The integration of knowledge and experimentation strategies in understanding a physical system

This study investigated how people integrate different kinds of knowledge in coming to understand the functions of components of a physical system. Twenty-three undergraduates worked on a hypothesis-testing task in which they constructed test circuits to decide the identity of electrical components hidden inside boxes. The students' problem-solving was driven by qualitative causal models that included ideas about cause and effect, task demands, and functions of circuits and circuit components. There was a hierarchy of four causal models, with higher levels representing increasing understanding and supporting increasingly successful problem solution. These causal models were associated with characteristic experimentation strategies, including strategies for generating evidence, interpreting evidence, and managing memory requirements. Some of these strategies followed directly from the causal model a student held, whereas others appeared to be more general. The level of understanding a student eventually attained about this physical system was a function of both domain knowledge and proficiency in experimentation strategies.     

Psychic phenomena and early emotional states

This paper examines the relationship between severe early trauma and the development of psychic intuition. A case presentation with extensive dream work helps to illustrate this connection by exploring the psychological meaning of one patient's acute receptivity to unconscious communications. The paper includes a historical overview of Freud's attitudes toward occultism, as distinct from later psychoanalytic views, including those of Wilfred Bion. Many of Bion's views have more in common with Jung's perspective than with Freud's, with particular reference made to spiritual and religious differences. Bion clearly states that Freud and psychoanalysts have focused on phenomena, not on noumena, which Bion considers to be the essence of the psychoanalytic point of view.     

Synchronicity and the capacity to think: a clinical exploration

Synchronicity blurs the boundaries of psyche and physis. This invisible dance of mind and matter suggested to Jung an interconnection between physical and mental events reflecting a unified 'psychophysical space-time continuum'. His idea of exteriorization put forth the notion that unconscious thoughts can manifest themselves in the external world. I have related this to Bion's theory of thinking, where thoughts, which should be a prelude to action, become actions in themselves, projections of unthought thoughts. Through detailed clinical work with dreams I will explore the effects of early trauma on the development of the capacity to think, and the way in which synchronistic events relate to projections of early traumatic experiences which have not been 'mentalized'.     

Sándor Ferenczi: A Contemporary Introduction,by Alberto Fergusson and Miguel Gutiérrez-Peláez,Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2022, 125 pp.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -