Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Psychological Literacy
The Breadth of Being-ness
On my website I’ve posted a more lengthy paper about how it would be better for us to imagine that our sense of self expand beyond the boundaries of our brain and body to include not only close relationships, but our participation in wider social networks. (Some of you may know that my career and […]
The Dramaturgical Model
I have been involved with psychodrama for 50 years and have written books about it. The idea of life-as-drama is intriguing. I have taught “psychological literacy” to senior adults and I realized another point about this: It’s time that practical psychology escapes from the clutches of academia! Practical psychology should be like reading and writing […]
The Experience of Vitality
Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), the noted pioneer of contemporary views of mythology, wrote: “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will […]
The Fuddy-Duddy Complex
This is a complex of a number of associated images, thoughts, and feelings that emerge regarding the theme of entertaining opinions and judgments about things that really don’t concern you. It occurred to me that this is a not uncommon theme for parents of adult children whose life choices differ in various ways from your […]
The Gestalt Function
There’s a function of the mind called “Gestalt” that’s not “Gestalt therapy” but rather the innate tendency to see meaningful patterns in what is perceived. The mind tends to see things as wholes. Shown a series of still pictures quickly enough, it generates the illusion of motion (and from this, movies and television). The Gestalt […]
The Hero Process
What does it mean to have a hero, or to be a hero to someone else? In the course of your life, do you participate in anything heroic? Does heroism need to require physical daring? Super-powers? I think the word has become distorted and diluted. I want to suggest that the heroic reflects a process […]
The Higher “I”
I’ve become increasingly aware that I’m only part-way between me and not-me. There are parts of me that are spontaneous, and realistically speaking I should not take credit for these parts or their products. I’m tempted to say, like Jack Horner in the nursery rhyme, “Oh, what a good boy am I!” But a couple […]
The Higher Unconscious
The unconscious is not less conscious but more! It’s not just pushed down; it’s not just “Let’s not look at what we’re doing,”—i.e., repression—but rather what we’re doing you couldn’t begin to understand! What if the unconscious is super-con-scious and much faster and more clever than you can be. Some of it is influenced by […]
The Human Potential Movement Revisited
I realized this morning that my life is to some degree a “product” of the Human Potential Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was a sub-cultural movement that blossomed in urban centers, more vividly in the greater San Francisco Bay Area and nearby regions (such as the Esalen Institute about 100 miles […]
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 […]
The Influence of Abner Dean
I was strangely influenced as a young man by the surrealistic, semi-cartoon art of Abner Dean, who drew cartoons and pictures that intrigued me. I had been into comic books, but here was a fellow who, like Saul Steinberg, used cartooning to present serious themes. Recently, I remembered Dean and wondered why I was fascinated […]
The Lies We Live By
I have evolved from my role as psychiatrist in part into the role of cultural critic, because I found that part of what has come to be regarded as neurosis is just that some folks take to heart the lessons they’ve been taught or picked up from the ambient culture. It began to dawn on […]
The Lure of Irrational Hope
A friend asked, “Why are people so inclined towards irrational hope?” I pondered and here are some thoughts. You are welcome to comment. First, some hope is semi-rational in the sense of it doesn’t hurt to look for the best, and it’s no help to imagine negative consequences—unless you can do something realistic to change […]
The Meaning Instinct
I suggest that humans have an intrinsic need to construct meaning—something that orients them to the chaotic phenomena of the world. We pass along meanings as stories, myths; we organize religious-cultural systems based on these stories. It is universal. (When people become sufficiently disoriented through delerium (due to fever, some plants or medicines, some illnesses, […]
The Mind-Field
There’s everything we think is material, and then there’s the mind-field, which is inestimably vaster. It involves the (many?) dimensions of consciousness, including our own levels and probably fuzzing into hyper-consciousness. It probably fuzzes into hypo-consciousness, the qualities of mind of a leaf or a cell or a virus or maybe even a grain of […]
The Myth of Efficiency II
A recent conversation on email with a colleague who is interested in emotional intelligence sparked my thinking: I realize that I’ve written about the myth of efficiency before, but this just raised the theme again. He wrote, “I strongly believe that strong communication and understanding will always triumph business owners who focus mainly on numbers, […]
The Mythic Path (Book Review)
Feinstein, David & Krippner, Stanley. (1999) The mythic path: discovering the guiding stories of your past—creating a vision for your future. (Publisher: New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam, 1999. On page xiii of the Introduction to the 2nd edition by Jean Houston , she says, “ The zeit is getting geistier… the new mythology, […]
The New Sensitivity
Evolution requires periodic shifts in what we are sensitive to and what we need to learn to ignore. In the past, we had to ignore a variety of physical discomforts or psychological traumas because we simply didn’t know yet how to avoid them! Now that we do have many more ways of ensuring basic safety, […]
The Pervasiveness of Illusion
On a paper on my website I present what I said (sort of) to those attending the June / Summer program of the Senior University Georgetown, where I often teach. I find that we’ve shifted in our awareness of the pervasiveness of illusion so that instead of illusion being a sometime thing, these dynamics tend […]
The Psychology of Rapport: Sociometry
The Brafman brothers’ recent book, “Click,” and other writings speak to an extension of the growing popularity of applied social psychology and social intelligence, which is a sub-trend in contemporary psychology. Back in the 1930s, one of my teachers, Dr. J. L. Moreno, was writing about this dynamic. He became more well known for his […]
The Psychology of Spirituality: Some Notes
Of course this is a vast field, but here are some observations. I was chatting with a friend who’s in the mental health field and he noted his difficulty with religion; but at the same time, seemed to be a little interested in spirituality. He mentioned John Bowlby, a psychoanalyst interested in the dynamics of […]
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 […]
The Resonance of the “Wow!”
The title of this post is a bit of paradoxical apophatic musing. Apophatic refers to the stance that we—human consciousness—cannot begin to begin to know Divine essence. A degree of surrender is needed. Yet we can in our foolish innocence speculate. So also a three-year-old can talk about “my mommy” and know deeply that of […]
The Roots of Spontaneity
It occurred to me that spontaneity is a natural drive that emerges when in healthy infancy and childhood kids can enjoy the innocence of feeling (1) the freedom to take it over, to do it again and again until one “gets it”; and (2) the freedom to not feel at all ashamed to ask for […]