The Exploratory and Creative Functions of Free Associations
There is an important analogy between the creative process in the sciences and the arts and the processes of free association: an analogy which is so close as to be almost an identity. This arises from the fact that it is impossible to produce free associations, to be freely imaginative, to be freely creative if at the same time and in the very moment of "freedom" one attempts to maintain a watch-
ful, critical scrutiny1 of what one is producing. The person who is producing free associations with least internal friction and inter- ference is unable subsequently to retrace the path of his associations, unable usually to remember many of the items of their sequence.
1 scrutiny - исследование, изучение
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(This is analogous to the difficulty one has in recalling a list of nonsense syllables, which, rearranged to form words and sentences, would be easily remembered as a single unit.) Therefore any retrospective inspection of free associations must depend upon a detached observer who notes and records their sequence, or upon some automatic recording device. Similarly, the creative scientist or the creative artist, writer, or musician, has to set down his productions, put them aside, and let time elapse, before he will be able to turn back to them with objective scrutiny, with lessened identification and less personalized defense of them, than is pos- sible at the moment of creating or immediately thereafter. This ability to get outside of one's own skin, to view one's own pro- ductions as though one were a third person, involves a transition from preconscious symbolic functions and preconscious identifi- cations to conscious and objective self-criticism. At the same time
it requires a purging of conscious and preconscious processes of the unconscious ax-grinding which arises out of deeper levels of conflict and pain.
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Willem van der Eyken
The Developing Child
A human being is the most complicated piece of biological engineering in the world, and its development, from the first fer- tilisation1 of the female egg through to the incredibly long growth period of some eighteen years to the full-grown adult, is one that baffles imagination.
The complexity of the human brain, in particular, is one to inspire awe. It has been described as equivalent to a computer with 109 elements contained in a package occupying about one-tenth of a cubic foot weighing only three and a half pounds. But the now common practice of comparing the human brain to a computer is a scandalous exercise in oversimplification2. For the brain's elements provide biological factory that not only gives off continuous power
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1 fertilisation - оплодотворение
2 oversimplification - чрезмерное упрощение
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but which feeds in a constant and diverse array of information for sorting, analysis and action. Moreover, the brain, unlike any com- puter, has the whole history of its development wrapped up in itself. It is as if the Concord airliner1 had built into its own structure not only the airframes of earlier airliners, but the wooden struts used by the Wright brothers as well.
Not only does the brain contain a vast number of elements or brain cells, many of which have very special function, but each of these cells can, in theory, communicate with its neighbour to form
a pathway and so create a network whose range defies calculation.
It has been worked out that if the elements were limited to a million, the number of different two-cell links that could be formed would amount to Ю2.783.00, a number so vast that it would fill several books
of this size just to write down. But the actual number of nerve cells
is nearer 10,000 million!
In a famous quotation, Sir Charles Sherrington, one of the great research workers on the brain, once described it as 'an enchanted loom, where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one. Only eight weeks after conception, the rudiments of this loom are at work, and by the seventh foetal month, it is possible to record some electrical activity from the growing brain. Because the evi- dence from these electrical impulses may in time lead to a greater understanding of the development of what we call intelligence and the phenomenon of learning, it is worthwhile considering them in greater detail.'
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Z. Harris
Discourse Analysis
Discourse analysis performs the following operations upon any single connected text. It collects those elements (or sequences of elements) which have identical or equivalent environments within
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a sentence, and considers these to be equivalent to each other (i. e.
1 Concord airliner - самолет Конкорд
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members of the same equivalence class). Material which does not belong to any equivalence class is associated with the class member to which it is grammatically most closely tied. The sentences of the text are divided into intervals, each a succession1 of equivalence classes, in such a way that each resulting2 interval is maximally similar in its class composition to other intervals of the text. The succession of intervals is then investigated for the distribution of classes which it exhibits, in particular for the patterning of class occurrence.3
The operations make no use of any knowledge concerning the meaning of the morphemes or the intent or conditions of the author. They require only a knowledge of morpheme boundaries, including sentence junctures4 and other morphemic intonations (or punc- tuation). Application of these operations can be furthered by ma- king use of grammatical equivalences (or individual morpheme occurrence relations) from the language as a whole, or from the linguistic body5 of which the given text is a part. In that case it is necessary to know the grammatical class of the various morphemes
of the text.
Discourse analysis yields considerable information6 about the structure of a text or the type of a text, and about the role that each element plays in such a structure. Descriptive linguistics, on the other hand, tells only the role that each element plays in the structure of its sentences. Discourse analysis tells, in addition, how
a discourse can be constructed to meet various specifications. It also yields information about streches of speech longer than one sentence, thus it turns out that while there are relations among successive sentences, these are not visible in sentence structure (in terms of what is subject and what is predicate, or the like), but in the pattern of occurrence of equivalence classes through successive sentences.
1 each a succession n соответствии с последовательностью
2 resultinrg - зд. последующий
3 occurrence - зд. распределение
4 sentence junctures - соединение отдельных предложений
5 linguistic body - лингвистическое целое
6 Discourse analysis yields considerable information анализ текста дает значительную информацию
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OttoJespersen
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