Hypothetical speech: A developmental perspective

The definitional responses on standardized tests of 49 children, ages 3–15, give evidence of a transitional stage in defining which is called hypothetical. Definitions of this stage are indicated by hypothetical markers. Five hypothetical markers are described briefly and one,like, in greater detail. The relationship oflike to taxonomic conceptual structure and to synonymy is stressed. The roles oflike in language development, logical inference, and communication are discussed.     

Sexuality and textuality

Post-Freudian theories have been criticized for abandoning what is basic to psychoanalysis: the biological body and sexuality as the source of intrapsychic motivation. Arguably, however, they are more present than ever before-for example, in explanations by theorists who propose therapeutic actions beyond interpretation, presymbolic enactments of procedural memories, or disclosures of the analyst's bodily states as an aspect of intersubjectivity. By contrast, the Freudian body was always a text whose mediated meanings require interpretation, for which Freud provided eloquent guides. It is this textuality, and not sexuality, that distinguishes a psychoanalytic approach: a psycho-logic constructed according to a grammar of desire that mediates experience and creates interpretable behavior, both in action and in speech. Theoretical changes in psychoanalysis are traced historically along the dimension of textuality, the example of perversion is invoked, and the conclusion drawn that any theoretical approach, traditional or post-Freudian, that expands an understanding of textuality contributes to the science of psychoanalysis.     

From dyad to dialogue: language and the early relationship in American psychoanalytic theory

The centrality of language for a Freudian theory of mind and treatment has not been retained by most post-Freudian theorists. American writers have turned to academic developmental research on mother-child interactions to depict the preoedipal period as preverbal, presymbolic, nonconscious. This view presents the early relationship as developing in linear stages in which visual observational data (e.g., contingent behavior action patterns between two persons) are privileged over aural-oral data of communicational exchanges. An alternative view is presented that redefines the earliest relationship in terms of communicational exchanges, mediation, and dialogue. The claim is that understanding the nature of mediated communication keeps language central to psychoanalysis and reestablishes an intrapsychic dimension in the concept of relationship that is lost when relationship is reduced to behavioral patterns.