Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Wisdom-ing
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-Prioritizing
Revising my “bucket list”—i.e., the things I want to do before I kick the bucket. Here’s how I think about it. Let’s say there are a thousand things I might do, and let’s plot them on a spectrum from 1 for things I hate to do to 100 for things I love to do. Most […]
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 […]
Really, Really Like
There are tons of things I don’t care for that much. Meh. Some stuff I prefer not to encounter, engage, hear, go to. I don’t need to put them down, but they’re just so not my cup of tea. And then there are things I sort of like. And things I really like. But what’s […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Replacing “Psychodrama”with “Enhanced Simulations”
Although I’ve given part of my life to promoting Moreno’s psychodrama, I don’t really like the word itself. “Psychodrama” as a word has several implications. It suggests drama, a word that originally mean something done, enacted, rather than talked about, but has come to mean something heavy, “dramatized” for effect, given visual and dialogue cues […]
Responsibility for Spiritual Journey
I’ll be giving a talk in mid-May, 2014, on the topic of Taking Personal Responsibility for Your Spiritual Journey. (This will be for our local club in Sun City Georgetown Texas, Spirituality Anonymous.) Dare we realize that we do have the freedom to find our way to the Divine in our lives? Indeed, perhaps we […]
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: 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 […]
Scientism Criticized
Scientism is a term for applying the methods or criteria of science to assess whether something is true. It over-reaches, assuming that it is the only way to assess the usefulness of an idea. I think that scientism is wrong; while there are many things that merit being tested by science, there are other things […]
Semantics: How Words Mean
People fool themselves, and fool each other. The ancient art of rhetoric was one of the major elements in the curriculum in the Graeco-Roman culture over two thousand years ago. (The word “trivia” derived from the trivium, which involved the three subjects taught first in in medieval universities, namely: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. But these were […]
Sentimental-osis
I woke up from a dream, and on and forgetting the rich eventful-ness of what was going on in the dream, I experienced a pang of grief-loss. I sensed that dream was still engaging my interest, though I couldn’t say why. Dreams have that power. Then another frame of reference kicked in: I’ve learned to […]
Shakespeare Authorship
Who really wr9te the early 17th-Century plays commonly attributed to Will-iam Shakespeare? Sir Henry Neville! I have a friend, Dr. John Casson, living in northern England, who wrote a book about one of my interests, titled Drama, Psychotherapy and Psychosis. It’s about dramatherapy and psychodrama with people who hear voices, a groundbreaking book based on […]
Simulations for Planning
Of late I realize that I have transcended therapeutic role playing—psychodrama, drama therapy, etc.—and moved towards thinking that all of this is beyond therapy. It applies also in wrestling with the challenges of re-visioning new fields, re-visioning how to develop skills. I have left medicine, left psychiatry, left the whole medical model where some people […]
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 […]
Some Elements of Hope
An acquaintance posted a jeremiad on one of the listserves I plug into—a rant by a friend about how we’re all going to hell in a handbasket. It was too sad—I couldn’t take it. There was a psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, who had a number of good ideas about education, my favorite being the concept of […]
Some Theology of Consciousness
I recently heard a talk by Ilia Delio, a Catholic theologian and professor who stretches what catholicity means. She recently wrote a book about Teilhard de Chardin and quotes some little known papers that have come available. It turns out that Teilhard went beyond denominational religion, which meant that he went beyond the necessary hierarchy […]