The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R), Boston Naming Test (BNT), Paired Associate Learning of the Wechsler Memory Scale (PAL), and verbal fluency tests were administered to 241 normal children aged 6-12 years. Normative data were compiled for the BNT, PAL, and verbal fluency tests. A Principal Components Factor Analysis with Varimax Rotation was conducted to determine whether the tests evaluated similar or differential functions. Three factors emerged, accounting for 67.7% of the variance: Factor 1 contained loadings from two semantic fluency measures (animals and food), Factor 2 contained the PPVT-R and the BNT, and Factor 3 contained two measures from the PAL (easy and hard associations). In children, the BNT relates more to word knowledge than to retrieval or fluency, and verbal memory appears to be relatively independent of these linguistic functions.

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As advances in neuroscience have furthered our understanding of the role of brain circuitry, genetics, stress, and neuromodulators in the regulation of normal behavior and in the pathogenesis of psychopathology, an increasing appreciation of the role of neurobiology in individual differences in personality and their pathology in personality disorders has emerged. Individual differences in the regulation and organization of cognitive processes, affective reactivity, impulse/action patterns, and anxiety may in the extreme provide susceptibilities to personality disorders such as borderline and schizotypal personality disorder. A low threshold for impulsive aggression, as observed in borderline and antisocial personality disorders, may be related to excessive amygdala reactivity, reduced prefrontal inhibition, and diminished serotonergic facilitation of prefrontal controls. Affective instability may be mediated by excessive limbic reactivity in gabaminergic/glutamatergic/cholinergic circuits, resulting in an increased sensitivity or reactivity to environmental emotional stimuli as in borderline personality disorder and other cluster B personality disorders. Disturbances in cognitive organization and information processing may contribute to the detachment, desynchrony with the environment, and cognitive/perceptional distortions of cluster A or schizophrenia spectrum personality disorders. A low threshold for anxiety may contribute to the avoidant, dependent, and compulsive behaviors observed in cluster C personality disorders. These alterations in critical regulatory domains will influence how representations of self and others are internalized. Aspects of neurobiological functioning themselves become cognized through the medium of figurative language into an ongoing narrative of the self, one that can be transformed through the analytic process, allowing for the modulation of genetic/biological thresholds.

Despite the central role that repetition plays in foundational analytic concepts such as instinct, transference, and regression, the presence of different kinds of repetitive forms and their relationship to representation and symbolization have only been subject to limited empirical investigation. The current article defines a continuum of repetitions from redundant, invariant repetitions, which remain closer to action, to symbolic repetitions that involve different modes of mental representation. Using a single-case study with a mixed quantitative/qualitative methodology, measures of repetition and symbolization were applied to verbatim recordings of psychoanalytic sessions. As verbs are the grammatical form that best track intention and motivation, invariant verb forms were chosen as a linguistic marker of repetition. Symbolic processes were evaluated by a computerized measure of referential activity, an empirical tool to measure imagistic language. There was an overall negative correlation between invariant repetitions and imagistic speech. Following the quantitative analysis, qualitative clinical illustrations indicated that when the patient constructed a narrative with a vivid, specific, and evocative representational structure (i.e., dream, fantasy, memory), the use of invariant repetitions decreased. Further qualitative analyses showed that a measure of repetition, when used in conjunction with a measure of symbolization, was able to identify different discourse patterns reflecting fluctuations in the patient’s thinking processes and affective states.

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The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed an analysis of language, thought, and internalization that has direct relevance to the current concerns of psychoanalysts. Striking methodological and conceptual similarities and useful complementarities with psychoanalysis are discovered when one peers beneath the surface of Vygotskian psychology. Our adaptation of Vygostsky's views expands upon Freud's assigned role to language in the topographic model. We suggest that the analysand's speech offers several windows into the history of the individual, through prosody, tropes, word meaning, and word sense. We particularly emphasize Vygotsky's views on the genesis and utilization of word meanings. The acquisition of word meanings will contain key elements of the internal climate present when the word meaning was forged. Bearing this in mind, crucial theoretical questions follow, such as how psychoanalysis is to understand the unconscious fantasies, identifications, anxieties, and defenses associated with the psychodynamics of language acquisition and later language usage. We propose that the clinical situation is an ideal place to test these hypotheses.

The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is discussed, a construct that, when introduced into psychoanalysis, advances understanding of the key clinical relationship between the intrapsychic and the interpersonal. Strands from several psychoanalytic formulations are brought together and forged into a coherent construct, which is then contrasted with the transference. It is shown how the ZPD provides the transference with its mutative potential. Just as the transference provides the motivation for the recruitment of objects to accomplish its purposes (repetition), the ZPD leads to the recruitment of objects in order to accomplish its purposes (to learn by ushering individuals into a speech and internalization community). Under the sway of the transference objects are sought so that early disregulating experiences can be repeated and an opportunity provided for a better resolution. The ZPD works in tandem with the transference, capitalizing on the impetus provided, allowing for the possibility of internalization, a beneficial outcome to transference repetition which otherwise would have no agent of conflict resolution. In analysis, when the transference and the ZPD enjoin smoothly, the potential outcome is "insight" in a broad sense. The processes of the ZPD define the optimal interpersonal context of psychoanalysis, one that allows the intrapsychic to be best reached by analytic interventions. Given the inevitability of mutual influences between analyst and analysand, the analyst strives simultaneously to be in the ZPD yet outside the transference with the analysand, a crucial tension that is a constant, precarious technical factor. This useful tension casts light on such procedural guides as optimal frustration and abstinence.

This paper follows our previous one, where we described a psychoanalytic conception of language, thought, and internalization that is informed by the thinking of Lev Vygotsky. Here, several aspects of the analytic process which allow for the understanding of ineffable experiences in the analysand's history and the analytic situation are investigated: specifically, primal repression, metaphor, and the role of speech in free association. It is suggested that Freud's notion of primal repression be revived and redefined as one aspect of the descriptive unconscious. Some implications of primal repression for transference and resistance are explored. The metaphoric in its broad sense is examined as one example of how early dynamic experiences embedded in the process of language acquisition can be reached within the clinical situation. It is proposed that an understanding of free association is enhanced by awareness of distinctions between inner, egocentric, and social speech. The basic rule can be interpreted as an invitation for the analysand to use inner speech in collaboration with the analyst as best he or she can. Further, the aliveness and degree of superficiality of the analysis can be seen as a function of the analyst's ability to appreciate the properties of inner speech and foster the conditions in the analysis that allow for its unfolding.