Category: Philosophy

Posted on

Matthew Collings, deep and shallow

I listened to a podcast today for the second time – Kim Hill interviewing Matthew Collings. I realised I had blogged it before in Thousand Sketches, and there is a link there too – I recommend it.

If this is an age of shallowness then it is sort of deep to be shallow. Kim: “Shallow is the new deep”.

I don’t buy that though. It is an age where we are more conscious than ever and we flee. There are oceans of depth and we flee to the shallow. But not everyone. The “long tail” comes into play. At the top of the zeitgeist it may be shallow, ironical & tabloid, but down the tail it gets more interesting, there are activists, thinkers, and people having real relationships.

Anyway, it was a good listen even for the second time, happened cause I was cleaning up after re-installing a backup.

Posted on

Layout back to normal.

But what it looked like  was something like the Socio site.  My image, also on Thousand Sketches is used as the masthead.

The encounter symbol.  Nice.  It does draw my attention to the difference between up and down as opposed to left & right.  Horizontal implies equality, or perhaps more neutrally, it implies similarity.  The up/down  in this encounter symbol seems like different entities interacting.

Up /down has some power implications, or is that just cultural? Maybe it is OK!  Maybe it is always good to know, who is earthy, who is airy.   Maybe every encounter is a meeting of earth & sky. The “masculine” aspect is the top one it would seem, but the overvaluing of that is probably cultural.

Posted on

Great podcasts – Friendship

BBC – Radio 4 In Our Time – Philosophy Archive

This is a treasure page. I have to be in the mood for this rather heavy stuff, but they are worth the effort. I have subbed to them and have a back log on my player. Unfortunately they are only streaming them there at the moment – Total Recorder would get them though. I particularly enjoyed the history of friendhip one today.

Friendship

It seems that with Imago we have a philosophy and a practice of love, built on all the traditions before it, and still those old traditions, even on friendhip, can amplify our notions of love.

Posted on

Assertive Outreach by Peter Ryan and Steve Morgan

Amazon

Assertive Outreach: A Strengths Approach to Policy and Practice by Peter Ryan and Steve Morgan

 A Strengths Approach to Policy and Practice

This book gives a comprehensive, evidence-based account of assertive outreach from a strengths perspective. It emphasizes developing a collaborative approach to working with the service user, which stresses the achievement of the service users own aspirations, and building upon the service users own strengths and resources. The book provides a comprehensive, authoritative approach to the subject, that combines an overview of the policy and practice issues. It makes use of extensive case study material to illustrate individual and team circumstances.

My last post pointed to the Author, Steve Morgan’s website.  The blurb above sounds excellent, and it seems there is a strong focus on practice-based evidence and I am now more curious about the “strenghts” approach which I have seen introduced top down with not much success.

Posted on

Practice-Based Evidence

Practice Based Evidence – Welcome:

Contemporary mental health services are challenged to address ‘evidence based practice’, but is this at the expense of ‘practice based evidence’?

At first glance there is a very welcome movement here for an approach that can avoid scientism in psychotherapy. I am enthusiastic that this will blend well with the sort of sociometric exploration that Moreno developed. Using the words practice-based evidence there is a swag of good stuff that comes up in Google. 

Posted on

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.”

Posted on

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!

Posted on

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.

Proudly powered by WordPress