Therapy for the Dead: Working Clinically with Jung's Black Books and The Red Book

With the 2020 publication of the facsimile edition of The Black Books, we have an opportunity to study the layers of C. G. Jung's creative writing process for the first time. In this paper, I explore Jung's practice of active imagination in relation to his fantasy dialogues with the dead during two specific episodes in 1914 and 1916. I discuss Jung's concept of the collective unconscious corresponding to the “mythic land of the dead” and I show how this idea develops in The Black Books and The Red Book, or Liber Novus, culminating in Septem Sermones ad Mortuos. I describe my work with a patient, who, in an early session, said she felt like the "living dead". I recount how the patient's experience of her own internal world began to change as we were able to wonder about the inner world of the patient's late mother and, together, to imagine her mother's lament. I consider the use of imagination when working with the concept of "therapy for the dead" (Hillman & Shamdasani, 2013, p. 164) in the context of intergenerational trauma.     

Executive dysfunction in autism

"Executive function" is an umbrella term for functions such as planning, working memory, impulse control, inhibition and mental flexibility, as well as for the initiation and monitoring of action. The primacy of executive dysfunction in autism is a topic of much debate, as are recent attempts to examine subtypes of executive function within autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders that are considered to implicate frontal lobe function. This article will review cognitive behavioural studies of planning, mental flexibility and inhibition in autism. It is concluded that more detailed research is needed to fractionate the executive system in autism by assessing a wide range of executive functions as well as their neuroanatomical correlates in the same individuals across the lifespan.     

Probability matching: encouraging optimal responding in humans.

Two hundred undergraduate students participated in a repeated-trials binary choice procedure in which choice of one outcome was correct on 75% of trials. Subjects received 192 trials and were divided into five conditions: (1) control; (2) subjects were given the actual probabilities; (3) subjects were told if they did well they could leave early; (4) competition condition; (5) midway through the task subjects were asked to recommend a strategy for another subject. Half of the subjects in each group were told that the best they could do was to be correct on 75% of the trials. This manipulation permitted assessment of the hypothesis that subjects in probability-matching tasks are seeking a strategy that will be correct on 100% of the trials. The results partially confirmed this hypothesis. In addition, two of the variables improved performance significantly (giving probabilities and asking subjects to recommend a strategy). However, while subjects in all groups improved significantly over trials, optimal choice did not occur in this task.     

Semantic priming without awareness: Some methodological considerations and replications

Previous studies of subliminal semantic priming effects are considered. The distinction between subjective and objective detection thresholds proposed by Cheesman and Merikle (1984) is accepted, and it is concluded that no convincing evidence has been adduced to support or deny the existence of semantic priming effects at or below objective threshold. New criteria for the assessment of objective thresholds are proposed, and four experiments are reported in each of which pattern-masked primes were presented 10% below objective threshold. The first three experiments presented primes, mask, and targets binocularly; the fourth used dichoptic presentation. Data were analysed using both conventional F ratios and the quasi F ratio advocated by Clark (1973). Results showed that significant subliminal semantic priming effects occurred in each experiment when conventional F ratios were used, and significant effects occurred in all but the first experiment when quasi F was used. Binocular and dichoptic presentation of stimuli gave semantic priming effects whose magnitudes did not differ significantly. It is concluded that semantic priming effects can be obtained below objective detection threshold. It is also concluded that replication with different participants and different stimuli is preferable to the use of quasi F ratios in investigations where verbal stimuli are used.