Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
The Meaning Instinct
I suggest that humans have an intrinsic need to construct meaning—something that orients them to the chaotic phenomena of the world. We pass along meanings as stories, myths; we organize religious-cultural systems based on these stories. It is universal. (When people become sufficiently disoriented through delerium (due to fever, some plants or medicines, some illnesses, […]
Posted in Essays and Papers, Psychological Literacy, Spirituality and Philosophy | 1 Comment
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 […]
Posted in History, Psychotherapy and Psychiatry | No Comments
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 […]
Posted in Psychodrama, Psychotherapy and Psychiatry, Wisdom-ing | No Comments
Action Explorations: A New Category
I’m proposing a new category for thinking about and addressing collective challenges: “action explorations.” This term includes a variety of approaches that have in common the properties of enactment, improvisation, role, and story. One of the approaches within this category is psychodrama, but most dictionaries and many professionals think of this approach mainly as a […]
Posted in Action Explorations, Current Events, Psychodrama, Wisdom-ing | No Comments
The Art of Blogging
So perhaps we consider blogging as an art form, as valid as sculpture or dance. How much attention should I put into it? Should every piece be rehearsed, re-worked, evaluated in terms of a variety of criteria? Is it elegant, well-written, understandable, persuasive, innovative? It is the extension of easy self-publishing, that’s all. Open to […]
Posted in Autobiographical, Essays and Papers, Whassup? | No Comments
Being a Little Unsure
Although I am bold enough to spout off on this blog, let’s be clear that I make no claims to being ultimately right. Often there is a varying degree of uncertainty. What brought this to mind is that I value a degree of intellectual humility. Not so much as to inhibit self-expression, but not so […]
Posted in Autobiographical, Follies, History, Psychological Literacy, Wisdom-ing | No Comments
Spirituality and Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy might be thought of as the art of bringing people forth into a greater potential; this art rests on the implicit world-views shared by the counselor and the client. What we call faith, spirituality, and religion partake of the assumptions about what it’s all about, albeit often only superficially. This essay is in part […]
Posted in Psychotherapy and Psychiatry, Spirituality and Philosophy | No Comments
Analysis Interminable
So my wife and I are pretty mentally healthy, but we are introspective, so we notice traces of neurosis, such as introjection of dissatisfied early attachment figures—also known as “hungry ghosts”—those for whom who we were was never enough—and we joked about it. I strongly suspect that 30 years of psychoanalysis would not suffice. “Only […]
Posted in Psychological Literacy, Psychotherapy and Psychiatry, Spirituality and Philosophy | No Comments
“Medical-ization”
This is the tendency to treat things as if they were a disease when instead they should be better imagined as something else, such as a common problem in ordinary life. A friend suggested that a number of conditions are “medicalized”—implying that they should not be. This is really interesting from multiple viewpoints. When is […]
Posted in Current Events, Psychotherapy and Psychiatry | No Comments
Perspectives on “Mental Illness”
Things have changed: Different types of “mental illness” need to be discerned. Certainly the history of medicine includes as a them the recognition that, for example, some diseases that seemed to be infectious were actually due to nutritional deficiency—such as pellagra. Similarly, a number of major mental illnesses such as “dementia paralytica” that was a […]
Posted in Book Reviews, Current Events, Psychotherapy and Psychiatry | 1 Comment