Transference and Countertransference Dynamics in a Multifamily Group for Transgender Adolescents

This article is an account of a pioneering multifamily group for transgender adolescents. Meetings were conducted in a Sexual Identity Consultation Service in a Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department in Paris. In addition to enabling both teenagers and their parents to escape a certain form of isolation, this novel mental health care setting also reinforced the ability of participants to free associate and to cathect substitute objects. The author highlights specific characteristics of transference movements and countertransference reactions of the therapists in this framework. An additional goal is to promote these innovative groups and to recommend similar groups for transgender adolescents and their parents.

Continuous Dependence for Two Implicit Kirk-Type Algorithms in General Hyperbolic Spaces

This paper aims to study extensively some results concerning continuous dependence for implicit Kirk-Mann and implicit Kirk-Ishikawa iterations. In order to equipoise the formation of these algorithms, we introduce a general hyperbolic space which is no doubt a free associate of some known hyperbolic spaces. The present results are extension of other results and they can be used in many applications.

Concreteness and Imageability

Previous research has shown that the positive effect of imageability upon recall is confined to abstract items. In Experiment I it was found that imageability would affect the recall of concrete items if subjects were instructed to use imagery in their memorizing. This suggested that imagery is not usually employed in remembering concrete items. In Experiment II subjects were asked to categorize items on the basis of their meaning. A majority showed sorting related to the concreteness of the items, but very few showed sorting related to imageability. In Experiment III it was found that the concreteness of an item correlated with the time taken to produce a free associate to it, but that its imageability did not. It was concluded that concreteness is a feature of lexical organization, and not a measure of the image-arousing quality of verbal material.

Roles of Direct and Shared Associations in Verbal Generalization

The power of associative relations to predict verbal generalization depends on their type: (a) direct, where one word is a free associate of another, and (b) indirect, where words have identical free associates in common. 30 Ss generalized between word-pairs preselected to have equal indices of predicted generalization based either on predominantly direct or indirect associations. Significantly greater amounts of generalization were obtained to directly related word-pairs ( P < .0001), indirectly related word pairs yielding no more than chance amounts. An index of generalization based exclusively on direct associations correlated significantly with generalization ( rho = .61) while inclusion of indirect associations reduced the correlation to chance levels ( rho = .10). Examination of the literature suggests that the success of indices using indirect associations may derive from their inclusion of direct associations as well.

Effects of Posture and Anxiety Level on Effectiveness of Free Association

Clinical observations have characterized low anxious (LA) Ss as possessing a repressive-denial defense pattern. The psychoanalytic notion that repression diminishes with relaxation and reduced motility on the couch was examined in the predictions that supine LA Ss would free-associate more effectively than supine HA Ss, but that the reverse would hold true in the sitting position. The 10 highest and lowest trait-anxiety rankings in each of the postural conditions were given Bordin's free-association procedure Results indicated a significant effect for posture and an interaction with anxiety level in the predicted direction. The differential effect of motility on repression in LA Ss vis-a-vis other defense styles in HA Ss was discussed.

Compound Verbal Stimuli and Word Association

In two replications, 97 and 122 Williams College students in elementary psychology classes were given two lists of word pairs with instructions to give a discrete free associate to each pair. List A contained word-pairs designed to increase the frequency of the normative primary responses and List B contained pairs designed to increase the range of responses. The results showed that significantly fewer different responses and significantly higher frequencies for the primary responses were given to List A than to List B. Compared to the single-word norms, responses to List A had higher, and to List B, lower, commonality. Two factors were used in constructing List A: (1) the stimulus pair denoted or connoted a third word; (2) in common speech, a third word frequently follows the stimulus pair. The List B pairs lacked these factors, or had them in a low degree.