Conceptual framework from the Paris Psychosomatic School: A clinical psychoanalytic approach to oncology1

This article presents further clinical material from the Paris Psychosomatic School ( Aisenstein, 2006 ). The Freudian foundations of psychosomatics are detailed and post-Freudian developments focusing on the contribution of the Paris Psychosomatic School are outlined, in particular, the somatizing process as a result of regression and the somatizing process as a result of drive unbinding. The authors argue that the latter possibly gives rise to progressive and serious illness leading to death. The relationship of classical psychoanalysis to psychotherapeutic treatment from the angle of the Paris school is commented on. The authors then turn to two clinical presentations of women suffering from breast cancer. The method of evaluating the patients’ capacities for undergoing psychotherapeutic treatment and their mental capacity for healing is discussed. The face-to-face psychoanalytic treatment undertaken with the second case is discussed. Finally, the authors recall Freud’s insistence after 1920 on the opposition of the life drives and the death drives, which placed self-destruction at the centre of psychic functioning. They conclude that current research in biology and medicine, notably research concerning programmed cell death, will converge with psychoanalytic psychosomatics to illuminate somatizing processes and demonstrate the relevance of psychoanalytic treatment to patients who are capable of mental reorganization in the course of their illness and medical treatment.     

MINDS: Toward a computerized test battery for use in health psychological and neuropsychological assessment

MINDS (Mental Information Processing and Neuropsychological Diagnostic System) was developed with the goal of integrating a number of independent and stand-alone test programs that are used in the diagnosis of psychological and neuropsychological health. The system runs under MS-DOS. The shell program integrates subject information with data obtained through the use of the individual test programs. The current test battery comprises tasks on memory, attention, and motor performance; these tasks require the use of additional peripheral response devices, which are controlled via a multiple I/O interface card. Questionnaires are also included; they have been developed with the author language shell program MicroCAT. MINDS is programmed to allow easy integration of new tests. As an example, the Motor Planning Test is described. The equivalence of the computerized questionnaires with existing tests is also discussed.     

Do Obese Women Have Poorer Social Relationships Than Nonobese Women? Reports by Self,Friends, and Coworkers

Both theory and research suggest that obese women may have relatively poor social relationships even if their self-reports about their relationships do not differ from the reports of nonobese women. Seventy-seven obese and 78 nonobese women completed self-report measures of social anxiety, social self-esteem, social competence, social network size, and perceived social support from friends and family. Friends and coworkers also rated these women on the same measures. The self-reports of obese and nonobese women did not differ significantly on any of these social measures, and ratings from friends and coworkers of obese women were not different from ratings of nonobese women by friends and coworkers. These results suggest that obese women may be able to overcome prejudice against obese people in their relationships with others.     

Personal management of growth: productivity, decision-making, emotion, and social behavior in my senior year.

The writer used self-recording and charting of his own behavior as a way to observe and manage changes during his senior year at high school. The method used has implications for the application of behavior modification technology to self-management, and to behaviors that occur inside an organism's skin. The results have implications for study of the Senior Slump", for college and career planning in high school, for clarifying interpersonal attitudes, and for keeping track of one's emotional well-being.     

Phonological priming in spoken word recognition: Task effects

In two experiments, we examined the role of phonological relatedness between spoken items using both the lexical decision task and the shadowing task. In Experiment 1, words were used as primes and overlaps of zero (control), one, two, or all four or five (repetition) phonemes were compared. Except for the repetition conditions, in which facilitation was found, phonological overlap resulted in interference on word responses. These effects occurred in both tasks but were larger in lexical decision than in shadowing. The effects that were evident in shadowing can be attributed to an attentional mechanism linked to the subjects' expectancies of repetitions. The extra effects obtained in lexical decision can be interpreted by taking into account both activation of the response corresponding to the prime's lexical status and postlexical processes that check for phonological congruency between prime and target. In Experiment 2, some modifications were introduced to prevent the involvement of strategic factors, and pseudowords were used as primes. No effect at all was observed in shadowing, whereas in lexical decision interference effects occurred, which is consistent with the hypothesis that lexical decision may be negatively affected by finding a phonological discrepancy at the same time as the primed response is reactivated. Neither experiment provided evidence for the occurrence of phonological priming in the perceptual processing of words.     

Phonetic analysis of speech and memory codes in beginning readers

Two experimental tasks, a speech segmentation and a short-term memory task, were presented to children who began to learn to read following either the “phonic” or the “wholeword” method. The segmentation task required the child to reverse two segments (either two phones or two syllables) in an utterance. The phonic group performed significantly better than the whole-word group in the “phonic reversal” task, but no difference appeared in the “syllable reversal” task. This indicated (1) that most children by the age of 6 years are ready to discover that speech consists of a sequence of phones and (2) that the moment at which they do it is influenced by the way they are taught to read. In the memory task, the children recalled series of visually presented items whose names either rhymed or did not. The difference in performance for the rhyming and nonrhyming series was significant in both groups. It was no greater for the phonic than for the whole-word group and was uncorrelated with the “phonic reversal” task. These results are discussed in connection with the distinction between ways of lexical access and ways of representing verbal information in short-term memory.