Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Teasing: Another Spectrum
Teasing can range from mild joshing to outright sadism, really nasty mean. The other extreme has nothing indirect, just people being kind, tactful, appreciative. There’s a good deal of communication that’s in-between. Some people feel anxious about being perceived as being “soft” by others. Others are are coarser: they interact by introducing an an edge […]
Posted in Essays and Papers, Mind-Spectrums, Play and Spontaneity | No Comments
Awesome! No Problem!
The desk clerk was a young man who responded to matter-of-fact arrangements being made at a hotel with such phrases, instead of saying “okay,” “good,” or “yes, Ma’am.” It’s strange when young people say “awesome” to describe fortunate but really rather mundane events. Or when something has evidently been a big problem, but they work […]
Posted in Autobiographical, Foolin Around, Uncategorized | No Comments
Growing More Psychologically-Minded
It may take a century or more before even a moderate number of people become moderately psychologically-minded. Freud set this back a few decades, I fear. But even if Freud didn’t give people excuses to hate the machinations of the mind as viewed through his distorted lens, people would still avoid looking at their own […]
Posted in Follies, Psychological Literacy, Psychotherapy and Psychiatry, Whassup? | No Comments
Being Silly as Part of Health
“And when was the last time you were silly?” This might well be on the standard list of questions asked by one’s doctor. “If it’s been over a week, it’s not okay.” Wow! I mean, what if this is right? What if this becomes part of the medical “review of systems” that every doctor must […]
Posted in Play and Spontaneity, Psychological Literacy, Psychotherapy and Psychiatry | No Comments
Fabulation 2
As you may have noticed, I dare to make up stuff. You can, too. (As a matter of fact, you do, all the time, but you don’t know it. It’s unconscious. Maybe with the tools I’m producing you can know it a little more, or at lest know about that.) The fancy term for making […]
Posted in Foolin Around, World of Almost-Real | No Comments
How the Mind Works
The mind, or as they say in a children’s song, “Der Honky-Donky-Doodle,” works in mysterious ways. At last (or as I am wont to say, alas) neruo-imaging has met neuro-imagining and resulted in a picture of the nerve bundle that connects right and left brain, the “corpus callosum,” as it is technically called. Below is […]
Posted in Art (Mandalas, Doodles, Scripts), Follies, Foolin Around, Mind-Spectrums, World of Almost-Real | No Comments
Propaganda
As we begin the debates and the next round of political jostling for public office, I’m reminded that I’ve been interested since my early teen years 65 years ago in propaganda, the way the newspapers and other media can and do distort the truth. The old term for this is “rhetoric,” and I think they […]
Posted in Autobiographical, Current Events, Follies, Wisdom-ing | No Comments
More on the “War Against Drugs”
I’ve noticed a number of recent articles in current journals—Time, National Geographic, etc.—that speak to the argument for the legalization of marijuana and the counter-push, the “War” against drugs. Tobacco and Alcohol are excluded from this “war,” please note, in spite of the extensive damage they do to health. In a recent book titled the […]
Posted in Current Events, Essays and Papers, Whassup? | No Comments
Accepting Limitations
Early this morning when I was dreaming, in the dream I was at a sort of class lecture, and my eyes kept closing and sort of being glued shut. I tried to keep my eyes open with my fingers as I wanted to hear what the speakers were saying. Upon awakening I did a bit […]
Posted in Spirituality and Philosophy, Wisdom-ing | No Comments
I Can “Fabulate”
There’s a word, “confabulation,” that refers to the way some people’s minds rather obviously make up a reality, memories, consistent thinking, that jibes with a slight suggestion. It’s more obvious in some patients than others. I daresay that in subtle ways it’s ubiquitous! We do this far more naturally in dreams. Then when we wake […]
Posted in Follies, Foolin Around, Psychology, World of Almost-Real | No Comments