Unusual Child–Mother Communication During Separation: A Psychoanalytic Study

This paper describes two vignettes from psychoanalytic work with a mother who experienced unusual communication with her baby when they were apart. These episodes suggest there are sensory cues or an extrasensory perceptual awareness between individuals separated by physical distance. This paper attempts to describe these thought transferences in order to better understand communication phenomena that have not been described in the scientific literature.     

Substantive unconscious and adjective unconscious: the contribution of Wilfred Bion

The author first provides her readers with a brief summary of some of Freud's ideas, as found throughout his work, on the notion of 'unconscious'. The notion of unconscious as noun is contrasted to the idea of unconscious as adjective, this latter being proposed as a quality, or a state, ever temporary, dynamic, and subject to the constant changes going on in the individual's internal psychic world, as well as to external conditions. After presenting some considerations, the author then contrasts the Kleinian model of the mind to the Freudian, and Wilfred Bion's contribution is discussed at some length. Within Bion's conception of psychic functioning, the model of 'dream' is highlighted and, in this regard, clarifications are sought regarding Bion's view of the unconscious. To conclude, a brief and superficial approximation to the work of Carl Jung is touched upon, although the author admits to knowing little of Jung's positions.     

What is analysis?

This paper attempts to discern a ground for doing depth psychological work in times of disappearance, loss and the absence of the gods. Through the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, and to a lesser extent, Rainer Maria Rilke, it seeks to discover the significance of fragmentation and conflagration in the manifestations of both psyche and the post-industrial landscape we inhabit. What does the ‘death of god’ mean for our notions of symbol and self and for the practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis? How do we understand our daily clinical work in the context of ruin, holocaust and despair?     

Perception of genetic risk among genetic counselors

A mailed survey of female prenatal genetic counselors, obstetric nurses, and high school biology teachers was conducted to determine if these groups hold different attitudes toward genetic risk and to investigate the extent to which any differences result from the effect of different professional experiences. In this study, the participants were 166 genetic counselors, 116 obstetric nurses, and 78 biology teachers (n = 360). Survey participants completed a written questionnaire designed to assess their numeric estimate of the empiric risk for birth defects/genetic problems, their subjective perception of this risk, and their personal use of prenatal diagnosis. Genetic counselors were found to be less likely than the other groups to consider the frequency of birth defects/genetic problems as rare and were 10 times more likely than nurses and 8 times more likely than teachers to have had prenatal diagnosis. Furthermore, more than half of the prenatal diagnosis procedures had by genetic counselors were not medically indicated. These results suggest that genetic counselors have an increased perception of genetic risks relative to nurses or teachers. Possible explanations for this finding are discussed, and the potential role of discordant risk perception in creating biases in the genetic counseling process is explored.     

Development Towards Wisdom and Maturity: Sufi Conception of Self

By applying results from in-depth interviews with older Iranian Sufis residing in Sweden, this article describes the benefits of the value system of Sufism prizing mystical union above self-realization. As persons conceive of themselves as all forming parts of other-than-self rather than as separate selves, the result is tolerance towards other people's opinions and the vanishing of hostile feelings and competition. Compassion and identification with the whole of creation allows Sufis to avoid the sense of loneliness and exclusion felt by so many immigrants.     

Paradoxical breathlessness in asthma

This study tested the hypothesis that breathlessness in asthma relates linearly to airway obstruction when situational, attentional and emotional influences are held constant via random presentation of different intensities of externally applied airflow obstruction. Adolescents with stable asthma and normal controls (n=25+25) with lung functions of approximately 3.5 l forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV₁) breathed through a device which obstructed airflow with five stimulus intensities, analogous to a mean reduction in FEV₁ of 8–66%. A session consisted of 10 blocks, each with presentation of five stimulus intensities plus the baseline resistance of the apparatus. Breathlessness was continuously reported by moving a lever along a 10-point scale. The mean breathlessness was computed per stimulus intensity. Lung function and anxiety were measured before and after the test.

Participants with asthma, not controls, manifested a paradoxical response: they reported significantly more breathlessness, but undifferentially. One patient against 12 controls reported consistently more breathlessness from baseline to severe obstruction. The hypothesis was only supported for controls. Breathlessness did not correlate with severity of asthma, lung function, duration of asthma, number of exacerbations over the last six months, age, sex or anxiety.

It was concluded that the meaning of airflow obstruction in patients with asthma has changed and underlies their paradoxical responses, even when situational, attentional and emotional factors are controlled.     

Perception of dynamic acoustic patterns by an individual with unilateral verbal auditory agnosia

Previous studies have found that subjects diagnosed with verbal auditory agnosia (VAA) from bilateral brain lesions may experience difficulties at the prephonemic level of acoustic processing. In this case study, we administered a series of speech and nonspeech discrimination tests to an individual with unilateral VAA as a result of left-temporal-lobe damage. The results indicated that the subject's ability to perceive steady-state acoustic stimuli was relatively intact but his ability to perceive dynamic stimuli was drastically reduced. We conclude that this particular aspect of acoustic processing may be a major contributing factor that disables speech perception in subjects with unilateral VAA.     

Ratings of emotion in laterally presented faces: sex and handedness effects

Sixteen right-handed participants (8 male and 8 female students) and 16 left-handed participants (8 male and 8 female students) were presented with cartoon faces expressing emotions ranging from extremely positive to extremely negative. A forced-choice paradigm was used in which the participants were asked to rate the faces as either positive or negative. Compared to men, women rated faces more positively, especially in response to right visual field presentations. Women rated neutral and mildly positive faces more positively in the right than in the left visual field, whereas men rated these faces consistently across visual fields. Handedness did not affect the ratings of emotion. The data suggest a positive emotional bias of the left hemisphere in women.     

Der “dritte Weg” der “neo-eurasischen” Zeitschrift “Elementy” -- zurück ins Dritte Reich?

Studies in East European Thought - Articulated in the twenties, the doctrines of the exiled Russian ‘Evrazijstvo’ movement are undergoing a renaissance in Russia today. As the...     

Selection and inhibition in infancy: evidence from the spatial negative priming paradigm

We used a spatial negative priming (SNP) paradigm to examine visual selective attention in infants and adults using eye movements as the motor selection measure. In SNP, when a previously ignored location becomes the target to be selected, responses to it are impaired, providing a measure of inhibitory selection. Each trial consisted of a prime and a probe, separated by 67, 200, or 550 ms interstimulus intervals (ISIs). In the prime, a target was accompanied by a distractor. In the probe, the target appeared either in the location formerly occupied by the distractor (ignored repetition) or in another location (control). Adults exhibited the SNP effect in all three ISI conditions, producing slower saccade latencies on ignored repetition versus control trials. The SNP effect obtained for infants only under 550 and 200 ms ISI conditions. These results suggest that important developments in visual selection are rooted in emerging inhibitory mechanisms.