From Eclecticism to specialisation and beyond

Just deleted this from a paper I’m writing where it is not relevant. But I want to keep the paragraph.

Years of involvement in psychodrama equipped me well to work with couples. However in the last decade or so I found myself doing more effective work helping people learn the art of loving as I learned from other modalities. Much reflection and exploration in practice led me to a new understanding of psychodramatic relationship therapy. Through engagement with Imago I learned to love and understand psychodrama afresh. (Logeman, 2009) How can we as psychodramatists best think of our relationship with other modalities? I have rejected eclecticism as it leads to a loss of focus. Marriage or integration does not for philosophy. I have tried translation; I challenged myself to use psychodrama concepts to make sense of what I have learned by being eclectic, but that does not honer some views and practices that simply are not present in psychodrama. I am satisfied to think that psychodrama can be enriched. Psychodrama has cosmology and a holistic view of human nature. At heart it is a theatrical method and anything can be put on the stage, including new ideas and methods.

To a Waverer, by Bertolt Brecht

To a Waverer, by Bertolt Brecht

You tell us
It looks bad for our cause.
The darkness gets deeper. The powers get less.
Now, after we worked for so many years
We are in a more difficult position than at the start.
But the enemy stands there, stronger than ever before.
His powers appear to have grown. He has taken on an aspect
of invincibility.
We however have made mistakes; there is no denying it.
Our numbers are dwindling.
Our slogans are in disarray. The enemy has twisted
Part of our words beyond recognition.

What is now false of what we said:
Some or all?
Whom do we still count on? Are we just left over, thrown out
Of the living stream? Shall we remain behind
Understanding no one and understood by none?

Have we got to be lucky?

This you ask. Expect
No other answer than your own.

My Review of The Golden Notebook – Goodreads

The Golden NotebookThe Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

I’m now about 20% into the book. I like it because have lived some of this life she describes. Middle class intellectuals in some colony. I see other reviewers don’t like hearing the privileged ruminate about their agonies. But we are a select bunch! For everyone one of us who entertain marxist ideals of a change in the system there are hundreds who don’t. It takes a modicum of privilege to even read stuff. So to hear how thes commies and fellow travellers carried on in the fifties is of interest to me. But I can see you had to be there perhaps to get it.

But then I was not there. I’m a generation older. It may not be common knowledge but there was a small wave of Marxist revival in the late sixties and early 70s. I imagine all round the world. It grew out of the vietnam war protests and the countercultural movement. It dawned on some of us liberals that we did not just want Peace. We want the Viet Cong to win. The imperialists needed to be defeated, and they were. It became clear too that national liberation was a viable and worthwhile step in the march of progress. Maybe that was not so clear to Lessing in her time? And the communes and alternative endeavours did not really work, not as a way of changing the system. It may sound crazy but I, along with many thought the “Times were a’ changin”. But really, no. And then China was in a stage before the cultural revolution disasters. It was easy to see there was something to be learned from the communists.

And there was! And then there was not!

Why did she get a Nobel Prise for her work? I think of Obama getting the peace prize – do you have to be a phoney to get it? I don’t think Lessing is a phoney. However she may have been mistaken for someone who is anti communist. It is very different to be a disillusioned to being anti. Jesuit priests apparently do not need to believe in god, they need to be searching for god. I wish there was some sort of world order of people searching for the marxist line of out time. And a Doris Lessing of our time – or at least one for baby boomers. Perhaps Marge Piercy? Is there anyone like her today, filling that niche she filled in 62?

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Evernote killed my blog

I used to write more in this blog than I do now. I always said I was just writing for myself, that it was a sort of note taking.

I have become an avid user of Evernote – and it is all private.  Notes to myself.  This has taken the driving force out of my motivation, which, I’m sorry to say, dear reader, was not to inform or please you but more about me.

Of course blogging has lost its pride of place as a form of communication with the advent of social media.  I don’t do much of that, but some, and that will have had an impact as well.

The other thing that never worked well in this blog is that I am a multiple personality.  I have six.

Which one is writing this blog?  The psychophile, the technophile… those two do ok here, after all the blog is on the cusp of these two interests, but I also do art, and I am a bushwalker and then there is a passion for specifically psychodrama and imago.  And movies and books!  And I used to be a communist so there is that whole interest in politics.  I use the tag World for that.

No unified focus.  Does that matter?

My Evernote account is more than capable of containing wild diversity.  Tags.  

There are tags here too.  And “notebooks”  This one has the notebook Journal.  And a bunch of tags, but who would ever use them? I do, Psyberspace is a resource with all my ramblings for a couple of decades.

 

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Turning the Paradox – my review on goodreads

Turning the ParadoxTurning the Paradox by Michael Harvey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I liked it! This is written by a good friend. I read it about a year ago, and at the time I thought I could hear a bit much of mike’s philosophy of life being thrust at me. A good philosophy it is, but in a novel I want to be shown not told. Yet a year later I recall the feel of the place and enjoyment of the story and the characters.

I’d recommend it if you like a novel of ideas, about communes and the west coast of New Zealand, with a touch of the thriller thrown in.

I am starting on his next novel with positive anticipation. Dog Harbour

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Dog%20Harbour

The technium

Kevin Kelly Interview – transcript:

http://edge.org/conversation/the-technium

Sums up many of his ideas.  I find his clarity inspiring.  There are just some ideas he explains well.

 

with new tools:

 

So you have the power to do evil expanded. You have the power to do good expanded. You think that’s a wash. In fact, we now have a choice that we did not have before, and that tips it very, very slightly in the category of the sum of good.

Does it? I can’t quite make that moral leap, but what is clear is that there are more options. For the baddies too! The root of evil may be ignorance and there fore as knowledge tools improve so does good?

I like this idea too:

It may be that for us to really master the issues of attention management, critical thinking, learning how technological devices work and how they bite back, all this techno-literacy may be something that we have to spend several years being trained to do. Maybe you can’t just learn it by hanging around people who do it or else just hanging around trying to learn it by osmosis. It may require training and teaching, a techno-literacy, and learning how to manage your attention and distractions is something that is probably going to require training.

I think the same about relationship. We now have so many relationship tools that need teaching that we need, as he puts it (in relationship to new media):

We know that from plenty of studies of literate and illiterate people from the same culture—that reading and writing changes how your brain works. That only came about because of four or five years of deliberate practice and study…

I get inspired like this with Kevin Kelly usually because I like what he says about the future and tools, but sense that I have a psychological perspective that he, and the whole Edge buch miss.

The evolution of psyche.

Then I want to get writing.

I also like:

There’s this conundrum, this dilemma of remaining different while connected, because if you’re just different but not connected, there’s no power in that, and that’s actually easy to do, but can you remain different while connected? You’re different in certain degrees, yet you’re part of the uniform standard. So it’s like you don’t want to make up new words that don’t mean anything. You want to write a book that uses the standard words in the dictionary, so you’re going to be different while connected to the standard. You’re connected to the English language, but you’re going to be different with what the words say.

I suppose that is what we get heretics, they speak to powers they are connected with. Not just to the desert.

I now want to read the “new economy”

http://kk.org/books/KevinKelly-NewRules-withads.pdf