Flexibility of the Psychoanalytic Approach in the Treatment of a Suicidal Patient: Stubborn Silences as “Playing Dead”

The author presents the clinical case of a patient in his third analysis who seemed emotionless, did not feel alive, and complained of an uncontrollable urge to gamble, with disastrous financial results. His previous four-session-a-week “orthodox” analysis had left him prey to a sense of emptiness and to intense suicidal urges. He wanted only two weekly sessions, which became three after some analytic work. The author stresses the danger of rigidly following inflexible standards and the consequent activation of a pseudo-compliance in the analysand. A more slowly paced psychoanalysis should not be considered lower in the pecking order than “high-frequency” treatment, the author maintains: It requires great creative subjective involvement on the part of the analyst and close interaction in the context of the analytic couple. The author shows how this analysis involved a series of interactions in which the analyst was called upon to exercise a complex responsiveness, attuned in each instance to the patient's current needs. Finally he focuses on some clinical passages to show how the patient's internal theories represent a glaring assault on common sense and how death was not recognized perceptionally on a realistic level, but was instead replaced with acting out death against himself by keeping himself mentally dead and by suicidal urges.     

Galin Tihanov,The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond. Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press, 2019. 258 pages. $60. Hardcover ISBN: 9,780,804,785,228

Studies in East European Thought - This review discusses an important recent book by Galin Tihanov, the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London.     

The internal family and the facts of life

Primitive defensive mechanisms innvolving splitting and projections are an essential process in the development of the infant. However, if these persist into adult life unmitigated by more depressive processes involving introjection and awareness of secure good objects they are shown to be inadequate to the task of coping with life crises, based as they are on the denial and distortion of reality. In this paper, I describe two patients who were seen in very different treatment settings and in whom such mechanisms were predominant. These began to fail when the patients were faced with difficult external events. These caused feelings of panic about impending mental disintegration. I then show how these patients sought to re-establish their primitive defensive structures.     

Ramus and Other Renaissance Philosophers on Subjectivity

This paper considers philosophical approaches that are relevant to the intertwinement of logic, metaphysics, and psychology proposed by the Aquinas commentator Tommaso de Vio Cardinal Cajetan, the humanist Petrus Ramus, the pure Aristotelian Cornelius Martini, the Semi-Ramist Bartholomaeus Keckermann, and the lexicographer Rudolf Goclenius. Mostly, however, it is about Ramus and his followers, the Ramists, because of the role they played in exacerbating a discussion on the constitution of objectivity during the Renaissance that was to have an impact on Cartesian andpost-Cartesian theories of subjectivity. Finally, keeping in mind that Kant was familiar with the secunda Petri, i.e., with the second part of Ramus's logic, namely the theory of judgment, some common ground is recognizable between Ramus and Kant as well. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Stress-Induced Cardiomyopathy and Psychological Wellbeing 1 Year After an Acute Event

Stress cardiomyopathy (SCM) typically presents similar symptoms to acute myocardial infarction (AMI). However, these symptoms differ when it comes to a transient and completely reversible myocardial dysfunction, which is frequently precipitated by acute stressful events, occurring in the absence of plaque rupture and coronary thrombosis. The purpose of this study was to investigate health-related quality of life (HRQL) and emotional burden subsequent to cardiac events in SCM patients. Thirty-seven SCM patients were compared with 37 matched AMI patients. All selected patients were assessed for HRQL and psychological distress at baseline and 1-year after the acute event. After controlling for covariates, scores on the Psychological General Well Being Index indicated that depressed mood had increased in both groups, but the increase for SCM patients was greater than for AMI patients. The AMI group displayed greater decreases than the SCM in physical quality of life and in total cardiac-related health quality of life. The percentage of patients with psychological distress increased significantly more in the SCM group than in the AMI group, and it made no difference whether the triggering event was emotional or physical. Our results suggest that, despite the more favorable medical prognosis of SCM patients, their cardiac condition being transient and resolving completely in few weeks, the psychological impact associated with their condition is more negative 1 year later than in the case of AMI patients whose medical prognosis is less favorable, and this difference is independent of type of trigger event.     

Beyond the internalism/externalism debate: The constitution of the space of perception

This paper tackles the problem of the nature of the space of perception. Based both on philosophical arguments and on results obtained from original experimental situations, it attempts to show how space is constituted concretely, before any distinction between the “inner” and the “outer” can be made. It thus sheds light on the presuppositions of the well-known debate between internalism and externalism in the philosophy of mind; it argues in favor of the latter position, but with arguments that are foundationally antecedent to this debate. We call the position we defend enactive externalism. It is based on experimental settings which, in virtue of their minimalism, make it possible both to defend a sensori-motor/enactive theory of perception; and, especially, to inquire into the origin of the space of perception, showing how it is concretely enacted before the controversy between internalism and externalism can even take place.     

The relationship between parental involvement,self-regulated learning,and reading achievement of fifth graders: a path analysis using the ECLS-K database

This study examined the relationship between parental involvement, self-regulated learning (SRL), and reading achievement through analyzing the fifth grade data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–1999 (ECLS-K). The results identified six dimensions of parental involvement that are likely to foster SRL of fifth graders: School Involvement, TV Rules, Homework Help, Homework Frequency, Parental Education Expectations, and Extracurricular Activities. Of these three dimensions, Parental Education Expectations, School Involvement, and Homework Help, were found to have stronger effects on SRL; Parental Education Expectations was found to have the strongest beneficial effect on SRL. The results also suggest that SRL mediates the relationship between parental involvement and reading achievement. These results provide a framework for parents to help their children develop SRL skills and guide educators and school administrators as they intend to increase parental involvement and its effectiveness.     

A randomized experiment comparing random and cutoff-based assignment

In this article, we review past studies comparing randomized experiments to regression discontinuity designs, mostly finding similar results, but with significant exceptions. The latter might be due to potential confounds of study characteristics with assignment method or with failure to estimate the same parameter over methods. In this study, we correct the problems by randomly assigning 588 participants to be in a randomized experiment or a regression discontinuity design in which they are otherwise treated identically, comparing results estimating both the same and different parameters. Analysis includes parametric, semiparametric, and nonparametric methods of modeling nonlinearities. Results suggest that estimates from regression discontinuity designs approximate the results of randomized experiments reasonably well but also raise the issue of what constitutes agreement between the 2 estimates.