The present and absent object—on thinking and the capacity to symbolize

In this paper, Bion's different theories on the development of thinking will be introduced: on the one hand, his theory of thoughts as resulting from tolerance for the absence of the object, and on the other hand, dream thoughts and thoughts as resulting from the presence of the object, originally through the mother's containing function. The effects of failures in this development will be discussed; among other things, a hypertrophy of the apparatus of projective identification at the expense of thinking capacities. Briefly, a comparison will be made between a facilitating relation between container and contained and the oscillation between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive position, which Bion describes as a prerequisite for open symbolizing processes. Bion's theories and concepts will be supplemented by Winnicott's theories on the “creative illusion” and the breast/the mother as a “subjective object” as a precondition for the symbolizing capacity that later develops in the “potential space”. Very briefly, a comparison is made between Winnicott's term “the subjective object” and Segal's term “symbolic equation”. Clinical vignettes are interpolated.     

The cognitive underpinnings of creative thought: A latent variable analysis exploring the roles of intelligence and working memory in three creative thinking processes

The field of creativity has largely focused on individual differences in divergent thinking abilities. Recently, contemporary creativity researchers have shown that intelligence and executive functions play an important role in divergent thought, opening new lines of research to examine how higher-order cognitive mechanisms may uniquely contribute to creative thinking. The present study extends previous research on the intelligence and divergent thinking link by systematically examining the relationships among intelligence, working memory, and three fundamental creative processes: associative fluency, divergent thinking, and convergent thinking. Two hundred and sixty five participants were recruited to complete a battery of tasks that assessed a range of elementary to higher-order cognitive processes related to intelligence and creativity. Results provide evidence for an associative basis in two distinct creative processes: divergent thinking and convergent thinking. Findings also supported recent work suggesting that intelligence significantly influences creative thinking. Finally, working memory played a significant role in creative thinking processes. Recasting creativity as a construct consisting of distinct higher-order cognitive processes has important implications for future approaches to studying creativity within an individual differences framework.     

The role of positive thinking in social perceptions of cancer outcomes

Pressure for ‘positive thinking’ (PT; i.e. focusing on positive thoughts/suppressing negative thoughts to ‘fight’ cancer) burdens cancer patients facing health deterioration. It was determined whether PT exposure enhanced effort, control and responsibility attributions assigned to an individual for his/her cancer trajectory. Within an online blog a hypothetical same-gender person describes a personal cancer experience. 482 participants were assigned to one of six experimental conditions in which we manipulated PT exposure (blogger learns about ‘power of PT’ but does not try it, blogger tries PT, control/no PT) and cancer outcome (successful/unsuccessful treatment). A 3?×?2?×?2 multivariate analysis of covariance (with personal cancer experience covariates) tested PT exposure?×?cancer outcome?×?gender effects on attributions for the blogger's cancer outcome. Results indicate that PT exposure enhanced effort and responsibility attributions assigned to individuals for their cancer outcomes and that responsibility attributions differed as a function of gender. Findings suggest that exposure to the idea of PT may lead to cancer patients being perceived as culpable if they do not recover from the disease.     

The Vatican and Europe: Political Theology and Ecclesiology in Papal Statements from Pius XII to Benedict XVI

The article examines the origins and evolution of the Vatican's political theology and ecclesiology for Europe from Pius XII (especially after the Second World War) and including the pontificates of John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. It seeks to examine the continuities of the ‘Idea of Europe’ in papal thought against a background of changing political context – the end of the Second World War, the Cold War, the fall of the communist state system, the emergence of a united but diverse Europe after 1989. The political structures of the continent now include within its geographic sweep Western and Eastern Christian churches which, divided by tradition and modern history, find their relationship a key marker in the contemporary religious identity of Europe. This reality is a significant framework for Vatican thinking on Europe especially for John Paul II and Benedict XVI.     

Institutional creativity and pathologies of potential space: The modern university

Abstract

This paper proposes the applicability of object relations psychoanalytic conceptions of dialogue (Ogden, 1986 Ogden, T. 1986. The matrix of the mind, London: Karnac.  [Google Scholar], 1993 Ogden, T. 1993. “On potential space”. In In one's bones: The clinical genius of Winnicot, Edited by: Goldman, D. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aaronson.  [Google Scholar]) to thinking about relationships and relational structures and their governance in universities. It proposes that:

• the qualities of dialogic relations in creative institutions are the proper index of creative productivity; that is of, as examples, ‘thinking’ (Evans, 2004 Evans, M. 2004. Killing thinking: The death of the universities, London: Continuum.  [Google Scholar]), ‘emotional learning’ (Salzberger-Wittenburg et al., 1983 Salzberger-Wittenburg, I., Henry, G. and Osborne, E. 1983. The emotional experience of learning and teaching, London: Routledge.  [Google Scholar]) or ‘criticality’ (Barnett, 1997 Barnett, R. 1997. Higher education: A critical business, Buckingham: Open University Press.  [Google Scholar]);

• contemporary institutions' explicit preoccupation in assuring, monitoring and managing creative ‘dialogue’ can, in practice, pervert creative processes and thoughtful symbolic productivity, thus inhibiting students' development and the quality of ‘thinking space’ for teaching and research.

In this context the paper examines uncanny and perverse connections between Paulo Freire's (1972 Freire, P. 1972. Pedagogy of the oppressed, London: Penguin.  [Google Scholar]) account of educational empowerment and dialogics (from his Pedagogy of the oppressed) to the consumerist (see, for example, Clarke & Vidler, 2005 Clarke, J. and Vidler, E. 2005. Creating citizen-consumers: New labour and the remaking of public services. Public Policy and Administration, 20: 19–37.  [Google Scholar]) rhetoric of student empowerment, as mediated by some strands of managerialism in contemporary higher education. The paper grounds its critique of current models of dialogue, feedback loops, audit and other mechanisms of accountability (Power, 1997 Power, M. 1997. The Audit Society: Ritual's of verification, Oxford: Oxford University Press.  [Google Scholar]; Strathern, 2000 Strathern M. Audit cultures: Anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy London Routledge 2000 [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), in a close analysis of how creative thinking emerges.

The paper discusses the failure to maintain a dialogic space in humanities and social science areas in particular, exploring psychoanalytic conceptions from Donald Winnicott (1971 Winnicott, D. W. 1971. Playing and Reality, London: Routledge.  [Google Scholar]), Milner (1979 Milner, M. 1979. On not being able to paint, New York: International Universities Press.  [Google Scholar]), Thomas Ogden (1986 Ogden, T. 1986. The matrix of the mind, London: Karnac.  [Google Scholar]) and Csikszentmihalyi (1997 Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1997. Creativity, New York: Harper Perennial.  [Google Scholar]). Coleridge's ideas about imagination as the movement of thought between subjective and objective modes are discussed in terms of both intra- and inter-subjective relational modes of ‘dialogue’, which are seen as subject to pathology in the pathologically structured psychosocial environment. Current patterns of institutional governance, by micromanaging dialogic spaces, curtail the ‘natural’ rhythms and temporalities of imagination by giving an over-emphasis to the moment of outcome, at the expense of holding the necessary vagaries of process in the institutional ‘mind’. On the contrary, as this paper argues, creative thinking lies in sporadic emergences at the conjunction of object/(ive) outcome and through (thought) processes.     

The Acquisition and Function of Religious Beliefs: A Review and Synthesis of Proximate and Ultimate Perspectives

ABSTRACT

Two main scientific approaches have renewed in the last decade the scientific study of religion: the cognitive and the adaptationist. The former is focused on proximate causes, the latter is looking for ultimate causes of religious beliefs and behaviours. Both approaches are useful and promising. However, in both cases, various important aspects and contexts associated with the origin, acquisition, and transmission of religious beliefs have been neglected. The present paper offers an approach that conjoins both models after reviewing several critical issues, to highlight a distinction between cognitive conditions and structures, on one side; and developments or applications, on the other. As a result greater attention needs to be paid to religious functions and their cultural framework to better understand religion and to explain some current processes, like massive secularization in several areas.     

Decontextualisation as a rhetorical mechanism in the op-ed article ‘Finding design in nature’, by Cardinal Schönborn (2005)

The objective of this paper is to make a rhetorical analysis of the op-ed entitled ‘Finding design in nature’ by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna, published by The New York Times in 2005, three months after the death of John Paul II. In this essay, the Cardinal states that it is an error to affirm that Catholic doctrine is compatible with the ‘neo-Darwinist’ theory of evolution and that the Roman Catholic Church accepts that theory. For the Archbishop, the origin of this error lies in the abuses committed in the interpretation of John Paul's 1996 speech in which the Pope declared that evolution was more than a hypothesis and took a more favourable stance towards evolutionary theory than his predecessors. In his article, the Cardinal describes that papal message as ‘vague and unimportant’. We interpret Cardinal Schönborn's position as a personal rhetorical change with respect to John Paul II's 1996 speech. In our view, the Archbishop directs his criticism against evolutionary theory not only because of its scientific theories (not rejected by Church Magisterium) but also for being potentially dangerous in its use by certain authors as a scientific argument in support of their atheism.     

Beteendeterapi Vid Angest,Depression Och Smkrta

Davidson, P 0 (Ed) : The Behavioral Management of Anxiety, Depression and Pain. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1976. 197 sid.     

Athletes' perceptions of how cognitive interference during competition influences concentration and effort

Abstract

This paper investigates athletes' perception of the relationship between cognitive interference and its effects on concentration and effort during sport performance. The sample consisted of 115 volleyball players that took part in a national university tournament. Three different kinds of thoughts were investigated: ‘performance worries’, ‘situation-irrelevant thoughts’, and ‘thoughts of escape’. Path analysis was used to examine the relationships. All kinds of thoughts were reported to be detrimental to concentration, whereas different patterns of associations emerged between different thoughts and subsequent effort. ‘Performance worries’ were reported to be related to increases in effort for athletes holding higher goal attainment expectancies and decreases in effort for athletes holding lower goal attainment expectancies. ‘Thoughts of escape’ were reported to be related to decreases in effort, while no significant relation between ‘situation irrelevant thoughts’ and effort emerged. Results stress the importance of further examining the role of interfering thoughts athletes experience during competition.     

Structural equation modelling of human judgement

Structural equation modelling (SEM) is outlined and compared with two non-linear alternatives, artificial neural networks and “fast and frugal” models. One particular non-linear decision-making situation is discussed, that exemplified by a lexicographic semi-order. We illustrate the use of SEM on a dataset derived from 539 volunteers' responses to questions about food-related risks. Our conclusion is that SEM is a useful member of the armoury of techniques available to the student of human judgement: it subsumes several multivariate statistical techniques and permits their flexible combination, and it provides robust goodness-of-fit statistics and is available in (generally) easy-to-use computer packages. Although the number of tasks for which SEM provides a persuasive psychological model is small, it is very useful in identifying the important variables and their inter-relations that contribute to task performance, and thus can constitute a valuable intermediate staging point between raw data and a fully fledged psychological theory.