On becoming a psychoanalyst

One has the opportunity and responsibility to become an analyst in one's own terms in the course of the years of practice that follow the completion of formal analytic training. The authors discuss their understanding of some of the maturational experiences that have contributed to their becoming analysts in their own terms. They believe that the most important element in the process of their maturation as analysts has been the development of the capacity to make use of what is unique and idiosyncratic to each of them; each, when at his best, conducts himself as an analyst in a way that reflects his own analytic style; his own way of being with, and talking with, his patients; his own form of the practice of psychoanalysis. The types of maturational experiences that the authors examine include situations in which they have learned to listen to themselves speak with their patients and, in so doing, begin to develop a voice of their own; experiences of growth that have occurred in the context of presenting clinical material to a consultant; making self-analytic use of their experience with their patients; creating/discovering themselves as analysts in the experience of analytic writing (with particular attention paid to the maturational experience involved in writing the current paper); and responding to a need to keep changing, to be original in their thinking and behavior as analysts.     

Some normative data on mental health professionals' attitudes about racial minorities and women

Although codes of ethics of the mental health professions and the recently developed race- and gender-specific models of counseling and psychotherapy stipulate positive and accepting attitudes toward racial minorities and women, formal assessment of these attitudes has been hindered by the absence of appropriate measurement tools and generalizable data. This study provides some normative data by reporting responses of 705 psychologists and social workers to the Quick Discrimination Index, a psychometrically sound 23-item self-report measure previously administered to several different professional groups. Analysis indicated psychologists and social workers reported particularly positive attitudes toward racial minorities and women but expressed the same racial and sex contradictions, ambivalences, and vulnerabilities reported by the general public.     

The differential contribution of executive functions to temporal generalisation,reproduction and verbal estimation

Evidence from dual-task studies suggests that executive resources are recruited during timing. However, there has been little exploration of whether executive recruitment is universal across temporal tasks, or whether different temporal tasks recruit different executive resources. The current study explored this further by examining how individual differences in updating, switching, inhibition and access affected performance on temporal generalisation, reproduction and verbal estimation tasks. It was found that temporal tasks differentially loaded onto different executive resources. Temporal generalisation performance was related to updating and access ability. Reproduction performance was related to updating, access and switching. Verbal estimation performance was only related to access. The results suggest that executive resources may be recruited when monitoring and maintaining multiple durations in memory at the same time, and when retrieving duration representations from long-term memory. The findings emphasise the need to consider timing behaviour as the product of a wide range of complex, integrated, cognitive systems, rather than as the output of a clock in isolation.     

The Miscarriage Experience: More Than Just a Trigger to Psychological Morbidity?

Most quantitative research considers miscarriage a trigger to grief, anxiety and depression. The present qualitative study involved in depth interviews with a heterogeneous sample of 13 women who had experienced a miscarriage up to five weeks previously. The women described their experiences using a range of themes which were conceptualised into three stages: turmoil, adjustment and resolution. For the majority, the turmoil stage was characterised by feelings of being unprepared and negative emotions. Some women who had had an unwanted pregnancy described their shock at the physical trauma of miscarriage but described the experience as a relief. The women then described a period of adjustment involving social comparisons, sharing and a search for meaning. The latter included a focus on causality which left a minority, particularly those who had had previous miscarriages, feeling frustrated with the absence of a satisfactory medical explanation. The final resolution stage was characterised by a decline in negative emotions, a belief by some that the miscarriage was a learning experience and the integration of the experience into their lives. This resolution seemed more positive for those with children and more negative if the miscarriage was not their first. Rather than being a trigger to psychological morbidity a miscarriage should be conceptualised as a process involving the stages of turmoil, adjustment and resolution. Miscarriage could also be considered a pivotal point in the lives of many women resulting in the reassessment of both their past and future experiences.     

Examination stress and changes in mood and health related behaviours

Abstract

The present exploratory study evaluated the effect of stress (an examination period) on changes in mood and health related behaviours. 83 medical students completed measures of mood and health related bchaviours at baseline and four weeks later either during their examinations period (the stress condition) or after a comparative control period (the control condition). All subjects also completed ratings of stress mediating variables: social support, perceived control and coping style at baseline. The results showed deterioration in mood in terms of increases in depression and anxiety and changes in health related behaviours in terms of increased numbers of subjects who identified thcmsehes as smokers, and dcmascs in alcohol consumption, exercise and food intake in subjects in the stress condition. The results also suggest that social support moderated the effects of the examination stress and was related to greater decreases in smoking, decrcases in alcohol craving and increases in eating behaviour. In addition, an avoidance coping style (problem avoidance, wishful thinking) was related to greater decreases in eating behaviour. 'Ihe nsults an discussed in the context of the stress/illness link and the role of behavioural change.     

The role of executive functions in human prospective interval timing

Human timing is thought to be based on the output of an internal clock. Whilst the functioning of this clock is well documented, it is unclear which other cognitive resources may moderate timing. Brown (2006) and Rattat (2010) suggest that the central executive of working memory may be recruited during timing. However it seems likely that the fractionated executive component processes identified by Miyake et al. (2000) and Fisk and Sharp (2004) may differentially contribute to timing performance; further exploration of this was the aim of the present study. An interference paradigm was employed in which participants completed an interval production task, and tasks which have been shown to tap the four key executive component processes (shifting, inhibition, updating and access) under single and dual-task conditions. Comparison of single and dual-task performance indicated that timing always became more variable when concurrently performing a second task. Bidirectional interference only occurred between the interval production task and the memory updating task, implying that both tasks are competing for the same executive resource of updating. There was no evidence in the current study to suggest that switching, inhibition or access was involved in timing, however they may be recruited under more difficult task conditions.     

Reading Susan Isaacs: toward a radically revised theory of thinking

The author views Isaacs's (1952) paper, The nature and function of phantasy, as making an important contribution to the development of a radically revised psychoanalytic theory of thinking. Perhaps Isaacs's most important contribution is the notion that phantasy is the process that creates meaning, and that phantasy is the form in which all meanings - including feelings, defense 'mechanisms,' impulses, bodily experiences, and so on - exist in unconscious mental life. The author discusses both explicit formulations offered by Isaacs as well as his own extensions of her ideas. The latter include (1) the idea that phantasying generates not only unconscious psychic content, but also constitutes the entirety of unconscious thinking; (2) the notion that transference is a form of phantasying that serves as a way of thinking for the first time (in relation to the analyst) emotional events that occurred in the past, but were too disturbing to be experienced at the time they occurred and (3) a principal aim and function of phantasy is that of fulfilling the human need to get to know and understand the truth of one's experience. The author concludes by discussing the relationship between Isaacs's concept of phantasy and Bion's concepts of alpha function and the human need for the truth, as well as the differences between Fairbairn's and Isaacs's conceptions of the nature of unconscious internal object relationships.