item formats in personality assessment

The reliabilities and validities of true-false and forced-choice formats in personality assessment were compared. Subjects from college residential units were assigned randomly to groups receiving the Personality Research Form (PRF) in either forced-choice or standard true-false form. Reliabilities were substantially higher for the true-false form. Peer rating validities for each format were in a comparable range, but correlations with self-ratings were higher for the true-false form. Results do not support the contention that a forced-choice format is consistently more valid than a standard format. Subjects well acquainted with ratees manifested more highly differentiated judgments, showed consistently higher validity, but were more prone to show a bias to attribute more salient traits, like dominance and exhibition, to ratees.     

An analysis with Bion: an interview with James Gooch. Interview by JoAnn Culbert-Koehn

In 1968 Wilfred Bion moved to Los Angeles, escaping the perils of fame in London. He lived in Los Angeles until a few months before his death in Oxford in 1979. He made a deep impact on psychoanalysis in Los Angeles through those he analysed and what he wrote. James Gooch, psychiatrist and founding president of the Psychoanalytic Center of California describes in detail the transformative experience of his analysis with Bion in an interview with JoAnn Culbert-Koehn, Jungian analyst. Dr. Gooch describes important differences between his analysis with Bion and his classical Freudian analysis during his analytic training.     

An examination of disciplinary procedures with children

In Experiment I the effect of the contingent application of negative attention (a verbal reprimand plus a brief period in which the authority person glares intently at the child) and repeated commands on the noncompliant behavior of children was examined. Thirty-two mother-child pairs served as subjects. The results indicated that negative attention decreased noncompliance whereas repeated commands did not. In Experiment II the effectiveness of negative attention, isolation, ignoring, and a combination of procedures (the alternate use of isolation, ignoring, and negative attention with the same subject) in reducing noncompliance and maintaining it at a low level during a recovery period was examined. Twenty-eight mother-child pairs served as subjects. The results indicated that each of the four disciplinary procedures reduced noncompliance. However, negative attention was associated with less off-task behavior than the isolation and combination procedures when discipline was being imposed and a lower level of noncompliance than ignoring during recovery, whereas the combination condiiton was the only procedure that maintained noncompliance during recovery at the treatment level.     

An occupational taxonomy by professional characteristics: Implications for research

Theorists concerned with the nature of professionalism and researchers investigating professionals in the work environment often assume that professional occupations are a unique occupational type. To test this assumption, an occupational taxonomy based on nine dimensions of professionalism was derived empirically. The taxonomy represented expectations only to a moderate degree. Several implications were noted for the use of occupational taxonomies in the generalization of research findings on one occupational group to other occupational groups in the same classification.     

An algorithm for clustering relational data with applications to social network analysis and comparison with multidimensional scaling

A method of hierarchical clustering for relational data is presented, which begins by forming a new square matrix of product-moment correlations between the columns (or rows) of the original data (represented as an n × m matrix). Iterative application of this simple procedure will in general converge to a matrix that may be permuted into the blocked form [_?1¹₁^?1]. This convergence property may be used as the basis of an algorithm (CONCOR) for hierarchical clustering. The CONCOR procedure is applied to several illustrative sets of social network data and is found to give results that are highly compatible with analyses and interpretations of the same data using the blockmodel approach of White (White, Boorman & Breiger, 1976). The results using CONCOR are then compared with results obtained using alternative methods of clustering and scaling (MDSCAL, INDSCAL, HICLUS, ADCLUS) on the same data sets.     

Interference with ingestional aversion learning produced by preexposure to the unconditioned stimulus: Associative and nonassociative aspects

Preconditioning exposure to a lithium chloride unconditioned stimulus (US) interferes with the subsequent conditioning of a taste aversion. Multiple US preexposures produce a long-lasting or durable interference with aversion learning, whereas a single US exposure produces a transient interference effect. The present experiments demonstrate that the durable US preexposure effect is substantially reduced if the method of drug treatment (infusion versus injection of the drug into the peritoneal cavity) or the spatial cues present during drug treatment (home cage versus a distinctive environment) are changed between the preexposure and taste conditioning phases of the experiment. In contrast, these manipulations do not attenuate the proximal/transient US preexposure effect. These findings indicate that different mechanisms are responsible for the two US preexposure effects. The results are consistent with previous suggestions that the durable effects of lithium preexposure are due to associative interference produced by the exteroceptive stimuli that accompany drug administrations and indicate that the proximal/transient US preexposure effect is mediated by nonassociative mechanisms.     

An analysis of neurological soft signs in children with learning problems

Eighty children with learning problems were systematically evaluated for neurological soft signs, general intelligence, scholastic achievement, hyperactivity, and neurocognitive dysfunction. A factor analysis yielded six factors, and a higher order, general ability factor was derived from an orthogonal rotation. Neurocognitive functions appeared in three factors suggesting “types” of dysfunctions. The higher order general ability factor represents a broad range of skills. The two other factors with neurocognitive loads suggest a distinction between verbal-motor integration and visual-motor integration. Age, sex, and hyperactivity formed the remaining clusters.     

Driven by distraction: An integrative review of social facilitation theory and research

Social facilitation refers to the enhancement of an organism's dominant responses by the simple physical presence of species-mates, independent of any informational or interactional influences the others may exert. This phenomenon represents the consequences of the most elementary transition from a nonsocial to a social environment, and is one of the first research areas in experimental social psychology. The present analysis examines the status of three different explanations for socially facilitated behavior. Substantial weaknesses exist in the propositions that the presence of others elicits a reflexive alertness or preparedness response (Mere Presence) and that the presence of others increases drive through classically conditioned anticipations of positive and negative outcomes (Learned Drive). A third proposition argues for increased drive due to response conflict involving incompatible tendencies to attend to others and to ongoing task requirements (Distraction/Conflict). The basic assumptions of the Distraction/Conflict hypothesis are found to have considerable empirical support, and a wide variety of apparently anamolous results are integrated into the attentional conflict framework. Finally, a synthesis of the three approaches is proposed wherein slightly modified versions of the Mere Presence and Learned Drive theories serve to specify two common antecedents for the arousal of attentional conflict (the Attentional Processes model). Connections between the Attentional Processes model and past and future research are explored.     

Conditioned enhancement of human's liking for flavor by pairing with sweetness

This paper reports a procedure, like classical conditioning, that produces enhancement of liking for flavors by humans. The procedure is “pairing” of a relatively neutral flavor with sugar (a hedonically positive taste). Specifically, subjects drank 24 small samples of flavor A sweetened and 24 small samples of flavor B unsweetened. They were then tested for their liking for flavors A and B, both sweetened and unsweetened. In three different studies, varying in a number of aspects of stimulus presentations and context, a relative enhancement in liking for flavor A appeared both on the day of exposure and 1 week later. An absolute enhancement in liking of flavor B (a “mere exposure” effect) also occurred in two of the three experiments.     

From Copenhagen to the consulting room: Pauli and Jung in Copenhagen

In this paper the city of Copenhagen is used as a starting point to highlight some critical historical events, both concerning the exchange of ideas between the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and C.G. Jung and the history of psychotherapy in Scandinavia. Pauli's years in Copenhagen under the influence of Niels Bohr and his philosophy prepared him mentally to receiveC.G. Jung's ideas. The paper also recounts the one occasion that Jung was in Scandinavia, attending the 9th conference of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy in Copenhagen, just before going to New York in 1937 to give his final seminars on Pauli's dreams. The reason for focusing on these particular events is that they also constitute part of the history of the reception of psychodynamic psychology in Sweden and Scandinavia.     

The use of English stress assignment rules by children taught either with traditional orthography or with the initial teaching alphabet

This experiment examines children's use of spelling conventions as a guide to pronunciation, and their ability to handle stress assignment rules. The subjects, 7-year-old school children, of whom half had learned to read and write using traditional orthography (t.o.) and half had learned using the initial teaching alphabet (i.t.a.), read out short simple sentences each containing a two-syllable nonsense word. The grammatical category and the spelling of the nonsense words were varied systematically. It was found that, in assigning stress, both groups of children were influenced by phonemic and grammatical features in a manner similar to that predicted by Chomsky and Halle (1968), but they differed in their handling of the silent final e. It was the i.t.a. children whose use of this orthographic device was more in accordance with Chomsky and Halle's theory, despite their relative lack of experience with it. A comparison with Smith and Baker's (1976) adult subjects indicated substantial differences between adults and children, particularly in their treatment of words with a lax final vowel.     

Social control by adult preference in operant conditioning with children

During daily sessions four institutionalized retardates and four normal, first-grade children each played a two-choice marble dropping game while an adult experimenter sat beside and watched. When one of two colored lights was presented, two tokens were dispensed as soon as the subject dropped a marble, and when the other light was on, one token was dispensed. During choice trials that were interspersed among single-colored trials the subject was required to choose one of the two different colored holes. After the subject developed a preference for the color that earned two tokens, the experimenter stated a preference for the response that earned only one token (i.e., “I like it better when you put it into the —colored hole.”) Six of the eight subjects immediately switched to the response that earned low magnitude reinforcement when the experimenter stated his preference. Only two subjects switched back to the response that earned high magnitude reinforcement when the experimenter left the room. Subjects complied with the experimenter's preference statement regardless of whether or not it also included a negative component (i.e., what the experimenter did not like). There were no systematic differences between mentally retarded and normal subjects.