Category: Uncategorized

Tools

A new pseudo Category section of this weblog. Gadget talk, software, woosh, Palms.

Got this from Josh, thanks Josh it looks great!

~

The Most Important Election of our Lifetime
~ Spot the Difference Quiz Game! ~

http://www.theyrule.net/mostimportantelection

It is common knowledge that this is ‘the most important election
ever’ – but can you tell the
difference between the two main candidates?

This quiz is intended to question just how significant the
difference between Bush and Kerry really
is. I hope that people find it provocative as well as
thoughtful. Please follow the link at the end
of the quiz for some more serious examinations of the question.

I sent this to a bunch of people whom I haven’t spoken to in a
while – hi! – please use this as an
opportunity to reconnect!

Bring the Troops Home Now!

Josh On

Sociocorpus

Dan Randow’s Sociocorpus is the current amalgamation of several blogs about online groups and knowledge management. Sociocorpus is a great concept. I Googled it and it went straight to Dan’s Blog. Original! I am not sure if Dan has explained it somewhere, but I see it like this: Socius is an element in the collective psyche, as Jung might called it, or the sociometric matrix in Moreno’s language. This collective stratum consists of groups which have a life of their own more than the sum of their parts, socii. Each socius is embodied somewhere, hence corpus. And the sociocorpus has taken an evolutionary leap in the last couple of decades, it incorporates in new ways as new media evolve.

Here is a nice post Online Collaboration has Two Humps to get over… I have some comments to make & will do that Dan’s blog.

There are two barriers to be crossed before Online Collaboration can gain momentum: an “Access Hump” and a “Participation Hump”.

The Access Hump has to be crossed by each individual by learning to use a new technology, remembering the location, user name and password and rules of a new place. Some people refer to this as achieving ‘social presence’. Hand-holding works well here.

Once the Access hump is crossed, the group has to cross the Participation Hump. This occurs as people begin to contribute and others respond. The benefits emerge from the participation and the participation occurs when people expect benefits. Structured group spaces work well here.

There is a third stage in which the participation pattern becomes complex. The back-channel and links to other groups and individuals form a self-organising and wide-ranging system. Blogs work well here.

Ivan Illich (1926 – 2002)

A good site! Has an archive of a lot of items to download as well as some mp3 talks.

Whole Earth: Remembering Ivan Illich

This is a wonderful page of tributes to Illich who died in Bremen, Germany on December 2, 2002. He was 76. I have been deeply influenced by Illich. His book, Deschooling Society was important to me in the early 70’s in setting up “four Avenues – School Without Walls”. At the time I sis not want to call it a school at all, but a Community Participation Project. I was persuaded for practical reasons to go with the word “school” – I do not have the absolute devotion to principle of Ivan Illich. It actually got a lot worse and was renamed “Four Avenues Alternative School” – which strangely did not bother me too much because by then that is what it had become.

What do Illich’s ideas mean for psychotherapy? I imagine the ideas would highlight the sickness of institutions that enshroud it.

I recommend this page! Worth reading & easy to read, a good intro to Illich – another valuable er, outsider. Here are some paragraphs from the section by Jerry Brown:

Among the serious thinkers I have had the privilege to meet, Ivan Illich alone embodied in his personal life as well as in his work, a radical distancing from the imperatives of modern society. From Deschooling Society (1971) to In the Vineyard of the Text (1993), he bore witness to the destructive power of modern institutions that ‘create needs faster than they can create satisfaction, and in the process of trying to meet the needs they generate, they consume the earth.’

Ivan Illich was the rarest of human beings: erudite, yet possessed of aliveness and sensitivity. He savored the ordinary pleasures of life even as he cheerfully embraced its inevitable suffering. Steeped in an authentic Catholic tradition, he observed with detachment and as a pilgrim the unforgiving allure of science and progress. With acute clarity and a sense of humor, he undermined, in all that he wrote, the uncontested certitudes of modern society.

I have some earlier Illich posts on this blog:

2002

I love a particular brand of old nutters. Today I am thinking of David Cooper, the Marxist anti-psychiatry advocate from the seventies. I still think what he saw & stood for was spot on. But being passionate, extreme and radical does not make for a revolution. He hardly ranks on the Net, mere mentions with no real appreciation of his value. Yet he was quite profound, in an ineffective sort of way. The question remains: How to be psychologically political, can something be salvaged from ashes?

This is typical of the ashes that remain: From Psychiatry at 2000 A bird’s-eye view Henry R. Rollin

The anti-psychiatry movement

In the 1960s a new movement emerged to trouble the waters of the psychiatric establishment — psychiatry. The movement, left-wing in politics, sported an international membership including, for example, Ronald Laing and David Cooper in England; Thomas Szasz in America and Michel Foucault in France, the only one, incidentally, without psychiatric credentials. The gospel according to this group was that psychiatry was a form of social repression; that treatment was disguised punishment and, above all, that mental hospitals must be closed forthwith to avoid further damage to the patients.

The movement for a time enjoyed widespread popularity; but it died, because, in practice, the results were an unmitigated disaster, as witness David Cooper’s venture in England in 1962. “The lunatics have taken over the asylum”, was how it was aptly summarised.

A useful potted history of Anti-Psychiatry here: The free Dictionary

Carl Jung – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

From the wonderful Wikipedia:

Early in Jung’s career he coined the term and described the concept of the ‘complex’. Jung claims to have discovered the concept during his word association and galvanic skin response experiments. Freud obviously took up this concept in his Oedipus complex amongst others. Jung seemed to see complexes as quite autonomous parts of psychological life. It is almost as if Jung were describing separate personalities within what is considered a single individual. But to equate Jung’s use of complexes with something along the lines of ‘multiple personality disorder’ would be to stretch the point beyond breaking.

Birth Trauma and Its Relation to Mental Illness, Suicide and Ecstasy by Stanislav Grof, M.D.

For a long time I have held this COEX idea as central to the psychotherapy I do. I think of them as patterns of the psyche. It is the pattern that unites development with myth. Many myths are stages of development & many stages of development are best expressed as myth. what Groff describes here must go by many names, Complexes? Archetypal structures?

“COEX: Systems of Condensed Experience: – A COEX system is a specific memory constellation comprising in a condensed form experiences (and/or fantasies) from different life periods of the individual. Memories belonging to a particular COEX system have a similar basic theme or contain similar elements and are accompanied by a strong emotional charge of the same quality.

This one has been getting a lot of attention, I walk past it everyday and people stop & look.