THE FATHER,THE FATHER FUNCTION,THE FATHER PRINCIPLE: SOME CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOANALYTIC DEVELOPMENTS

The author discusses Freud's thinking on the role of the father, as well as that of later French theoreticians. To illustrate his remarks, he draws on the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1912–1987), a Brazilian poet whose work often dealt with themes of the father, the family, and his own paternal relationship. The author also discusses the psychic formation of the father principle and how this may be evident in the clinical analytic setting, even when the analyst's approach privileges field theory, intersubjectivity, or other concepts emphasizing the relationship between analyst and patient.     

Perceptions of Children Who Lie: Influence of Lie Motive and Benefit

KILMARTIN (1994) suggested that masculine traits may result from externalizing defense style and that when unconscious and unwanted feminine traits about the self occur, they are dealt with in an external way, radier man being directiy resolved by the individual. However, this dieory has received little empirical support. Lobel and Winch (1986) measured defense style among male college students; they found mat men who scored higher in masculinity tended to score higher on acting out (finding an object to attack) and splitting (separating affect from content). Lobel and Winch concluded mat use of diese defense styles reflects avoidance of emotional expression. In turn, diese findings have been supported by research that has suggested mat men use avoidance coping strategies more man women do (McCall &; Struthers, 1994).     

Reasons for Not Helping

Second-grade, fourth-grade, sixth-grade, high school, and college students (N = 140) were asked to describe situations in which they would not help someone else and their reasons for not helping in those situations. Younger subjects used perceived self-incompetence as a reason for not helping more frequently than did older subjects. In contrast, older subjects more frequently cited a desire not to violate another's personal situation and/or their own internalized values, laws, and rules as reasons not to help than did their younger counterparts. For a majority of the not-helping categories, however, no significant effect of age level was found, and indeed, some individuals in even the youngest age group expressed subtle and insightful reasons for not helping.     

The Role of Perspective Taking and Empathy in Children's Machiavellianism,Prosocial Behavior,and Motive for Helping

Fourth- and fifth-grade children (N = 117) were categorized into high- and low-empathy and affective-perspective-taking (APT) groups based on their scores on the Bryant (1982) empathy scale and a modified version of the Rothenberg (1970) and Silvern, Waterman, Sobesky, and Ryan (1979) APT measures. Children in the low-empathy/high-APT group had significantly higher Machiavellianism scores on Braginsky's (1970) measure than did children in the other empathy/APT groups. Highly empathic children were rated by their teachers as more helpful under certain circumstances and cited other-oriented reasons for their own helping behavior more frequently than did less empathic children.     

The Relation of Distressful Childhood Experiences and Empathy in College Undergraduates

We assessed the relation between the empathic responsiveness of young adults and the relative frequency and intensity of distressful events they experienced as children. Undergraduate subjects (N = 111; 56 men and 55 women) were led to believe that they were participating in two separate studies. In the first study, students completed the Distress Experiences in Childhood questionnaire, a filler task, and a slightly abbreviated version of the Mehrabian and Epstein (1972) empathy measure. In the second study, students watched an emotion-laden videotape of a patient (actually an actress) in a therapy session and subsequently completed an emotional-response questionnaire adapted from Batson, O'Quin, Fultz, Vanderplas, and Isen (1983). Students who rated their distressful childhood experiences as highly distressing scored higher on both measures of empathy than did students who rated their experiences as relatively less distressing. In contrast, the number of distressful childhood experiences reported was generally unrelated to empathy scores.     

Children's Anticipated Responses to Hypothetical Peers With Undesirable Characteristics: Role of Peers' Desire to Change,Effort to Change,and Outcome

The authors explored the extent to which 5th- and 6th-grade students’ anticipated responses to hypothetical peers with undesirable characteristics (e.g., being overweight) are influenced by information that each peer (a) desired (or did not desire) to change the characteristic, (b) exerted effort (or did not exert effort) to change the characteristic, and (c) was successful (or unsuccessful) in changing the characteristic. In general, the children anticipated responding more favorably to peers who were successful in overcoming an undesirable characteristic than those who were unsuccessful. However, across both outcome conditions, peers who wanted to change and exerted effort to change were rated more favorably than were peers who reported no effort to change an undesirable characteristic, regardless of whether or not they had expressed a desire to change that characteristic. For peers whose failure to change an undesirable characteristic was associated with no effort to change, those who expressed a desire to change were rated more favorably than those who expressed no desire to change.     

Risk,Resilience, and the Rorschach: A Longitudinal Study of Children Who Experienced Sexual Abuse

Experiencing sexual abuse increases the risk that children will report or otherwise demonstrate problems with emotion, behavior, and health. This longitudinal study of 44 children who experienced sexual abuse examined whether information processing as assessed via the Rorschach Inkblot Test was associated with child-reported depression symptoms assessed via the Children's Depression Inventory (Kovacs, 1992) concurrently and an average of 15 months later. Children whose Rorschach protocols were relatively free of scores suggesting intense distress, complex processing, and sexual content were more likely to experience remission of depression symptoms at follow-up. Findings provide incremental validity for certain Rorschach indexes to inform prognosis regarding depression symptoms and perhaps their treatment.