Metaphorical interpretations: A critical examination

Abstract

This paper seeks to place the technique of metaphorical interpretations (called amplification in analytical psychology) under scrutiny due to theoretical uncertainty surrounding the therapeutic value of the practice. The historical roots in Freud and Jung are briefly presented, as well as the contributions of subsequent psychoanalytic theory. The theoretical and technical implications of the practice of metaphorical interpretations have relevance for practitioners who are working psychotherapeutically with clients, as well as those who are case managing patients (under CPA), particularly patients with severe disturbances. Case material is presented and advanced theoretically from which it is suggested that potential problems with metaphorical interpretations result primarily from an incorrect assessment of the patient's symbolic capacity and/or the inappropriate presentation of the interpretation. Aspects relating to countertransference and unamplifying (internal amplifications) are also explored. Finally, the positive aspects of metaphorical interpretations are noted.     

The Power of Pictures: Vertical Picture Angles in Power Pictures

Conventional wisdom suggests that variations in vertical picture angle cause the subject to appear more powerful when depicted from below and less powerful when depicted from above. However, do the media actually use such associations to represent individual differences in power? We argue that the diverse perspectives of evolutionary, social learning, and embodiment theories all suggest that the association between verticality and power is relatively automatic and should, therefore, be visible in the portrayal of powerful and powerless individuals in the media. Four archival studies (with six samples) provide empirical evidence for this hypothesis and indicate that a salience power context reinforces this effect. In addition, two experimental studies confirm these effects for individuals producing media content. We discuss potential implications of this effect.     

Liking Violence and Action: An Examination of Gender Differences in Children's Processing of Animated Content

It is widely assumed that children like violence in cartoons, but this assumption has not been supported in existing studies that show nonviolent programs are liked just as much or more than violent programs. The present experiment extended enjoyment of media violence research by testing whether violence and action (independently manipulated) influenced children's liking of slapstick cartoons. We also proposed a path model to test potential indirect effects of violence and action on liking. Using animation software, four versions of a slapstick cartoon were created that varied in terms of violence (present, absent) and action (high, low). A total of 128 elementary school children watched one of the four versions of the program. Violence had no direct effect on the liking of the cartoon, but did indirectly decrease liking for males by decreasing boys' wishful identification with the anthropomorphized characters. Action increased liking for males but not for females.     

Resurrection as Insurrection: Potential Space and the Subversion of Political Totalities

In this article, I depict the shared belief in resurrection as subversive vis-à-vis political totalities. More particularly, I argue that the idea of resurrection as insurrection emerges against the background of the political realities of the Roman Empire and its diverse tools for controlling people through public spectacles of terror that heighten fear, helplessness, and indifference, thwarting motivations for resistance and insurrection. From this context, resurrection reveals a present-future possibility of an embodied care, hope, and freedom in spite of and not subject to principalities that aim to subjugate bodies and minds. Given this idea of resurrection, I use an emended version of Winnicott’s (1953, 1967, 1971) concept of potential space and Arendt’s (1958) space of appearances to portray the interpersonal and psychosocial dynamics that make it possible for people to retain care, hope, and freedom in resisting and subverting the political totalities that undermine each.     

Virtuous testimonial belief in young children

I lay out the challenge posed by testimonial knowledge in young children to virtue reliabilist accounts of knowledge. In particular, I examine accounts from Greco and Pritchard and argue that those accounts are too demanding. More specifically, I make the case that young children can have testimonial knowledge without meeting the ability requirements claimed by Greco and Pritchard. As a virtue theoretic alternative, I argue that an agent’s belief must be epistemically virtuous, but that this may sometimes involve belief from a trait rather than an ability.     

Avoiding death or engaging life as accounts of meaning and culture: comment on Pyszczynski et al. (2004)

Terror management theory emphasizes that self-esteem consists of a sense of meaning and significance, which serves mainly to defend against death awareness. The current authors counter that people's search for meaning and significance cannot be wholly reduced to defensive processes because it also reflects intrinsic developmental processes. Sociometer theory similarly offers a mainly defensive account of self-esteem, and its exclusive focus on belongingness versus exclusion ill equips it to deal with the multiple needs underlying self-esteem. The current authors suggest that self-esteem resulting from defenses against anxiety (whether about death or exclusion) is akin to contingent self-esteem, whereas true self-esteem is based in ongoing satisfaction of needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness.     

Revisiting within-modality and cross-modality attentional blinks: effects of target-distractor similarity

When two masked targets (T1 and T2) require attention and are presented within half a second of each other, the report accuracy for T2 is reduced, relative to when the two targets are presented farther apart in time. This effect is known as the attentional blink (AB). Potter, Chun, Banks, and Muckenhoupt (1998) argued that all AB-like effects observed when at least one of the targets was presented outside of the visual modality did not represent true instances of the AB, but instead were artifacts of task-set switching. However, in the Potter et al. experiments the presence or absence of task-set switching opportunities was confounded with the T2 task, as well as the alphanumeric class of T2 with respect to the distractors. In the present experiment, we examine the influence of T1 alphanumeric class, T2 alphanumeric class, and switching operations in a fully crossed design that unconfounds these factors. In contrast to the conclusions of Potter et al., the present results suggest that the T2 alphanumeric class can account for the pattern of ABs observed across conditions, without necessarily implicating a separate switch cost. The implications for theoretical models of the AB and the debate over the validity of cross-modal ABs are discussed.     

Having the memory of an elephant: long-term retrieval and the use of analogues in problem solving

The authors report 4 experiments exploring long-term analogical transfer from problem solutions in folk tales participants heard during childhood, many years before encountering the target problems. Substantial culture-specific analogical transfer was found when American and Chinese participants' performance was compared on isomorphs of problems solved in European versus Chinese folk tales. There was evidence of transfer even among participants who did not report being reminded of the source tale while solving the target problem. Comparisons of different versions of a target problem indicated that similarity of solution tool affected accessing, mapping, and executing components of problem solving, whereas similarity of goal object had only a moderate effect on accessing. High school students also evidenced greater transfer than did middle school students.