Castration, Circumcision, Binding: Fathers and Agents of Socially Accepted Violence.

This paper focuses on the psychology of a neglected phenomenon-that of socially accepted violence. It offers a Lacanian informed model for the understanding of those who are granted with the authority to carry out particular forms of sanctioned violence-parents in relation to their authoritative role as agents of Law in the family. The paper discusses both the rite of circumcision and the biblical story of the Akedah as paradigmatic examples of socially accepted violence and builds on them to explore potential psychological configurations that parents may assume when they are socially expected to apply violence as part of their parental role.

Agents of the Father's law in a society of brothers: A philosophic and psychoanalytic perspective on legitimate use of violence.

This paper explores subjective processes of "Agents of Law" - individuals who the state grants the authority to use violence - and the dissonance stemming from the contradictory demands posed on them as legitimate users of violence despite the societal taboo against violence. A conceptual model will be offered based on two theoretical legs, Lacanian psychoanalysis and political theories of legitimacy. Specifically, psychoanalytic ideas would serve to examine unconscious processes, subject position and various identifications related to the question of "self-legitimacy" of Agents of Law.

Agents of Law: Psychoanalytic Perspective on Parenthood Practices as Socially Accepted Violence.

This paper presents a theoretical model of parental authority from the vantage point of parental subjecthood, using a roughly Lacanian formulation of what it means to take a (parental) subject position. For Freud, the parental role involves the acceptance of social rules that may, at times, involve a socially acceptable degree of violence. Nevertheless, psychoanalytic discussions have disregarded the parents' subjective experience as agents of the Law and purveyors of threatening authority.

The amnestic syndrome: applying the Rorschach Inkblot method for differential diagnosis.

Dissociative processes were investigated in a man diagnosed with focal retrograde amnesia (FRA) following a traumatic head injury without any anterograde memory deficit. Findings were derived from the Rorschach Inkblot method, which was administered together with other performance-based tests and a self-report inventory for evaluating dissociative proneness in personality functioning. A substantial set of behavioral and test response variables indicated dissociation proneness and the activation of dissociative mechanisms.

The neural correlates of linguistic distinctions: unaccusative and unergative verbs.

Unaccusative verbs like fall are special in that their sole argument is syntactically generated at the object position of the verb rather than at the subject position. Unaccusative verbs are derived by a lexical operation that reduces the agent from transitive verbs. Their insertion into a sentence often involves a syntactic movement from the object to the subject position.

Cortical representation of verbs with optional complements: the theoretical contribution of fMRI.

Verbs like "eat" are special in that they can appear both with a complement (e.g., "John ate ice-cream") and without a complement ("John ate").

An fMRI study of syntactic layers: sentential and lexical aspects of embedding.

Sentences with embedding are more complex than sentences without embedding, because they contain more syntactic layers in their phrasal architecture. Until now, neuroimaging studies tested embedded sentences that also included syntactic movement. To explore which cortical areas are specifically involved in the processing of syntactic layers, we used embedded sentences that did not include syntactic movement.

Cortical representation of verb processing in sentence comprehension: number of complements, subcategorization, and thematic frames.

The processing of various attributes of verbs is crucial for sentence comprehension. Verb attributes include the number of complements the verb selects, the number of different syntactic phrase types (subcategorization options), and the number of different thematic roles (thematic options). Two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments investigated the cerebral location and pattern of activation of these attributes.

Neural correlates of semantic and morphological processing of Hebrew nouns and verbs.

Neuropsychological evidence regarding grammatical category suggests that deficits affecting verbs tend to localize differently from those affecting nouns, but previous functional imaging studies on healthy subjects fail to show consistent results that correspond to the clinical dissociation. In the current imaging study, we addressed this issue by manipulating not only the grammatical category but also the processing mode, using auditory presentation of Hebrew words. Subjects were presented with verbs and nouns and were instructed to make either a semantic decision ("Does the word belong to a given semantic category?") or a morphological decision ("Is the word inflected in plural?").

Latent inhibition and overswitching in schizophrenia.

Attention disorders in schizophrenia are manifested in two different ways. On the one hand, the schizophrenia patient tends to keep a learned response even after it ceases to be relevant (perseveration). On the other hand, the schizophrenia patient tends to replace an adaptive response without being given a reason to do so (overswitching).

Presymptomatic signs in healthy CJD mutation carriers.

Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (CJD) is a rapidly progressing dementia with neurological, psychiatric and cognitive symptoms. We focused our study on the familial CJD form among Libyan Jews (the E200K mutation), trying to identify preclinical neuropsychological signs in mutation carriers to facilitate early diagnosis of the disease. A wide range of neuropsychological tests was administered to 27 healthy volunteers, all first-degree relatives of genetic CJD patients.

Perseveration and over-switching in schizophrenia.

Perseveration and switching in positive and negative schizophrenic patients are usually seen as manifestations of attention disorders. They may be closely related to each other, but have not been investigated in an integrated fashion. Such integrated investigation could contribute to the neurophysiological understanding of the relationship between the regional and the pharmacological deficit in schizophrenia.