Dreaming to Different Beats: Reply to Commentaries

Psychoanalysis is in the throes of transition and suffers in diverse quarters from a case of postmodern jitters. We are casting aside old paradigms and approach the new with trepidation. We fail to see that deconstruction is a practice rather than an end in itself. The bridge from the old to the new is yet to be completed. This response to reviews of Sexual Subjects: Lesbians, Gender and Psychoanalysis argues that psychoanalysis is not value free in theory or practice, nor can it be. Attempts to deconstruct psychoanalytic concepts of gender and sexuality aim, rather, at delineating values and demonstrating just how they are reflective of a particular siruation in place and time. The deconstruction of gender does not preclude the study of development—a development that is grounded in the analytic decoding and attribution of meaning to experience rather than morphology or critical stages. A hermeneutic-constructivist psychoanalysis is not necessarily at odds with a developmental approach to narrative. Moreover, a theory that acknowledges the performative aspects of gender can simultaneously account for “internal representations” that result from our specific historicities, our intersubjective, fantasized relationships. The deconstruction of gender binaries—the historical imposition of gendering on aspects of experience, desire, and identity that are culturally but not essentially related to constitutionally based sexual differences—does not necessitate the dismantling of a frame of self-systems, or the language that may be best suited for describing an individual's experience.     

Jungian analysis: An elder's perspective

Dr. Joseph L. Henderson has the richest and longest history of any analyst who trained with Jung. He is in his 97th year, in excellent health and spirit, and continues to practice daily. He was in Zürich in the 1930s when Jung was developing many of his theories in the seminars Henderson attended. Henderson trained and analyzed with Jung, although he worked with other analysts as well. He received his medical training in London. Jung asked Henderson to write a chapter in Man and His Symbols, and he has been writing ever since. He is the author of Thresholds of Initiation and other books related to Jungian psychology. After World War II, along with the late Joseph Wheelwright, Elizabeth Whitney, Jane Wheelwright, and other analysts, he co-founded the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, one of two Jungian centers in the U.S. at that time. He continues to work with candidates in training to become analysts, and to help research organizations such as the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS)     

"Let's work together": what do infants understand about collaborative goals?

Collaboration is fundamental to our daily lives, yet little is known about how humans come to understand these activities. The present research was conducted to fill this void by using a novel visual habituation paradigm to investigate infants’ understanding of the collaborative-goal structure of collaborative action. The findings of the three experiments reported here suggest that 14-month-old infants understand that the actions of collaborative partners are complementary and critical to the attainment of a common collaborative goal. Importantly, 14-month-olds do not interpret the actions of two individuals in terms of a collaborative goal when their actions are not causally related. The implications of our findings for theories of collaboration and folk psychology are discussed.     

The unanticipated interpersonal and societal consequences of choice: victim blaming and reduced support for the public good

Choice makes North Americans feel more in control, free, and independent, and thus has many positive consequences for individuals' motivation and well-being. We report five studies that uncovered novel consequences of choice for public policy and interpersonal judgments. Studies 1 through 3 found that activating the concept of choice decreases support for policies promoting intergroup equality (e.g., affirmative action) and societal benefits (e.g., reducing environmental pollution), but increases support for policies promoting individual rights (e.g., legalizing drugs). Studies 4 and 5 found that activating the concept of choice increases victim blaming and decreases empathy for disadvantaged people. Study 5 found that choice does not decrease Indians' empathy for disadvantaged individuals, indicating that the social and interpersonal consequences of choice are likely culture-specific. This research suggests that the well-known positive effects of choice for individuals can be accompanied by an array of previously unexamined and potentially negative outcomes for other people and for society.     

‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside’: opportunity structures for four un/underemployed young people living in English coastal towns

Long-term unemployed young people are a ‘social concern’ in many countries. The focus for research is usually cities, but may also include rural areas. The qualitative study described in this paper focuses instead on four young people living in coastal towns in South East England. The study suggests that their experiences in education and employment markets are shaped, negatively, by their particular location and the ongoing opportunity structures. The paper outlines their views and discusses the three main themes that emerged from the analysis: opportunity structures, supported resilience and the impact of living in a coastal town. Implications for targeted youth guidance are considered, alongside a consideration of the reflexive role of the researcher in such work.     

Family Functioning, Self-Concept, and Severity of Adolescent Externalizing Problems

We investigated direct and shared effects of family functioning and self-concept on the severity of adolescent externalizing problems in a sample of 224 clinically referred adolescents. Structural equation modeling (SEM) revealed strong, direct relationships between problem behaviors and both family functioning and self-concept. Using R. M. Baron and D. A. Kenny's (1986) and G. N. Holmbeck's (1997) criteria for testing mediation in SEM, family functioning partially mediated the relationship between self-concept and problem behaviors. A moderation model, testing the relationship between externalizing problems and the interaction between family functioning and self-concept, did not yield a significant effect. Our findings indicate that self-concept and family functioning exert direct and shared effects on externalizing problems and suggest that interventions for clinically referred adolescents should target both the individual adolescent and his/her family.     

Offline consolidation supersedes prior knowledge benefits in children's (but not adults’) word learning

Prior linguistic knowledge is proposed to support the acquisition and consolidation of new words. Adults typically have larger vocabularies to support word learning than children, but the developing brain shows enhanced neural processes that are associated with offline memory consolidation. This study investigated contributions of prior knowledge to initial word acquisition and consolidation at different points in development, by teaching children and adults novel words (e.g., ballow) that varied in the number of English word‐form “neighbours” (e.g., wallow, bellow). Memory for the novel word‐forms was tested immediately after training, the next day and 1 week later, to assess the time‐course of prior knowledge contributions. Children aged 7–9 years (Experiments 1, 3) and adults (Experiment 2) recalled words with neighbours better than words without neighbours when tested immediately after training. However, a period of offline consolidation improved overall recall and reduced the influence of word‐form neighbours on longer term memory. These offline consolidation benefits were larger in children than adults, supporting theories that children have a greater propensity for consolidating phonologically distinctive language information. Local knowledge of just a single word‐form neighbour was enough to enhance learning, and this led to the individual differences in word recall that were related to adults’ global vocabulary ability. The results support the proposal that the relative contributions of different learning mechanisms change across the lifespan, and highlight the importance of testing theoretical models of word learning in the context of development.