Tattoo and taboo: on the meaning of tattoos in the analytic process

Tattooing projects a visual image in transference to form a backdrop for the most salient unconscious inner conflicts arising during an ongoing analytic process. Like a snapshot, the tattoo is a dialectic record of the mother-father relationship, of desires for closeness and distance, commonality and difference, identification and individuation. As Walter Benjamin famously stated about the nature of visual images in his Arcades Project, the tattoo represents "dialectics at a standstill." What seems paramount to the patient who participates in the act of tattooing is the need for stasis and immutability, as if bringing unconscious conflicts to "standstill" were to deliver a sense of stability. Unconsciously, the need is triggered by a threat to the inner stability resulting from fear of violating a taboo escalating to the point that fears of abandonment and fusion become unbearable. On the one hand, the tattoo is a visual symbolization of a taboo transgression; on the other hand, it activates the same through an act of self-injury that resembles the magical ritual acts of indigenous peoples' use of tattoos. The taboo thus serves as an ersatz for the actual violation of the taboo in real life, so that the tattoo may be ascribed a magical significance or totemic function. And yet the tattoo's success as a vehicle for constructing a transitional object is always contingent on the tangible manipulation of the skin conjoined with the creation of a symbolizing visual image. The image then acts like a "patch" to repair holes blown into Winnicott's "potential space" and to reconstruct it.     

Distortions of perceived length in the frontoparallel plane: tests of perspective theories

The perceived length of a line segment in a frontoparallel plane is sometimes affected by the presence of other line segments in the visual field. Perspective theories attribute such interactions to size-constancy scaling: The configuration of line segments present in the visual field includes depth cues that trigger size scaling of each line segment. In three experiments, we test this claim for a range of simple configurations composed of two line segments joined at a point. These configurations include the inverted T configuration of the bisection illusion, as well as the L configuration of the horizontal-vertical illusion. We conclude that the available depth cues, even when supplemented by known biases in perspective interpretations, do not account for observed distortions in judgments of relative length.     

Book reviews

Hearing Haggerd, M. P. & Evans, E. F. (Eds.). 1987. British Medical Bulletin, 43 (4), 775-1037. ISBN 0-443-02899-6. £22.50.

Perlmutter, M. (Ed.) (1986). Perspectives on intellectual development : The Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology. Vol. 19. Hillsdale,NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Pp. 261. ISBN 0-89859-784-6. £19.95.

Ellis, H. D., Jeeves, M. A., Newcombe, F., & Young, A. (Eds.) (1986). Aspects of face processing. Bordrecht : Martinus Nijhoff. Pp. 509. ISBN 90-247-3357-X. £80.25.

Gabrielsson, A. (Ed.) (1987). Action and perception in shythm and music. Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Music. Pp. 237. ISBN 91-85428-51-5.

Dowling, John E. (1987). The Retina. Cambridge, MA, and London :Belknap Press. Pp. xiv + 282. ISBN 0-674-76680-6. $29.95.

Foorman, B. R. & Siegel, A. W. (1986). Acquisition of reading skills : Cultural constraints and cognitive universals. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Pp. 168. ISBN 0-89859-642-4. £15.00.

Stillings, N., Feinstein, M., Garfield, J., Rissland, E., Rosenbaum, D., Weisler, S., & Baker-Ward, L. (1987). Cognitive science : An introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 533. ISBN 0-262-19257-8. £22.50.

Kapur, N. (1988). Memory disorders in clinical practice. London:Butterworths. Pp. 289. ISBN 0-407-00712-1. £39.50.

Bussis, A. M., Chittenden, E. A. Amarel, M. & Klausner, E. (1985). Inquiry into meaning: An invetigation of learning to read. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Pp. 367. ISBN 0-89859-504-5. £32.95.