The relationship of drive for muscularity to sociocultural factors, self-esteem, physical attributes gender role, and social comparison in middle school boys

This study examines the relationship of three sociocultural factors—media influence, peer teasing, and parent teasing/comments and three potential moderator variables—self-esteem, social comparison, and endorsement of male strength and athleticism—to drive for muscularity in middle school boys. There were 287 seventh and eighth grade boys who completed a questionnaire measuring these variables as well as body mass index (BMI) and pubertal status. Results indicated that media influence and male physical attributes endorsement were particularly important correlates of drive for muscularity. These findings have implications for programs designed to prevent body dissatisfaction among adolescent boys.     

The association between heroin use and anxiety sensitivity among inner-city individuals in residential drug use treatment

The current study represents an initial investigation of the association between heroin use and anxiety sensitivity (AS). Within a sample of 172 inner-city treatment seeking drug users, AS was compared across past year (1) heroin users with no crack/cocaine use (n=12); (2) crack/cocaine users with no heroin use (n=66); (3) users of both heroin and crack/cocaine (n=45); and (4) individuals with no use of heroin or crack/cocaine (n=49). Consistent with expectations, primary heroin users evidenced higher levels of AS than all other groups, with these differences also evidenced for the physical and social subscales. Differences in AS total score and physical subscale score persisted after controlling for demographic variables, depressive symptoms, and primary use of drugs other than heroin and crack/cocaine including alcohol, nicotine, marijuana, and hallucinogens. Findings suggest a unique relationship between AS and heroin, and set the stage for future work explicating the direction of the observed association.     

Re-visiting the competence/performance debate in the acquisition of the counting principles

Advocates of the "continuity hypothesis" have argued that innate non-verbal counting principles guide the acquisition of the verbal count list (Gelman & Galistel, 1978). Some studies have supported this hypothesis, but others have suggested that the counting principles must be constructed anew by each child. Defenders of the continuity hypothesis have argued that the studies that failed to support it obscured children's understanding of counting by making excessive demands on their fragile counting skills. We evaluated this claim by testing two-, three-, and four-year-olds both on "easy" tasks that have supported continuity and "hard" tasks that have argued against it. A few noteworthy exceptions notwithstanding, children who failed to show that they understood counting on the hard tasks also failed on the easy tasks. Therefore, our results are consistent with a growing body of evidence that shows that the count list as a representation of the positive integers transcends pre-verbal representations of number.     

Treating the “Wise Baby”

In a previous examination of Ferenczis concept of the Wise Baby (1996), I had noted both its applications and its limitations in the analytic treatment of an unusually intelligent adult. Ferenczis concepts of the origin of intellect in trauma and of the wise baby have often left the indistinct impression of being interrelated phenomena. In this paper, I regard as arguable the notion that very high intelligence is pathological when it is precocious. This return visit to the territory of the wise baby extends Ferenczis ideas about the origin and use of the intellect to include a consideration of what may constitute effective treatment for those who suffer from giftedness.Judith E. Vida, M.D. edits On the Arts for this journal. She is a Founding Member and Faculty of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, CA, a member of both American and International Psychoanalytic Associations, and of the Sándor Ferenczi Society of Budapest. Her private practice is in Pasadena, CA.Address correspondence to Judith E. Vida, 301 S. Fair Oaks Ave., Suite 406A, Pasadena, CA 91105, USA; e-mail: jvida@spence.net     

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Severely Disturbed Borderline Patients: Observations on the Supervision Group of Psychotherapists

The authors describe the role of a supervision group of psychotherapists within a wider therapeutic field for severely disturbed borderline patients. The group concentrates on the transference and countertransference, seen according to Racker’s distinction between concordant and complementary identifications. The implications of the prevalence of the complementary identifications over the concordant identifications of the therapists to their patients and the resulting regression to primitive defense mechanisms can be counterbalanced by the group’s integrative functioning as receiver (1) of a variety of information about the patient, (2) of the therapist’s attempt to understand and synthesize, and (3) of the therapist’s countertransference reactions to his patient. The major discrepancies between the various conceptions of the borderline patients’ psychic world and the appropriate therapeutic technique to be applied are also discussed, as well as the way the group filters the information and integrates the therapeutic thought. It might be said, therefore, that, in the “inpatient” phase of the individual psychotherapy, the group of psychotherapists functions, for the patient and the treatment, in a synthesizing context, as it provides the therapist with a space of integration for his split-off part of self and object representations, which the therapist makes use of for his patient.*Members of the Athens University Project for Borderline Patients’ research team consisting of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, Eginition Hospital, 74 Vas Sophias Avenue, Athens 11528, Greece.Maria Chatziandreou, M.D., is a member of the Hellenic Psychoanalytical Society.Haris Tsani, M.D., is a candidate of the Hellenic Psychoanalytical Society.Nikos Lamnidis, M.D., is a candidate of the Hellenic Psychoanalytical Society.Claire Synodinou, Ph.D., is a member of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society and an associate professor at Panteion University, Athens.Grigoris Vaslamatzis, M.D., is a training analyst of the Hellenic Society of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and an associate professor of psychiatry at Athens University.Address correspondence to: Maria Chatziandreou, M.D., 1-3, Skippi Street, 11525 Athens, Greece.     

The place of the 17th century in Jung's encounter with China

After recounting several dreams and related alchemical interests of Jung's tied to the 17(th) century, a contextualizing look at select scientific and philosophical developments of that century is presented. Several precursors of the contemporary debates on the mind/body relation are noted, with special reference to the work of Antonio Damasio. This in turn leads to a reconsideration of the work of the 17(th) century polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, which Jung read as a major precursor to his formulation of synchronicity (via Leibniz's concept of 'pre-established harmony'). Leibniz was the first philosopher to articulate the mind/body relationship in terms of supervenience, sharing an accord with those contemporary philosophers and scientists who see the mind as being an emergent property of the body-brain. Similarly, these ideas are also consistent with a reformulation of synchronicity in terms of emergence. Tracing Leibniz's interest in China reveals another set of links to Jung and to emergentism. Jung's use of Taoist concepts in developing the synchronicity principle is well known. According to scholars, Leibniz was the first major Western intellect to study the I-Ching, through the assistance of a Jesuit missionary in Beijing, Fr. Joachim Bouvet. Some details of the Leibniz-Bouvet correspondence are discussed here. Despite Helmut Wilhelm's presenting aspects of this correspondence at an Eranos conference, Jung does not appear to have integrated it into his writing on synchronicity--a possible reason for this omission is suggested.     

Mel Gibson’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Passion</Emphasis> and the Many Uses of Christ’s Suffering

Many Christians resonated with Mel Gibsons film, The Passion of the Christ. The films sympathetic portrayal of Pontius Pilate reinforces the sense of victimization Americans have experienced since 9/11, however, and obscures the real meaning of Christs suffering.Marian Ronan is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Theology and Religion at the American Baptist Seminary of the West, a member seminary of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA.     

Unconsciously Poisoning the Roots: Psychological Dynamics of the Bible in Jewish/Christian Conflict

The persistence of antisemitism in Christian cultures despite the irrationality and destructiveness of its myths and attitudes has led more than one writer to consider that it may be deeply rooted in psychological dynamics, both individual and social. Likewise, much has been written about how the New Testament writings, especially certain passages in the Gospels, reflect a bitter split between the emerging Christian community and other Jewish groups. Seldom, however, are these two avenues of exploration brought together, asking how psychological mechanisms of defense and the formation of the biblical texts interact. In a recent book, The Jew and Deicide: The Origin of an Archetype (Davis, 2003), psychologist Frederick B. Davis attempted to do just that. Unfortunately, his presentation is deeply flawed by his lack of familiarity with basic New Testament studies and methods. His fundamental premise is sound—that the interplay of the texts, the communities that created them, and their subsequent interpreters evidence psychological dynamics that fuel an ongoing conflict. In this paper, I will suggest how those dynamics were active within the first century Christian community and were expressed in New Testament writings, and how those same dynamics are stimulated in later readers.Paper originally presented March 22, 2004. In D. MacDonald (Chair), New Testament Texts and Traditions. Session conducted at the Western regional meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Whittier, CA     

Syntactic Priming: A Corpus-based Approach

The present study is a corpus-based investigation of syntactic priming, i.e. the tendency to reuse syntactic constructions. On the basis of data from the ICE-GB corpus, I analyze two different pairs of syntactic patterns, the so-called dative alternation and particle placement of transitive phrasal verbs. Although it has sometimes been argued that only experimental data can contribute to studies of priming, the analysis shows that (a) the corpus-based results for datives are very similar to the experimental ones; (b) priming is also obtained for the verb-particle construction, a construction hitherto not explored in the priming literature and (c), most importantly, in line with much previous psycholinguistic and corpus-linguistic work, priming effects turn out to be strongly verb-specific such that some verbs are much more resistant or responsive to priming than others. I conclude with a discussion of how corpus data relate to experimental data and how the corpus-based findings can contribute to psycholinguistic model building.This paper is dedicated to Günter Rohdenburg on the occasion of his 65th birthday I thank (in alphabetical order) Doris Schönefeld (Ruhr University of Bochum), Anja Steinlen (University of Southern Denmark) and Stefanie Wulff (University of Bremen) for comments on a previous draft of this paper. In addition, I have benefited a lot from discussion with Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (University of Freiburg) and from the very detailed and useful comments of one anonymous reviewer, which made it possible to improve the paper considerably. Naturally, all remaining inadequacies are my own.     

Lexical retrieval constrained by sound structure: the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus

Positron emission tomography was used to investigate two competing hypotheses about the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in word generation. One proposes a domain-specific organization, with neural activation dependent on the type of information being processed, i.e., surface sound structure or semantic. The other proposes a process-specific organization, with activation dependent on processing demands, such as the amount of selection needed to decide between competing lexical alternatives. In a novel word retrieval task, word reconstruction (WR), subjects generated real words from heard non-words by the substitution of either a vowel or consonant. Both types of lexical retrieval, informed by sound structure alone, produced activation within anterior and posterior left IFG regions. Within these regions there was greater activity for consonant WR, which is more difficult and imposes greater processing demands. These results support a process-specific organization of the anterior left IFG.