The ability to define words by means of other words, which forms a part of many standardized tests, must be learned by a child. The nature of the ‘definitional task’ and the development of language responses (from children 4; 5 to 7; 5) are discussed in terms of a linguistic analysis of the definitional form and its semantic relations. Progress in definitional strategies by children moves along two continua: conceptually from the individually experiential to the socially shared; and syntactically from actual predicates through hypothetical predicates to adult definitional sentence frames. Implications include novel elicitation techniques, psycholinguistically informed evaluation of direction and scoring measures of some common standardized verbal tests, and better understanding of the range of normal development on one specific language task.

Freud's 1925 paper on negation provides the foundation for exploring an expanded developmental line of negation. Incorporating evidence from child language studies and explanations from the philosophy of language, this paper describes three types of negation that emerge in a developmental sequence: rejection, refusal, and denial. Clinical examples illustrate each type of negation, demonstrating how it might appear in clinical interactions. Along the way, confusions in terminology (due partly to translation problems) and questions for developmental theory are discussed. An expanded developmental line of negation provides additional interpretive perspectives on the forms of defense that Freud was addressing in "Negation" (1925) and subsequent papers (1927, 1940a,b).

The concept of unconscious fantasy should be retained as fundamental to any psychoanalytic approach. The concept is reexamined in the face of two challenges: today's theoretical pluralism and the recent integration of findings from academic research. The first section reviews post-Freudian theoretical contributions to Freud's original concept, concluding that in its evolved form it is flexible enough to serve multiple perspectives. The second section examines four features identified with primary process thinking, demonstrating that a model of early mentation based on adult dream work cannot be supported by research on early development. However, the contemporary concept of unconscious fantasy is compatible with research findings from child development studies and cognitive neuroscience, permitting psychoanalysts to enter dialogue with those fields. Our contribution is not the posit of a new form of thinking (primary process) but an understanding of how general cognitive processes are enlisted for motivated purposes.

Post-Freudian theories have been criticized for abandoning what is basic to psychoanalysis: the biological body and sexuality as the source of intrapsychic motivation. Arguably, however, they are more present than ever before-for example, in explanations by theorists who propose therapeutic actions beyond interpretation, presymbolic enactments of procedural memories, or disclosures of the analyst's bodily states as an aspect of intersubjectivity. By contrast, the Freudian body was always a text whose mediated meanings require interpretation, for which Freud provided eloquent guides. It is this textuality, and not sexuality, that distinguishes a psychoanalytic approach: a psycho-logic constructed according to a grammar of desire that mediates experience and creates interpretable behavior, both in action and in speech. Theoretical changes in psychoanalysis are traced historically along the dimension of textuality, the example of perversion is invoked, and the conclusion drawn that any theoretical approach, traditional or post-Freudian, that expands an understanding of textuality contributes to the science of psychoanalysis.

Most psychoanalytic writers have followed developmental psychologists such as