Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Psychological Literacy
Re-Doing Your Philosophy of Life
Everyone generates a meaning system. Most often it is an unconscious set of assumptions that help you make sense out of things. Alfred Adler (a physician who was an earlier associate of Freud but then dropped away because of his own independent ideas) observed that children around the age of five begin to have provisional […]
Re-Juvenile
Thinking of Christopher Noxon’s book, “Re-Juvenile,” (New York: Crown Publishing, 2006), generally I enjoyed it. I think the author speaks to the hunger for a re-integration of the best elements of child-like-ness, as I talked about in my book, The Art of Play, now being revised. However, the language is problematical. I described the value […]
Re-Narrating Your Life
I wrote about this previously under the title, “Creating Your Living,” but that was not the best phrase. You don’t create what you do, but you create how you describe what you do, or did. Indeed, how you describe it makes it anywhere from tragic to annoying, from good enough to glorious. You’re playing with […]
Re-Thinking “Disorders”
I just read that "federal health officials" said that, using a wider screening for "autism spectrum disorders," guess what: more kids are picked up who fit the broader or looser criteria. Duh. If you loosen the criteria on anything, that increases the sensitivity to shades on what used to be the borderline and you’ll pick […]
Re-Thinking “Philosophy”
My dear wife Allee said that everyone had a philosophy of life, either implicit or explicit. I disagreed, saying that the word was appropriate only when there was some effort to rationally coordinate the different elements (to draw a phrase from Whitehead near the end of his book, Modes of Thought). I’ve come to see […]
Reasons to Scowl
On the airplane home I noticed some scowling folks and I was tempted to judge them for being a little grumpy; but then, I shifted to a compassionate contemplation of why they might be scowling and jotted down the notes that led to the items listed below. I confess that I’ve been rather happy about […]
Recognizing Shame
I have two friends, Sheila Rubin, LMFT & Bret Lyon, Ph.D, who write about the dynamics of shame, and give workshops on this topic. It’s a basic theme in psychology and needs to be addressed. Many of those who really need therapy need also to treat their shame, as shame complicates their disorder. Many get […]
Reconsidering the Oedipal Complex
I’m thinking that a little bit of this is a good thing. I was watching an attractive young mother coo over her baby, about 9 months old, and I thought, “Hm, I want an Oedipal complex. I don’t want to marry Mom or have sex with her, but I do want her to absolutely delight […]
Reflections of a Gran’popala
Dear “Junior Kiddos” (I am blessed with four darling grandchildren, ages six through eleven, and what with my beginning to post on this blog and their getting old enough to read, I have hopes they will read this. But of course it’s also addressed to kids everywhere and perhaps also will speak for and to […]
Reflections on Hating
Hating is a mixed bag. Sometimes it can even be experienced as fun, or mixed with humor. Usually, though, it vaguely hurts the heart. The illusion is that it may seem better to hate than to feel powerless, to feel as if one is a victim, or even vulnerable to being victimized (or that those […]
Reiteration as an Important Component of Communications
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 […]
Relevance
An acquaintance by email, Eric Kreuter, is writing about relevance. What an interesting word! It seems to connect in my mind with meaning, the sense of meaning, of being meaningful to others, to some cause, as needed, as having made a difference. It links also with a sense of self as rooted in a historical […]
Responsibility Reconsidered
A friend wondered, “Why haven’t humans done a better job of taking care of themselves and the environment?” I responded, after a friendly greeting: “Fair question: Why have humans not done a better job? Answer: Species wise, homo not-so-sapiens is, as a species, fairly immature, emerging through several species levels over 1,000,000 years to be […]
Role Dynamics & Identity
One nice thing about thinking about life in terms of the roles we play—i.e., “role dynamics”— is that it takes the pressure off of having to “be” wonderful. I am not sure, but suspect that many young people still are caught up in the semantic jungle of labels. How can I be okay when I […]
Role Dynamics: A User-Friendly Language
One of the challenges today, it seems to me, is to bring practical psychology into the mainstream. I think one of the factors inhibiting this integration is the fact that much of psychology for 40 or more years was “tainted” by psychoanalytic jargon, which has a unfortunate tendency to pathologize—that is, to make ordinary behavior […]
Semantics Illustrated
Saul Steinberg is a cartoon-artist whose drawings I find to be thought-provoking (and I dearly love my thoughts to be provoked). Here in a New Yorker magazine cover of September 17, 1960 he portrays words and names that evoke different associations in different people. Sail on, oh ship of American hegemony (at the time, a […]
Shame: An Underestimated Dynamic
I think shame should be recognized as being as toxic as lead or scaring kids with descriptions of hell. And many medical conditions have a “final common pathway,” a certain rash, headache, fever. I think shame and guilt—they overlap in many ways, although some differences might be discerned—also generate a kind of shrinkage, a somato-psychic […]
Sharing Your Story
I’m suggesting some reasons why it would make sense to weave in a degree of group dynamics, sharing our stories—especially the stories of our spiritual journeys—, listening, offering support to each other, and even deepening this exploration together using certain psychodramatic methods. We were raised in an era before actual spiritual community. Some of us […]
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)
There’s a trend towards introducing practical psychology in the schools—under the term, "social and emotional learning" or SEL. I have known some of its pioneering people and been to some conferences and am most eager to promote this. (Some resources are linked here on my website.)I wouldn’t be surprise if some practitioners mangle the method—that […]
Social-Depth Psychology
Fields become more complex as new developments and tools for examination emerge. Bacteriology evolved to include other microscopic and sub-microscopic agents, viruses, Rickettsiae, etc. So, too, 20th century psychology and sociology will be viewed in the next century, I predict, as offering promising beginnings, but still coarse. Already the discovery of the mirror neuron system […]