Wow! eBook
Primary Process Thinking: Theory, Measurement, and Research
Author(s): Robert R. Holt (Author)
- Publisher: Jason Aronson, Inc.
- Publication Date: December 19, 2008
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 153 pages
- ISBN-10: 0765706423
- ISBN-13: 9780765706423
Book Description
Volume two is an enclosed compact disc. The first ten chapters constitute a detailed scoring manual, designed to be self-teaching, for applying the concepts of primary process, its controls and defenses, to data from the Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Tests, dreams, and free verbal data. The remaining chapters treat its reliability and validity, including a critical summary of over one hundred researches from around the world, demonstrating how it can be used not only to test psychoanalytic propositions but to illuminate issues in clinical psychiatry, clinical and developmental psychology, and personality. A concluding chapter points to many promising directions for further research.
Editorial Reviews
Review
A masterful reconceptualization of a psychoanalytically-based theory of thinking, transcending Freud’s no longer tenable metapsychological constructions, and incorporating now neuroscience and cognitive science advances—engagingly written and happily quite jargon-free. A must for those concerned to understand the nature of thinking as a quintessential human activity. (Robert S. Wallerstein, MD)
The nature and functions of primary process modes of thought are thoughtfully, systematically explored in Holt’s scholarly monograph. Underlying much poetry, metaphor, and tropes, primary process thoughts explain much allusive creativity in the arts and are an unacknowledged presence in spontaneous, unconsidered life. (Jack Block)
Robert Holt takes us on a splendid journey through a jungle of theories concerning primary and secondary process thought. He lays out a lucid empirical path to study issues long mired in the conceptual realm, from condensations to displacements, so to speak. Holt’s sterling empirical approach, forged from psychoanalytic insights but liberated from the attending vicissitudes, highlights a novel contribution to the science of mind. (Jaak Panksepp)
This extraordinary, useful, and yes, daunting book is the result – indeed, in an important sense, the culmination – of a long and productive professional lifetime of work…. An expert, closely reasoned, detailed critique…. Offers an ingenious, creative, multifaceted manualized system that the auhtor and his collaborators have developed over the years for scoring primary process manifestations in Rorschach responses…. Demands attentive reading and repays it by introducing a method that is itself a codification of Holt’s sophisticated understanding of how primary process thinking reveals itself in actual clinical work…. Holt is scrupulous…. Provides exemplary demonstrations of the application of scientific rigor and the payoff from years of devoted concentration on a grand but humbling topic. (Kaley, Harriette
Psyccritiques)A remarkably sophisticated integration and operationalization of the psychoanalytic theory of thinking, from illogical drive-laden to adaptive even creative thought, that has led to systematic empirical investigations that have enabled Robert Holt to enrich and extend the psychoanalytic theory of complex mental processes. (Sidney J. Blatt)
