Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Psychological Literacy
Illusions
I’m preparing a series on illusion for a class I’ll be giving starting at the end of this month at the lifelong learning organization that I helped found about 19 years ago. Not optical illusions, or magician’s illusions—though those are undoubtedly interesting, but psychological illusions. These operate at all levels of social organization. I […]
Illusions and Foolishness I
A few months ago my son David and I were chatting about ways people lapse into illusion and foolishness, and he suggested that I write it up as a book, or at least put it on the blog. I came up with several score items—well, actually I blurted out, “There are a hundred of them!” […]
Illusions: A Wider Perspective
Two topics (among many others) on my mind seem to be overlapping as I discover more books reflecting more research on the topic: illusion and critical thinking. It turns out Freud just opened the door a crack—the unconscious is far more vast and complicated than he ever knew! (Freud once likened himself to Columbus and […]
Imagination Development
So there’s the name: Imagination Development. Imagination can and should be developed! It’s a theme that helps rationalize some hobbies, or it could be a hobby in itself. It’s a kind of mental yoga. Stretching and bending the imagination, playing, pretending, consciously daydreaming. It relates to Jung’s suggestion that we actively imagine. Most people don’t […]
Increasing Sensitivity
I’m happy to realize that even at the age of going-on-74, I am still learning. Times change and so does sensitivity to things that I had taken for granted. Around 1976 my daughter, then not-yet-eight, called to my attention in a rather stark fashion, in all innocence and love, smelling my tobacco-infused beard, “You stink, […]
Is a Puzzlement: What to Do?
Sometimes I want to get out and do various things—support local or national candidates or causes, work for the team, give more money to this or that charity, get all worked up about various political issues, religious issues, social issues—so many things. And then there’s my profession, and the insatiable needs to do more to […]
Jung and Moreno
I’ve recently encountered a paper about Jung and Moreno, which reminded me of some books, and it got me thinking, as I am wont to do. Jung, whom Freud dis-missed as messing in the dark mud of occult-ism, plumbs the non-rational that suffuses the realm of the unconscious. (Dreams, for example!) Jung opens some doors, […]
Just Do It–A Misleading Cliche
The saying, “just do it,” is an oversimplification and deserves to be critiqued, semantically unpacked, examined more closely, which is what this blog piece aims to do. (Please forgive my pedantry. One of my goals is to promote imagination, spontaneity, play. Another goal is to promote critical thinking, reflection. It might seem that these two […]
Just Thinkin’
There is a hidden assumption that everything can be presented in terms known to all. This is as fallacious as saying that all higher mathematics can be symbolized by simple arithmetic and no other symbols are needed. It’s a matter of trying not to be all “stuck up”—we learned to try to not be this […]
Later-in-Life Learning
There’s a lot about early and even mid-childhood development and the many things that go on during these phases. But I’ve been impressed recently, on reflection, how much still there are lessons to learn, new integrations, continued healing of past stresses, traumas, neuroses, and relationships. We realized also that this continued learning is part of […]
Let it Go (On Not Over-Packing One’s Life)
I’ve been contemplating a bit of obsolete mental programming I picked up in my youth: The cultural injunction to be well-read, well-informed, scholarly, well-traveled, active, etc. (At least this was so for the sub-culture in which I grew up in the mid-20th century.) I should keep up on the news, know what’s up so that […]
Life Enrichment
There’s a new field emerging: Life Enrichment. It’s for just what it says. It emerges from improvisational theatre and psychodrama, and has roots in the way we played with imagined scenarios as kids—cops and robbers, house, hospital, whatever. Our great grandchildren may say about our generation, "Can you believe they were mostly just one person? […]
Life is Very Multi-Complex
There are so many things to do, so many roles to play: Going to the toilet has many sub-roles, depending on whether you’re a man or a woman, depending on whether you’re constipated or have diarrhea, on the quality of the plumbing and the warmth of the toilet, on whether the toilet is in the […]
Lifelong Re-Creation
It’s time here in the early 21st century to recognize that many procedures that have arisen from the context of “therapy” have far wider application! (It’s no more daring to note this than to note that there are now many thousands more applications for computers and associated technologies than there were back in the 1950s.) […]
Living Creatively
One of my life missions is the introduction of methods that people can use to live more creatively. The methods are adaptations of psychodrama or a type of improvised dramatic enactment. I’ve written about this in other contexts, such as a chapter in Jacob Gershoni’s edited book, Psychodrama in the 21st Century. An imaginative application […]
Living in Exponential Times
What a phrase, “exponential times.” A five minute YouTube clip emphasizes this: . I was told that the Sony Corporation played that clip at an annual shareholder meeting. My friend, Ed, who sent me this went on to say: “It has ever been thus, but in exponents there is a cusp where things do change […]
Magical Thinking
My wife reminded me that this bit of psychodynamic jargon may not be easily understood by most people, the term “magic” immediately drawing them into their own associations to that term. I realized (of course!) that she’s right, and that I’d grown so used to the term that I thought people knew what it meant. […]
Making Meaning
I’ve participated in the Network for Personal Meaning, and a recent email from Dr. Wong, who heads up that group reminded me of some thoughts I’ve had about this topic. Personal meaning emerges largely as a feeling, like feeling secure in one’s home. It can also be stifled by a childhood of great insecurity. But […]
Meaning as Vital-Mind-M
I’ve been thinking of the need for a sense of meaning in life, becoming more intensely aware of the need for this to be operating at a certain level. It occurs to me that feeling that life is meaningful is a kind of psycho-cultural nutrient, a kind of vitamin-equivalent that I call a “Vital-Mind” component. […]
Mind-Spectrums Picture
The problem with mind-spectrums is that they involve different sorts of things, receptive sense organs, intuitive “organs,” temperamental sensitivities, interpretative biases (which follow worldviews), frames of reference, etc. There are tendencies to imagine as distinctly different things that which is the same thing (at least as resonating to one part of one kind of spectrum), […]