Familiar Words in Unfamiliar Surroundings: Davidson’s Malapropisms,Cavell’s Projections

Abstract

In their discussions and criticisms of the idea that language use is essentially a matter of following rules, Davidson and Cavell both invoke as counterexamples instances of intelligible linguistic innovation. Davidson’s favorite examples are malapropisms. Cavell focuses instead on what he calls projections. This paper clarifies some important differences between malapropisms and projections, conceived as paradigmatic forms of linguistic innovation. If malapropisms are treated as exemplary it will be natural to conclude, with Davidson, that a shared practice, be it rule-governed or not, matters only instrumentally – as something that may enhance but is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful communication. By contrast, if Cavellian projections are seen as exemplary, a shared practice will be conceived not only as essential to the possibility of meaningful linguistic innovation, but as already permeated by the sort of creativity of which projections are only particularly striking examples. It is also argued that malapropisms are not particularly convincing as counterexamples to the sort of view Davidson wants to reject. Cavellian projections, on the other hand, are powerful as counterexamples, and reflecting on the nature of their inventiveness is crucial to understanding and seeing the plausibility of Cavell’s own conception of language.     

Impervious and intrusive: The impenetrable object in transference and countertransference

The author describes an internal object that he calls the ‘impenetrable object’ which has two characteristics: being impervious to the projections from the patient and being intrusive, i.e. projecting into the patient. It arises out of an early relationship with a mother who may be generally disturbed or traumatized so that she is unable to take in or tolerate the child's projections and may use the child as a receptacle for her own projections. He links the concept of an impenetrable object with other concepts such as Williams's ‘reversal of the container–contained relationship’ and Green's ‘dead mother’. If such an object dominates the patient's internal world, it can lead to severe difficulties in the analytic process. Interpretations may be experienced as violent projections from the analyst which the patient has to ward off and the analyst may enact an impervious or intrusive object in various ways. The author describes a case in which such dynamics played a significant role. He argues that intensive work in the countertransference is required to detect subtle enactments and allow a shift in the analyst, which in turn can enable change in the patient. He gives clinical material that demonstrates such work by the analyst and illustrates the shift from an impenetrable object to a more permeable one in the patient's internal world.     

Hello/goodbye new families: group work with five looked-after siblings in foster care together awaiting a move to separate adoptive families

This paper describes group work with five siblings aged between three and nine. They were taken into care following severe abuse involving neglect, physical and emotional abuse. In it, we consider the impact of the losses on the network and the children. We explore how Freud, in his paper ‘Mourning and melancholia’ (1917), and others who built on his work, helped us understand the children’s losses. The sibling group was planned in order to address the children’s need to say goodbye to their birth parents, their foster carers and to each other and to prepare them for their individual separate adoptions. The group ran for 18 months and ended when four children had been placed in their adoptive homes; the last child to be adopted was then seen individually until she was also placed. The group work is described with the use of quotes from sessional material to illuminate the processes for these children in facing their complicated and ambivalent losses, the mourning process and their progress towards becoming individuals in their own right rather than enacting fragmented functional parts/roles on behalf of their sibling group as a whole. Their mourning of the loss of each other was complicated by their earlier reliance on each other to manage the difficulties they had faced when surviving their abusive early lives together.     

Anticipated cooperation vs. competition moderates interpersonal projection

Two experiments investigated the impact of anticipated interdependence on people’s projection of their characteristics onto an unknown target. After participants had rated themselves on a list of personality traits, they were led to expect a situation of cooperation or competition with another participant and rated this participant on the same list of traits. In both experiments, projection of self-attributed traits was stronger under cooperation than competition. This effect was independent of trait valence, whether defined a priori (Experiment 1) or as an idiosyncratic measure (Experiment 2). Experiment 2 also revealed that the moderation of interpersonal projection by interdependence was not driven by changes in participants’ self-representation. These findings suggest that the anticipated interdependence context influences the way we perceive similarity with unknown others. We discuss possible cognitive and motivational mechanisms underlying this effect.     

Testing Our Quasi‐Statistical Sense: News Use,Political Knowledge,and False Projection

Although widely studied, previous research of projection in the context of public opinion did not incorporate the distinction between adequate and false projection developed in the cognitive studies: Adequate projection contributes to accurate perceptions of public opinion while false projection impairs it. The analysis presented in this study includes the above distinction, building on two case studies: (1) a dataset comprised of 25 surveys conducted over a period of 10 years (N = 11,313) and (2) a panel study of the 2013 Israeli general election. Relying on the assumptions of the Bayesian model, we tested if frequent news exposure and factual political knowledge reduce false projection. We found that false projection is a highly persistent psychological tendency with little variance. Although news exposure and political knowledge did contribute to a more accurate perception of public opinion, they did not reduce false projection. Conversely, knowledge increased false projection among moderates and had no effect in this respect among proponents of a more extreme ideology. These findings align better with the motivated reasoning model than with the Bayesian model.     

THE ANALYST'S HATRED OF ANALYSIS

Analytic work is loved and hated. Both attitudes deserve scrutiny, but the analyst's hatred of analysis, which transcends countertransference responses to individual patients, represents an impediment to gratifying analytic work whose recognition and conceptualization has been resisted. The author suggests that antipathy among analysts toward analysis and the analytic situation is normative and expectable, yet commonly experienced as shameful. He speculates that it is sometimes disavowed and projected. Training institutes might inadvertently foster this sense of shame rather than promote its working through. The recognition that analytic identity functions as both a loving and a persecutory internal object has implications for psychoanalytic education and practice.     

Group Merger Between Political Parties: The Role of the Ingroup Projection Process

In 2007, the two most important Italian left‐wing parties merged into a single political entity. This study intends to analyze the merging process. Specifically, and in line with the ingroup projection hypothesis of Mummendey & Wenzel, we have explored whether the identification and the favoritism toward the upcoming common group was affected by the perceivers' projection of specific and common stereotypical traits from the subordinate groups to the superordinate one. Political militants' (N = 132) levels of ingroup identification; their representations of the previous ingroup, outgroup, and of the new party; and their attitudes towards the common group were assessed. Results confirmed that the cognitive representation of the merged party was shaped much more on the basis of the typical traits of the ingroup than of the outgroup. Moreover, structural equation analyses showed that the identification with the superordinate category and the consequent favoritism toward the merger were related to the projection of ingroup attributes. The findings also suggested that the ingroup projection may be particularly crucial when the intergroup bias is high. Finally, political implications are discussed in terms of obstacles and resources inherent to the merging process.     

The phantom limb in dreams

Mulder and colleagues [Mulder, T., Hochstenbach, J., Dijkstra, P. U., Geertzen, J. H. B. (2008). Born to adapt, but not in your dreams. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 1266–1271.] report that a majority of amputees continue to experience a normally-limbed body during their night dreams. They interprete this observation as a failure of the body schema to adapt to the new body shape. The present note does not question this interpretation, but points to the already existing literature on the phenomenology of the phantom limb in dreams. A summary of published investigations is complemented by a note on phantom phenomena in the dreams of paraplegic patients and persons born without a limb. Integration of the available data allows the recommendation for prospective studies to consider dream content in more detail. For instance, “adaptation” to the loss of a limb can also manifest itself by seeing oneself surrounded by amputees. Such projective types of anosognosia (“transitivism”) in nocturnal dreams should also be experimentally induced in normally-limbed individuals, and some relevant techniques are mentioned.     

Imagining intergroup contact promotes projection to outgroups

Three studies investigated the conditions under which imagining intergroup contact would lead to greater projection of positive traits to outgroups. In Experiment 1 (Mexico) imagined contact predicted greater self-outgroup positive trait overlap for majority but not minority ethnic groups. In Experiment 2 (UK) imagined contact led to greater projection of positive traits to the outgroup for lower compared to higher identifiers. In Experiment 3 (UK) imagined contact led to greater projection of positive traits to the outgroup when the self was salient compared to when the outgroup was salient. These findings suggest that the social cognitive consequences of imagined contact are most favorable for intergroup relations when the personal self, but not social self, is salient. We discuss the implications of these findings for a developing model of imagined contact effects.     

儿童"假想伙伴"研究及其对教育的启示

“假想伙伴”现象的描述最早出现于20世纪30年代,但把它单独作为一个重要课题进行专门研究却是近二十年的事情。文章回顾了有关假想伙伴研究的历史起源和近期研究成果。文章认为创造假想伙伴是儿童解决适应困难的一个有效手段。分析这一现象对幼儿教育具有很大的启示意义。