Medical student dreams about medical school: The unconscious developmental process of becoming a physician

This paper is a report on a collection of almost four hundred dreams of medical students and postgraduate trainees with the manifest content about medical training. It is a unique dream collection from a defined population that experiences a developmental sequence of observable, reality events. The reality events appear in the manifest content of the dreams along with their symbolic alterations. The dreams are used as a psychodynamic database. The data may illustrate which reality experiences seem psychologically formative, their emotional developmental sequences and their specific emotional content. This is a pilot project exploring whether dream material collected from a discrete task group might give information about a group's emotional adaptation. The dreams seem to show an unconscious developmental process in response to medical training and becoming a physician that unfolds in overlapping stages as trainees learn to master skills and tolerate care-giving responsibility for human life. A progressive, unconscious hero-healer fantasy seems to form. It becomes elaborated in masochistic and then sadistic fantasies. These fantasies are evoked by, and used as a defense against, inevitable but painful anxieties of emotional adaptation to medical education experiences.     

Why Maximize Expected Choice-Worthiness?1

This paper argues in favor of a particular account of decision-making under normative uncertainty: that, when it is possible to do so, one should maximize expected choice-worthiness. Though this position has been often suggested in the literature and is often taken to be the ‘default’ view, it has so far received little in the way of positive argument in its favor. After dealing with some preliminaries and giving the basic motivation for taking normative uncertainty into account in our decision-making, we consider and provide new arguments against two rival accounts that have been offered—the accounts that we call ‘My Favorite Theory’ and ‘My Favorite Option’. We then give a novel argument for comparativism—the view that, under normative uncertainty, one should take into account both probabilities of different theories and magnitudes of choice-worthiness. Finally, we further argue in favor of maximizing expected choice-worthiness and consider and respond to five objections.     

Is IQ in Childhood Associated with Suicidal Thoughts and Attempts? Findings from The Mater University Study of Pregnancy and Its Outcomes

This study explores associations of IQ at age 14 with adult symptoms of suicidal thoughts and attempts at age 21. Analysis was based on the Mater University Study of Pregnancy and its outcomes, an Australian prospective birth cohort study started in Brisbane Australia in 1981. We assessed associations with suicide thoughts, plans, and attempts. We used two measures of IQ: the Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices and the Wide Range Achievement Test. In multivariable analyses, there was an inverse association between Raven's IQ and suicide thoughts, plans, and attempts, but no strong evidence of an association between the WRAT3 and the three suicidal items. Specific aspects of intelligence may be associated with suicidal thoughts, plans, and attempts.