Prospective memory: The relative effects of encoding,retrieval, and the match between encoding and retrieval

Previous prospective memory studies have revealed some important features of encoding, retrieval, and the match between the encoding and the retrieval that contribute to prospective memory performance. However, these studies have not provided evidence concerning the relative importance of these three factors because no study has investigated all three in a single design. We developed a laboratory-based paradigm that allowed us to manipulate different characteristics of encoding, retrieval, and the match between encoding and retrieval simultaneously in a single experiment. The results of eight experiments showed that all three factors have an influence on prospective memory performance, but that the match between encoding and retrieval has a significantly larger influence than either encoding or retrieval factors.     

Implicit volition and stereotype control

Goals are mental representations that vary in accessibility and operate within goal systems. The implicit nature of goal activation and pursuit is shown here to make goals effective not merely at overturning the influence of an activated stereotype on how people respond to members of stereotyped groups, but effective at implicitly controlling the activation of stereotypes in the first place. In a set of experiments examining chronic egalitarian goals, faces and names of members of stereotyped groups presented as target stimuli led to the inhibition of stereotypes, as well as to the heightened accessibility of egalitarian goals. A separate set of experiments illustrate a similar ability of individuals to control stereotype activation when egalitarian goals are temporarily triggered within a context, rather than being chronically held. Goals that require one to inhibit stereotypic associations to a target can lead to the intended, yet implicit, control of stereotype activation, even when one is not aware the goal is active or being pursued or being regulated.     

Tanya and the Adaptive Dialectic of Romantic Passion and Secure Attachment

My analytic work with Tanya illustrated one unique, heightened, individual version of a pervasive human conflict: the way in which erotic passion can be experienced as inherently conflicting with other relational bonds and broader values. In virtually every culture throughout human history, we find expressions of this tension between passionate Eros and other forms of love.

My clinical approach entails an openness to multiple analytic perspectives, including Mitchell's posthumous views in Can Love Last. In addition, I make use of a sensibility informed by evolutionary biology as a vantage point for understanding the individual struggle of patients like Tanya, as well as illuminating some of the larger issues about Eros and attachment. I suggest that romantic aspects of Eros may have evolved as part of a complex psychological system designed to deal with specifically human existential vulnerabilities and anxieties, as well as a way of challenging the inherent human tendency to over-accommodate to the subjective world of the other.     

“They Go Too Far”: Reply to Review Essays by Lewes and O'Connor

Kenneth Lewes and Noreen O'Connor share little common ground in their discussions of Lesbian Lives. They agree that it represents, in Lewes's words, “important trends in psychoanalysis and more general intellectual discourse” (“the developing discourse on homosexuality, the ascendancy of feminist ideas within psychoanalysis, … the shift … from classical drive theory to … more … relational approaches, and the influence of postmodern social and literary thought”). But whereas O'Connor welcomes a text she sees as offering “critiques of traditional psychoanalysis's binary theorising of gender and sexuality,” Lewes finds that Lesbian Lives presents “certain questions and difficulties, especially to those who, like myself, espouse theoretical and political allegiances quite different from them.” This article responds to several of Lewes's distortions and misreadings, including his allegations that the authors believe they can “conduct therapy without theory or value” and that they “insist on the essential sameness of people who are heterosexual and homosexual.” Lewes also wrongly attributes to the authors a simplistic belief in “sexual fluidity” and the “multiplicity of selves.” Instead, the text of Lesbian Lives in various ways encourages psychoanalysis to incorporate into its developmental models what it has learned clinically about the multiple dimensions of subjective experience.     

Zwischen Tod und Urszene

Are there psychoanalytic ideas about what it means to be fully and creatively alive? Thoughts about this are prompted by Winnicott’s account of living by compliance or by creative apperception. A necessary aspect of independent, creative aliveness is a capacity to be interested in what disturbs our usual thought processes. Clinical examples show the truth of this for therapists in the clinical situation and it applies to life in general as well. Being fully alive involves a particular use of memory so as to move actively up and down one’s life experiences between past and present and also the ability to extend this imaginatively into the future, including particularly the experience of one’s own death which is ultimately and inescapably ‘uncanny’. Such freedom of internal movement makes it possible to see the present as a point of encounter between the past and the future. The past is bounded by the primal scene and the future by death, which represent the beginning and end of time. The present is thus also an encounter between time and timelessness. To tell a dream in an analytical session is to bring the timelessness of the unconscious into a time-bound framework. A clinical example shows how a sense of this crossover between time and timelessness helped a patient use his dream experience to develop a greater sense of aliveness. Vermeer’s painting of ‘The Kitchen Maid’ pouring milk is analysed as a visual representation of the intersection of time and timelessness. A case in a clinical seminar is described, which produced a disorienting sense of timelessness in the seminar group. The seminar leader then needed to help the discussion stay poised at a crossing-point between timelessness and time. A discussion of the myth of Orpheus considers Orpheus’ compulsion to look back at Eurydice as a failure of aliveness because he could not dream Eurydice at the intersection between the timelessness of the underworld and the linear temporality of everyday existence.     

„Es waren ja fast alle weggegangen“

The complex and partly disputed history of German psychoanalysis during the Third Reich has been thoroughly investigated to date. There are various stages of historical analysis which are distinguished by differing discourses that are presented as part of this work. The first stage of historical analysis was characterized by conflicts within the German psychoanalytical societies and marked by two antagonistic narratives about the transformation of German psychoanalysis during the Third Reich. This study investigated which discourses on the history of German psychoanalysis were integrated into the professional biographies of the first generation of post-war psychoanalysts. In this study 23 narrative interviews were conducted with psychoanalysts who where born before 1st January 1937 focusing on the professional biography and the results were analyzed. The interviewees stressed the ‘damage’ to German psychoanalysis in general and on their training in particular. The ‘damage’ was described as an uncontrollable result of National Socialism and the structural and theoretical changes that were connected to it whereby its effects continued to impact on post-war psychoanalysis. Especially the discourses of the first stage of historical analysis appear to have been integrated into professional biographies and are still having an impact on the interpretation of history for the post-war generation to this day. The history of psychoanalysis is presented as a narrative of ‘rescue’ or ‘liquidation’ of psychoanalysis during the Third Reich depending on the professional identity of the psychoanalysts.