Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Psychological Literacy
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 […]
The Spectrum of Pretense
I saw the cartoon-graphic movie, The Rise of the Guardians, yesterday, and something in it repeatedly brought tears to my eyes, especially in the second part. At first I didn’t know why it touched me so, and then these thoughts came to me: I have preserved a capacity to imagine and pretend, what some might […]
The Super-Conscious “Unconscious”
It occurs to me that it’s possible that what people call the unconscious mind is at least partially super-conscious. It isn’t repressed so much because it’s nasty and we don’t want to think such thoughts, but rather the things it’s thinking are so subtle that they can’t be recognized, or so subtle that there are […]
The Wise-Elder Role
A friend of mine is a part of a “crone” group—no, not the withered old hag of some popular children’s stories. Unfortunate word, very age-ist. (If you floss your teeth, you need not lose them and become toothless as you age! Read more about flossing on my website.) Crone is really a term for wise […]
Thinking About Believing
A friend cited a book by Julia Kristeva (a psychoanalyst / philosopher / writer): "This Incredible Need to Believe,” and noted one of her points: We cannot interact with this world, even speak one word, without believing: – that there is a real person opposite one; and – that this world is real, not some […]
Thinking About Trauma
I think it useful to consider that there is a spectrum of trauma from the mildest to the most severe. On one hand, I’m inclined to say that it does not meet the requirements for being considered “trauma” unless there is a radical break with what the psychiatrist Jules Masserman in 1953 called the “Ur” […]
This is “My Brave”
Moreno’s theory of group work did not necessarily involve psychodrama. Of course it bridges over naturally, but my emphasis here is that just doing it openly in a group has healing power. There is a website called www.thisismybrave.org that opens mental illness up wide! Wow!
Too Much Too Much-ness
My darling wife Allee was talking about a book she was reading about mothers and daughters, and commented that the author of one of the chapters overdid it on the use of the Jungian idea of the “Shadow.” I think this is a useful concept, so I asked her to explain. It turned out that […]