My Life as a Psychoanalyst in Spain

This article attempts to explain, in a necessarily brief way, the reasons underlying my choice of the psychiatry specialty: why I chose the psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy, the authors and theories that have influenced me the most, and my current professional situation, making some allusion to my hobbies.     

Psychic Truth and the In-Session Work of the Analyst

I seek to address one of the issues most affected by the postmodern culture, such as the crisis of rationality and truth, and try to reformulate its place within the psychoanalytic clinic using the contributions of Freud and Ferenczi, who drew the matrix of a passionate dialogue about the truth and the analyst work that has nurtured many contemporary theoretical developments. Essentially, the major influences of postmodern thought in psychoanalysis are to emphasize the importance of the patient–analyst interaction, the role played by the analyst in the patient’s transference and the rejection of the model of the analyst as a distant observer who interprets without having anything to do with whatever happens within the mind of the patient. Consequently, because both postmodernism and psychoanalysis are concerned with human subjectivity and love for truth, although indeed understanding them from different perspectives, both schools of thought become easily interrelated. I conclude that psychoanalysis, committed as it is with the search for truth, cannot ignore the influence of postmodern thought, as well as the postmodernist movement should not disregard all theoretical consistency provided by psychoanalytic theory and metapsychology.     

Cognitive processing of currency: Euros and dollars

In the current study, we evaluated whether the processing of currency was determined by familiarity of people with banknotes. In Experiment 1, participants who used the Euro currency named sequences of Euro banknotes and Dollar banknotes blocked by category or mixed with exemplars of other categories. The participants showed an interference effect in the blocked context with Dollar banknotes but not with Euro banknotes. In Experiment 2, the interference effect was observed with Euro banknotes when participants were not familiar with the Euro currency. These results suggest that the semantic processing of banknotes depends on the participants' familiarity with currency.     

Personality factors in relation to violent crimes

The personalities of a group of 54 persons (51 men and 3 women), imprisoned for the perpetration of violent crimes, were evaluated. The results were then compared to a normative group. This study considers personality factors and dimensions on three levels: (a) Basic factors: the "Big Five", (b) Personality disorders and clinical syndromes, (c) Personality dimensions related to personal wellbeing and social adaptation said to define a psychologically healthy individual. The results of the study show that it is not possible to define a basic personality profile for this group of violent delinquents based on the "Big Five" factors. It is, however, possible to find two habitual patterns of behaviour if the Millon Model (1990) is applied. These two behaviour patterns and attitudes towards life situations will be named "Dependent with compulsive traits" and "Psychopath tendencies". Both relate to indicators of mental health.     

Generalization of tacting actions in children with autism

This intervention compared the effects of two procedures on the generalization of a tacting repertoire (labeling) in 6 children with autism spectrum disorder. In one procedure the verbal antecedent stimulus “What is she doing?” appeared together with a person performing an action; in the other procedure, the antecedent stimulus was just the presence of the action. In initial tests, children emitted tacts only when the action was presented with the verbal antecedent. Thereafter, they learned to tact an action without the verbal antecedent and received tests to evaluate generalization to another action. Results indicated that in order to obtain generalization of tacting actions, it was necessary to learn to tact other actions without the verbal antecedent as well as learning to tact the action with the verbal antecedent. These findings have relevance for generalization of tacting actions from control by verbal antecedents to natural conditions and the production of spontaneous language.     

Brightness for different surround conditions: the effect of transient glare

We measured the effect of a transient glare source on t heperceived brightness of astandard luminance (L(STD)) patch (0.5 cd/m2) as a function of the surround luminance (Ls). In the experiment, both increment and decrement stimuli were dependent on the value of the Ls (0.01, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 1.0, 1.5, or 2.0 cd/m2). We adopted a magnitude comparison paradigm using constant stimuli to determine the test matching luminance (L(M)). When L(S) was lower than the luminance of the patch, which corresponds to increments, LM was lower than L(STD), and this effect was highest for the lowest L(S). There was a small but noticeable cusp as increments shifted to decrements. As L(S) increased further (i.e., as the decrement grew), L(M) flattened out below L(STF). The overall pattern of results could be interpreted in terms of the concept of contrast brightness, with consideration of the intrinsic differences in brightness evaluations between decrements and increments.     

Which variability?

Drai and Grodzinsky provide a valuable analysis that offers a way of disentangling the effects of Movement and Mood in agrammatic comprehension. However, their mathematical implementation (Beta model) hides theoretically relevant information, i.e., qualitative heterogeneities of performance within the patient sample. This heterogeneity is crucial in the variability debate.