On the Normal and Pathological Middle-age Crisis—Erich Maria Remarque,a Lost Survivor

The case illustration is from a long-term experience of individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a male patient, who started therapy when he was 15-years- old. According to DSM-IV criteria, he was diagnosed with a major depressive disorder. A psychological assessment including a Rorschach test showed a poorly integrated but well-adapted Borderline-Narcissistic personality disorder. Various classes of ant-idepressant drugs were used with equivocal or uncertain effects, and the roots and causes of the patient's negative reactions to medication had to be thoroughly investigated and dealt with during psychotherapy. Pharmacotherapy might succeed in targeting the various symptoms of depressive states, but the psychodynamic approach in a psychotherapeutic relationship widens the scope and works introspectively, allowing the patient insights to understanding the symptoms. The use of a psychotropic agent is usually based on trust and belief in its expected effect, but often the effect is not as expected. The psycho- pharmacological drug is also imbued with manifest and latent meanings which can be reached at in the psychoanalytic report. Such meanings and expectancies, and the consequent reactions affect both the patient and the psychotherapist. They have to be dealt with and overcome by psychoanalytic understanding and intervention, as well as experience and skill in use of the medicine concerned.     

Phallic Integration and Male Identity Development

The analytic setting as well as the analyst's initial communications unavoidably exert influence that may be perceived by the patient as a sexually tinged intrusion, which evokes questions about what the analyst wants. Together with the asymmetry of the analytic relationship, these phenomena uncannily bring to life a repressed relationship between infant and adult in which analogous stimuli constitute enigmas for the child. The theoretical understanding of Jean Laplanche of such enigmatic transference in terms of “primal seduction” is reviewed and clinical material is provided to illustrate Laplanche's ideas. The discussion addresses “recentralized” and “decentralized” aspects of sexuality. Primal seduction is discussed as including not only intrusion, but also qualities of stimulation and trust.     

Assessing the Factorial Validity of the Attitudes and Belief Scale 2-Abbreviated Version: A Call for the Development a Gold Standard Method of Measuring Rational and Irrational Beliefs

Rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT) does not possess a measure of rational and irrational beliefs that meets internationally recognised standards for acceptable psychometric properties. Without such a measure the theory/practice of REBT cannot be rigorously evaluated, thus undermining its scientific veracity. The current study investigates the validity and reliability of a recently developed measure of rational and irrational beliefs: the Attitudes and Belief Scale 2-Abbreviated Version (ABS-2-AV). University students from three countries completed the ABS-2-AV (N = 397). An alternative models framework using confirmatory factor analysis indicated that a theoretically consistent eight-factor model of the ABS-2-AV provided the best fit of the data. A number of post hoc modifications were required in order to achieve acceptable model fit results, and these modifications revealed important methodological limitations with the ABS-2-AV. Results indicated that the validity of the ABS-2-AV was undermined due to items measuring both the psychological process of interest (rational and irrational beliefs) and the context in which these beliefs processes are presented. This is a serious methodological limitation of the ABS-2 and all questionnaires derived from it, including the ABS-2-AV. This methodological limitation resulted in the ABS-2-AV possessing poor internal reliability. These limitations are discussed in relation to the broader REBT literature and the impact such problems have on research and practice. A call is made for REBT researchers to come together to develop a “gold standard” method of assessing rational and irrational beliefs that meets international standard for psychometric excellence.     

Engaging Narratives and the Limits of Lay Ethics: Introduction

How can one discover the ethical issues associated with nanotechnologies? One heuristic is to tend closely to the ethical reflections of lay publics and the ways in which these are informed by experience with technological innovation, technology governance, and the (broken) promises of visionary science and technology. A close collaboration between social scientists and philosophers took this heuristic to its limits: On the one hand, it achieved remarkably fine–grained insights into public reflection about nanotechnologies. On the other hand, a philosophical analysis of these reflections makes apparent that there is a profound disconnect between the lay ethics rooted in public talk and the ethical and normative commitments that are embedded in nanotechnological research programs and practices. Accordingly, critical engagement with the ways in which ordinary people try to make sense of nanotechnologies constitutes a novel heuristic for the discovery of ethical issues. This introduction and the subsequent four papers show this heuristic at work.     

Stimulus-response compatibilities during top-bottom discriminations.

Participants indicated whether a small dot was located near the top or bottom pole of a rotated object. Response times increased as a function of object orientation more for top trials than for bottom trials. The interaction between orientation and response was shown to be due to a relationship between response times and the dot's height on the screen. The orientation effect was influenced, positively and negatively, by a vertical arrangement of the response keys depending on whether the upper or lower key was used for the top response. Horizontal key placement produced an intermediate orientation effect, with asymmetries of about 180 degrees depending on which hand was used for top responses. This task appears to reflect spatial stimulus-response compatibilities more than object processing.     

Process causality and asymmetry

Process theories of causality seek to explicate causality as a property of individual causal processes. This paper examines the capacity of such theories to account for the asymmetry of causation. Three types of theories of asymmetry are discussed; the subjective, the temporal, and the physical, the third of these being the preferred approach. Asymmetric features of the world, namely the entropic and Kaon arrows, are considered as possible sources of causal asymmetry and a physical theory of asymmetry is subsequently developed with special reference to the questions of objectivity and backwards causation.An earlier draft of this paper was read at the A.A.P. conference at the University of Sydney, June, 1990. The author would like to thank Peter Menzies and Huw Price for their helpful comments.