Regression and the Maternal in the History of Psychoanalysis, 1900-1957

This paper examines the history of the concept of ‘regression’ as it was perceived by Sandor Ferenczi and some of his followers in the first half of the twentieth century. The first part provides a short history of the notion of ‘regression’ from the late nineteenth century to Ferenczi's work in the 1920s and 1930s. The second and third parts of the paper focus on two other thinkers on regression, who worked in Britain, under the influence of the Ferenczian paradigm – the interwar Scottish psychiatrist, Ian D. Suttie; and the British-Hungarian psychoanalyst, and Ferenczi's most important pupil, Michael Balint. Rather than a descriptive term which comes to designate a pathological mental stage, Ferenczi understood ‘regression’ as a much more literal phenomenon. For him, the mental desire to go backwards in time is a universal one, and a consequence of an inevitable traumatic separation from the mother in early childhood, which has some deep personal and cultural implications. The paper aims to show some close affinities between the preoccupation of some psychoanalysts with ‘regression’, and the growing interest in social and cultural aspects of ‘motherhood’ and ‘the maternal role’ in mid-twentieth-century British society

A "metric" complexity for weakly chaotic systems

We consider the number of Bowen sets which are necessary to cover a large measure subset of the phase space. This introduce some complexity indicator characterizing different kind of (weakly) chaotic dynamics. Since in many systems its value is given by a sort of local entropy, this indicator is quite simple to be calculated. We give some example of calculation in nontrivial systems (interval exchanges, piecewise isometries e.g.) and a formula similar to the Ruelle-Pesin one, relating the complexity indicator to some initial condition sensitivity indicators playing the role of positive Lyapunov exponents.Comment: 15 pages, no figures. Articl

Key Elements of the Ageing Management of the WWER-440/213 type Nuclear Power Plants

The owner’s intention of WWER-440/213 units in Central Europe is to keep the plants in operation as long as technically feasible and reasonable from business point of view. The preconditions of the long term operation and license renewal are the safety and good plant condition. The past and recent ageing management practices have to ensure the required condition and performance of the essential structures, systems and components. In the paper an overall picture of the long term operation of WWER-440/213 units is given. The review covers ageing of mechanical equipment, building structures and electrical equipment to. Key elements of the ageing management are identified and described. Basic issues of assessment of ageing of essential structures, systems and components, also the issues related to availability of design basis information and lacking environmental qualification are discussed. Reference examples typical for WWER-440/213 plants long term operation are given from Paks Nuclear Power Plant practice

A Characterization of Infinite LSP Words

G. Fici proved that a finite word has a minimal suffix automaton if and only if all its left special factors occur as prefixes. He called LSP all finite and infinite words having this latter property. We characterize here infinite LSP words in terms of $S$-adicity. More precisely we provide a finite set of morphisms $S$ and an automaton ${\cal A}$ such that an infinite word is LSP if and only if it is $S$-adic and all its directive words are recognizable by ${\cal A}$