Donald P. Spence

Lexical co-occurrence and association strength

The 1-million-word Brown corpus was searched for co-occurrences of semantically related pairs of concrete nouns appearing within an arbitrary window of 250 characters. Related pairs of nouns (OCEAN-WATER) co-occur significantly more often than matched, unrelated pairs (OCEAN-HAND), and this difference remained significant within blocks of text up to 1000 characters in length. Frequency of co-occurrence, corrected for chance, is significantly correlated with association strength. Lexical distance between co-occurring members of a given pair is inversely correlated with association strength. Significantly more co-occurrences were found, per unit text, in the fictional sections of the corpus.

The Rhetorical Voice of Psychoanalysis

The rhetorical voice of psychoanalysis has a long history and has only recently come to be seen as a special feature of the theory. Its beginnings can be found in Freuds earliest pleadings for the usefulness of metaphor and analogy, although he felt that they were largely provisional and would eventually be replaced by more durable concepts. We have begun to see problems in replacing the central metaphors; the rhetorical base of psychoanalysis may be more enduring than we thought. While our metaphors may never provide epistemic access to the stuff of the mind, they can and do point to specific clinical encounters. Ways must be found to expand our rhetorical treasure chest and develop language even better suited to our concepts and observations.

Narrative Truth and Putative Child Abuse

Memories of early child abuse can be read in at least two distinct ways--as true accounts of an unspeakable event or as metaphors for a wide range of boundary violations which belong to both past and present. An actual memory of an early experience tends to fade unless repeatedly rehearsed; because abuse memories are inherently shameful, it seems reasonable to be skeptical of this kind of repetition and to be suspicious of their sudden emergence. An actual memory of an early experience would be told from the childs point of view and would probably contain many false starts, internal contradictions, and all the other earmarks of a confused memory that refer to an early happening; by contrast, a seamless account with a tight narrative structure and an almost total absence of doubt or irrelevant detail is almost certainly false. An actual memory would tend to have its own flavor and style; by contrast, a memory of child abuse that sounds too much like other memories is more likely a metaphor for something else. Therapists, lawyers, and other professionals need to be trained to listen metaphorically to these accounts, to be on guard against hearing them as concrete references to a particular time and place, and to beware of reinforcing them prematurely.

Lexical correlates of cervical cancer

Abstract On the assumption that word choices are determined by psychological as well as linguistic constraints, transcripts of 62 interviews with women at risk for cervical cancer were examined by computer for the frequencies of usage of hope- and hopeless-connotative words. Word usage rates differed for cases of differing cancer status (as established by subsequent cone biopsy results) and this “lexical leakage” was more pronounced in patients who were openly concerned about the risk of cancer than in those who were strongly defended against the possibility of cancer. Similar trends were found for the interviewers speech. The results are discussed with respect to the role of mental state in the etiology of disease, the interaction of lexical leakage with defense, and the coordination of patient and doctor speech in clinical interviews.

Monitoring The Analytic Surface

How do we listen during an analytic hour? Systematic analysis of the speech patterns of one patient (Mrs. C.) strongly suggests that the clustering of shared pronouns (e.g., you/me) represents an important aspect of the analytic surface, preconsciously sensed by the analyst and used by him to determine when to intervene. Sensitivity to these patterns increases over the course of treatment, and in a filial block of 10 hours shows a striking degree of contingent responsivily: specific utterances by the patient are consistently echoed by the analysts interventions.

When interpretation masquerades as explanation

The principal goal of the clinical interpretation (and of the larger clinical narrative) is to bring about insight and change in the patient, and not to present a reasoned argument that relies on public data and shared rules of evidence and logic. When the clinical account is transposed to the public domain and presented as a form of explanation, it is no longer designed for the benefit of one individual but must now be accessible to all. We are still under the shadow of Freuds five famous cases which are literary landmarks of exposition and persuasion. As a result, we are less sensitive to what happens when interpretations are substituted for explanations. The time has come to develop a new genre and a new mode of clinical reporting that would allow the reader to participate in the argument, allow him to evaluate the proposed links between evidence and conclusion (instead of relying on the authority of the analyst-author), and open up the clinical report to the possibilities of refutation, disconfirmation, and falsification.

Lawfulness In Lexical Choice: A Natural Experiment

The choice of specific words during face-to-face conversations may be just as overdetermined as the choice of words during free association. To explore this hypothesis, we looked in detail at three words used by patients who were at risk for cervical cancer and who were interviewed during a hospital visit for cone biopsy. We hypothesized that an ongoing disease process would influence choice of language, even though the interviews were conducted before the patients were informed of the results of the biopsy. We also hypothesized that choice of words by the interviewer would be affected by the patients language. More distant derivatives, if they can be identified, may also behave in an equally lawful manner, and further research is needed to find ways of uncovering and measuring these silent markers.

Impact of Interpretation on Associative Freedom.

Seventy hours from the psychoanalytic case of Mrs. C, covering the full course of treatment, were scored for associative freedom, number of interventions, and a variety of clinical phenomena such as clarifications, interpretations, different forms of resistance, transference manifestations, and the like. Associative freedom significantly increased over the course of treatment and was significantly related to the number of analyst interventions per hour. The relationship was particularly strong in the latter stages of treatment. Three specific types of interventions were found to increase associative freedom in the latter stages of treatment. The effect of each type was found to influence both the session containing the interpretation and the next 3 sessions. This carryover effect was specific to the latter stages of the analysis.

When Do Interpretations Make a Difference? A Partial Answer to Fliessapos;s Achensee Question

Interpretations seem to matter most (at least in the case of Mrs. C) when the analyst feels included in the patientapos;s thoughts. During hours of this kind (Related hours, scoring high on the cooccurrence of first- and second-person pronouns such as me/you), the analystapos;s interpretations are more comprehensive and probing; he intervenes earlier and more often within the session; and his specific interpretations have a greater effect on the patientapos;s associations, as measured by an increased frequency of specific discourse markers. Low-scoring hours, with relatively few pronominal references to the analyst, were characterized by more superficial interpretations; later and fewer interventions; a greater tendency for the analyst to misunderstand the patientapos;s productions; and a decreased effect of specific interventions. Special care was taken to protect the findings from the dangers of suggestion (the Achensee question).

ON SOME CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS OF ACTION LANGUAGE

Schafers action language can be criticized on purely theoretical grounds; here, the emphasis is on some of its clinical implications. First, action language tends to put the patient into an adversary position with respect to the analyst; this interferes with the therapeutic alliance, discourages regression, and encourages self-consciousness and problem-solving reasoning. Second, action language tempts the analyst to use premature labels in place of ambiguous metaphors; premature clarification may undercut the process of analytic discovery. Third, a focus on action and responsibility, because it highlights conscious mechanisms and the secondary process, may run the danger of working against the analytic process. It may yield rationalization rather than insight and convey the message that the analyst does not take seriously the concept of the unconscious. Fourth, by emphasizing clarity in favor of metaphor, action language may put an unnecessary emphasis on rationality and may discourage the kind of groping self-exploration that is the essence of productive analysis.