The Unreal Child1

Unrepresented mental states lead to an impaired ability to feel emotions and trust in oneself, one’s history and in the world. The article explores the question of how representations of oneself and the relevant other, the mother, become possible in the course of therapy when dissociative processes previously made this impossible, and what role unconscious communication plays in the analytic realm. This question will be explored by examining the theories of André Green, Philip Bromberg, and Howard Levine.     

Socialization and cognition in children between the age of 18 and 24 months

A cross-cultural study of mother–child dyads was set up to test the hypothesis that sociocultural differences, mediated by variations of maternal intervention, influence the way in which the child manipulates objects and, thereby, his cognitive and social competences. Two series of observations were conducted with three groups of children aged 18–24 months (15 from the American middle class, 15 from French families and 15 from North African families—the last two groups both underprivileged): (a) ‘naturalistic’ observations of two systems of interaction (child–mother and child–children interaction) showed that each child is characterized by one type of object manipulation (protected, induced, activated or autonomous) and that maternal intervention varies with the sociocultural background; assessment of the child's behavioural sequences unravelled his strategies for solving and avoiding conflicts with his peers; (b) observations of the child with a standardized material permitted an evaluation of his cognitive competences for spontaneous problem-solving. Regarding the assumptions of our hypothesis, the results furnish the following conclusions: (1) social and cognitive competences are related to the object manipulation type. In all samples, children characterized by ‘activated’ and ‘autonomous’ manipulation obtain the better results; (2) maternal intervention differs among the samples depending on the sociocultural background; these differences (limitation and physical contact) do not correspond to differences in types of manipulation; (3) type of manipulation is an interactive construction; it characterizes the functioning of the mother–child dyad and its prevailing dynamics between permanence and change. ©1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Commentaries on “Beyond statistical significance: Five principles for the new era of data analysis and reporting”

Three commentaries below provide different perspectives on data analysis and reporting. They generally focus on how the quality of the measures and manipulations determines the value of the analysis. Norbert Schwarz and Fritz Strack's comment is less on the right statistic and more on “sloppy reasoning, gaps between theoretical concepts and their operationalizations, and blissful ignorance of the situated nature of human thinking, feeling, and doing contribute more to the limited reproducibility of empirical findings than the choice of a particular test statistic.” They propose that particular effects are contextual and inappropriately labeled as true or false. Instead, our job is to focus on general constructs that make sense of the diversity of human experience and psychological reactions. Too often studies replicating psychological effects in the noisy and confounded conditions of the marketplace result in statistical uncertainty of garbage in, garbage out. Researchers instead need to look toward tests of specific interactions, which can clarify the influencing factors based on theoretical considerations. The second comment is by Andrew Gelman, an outstanding psychological statistician. He proposes that “once the data have been collected, the most important decisions have already been done.” He then provides four recommendations that enable the statistics to work appropriately. The first requirement of an effective study is to be sure that the measures address the construct of interest. Similar to the position of Schwarz and Strack, it is important to articulate the relevance of a statistically significant finding. The second recommendation seeks to curb large number of studies with inflated effect sizes built from narrow studies and unwarranted optimism. The third recommendation is to simulate data from a model and consider the distribution of possible results. That is often done to test a new analysis method, but it can be even more important in marketplace studies where novel characteristics of the sample and experimental conditions are included in the analysis. Finally, he recommends that one consider likely analyses needed before getting the data. Such foresight would encourage, for example, thinking about the kind of data needed to defend the equality of the control demographics against the treatment. The final commentary is by Stijn van Osselaer. He agrees that p-values reflect the detailed methods from a given study but do not focus on the problem of generalizability. Like Gelman, he sees designs focused on effect sizes may have generated too many studies that do not replicate. He contrasts broad explorations with narrowly defined existence tests that provide evidence that an effect exists somewhere but are mute on other contexts where they may apply. For theoretical problems relevant to applications, it is important to identify moderators through broad sampling across population characteristics, stimuli, and situations. He proposes that consumer psychologists should not try to do everything in one paper, but to build practically relevant, applicable knowledge across multiple articles. Different articles, authors, and research methods play various roles, with each article focusing on important stages in the process from generating hypotheses, providing existence proofs, and exploring their broad applicability. That pragmatic approach can integrate theoretical silos that seek to resolve complex human problems and has promise as a criterion for relevant publications.     

Identity and Difference: A Hundred Years of Analytic Philosophy

At its origins, analytic philosophy is an interest in language, science, logic, analysis, and a systematic rather than a historical approach to philosophical problems. Early analytic philosophers were famous for making clear conceptual distinctions and for couching them in comprehensible and lucid sentences. It is argued that this situation is changing, that analytic philosophy is turning into its mirror image and is thereby becoming more like the kind of philosophy that it used to oppose.     

Test of a potential link between analytic and nonanalytic category learning and automatic, effortful processing

The link between automatic and effortful processing and nonanalytic and analytic category learning was evaluated in a sample of 29 college undergraduates using declarative memory, semantic category search, and pseudoword categorization tasks. Automatic and effortful processing measures were hypothesized to be associated with nonanalytic and analytic categorization, respectively. Results suggested that contrary to prediction strong criterion-attribute (analytic) responding on the pseudoword categorization task was associated with strong automatic, implicit memory encoding of frequency-of-occurrence information. Data are discussed in terms of the possibility that criterion-attribute category knowledge, once established, may be expressed with few attentional resources. The data indicate that attention resource requirements, even for the same stimuli and task, vary depending on the category rule system utilized. Also, the automaticity emerging from familiarity with analytic category exemplars is very different from the automaticity arising from extensive practice on a semantic category search task. The data do not support any simple mapping of analytic and nonanalytic forms of category learning onto the automatic and effortful processing dichotomy and challenge simple models of brain asymmetries for such procedures.     

决策与推理的双系统——启发式系统和分析系统

近来,在决策与推理的研究中,研究者提出了双系统作用模型：基于直觉的启发式系统和基于理性的分析系统。启发式系统加工速度较快,不占用或占用很少的心理资源,容易受背景相似性、刻板印象的影响;分析系统加工速度慢,占用较多的心理资源,遵从逻辑和规则,而且两个系统有不同进化历史和神经基础。该文根据已有的相关研究,综述了双系统在决策与推理中可能的作用机制、相互关系、个体差异,同时指出了目前研究存在的不足     

From symbolic law to narrative capacity: A paradigm shift in psychoanalysis?1

In the Freudian perspective, the primal phantasies, a refl ection of prehistory, oblige us through our phylogenetic heritage and its repetition in the ontogenetic to recognize the limits of generation and sex, to submit to the symbolic law represented by the father of the primal horde and to fi nd‐as is sought in the treatment‐one's ‘right’ place in the primal scene (Oedipus complex). Clinical experience with patients suffering from narcissistic disorders soon led certain analysts to propose a paradigm change, which has brought about important modifi cations to technique, but also, more recently, modifi cations at the level of metapsychology. Certain contemporary analysts have a conception of the subject focused on processes of interaction and communication between ‘thinking apparatuses’ in the here and now. The author shows that this current development is taking place in parallel with major trends in our postmodern era in which communication and negotiation replace former religious, mythical, philosophical, moral or political beliefs.     

Alphabetizing in old age

Abstract: A long term, intensive analysis with a woman in old old age is reported. An attempt is made to answer the question, ‘What, in analytic work, is healing?’. The patient's previous classical Jungian work is contrasted with the author's developmental perspective. It is suggested that an enactment, representing what Neville Symington has called an analyst's act of freedom, was crucial in effecting a profound transformation in the patient's psyche.     

Optimum route of the south transcontinental gas pipeline in SE Europe using AHP

The development of a south energy corridor connecting Europe with the natural gas reserves of the broader Caspian Region and Middle East aims at increasing the EU security and diversification of energy supply. In this paper, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method with geopolitical, economic and technical criteria is applied to define the most preferred route of the transcontinental gas pipeline that branches in SE Europe to transport Caspian gas further into the targeted markets of Europe. The paper is divided into five sections. The first introduces the purpose of the paper. The second describes the used AHP method in detail (criteria, sub-criteria, weights, consistency indexes). The third briefly addresses the need of EU to diversify its supply sources and the planned gas projects in SE Europe. In the fourth section, the method is applied to the four alternative pipeline routes and the robustness of the results is examined with sensitivity analysis. The fifth section comments on the results of the method. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.