Royal Road Research Articles

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Music: an Intersection on the Oral and Aural Road

This paper is organized around two ideas. The first invites the reader to consider the importance of music in emotional life, suggesting that for some people, music can have profound, deep, and transformative effects, both in loosening defenses and in deepening the psychoanalytic experience. The second idea is that analysis of the formal properties of music have both specific and overdetermined meanings that share elements with psychoanalytic principles. I suggest that, if the verbal analysis of dreams paves a royal road to the unconscious, the formal properties of music provide an aural road to the same destination. Two clinical vignettes and scenes from Verdi’s opera Otello are used to illustrate these interrelated ideas.

Why youth is not wasted on the young: immaturity in human development

Preface. Acknowledgments. Chapter 1: The Benefits of Youth. Rushing through Childhood. Views of Development. A Darwinian Perspective. I Come Not to Praise Immaturity. Chapter 2: The Youngest Species. A Brief Look at Human Evolution. The Evolution of Childhood. Timing is Everything. The Youngest Species. Chapter 3: The Slow Rate of Growing Up. The Gamble of Delayed Development. Big Brains, Social Complexity, and Slow Development. Cooperating and Competing. Family Matters. Slow Growth and Brain Plasticity. Developmental Plasticity and Evolution. When Slow is Fast Enough. Chapter 4: Adapting to the Niche of Childhood. The Benefits of Limitations. See Things My Way. Learning Language. How Do Adults View Children's Immature Thinking?. Adapting to Childhood. Chapter 5: The Advantages of Thinking You're Better than You Are. The Development of Metacognition - Knowing What We Know. Some Benefits of Less-Than-Perfect Metacognition. When We Deal with Children. Know Thyself, But Not Too Well. Chapter 6: Play: The Royal Road through Childhood. What is Play?. The Adaptive Value of Play. Children Playing, Children Learning. Play it Again, Kid. Chapter 7: The Most Educable of Animals. The Myth of Earlier is Better. Prenatal Learning. Early (Postnatal) Learning. Developmentally Appropriate Practices in Early Education. Stress in the Schoolhouse. Old Brain, New Curriculum. Chapter 8: The Changing Face of Childhood. Pushing Children through Childhood. A Brief History of Childhood. The Costs of Ignoring Immaturity: The Well-being of America's Children. The Independent Human Juvenile: A New View of Childhood?. Racing to Adulthood, Prolonging Adolescence. Epilogue: Homo Juvenalis. Revisiting Childhood. Visiting Adulthood. Notes. References. Index

Contesting Literary Biography in the Romantic Period: The Foreshadowing of Psychological Biography

This essay surveys critical approaches to Romantic literary biography, both by Romantic writers themselves and by recent scholars. While accepting the argument that an epistemological shift in the late eighteenth century saw the emergence of interest in subjective experience as recorded in the new genre of full-length biography, it rejects the centrality some scholars have placed on the debate over whether literary biography was an ‘art’ rather than a ‘science’. Rather it suggests that the central debate was over the depiction of the ‘inner man’. Does the imperative for biographical ‘truth’ sanction the publication of revelations – often scandalous or shocking – of a subject's private life? Or is the ‘truth’ to be found in Carlyle's insistence on the transcendent powers of the visionary poet? Key biographies will be considered, including those of Gray, Burns, Cowper and Byron, as will key biographers, including Mason, Hayley, Currie, Lockhart, Southey, Moore and Carlyle. The relative importance of biographical commentators James Stanfield and Isaac D’Israeli forms an important part of this discussion. D’Israeli's introduction from his reading of the new German psychology of the term ‘psychological character’ is an important step on the royal road that will lead to Freudian biography.

Following the Royal Road: A Guide to the Historic Camino Real de Tierra Adentro (review)

Book Reviews Jesús F. de la Teja, Editor Following tL· Royal Road: A Guide to the Historic Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. By Hal Jackson, foreword by Marc Simmons. (Albuquerque: University ofNew Mexico Press, 2006. Pp. 226. Illustrations, maps, suggested readings, appendix, index. ISBN 0826340857. $19.95, paper.) Renewed scholarly and popular interest in die Camino Real de Tierra Adentro , the royal road running from Mexico City northward into the far reaches of New Mexico, began on the eve of the Columbus Quincentennial of 1992, which celebrated or decried the momentous events of 1492, depending on one's historical point ofview. In New Mexico, Gabrielle Palmer got the wheels turning with the formation ofthe Camino Real Project and die preparation ofa traveling exhibition that subsequendy toured all over the region touched by the famous road and to many points beyond. Activity aimed at preserving, researching, and interpreting the historic Camino Real in die United States and Mexico has been intensive for more than a decade. In the late 1990s the first of a continuing series of international conferences brought togedier scholars from a variety ofacademic disciplines from Spain, Mexico, and die United States researching various aspects of die Camino Real. Binational agreements to preserve die road followed. Publication ofcollected papers followed a number of die conferences. A dedicated group of "trail buffs," history aficionados, and scholars formed the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro Trail Association (CARTA) in 2003. Finally, in 2005 the Camino Real Heritage Center opened in its impressive location thirty-five miles soudi of Socorro, New Mexico. All this focus of attention on the Camino Real suggests that die road will attract many visitors in the future, many in need of a guide. Into the breach steps HalJackson, professor emeritus of geography at Humboldt State University and adjunct faculty member ofdie University ofNew Mexico's Department of Geography, with the first motorist's guide to the Camino Real. As would any travel guide wordiy of the name, Jackson's book provides background information on the sites to be visited and practical suggestions on routes to follow, places to eat, and recommended accommodations. Unlike your typical touristguide, Jackson's narrative is informed by die latest scholarship on the Camino Real and by historic travelogues. The book devotes roughly equal attention to die Camino Real in each country —four chapters each. The nordiern section ofthe Camino Real is located mosdy in New Mexico with a historically significant portion in die greater El Paso area, 2??8Book Reviews345 including Ysleta, Socorro, and San Elizario. In all likelihood this northern portion will be the part of the Camino Real diat motorists from the United States will explore . The much more interesting part of die road, from the standpoint of travel adventure, however, is the southern section, which is located in Mexico. It is here thatJackson really shines, offering his firsthand travel tips to out-of-die-way places, many that once were important stops on the Camino Real in Mexico and are no longer occupied and tricky to find. An excellent example of the kind of useful information the traveler will find relates to the directions to the silver-mining town of Cusihuiriáchic in the State of Chihuahua. After giving detailed directions that include looking for signs, sleuthing out cross streets, making right-hand and left-hand turns, it must have occurred to the author that there was a pretty good chance the motorist would miss a crucial street or turn. With this in mind, Jackson advises, "If you have trouble, just ask anyone for 'Cusi' and they'll direct you there" (p. 127). This would surely be a welcome suggestion to a lost traveler unsure how to pronounce the tongue-twisting name of their intended destination. With this guide in hand, the traveler should have every confidence in venturing on a Mexican trip into the past of the Camino Real. New Mexico State UniversityRick Hendricks El Gran Norte de Mexico: Una frontera imperial en la Nueva España (1540-1820). By Alfredo Jiménez. (Madrid, Spain: Tébar, 2006. Pp. 536. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 8473602218. €28.95, Paper.) The history of northern New Spain has traditionally...

Trust and Welfare State Reform: The Example of the NHS

AbstractThis article discusses the impact of New Public Management on public trust in welfare state institutions, using the example of NHS reform. Discussion of trust in public institutions across political science, psychology and sociology indicates that it is based on both rational/objective considerations (competence and capacity to deliver the service) and affectual/subjective factors (shared values, belief that the trustee shares the trustor's interests). The New Public Management foregrounds individual responsibility and incentives for both suppliers and users of services, in the NHS example in quasi‐markets, management by target and patient choice. These accord with an individualized market rational‐actor model rather than with affective considerations. Analysis of attitude survey data on the NHS confirms that rational/objective and affectual/subjective factors contribute to public trust in this field. However, a comparison between perceptions in England, where the internal market has been vigorously pursued, and Scotland, where the purchaser/provider split was discarded after devolution, indicate that the market does not offer a royal road to perceptions of superior quality in the objective factors. Conversely, the more market‐centred system can make progress in relation to the more subjective affectual factors.

The Royal Road

The Royal Road

Freud's Ironically Jewish Science: Commentary on Paper by Jill Salberg

In his commentary on Jill Salberg's integrative and contextualizing article, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Freud's Jewish Identity Revisited,” Aron examines several ideas related to Freud's ironically “Jewish science.” First, this commentary takes up the question of what it has meant to speak of a “Jewish science” historically, and what it might mean today. Shockingly, Aron shows that the rise and fall of psychoanalysis has been traced to Jewish influence. He then expands on Salberg's article by reviewing the relationship between circumcision and castration and considers the impact of Freud's Jewish identity and his anxiety about anti-Semitism on the structure of the psychoanalytic method and specifically on Freud's discovery of the “royal road.”

Between memory and destiny: Repetition

This essay focuses mainly on the topic of repetition (agieren)—on its metapsychological, clinical, and technical conceptions. It contains a core problem, that is, the question of the represented, the nonrepresented, and the unrepresentable in the psyche. This problem, in turn, brings to light the dialectical relation between drive and object and its specific articulation with the traumatic. The author attributes special significance to its clinical expression as ‘destiny’. He points out a shift in the theory of the cure from recollection and the unveiling of unconscious desire, to the possibility of understanding ‘pure’ repetition, which would constitute the very essence of the drive. The author highlights three types of repetition, namely, ‘representative’ (oedipal) repetition, the repetition of the ‘nonrepresented’ (narcissistic), which may gain representation, and that of the ‘unrepresentable’ (sensory impressions, ‘lived experiences from primal times,’‘prelinguistic signifiers,’‘ungovernable mnemic traces’). The concept‐the metaphor‐drive embryo brings the author close to the question of the archaic in psychoanalysis, where the repetition in the act would express itself. ‘Another unconscious’ would zealously conceal the entombed (verschüttet) that we are not yet able to describe‐the ‘innermost’ rather than the ‘buried’ (untergegangen) or the ‘annihilated’ (zugrunde gegangen)‐through a mechanism whose way of expression is repetition in the act. With ‘Constructions in analysis’ as its starting point, this paper suggests a different technical implementation from that of the Freudian construction; its main material is what emerges in the present of the transference as the repetition of ‘something’ lacking as history. The memory of the analytic process offers a historical diachrony whereby a temporality freed from repetition and utterly unique might unfold in the analysis. This diachrony would no longer be the historical reconstruction of material truth, but the construction of something new. The author briefly introduces some aspects of his conception of the psyche and of therapeutic work in terms of what he has designated as psychic zones. These zones are associated with various modes of becoming unconscious, and they coexist with different degrees of prevalence according to the psychopathology. Yet each of them will emerge with unique features in different moments of every analysis, determining both the analyst's positions and the very conditions of the analytic field. The zone of the death drive and of repetition is at the center of this essay. ‘Pure’ repetition expresses a time halted by the constant reiteration of an atemporal present. In this case, the ‘royal road’ for the expression of ‘that’ unconscious will be the act. The analyst's presence and his own drive wager will be pivotal to provide a last attempt at binding that will allow the creation of the lost ‘psychic fabric’ and the construction, in a conjectural way, of some sort of ‘history’ that may unravel the entombed (verschüttet) elements that, in these patients' case, come to the surface in the act. The analysand's ‘pure’ repetition touches, resonates with something of the new unconscious of the analyst. All of this leads the author to underline once again the value of the analyst's self‐analysis and reanalysis in searching for connections and especially in differentiating between what belongs to the analyst and what belongs to the analysand. A certain degree of unbinding ensures the preservation of something ungraspable that protects one from the other's appropriation.

Is a Schizoanalysis of Cinema Possible?

Is a schizoanalysis of cinema possible? This question arises from the observation that there is no apparent continuity between Deleuze’s two-volume collaboration with Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, and the books he wrote afterwards, Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. It is also prompted by the observation that Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus seem to rely a great deal on cinema in order to develop and exemplify the many new concepts these books introduce. This paper highlights three such instances in their work. The fact is, Deleuze and Guattari claim that the core schizoanalytic concepts of the body without organs, the abstract machine and assemblage can account for “all things”; as such, these concepts must account for cinema too. It is the sheer expansiveness of these concepts that makes them attractive to cinema studies. Not only that, they promise a way of engaging with cinema that isn’t reliant on the fictions of identification, recognition and fantasy. In this sense we are permitted to assume that to some degree Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 are already schizoanalytic, albeit in ways we have yet to properly understand. The author makes a direct link between cinema and schizoanalysis by highlighting the significance of delirium to both. This paper argues that the royal road to a schizoanalysis of cinema is via delirium rather than dream or fantasy. It goes on to show how Deleuze and Guattari’s formalisation of delirium as a “regime of signs” can be used to inaugurate a new kind of semiology of cinema.

Hocart and the royal road to anthropological understanding*

Hocart and the royal road to anthropological understanding*

Is the Interpretation of Dreams the Royal Road to the Knowledge of the Unconscious Activities of the Consumer Mind?: The Interdisciplination of Freud''s Theory of the Unconscious

Is the Interpretation of Dreams the Royal Road to the Knowledge of the Unconscious Activities of the Consumer Mind?: The Interdisciplination of Freud''s Theory of the Unconscious

Effects of diversity control in single-objective and multi-objective genetic algorithms

This paper covers an investigation on the effects of diversity control in the search performances of single-objective and multi-objective genetic algorithms. The diversity control is achieved by means of eliminating duplicated individuals in the population and dictating the survival of non-elite individuals via either a deterministic or a stochastic selection scheme. In the case of single-objective genetic algorithm, onemax and royal road R 1 functions are used during benchmarking. In contrast, various multi-objective benchmark problems with specific characteristics are utilised in the case of multi-objective genetic algorithm. The results indicate that the use of diversity control with a correct parameter setting helps to prevent premature convergence in single-objective optimisation. Furthermore, the use of diversity control also promotes the emergence of multi-objective solutions that are close to the true Pareto optimal solutions while maintaining a uniform solution distribution along the Pareto front.

Cross-functionality and innovation in new product development teams: A dilemmatic structure and its consequences for the management of diversity

The ubiquitous hope among managers of new product development (NPD) teams that a cross-functional team composition may be a royal road to enhancing team innovations appears to be an illusion. Empirical analyses show positive as well as negative or nonsignificant relationships between cross-functionality and team innovations. In this article, we integrate the extant literature and develop a process model that explains the contradictory empirical findings. We propose that introducing specific mediators and moderators enables improved predictions of the effects of cross-functionality on team innovations. In developing our model, which is primarily based on a conflict-theoretical perspective, we address theories of social categorization, identity and self verification, information/decision making, group problem solving, and innovativeness, respectively. Our process model explicates how (i.e., via what mediators) and when (i.e., in the presence of what moderators) cross-functionality enhances or impedes synergistic communication among team members, which in turn fosters team innovations. On the basis of this new model we discuss strategies for managing cross-functionality in NPD teams.

What's in a nAme: What Analyst and Patient Call Each Other

Awkward moments often arise between patient and analyst involving the question, "What do we call each other?" The manner in which the dyad address each other contains material central to the patient's inner life. Names, like dreams, deserve a privileged status as providing a royal road into the paradoxical analytic relationship and the unconscious conflicts that feed it. Whether an analyst addresses the patient formally, informally, or not at all, awareness of the issues surrounding names is important.

Problématique clinique pour la psychose

The analysis treatment of a psychotic individual presupposes a global problem focus on the causes of psychosis, its structure, its outbreak, and the stages in its development. Here, psychosis is viewed in its specifically psychic dimension, where Lacanian theory, to which the author adheres, places the cause of the sickness: (the "forclusion" of the names of the father). This formula indicates the absence of the paternal function. This lack originates in the fact that a dysfunction of the symbolic order in the family structure presides over the birth of a subject. The locating of the elements (the signifiers) of such symbolic dysfunction is essential because the delusion attempts to repair this defect in the representational order. Against this defect the subject first constructed imaginary assemblings which allow him a provisional articulation, satisfying for him, to others and to social reality. The outbreak of the psychosis results in the collapse of such imaginary scaffoldings. Then after a period of bewilderment and psychic retreat, all the effort of the psychotic is directed at the reconstitution of a new representational order. The work of the analysis consistants of attempting, on the basis of the signifiers put forward by the delusion, to assist the psychotic in his reconstitution of symbolic order. The delusion is the access road to this work in psychosis just as the dream is the royal road to the unconscious in the neurosis. The effort of this article is directed at situating these stages in the treatment of psychosis in their theorical and clinical foundations.

Character: Under Erasure?

The paper you are reading now is very different from the one I set out to write. In that paper I had hoped to find a way of going beyond the Glance beyond Doubt (1996) which Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan casts in that book. There, Rimmon-Kenan affirms the possibility - albeit a highly limited possibility - of talking about subjectivity in literature, as well as about representation, and of doing so from within the highly skeptical terms of structuralist and post-structuralist discourse. I had hoped to affirm more than that, and to reinstate character as a central - nay, as an indispensable - feature of the literary text. In doing so, I was meaning to ride an old hobby horse: the conviction that responsiveness to characters is the royal road into the vast majority of the works we study and teach, and that to divert our attention from them is, in effect, to block access to the vital life of those works. The challenge, I thought, was to find a way to affirm them in terms appropriate to the discourse within which Rimmon-Kenan worked so productively. Rather quickly I found this task both pointless and beyond my powers. The more I pondered the issues the more I came to feel that the grounds for the neutralization of character within the terms of the relevant discourse were too complex and closely reasoned for me to engage here. Beyond that, I felt that my own position could best be argued by engaging a work in which the centrality of character cannot be elided. Sophocles' Oedipus Tyranus came to mind as ideal for this purpose.1 It struck me, for the umpteenth time, that without entering into the 1 It will of course be objected that Oedipus is a drama and therefore not relevant to narratology. My view is that, despite the radical difference in the mode of presentation, drama and narrative share essential structural elements, and that there are contexts in which the two can be, if not conflated, treated in similar terms. For an excellent analysis of the fate of character in drama since the end of the nineteenth century, and a study of how its treatment in drama has paralleled, in substance and often in form, its denigraton (or dissipation) in fiction, see Elinor Fuchs (1996).

Self and Talent—Treatment Considerations

The clinical pursuit of patients' experiences of talent, in their current life and in their developmental years, has broadened the clinical field considerably and provided more lanes and latitude in the “royal road to the unconscious.” Interest in patients' talents has been experienced as an invitation to bring in their created works, not just as a display of aesthetic interest but, much more importantly, as another pathway through which the analyst can access an understanding of the deepest and most meaningful levels of selfexperience. This article explores some of the meanings of talent for the self and suggests that there is a developmental line for the maturation of one's relationship to one's talent. I provide discussion that illustrates the coextensiveness of the inner experience of talent with the selfobject surround throughout growth and maturation. Finally, I provide illustrations of how talent can be experienced and how exploration of experiences of talent can play a quintessential role in psychoanalytic treatment.

Appropriation de l'espace et construction de la temporalité adolescente: L'exemple de la fascination pour les lieux souterrains

Teenager oscillates between the ‘settled family memory’ and his ‘personal memory’ (Muxel). This intrapsychic and relational conflict is intensive, due to the teenager's lack of ‘bagage’. This paper emphasizes upon the way that teenagers acquire spatial notions, in a compensatory manner. Such a strategy seems to be the royal road, the very essence, of the ‘work of historization’ (Aulagnier) related to the ‘process of subjectivation’ (Richard). The author demonstrates those ideas through the exemple of the fascination for underground space. Typical of teens, this passion represents a way to name their genealogical affiliation.

An Attitudinal Theory of Excuse

The mother lode of criminal law scholarship is a unitary theory of excuses, that is, a normative account as to why a person who engages in conduct that a criminal statute prohibits ought nevertheless not be blamed for it. After defining Aexcuse@ against commentators who argue that it cannot be coherently defined, and after criticizing competing theories of excuse, I argue that the feature that renders persons normatively blameless -and, typically, legally blameless, too -for engaging in conduct that a criminal statute prohibits is the possession of a certain attitude with which he engages in it. A person is normatively blameless if, despite engaging in conduct that a statute prohibits, he was motivated by proper respect for interests that the statute seeks to protect. Professor of Law, Michigan Law School. I am deeply indebted to Joshua Dressler and Tom Green for their thoughtful and meticulous comments on the entirety of essay; to Antony Duff, Sandy Kadish, Kent Greenawalt, Ken Simons, and Lloyd Weinreb for their comments on portions of an earlier draft; to Douglas Husak for engaging in extended correspondence with me about justification and excuse; and to Jonathan Westen for bracing conversations about justification and excuse while backpacking in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. AN ATTITUDINAL THEORY OF EXCUSE The mother lode of criminal responsibility scholarship is a unitary theory of criminal excuses, that is, a persuasive normative account of why the criminal law adjudges actors to be blameless despite their having committed criminal wrongs. The law=s other criminal defenses do not readily lend themselves to unitary normative accounts or, if they do, rest on normative accounts that are self-evident. Consider what Paul Robinson aptly calls Anon-exculpatory@ defenses, that is, defenses like double jeopardy and diplomatic immunity that bar actors from being tried for reasons that are independent of whether or not they engaged in the blameworthy conduct with which they are charged. Individual non-exculpatory defenses such as double jeopardy may be difficult to explicate, but double jeopardy and diplomatic immunity share nothing normative in common, except that, like all nonexculpatory defenses, they bar actors from being tried and convicted. Consider, too, a defendant who denies that he committed the actus reus of a charged offense or who claims that, if he committed it, he did so because it was the lesser of two evils and, hence, justified. Unlike non-exculpatory defenses, these are veritable Aexculpatory 1 See Michael Moore, Choice, Character, and Excuse, in PLACING BLAME 548 (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1997)(A[Excuses are the royal road to theories of responsibility generally@). For others who have proposed theories of excuse, see Richard Brandt, A Motivational Theory of Excuses, in J. PENNOCK AND J. CHAPMAN, EDS., NOMOS: CRIMINAL JUSTICE 165 (New York: New York University, 1985); Michael Corrado, Notes on the Structure of a Theory of Excuses, 82 J. CRIM. L. & CRIMINOLOGY 465 (1991); Joshua Dressler, UNDERSTANDING CRIMINAL LAW ' 17.03 (3d ed., New York: Lexis Publishing, 2001); Claire Finkelstein, Excuses and Dispositions in Criminal Law, 6 BUFF. CRIM. L. R. 317 (2002); George Fletcher, RETHINKING CRIMINAL LAW 798-817 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978); John Gardner, The Gist of Excuses, 1 BUFF. CRIM. L. R. 575 (1998); H.L.A. Hart, Legal Responsibility and Excuses, in PUNISHMENT AND RESPONSIBILITY 28 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); Sanford Kadish, Excusing Crime, 75 CALIF. L. REV. 257 (1987); Paul Robinson, Excuses, in STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION IN CRIMINAL LAW 81-94 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Robert Sullivan, Making Excuses, in A. Simester & A. Smith, eds., HARM AND CULPABILITY 131 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); George Vuoso, Background, Responsibility, and Excuse, 96 YALE L.J. 1661 (1987); Glanville Williams, The Theory of Excuses, 1982 CRIM. L. REV. 732. 2 See Paul Robinson, STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION IN CRIMINAL LAW 71-77.

Comments on Vic Blake, “In two Minds”

The paper poses questions raised by Vic Blake's response to the author's paper, “A Fork in the Royal Road: On ‘Defining’ the Unconscious and its Stakes for Social Theory” (PCS 9/1).