Psychology GRE: what to expect

Psychology:

• Approximately 205 questions.
• Some questions may ask for the description of an experiment or a graph.
• Most questions assess knowledge acquired through undergraduate general psychology courses.
• Questions may include material on factual information, analyzing relationships, applying principles, making conclusions from data, evaluating a research design, and/or identifying a psychologist who has made a theoretical or research contribution to the field.
• 40% of the Exam includes Experimental or Natural Science oriented questions, 43% Social or Social Science oriented questions, 17% General Psychology questions.
• In addition to a total score, the Psychology Subject Test includes 2 subscores even though there are 3 sub-sections. There is a Experimental Psychology Subscore and a Social Psychology Subscore. The General Psychology only contributes to the total score.
• Experimental and Natural Science topics include:
  • Learning
  • Language
  • Memory
  • Thinking
  • Sensation and Perception
  • Physiological Psychology
  • Ethology
  • Comparative Psychology
• Social and Social Science topics include:
  • Clinical Psychology
  • Abnormal Psychology
  • Developmental
  • Personality
  • Social Psychology
• General Psychology topics include:
  • The History of Psychology
  • Applied Psychology
  • Measurement
  • Research Designs
  • Statistics

the thing of writing

I’m looking at Mel Levine’s book, The Myth of Laziness, and he brings writing to the forefront of one’s capacity to produce.  He outlines the processes that can be employed to help one write.

1.  Developing a Project Mentality
A project mentality is the belief that worthwhile and gratifying results are obtained in well-planned steps over an extended period.  Ernest Hemingway once said, “Writing is rewriting.”

2.  Organizing

3.  Exercise Quality Control over Writing
Ask, “How am I doing?” This offers you a chance to regulate what you’re doing and get it back on course if it has strayed from your original intentions or needs.  Soon after writing, you need to compare your your output to what was originally intended.”  This includes proofreading.

4.  Developing Fluent Oral Language

5.  Thinking on Paper

6.  Applying Technology

7.  Exploiting Affinities

Lacan: Mirror Stage

Today I’m meeting the Lacan philosophy group for round 2.  We’ve decided to talk about Lacan’s Mirror Stage.  I’ve just now opened the documents and have an hour to digest.  The material all looks so good but I need stick to the topic.  Focus!

Material:

1.  Ecrits, Translated by Bruce Fink

2.  The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, Edited by Jean-Michael Rabate

3.  VII: The Topic of the Imaginary

Ecritis:

“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” p. 93

The primary function of the mirror stage is identification: a child is transformed when they assume an object/image,

“The l is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.”

“But the important point is that this form situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming, no matter how successful the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own reality.”

The function of the mirror stage is a particular case of the function of imagos, which is to establish a relationship between an organism and its reality–or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt.

“The mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation-and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an “orthopedic” form of its totality-and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid struc- ture. Thus, the shattering of the lnnenwelt to Umwelt circle gives rise to an inexhaustible squaring of the ego’s audits.”

“The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis provide us schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the balance of the psychoanalytic scales–when we calculate the angle of its threat to entire communities–provides us with an amortization rate for the passions of the city.”

The Cambridge Companion:

The Lacanian hypothesis asserts fundamentally that the unconscious and its effects on human beings are consequences of language:

“To recognize an effect of language in the drive already meant assuming that language, far from being reduced to its function of communication, is an operator capable of transforming the Real.”

The drive is produced by the operation of language:

“The drive derives from needs, the drive is a transformation of natural necessi- ties produced by language, through the obligation of articulating demands.”

VII: The Topic of the Imaginary

“Commenting on a text is like doing an analysis.  How many times have I said to those under my supervision, when they say to me – I had the impression he meant this or that – that one of the things we must guard most against is to understand too much, to understand more than what is in the discourse of the subject.  To interpret and to imagine one understands are not at all the same things.  It is precisely the opposite.  I would go as far as to say that it is on the basis of a kind of refusal of understanding that we push open the door to analytic understanding.”