Equivalence in Freud's Primary Process.

Freud's concept of the primary process, when confined to the selection of objects for the formation of dreams or symptoms, depends strongly on the concept of association, which in turn depends strongly on the logic of pars pro toto. An examination of how Freud saw the primary process selecting objects leads to the identification of an equivalence relationship as governing his model. This results in a logical understanding of how the primary process works in forming associations and choosing candidate objects for dreams and symptoms. The relationship of this result to the work of Matte Blanco is also discussed, and the insights of this paper are applied to defining Freud's concept of a complex.

Why nature doesn't turn off neurosis.

This paper develops an integration of psychoanalytic and wisdom tradition concepts to answer the question as to why nature does not turn off neurosis, The proposed answer is that nature wants a person to exploit the neurosis for two gains, one being the increase in adaptive capacity resulting from releasing it and the second involving the difficulty in the release itself, the latter related to gains proffered by the world's wisdom traditions. These see a movement from the psyche's creation by passive, unconscious means of finite promise rooted in parental love to creation by active, consciously chosen means of unlimited promise involving a direct relationship with nature and the Cosmos.

Job's story and family health.

This paper examines the book of Job for encoded psychological meaning. Its main conclusion is that the story imagery expresses a need to rectify fatherly and parental oblivion for a child who is the object of the destructive envy of a sibling. A family dynamic is constructed from the story's repeated emphasis of Job's blamelessness and the story's position that Satan both proposes and causes Job's sufferings. The emergent family model sees Job as representing a son, Satan an envious rival, and God a father or parent(s). This paper proposes that Job's story may be reactive to a period where male authority was at risk of becoming excessive, threatening family and community health.

Distressed mothers and their infants use a less efficient timing mechanism in creating expectancies of each other's looking patterns.

The prediction of events and the creation of expectancies about their time course is a crucial aspect of an infant's mental life, but temporal mechanisms underlying these predictions are obscure. Scalar timing, in which the ratio of mean durations to their standard deviations is held constant, enables a person to use an estimate of the mean for its standard deviation. It is one efficient mechanism that may facilitate predictability and the creation of expectancies in mother-infant interaction. We illustrate this mechanism with the dyadic gaze rhythm of mother and infant looking at and looking away from each other's faces. Two groups of Hi- and Lo-Distress mothers were created using self-reported depression, anxiety, self-criticism and childhood experiences. Lo-Distress infants (controls) used scalar timing 100% of the time, about double that of Hi-Distress infants. Lo-Distress mothers used scalar timing about nine times as much as Hi-Distress mothers. The diminished use of scalar timing patterns in Hi-Distress mothers and infants may make the anticipation of each other's gaze patterns more difficult for both partners.