Responses to Shapiro and Silber

The Psychoanalytic Review, 2012

Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, 2020

The invitation to review a single volume of Barnaby B. Barratt’s trilogy, collectively an homage to free association, turned into an occasion for serendipitous revelation. I wound up discovering a leading contemporary psychoanalytic theorist who has been hiding in plain sight. While I’d chosen to review the middle volume only, Radical Psychoanalysis: An Essay on Free-Associative Praxis (2016), it drew me irresistibly to the other two—Beyond Psychotherapy: On Becoming a (Radical) Psychoanalyst (2019), and What is Psychoanalysis? 100 Years after Freud’s “Secret Committee” (2013). I’d intended to merely skim them for a sense of the larger project, time after all being what it is, jumping from chapter to distant chapter as guided by the disruptive flow of my curiosity and desire. But as I review my exuberant highlighting in all three texts, I see that my idiosyncratically associative and temporally circuitous path culminated in my my having read the entire trilogy.

The use of the concept 'the unconscious' and the collapse of spacial metaphors into literal reality has made accurate theorizing a challenge. However, the phenomena of non-awareness or partial awareness is crucial to psychoanalytic investigations. As such, a model of dissociation (and its conceptual partner association) that articulates the mechanisms of its process may advance our theorizing significantly. Dissociation, as a process rather than a structural content, clearly covers the phenomena of unconsciousness without the use of spatial metaphors. In order to accurately accomplish this task the relationship between subjective experience (phenomenal consciousness), awareness and cognitive notations (first and second-order judgements) will be explored more fully.

Journal of the Canadian Association For Curriculum Studies, 2003

Research no longer merely seeks successful comprehension. It returns to things it cannot understand. It measures by fortifying its needs and methods. -de Certeau, The Writing of History 2 I "What am I supposed to do?" the analysand asks. "Just say whatever comes to mind," the analyst replies. So begins the strangely frustrating psychoanalytic request Freud called "the fundamental rule": free association. 3 Rarely can a rule be so indiscriminating, although it is precisely through indiscretion that this rule miniaturizes the story of psychoanalysis; its interpretation makes psychoanalysis psychoanalytic. Perhaps for this reason the rule is very difficult to accept, unless, of course, it can dawn on the speaker that she or he is free to freely associate with her or his conflicts. Let us note there is nothing here to solve. Instead, this experience of conflict allows for all that will follow, not just in the analytic setting, although it is there where free association may matter most, but also something like free association can take residence in the pedagogical imagination, where there, too, the fragility of language gives notice to the difficulties of freely associating and the utter importance of doing just that. The astounding paradox at the center of free association is frustrating. The more one tries to let whatever is on one's mind come out into words,

2000

Memory tasks and their theoretical implementations model everyday memory tasks. Research on free recall, cued recall, and recognition as well as work with implicit memory procedures capture some if not the majority of the characteristics of the memory requirements needed in interactions with the environment. In this context, it is interesting that a memory task that has been used in research for more than one hundred years (Galton, 1880) has not attracted much theoretical attention. We refer to free association, a task that requires participants to produce the first word to come to mind that is related in a specified way to a presented cue (e.g., meaning, rhyme, makes a word). This task is used in everyday activities as a means for "collecting thoughts." For example, in using the yellow pages free associating to a needed product or service can be helpful in determining an effective search heading. The same advantage is apparent when attempting to find information on the internet, or just the right word in writing and speech. Similarly, we are often called upon to provide information in response to broad and unanticipated questions such as "Why are you a democrat?" In such cases, recovering the needed information can be more akin to free association to the question than to directed recall. Free association is a utilitarian production task that has been directed to a variety of different types of information, such as categories, words, rhymes, word stems and fragments Free Association

Synthese, 2016

I challenge the dominant understanding of what it means to say two thoughts are associated. The two views that dominate the current literature treat association as a kind of mechanism that drives sequences of thought (often implicitly treating them so). The first, which I call reductive associationism, treats association as a kind of neural mechanism. The second treats association as a feature of the kind of psychological mechanism associative processing. Both of these views are inadequate. I argue that association should instead be seen as a highly abstract filler term, standing in for causal relations between representational states in a system. Associations, so viewed, could be implemented by many different mechanisms. I outline the role that this view gives associative models as part of a top-down characterization of psychological processes of any kind and of any complexity.

Parrhesia, 2017

Review essay of Talia Morag, Emotion, imagination and the limits of reason (Routledge, 2016). The relationship between psychoanalysis and other forms of thought, including philosophy, has always been fraught at best. This review examines the claims of an important new book that draws on contemporary analytic philosophy in its reconstruction of a psychoanalytic theory of emotions.

Memory & Cognition, 2000

This paper reports the results of a study of free association in which participants were asked to produce the first two words to come to mind. The findings were used to estimate the reliability of indices of strength and set size for different types of items and to model free association as a retrieval task. When confined to first responses, reliability was generally high for both indices, particularly for words with smaller sets of associates and stronger primaries. When second responses were included, reliability declined. A second response added new but weak items to the set, and, when the primary associate was not produced on the first opportunity, it tended not to be produced on the second. Relative to when multiple responses are requested, first-response free association provides more reliable indices of the relative strength and set size for a word's strongest associates. A model of free association assuming that a strength distribution underlies each response provided a good fit to the data.

Psychoanalytic theory has great explanatory scope. Hypotheses about psychological mechanisms such as identification and projection, and about the unconscious working of motives, provide explanations for many aspects of development from infancy through adulthood; for symptoms and structures of motivational conflict in mental disorders including schizophrenia, depression and mania; and for the role of unconscious motivation and mental conflict in war and other forms of group conflict. (For italicized terms see Laplanche and Pointalis in the recommended reading below).