Adam Blatner

Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner

Table of Contents:

History

For the Heaven of It

Play is fun, and creativity as play is fun, is heaven. It’s not done “for the hell of it.” That was from a time when the Protestant Ethic ruled, and if it was fun, there must be something wrong with it. Duty and work were unpleasant in the old days, at least in the minds […]

Hello, World

Well, there you are, whether you’re aware of it or not, needing if not awaiting my efforts to change you for the better. Please forgive me for not being able to offer much more than the tiniest nibble at the ineffable monumentality of the challenge, but I’m just a little person, a member of a […]

History of Medicine: Now Playing

Thinking about my medical school class reunion, I flash on the branching of the Great Story, the history of the cosmos ,  out of which come the history of the evolution of humanity, and with it, – the history of consciousness evolution, which branches in many directions, such as the history of various endeavors, farming, […]

History of Psychotherapy

For those who might be interested, I’ve just posted several webpages that accompany a lecture I’m giving today on the history of psychotherapy. I would be open to suggestions for additions or revisions. It might be of interest to look at the many other papers I’ve written on different aspects of the art of bringing […]

Hitler Was Not Crazy!

Perhaps he was a little towards the end, when I think he was known to abuse amphetamines to stay awake to cope with the stress of the later stages of the Second World War. But in the early parts, it seems to me that many politicians resort to similar exaggerations or not-easily-disproven lies, and for […]

How Great “We” Are

Reading a chapter in a book on Jung and Moreno (edited by Craig E. Sephenson), I was struck not only by the general theme of the ways different approaches are finding some common ground, but in particular one part of Chapter 11 by Emilijah Kiehl. She is an analytical psychologist in the London area, but […]

Immigration

Very early in the last century my parents immigrated from the old country. The traveled from Eastern Europe and came to the USA, to New York City. There was a huge immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe to England and the USA, the “golden country.” Emma Lazarus’ poem on the Statue of Liberty always touches […]

Improvisational Theology

In 1979 Elaine Pagels wrote a book titled The Gnostic Gospels (Vintage Books), in which she noted that for the Gnostics, being considered “spiritually mature” or “initiated” was to write something that is stimulatingly original. That’s how I understood it. We have been living through millennia of quasi-worship of those who presume to know enough […]

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, […]

Interspirituality (Cultural Trends Part 3)

Interspirituality is a few steps beyond tolerance, which evolved into inter-faith dialogue. My understanding of this term is that it refers to a search for or at least an opening to an appreciation of those elements in all religions that speak to the same psychological and communal-ethical spirit. (This builds on a blog of July […]

J. L. Moreno, M.D.—Some Thoughts

Next year they’re running an article on Daimon, a literary journal Moreno edited a century ago. Moreno was a multi-dimensional genius, with ideas branching into philosophy as well as medicine; sociology as well as history; and so forth. He needs to be recognized as reaching well beyond his field of medicine and the remedying of […]

Keep Believing, Keep Pretending

There is a little verse is at the end of the 1980s Muppet Movie in which the melody of the Rainbow Connection is once again sung as a reprise: “Life’s like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending. We’ve done just what we set out to do, Just like the lovers, the […]

Kvelling

To “kvell” is to swell with pride, such as reading about my alma mater, The University of California Medical School, which won recognition as one of the top centers in the nation according to the US News and World Report. I also kvell for my kids and grandkids, a list of achievements that are considerable, […]

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 […]

Medical-ization

A friend, asking about what she called “arbitrary definitions of illness,” noted that they “pose a therapeutic challenge. As a society we also tend to medical-ize normal human conditions (like infertility). And what’s normal?” This got me thinking about the nature of “diagnosis.” Also, the word "medicalize" is interesting.   Sometimes diagnosis is one of […]

Metaphysics: Co-Creative Dynamics

I strongly suspect that it may be better to think of reality as we know it as co-created. That is to say, our minds co-create what we call reality. (By mind, I think this dynamic operates in dimensions or realms far from our material realm, yet co-exists; and even so, much of mind is to […]

Mind-Blowing In-Sight

We are all living in a time when the full logical impact of our present situation for humanity is that we now seem to be part of the culmination of four billion years of planetary evolution within a cosmos four and a half times older than that. I just realized this: It is truly mind-blowing […]

Multi-Perspectival Man Meets Modern-Man!

[Chapter 3: Previous episodes on August 29 and August 23] In this episode, Modern-Man protests, “Of course there is truth! It is out there, And we can and will discover it. Truth is at least in theory accessible. Everything fits, or at least would fit together, if we were only clever enough. It has to! […]

Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids (Book Review)

Mason, Phil. (2009). Napoleon’s hemorrhoids (and other small events that changed history. New York: Skyhorse Publishing —delightful book, chock full of brief anecdotes about the little glitches, where things went awfully wrong, close calls, or moments of serendipity. It’s amusing or terrifying to contemplate how things might be different but for… The  author in this […]

New-Fangled Cars Today!

My son got a new car with a lot of “bells and whistles,” new gadgets. He writes: “Alas, it lacks the latest Telepathic Soul-Connection (TSC) technology. So it’s not so great.  It doesn’t do the driving for you.” But he says he is relatively sure we will be able to buy self-driving cars within 10-15 […]

Nibbling at the Ineffable

It’s all so big, so multi-dimensional, so head-spinning complex, all we can do is to nibble on this “mountain.” The Ineffable is a adjective that means it cannot be captured in words, nor music nor art. It’s way too big. We can try, recognizing that whatever we say is only a pointer, and by definition, […]

On Intellectual Inhibition

A friend of mine is interested in the frontiers of consciousness development—as am I—and had recently attended the national conference of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). One theme he noted was the growing confidence that appreciation for the not-entirely- materialistic way of viewing the world was growing. I asked him (as I am wont […]

Opening Frontiers of Knowledge

Consider that we live at the surface of existence, and are learning to partake of increasing “depth” through successive expansions in many directions, including some of the following: During the 15th and 16th century, the Renaissance, Western culture expanded to reconnect with its own pre-medieval past, the classic Graeco-Roman civilization, along with the spiritual traditions […]

Overcoming a Handicap

I has congenital megacolon, also known as Hirshprung’s Disease. (It was also what Elvis Presley had!) I couldn’t pass my bowels and it piled up. Doctors said it felt like a rock. They took me to a doctor when I was one year old (or earlies) and they did a bilateral sympathectomy, because the disorder […]

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