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In this article, we offer some reflections on the concept of surprise by questioning its place and role in the practice of analytic processes. After discussing some elements related to the preconditions for surprise to occur in the analytic framework, in particular the dialectic between predictability and unpredictability, we examine the particularities of the mental state that favors states of surprise by drawing on the notions of »negative capability« and »selected fact«. We would like to propose a typology of moments of surprise that may be encountered in the analytical framework and that reveals their heterogeneous and polymorphic dimensions. Surprise can indeed vary in its temporality and intensity and can be experienced by both the analyst and the analysand separately or together. Surprise thus appears as an expression of unconscious meaning according to a reorganization of its relation to defense mechanisms such as splitting or repression. It could also maintain variable relationships with other sensory impressions such as astonishment, horror, and disconcerting strangeness. We further propose to consider surprise as an essential feature of the symbolization process to which the analyst pays particular attention. From this perspective, it appears as an expression of an encounter with the unexpected at the interface between the inside and the outside, between pleasure and displeasure, which is why it is so central to the work of psychic integration. It therefore occupies an essential place in analytic work and is catalyzed by the occurrence of transference and free association. Finally, the article concludes with some thoughts on surprise at the intersection of psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and epistemology, drawing in particular on Karl Friston’s work on the Bayesian brain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The device of analytic psychodrama with its own peculiar characteristics, according to the method developed by Dr. Lemoine, at the design level, was well suited to the medium to long-term treatment needs of patients in charge of SerDP. The experience itself was innovative with respect to the field of application, it met the design expectations not only from a clinical point of view, but also from an economic point of view. The most important part, however, remains the clinical one, and from this point of view the numbers represented in the tables of the text are also encouraging. An important fact to underline concern the effectiveness of the method in its progress, which not only confirmed the expected expectations, but also exceeded them. From this we can deduce the reproducibility of the experience, which has as an indispensable condition a thorough training of the two psychotherapists involved in its application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Free association" and the "fundamental rule" are bedrock for psychoanalytic therapy and apply to what both patient and analyst should experience in the process. The article traces Sigmund Freud's revolutionary recognition of the importance of free association that began with his tribute to the works of Ludwig Börne and Friedrich Schiller. The author invokes other proposals akin to free association made by artists and scientists, including John Keats, Charles Dickens, Robert Frost, Thomas S. Kuhn, Arthur Koestler, and Albert Einstein. While emphasizing the importance and the liberatory potential of free association as it relates to effective treatment and discovery, the author contends that there is a "moral press" for both the patient and the analyst to permit free associative thoughts, particularly to question assumptions about how things are supposed to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The educational and clinical effects of the process of case writing during analytic training have not been extensively studied, even though the case report, as a product, has prompted attempts to make it a more revealing and accurate document. Countertransference experiences during an analysis can constrain both the candidate's writing and the analytic work, while examining them during the writing process can deepen the candidate's analytic work. Three overlapping resistances to the writing, and their underlying anxieties, are described. These are publication resistances: concerns about the anticipated reception of the candidate's work by potentially critical readers; transference resistances: feelings toward the analytic institute that requires the writing; and countertransference or reimmersion resistances: fears of reawakening reactions from the analysis. These can interfere with finding a safe internal space in which to write. Examples are given of writing through of these resistances during case supervision, resulting in more open writing and in a deepening of the analytic work. As the case writing process can have direct and potentially profound effects on the candidate's current and future analytic work, it is proposed that the process of case writing is a fourth pillar of analytic training, in addition to the candidate's personal analysis, case supervision, and didactic seminars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poet Robert Priest presents a selection of what he calls 'meme-splices', or micro poems, which he composes through free association originating in brief phrases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arts for Linguistic & Literary Studies is the property of Thamar University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Degradation of ethics and morality during adolescence poses a threat that can hinder or even jeopardize the future of teenagers. This counseling is conducted to provide education and a deep understanding of how teenagers can build strong morals and develop positive adolescent ethics. The counseling uses the PAR approach with the aid of media such as laptops, LCD projectors, and materials as primary tools for conveying information. The results of the counseling show: the event was conducted very well, with excellent interaction between the presenter and participants. The presenter effectively and smoothly delivered information about ethics and morality, the causes of their decline, and strategies for prevention. Conclusion: The counseling on ethics and morality has a positive psychological impact as participants are able to understand the material well.

This paper is mainly concerned with the conception of free will in Freudian theory and psychoanalytic ego psychology. There are a number of Freuds, not all consistent with each other, on the issue of free will: the Freud who views free will as an illusion, the Freud who identifies as a goal of psychoanalytic treatment the enhancement of the ego’s freedom to choose, and the Freud who locates control of motility (action) in the conscious ego. As for an ego psychology perspective, free will lies in the ego’s relative autonomy from drives, as well as in the freedom to not will and to relinquish control. In contrast to Freudian theory and ego psychology, the question of free will is not salient in post-Freudian theories, where the greater emphasis is on issues having to do with meeting needs rather than on gratification of wishes. Finally, free will is not only a matter of freedom from inner compulsion, but also of freedom from external coercion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proper names habitually express the cultural and social characteristics of a group; therefore, they express collective confirmation of a sense of self-image, affiliations, and emotional anchors. The goal of this investigation is to help deepen our understanding of the onomastic identity revealed in the collective discourse and manifested through the memetic features of onyms. The research presented here consolidated onomastics, psycholinguistics, memetics, and cultural studies. The focus of this investigation is on the changing collective onomastic identity in the Ukrainian society. The data for this research was gathered from two free associative experiments carried out with Ukrainian respondents in 2006 and 2021. In both years, respondents were presented with identical lists of stimuli. Both corpora reveal proper names with memetic features that were preserved in collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Umm Al-Qura University Journal for Languages & Literature is the property of Association of Arab Universities and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Two distinct spaces can be seen as operating in a session—a private one in the analyst's mind, where formulations take shape, and one shared between patient and analyst, in which interpretations are offered. By maintaining a focus on the here and now in the latter space, taking care to protect it from intrusions from the analyst's theory except as hypotheses (in the form of interpretations derived from those formulations) aimed at eliciting unconscious responses that further the analytic inquiry, a basis for analytic work is established that aligns with ordinary scientific processes: theory is generated in the mind of the researcher, and hypotheses derived from it are tested systematically in a laboratory setting. Self-understanding that develops out of such an arrangement can then be seen as based on evidence, minimizing the role of suggestion. This line of thinking is illustrated with excerpts from the beginning of the analysis of a depressed patient. In developing areas of theory, when reliable evidence is particularly important, this way of working holds promise. In this case evidence was systematically gathered that led to the formulation of a model of internal racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proper names habitually express the cultural and social characteristics of a group; therefore, they express collective confirmation of a sense of self-image, affiliations, and emotional anchors. The goal of this investigation is to help deepen our understanding of the onomastic identity revealed in the collective discourse and manifested through the memetic features of onyms. The research presented here consolidated onomastics, psycholinguistics, memetics, and cultural studies. The focus of this investigation is on the changing collective onomastic identity in the Ukrainian society. The data for this research was gathered from two free associative experiments carried out with Ukrainian respondents in 2006 and 2021. In both years, respondents were presented with identical lists of stimuli. Both corpora reveal proper names with memetic features that were preserved in collective memory.

The associative manner by which thoughts follow one another has intrigued scholars for decades. The process by which an association is generated in response to a cue can be explained by classic models of semantic processing through distinct computational mechanisms. Distributed attractor networks implement rich-get-richer dynamics and assume that stronger associations can be reached with fewer steps. Conversely, spreading activation models assume that a cue distributes its activation, in parallel, to all associations at a constant rate. Despite these models' huge influence, their intractability together with the unconstrained nature of free association have restricted their few previous uses to qualitative predictions. To test these computational mechanisms quantitatively, we conceptualize free association as the product of internal evidence accumulation and generate predictions concerning the speed and strength of people's associations. To this end, we first develop a novel approach to mapping the personalized space of words from which an individual chooses an association to a given cue. We then use state-of-the-art evidence accumulation models to demonstrate the function of rich-get-richer dynamics on the one hand and of stochasticity in the rate of spreading activation on the other hand, in preventing an exceedingly slow resolution of the competition among myriad potential associations. Furthermore, whereas our results uniformly indicate that stronger associations require less evidence, only in combination with rich-get-richer dynamics does this explain why weak associations are slow yet prevalent. We discuss implications for models of semantic processing and evidence accumulation and offer recommendations for practical applications and individual-differences research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Free association among words is a fundamental and ubiquitous memory task. Although distributed semantics (DS) models can predict the association between pairs of words, and semantic network (SN) models can describe transition probabilities in free association data, there have been few attempts to apply established cognitive process models of memory search to free association data. Thus, researchers are currently unable to explain the dynamics of free association using memory mechanisms known to be at play in other retrieval tasks, such as free recall from lists. We address this issue using a popular neural network model of free recall, the context maintenance and retrieval (CMR) model, which we fit using stochastic gradient descent on a large data set of free association norms. Special cases of CMR mimic existing DS and SN models of free association, and we find that CMR outperforms these models on out-of-sample free association data. We also show that training CMR on free association data generates improved predictions for free recall from lists, demonstrating the value of free association for the study of many different types of memory phenomena. Overall, our analysis provides a new account of the dynamics of free association, predicts free association with increased accuracy, integrates theories of free association with established models of memory, and shows how large data sets and neural network training methods can be used to model complex cognitive processes that operate over thousands of representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of underutilized concepts in Lacan's "Function and Field of Language and Speech in Psychoanalysis" are examined with an eye to rendering them accessible and practicable to analysts from outside the Lacanian tradition. The concepts of empty and full speech are discussed, along with the notions of the subject of the unconscious, and speaking as itself a mode of intersubjectivity. Attention is afforded the future-oriented mode of psychic temporality that Lacan argues pertains to psychoanalytic practice (that of the future anterior tense, the standpoint from which analysands situate themselves in respect of what they "will have been"). These concepts are then linked to technical initiatives—such as punctuation (the "editorial" role the analyst plays in reference to the analysand's speech) and scansion (the use of suspension, interruption, or cutting to highlight facets of that speech). These techniques can be read as extensions of Freud's fundamental rule of free association insofar as they aim to disrupt defensive ego narratives, engage unconscious processes, and draw analysands' attention, in a potentially transformative manner, to their speech and what it does. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This comment paper reviews Fossa (2022) from the perspective of the semiotics of inner speech. The syntactic and semantic features of inner speech described in Vygotsky, Thinking and Speech, Chap. 7, are, on the one hand, a source of creativity through the affective dimension of inner spech and, on the other hand, a therapeutic function of psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy. The function of inner speech in the pre-reflective dimension is the focus of Fossa's edited volume. In order to reinforce this argument, the present paper takes as its cue the internal forms of words discussed by Potebnya and examines them. The internal form of words has certain primordial features and evokes a figure (образ; picture). Internal forms have figurative properties. Through this context-independent figuration (phonological, visual image, experiential sense of meaning), semantics causes a unit with other words in a loose semantic linkage. As they are not bound by the external form of segmented speech, they bring about a sense of reification, as if the internal form repeats itself in the proximity of semantic sense, even if the manifested expressive content is different. The internal form of words, in which the form conveys meaning as it is, reveals the semiotic character of dreams and free association, which psychoanalysis uses as clinical material. Many psychotherapies actively use pre-linguistic mediating effects, because surrendering to the internal forms that are repeated in inner speech allows the subject to return to a pre-reflective dimension from which a new subject can be recovered. From the above, this paper has shown that in the boundary zone of the transition from inner speech to outer speech situations, exposure to alterity, to intimate unknown, is involved in the constitution of the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media has profound impact on how we experience the world and interact with others. Rapidly advancing technology has created platforms that have become increasingly image-based and emotionally manipulative. Do the new patterns of communication change patients' mental processes? Is free association becoming more imagistic? Contemporary clinical settings invite new perspectives on the intersections between the social and individual realms, patients' modes of expression, and analysts' interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(1) Objective: Social representations theory (SRT) is a body of theory within social psychology concerned with how individuals, groups, and communities collectively make sense of socially relevant or problematic issues, ideas, and practices. SRT has been increasingly sued in the area of health and disability. The current study examined the social representations of “tinnitus” and “health” among individuals with tinnitus who are seeking online psychological interventions. (2) Materials/Method: The data were gathered using a free association task about their “tinnitus” and “health” from 399 individuals with tinnitus. The data were analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative analyses methods. (3) Results: The responses resulted in 39 and 30 categories respectively, for “tinnitus” and “health”. The most commonly occurring categories for tinnitus included: descriptions of tinnitus (18%), annoying (13.5%), persistent (8%), and distracting (5%). The most commonly occurring categories for health included: content (12%), conditions (8%), active (7%), take control (6%), and overweight (5%). The responses to tinnitus had predominantly negative connotations (i.e., 76.9%) whereas a larger proportion of responses toward their health was related to positive connotations (i.e., 46.4%). These frequently occurring items were also dominant in similarities analysis. Prototypical analysis of tinnitus responses identified categories horrible and bothersome to be key items in the central zone. The categories in central zone of health responses included: content, active, healthy, grateful, and overweight. (4) Conclusions: Individuals with tinnitus have very negative view of their tinnitus impacting their psychological status. Tinnitus management should focus on reducing the negative associations toward their tinnitus and strengthen the positive aspects related to their general health.

How do people make everyday decisions in order to achieve the most successful outcome? Decision making research typically evaluates choices according to their expected utility. However, this research largely focuses outcome is successful and satisfying for the decision maker. Instead, we use an everyday decision making task in which participants describe a personally meaningful decision they are currently facing. We investigate the decision processes used to make this decision, and evaluate how successful and satisfying the outcome of the decision is for them. We examine how well analytic, attribute-based processes explain everyday decision making and predict decision outcomes, and we compare these processes to associative processes elicited through free association. We also examine the characteristics of decisions and individuals that are associated with good decision outcomes. Across three experiments we found that: 1) an analytic decision analysis of everyday decisions is not superior to simpler attribute-based processes in predicting decision outcomes; 2) contrary to research linking associative cognition to biases, free association generates valid cues that predict choice and decision outcomes as effectively as attribute-based approaches; 3) contrary to research favouring either attribute-based or associative processes, combining both attribute-based and associates best explains everyday decisions and most accurately predicts decision outcomes; and 4) individuals with a tendency to attempt analytic thinking do not make more successful everyday decisions. Instead, frequency, simplicity, and knowledge of the decision predict success. We propose that attribute-based and associative processes, in combination, both explain everyday decision making and predict successful decision outcomes.

(1) Objective: Social representations theory (SRT) is a body of theory within social psychology concerned with how individuals, groups, and communities collectively make sense of socially relevant or problematic issues, ideas, and practices. SRT has been increasingly sued in the area of health and disability. The current study examined the social representations of "tinnitus" and "health" among individuals with tinnitus who are seeking online psychological interventions. (2) Materials/Method: The data were gathered using a free association task about their "tinnitus" and "health" from 399 individuals with tinnitus. The data were analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative analyses methods. (3) Results: The responses resulted in 39 and 30 categories respectively, for "tinnitus" and "health". The most commonly occurring categories for tinnitus included: descriptions of tinnitus (18%), annoying (13.5%), persistent (8%), and distracting (5%). The most commonly occurring categories for health included: content (12%), conditions (8%), active (7%), take control (6%), and overweight (5%). The responses to tinnitus had predominantly negative connotations (i.e., 76.9%) whereas a larger proportion of responses toward their health was related to positive connotations (i.e., 46.4%). These frequently occurring items were also dominant in similarities analysis. Prototypical analysis of tinnitus responses identified categories horrible and bothersome to be key items in the central zone. The categories in central zone of health responses included: content, active, healthy, grateful, and overweight. (4) Conclusions: Individuals with tinnitus have very negative view of their tinnitus impacting their psychological status. Tinnitus management should focus on reducing the negative associations toward their tinnitus and strengthen the positive aspects related to their general health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud, early in psychoanalytic history, modified hypnotic technique and recommended, in its stead, free association. This paper takes a close look at the theoretical foundations of that technique in light of theoretical developments over the past hundred plus years. It is argued that free association is similar to an asymptote, which is never quite reached. Moreover, it is argued that the direction to free associate is contraindicated in many, if not most, psychological disturbances. Guided association or avoidance of free association is sometimes required. For a limited group of patients, whose major ego functions (abstraction, integration, and reality testing), ego strengths (impulse control, affect tolerance, and containing primary process), object relations (capacities for empathy, trust, and closeness), and superego (shame/guilt) are intact, the direction to use the couch and attempt to free associate may still be quite useful. For most people who present for treatment, however, this approach is likely not beneficial. The complex arguments about the decision-making process regarding free association are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Research in Educational & Human Sciences Arts & Languages is the property of Research & Development of Human Recourses Center (REMAH) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

People's understanding of topics and concepts such as risk, sustainability, and intelligence can be important for psychological researchers and policymakers alike. One underexplored way of accessing this information is to use free associations to map people's mental representations. In this tutorial, we describe how free association responses can be collected, processed, mapped, and compared across groups using the R package associatoR . We discuss study design choices and different approaches to uncovering the structure of mental representations using natural language processing, including the use of embeddings from large language models. We posit that free association analysis presents a powerful approach to revealing how people and machines represent key social and technological issues., Competing Interests: The authors have no competing interests to declare., (Copyright: © 2025 The Author(s).)

While developments within psychoanalytic thought have expanded our understanding of the phenomenon of countertransference and its meaning, clinicians are often left with a sense that negative countertransference is a sign of a therapist's own "unfinished business." Within the context of clinical supervision, the model of putting countertransference reactions through The Therapist Translator is introduced as a means of exploring how to best give voice to and make use of the emotional responses that arise from within the intersubjective analytic field. In this article, the authors introduce a group process dynamic that utilizes the free association of multiple clinicians to assist in "translating" relatively unformulated material into conscious, linguistic information that can be incorporated into the treatment.

How do people make everyday decisions in order to achieve the most successful outcome? Decision making research typically evaluates choices according to their expected utility. However, this research largely focuses on abstract or hypothetical tasks and rarely investigates whether the outcome is successful and satisfying for the decision maker. Instead, we use an everyday decision making task inwhich participants describe a personally meaningful decision they are currently facing. We investigate the decision processes used to make this decision, and evaluate how successful and satisfying the outcome of the decision is for them. We examine how well analytic, attribute-based processes explain everyday decision making and predict decision outcomes, and we compare these processes to associative processes elicited through free association. We also examine the characteristics of decisions and individuals that are associated with good decision outcomes. Across three experiments we found that: 1) an analytic decision analysis of everyday decisions is not superior to simpler attribute-based processes in predicting decision outcomes; 2) contrary to research linking associative cognition to biases, free association generates valid cues that predict choice and decision outcomes as effectively as attribute-based approaches; 3) contrary to research favouring either attribute-based or associative processes, combining both attribute-based and associates best explains everyday decisions and most accurately predicts decision outcomes; and 4) individuals with a tendency to attempt analytic thinking do not make more successful everyday decisions. Instead, frequency, simplicity, and knowledge of the decision predict success. We propose that attribute-based and associative processes, in combination, both explain everyday decision making and predict successful decision outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Psicoterapia y Psicosomática is the property of Instituto de Estudios Psicosomaticos & Psicoterapia Medica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of RumeliDE Journal of Language & Literature Research / RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of RumeliDE Uluslararasi Hakemli Dil & Edebiyat Arastirmalari Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Human free association (FA) norms are believed to reflect thestrength of links between words in the lexicon of an averagespeaker. Large-scale FA norms are commonly used as a datasource both in psycholinguistics and in computational mod-eling. However, few studies aim to analyze FA norms them-selves, and it is not known what are the most important factorsthat guide speakers’ lexical choices in the FA task. Here, wefirst provide a statistical analysis of a large-scale data set ofEnglish FA norms. Second, we argue that such analysis caninform existing computational models of semantic memory,and present a case study with the topic model to support thisclaim. Based on our analysis, we provide the topic model withdictionary-based knowledge about word synonymy/antonymy,and demonstrate that the resulting model predicts human FAresponses better than the topic model without this information.

Abstract Background There is a knowledge gap in whether psychopathology aspects can shape and mark the social representations about health and lifestyle. In this work, we investigated the association of psychopathology and shame with the centrality of the words describing eight common social representations of health and lifestyle. Methods A convenience sample of 288 adults participated with an average age of 44.7, and 62.6% were women. The participants were asked to express three consecutive words associated with eight different health and lifestyle experiences by utilizing the free association method. The participants also were completed the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R), the Experiences of Shame Scale (ESS), and the Other as Shamer Scale (OAS). Canonical correlation analysis was applied to investigate the relationship between the set of the eight-word centralities and the psycho-demographic variables consisting of the subject's age and gender, the SCL 90 subscales, the OAS, and the ESS. Based on these findings, a structural equation explorative model was formed to test the unidimensionality of the five centralities construct. Results Τhe psychological characteristics of interpersonal sensitivity, depression, external shame, and hostility were found to affect the word selection process on the social representations concerning nightlife, health, diet, lifestyle, and alcohol consumption. Participants with increased levels of depression tend to choose more centrally positioned words when the stimulus word was diet and more decentralized responses when the stimulus word was health. At the same time, higher external shame corresponded to more decentralized words for the categories of health and lifestyle. Conclusions Our results indicate that there is a potential interaction between the psychological state and how a social representation of health and lifestyle is constructed through selected words. Graph theory emerged as an additional tool to use to study these relations.

In this paper I propose a model of the fundamental components of psychoanalytic psychotherapies that I try to explicate with contemporary theories of the Bayesian brain and the Free Energy Principle (FEP). I first show that psychoanalytic therapies require a setting (made up of several envelopes), a particular psychic state and specific processes (transference, free association, dreaming, play, reflexivity and narrativity) in order to induce psychic transformations. I then analyze how these processes of transformations operate and how they can be enlightened by the FEP. I first underline the fact that psychoanalytic therapies imply non-linear processes taking time to unfold and require a setting containing high entropy processes. More precisely, these processes are characterized by an interplay between extension and reduction of free energy. This interplay also favors the emergence of new orders of subjective experience, which occur following states of disorder, according to a certain energetic threshold allowing the modification and improvement of mental functioning. These high entropy states are also characterized by random functioning and psychic malleability which favors the exploration of subjective experience in an original manner. Overall, the approach proposed in this paper support the dialogue between psychoanalysis and other fields of research while underlining how psychoanalytical theoretical and conceptual constructs can also be useful to other disciplines, in particular the neurosciences of subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychoanalysis has, almost since its inception, regarded artistic creation as a privileged window to more universal psychological dynamics. If creative writing is interesting in itself, its failure can be fascinating. It is not unusual for some successful authors to find themselves unable to write. They suffer what is commonly known has "writer's block," a term coined by the psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler in his seminal study of blocked writers in the 1940s and 50s. This paper illustrates how the psychoanalytic study of "writer's block" can go way beyond Bergler's theorization. A writer who cannot write is also someone experiencing inner conflict, a self not living up to its expectations, a person that has lost the ability to play. Freudian, ego psychology, and object relations theory are some of the theoretical lenses used to look at "writer's block," and to show how this circumscribed phenomenon can shed light on more common struggles and muddles. A brief narration of the author's experience of writer's block is presented as an illustration of the parallels between psychoanalysis and writing, especially regarding the importance and use of reverie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: To influence educational psychology practice by sharing key themes from research and work capturing young peoples' experiences of engaging with youth offending services (YOS). Rationale: The prioritisation of the voice of the child in educational psychology practice is central to inclusivity (Davie, 1993; Messiou, 2002). Professionals capture and respond to the voices of children and young people, with varying degrees of authenticity, accountability and longevity (Hart, 1992; Hart et al., 2004). It is important that adults facilitate and support meaningful participation (Hart, 2008) by employing appropriate methods to enable young people to share their narratives. This paper seeks to influence educational psychology practice through the authentic voice of young people; focusing on what they say works when they are engaging with youth offending services, and highlighting accessible methods used to elicit voices. Method: The author discusses their experience of using free associative methods; the Grid Elaboration Method (GEM) (Joffe & Elsey, 2014) and the Free Association Narrative Interview (FANI) (Hollway & Jefferson, 2008) as part of their qualitative doctoral research with five young people recruited through a local authority YOS, answering the research question 'What do participants talk about when asked about their engagement experiences with youth offending services?' The author describes how these approaches facilitated accessible means to hearing young peoples' voices, capturing their views through codes and themes illuminated through thematic analysis. Prioritisation of child voice during this formative experience inspired a co-production project creating a whiteboard video describing young peoples' experience of working with a YOS. It provided space, voice, audience and influence to young people involved (Lundy, 2007) and through it, an accessible resource exists for those who may engage with YOS in the future. Limitations: The small number of participants recruited for the original research study (five) and the co-production project in YOS (six), impedes generalisability. Further limitations relate to the interpretivist nature of the original piece of research and following co-production project. The psycho-social approach, inherently acknowledges the subjective nature of analysis undertaken, suggesting that each individual researcher may analyse the data from a subjective perspective and therefore may come to different themes than those illuminated by this researcher. Implications and discussion: Themes that emerged through the script and visual imagery during the co-production project are linked back to key themes from the author's original research. Key considerations for educational psychologists working in YOS are shared, focusing on the role educational psychologists can play in supporting young peoples' meaningful engagement through supporting relationship and identity development and the structural processes that serve psychological functions. Proposals for educational psychology roles in YOS that provide consultative and supervisory support as well as in strategic shaping of services are also shared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distinguishing feature of psychoanalytic treatment, compared to other forms of treatment, is that it offers the opportunity to go through experiences and thereby develop to become a more psychologically experienced person. The aim of this paper is first of all to try to clarify, with the help of the philosophy of Hegel, Heidegger and Gadamer, what it means to 'go through an experience', to 'learn from experience' and to 'become experienced'. Next, and on the basis of the clarification of the concept of experience, the aim is to develop an understanding of the clinical challenges psychoanalysis is facing when it tries to offer a kind of contact that will enable the patient, in the best case scenario, to go through the experiences that she/he has never before permitted her/himself to go through. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a socio-anthropological consideration of psychoanalysis, we propose the dream as a way to access the study of malaise and as a territory for social research. The Transdisciplinary Laboratory in Social Practices and Subjectivity (LaPSoS) presents its theoretical and methodological contributions through a study entitled, "Everyday life, dreams and adolescent malaise". We outline the data collection protocol and its analysis matrix. We conclude by identifying research possibilities in the oneiric realm in which the tool of free association, a psychoanalytic method of dream interpretation put at the service of social research, made it possible to trace articulations between problems classically considered as either individual or social. This same method allowed the participants to guide the interpretation from their own associations. We propose that dreams are a relevant terrain for the study of contemporary subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I propose a model of the fundamental components of psychoanalytic psychotherapies that I try to explicate with contemporary theories of the Bayesian brain and the Free Energy Principle (FEP). I first show that psychoanalytic therapies require a setting (made up of several envelopes), a particular psychic state and specific processes (transference, free association, dreaming, play, reflexivity and narrativity) in order to induce psychic transformations. I then analyze how these processes of transformations operate and how they can be enlightened by the FEP. I first underline the fact that psychoanalytic therapies imply non-linear processes taking time to unfold and require a setting containing high entropy processes. More precisely, these processes are characterized by an interplay between extension and reduction of free energy. This interplay also favors the emergence of new orders of subjective experience, which occur following states of disorder, according to a certain energetic threshold allowing the modification and improvement of mental functioning. These high entropy states are also characterized by random functioning and psychic malleability which favors the exploration of subjective experience in an original manner. Overall, the approach proposed in this paper support the dialogue between psychoanalysis and other fields of research while underlining how psychoanalytical theoretical and conceptual constructs can also be useful to other disciplines, in particular the neurosciences of subjectivity.

ABSTRACT Objective: To analyze the structure and contents of transgender women’s social representations of their bodies and body modification practices. Methods: Research conducted with 92 women using the Snowball technique. The data were collected using the free evocation of words technique and processed by the Evoc software, which organized the central and peripheral elements. Results: The representation of the real body includes two structuring aspects: one related to the need to adapt/modify the body conformation according to the self-reported gender, because of the dissatisfaction with the body itself; the second reveals the happiness/satisfaction considering the results obtained through the body modification/adaptation practices adopted in the transition. Final considerations: The body is constituted as a complex object and was represented by elements that reinforce the understanding of body modifications as needs, with a view to satisfaction, personal fulfillment, and care of one’s own body.

Through classical conditioning procedure, subjects give the conditioned response to the neutral stimuli (to which at the beginning no response was elicited) as a result of its pairing with the unconditioned stimuli. To reverse this procedure, extinction paradigm is performed. Several problems might arise as a result of the extinction process that are renewal, reinstatement, and spontaneous recovery of the conditioned response. However, memory reconsolidation view seems to offer considerable solutions to those problems. Accordingly, acquired memories do not stay in their consolidated and stable state. Instead, every time they are reactivated, they become labile and then reconsolidated again with the subsequent protein synthesis. Thus, interventions during this labile state would offer modifications in the original memory, meaning that they could also provide a solution to the problems arisen as a result of extinction procedure. In the light of the neuropsychoanalytic literature, the current review examined whether or not the technique of free association would lead to the reactivation of original memories while rendering them labile which might also result in modifications in them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple versions of the Chinese Remote Associates Test (CRAT) have been developed. Thus far, all CRATs have employed verbal stimuli; other forms of stimuli have not yet been used. In this context, the present study compiled a Chinese Visual Remote Associates Test (CVRAT) that conforms to the Chinese language and culture based on a picture naming database. The developed CVRAT has two versions, CVRAT-A and CVRAT-B, each comprising 20 test questions. A typical CVRAT question consists of three stimuli pictures, requiring respondents to propose a target word that is semantically associated with all the pictures. When compiling the CVRAT, this study first selected target words, sifted through stimuli words and corresponding pictures, and analyzed pilot test questions. After compilation, their reliability and validity were examined. The results showed that the CVRAT had moderate internal consistency reliability, good criterion-related validity for the Chinese Word Remote Associates Test (CWRAT), Chinese Radical Remote Associates Test (CRRAT), Chinese Compound Remote Associates Test (CCRAT), insight problem-solving, as well as acceptable discriminant validity for fluency, flexibility, and originality of a divergent thinking test. In other words, CVRAT can effectively measure remote associative capability and provides a figural creativity test that facilitates the understanding of different kinds of remote associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]