When death thoughts lead to death fears: Mortality salience increases death anxiety for individuals who lack meaning in life

Research derived from terror management theory demonstrates that subtle reminders of mortality increase strivings for meaning. It is argued that such strivings reflect efforts to prevent the anxiety that death reminders may otherwise cause. However, no research has directly tested the assertions that subtle mortality primes increase death anxiety and perceptions of meaning in life moderate this effect. The current study examined these predictions. Meaning in life was measured, death cognition primed, and death anxiety assessed. A mortality prime increased death anxiety, but only for individuals who lack perceptions of meaning in life. Theoretical and applied implications are discussed.     

Secondary Revision: On Rethinking the Analytic Process and Analytic Technique

The author relates aspects of his own personal history and professional development in an effort to explain the changes in his way of thinking and working as an analyst that have evolved over the past thirty years. He also includes some of his current thinking on the questions of countertransference, the uses of memory, and contemporary analytic technique.     

On Unconscious Communications and Covert Enactments: Some Reflections on Their Role in the Analytic Situation

By means of an extended clinical example, this paper focuses on the impact that unconscious communications in the form of nonverbal behavior may have on the course and outcome of an analysis.

Responding to sudden catastrophic illnesses in their fathers, patient and analyst created enactments aimed at blinding them to hard truths about their relationships with this parent.

Serving as powerful resistances that led to a stalemate and all but ended treatment, these nonverbal enactments had to be recognized, confronted, and understood by both participants before analytic work could be resumed and progress achieved in this analysis.     

Commentary

A critique and discussion of the six papers offered in this volume is provided. Links to prior traditions in outcome and process research from the past are made. In addition the author reviews the somewhat negative reception of clinicians to empirical research and indicates the opinion that such attitudes have been to the detriment of our scientific status and public trust.     

Ritual without myth: The use of legal materials for the study of religions

This essay explores the role that Buddhist narrative literature plays in fostering the cultivation of ethically valorised emotions. The essay focuses on astonishment, as it figures in ārya ?ūra's Jātakamālā, a collection of Sanskrit narratives. The essay examines how and why ārya ?ura valorises astonishment and what this valorisation reveals about the significance of emotions in Buddhist ethical life. The key distinction implicit in ārya ?ura's work between natural and cultivated emotions is worked out.     

Methodological concerns in the psychology of religion: Continuities,losses and transforming perspectives

This article seeks solutions to what has recently been called the ‘crisis' in the psychology of religion by returning to the programs of its founding fathers. It explores some of the methodological debates that followed the translation of William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience into German. More was at stake than the commonly drawn distinction between empirical and hermeneutical approaches to religion, or between quantitative and qualitative methods. What was at stake was the need for another kind of psychology in general. This article pays special attention to Wilhelm Wundt's fundamental criticism of James and of others in the psychology of religion. Despite the problems inherent in both James' and Wundt's aborted general psychology programs, each nonetheless contains approaches that may yet serve as an impetus to contemporary research on religion. Contemporary developments in cultural psychology in particular complement current research in the psychology of religion.     

Probability logic and combining evidence

In Hailperin 1996 Hailperin, T. 1996. Sentential Probability Logic, Bethlehem and London: Lehigh University Press and Associated University Presses.  [Google Scholar], in addition to its formal development of Probability Logic, there are many sections devoted to historical origins, illustrative examples, and discussion of related work by other authors. Here selected portions of its formal treatment are summarized and then used as a basis for a probability logic treatment of combining evidence.     

Logic Semantics with the Potential Infinite

A form of quantification logic referred to by the author in earlier papers as being ‘ontologically neutral’ still made use of the actual infinite in its semantics. Here it is shown that one can have, if one desires, a formal logic that refers in its semantics only to the potential infinite. Included are two new quantifiers generalizing the sentential connectives, equivalence and non-equivalence. There are thus new avenues opening up for exploration in both quantification logic and semantics of the infinite.