Category: Psyche

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Brights – nice name for this breed of athiests

A Jungian Notebook

Dolores Brien is one of my favourite bloggers.  This post is typical of why.  In the recent post on various scientists etc I was attracted to science on the one hand and repelled on the other.  Got something clear: I am repelled by the brights.  Good to see Freeman Dyson is not among them, I’d like his blog too – does he have one?  His daugter does – she uses flickr! Some athiests are more spiritual than religious people – dyson is one & maybe Dolores too.

Although Dyson is not a religious believer and as a distinguished scientist is eminently qualified to be a “bright” should he choose to do so, he tells us that he himself sees religion as a “precious and ancient part of our human heritage.” Dennett, on the contrary, “sees it as a load of superfluous mental baggage which we should be glad to discard.” What is missing from Dennett, as Dyson sees it, is the recognition that science is only one way of understanding. “Science,” Dyson writes, “is a particular bunch of tools that have been conspicuously successful for understanding and manipulating the material universe. Religion is another bunch of tools, giving us hints of a mental or spiritual universe that transcends the material universe.” If you use, as Dennett does, only the scientific tools, you will never understand religion. “We can all agree that religion is a natural phenomenon, but nature may include many more things than we can grasp with the methods of science.”

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“Connected Knowing” closer to the source.

Tracking down the source…

Amazon

Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind
by Mary Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, Jill Tarule

This 1996 edition is the 10th aniversary edition – originally from 1986

From interviews with 135 women (mostly privileged college students) regarding their search for truth and knowledge, the authors (all female faculty members of colleges or universities) determine five learning “perspectives” that characterize “women’s way of knowing.” The somewhat philosophical text, which skillfully blends narration, documentation, and excerpts from interviews, sees higher education’s teaching methods as more responsive to male “impersonalness” than female “connectedness” and recommends ways to improve the situation. On the whole, a work ironically geared more to the dialectician or feminist scholar than to the “integrated constructivist” or “passionate knower.” For large public and academic libraries. Janice Arenofsky, formerly with Arizona State Lib., Phoenix Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The story interestingly continues, in 1996:

Amazon

Knowledge, Difference and Power: Essays Inspired by Women’s Ways of Knowing
by Nancy Rule Goldberger, Jill Mattuck Tarule, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Mary Field Belenky

From Publishers Weekly
Ten years ago, the editors, all educators working in the field of psychology, published a theory of epistemology based on interviews with women that caused ripples in academic circles. This anniversary volume contains 15 articles, including one by each editor, that deal with the controversies that arose from the original work, Women’s Ways of Knowing, and the ways in which the writers have since changed their thinking. Several pieces, including one by feminist Sara Ruddick, deal with the concept of “connected knowing,” which, according to the authors, means acquiring knowledge by entering the belief world of another person; it has been criticized by some as contributing to a gender-determined system of learning. An interesting piece by social psychologist Aida Hurtado addresses the issues of race and class in relation to ways of knowing. These scholarly contributions will be of interest primarily to those already familiar with the original work.

This led me to a pdf:

A Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction
Carol Cohn and Sara Ruddick
to be published in: Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction
eds. Steven Lee and Sohail Hashmi, under review at Cambridge University Press.

Which in turn has interesting references:

The phrase “alternative epistemology” comes from Margaret Urban Walker, “Moral
Understandings: Alternative ‘Epistemology’ for a Feminist Ethics,” Hypatia, vol. 4, no. 4
(1989) pp.15-28.

They go on to refer mostly to the two books above… so it seems we are at the source.

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Connected knowing and Role-Reversal

Imago World

A short article: Receiving Sexual Pleasure by Sylvia Rosenfeld, LCSW, again has that Imago reference to “connected knowing”:

The goal of Imago Relationship Therapy is to create the conditions in a relationship that will encourage positive change in partners. The right environment retrains the brain. The behavioral component of sex therapy does this as well. The integration of both therapies can help a couple move from “separate” to “connected” knowing. Dialogue and behavioral assignments, especially sensate focus, create the continual repetition, through words and actions that translate what their “brains” know to what their “hearts” know as well.

I just had a thought that this might be what Psychodramatists call “Role-Reversal” in a sense couples become more empathic as they dialogue, to the point where they have a knowing of each other that goes beyond empathy, they know so many of the dots that it is easy to fill in all the dots (if you get my drift). I can grasp these things more when I can relate them to my primary modality, that is where I learnt things in a visceral way.  In Psychodrama the role reversal is enacted where people literally change places and enact the role that the other had.  It is an important technique.  However it is also used as a way of speaking about an ability people have to step into the shoes of the other.  Again to mix modalities, someone with a narcissitic wound can’t role revers – that is the same wound.  It is also one of the latest stages of child development, and builds on other skills such as mirroring.

I heard about how in the grieving process for a miscarriage the parent role-reversed with the spirit of the child. They had named the unborn baby Martha. In the role reversal the child revealed many feelings and some gratitude for its brief in utero time on earth. She also made it clear that she did not like the name Martha & would they please change it. What sort of knowing is that!

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Knowing

Barbara L. Green – For Therapists:

Knowing:
Imago and Object Relations

All sounds a bit mysterious to me, but it is a worthy project, to grasp the shape of the Imago (which I think of a a complex of little hooks or valencies which search out healing relationships.)  Now that is a form of knowing, and yes it will have its origins in that psychological entity which Psychodramatists call the “Original Social Atom” or internal object relationships in the Britich Psychoanalytic tradition.

The amalgam that is the imago, therefore, is a complicated component of the mental apparatus. Partly conscious but to a large degree preconscious and unconscious, it contains numerous bytes of knowledge. Some are certainties but have never become differentiated thoughts; others are the residue of direct bodily experiences recorded permanently, like a dent made in the earth by a falling meteor. Still others result from distal observations and are filed away, to be later referred to with unconscious automaticity.

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Connected Knowing – turning up in the wrong places…

Catholic University Au

Later: Thursday, 23 October, 2008 – the link to the specific page & the Kandinsky is dead.

Finished up at this page looking up epistemology stuff for my article on Psychotherapy & Science which I am rewriting. I am putting it here on my blog partly ’cause I love the Kandinsky. Also because the “connected knowing” theme has found its way into Imago via Helen Hunt’s feminism. Science & Psychotherapy paper is, I believe a way expand connected knowing idea as a way of doing science.

There seems to be some truth in this, despite the sometimes degrading treatment of the sexuality of women (humiliating stereotypes and a ‘double standard’ which applies in many cultures). It is important to speak from the different contexts of women’s experience and bring to theological reflection a closeness to and integration with bodily processes. This is what a number of feminists call ‘connected knowing’ which contests the one-dimensional rationalist thinking which has dominated Western progress thought. We are challenged by this Feminist experience to question certain patterns of thought which justify the exploitation of people (women, workers and the poor) and to replace these patterns with a connected and Conciliar process that is more sensitive and just.

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John Brockman interviewed by Kim Hill

Radio New Zealand – Saturday, 15 July:

9.05am Interview: John Brockman Literary agent and founder of online salon The Edge Foundation (www.edge.org) to bring together people working at the edge of a broad range of scientific and technical fields. He is the editor of: ‘What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty’ (ISBN 0060841818), ‘Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist’ (ISBN 0-375-42291-9), and many other books.

I don’t know how long the podcast will be up there for. Forever I hope, but I listened to it later via mp3 player – which is agreat thing to be able to do! I found it interesting, always one to enjoy the reminiscences of a boomer in the 60’s.  Disturbing too… such interesting people and stories and ideas but with is a strange scientism in the mix, he sides with Dawkins not Gould, there is a glowing link to Denis Dutton at the end, who maligns psychotherapy with his zealous cult like devotion to skepticism.

More on Brockman here by Bruce Stirling (Interesting that I just said he is interesting):

Wired 7.09: Agent Provocateur:

“You’re not interesting?” “Not not-interesting!” he snaps. “Post-interesting! Interesting doesn’t pay. Well, it pays once, but not twice. I used to be interesting. I was, like, the It Boy. Being so interesting – well, it’s not so interesting.”

Then and Now:

    Brockman

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Professional identity

My third psyberspace podcast

Download:  MP3

Listen: Odeo

door
Psychotherapy & Counselling – the difference – registration of Psychotherapy as a profession in New Zealand

There is no simple way of saying that someone is doing a psychotherapy in the way we could say they have done an analysis. Psychotherapy as a project!
I also ask the question of how all this might apply or not to psychotherapy online.

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Honouring a Classic

A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

This is a link to Kaitlin Duck Sherwood's classic and once rather useful guide. Effective Email is not a bad title.  It is, in hindsight an idealistic paper, honourable because of that but also impractical & frustrating.  There is an ideology about email embedded in the work that we now know will remain an ideal. In 2006 this 2000 document is dated.  It is dated not just because it is from the last century or because of new technology (it is somewhat technology neutral, but technology has surpassed these older ideas) but mainly because something completely new is needed

    * to relate to the reality of actual practice
    * to grapple with ineffective practices and fallacies  that have gained more popularity

For example there is a link to a page by Kaitlin Duck Sherwood on Email Overload. Which has a range of tips, some better than others but which is flawed in its attitude to the question.  Even in its title.

There is no such thing as email overload, any more than that there is a library overload, or an art gallery overload, information overload or a shortage of time, or difficult problems… you get the idea, own the challenge, don’t be a victim to abundance in the world; be wise to the flow of stuff.

I am planning some posts here around Email Intelligence.  I want to find the central principles of wise email practices.

This is not a trivial thing, a good practitioner would be a back belt in communication, there would be personal fitness combined with a thorough tradition, and like judo would use the energy in the "enemy" as a source of strength, as a friend.  There may be a bigger topic here – the art of communication in the digital era.  I will however focus (slowly I'm afraid) on principles and practices related to email.  And in case you have not spotted, I am already indebted to David Allen's GTD tradition in my thinking here. They are good on email practice, and I also see limitations.

I recall some earlier posts on this theme.  I will go back & tag some old posts.

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