Meaning and Discourse. A Computer Model of Psychoanalytic Speech and Cognition: By John Henry Clippinger, Jr. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. 231 pp.

"How do speakers arrange linguistic items … to convey and to conceal their meanings and intentions? Or, from another perspective, what inferences can we make about a speaker's cognitive (and affective) processes from an examination of the manner in which his or her discourse is constructed?" (p. xi). This question, posed by the author as the problem to be addressed in this book, is more familiar to psychoanalysts in its second form. Indeed, it is from the latter perspective that psychoanalysis functions as a method of investigation as well as a therapeutic endeavor, developing certain hypotheses about underlying cognitive and affective activities from the data of a type of discourse, i.e., free association.

In this intriguing book, however, Clippinger has attacked the problem from the opposite direction. Starting with a conceptual framework of information processing, he has developed certain hypotheses regarding the cognitive and linguistic processes underlying discourse. He has then constructed a computer program that fairly accurately reproduces and predictably varies a selected sample of psychoanalytic disourse. The discourse episode, a patient's verbalization in a fragment of a psychoanalytic session selected from taperecorded sessions of four years of analysis, reproduces virtually every stammer, hesitation, and ungrammatical construction and clearly demonstrates the patient's uncovering, through her associations, an unconscious fantasy, as well as the interplay of associated defenses. By this successful modeling, the author has attempted to demonstrate the validity of his underlying hypotheses.