Liebe in der Analyse – ein Fall für den Staatsanwalt?

Zusammenfassung. Im Vorfeld der Diskussionen¹über den inzwischen in Kraft getretenen § 174 c StGB wird einer pauschalen P?nalisierung von sexuellen Beziehungen im Kontext von Psychotherapien widersprochen. Anhand der „chronique scandaleuse“ von Krutzenbichler und Essers wird dargelegt, da? es seit den Anfangszeiten der Psychoanalyse bis heute immer wieder „Analysezwischenf?lle“ solcher Art gegeben hat. An einem Fallbeispiel wird darüber hinaus aufgezeigt, da? die Sch?dlichkeit intimer Kontakte differenziert betrachtet werden mu?. Der Beitrag mündet in eine „Psychoanalyse der analytischen Situation“: statt nach dem Gesetzgeber zu rufen, sollten die Psychoanalytiker das Problem als ein der psychoanalytischen Situation von ihrer Konstruktion her inh?rentes erkennen und analysieren.

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Love in psychoanalysis – a case for the public prosecutor?

Summary. This essay protests in the course of the discussions about § 174c StGB that in the meantime came to effect, against a general penalization of sexual contacts in the context of psychotherapy. On the basis of the “chronique scandaleuse” of Krutzenbichler and Essers it is showed, that since the beginnings of psychoanalysis up till today there occurred repeatedly such “incidents in analysis”. A case study helps to show, that the harm of intimate contacts has to be considered with great differentiation. The article's conclusion is a “psychoanalysis of the analytical situation”: instead of calling for the legislative psychoanalysts should recognize and analyse the problem as an inherent one rooted in the construction of the psychoanalytic situation itself.

     

Autism: beyond “theory of mind”

The theory of mind account of autism has been remarkably successful in making specific predictions about the impairments in socialization, imagination and communication shown by people with autism. It cannot, however, explain either the non-triad features of autism, or earlier experimental findings of abnormal assets and deficits on non-social tasks. These unexplained aspects of autism, and the existence of autistic individuals who consistently pass false belief tasks, suggest that it may be necessary to postulate an additional cognitive abnormality. One possible abnormality - weak central coherence - is discussed, and preliminary evidence for this theory is presented.     

Feature selection and classification: A developmental study

Two hundred and thirteen children between the ages of 4 and 16 sorted 30 complex objects freely into groups. These were either schematic faces, schematic imaginary animals, or histoform patterns and were constructed from 9 independently and continuously varying features, each with 10 levels. The three sets were equivalent in terms of underlying numerical structure. A new method of analysis of the groups formed yielded the following direct measures of subjective organization in the sorting of each child: the number of features used in sorting, the accuracy of sorting, and the number of independent dimensions of classification. Both the material and the analysis of sorting were devised on the assumption that only some of the component features of complex objects are used for classification, while others are ignored. Sorting performance differed markedly both with age and with different types of material. The improvement in sorting ability with age, except for the youngest children, could be attributed to an increase in the number of features used rather than an improvement in the accuracy of use. In contrast, the poor sorting of histoform patterns as opposed to faces and animals was due to a low level of sorting accuracy. The basic results on the development of classification confirmed previous studies, and hence suggest that it is valid to consider feature selection as a basic component of classification.     

Global effect of a nearby distractor on targeting eye and hand movements

Eye-hand coordination was investigated with the global effect paradigm. In this paradigm, saccades typically land in between the target and a nearby presented distractor, the configuration's center of gravity. This so-called global effect, or spatial averaging, is attributed to incomplete target selection. Four experiments demonstrated a similar effect for hand movements; thus, eye and hand are coupled during target selection. However, under some conditions the global effect was different for eye and hand, suggesting that their coupling is not achieved through a shared target representation. Instead, eye and hand seem to use 2 separate target representations that exchange information. The convergent amplitudes of eye and hand with simultaneous execution support this interpretation. Latencies showed a similar converging pattern.     

Mortality and World Hunger

Why does world hunger hold an inferior place on the contemporary moral agenda? Proposed answer: because it is a political, not a moral problem. It is not a moral problem, because morality needs two conditions fulfilled: that those be in some way close to the agent unto whom that agent is doing something that is to be morally assessed; and that the relevant good or bad states or events can be clearly credited to some particular agent or agents. Neither condition is fulfilled in the case of world hunger. This explains morality's failure to come to grips with it. Yet, while lacking morality's endorsement, the abolition of world hunger may still be a political goal.     

The Biological Basis of Social Interaction

The fact that brain disorder can impair social interactions in different ways suggests that social competence has multiple components that have foundations in brain systems. The physiological basis of one aspect of social cognition, theory of mind, is just beginning to be understood. Brain-imaging studies suggest that a network of areas linking medial prefrontal and temporal cortex forms the neural substrate of mentalizing, that is, representing one's own and other people's mental states. The medial prefrontal areas are prominent also in tasks that involve self-monitoring, whereas the temporal regions are prominent also in tasks that involve the representation of goals of actions. We speculate that the precursors of mentalizing ability derive from a brain system that evolved for representing agents and actions, and the relationships between them.     

Cumulative Keyword Index for Volumes 93-95

Individuals with autism frequently show impairments in text reading comprehension. This often is attributed to poor ability to draw inferences during reading and to inadequate access to relevant knowledge. The current study tested this hypothesis by measuring the time taken to read the same question, relating to either physical or social world knowledge, when it was either relevant or irrelevant to the bridging inference evoked by a preceding two-sentence vignette. In the study, 16 normally developing adolescents and 16 adolescents with autism were matched on word reading accuracy, chronological age, and vocabulary but differed significantly in text comprehension. A strong priming effect was found, robust over participants and over items; participants read those questions that were relevant to the inference evoked by the vignette faster than they read those questions that were irrelevant, and no interaction with group membership or type of knowledge was found. This indicates that readers with autism, just like controls, were activating appropriate world knowledge primed by implicit inferences while reading the vignettes. Thus, the comprehension problems in these readers cannot be attributed to an inability to make implicit inferences or to draw on relevant world knowledge. Instead, we suggest that these problems must be sought at a higher level of text processing.     

Egocentrism, allocentrism, and Asperger syndrome

In this paper, we attempt to make a distinction between egocentrism and allocentrism in social cognition, based on the distinction that is made in visuo-spatial perception. We propose that it makes a difference to mentalizing whether the other person can be understood using an egocentric ("you") or an allocentric ("he/she/they") stance. Within an egocentric stance, the other person is represented in relation to the self. By contrast, within an allocentric stance, the existence or mental state of the other person needs to be represented as independent from the self. We suggest here that people with Asperger syndrome suffer from a disconnection between a strong na?ve egocentric stance and a highly abstract allocentric stance. We argue that the currently used distinction between first-person and third-person perspective-taking is orthogonal to the distinction between an egocentric and an allocentric stance and therefore cannot serve as a critical test of allocentrism.     

Interactions between apparent motion rivalry in vision and touch

In multistable perception, the brain alternates between several perceptual explanations of ambiguous sensory signals. It is unknown whether multistable processes can interact across the senses. In the study reported here, we presented subjects with unisensory (visual or tactile), spatially congruent visuotactile, and spatially incongruent visuotactile apparent motion quartets. Congruent stimulation induced pronounced visuotactile interactions, as indicated by increased dominance times for both vision and touch, and an increased percentage bias for the percept already dominant under unisensory stimulation. Thus, the joint evidence from vision and touch stabilizes the more likely perceptual interpretation and thereby decelerates the rivalry dynamics. Yet the temporal dynamics depended also on subjects' attentional focus and was generally slower for tactile than for visual reports. Our results support Bayesian approaches to perceptual inference, in which the probability of a perceptual interpretation is determined by combining visual, tactile, or visuotactile evidence with modality-specific priors that depend on subjects' attentional focus. Critically, the specificity of visuotactile interactions for spatially congruent stimulation indicates multisensory rather than cognitive-bias mechanisms.