Adam Blatner

Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner

Table of Contents:

Psychological Literacy

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 […]

Reflections on Reunions (Part 1)

A week ago I attended my wife’s 50th high-school reunion; before that, in April, my 50th medical school reunion; before that a family-get-together around a rite of passage of a cousin-twice-removed. So it has had me thinking: What is the deep attraction of reunions? I sensed that it was important, but it also was a […]

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 […]

Roots, Affiliations, and the Sense of Self

On my website I wrote about how the sense of self is an aggregate illusion, a feeling and complex of images that arise out of a goodly number of sources. Now I’ve realized that equally that our affiliations and identifications overlap with the categories of our roots and our preferred social networks. They are invisible […]

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 Embedded-ness

I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon, how people are caught up in an invisible matrix of influences. I recently read an article in the April, 2014 Discovery Magazine about how depth psychology and neurophysiology are being brought together, and I am in favor of integrations. (Actually, they were talking about psychoanalysis, but I find that […]

Social Sensitivity (or its lack)

Many qualities are enjoyed or missed by various people according to the varying distribution of talents. Howard Gardner, a psychologist, in 1983  wrote about eight that he identified in his book, Frames of Mind. One of these, interpersonal intelligence, is the focus here. My career in part is a healing of the wound, a compensation […]

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 […]

Social-Depth Psychology

J. L. Moreno developed a method called sociometry that involved more systematically asking people about their interpersonal preferences according to specified criteria. Diagramming the responses brings into view the intangible matrix of the social field. It operates in a way analogous to what a microscope does. But more, the social field thus exposed deserves attention […]

Socio-Psycho-Analysis

Reflecting on over 35 years as a psychiatrist, I think that at least half of the problems people have psychologically are due not to the quirks of their own minds or the particulars of their family makeup, but rather that they (1) believe the common (non-)sense ideas of their culture, following a host of social […]

Sociometry for the Holidays

This is a time when we write and send greeting cards, send out and accept holiday invitations, hold parties and decide whether or not to go here or there. It’s a time that people are intuitively feeling into their social networks. These feelings are very varied!    – There are those with whom you feel […]

Sociometry in the Family

Comments on a cover article for Time Magazine of October 3, 2011—title: Mom liked you best* (*of course she would never admit it); (author: Mr. Jeffrey Kluger). It’s good that this theme is brought up again in an era in which social psychology is coming more into prominence, gradually competing with the trend towards focusing […]

Sociometry—What to Teach

Sociometry is the measurement of degrees of attraction or its opposite—un-attraction?—among people. It is part of the complex of creations of Jacob L. Moreno, a born-Viennese physician who immigrated to the United States and developed psychodrama. (This is one of my interests!) Sociometry was one of this genius’ major creations, but it has been largely […]

Sociometry: An often-overlooked dimension of social psychology.

One of the more important dimensions of psychology operates not so much in the mind of the individual but rather in the interpersonal field. (This is perhaps why it was missed by the psychoanalysts.) One pioneer, Dr. Jacob L. Moreno, in the 1930s, noticed this dynamic and tried to find ways of measuring it. It’s […]

Some Facets of Depth Psychology

  Depth psychology is my term for the complex of approaches that attend to the way that unconscious processes are a significant determinant in human behavior.  In the 20th century, Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis was the most prominent exemplar, even early in that century Jung and Adler broke with Freud and pursued their visions—equally partaking […]

Spectro-Psychography

This is a neologism, a word I’ve just made up: So far it’s not on Google. It refers to the consideration of the ways mental phenomena can be viewed as a continuum, with different areas possessing different qualities. These are innumerable and I invite you to play. Send me your ideas and if I like […]

Spectro-Psychography II

For some time I’ve been thinking about how there are so many things that are best thought about as as spectrum, from too little to just right, to too much. I hinted at this in my post yesterday and wrote about this also on my website Another boost to this idea was the work my […]

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