THE DISSOCIATIVE TURN IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

In his response to the Roundtable Discussions on what is effective in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, the author focuses on the renewed interest in the concept of dissociation that began to emerge toward the end of the 20th century. A contemporary psychoanalytic position informed by the impact of developmental trauma has led to an understanding of and interest in the dissociative mind. The actuality of trauma during infancy and early childhood is recognized as a key factor leading to the emergence of dissociative processes, the potential dissociative structuring of the mind, and mind being characterized by multiple, discontinuous, centers of consciousness. The therapeutic goal in the psychoanalytic work with fragmented patients is to establish communication and understanding between the dissociated self-states. The author offers two brief clinical examples of working with dissociated self-states.     

Detecting letters in continuous text: effects of display size

In three letter detection experiments, subjects responded to each instance of the letter t in continuous text typed in a standard paragraph, typed with one to four words per line, or shown for a fixed duration on a computer screen either one or four words at a time. In the multiword and the standard paragraph conditions, errors were greatest and latencies longest on the word the when it was correctly spelled. This effect was diminished or reversed in the one-word conditions. These findings support a set of unitization hypotheses about the reading process, according to which subjects do not process the constituent letters of a word once that word has been identified unless no other word is in view.     

Dogmatism, Locus of Control of Reinforcement, Importance of Issues, and Relationships to Political Activity

This study examined the cumulative and interaction effects of dogmatism, I-E, and issue salience on political activity. Indexes of the variables were developed from factor-analytic results based on personal, group, and mail interviews with 212 adults in the Detroit area. The three psychological variables were then dichotomized at the median and related to political activity, utilizing multiple regression and a step-wise interaction procedure. The multiple r was .41 ( p <.01) with issue salience contributing the greatest amount of variance. Comparisons to multiple-regression predictions indicated interaction effects with low-issue importance reducing political activity and high-issue importance increasing political activity. Split-half analyses indicated substantial stability in the findings. A broader conceptualization for relating psychological variables to political activity was discussed.     

The effect of electric shock on rats' choice between familiar and unfamiliar maze arms: A replication

It is argued that experiments showing that noise and electric shock produce gross changes in rats' locomotor activity are only weak evidence for a relationship between fear and exploration. Stronger evidence comes from an experiment in which fewer shocked than unshocked rats chose the unfamiliar arm of a maze. Certain details of this experiment are unclear, and an attempt is made here to confirm its findings. In one experiment, shocked rats again chose the unfamiliar arm less often than unshocked rats, and in a second experiment it was shown that this finding cannot be explained by saying that shocked rats choose at random. These results are discussed in relation to recent suggestions about exploration in rats.     

Concomitant direction and distance aftereffects of sustained convergence: A muscle potentiation explanation for eye-specific adaptation

Fixating a target for 6 min was shown to produce distance aftereffects that varied in direction and magnitude as a linear function of the convergence angle. Eye-specific direction aftereffects also were obtained in a nasal direction under conditions that produce increased perceived distance and in a temporal direction under conditions that produce decreased perceived distance. These aftereffects were shown to be sensitive to the range of horizontal versional eye movements that accompany the near or far convergence positions maintained during exposure. The results provide a logical alternative to perceptual learning accounts of eye-specific adaptation.