On the Mirror Stage with Henry and Eliza or Play-ing with Pygmalion in Five Acts

This play-ful paper examines the Pygmalion myth as interpreted by George Bernard Shaw in the 1938 film, an adaptation of his 1912 play. This myth of creation is discussed as a cautionary parable for the psychoanalytic treatment situation; mirroring is viewed from the perspectives of Winnicott, Kohut, and Lacan. It is suggested that the wish to create and to be created may play a role in all analyses.     

Conversations With Dying Parents: More Difficult Than the Birds and the Bees

Individuals ease life‐span transitions for family members in each stage of the life cycle. Parents educate their adolescent children about relationships and sexuality and act as role models. The author proposes that children can play a primary role in the painful but potentially rewarding process of comforting and leave‐taking of dying parents.     

THE SEDUCTIVE SUPEREGO: THE TRAUMA OF SELF-BETRAYAL

The author describes a pathological manifestation of the approving superego that functions as a perversely seductive superego. In this process, the seductive superego rationalises and makes ego-syntonic a gratification of forbidden wishes that will result in unconscious punishment. The author argues that the seductive superego torments the self by teasing it with the presence of a tantalising but forbidden object of desire and then by inflicting shame on the self for its timidity, which prevents it from pursuing the object in spite of the dangers. He suggests that the seductive superego inflicts a betrayal trauma upon the self by unconsciously actualising a sado-masochistic fantasy of seduction, surrender and betrayal, along with a humiliating punishment for surrendering.     

Reduced right hemisphere activation in severely abused violent offenders during a working memory task: An fMRI study

This study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to address two important gaps in our knowledge of brain functioning and violence: (1) What are the brain correlates of adults in the community who have suffered severe physical abuse early in life and who go on to perpetrate serious violence in adulthood? (2) What characterizes those who experience severe physical abuse but who refrain from serious violence? Four groups of participants recruited from the community (controls, severe physical child abuse only, serious violence only, and severely abused, seriously violent offenders) underwent fMRI while performing a visual/verbal working memory task. Violent offenders who had suffered severe child abuse show reduced right hemisphere functioning, particularly in the right temporal cortex. Abused individuals who refrain from serious violence showed relatively lower left, but higher right, activation of the superior temporal gyrus. Abused individuals, irrespective of violence status, showed reduced cortical activation during the working memory task, especially in the left hemisphere. Brain deficits were independent of IQ, history of head injury, task performance, cognitive strategy, and mental activity during the control task. Findings constitute the first fMRI study of brain dysfunction in violent offenders, and indicate that initial right hemisphere dysfunction, when combined with the effects of severe early physical abuse, predisposes to serious violence but that relatively good right hemisphere functioning protects against violence in physically abused children. Aggr. Behav. 27:111–129, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Research and Theory Religion and Spirituality in Coping With Stress

Relations among and between religion, spirituality, and the ability to cope with stress were examined using a sample of 115 graduate students in counseling. Religion and spirituality positively correlated with coping with stress. Counseling students who expressed spirituality through religious beliefs had greater spiritual health and immunity to stressful situations than counseling students who identified themselves as spiritual but not religious. Counseling students with a religious/spiritual affiliation indicated more discomfort counseling clients hostile to religion compared with counseling students with a spiritual‐only affiliation. The results have implications for preparing counseling students to work with clients with religious/spiritual issues.     

Synesthesia: Strong and Weak

In this review, we distinguish strong and weak forms of synesthesia. Strong synesthesia is characterized by a vivid image in one sensory modality in response to stimulation in another one. Weak synesthesia is characterized by cross-sensory correspondences expressed through language, perceptual similarity, and perceptual interactions during information processing. Despite important phenomenological dissimilarities between strong and weak synesthesia, we maintain that the two forms draw on similar underlying mechanisms. The study of strong and weak synesthetic phenomena provides an opportunity to enrich scientists' understanding of basic mechanisms involved in perceptual coding and cross-modal information processing.     

Selective word-learning deficits in aphasia

The purpose of this study was to determine whether patients with focal brain damage can learn anything about a new word, and if so, whether selected aspects of the new word are acquired depending on the nature of the patient's language processing deficit. In the context of drawing pictures with a number of felt pens identical in all respects except color, agrammatic Broca's aphasics and fluent aphasics were exposed to the new word "bice," an adjective referring to the dark green portion of the color spectrum. Our findings revealed that brain-damaged patients can engage in lexical acquisition, but Broca's aphasics and fluent aphasics apparently learn about different aspects of the new word. Specifically, on successive exposures to "bice," both Broca's aphasics and fluent aphasics exhibit progressively more accurate hypotheses for identifying a bice-colored object. During subsequent assessments, agrammatic aphasics reveal on a metalinguistic judgment task their significant difficulty appreciating the grammatical form class of "bice"; on an object classification task, fluent aphasics are significantly impaired in their classification of bice-colored objects as "bice." Taken together, these unique word-learning profiles reinforce earlier observation on the selective nature of language processing deficits after focal left-hemisphere insult, and support the claim that separate language processing devices may be selectively compromised in different groups of aphasics. The relationship between syntactic and lexical semantic processing is discussed.     

The psychophysiology of combat-induced post-traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam veterans

The psychophysiological responses of heart rate (HR), systolic and diastolic blood pressure, skin conductance level and forehead electromyogram were compared during: rest, mental arithmetic and combat sounds of gradually increasing intensity for five groups of Ss: Vietnam veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); Vietnam veterans without PTSD but with comparable levels of combat experience; Vietnam veterans with other psychiatric disorders; Vietnam-era veterans; and nonveteran phobics. HR response to low-intensity combat sounds provided good discrimination between veterans with PTSD and the other groups and seems to resemble a conditioned emotional response.