Redeeming the lost voice of the ancestors

The Holocaust of the Jews in World War II involved not only the murder of 6 million Jews but also the traumatic destruction and wipe-out of whole communities, with their rich culture and tradition which had existed for centuries. In places where no one survived, it was almost impossible to reconstruct the collective memory of those communities. The voice of the ancestors was lost. As a daughter of Holocaust survivors, I have always felt the strong presence of the loss, not only of the murdered family members but also of the ancient colourful world of Eastern European Jews. I have always felt compelled to link back to that lost world. In the past three years, my journey to the pre-war past has become more intense. This article describes the double role of my journey: it is both an attempt to reconstruct, redeem and preserve the memory of the lost ancestors, and a personal journey to the echoes of my ancestors' voices within my soul.     

Development of voice recognition: parallels with face recognition.

Encoding and subsequent recognition of unfamiliar voices was examined in children, aged 6 to 16, and in adults. Performance changed markedly with age, improving sharply between ages 6 and 10, with 10-year-olds approaching adult levels. After age 10 accuracy declined significantly but returned to the adult level by age 14. The course of development closely matches that recently documented for the ability to encode and recognize unfamiliar faces. Several parallels between voice recognition and face recognition are discussed.     

Encounters with Omnipotence in the Psychoanalysis of Substance Users

An assumption made in this paper and explored for its clinical implications is that an act of chronic drug use often marks or serves to implement an underlying omnipotent self-state. Psychoanalytic work with substance users, as compared with other approaches, trains attention on these omnipotent states and makes use of the transferential exchange as a therapeutic tool. States of omnipotence are particularly examined here in the context of recent attention to dissociation as an organizing force in the personality, and in the configuration of the transference—countertransference of the treatment relationship. A case illustration is used to apply current thinking on dissociative and projective processes, and their role in enactment in the therapeutic exchange, to illuminate the frequent interplay of omnipotence and helplessness in analytic work with substance-using and other patients.     

Encounters with the Religious Imagination and the Emergence of Creativity

Ervin Laszlo's notion of the interrelationship between evolution and creativity as being intrinsic to universal life processes has been influential to the biological and social sciences. Central to Laszlo's thinking is the notion of convergence in biological and social systems that are posited on creative complexity. In this article, I employ Laszlo's concept of creativity in relation to the human religious imagination. Cross-cultural studies of the religious imagination examine the architecture of human consciousness and ways of knowing. These two areas are interlinked and generate new kinds of knowledge and understanding of the self and the world. In this way, the religious imagination is a means of generating new possibilities of mind and consciousness.     

Information persistence: Testing spatial and identity information with a voice probe

Summary Two experiments tested loss of information from iconic memory. In the first, subjects were shown a row of letters for 50 ms and were asked whether or not a named letter had been present in the display. The name was spoken at an SOA of –150, 0, 50, 100, or 200 ms. In the second experiment, the named letter was always present in the display, and the subjects were asked to identify its location in the row. Accuracy was independent of the SOA in the first experiment but dropped rapidly as the SOA increased in the second. Thus, subjects lose information needed to locate material in space, not information about the identity of the material.     

Resistance of voice onset time variability to intoxication.

Voice onset times of /d/ and /t/ were measured for 16 adult subjects (age range 21 to 26 years) under conditions of sobriety and intoxication. Subjects consumed beer to reach intoxication levels between 0.075 and 0.100% as measured using a portable breathalyzer test. Analysis indicated consistent variabilities over time for each subject and resistance of VOT variability to alcohol influence.     

Logic of imagination. Echoes of Cartesian epistemology in contemporary philosophy of mathematics and beyond

Descartes’ Rules for the direction of the mind presents us with a theory of knowledge in which imagination, considered as an “aid” for the intellect, plays a key role. This function of schematization, which strongly resembles key features of Proclus’ philosophy of mathematics, is in full accordance with Descartes’ mathematical practice in later works such as La Géométrie from 1637. Although due to its reliance on a form of geometric intuition, it may sound obsolete, I would like to show that this has strong echoes in contemporary philosophy of mathematics, in particular in the trend of the so called “philosophy of mathematical practice”. Indeed Ken Manders’ study on the Euclidean practice, along with Reviel Netz’s historical studies on ancient Greek Geometry, indicate that mathematical imagination can play a central role in mathematical knowledge as bearing specific forms of inference. Moreover, this role can be formalized into sound logical systems. One question of general epistemology is thus to understand this mysterious role of the imagination in reasoning and to assess its relevance for other mathematical practices. Drawing from Edwin Hutchins’ study of “material anchors” in human reasoning, I would like to show that Descartes’ epistemology of mathematics may prove to be a helpful resource in the analysis of mathematical knowledge.     

Personality as a predictor of the value of voice

The opportunity for workers to provide input, also known as voice, has received extensive study. The contrasting relational and instrumental theories of voice have stimulated research investigating why people value voice. However, researchers have yet to assess individual differences in the actual value that people place on voice. This consideration is particularly important because the effect of voice on perceived procedural fairness varies according to the value of voice. This laboratory study is an examination of the Big Five (extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, neuroticism, and conscientiousness; L. Goldberg, 1992) and core self-evaluations (neuroticism, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and locus of control; T. Judge, E. Locke, & C. Durham, 1997) as predictors of the value of voice for 96 undergraduates. Although both the Big Five and core self-evaluations accounted for significant variance in the value of voice, only 2 individual components (extraversion and self-efficacy) significantly predicted the value of voice.     

Inadequacy of voice recognition as a demonstration of self-deception

Gur and Sackeim (1979) argued that subjects deceived themselves when they failed to recognize their own voices on playback from a tape recorder. This claim is based primarily on the observation that subjects showed a heightened galvanic skin response when their own voices were present regardless of whether recognition took place. The authors suggest that even though subjects may not consciously recognize their own voices, a heightened physiological response implies that true recognition did in fact occur at some other level of cognitive processing. This article describes an experiment demonstrating that results similar to those arrived at by Gur and Sackeim can also be produced when subjects attempt to recognize the voice of a familiar "other." These results suggest that self-deception is not the main factor operating to produce the heightened physiological response.     

Close Encounters of a New Kind: Toward an Integration of Psychoanalysis and Buddhism

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -