The concept of medial understanding was the forerunner of what I call today co-conscious and co-unconscious states. Such a technique of reciprocal comprehension and “interpersonal memory” seemed to make possible astonishing matrimonial psychodramas, husband and wife reaching back into their first encounter and reliving, often with astonishing detail, all their moments of love and suffering, their silent tragedies and their moments of great decision
(Moreno, 1923).
Just how to produce such dramas remains somewhat obscure to me. Will experiment – and research!
The quote above is from this article by JL “Interpersonal Therapy and Co-Unconscious States, A Progress Report in Psychodramatic Theory” originally from: Group Psychotherapy, 14 (3-4), 234-241 (Sept-Dec., 1961) See PDF below.
This is my summary of what Moreno means by the social atom. In psychotherapy that “atom” or pattern is the client. When two of these “patterns” connect in love, then a lifelong process can follow. Maybe it is true love at first sight? Unlikely, love is blind. One possibility is to move from blind love to deep mature connection. The other possibility is hell. A third is lifeless boredom.
In a technological era like ours, the fate and future of the spontaneity principle as a major pattern of culture and living may depend on good fortune in tying it up with technological devices.
I had to do a big thing. The whole of this blog was corrupted. Nothing. With long guides about how to reinstall and reconnect to the database I did it.
I was scared of loosing this. I realise how much I love it when it is gone. Like Christchurch after the earthquake – I was not really home here in Christchurch till now when it is just a mess.
Pleased to see my post about wisdom & consciousness come up. How against the grain that is! I wonder why so may of the people I know who are “idealist in the philosophical sense” don’t dispute my outrageous claims against the received wisdom that is the engine that drives psychotherapy and pretty much all of self help and liberal politics.
Never mind… I’m saying nothing original, just marxism and Moreno stuff that no-one seems to get. I’m curious… is this important? I don’t think liberal tolerance of liberal ideas is a healthy thing. But then it does not really matter… that is the point, reality will win out no matter what stories we tell.
Bear with my reflections…
The ideology does not matter, but being in touch with what reality is up to… that does matter. Who can really figure What is to be done at this time? Wishful thinking wont help much.
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Anyway, pleased the blog is back
Later, Tuesday, 17 October, 2017
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
… every culture is characterized by a certain set of roles which it imposes with a varying degree of success upon its membership.
Moreno Who Shall Survive? p. 88
Two forms of the cultural conserve are referred to in my writings: the technological conserve, as books, motion pictures, robots, and the “human” conserve, the conserve which uses the human organism for its vehicle.
Love the work of Austin Kleon – this is an image from his 2018 Calendar
If “the focal conflict model” could be described in a picture, this is it. The black abyss shows the depth of the concept, and “We” that it is often something we share. The group is larger than the sum of its parts and can have its own disturbing motives.
Here is a link to the original analytic paper about these matters.
Got me thinking about the story of the cave. Ordinary people are fooled. Only certain elite trained people can see the world properly. They are enlightened. At one point they mention that knowledge (according to Plato) is not “bits” but that at a certain point there is a whole shift to a new mental state. It reminds me of spiritual enlightenment. They use the word ‘enlightenment’ in the podcast.
I think a qualitative shift in knowledge is possible. But it is not in the state of mind, that makes the shift. Something has been discovered, it is based on evidence. It can be taught, e.g. The world is round – species evolve. That is not a new state of mind, anyone can learn these things. There is “common wisdom” (maybe as old as this stuff in Plato) that ordinary learning won’t do the trick, that we need to go through some spiritual process of cleansing, saving or sitting and that there are special teachers. Plato certainly raises the right question – what is knowledge and what is belief, but his answers are not convincing, and maybe pernicious.
“We need a new state of consciousness before the world can change.” I hear that a lot. This spiritual answers seem wrong, yet Marx also talked of class consciousness. Certainly we need thorough study and knowledge. But the paradigm shifts don’t happen to “us” they happen as science, and social science discovers more about the way the things and people work. Then people need to be taught that stuff.
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Listened to another rather wonderful podcast Kim Hill interview with Ken Loach — Ken Loach – Life and films MP3 One moment I liked was where he says that class struggle in capitalism is not a belief of some kind. Once you have learned about it, like evolution, it is how it is.
People who impacted on me. Roughly in the order they did so. How I came to think the way I do, the intellectual & cultural biography. The juicier life story with real people is another, more personal story. The post about this post.
I had a few pop idols when I was a teenager. Mostly my mentors were people living around me. Then something new happened in a moment while reading Bertrand Russell that changed how I saw things. I think the book was called “On Morals”, but that does not seem to exist. Maybe it was Marriage and Morals but I can’t find the line I recall. “Morals is the science of how to live one’s life.” That does not Google, but that is what I recall. And as a teenager how to live my life was a burning question – that there was a science for that was very appealing. Further reading did not help much in a practical way (I will add Zorba The Greek to the list), but I began to read philosophy, and loved it.
I think of Russell as of marker in the sand for humanist, atheist, positivist rationality. ““I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.” I liked that. It summed up the atheism I was bought up with. (Now I think it is all a bit more mysterious. Maybe the universe forks and folds?)
The link to an album presented in Adobe Flash no longer works
Why he’s on the list.
Led to travel, New Zealand mountains.
Zorba the Greek
Colin Wilson
His book The Outsider led to my big shift at about same time as Peter Pinney
The book is a series of essays about what he calls outsiders, but presented from Wilsons existentialist position. Again how to live life! I identified with the central theme that outsiders are those who see too much. The main thing I got from the book is that I follwed through on every writer he mentioned. Now I knew who to look for in the library.
Colin Wilson is a bit of an embarrassment. He has an elitist perspective. Outsiders are artists and gifted, but not “supermen” above the doomed masses. He has an idea that the outsider has failed on some journey to enlightenment. I don’t like that type of spiritual approach to life, and did not even as CW put it forward.
