Today I heard on the news that both McCain and Obama separately have been talking up the idea encouraging people to become involved in giving to the community. It’s a good idea, but it needs a wave of positive emotion from the youth of America, and only Obama is really engaging the youth in a […]
Evidence continues to accumulate regarding the fragility of memory. Beyond the scandal of the “recovered memory syndrome” around 1992 and other ways that distortions of memory have been used (or probably mis-used) in many kinds of legal proceedings, attention to this problem is an important corrective in our tendencies to give more authority to certain […]
Sometimes my percolating brain generates more extensive essays, which I post on my website. The following posted today are worth checking out:
1. Belonging-ness: Posted on webpage: http://www.blatner.com/adam/psyntbk/belongingness.html
2. Paradigm Shift: My intuition is that we are in the midst of several fundamental shifts of world-view. One is the developing of more complex forms of self-reflective thinking: […]
Reiteration in communications means saying something repeatedly in slightly different ways. The point is that saying it just once may not be effective, not only because the information is not adequately processed by the audience, but also because the receptivity to the message is embedded within a context of a perceived relationship. What is communicated […]
I was wondering recently at the way my engaging in a session of dancing—either square dancing or folk dancing—can so lift my overall psychosomatic energy level. After a while of warming-up, what may have felt “tired,” “dragging,” “low key” disappears and I feel delighted, lighter, happier, more vital. What was it about dancing?! Then I […]
Whether consciously or unconsciously, we are improvising, making it up as we go along. We pretend that we are following rules, sticking to what’s expected, playing out the lessons we learn, and to some degree we are. However, in greater and lesser ways we are adding our own creative twists, nuances, stylistic elaborations, exaggerations, accentuations, […]
A common source of burn-out and/or employee stress in modern organizations is what I call the myth of efficiency. It assumes that there is a degree of inefficiency in work, and one of the tasks of the efficient professional or competent worker is to figure out how to “cut the fat” and detect those inefficiencies, […]
I think of philosophy as a game: It’s not a frivolous game, but rather it’s a game in the sense of challenge, flexibility, and its provisional nature. It’s a game of building the best possible explanation, a working model that accounts for an expanding range of phenomena. Of course, the game should be played with […]
I’ve been reading Brent Willock’s, Comparative-Integrative Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective fro the Discipline’s Second Century (New York: The Analytic Press, 2007). Great book—erudite, and significant in its purpose: We should consider more how it is time (theoretically and practically) to get past the era of competing “schools” of analysis (e.g., the object relations, self-psychology, neo-Freudian […]
In a recent trip to California we used a GPS (geographic positioning system) as a new electronic device in our rental car and I was impressed with it. In combination with a cell-phone, we were able to navigate to some places (and in time for the appointment) that otherwise might have left me lost, exasperatedly […]
