Narrative Fallacy and Other Limitations of Psychodynamic Case Formulation

Hello and welcome. This is Active Inference Guest Stream 74.1 on March 6, 2024. We're here discussing Narrative Fallacy in Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry with Alexei Toulczynski and guests. So first there will be a presentation, then we'll have a discussion and look forward to everyone sharing what they have to say on that. So thank you, Alexei, first to you for organizing this and catalyzing it and also for the presentation. So thank you. Go for it. Well, thank you, Daniel. I'm most grateful to Active Inference Institute and you personally for hosting us and your commentary and advice. I'd like to thank wonderful panel members from many different countries who found the time and expressed interest in being here. And to everyone watching us on YouTube. I'm hopeful to clarify from the get go the terminology because a lot of people I talked to reacted to the word fallacy. But as if I'm trying to kind of talk about truth in psychoanalysis or point out some inaccuracies, this is not my intent at all. Or to the word narrative because it's a vast topic and linguistics are involved, I just wanted to clarify that narrative fallacy, the two words together, is a specific technical term introduced by Nassim Talib in 2007. And so I'll try to keep this discussion sort of on the ground, under the hood. And I'll illustrate this concept, then I will define it. Hopefully we'll discuss it from the standpoint of neuropsychology, Active Inference, and then move on to clinical applications. And I very much look forward to a discussion. And so I'll proceed. This is the pre print of the paper, possibly some of you had a chance to look at it. And if you don't mind, I'll start with this example. What I'll ask everyone to do is to try to memorize a list of words that I'll give you and observe how you feel while doing so. And we'll do it a couple of times. Is that okay? Sure. Right. So here we go. So here we go. So Magnolia, 1964, firefighters, club, Chicago, jazz, 10. What was the last one? 10. Okay, now I will do the same thing. And I will present this to you in a slightly different format. Okay. On a cold winter day, in 1964, a jazz club Magnolia in Chicago caught on fire. The firefighters were on the scene within 10 minutes. For most of us, it is a little bit easier to retain the second format. And, you know, we'll talk today about why this is and what's going on here. And then I'm just using this as an illustration. The example is from the repeated battery for neuropsychological assessment, R-BANs. I modified it slightly, but this is sort of what we'll be talking about. Usually in these conversations, Miller and this is the case of the repeated battery for neuropsychological assessment. We'll talk about this. We'll talk about this. We'll talk about this. Usually in these conversations, Miller comes up and Mark Solms calls this Miller's law. I mean, I think it's a model. It's well established and researched. But Miller wrote a famous paper in 1956 called the magical number seven plus or minus two. He stated that we can process about seven units of information plus minus two on average. And it's important that he didn't say seven digits. He said seven chunks. So I wanted to say that, you know, he already in 1956 talked about chunking. And to by any chance, if somebody is not familiar with the term, when you hear a phone number, the area code is usually, you know, we memorize it as one unit of information. So I'm in Maryland and 301 is a frequent area code here. It doesn't take three units of information. It takes just one. The interesting kicker is that if we move from sort of random pieces of data to sentences, then our span immediately doubles. It becomes 15. So we'll make this kind of ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail ail…