Adam Blatner

Oh, my, sometimes I think my mind is like an artist’s studio, an “atelier,” with various papers or books, presentations being prepared or books someday to write or revise, blogs to post, papers to complete on my website. It’s not one thing after another, it’s a little bit of this, and then, now that I think about it, I’ll go over here and do a little bit of that. For example, some recent themes include:
– Might applied role theory or what I call role dynamics be better recognized or described as a “multi-leveled psychology” because it addresses the social and cultural elements as well as bio-physical and intra-psychic dynamics?
– Liminality: might it be more simply thought of as the complex dynamics associated with any type of role transition?
– Perhaps drama is a different type of multi-dynamic way of working with communications, up two steps from oral communications (statements, questions); up one step beyond written communications (still more one-way). Drama includes not only two-way, feedback, but elements of play, imagination, group support, a balancing of emotional and intellectual explorations, and the like. Its usefulness matches our culture’s need for a more complex mode of discourse.  – Drama as I am talking about it is hardly like scripted and rehearsed theatre—which is a complex elaboration of drama in a certain direction; rather, it refers more to a sublimation or extension of children’s pretend play, with much more sophistication.
– I’m beginning to think that what is called “action research” is really just a shift in what is considered to be adequate research, from the culturally-more-well-known types of doing science on groups of people and deriving statistical significant results (i.e., “nomothetic” or quantitative research) to engaging in more complex situations, recognizing the uniqueness that is the product of this complexity (i.e., “idiographic” or qualitative research). What’s on my mind lately.
Action Research— idiographic vs nomothetic?  
– And finally, meeting with friends or corresponding via email, I’m continuing to be increasingly impressed with the pervasiveness of the operations of non-rational mind. Another blog addresses this.