The impact of legislator attributes on interest-group campaign contributions

Legislators possess political assets that economic interest groups may find valuable in pursuing their goals. This paper examines the effect these legislative assets have on the campaign contributions made by two large and easily identifiable interest groups: corporations and labor unions. Committee assignment, voting record, and electoral security are significant predictors of both corporate and union contributions to House incumbents, while party affiliation and years in office also influence the behavior of union political action committees.     

The influence of unconscious fantasy process in addictions and relapse

This discussion reaffirms the connection between addiction and underlying unconscious fantasy process. It suggests that unconscious fantasies play a determining role in persisting patterns of substance abuse and addiction. Within this context, addiction is understood both as a derivative of thepersistence of these unresolved fantasies and an inadequate compromise formation. It suggests that relapse is a manifestation of the episodic reassertion and influence of these powerful fantasies. Consequently, successful treatment requires the working through of the underlying fantasy process and the establishment of healthier compromise formations.     

An Insight Approach to Marital Therapy

The trend in marital therapy has traditionally been away from insight approaches and toward action-oriented methods, such as manipulating the couple system or teaching partners to negotiate. This paper presents a form of insight therapy based upon systems theory and suggests that this orientation has much to offer. The first part describes general categories of relationship problems with which a couples therapist must deal. The second part takes each of these problem types and suggests how a therapist with the present systems-interpretive approach might proceed. The goal is a shared understanding by partners of their marital system.     

An empirical excursion into the quicksand of vehicle replacement

The rapid increase of physical distribution costs relative to other categories has resulted in a renewed interest in the analysis of transport operations. One of the most common problems is that of vehicle replacement, and in this paper we present an analysis of real data. The methodology is developed paying due regard to the role of quantitative analysis in the decision-making process, and the sort of data which is readily available in most transport departments. A traditional discounted cost model is presented and this is followed by a productivity-based analysis, which is shown to be an improvement. The latter generates optimal solutions and is flexible enough to carry out considerable sensitivity analysis.