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Adopting this stance is challenging because it requires the candidate or analyst to give up the idealization of psychoanalysis and often of the training analyst that can lie behind claims to exceptionalism and replace it with a realistic assessment. In this brief contribution, I revisit ideas that I have expressed over the past twenty years (e.g. Tuckett [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18]; Tuckett et al. [19]) and collect them together to outline six significant and inter-related barriers currently in place which prevent psychoanalysts, on the whole, from having a productive debate with each other and also with those in other disciplines, or society more generally. As Denis puts it, "If the are not to limit themselves to indoctrinating their patients with ready-made formulas, psychoanalysts must allow themselves to be taken over by their patient's psychic functioning" ([3], 43). Denis suggests that due to their everyday clinical experience analysts find it very hard to loosen their attachment to their own model of doing psychoanalysis, in part due to what he calls the traumatic quality of their work and its emotional uncertainties, which tempts them to a fetishistic solution. [Extracted from the article]

This paper investigates the role of sentiment in the US economy from 1920 to 1934 using digitised articles from The Wall Street Journal. We derive a monthly sentiment index and use a 10‐variable vector error correction model to identify sentiment shocks that are orthogonal to fundamentals. We show the timing and strength of these shocks and their resultant effects on the economy using historical decompositions. Intermittent impacts of up to 15 per cent on industrial production, 10 per cent on the S&P 500 and bank loans, and 37 basis points for the credit risk spread suggest a large role for sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas most commentators agree about the centrality of narratives in decision-making, the commentaries revealed little consensus about the nature of radical uncertainty. Here we consider thirteen objections to our views, including our characterization of the uncertain decision environment and associated cognitive, affective, and social processes. We conclude that under radical uncertainty, narratives rather than probabilities are the currency of thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT) is a theory of choice under radical uncertainty – situations where outcomes cannot be enumerated and probabilities cannot be assigned. Whereas most theories of choice assume that people rely on (potentially biased) probabilistic judgments, such theories cannot account for adaptive decision-making when probabilities cannot be assigned. CNT proposes that people use narratives – structured representations of causal, temporal, analogical, and valence relationships – rather than probabilities, as the currency of thought that unifies our sense-making and decision-making faculties. According to CNT, narratives arise from the interplay between individual cognition and the social environment, with reasoners adopting a narrative that feels "right" to explain the available data; using that narrative to imagine plausible futures; and affectively evaluating those imagined futures to make a choice. Evidence from many areas of the cognitive, behavioral, and social sciences supports this basic model, including lab experiments, interview studies, and econometric analyses. We identify 12 propositions to explain how the mental representations (narratives) interact with four inter-related processes (explanation, simulation, affective evaluation, and communication), examining the theoretical and empirical basis for each. We conclude by discussing how CNT can provide a common vocabulary for researchers studying everyday choices across areas of the decision sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution argues that Bouvet’s (1958) paper formulates a dilemma for psychoanalytic technique – what to do if the frame within which the analyst is working appears to require departure from core technique? Bouvet’s concern was that too much intuitive adaptation might promote, in effect, ›anything goes‹. He proposed his concept of distance, anchored in his original and important understanding of the formation of object relations, as a heuristic to test adaptations to situations in which patients are severely unable to separate the objects of their projection from the objects themselves. For me the dilemma is well stated, but I argue that its understanding and solution depends above all on clarity about what is supposed to constitute core technique and what a departure from it. The fragmentation of technique and loss of common understanding in today’s psychoanalytic world makes that difficult. Therefore, I approach my evaluation of Bouvet’s thinking by introducing ideas about the core suppositions every psychoanalyst must make, whether implicitly or explicitly, when he is working: suppositions about unconscious inference, unconscious repetition, the analytic situation and how to further the analytic process. I argue that the suppositions are rather different in what I sketch as the ›insight‹, ›here and now‹ and ›associative‹ approaches to psychoanalysis that characterise the modern scene. Practice that I have observed through the European comparative clinical methods project over 20 years, suggests that, under the intense emotional pressure of the clinical situation, adaptations have taken place in all three approaches so that many of the core suppositions that Freud gave us have been more or less inadvertently left behind. Bouvet proposed his concept of optimal distance as a heuristic check to allow the analyst to ask if he is stepping out of being an analyst. That check remains valuable. But how it is made depends on which of the three approaches the analyst supposes he is using and the suppositions made within them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do people form expectations about the future? We use amateur and expert investors' expectations about financial asset prices to study this question. Three experiments contrast the rational expectations assumption from neoclassical economics (investors forecast according to neoclassical financial theory) against two psychological theories of expectation formation—behaviorally informed expectations (investors understand empirical market anomalies and expect these anomalies to occur) and narrative expectations (investors use narrative thinking to predict future prices). Whereas neoclassical financial theory maintains that past public information cannot be used to predict future prices, participants used company performance information revealed before a base price quotation to project future price trends after that quotation (Experiment 1), contradicting rational expectations. Importantly, these projections were stronger when information concerned predictions about a company's future performance rather than actual data about its past performance, suggesting that people not only rely on financially irrelevant (but narratively relevant) information for making predictions but erroneously impose temporal order on that information. These biased predictions had downstream consequences for asset allocation choices (Experiment 2), and these choices were driven in part by affective reactions to the company performance news (Experiment 3). There were some mild effects of expertise, but overall the effects of narrative appear to be consistent across all levels of expertise studied, including professional financial analysts. We conclude by discussing the prospects for a narrative theory of choice that provide new microfoundational insights about economic behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing ecosystem of peer-to-peer enterprise – the Sharing Economy (SE) – has brought with it a substantial change in how we access and provide goods and services. Within the SE, individuals make decisions based mainly on user-generated trust and reputation information (TRI). Recent research indicates that the use of such information tends to produce a positivity bias in the perceived trustworthiness of fellow users. Across two experimental studies performed on an artificial SE accommodation platform, we test whether users' judgments can be accurate when presented with diagnostic information relating to the quality of the profiles they see or if these overly positive perceptions persist. In study 1, we find that users are quite accurate overall (70%) at determining the quality of a profile, both when presented with full profiles or with profiles where they selected three TRI elements they considered useful for their decision-making. However, users tended to exhibit an "upward quality bias" when making errors. In study 2, we leveraged patterns of frequently vs. infrequently selected TRI elements to understand whether users have insights into which are more diagnostic and find that presenting frequently selected TRI elements improved users' accuracy. Overall, our studies demonstrate that – positivity bias notwithstanding – users can be remarkably accurate in their online SE judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]