Adam Blatner

Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner

September, 2013

Vitality Enhancement

I am concerned with the gradual growth and seductiveness of an increasing number of media that make it easier to “veg out” as a “couch potato” spectator. To challenge that, I want to remind people of a category of “folk art” activities that can happen in neighborhoods and communities of all types. This may include […]

Posted in Art (Mandalas, Doodles, Scripts), Essays and Papers, Play and Spontaneity, Psychodrama | No Comments »

Psychodrama: Changing Word Meanings

Words change their meanings over time. In the 1930s “gay” was carefree, but now it’s homosexual. I’m in a field that uses the term psychodrama—a type of therapy, mainly, that uses the activity of role playing to raise consciousness. But psychodrama as a word drifted into the mainstream and become a term for a situation […]

Posted in Current Events, Psychodrama | 1 Comment »

Morbid Humor

I generally try to accentuate the positive, as the song lyric goes, but when I was younger (and still, a little) I cultivated a degree of morbid humor. I liked the characters of the cartoonist Charles Addams and the gross stuff in the EC horror comics line. In my own fantasy-art I have imagined various […]

Posted in Autobiographical, My Favorite Things, Play and Spontaneity | No Comments »

Metaphysical Art Explained: Angel-Wing Expansion

This mandala expresses the great mystery of becoming from yet another angle. Imagine that angels are dimensions or realms of being—meta-oversouls that facilitate a whole field of endeavors, such as Twitter, or Sports Cars, or mud wrestling. Some are deeply traditional, such as Yoga, and others quite new to human consciousness. Some express an old […]

Tags:

Posted in Art (Mandalas, Doodles, Scripts) | No Comments »

Spontaneity Development

There are needs for this skill set in a rapidly changing world. When once young people had been taught to simply follow directions, now they’re expected to not only think for themselves, but also innovate. We’ve discovered that the key to creativity is improvisation, and spontaneity development is improvisation training. For example, Justine Jones and […]

Posted in Essays and Papers, Play and Spontaneity, Wisdom-ing | 1 Comment »

Beyond Psychiatric “Sickness”

A friend wrote and said, “Recently there was a finding that male holocaust survivors lived longer than male Jews who left Europe before WW II. A sociologist speculated that the holocaust survivors became more adept at survival under extreme stress and called it “post traumatic growth.” Note that it was not labeled as a disorder. […]

Posted in Psychotherapy and Psychiatry | No Comments »

The Inadequacy Complex

I wasn’t sure if I had an inferiority complex—it just wasn’t the right word. (The term was originated not by Freud but by Alfred Adler.) If you left me alone with my books or play I was fine. Finally at age 76 I found a better word: Inadequacy complex, which senses and feels bad about […]

Posted in Autobiographical, Psychological Literacy, Psychotherapy and Psychiatry | No Comments »

The Relevance of Play

Play is not just a bit of frivolity. It is deeply connected to psychological freedom, spontaneity, and creativity. To illustrate the power of overlapping properties of a dynamic, consider electricity:  In the 19th century electricity was found not just to “flow,” but also to have many properties not envisioned at first, such as its relationship […]

Posted in Current Events, Play and Spontaneity, Psychological Literacy, Wisdom-ing | No Comments »

All Are Prophets

I was looking through one of Neal Donald Walsh’s Conversations With God series of books and other media, and this notion occurred to me: You and I can imagine vividly, too. It’s just that there has been a cultural taboo against speaking or writing one’s inspiration and then claiming as did the prophets of yore […]

Posted in Autobiographical, Spirituality and Philosophy, Wisdom-ing | No Comments »

Novelty in Philosophy

Let’s begin with a quote of a passage—one of m favorites—by Alfred North Whitehead, found near the end of his book, Modes of Thought. He wrote near the end (pp.237-238):    “The use of philosophy is to maintain an active novelty of fundamental ideas illuminating the social system. It reverses the slow descent of accepted […]

Posted in Art (Mandalas, Doodles, Scripts), Spirituality and Philosophy | No Comments »

Archives