AN ESSAY ON DREAMING,PSYCHICAL WORKING OUT AND WORKING THROUGH2

In this paper the author attempts to expand the idea put forward by Freud who considered dreams as a special form of unconscious thinking. It is the author's contention that the psychical working‐out function performed by dreams is a form of unconscious thinking, which transforms affects into memories and mental structures. He also attempts to clarify the way in which meaning is built and transformed in mental life. In that respect the unconscious internal world is seen as a form of unconscious thinking, a private theatre where meaning is generated and transformed. He focuses on what happens to feelings in dreams in connection with the meanings as a result of and an expression of the several stages of working through. The dream world is described as the setting where the mind gives expressive pictorial representation to the emotions involved in a conflict: a first step towards thinkability. The dreamwork also constitutes a process through which meaning is apprehended, built on and transformed at an expressive non‐discursive level, based on representation through figurative/pictorial images. The author draws on Meltzer's formulation to conjecture that the working‐through function of dreams, mainly in response to interpretations, is performed by a process of progression in formal qualities of the representations made available by dreaming in the form he has called affective pictograms. It is through progression in formal qualities of the representation that the thinking capabilities of the affective life develop and become part of the process of what is called metaphorically the metabolisation of emotional life. This process takes place through migration of meaning across various levels of mental process. In this perspective the analyst'sinterpretations of dreams effect what linguists call transmutation of the symbolic basis, a process that is necessary to help the mind to improve its capacity to think. Something expressed on the evocative plane and condensed into a pictographic image is then transformed into verbal language that expresses meaning. These conceptions are illustrated by a detailed clinical case.     

Capturing excellence in applied settings: A participant conceptualizer and praxis explicator role for community psychologists

Community psychology faces a crisis of personpower similar to that which Albee identified in the clinical field four decades ago. It is clear that there are not, and likely never will be, a sufficient number of community psychologists to be able to provide assessment, consultation, and planned change toward facilitating an inclusive psychological sense of community and sound health and prosocial development in all settings that could benefit from such assistance. To help resolve this crisis, an expanded role for community psychologists is proposed: that of participant conceptualizer and praxis explicator. A participant conceptualizer and praxis explicator has the role not only of working within settings to understand and help conceptualize change processes but also of reflecting on action processes that are a part of the setting, of reflecting on theory, and of generating products that share relevant learnings. How action research serves as the methodology that allows the flow and interplay of theory and action to take place also is discussed. Illustrations are drawn from the work of Leonard Bernstein, Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog, and the author's work in area of school-based social competence promotion. This article is based on much further reflection after my Distinguished Contribution to Practice in Community Psychology award address at APA in Toronto, August 1993. The latter was designed as a talk and featured musical excepts from Leonard Bernstein and Kermit the Frog, who also made an appearance at the talk and spoke briefly. A tape of the talk can be obtained from APA, for the curious. I think of my work as a public corporation, shares of which belong to many colleagues, friends, and mentors, far too numerous to mention. I give special thanks to Jim Kelly and Ed Trickett, to Irma Serrano-Garcia and Jim Dalton, to Emory Cowen and Roger Weissberg, to George Spivack and Myrna Shure, to Jack Chinsky and George Allen, to Tom Schuyler and to my parents, to those who generously shared selective truths about me that Jim Kelly compiled into marvelous and deeply appreciated introductory comments, and to my chief shareholders, my family, Ellen, Sara, and Samara, whose daily love, patience, and support I am honored to receive.     

Academic and nonacademic community psychologists: An analysis of divergence in settings,roles, and values

Differences between academic and nonacademic psychologists may be viewed as immutable, worthy of encouragement, or as a situation which the latter group must remedy by becoming “more scientific.” We contend that for community psychology, which perceives theory, application, and action as valid aspects of its broad paradigm, it would be most adaptive toexplicitly address the challenge of managing a balance between diversity and cohesion. There are signs that the present leadership of Division 27 recognizes aspects of this problem and is reconsidering the role and purpose of the Division as an organizing framework for the discipline (Trickett, Note 3). It is our view that engendering a commitment from various subgroups within the membership to addressing the disparities revealed by our respondents is required for resolving what we see as major obstacles to future development of the discipline. The conceptual and empirical approach presented in this study can be an important tool in forging constructive solutions to the challenges we have presented.     

Lightness of an object under two illumination levels

Anchoring theory (Gilchrist et al, 1999 Psychological Review 106 795-834) predicts a wide range of lightness errors, including failures of constancy in multi-illumination scenes and a long list of well-known lightness illusions seen under homogeneous illumination. Lightness values are computed both locally and globally and then averaged together. Local values are computed within a given region of homogeneous illumination. Thus, for an object that extends through two different illumination levels, anchoring theory produces two values, one for the patch in brighter illumination and one for the patch in dimmer illumination. Observers can give matches for these patches separately, but they can also give a single match for the whole object. Anchoring theory in its current form is unable to predict these object matches. We report eight experiments in which we studied the relationship between patch matches and object matches. The results show that the object match represents a compromise between the match for the patch in the field of highest illumination and the patch in the largest field of illumination. These two principles are parallel to the rules found for anchoring lightness: highest luminance rule and area rule.     

Gender discrimination may be worse than you think: testing ordinal interactions in power research

The authors reanalyze the data of a study by S. M. Elias and R. J. Loomis (2004), which aimed to determine how an instructor's gender may influence his or her ability to gain student compliance. S. M. Elias and R. J. Loomis observed few significant gender effects using traditional multivariate analyses of variance. The authors reanalyze this data using the more appropriate statistical techniques for detecting ordinal interactions recommended by M. J. Strube and P. Bobko (1989) and S. M. Elias (2004). An ordinal interaction occurs when 1 cell of a 2 x 2 design is responsible for a significant interaction (e.g., female instructors suffering only when rated by male students). Reanalysis of the data resulted in more robust findings.     

Cultural Dimensions,Gender, and the Nature of Self-concept: A Fourteen-country Study

Ratings of the importance of and satisfaction with 20 areas of the self were obtained from 3604 first or second year social science undergraduates from 14 countries (15 cultures). Factor analysis at the culture by gender level supported four factors for both sets of ratings. The resulting factor scores were analyzed for mean differences according to the cultural dimension of Individualism-Collectivism by Gender and by correlations with other cultural dimenions and economic indicators. It was found that participants from the 10 collectivist cultures placed greater salience for their self-concepts on “family values” than did those from the individualist cultures. However, this cultural difference was not found for “social relationships”. The expected gender differences, with females valuing “family values” and “social relationships” more highly, were found only for the individualist countries. The findings indicate that there may be a strong cultural level interaction effect between gender and Individualism-Collectivism on the nature of self-conceptions, and that the “family” and “social” aspects of self-concept in collectivist countries need to be considered separately.     

A method to analyze the spatial distribution of behavior

This article presents a method comprising an experimental environment, infrared detection system, data collection and processing software, behavior categories, and suggested quantitative analysis methods for studying some spatial properties of behavior. In the chamber, the location of a rat is determined at regular intervals by a 24 × 24 grid of infrared beams; the status of each line used interactively to determine changes in the environment are stored on disk for later analysis. From the status of the receptors, the computer decodes the location of objects in the chamber, and a binary 576-cell matrix is obtained for each sample. The series of matrices allows a number of behavior categories to be defined includingexploration, activity, andtime allocation. Exploration curves and time allocation surfaces are compared using a goodness-of-fit test; activity is assessed with time-series methods. Potential applications to psychological, pharmacological, and ethological research are considered.