The multiple meanings of secondary gain

The historical development of the concept of secondary gain is described in this article. Freud introduced this concept as a complement to primary gain. Freud modified the scope of both concepts during his career, but they remained within the boundary of an intrapsychological mechanism. Outside psychoanalysis, the concept of secondary gain has acquired further meaning with higher emphasis on interpersonal and social aspects. Consequently, it is often unclear what a writer or speaker means when he uses the term secondary gain. The different meanings of secondary gain in and outside psychoanalysis are illustrated with reference to literature and case reports.     

Processing idioms with multiple meanings

Three experiments are presented that examine understanding of idioms with one or more meaning. The results of Experiment 1 showed that subjects took longer to read and make paraphrase judgments for idioms when both their idiomatic and literal meanings are intended than it did to comprehend idioms meant only literally or idiomatically. In Experiments 2 and 3, subjects were faster at making phrase classification judgments for idioms with several different nonliteral interpretations than they were to make the same judgments for idioms with only one idiomatic interpretation. These findings suggest that idioms with more entries in the mental lexicon are accessed faster because it is more likely that one of their meanings will be encountered in a short time. The data overall support the idea that idioms are represented differently depending on their number of associated meanings.This research was supported by a Faculty Research Grant from the University of California, Santa Cruz. We wish to thank Dennis Johnston for his assistance in running subjects.     

Manufacturing multiple meanings of addiction: Time-limited realities

This article explores how clinicians, patients, and addiction as a youthful science manufacture meaning. Explanations of addictive behavior and addictive disease are viewed as constructs, ideologies, or ways of making meaning. This analysis considers the controversy—over whether addiction qualifies as a disease—to be primarily a matter of epistemology and social perception. Since there is no widespread agreement about what isease means in general, it is not possible to determine whether or not addiction is a disease in particular. The discussion also envisions how treatment for addicted clients might be reformulated as a transactional process utilizing the range of relevant theoretical models as time-limited reframes of addictive reality instead of dichotomizing addiction as either a disease or not.The authors extend thanks to Michelle Bowdler, Nancy Costikyan, Blase Gambino, Teri Loughead, Janet Mann, Peter Monius, Arthur Robbins, and Mitchell Young for their helpful assistance, suggestions, and comments on earlier drafts of this article.     

The ontology of meanings

In part 4 of Meaning, Expression, and Thought, Davis rejects what he calls Fregean ideational theories, according to which the meaning of an expression is an idea; and then presents his own account, which states that, e.g., the meaning of ‘Primzahl’ in German is the property of meaning prime number. Before casting doubt on the latter ontology of meanings, I come to Frege’s defence by pointing out that he was not an advocate of the position Davis named after him because Fregean senses are not lexical meanings and Fregean thoughts are not types of mental events.

The meanings of marital surnames

Sex Roles - To assess the meanings attached to marital surnames a younger group of adults (56 unmarried college students) and an older group (209 married and unmarried graduate students, members of...     

Rehabilitating neutrality

This article responds to Janet Kourany’s proposal, in Philosophy of Science after Feminism, that scientific practices be held to the ideal of ‘socially responsible science’, to produce results that are not only cognitively sound, but also significant in the light of values ‘that can be morally justified’. Kourany also urges the development of ‘contextualized philosophy of science’—of which feminist philosophy of science is exemplary—that is ‘politically engaged’ and ‘activist’, ‘informed by analyses of the actual ways in which science interacts with the wider society in which it occurs, the ways in which science is shaped by and in turn shapes society’, and that can contribute to understanding both the cognitive and social dimensions of science. Although I share Kourany’s commitment to contextualized philosophy of science, I question her proposed ideal of ‘socially responsible science’ and the grounds she provides for adopting it. My argument leads me to defend rehabilitating the traditional ideal of the ‘neutrality’ of science, which I reinterpret as the ideal of ‘inclusiveness and evenhandedness’.     

Interpretive neutrality

Published clinical examples are used to show how both contemporary ego psychological approaches and the relational approach are pre-structural, in the sense that they implicitly appeal to Freud's earlier, layering model. In this framework, defense and defended-against are seen as categorically different, with the consequence that both interpretation and the goals of analysis are necessarily normative. Viewed in this perspective, interpretive neutrality represents an unrealistic absence of influence. This perspective can also account for the widespread pessimism regarding exclusive reliance on interpretation and the consequent belief in the need to rely on the impact of the analytic relationship.     

The two meanings of a homophone

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 Ss were presented with sentences whose main noun was either a homophone or not. Following each sentence, Ss were presented with a single noun and they had to indicate whether it was relevant to the sentence or not. More specifically, irrelevant probes following sentences containing homophones were either irrelevant with respect to both interpretations of the homophone or irrelevant with respect to the present interpretation of the homophone but relevant with respect to its other interpretation. The data suggest that people compare the main noun and the probe, and that in doing so they compute both entries of the homophone noun. No effect was found due to a variation in the delay between the presentation of the sentence and the presentation of the probe.     

Therapeutic neutrality reconsidered

This paper suggests that therapists' tendency to ignore the impact of their own religious beliefs on their patients constitutes an area of potential abuse of psychotherapy. The author reviews the religious stance of the founders of psychotherapy, as well as recent criticisms of the therapeutic process, and proposes steps to safeguard against the inadvertent fostering of therapists' religious views on the patient.     

The odd effect and multiple meanings in English of the words "odd" and "even"

Under a variety of conditions, people take longer to make judgments about odd than about even digits and digit names. In English the words "odd" and "even" have multiple meanings. Perhaps the multiple meanings of these words are responsible for the slowing of responses to odd stimuli. This hypothesis was tested using participants who spoke no English and in whose native language, Polish, the words for the mathematical concepts of odd and even do not have multiple meanings.     

Aphasic performance on a lexical decision task: multiple meanings and word frequency

The lexical access of words varying in the number of meanings and frequency of occurrence was examined in fluent and nonfluent aphasic individuals and a control group of non-brain-damaged adults, using a lexical decision task. Fluent aphasic subjects performed similarly to nonfluent aphasic and normal subjects, showing that words with a high number of meanings and with a high frequency of occurrence were recognized as real words faster than words with few meanings or a low frequency of occurrence. While previous research has demonstrated that the number of meanings associated with a word exerts a powerful influence on the internal lexicon of normals, the results of this study suggest that brain damage resulting in aphasia does not disrupt this semantic organization.     

Industrial meanings

Industrial Society and its Museums 1890–1990: Social Aspirations and Cultural Politics, by Brigitte Schroeder‐Gudehus, ed., Newark, NJ: Harwood Academic Publs, Gordon & Breach Science Publs, 1993, hb, $48.00; UK: Chur & Reading, hb £30.00.