Impaired drawing from memory in a visual agnosic patient

A case is reported of an associative visual agnosic patient who could not draw from memory objects he could recognize, even though he could copy drawings flawlessly. His ability to generate mental visual images was found to be spared, as was his ability to operate upon mental images. These data suggest that the patient could generate mental images but could not draw from memory because he did not have access to stored knowledge about pictorial attributes of objects. A similar functional impairment can be found in some other visual agnosic patients and in patients affected by optic aphasia. The present case allows a discussion of relationships among drawing from memory, imagery, and copying procedures.     

Brentano on the individuation of mental acts

This paper aims to present and evaluate Brentano's account of the individuation of mental acts. In his early works, Brentano assimilated mental acts to tropes; however, he encountered difficulties in explaining their individuation, since the usual solutions for the individuation of tropes were not readily applicable to his theory of mental acts. In a later period, Brentano introduced into his psychology what he called the “soul,” and this allowed him to explain the individuation of mental acts. Finally, after his “reistic” turn, he excluded mental acts from his ontology, for he rejected abstracta of any kind, including abstract particulars, and admitted only things, or res (in Latin), that is, concrete particulars; in his late philosophy, there are no “thinkings,” but only “thinkers.” However, he still needed to explain what individuates different thinkers, and this was again the soul. In the conclusion, the paper critically compares the different theoretical options considered by Brentano.     

"The full story by no means all told": Harry Stack Sullivan at Sheppard-Pratt, 1922-1930

Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949) is well known for his interpersonal theory of mental illness, but little is known about how he actually worked as a clinician with patients. This article examines a pivotal time in Sullivan's career at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Baltimore from 1922 to 1930. Using clinical records as well as published writings, the article focuses on 2 crucial issues that are not fully addressed either in Sullivan's published writings or in past studies of him: first, his treatment as a gay psychiatrist of patients who he believed had homosexual orientations; second, the intellectual and institutional paradigm in psychiatry that influenced his practice. Finally, this article addresses the circumstances surrounding Sullivan's departure from Sheppard-Pratt, suggesting psychiatry's limited confrontation with the social stigmatization of homosexuality.     

On the countertransference of the patient: Transformations of the psychoanalyst's 'theoretical self' and their possible articulations with the vicissitudes of the analytic relationship

In this paper the author examines one of the many levels of the analyst/analysand relationship: the possible interaction between the analyst's mental routes in relation to theories (also meant, but not only, as internal objects) and the vicissitudes of the psychoanalytic relationships with his patients. The author assumes that an important variable affecting the transformation of certain therapeutic relationships is the change that takes place in the relationship between the analyst and that part of his internal world where his theories find their place. He names this part of his internal world 'theoretical self', and 'precipitates of the analyst's theoretical self' those complex formations, akin to more or less cohesive conglomerates, that are formed by his relationship to theories and to psychoanalytic institutions, and by the various, 'personal' internalised objects. The psychoanalyst will relate to these precipitates in a variety of ways, and he will make use of them mostly at an unconscious level in his analytical work; and his patient is likely to 'react' to them, almost chemically. The author also offers some working indications: the psychoanalyst, despite his knowledge of some aspects of his own countertransference, is in fact lacking in knowledge, unless he constantly does some extra work focusing on how his mental position (i.e. the relationship with the precipitates of his theoretical self) may intervene in any of the therapeutic relationships that he establishes-not necessarily in the same way in each of them. The author also illustrates his reflections and conceptualisations by reporting dreams and excerpts from sessions taken from three psychoanalytic treatments in the course of several years.     

On the Patient's Becoming an Individual: The Importance of the Analyst's Personal Response to a Deprived Patient and Her Dreams

What patients mainly want—which Ferenczi noted as early as 1932 in his clinical diary and which Bion later expressed in his Cogitations (1992)—and what some patients need, is to experience how the analyst lives and processes the interpersonal events that lie at the origin of their affective and mental suffering. This is especially true with schizoid patients who were profoundly emotionally deprived in childhood. In this paper, the author investigates this crucial aspect of the intersubjective analytic relationship in his treatment of just such a patient, an extremely silent and inert young woman. Through a detailed examination of clinical material from various stages of her analysis, he explores how the analyst's unconscious emotional response serves as both a tool for comprehension and a key element of environmental facilitation—a “new beginning,” to use Balint's phrase—that may help the patient attain a level of development and emancipation that he or she has never experienced before.     

Was Babbage's Analytical Engine intended to be a mechanical model of the mind?

In the 1830s, Charles Babbage worked on a mechanical computer he dubbed the Analytical Engine. Although some people around Babbage described his invention as though it had authentic mental powers, Babbage refrained from making such claims. He does not, however, seem to have discouraged those he worked with from mooting the idea publicly. This article investigates whether (1) the Analytical Engine was the focus of a covert research program into the mechanism of mentality; (2) Babbage opposed the idea that the Analytical Engine had mental powers but allowed his colleagues to speculate as they saw fit; or (3) Babbage believed such claims to be fanciful, but cleverly used the publicity they engendered to draw public and political attention to his project.     

Race, language, and mental evolution in Darwin's descent of man

Charles Darwin was notoriously ambiguous in his remarks about the relationship between human evolution and biological race. He stressed the original unity of the races, yet he also helped to popularize the notion of a racial hierarchy filling the gaps between the highest anthropoids and civilized Europeans. A focus on Darwin's explanation of how humans initially evolved, however, shows that he mainly stressed not hierarchy but a version of humanity's original mental unity. In his book The Descent of Man, Darwin emphasized a substantial degree of mental development (including the incipient use of language) in the early, monogenetic phase of human evolution. This development, he argued, necessarily came before primeval man's numerical increase, geographic dispersion, and racial diversification, because only thus could one explain how that group was able to spread at the expense of rival ape-like populations. This scenario stood opposed to a new evolutionary polygenism formulated in the wake of Darwin's Origin of Species by his ostensible supporters Alfred Russel Wallace and Ernst Haeckel. Darwin judged this outlook inadequate to the task of explaining humanity's emergence.     

On "Telepathic dreams?": an unpublished paper by Robert J. Stoller

In 1973 Robert Stoller wrote a paper on a series of dreams-his own and his patients'--that he reluctantly found himself calling "telepathic." He never submitted the paper for publication, though he returned to the topic of unconscious communication and telepathy with increasing fascination in the years before his death. Publication of Stoller's paper seems particularly opportune just now. In it he pleads for open-minded examination of data, however alien to current scientific belief those data seem. In the past, despite numerous published reports of possibly telepathic experiences in analysis, their investigation remained relatively one-sided, since a technical posture of anonymity with patients constrained analysts from revealing that a communication struck them as telepathic. This has limited what analysts have been able to learn about the information actually exchanged, how it was exchanged, and whether the communication was experienced as uncanny by the patient. Recent attention to the intersubjective nature of the analytic situation has led to a deemphasis of anonymity, opening freer dialogue that may facilitate the rigorous investigation Stoller calls for. Such investigation may further analytic understanding of unconscious mental function and communication in the clinical setting, and lend perspective to the growing body of carefully controlled experimental research on anomalous mental phenomena.     

Distinction between mental pain and psychic suffering as separate entities in the patient's experience

Abstract

Mental pain and psychic suffering are herein defined as two separate concepts in psychoanalysis. The concept of mental pain lies at the core of psychoanalysis; it was introduced by Freud and was further elaborated by a number of investigators, mostly by Bion. Mental pain refers to a pain that the patient reports as being impossible to describe in words, and lacking any associations, whereas psychic suffering can be both named and described by the patient. Mental pain is derived from non-tolerance on the part of the psychic apparatus when it is harmed by very painful emotions. In contrast to psychic suffering, mental pain resists elaboration and transformation by dream-work. How to address and transform the patient's mental pain is a major challenge facing the analyst in his clinical work because mental pain may halt or slow the progression of the analytical process. To overcome this hindrance, the work of the analyst is focused on helping patients to modify their mental pain into psychic suffering, that is, to reactivate in the patient the chain of transformations that generates thought. The analyst is also challanged with the mental pain of the patients because he has himself to tolerate the mental patient induced by counter transference. Suggestions for the analyst on how to deal with the mental pain of the patient during psychoanalytic therapy are proposed.     

Freud's Leonardo: psychobiography and autobiography of genius.

In his creation of a psychobiography of one genius and the hidden autobiographic analysis of another, Freud exemplifies what he described in the study: "Kindly nature has given the artist the ability to express his most secret mental impulses, which are hidden even from himself, by means of the works that he creates" (p. 107).     

THE BIOLOGIST AS PSYCHOLOGIST: HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN'S EARLY MENTAL ABILITY INVESTIGATIONS

In the early 1880s, biologist Henry Fairfield Osborn conducted some of the first questionnaire research in American psychology. This article details how he came to distribute Francis Galton's questionnaire on mental imagery in the United States, as well as how he altered it to suit his own burgeoning psychological research interests. The development and circulation of questionnaires at the very beginning of American scientific psychology, first by Osborn and later by G. Stanley Hall, is discussed in terms of the new psychology's often‐overlooked methodological plurality. Further, Osborn's late nineteenth century interest in individual variation and group differences in mental imagery ability are discussed in relation to his pervasive educational and social concerns, as well as his eventual status as a prominent eugenicist in the twentieth century United States. This research into mental imagery ability foreshadows the eugenic‐oriented intelligence testing that developed in the early twentieth century.     

Franz Joseph Gall's non-cortical faculties and their organs

Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) is remembered for his claims that behavior results from a large number of independent mental faculties, and that these faculties are associated with cortical organs. Apart from the 26 faculties he localized in the cerebrum, he also recognized one faculty (reproductive drive) in the cerebellum. This picture, however, is based on Gall's presentations in his well-known later works, his four volume Anatomie et Physiologie. These books reflect the outcomes of Gall's thinking. They were steered by the observations and feedback he received in Vienna and while presenting his theories in the German states and neighboring countries between 1805 and 1807. Examining his lists before what he published in Paris shows how his faculties were changing. Notably, and as shown here, he had previously included several faculties associated with brainstem structures, in addition to the cerebellum, which he would continue to associate with some reproductive behaviors.     

A Cross-Cultural Reflection on Shusterman’s Suggestion of the “Transactional” Body

This short article explores the meaning of Shusterman’s “transactional body,” derived from his statement that the will is not a purely mental affair that is independent of physical modality but is always an interaction with its environment. While he appreciates the Deweyan interactional model, he develops the “transactional mode,” which he implies should expand the body-mind unity to the level of social and cultural conditions. Shusterman finds similar integrations and transactions among the mental, psychophysical and physical levels in Asian philosophical traditions. This article conducts a comparative study between his theory and Mencius’ understanding of the body. Within the discussion, the analysis of aesthetic experience explicated by Dewey and Shusterman is reviewed as the link to the comparison.     

The hazards of high callings

Summary To conclude, it is the concern of this paper that a minister have enough sources of satisfaction and security in his nonprofessional life so that he is not tempted to use his parishioners for the attaining of those needs. The pastor must be free of the need to use his parishioners, else he is working, not primarily for the parishioners' well-being, but rather for his own needs for success. He must notneed to see people converted, nor counseled successfully, nor saved from divorce. This would be only using these parishioners as a means by which the pastor proves his abilities. To guard against this danger, in a work so important as the ministry, is a difficult task. But it can be done when the pastor works at having a successful and satisfying private life. Such a private life pays dividends in the mental health of the pastor, and in parish work which is well done.     

Light and color in a void: The analysis of a special needs child

This clinical report comes from the five year, four day a week analysis of a male child. What is special is that this treatment is of a child with marked mental retardation. I have retained this nomenclature because that is how Ricardo's parents described his mental capacity. What they meant was that he was greatly impaired in his cognition and this could be seen in Ricardo's severe cognitive, social, behavioral, and relational improprieties. I have privileged the function of psychoanalytic understanding and the role of transference to bring about modifications in this child's internal world. And I have considered the patient's psychotic mental state to be in need of psychoanalytic treatment not withstanding his psychosis's connection to his cognitive handicap. I have also added information I have received after the analysis, information that demonstrates continued integration coming from the analytic process. Owing to Ricardo's limited mental capacities, this article advances clinical information that is not often found in analyses of children. There are possibly many other children like him who nonetheless would benefit from dynamic psychoanalytic understanding. On the other hand, I shall not discuss this matter theoretically, even though some theoretic considerations are necessary. Clinical practice and the transferential relation are this report's principal material.     

Severe Mental Illness: A Bridge between Neurochemistry and the Collective Unconscious

This article builds a relationship between neurochemistry and Jung's a priori construct of the collective unconscious through an exploration of the psychotic delusions present in severe mental illness and the psychopharmacological drugs used to treat them. Jung's postulations of a collective unconscious were rooted in his clinical work with severely mentally ill patients, and he was aware, early on, that severe mental illness offered an example of the interplay between human biology and our psychological lives. Current post-Jungian discourse has moved away from addressing severe mental illness as a means of understanding the continued relevance of Jungian theory amidst advances in the fields of neuroscience. Narrative analysis of qualitative data on severe mental illness adds psychic dimension to medical research and offers evidence that the rise and fall of delusional content, replete with archetypal patterns of expression, are related to the presence or absence of psychopharmacological drugs used for the treatment of bipolar disorder.     

Reid on Fictional Objects and the Way of Ideas

I argue that Reid adopts a form of Meinongianism about fictional objects because of, not in spite of, his common sense philosophy. According to 'the way of ideas', thoughts take representational states as their immediate intentional objects. In contrast, Reid endorses a direct theory of conception and a heady thesis of first-person privileged access to the contents of our thoughts. He claims that thoughts about centaurs are thoughts of nonexistent objects, not thoughts about mental intermediaries, adverbial states or general concepts. In part this is because of the common sense semantics he adopts for fictional-object terms. I show that it is reasonable for Reid to endorse Meinongianism, given his epistemological priorities, for he took the way of ideas to imply that his view about first-person privileged access to our mental contents was false.     

Silvano Arieti's novel The Parnas: A scene from the Holocaust

Silvano Arieti was an Italian psychoanalyst who undertook psychoanalysis of schizophrenic patients in the 1960s and 1970s. He left Italy in 1939 at the age of twenty‐four following the Race Laws of 1938, and moved to New York until his death in 1981. A training analyst and author of several psychoanalytic and academic books, Arieti kept his research open in a wide variety of directions, giving equal weight to the internal world – as it seen from the psychoanalytic viewpoint – and to the organic functioning of the brain, as viewed from the perspective of the neurosciences. Arieti's interpretation of schizophrenia helped to overcome the dichotomies between the classical psychoanalytic approach, neurobiological research, and research into cognition, and opened up new paths for an interdisciplinary understanding of mental functioning and creative processes. This paper examines Arieti's book The Parnas (1979); this is a partly‐fictionalised account of a pre‐eminent figure (Parnas in Hebrew means “head”) in the Jewish community in Pisa, Giuseppe Pardo Roques, in the 1930s and early 1940s, who experienced mental illness and was killed in the Nazi extermination of Jews. The paper examines Arieti?s reflections on what he sees as the ‘insights’ provided by mental illness, which are considered through the figure of Giuseppe Pardo Roques, and in the context of the trauma of the Shoah in Italy.