BORGES IN MY OFFICE: THE ANALYSIS OF A MAN DWELLING OUTSIDE OF TIME

This article weaves together two threads: the intricacies of the analysis of a difficult‐to‐reach yet extraordinary patient and the literary works of Jorge Luis Borges, which played a significant role in the analysis as a source of inspiration, enriching the analyst's reverie and opening up new psychic spaces. The authors demonstrate the analyst's recourse to several of Borges's stories in order to enrich his own inner world and to better understand the analysand. Some of these stories are briefly presented through the analyst's dialogue with them, and there is a discussion of their function in facilitating the process of working through issues of time, memory, mortality, and identity, contributing to the enhancement of the patient's ability to come face to face with the unwanted, split‐off parts of his self and of reality.     

Split Self Affairs and Their Treatment

SUMMARY

The Split Self Affair is a long-term serious relationship. The split being played out in the affair reflects an internal split between doing things “right” and the emotional self. Treatment for those involved centers on understanding the origins of the internal split and on reclaiming the neglected emotional self. Long term individual therapy is the treatment of choice, augmented by other modalities.     

Soul in the world: symbolic culture as the medium for psyche

Whilst the loss of a sense of living connection with the material world is mainly associated with the scientific revolution in seventeenth century Europe, it can be traced back to Plato's introduction of a hierarchy between soul and body. Jung's attempted solution to this – esse in anima – is ingenious but maintains the Cartesian split by which the aliveness of the world is reduced to a projection of psychic forces (the archetypes). An alternative approach is proposed, rooted in the Aristotelean emphasis on practical activity that sees the soul as a function of our way of being in the world. Human cognition is extended and distributed by our social and material engagement with the world, especially via collective representations whose symbolic character is constitutive of the reality of the world in which we live. Despite the dominance of ‘scientific Cartesian’ representations in the modern Western world, there remain numerous instances of participation mystique that cannot be captured by the Cartesian notion of projection. These indicate an opening to ways of being in the world that may lead us out of the impasse of the Cartesian matrix.     

Conceptualizing splitting: On the different meanings of splitting and their implications for the understanding of the person and the analytic process

While “splitting” is a familiar concept, its meaning is not as self‐evident as is commonly assumed. In different contexts, it refers to different phenomena and is supported by different understandings of psychic dynamics. In this paper, the author presents four different conceptualizations of splitting, which capture the essential aspects of contemporary psychoanalytic discourse on the concept. There is a dissociative kind of splitting, which involves splitting off, in the face of trauma, whole personalities, which to some extent remain accessible to consciousness; there is a disavowal kind of splitting that splits off our awareness of disturbing realities or their meanings in our efforts to avoid the inner restraints imposed by repression; and there are two forms of splitting of the object into good and bad—one focusing on the splitting of representations of the object due to ego weakness and environmental determinants, and the other on the splitting of the mind itself in a primarily destructive act aimed at sparing the good from the destructiveness of our death instinct. All four conceptualizations have their origins in Freud's writing and then are further developed in the work of later analysts. The author argues that understanding the nature of these various conceptualizations of splitting can contribute to analytic theory and practice. It also sheds light on the essential nature of analytic approaches and how they offer different perspectives on the unity and disunity of man's basic nature.     

Should we rely on the Kenward–Roger approximation when using linear mixed models if the groups have different distributions?

The study explores the robustness to violations of normality and sphericity of linear mixed models when they are used with the Kenward–Roger procedure (KR) in split‐plot designs in which the groups have different distributions and sample sizes are small. The focus is on examining the effect of skewness and kurtosis. To this end, a Monte Carlo simulation study was carried out, involving a split‐plot design with three levels of the between‐subjects grouping factor and four levels of the within‐subjects factor. The results show that: (1) the violation of the sphericity assumption did not affect KR robustness when the assumption of normality was not fulfilled; (2) the robustness of the KR procedure decreased as skewness in the distributions increased, there being no strong effect of kurtosis; and (3) the type of pairing between kurtosis and group size was shown to be a relevant variable to consider when using this procedure, especially when pairing is positive (i.e., when the largest group is associated with the largest value of the kurtosis coefficient and the smallest group with its smallest value). The KR procedure can be a good option for analysing repeated‐measures data when the groups have different distributions, provided the total sample sizes are 45 or larger and the data are not highly or extremely skewed.     

Thinking about smoking: A novel approach to describing cognitive style profiles

Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory (CEST) emphasizes the dual roles of rational and experiential thinking, with individuals having varying preferences for each style. This study explored the relationship between these constructs, illustrating the value of the derived model in addictive behavior, as illustrated by smoking. Data were extracted from a study of the predictors of men’s health behavior. Participants comprised 212 Australian men (aged 25–65 years) who completed a self-report questionnaire which assessed thinking styles and recorded smoking status. Rational and experiential data were subjected to cluster analysis and median splits to identify logical subgroups based on participants’ dual responses. The four derived clusters were more representative of smoking status than groups defined by median splits. In general, both smokers and ex-smokers preferred experiential thinking and non-smokers preferred rational thinking. There was a strong tendency for smokers to report both low rational and high experiential thinking. The use of cluster analysis advanced the evaluation of the interactive nature of rational and experiential thinking by allowing an empirical test of their potential relationship. The thinking profiles reported represent an advance in the assessment of CEST which may provide a useful model for applications in fields both related to, and beyond, addiction.     

Graph matching approach and generalized median graph for automatic labeling of cortical sulci with parallel and distributed algorithms

The human brain cortex is very complex structure containing folds (gyri) and fissures (sulci) that were the subject of our study in this paper. The sulcus is one of the most important features in order to know the different functions areas of the brain. The exact identification of sulci on human brain using MRI images is helpful in many studies and applications related to brain diseases and human behavior. Automatic labeling of cortical sulci with all this complexity and inter-subject variability, this is considered non-trivial task. In this paper, we have proposed a new graph based approach of automatic labeling of cortical sulci with parallel and distributed algorithms using graph matching and generalized median graph. The graph matching is very important in many studies and applications such as pattern recognition and classification. The generalized median graph of a set of graphs is a way to represent a set of graphs by a comprehensive graph that minimizes the sum of the distances to all graphs. We have used the characteristics of shape, orientation and location to describe the sulci. The results that we have obtained prove that our approach is accurate and acceptable in this field which uses the graph matching for automatic labeling of cortical sulci.