Historiography and psychoanalysis

Abstract

The act of writing the history of psychoanalysis poses crucial questions with regard to the openness of society. This article examines the fundamental issues faced by researchers when they set about writing the history of psychoanalysis in a specific country. The significance of reconstructing features of the psychoanalytical practice is discussed. The opposition that exists between the current academic ideals and those of the psychoanalytic societies is outlined with reference to the changes that society has undergone, particularly during the past 30 years. In this context, the stance maintained by psychoanalysts with regard to psychiatry, academic psychology, and the university education of psychotherapists is defined. Government accreditation processes for psychologists and psychotherapists are likewise illustrated in the light of the opinions held by psychoanalysts at different moments in time.     

Invited commentary on the interview with Jan Stensson

Abstract

The potential of psychoanalysis as social criticism is explored in the context of the major social divides of gender, sexual orientation, race, social class, and ethnicity. It is argued that these divides play central roles in constructing individual psyches, and that their influence is inseparable from other social/ familial forces. Further, analyst and patient alike, inevitably enact the imperatives of class, race, gender, and sexuality in the analytic dyad. It is crucial that psychoanalytic theory be extended to account for the formative power of these cultural categories both in the construction of individual identity, and on the course of analytic work. Further, individual psychoanalysts must be aware of cultural countertransference in the analytic engagement. Finally, as a profession we have an obligation publicly to oppose the destructive imperatives of our economic, political, and social systems in the interest of individual and community psychic well-being.     

The memorability of names and the divergent effects of prior experience

Pre-experimental familiarity can have paradoxical effects on episodic memory. Knowledge of the stimulus domain usually enhances memory, but word frequency—a presumed correlate of prior experience—is negatively related to recognition accuracy. The present study examined episodic recognition of names and its relation to two measures of pre-experimental knowledge, name frequency, and fame. Frequency was operationalised as the number of hits in a national telephone directory, and fame as hits on national mass media websites. Recognition accuracy was increased by fame, but diminished by frequency. Four experiments confirmed the findings, using yes/no recognition, ROC curves, and remember-know paradigms. Hit rates were consistently more strongly influenced by fame than by frequency, whereas the reverse was true for false alarm rates. These dissociations suggest that two different forms of semantic memory, specific and nonspecific knowledge, interact with episodic memory in separate ways.     

Iconic Prosody in Story Reading

Recent experiments have shown that people iconically modulate their prosody corresponding with the meaning of their utterance (e.g., Shintel et al., 2006). This article reports findings from a story reading task that expands the investigation of iconic prosody to abstract meanings in addition to concrete ones. Participants read stories that contrasted along concrete and abstract semantic dimensions of speed (e.g., a fast drive, slow career progress) and size (e.g., a small grasshopper, an important contract). Participants read fast stories at a faster rate than slow stories, and big stories with a lower pitch than small stories. The effect of speed was distributed across the stories, including portions that were identical across stories, whereas the size effect was localized to size‐related words. Overall, these findings enrich the documentation of iconicity in spoken language and bear on our understanding of the relationship between gesture and speech.     

Stability in the metamemory realism of eyewitness confidence judgments

The stability of eyewitness confidence judgments over time in regard to their reported memory and accuracy of these judgments is of interest in forensic contexts because witnesses are often interviewed many times. The present study investigated the stability of the confidence judgments of memory reports of a witnessed event and of the accuracy of these judgments over three occasions, each separated by 1 week. Three age groups were studied: younger children (8–9 years), older children (10–11 years), and adults (19–31 years). A total of 93 participants viewed a short film clip and were asked to answer directed two-alternative forced-choice questions about the film clip and to confidence judge each answer. Different questions about details in the film clip were used on each of the three test occasions. Confidence as such did not exhibit stability over time on an individual basis. However, the difference between confidence and proportion correct did exhibit stability across time, in terms of both over/underconfidence and calibration. With respect to age, the adults and older children exhibited more stability than the younger children for calibration. Furthermore, some support for instability was found with respect to the difference between the average confidence level for correct and incorrect answers (slope). Unexpectedly, however, the younger children’s slope was found to be more stable than the adults. Compared to the previous research, the present study’s use of more advanced statistical methods provides a more nuanced understanding of the stability of confidence judgments in the eyewitness reports of children and adults.     

‘Pure Time Preference’: Reply to Lowry and Peterson

A pure time preference is a preference for something to occur at one point in time rather than another, merely because of when it occurs in time. Such preferences are widely regarded as paradigm examples of irrational preferences. However, Rosemary Lowry and Martin Peterson have recently argued that, for instance, a pure time preference to go to the opera tonight rather than next month may be rationally permissible, even if the amounts of intrinsic value realized in both cases are identical. In this reply, we argue that Lowry and Peterson's argument is unsuccessful.     

Suppression-induced forgetting diminishes following a delay of either sleep or wake

ABSTRACT

We investigated the duration of suppression-induced forgetting (SIF), and the extent to which retrieval suppression differs between negative and neutral memories. We further examined if SIF was differently affected by sleep versus wake during the delay interval between retrieval suppression and re-test. Fifty participants first learned to associate neutral words with either neutral or negative images. Then, a subset of the words was shown again, and participants were asked to either recall (Think), or to suppress retrieval of (No-Think) the associated images. Finally, a memory test for all items was performed either immediately after the Think/No-Think (T/NT) phase (No Delay), or after a 3.5?h delay interval containing either sleep or wake. Results revealed a SIF effect only in the No Delay group, indicating that this forgetting effect dissipates already after a 3.5?h delay interval. Negative items were experienced as more intrusive than neutral ones during the T/NT phase.