The collective past,group psychology and personal narrative: Shaping Jewish identity by memoirs of the Holocaust

Through honing its collective memory, especially after the Holocaust, the Jewish community has attempted to sustain its culture, bolster the Jewish identity of its members, and regain a resolute sense that its narrative is again proceeding. To some degree, all these aims are realized by instilling in its members the Jewish modal character structure: a psychological configuration with two contrastable entities. One chronically discomposed self-structure, defining itself as polluted and helpless, trembles with the appalling imagery of historical and imminent community disasters. The other entity believes in its unmatched capacity for reparative, socially beneficial actions. The paradigm of this psychological organization is found in many children of survivors. The memory of a tragic history abides alongside the community's hopes in the Jewish modal personality. The need to set forth and accommodate these two motifs imprints upon the Jewish "national" character many of its distinctive qualities. The designs of the Jewish community for this particularly Jewish twofold personality formation are augmented by the personal revelations of survivors. Therefore, Holocaustic testimonies are invested with a sacred aura. In measure, these recitals of the disaster with their stark images, plus the clashing affects aroused in the reader toward main characters of the narrative, dictate the way Jews define themselves in the world and the way they live. A confluence of being covertly commissioned by the Jewish community joins with the narrators' more idiosyncratic longings. Together they generate a steady stream of Holocaustic accounts. Complementary vectors drive the reader to peruse these records. The results therefrom, intimate knowledge of the disaster, plus the twofold personality motifs stamp many Jews as scions of the Holocaust.     

A review of patient outcomes in pharmacological studies from the psychiatric literature, 1966–1993

A literature search was conducted on studies of new drugs used with patients with schizophrenia reported by U.S. and non-U.S. researchers from 1966–1993, yielding 41 U.S., and a total of 24 other non-U.S. studies, among them 11 British studies. Results of the U.S. and non-U.S. studies were pooled separately and compared. Among several comparable conditions discussed, the lack of any data on suicides in the U.S. studies was observed. For a second statistical analysis of suicide rates ‘person-years’ were calculated to adjust for differing washout durations. The results obtained include findings that the percentage of patients relapsing in U.S. studies was slightly lower (37.9%) than in non-U.S. studies (46%); the percentage of patients dropping out in U.S. studies (10.5%) was higher than in non-U.S. studies (7.6%); known location of dropout patients in U.S. studies was 1.7%, compared to 2.6% in non-U.S. studies. The most interesting finding was that no suicides were reported in U.S. studies, compared to 0.6% of patients reported in British studies. Some U.S. studies used ‘challenge doses’, such as amphetamines or L-dopa; no non-U.S. studies reported their use. Compared to U.S. studies, those by non-U.S., and particularly British, researchers appeared to report adverse events in their studies. ‘Challenge’ drugs were not used; suicides were reported. It is estimated that the probability that no patients suicided who participated in the U.S. is small—one in 500.     

Nurses' Anxieties about Biohazards as a Function of Context and Knowledge1

Final-year nursing students (N= 96) described their anxieties about biohazards, not only in relation to the occupational context of a hospital ward, but also in relation to their general life context. These contexts were reported to vary in the extent to which they permitted control over exposure to the two particular biohazards chosen for study: human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and hepatitis B virus (HBV). The data showed that nurses' anxiety about contracting HIV infection varied significantly across the two contexts, while anxiety about contracting HBV infection did not. In the general life context, anxiety about HIV was greater than anxiety about HBV for all subjects. This difference was significantly greater for those with incorrect knowledge about objective HIV seroconversion rates than for those with correct knowledge.     

Intuition: A special kind of knowing?

It is argued that while counsellors have adopted the principle tenets of phenomenology—consciousness and meaning—they have built their work on an interpretation of intuition which is contrary to phenomenological rationale and presents it as a form of knowing which is esoteric and mystical. Phenomenologically, intuition differs from no other way in which sense is made of the world. Intuitions should then, in principle, be accessible to conscious understanding so as to allow counsellors to reflect (cognitively?) on their practice. If the process of intuition were really unknowable, then reflective practice in counselling would not be possible.     

Mental comparisons involving abstract attributes

Adult subjects in two experiments were presented pairs of stimuli that differed in varying degree on an abstract semantic attribute, and were required to choose the one with the higher value on the given dimension. Subjects in Experiment 1 chose the more pleasant member of a pair of pictures, concrete nouns, or abstract nouns. Those in Experiment 2, presented a pair of pictures or concrete nouns, chose the one whose referent had the higher monetary value. Theoretical interest centered on the effects of semantic distance, stimulus mode, and individual differences in imagery and verbal ability on choice time. In both experiments, response times (1) decreased with increases in semantic distance, (2) were faster for pictures than words (and for concrete than abstract words in Experiment 1), and (3) were faster for high- than for lowimagery participants. The results are completely consistent with a dual-coding (image vs. verbal) interpretation: Pleasantness and value, though conceptually abstract, are attributes of things rather than words, and they are accordingly represented in and processed by a system specialized for dealing with nonverbal information.     

A relay driver and contact closure sensing interface for an LSI-11 DRV11 parallel I/O board

A simple input and output circuit is described that allows users to sense contact closures and to drive relays from a Digital Equipment Corporation LSI-11 DRV 11 parallel interface board or a signal-compatible equivalent.     

A simple LSI-11 system for real-time control,interevent time storage,and data analysis

A simple laboratory computer system based on a Digital Equipment Corporation LSI-11, floppy disk, DRV11 parallel input-output board, and the RT-11 operating system is described. Interface to experimental devices is provided through a lab-built relay driver and relay closure sensing interface. An extensive high-level software package provides an easy-to-use control language (e.g., stimuli can be controlled with a simple “TURN ON” or “TURN OFF” instruction) and easy-to-use FORTRAN subroutines for data exploration (e.g., “IFIND” searches a data file for a particular event). The control software automatically generates, codes, and stores a complete log of every input and output event and its time of occurrence in each of five simultaneously running experiments. This provides the capability to reanalyze data in light of hypotheses not available when the experiment was designed. The FORTRAN subroutine library for data exploration provides a conditional and iterative search facility to sift out events or sets of events from the data file for analysis. Standard FORTRAN statements perform arithmetic operations on the resulting data.