Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Wisdom-ing
The World Needs You (Or, Why You Belong)
I read on a listserve news item of a colleague doing a workshop titled, "Where Do I Belong?" I wrote an email to my professional colleagues and, before erasing it, it occurred to me that it applied to lots of folks. I googled “The world needs you” and found many entries. Good! So what if […]
Therapy or Education?
Some has been written, indeed, of thinking of therapy as re-education! It is curious that methods of consciousness-expansion can be applied as therapy or education. My next (and last) project is to broaden action techniques, psychodramatic meth-ods, enhanced simulations, beyond psycho-therapy. There are tens of thousands of articles about applications in therapy, but Moreno wrote […]
There Goes Another One!
It turns out that there is one other universe—but of course, if there were one, there could be an infinite number! I dreamt about it last night—but it wasn’t a dream—it was a segment: Everything went fifty times faster than in our world. Bibbi-badda-bu-bi-bam! Faces, people, events—vaguely oriental, I recall, but oh-so-fast. I realized that […]
Thickening Philosophy with Psychology
Increasingly philosophy is coming round to appreciating the inevitability of distortions due to depth psychology. Carlin Romano’s book, America, the Philosphical (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), offers a nice review that brought me up to date about some figures about whom I had been sadly ignorant, such as Richard Rorty. Apparently a number of […]
Thinking About Believing
A friend cited a book by Julia Kristeva (a psychoanalyst / philosopher / writer): "This Incredible Need to Believe,” and noted one of her points: We cannot interact with this world, even speak one word, without believing: – that there is a real person opposite one; and – that this world is real, not some […]
Thinking About…
I discern several levels of consciousness: 1. Thinking, 2, thinking about thinking, 3,thinking about those processes, and 4. meditating on those levels. The first is straight thinking, calculating. Example: "He’s heading off that way, so I’ll cut him off." Leopards do this. The second level is more human: Thinking about thinking. Because of their developed […]
Thoughts on Creativity
Creativity is an emerging dynamic about which we continue to learn new facets and depths. It’s not as if we fully understand creativity. It’s more like electricity, a phenomenon about which we continue to discover new features even after a couple hundred years. Creativity may be reformulated in many ways. One element that may be […]
To Blog or Not to Blog
To paraphrase Hamlet’s soliloquy, in the play by Shakespeare, but things are different today: I have become more aware of “blogging,” which is another way of publishing my random thoughts or writing. What ego! What conceit! to think that anyone out there would care in the least about “random thoughts,” no matter how well-put. To […]
Top Dog in the Cosmos?
What if indeed we are NOT top dog in the cosmos? What if we humans are a species of life that ’s a whole lot smarter than algae, but only about half-way up to the ultimate in really-being-smart (yet still short of omniscience).
Toward the Popularization of Psychology
This has become a trend towards popularizing psychology, beginning almost a century ago, but this hasn’t happened, because vested interests in traditional religion oppose it. (One of the main doctrines in popular psychology, as I see it, is that we fool ourselves, and becoming aware of the many ways we do this would benefit humanity. […]
Toward Tomorrow: A New Myth
The acceleration of change in our era offers a new myth for our time: The blossoming of a flower or bud. Things can go along for months or weeks, but in a few days buds turn into leaves or flowers. Things change relatively fast after a long incubation. Birth happens. And so it is with […]
Trauma, ACoA, Psychotherapy
The following are thoughts stimulated by reading a book by my friend Tian Dayton, who recently published The ACoA Trauma Syndrome: The impact of child pain on adult relationships, (2012, Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications Inc.). The book notes that substance abuse affects not only the person involved, but often the family members, and offers […]
Tweetum-Tweetum
I think that’s the call of a Cardinal-bird. A walk on a late Spring morning, with Allee, who is recovering from an appendectomy. (It was done with one of those little ‘scopes that go in through the belly button.) Wow. In the olden days she would have had to stay in the hospital a couple […]
Two More Things About Enhanced Simulations
First, it’s another word for Action Explorations. Second, it’s axiodramatic and sociodramatic as well as psychodramatic. All these are more complex ways of re-examining political, ethical, and social norms as they evolve. What was if not righteous, then normative, become ethically dubious, challengeable, “evil.” This has been one angle on history. In this last century, […]
Tzimtzum Reconsidered
This title speaks to a re-thinking or re-interpretation of the Hebrew word, tzimtzum, which means contraction, and alludes to a mythic doctrine developed by Rabbi Isaac Luria in the 16th century community of Safed near the Galilee in Israel. So in the following myth I present the new story: In the beginning God’s presence was […]
Unconscious Depths
I was reminded of the depth of subtle programming in a gentle and amusing way, by realizing that the persistence of songs in my mind—I think they’re called “earworms”—in the week following my participation as one of over a hundred people in our Sun City Chorus singing our Christmas Concert. The songs carry on, after […]
Unfolding Consciousness
.Consciousness is progressing gradually, unfolding, ideas building on each other. Things take time and their processes operate on multiple levels and in multiple dimensions. Much of my work has gone in the direction of facilitating this unfolding consciousness, at whatever pace. A bit of encouragement here, a boost there. It’s a very slight intervention I […]
Vitality Enhancement
This is my term for a very valid activity. This phrase is needed. Of course it’s also recreation, but that category has been co-opted by two activities that may offer illusory gratifications. One is competition, which often is so focused on the winning that the fun is lost. The second gratification is vicarious. There’s a […]
Waking Up a Little More
I’ve been waking up to ways I’ve been asleep or veiled in ignorance or self-deception, and one of the things I’ve woken up to is the idea that lots of other people are as caught up in illusions as I’ve been. Everyone has a somewhat different combination of thousands of illusions and self-deceptions. Digging out […]
Watch Your Language: On Self-Scolding
I was talking with a friend who heard a sermon about taking God’s name in vain, and what this conversation reminded me of is that even if one doesn’t believe in the idea that the god of a hundred billion galaxies and more could have what we could ever begin to know of as a […]
Ways of Growth
This anthology is matched by a website for others to write about their non-psychotherapeutic applications of psychodrama, drama therapy, applied improvisation, drama in education, Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, and other forms that overlap with the expressive arts therapies. It has occurred to me with increasing vividness that much that began as "therapy" need not […]
What Are Old People For?
That’s the title of a book written in 2004 by Dr. William H. Thomas, subtitle: How elders will save the world. (Acton, MA: VanderWyk & Burnham, 2004). He brings up many points that I find important. I have become interested in subtle forms of oppression—including overt and subtle forms of age-ism—a theme that has become […]
What If Dreams Are Reflections of Trans-Dimensional Existence?
I have become vaguely aware that we humans are similar in many ways, and dissimilar in many ways; we are multi-dimensional minds in (as far as we know) three-dimensional bodies. But dreams tell us we are far more than 3-D! This is a cockeyed interpretation of dreams: Dreams, most people assert (and who am I […]
What We Don’t Know
Truly, of all the happenings in the vastness of the cosmos, what we know is almost infinitesimally tiny. So as a friend asked herself, “How can I teach when I don’t know?” I responded, “I too know (on this scale) next to nothing. Courage! On another scale, most people don’t have the tools to see […]
What’s It All About
It’s gloriously complex, to begin with. Each person has an incredible complex of challenges: – to heal the various hurts arising from areas of particular weakness, general weakness, lack of talent, physical disability (even slight), body form, too much this, not enough that, so many things to feel ashamed of. Then there’s the subtle […]