Category: Uncategorized

On a light at ground level that illuminates a statue. I have seen the same image in several places.

Christchurch has a form of grafitti that I have not seen before, neat, restrained, political or non-political comments in places where the Council is unlikely to remove them. I’ll collect all I see. This one was in front of the museum.

Psychoanalysts for Peace and Justice

The current spate of attacks on Iraqis remind me of stories my parents told me about reprisals taken by the German occupiers in Holland. If the Dutch resistance shot a Nazi then all the people in that city block would be killed. It pained me to see this same method enacted in the Polenski film which I saw before the march occupation of Iraq last year. It seems futile to resist if hundreds of civilians die. Two hundred and eighty were killed in reprisal bombings of neighbourhoods for the four US mercenaries that were killed last week.

Yet in Iraq there may be a new mood, the various factions are uniting against the occupation. Perhaps it has been building for a while, but it is now being reported in the local Press. The reprisals were met – thirty US troops were killed and hostages have been taken.

I have liked to the Psychoanalysts for Peace site, and I am all for peace – but I find myself pleased that the Iraqis are uniting & fighting back, I am on their side, their country has been occupied and the US must get out. I hope they win soon, and that the world opposition to the US mounts rapidly. There will be no peace without a defeat of US imperialism.

I typed a few psychological defences intoGoogle Sets and Google knew!

Google Search: define:countertransference

The entries on countertransference are more interesting and list both projections and projective identifications, which I think is right. Not bad for Artificial Intelligence (or is this human aided?) But it still does not really include the guts of it all. Of course the beauty of these definitions is that they link to websites, which will have more guts.

Google Search: define:countertransference: a type of projection. Dangerous when a therapist identifies with emanations from the client’s manifestations of the collective unconscious.
www.tearsofllorona.com/jungdefs.html

– the conscious and unconscious emotional reaction of the professional to the client.
www.calib.com/nccanch/pubs/usermanuals/menthlth/glossary.cfm

a term used in psychodynamic therapy describing a situation in which the therapist becomes emotionally involved with the patient, projecting the therapist’s own feelings onto the patient
lms.thomsonelearning.com/hbcp/glossary/glossary.taf

the psychoanalyst’s displacement of emotion onto the patient or more generally the psychoanalyst’s emotional involvement in the therapeutic interaction
www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn

I am reading an article on transference in psychotherapy – and thought I’d use the Google ‘define:’ function – to see if it helped… not bad so far but it has not gone beyond what I know already.

Google Search: define:transference: “(psychoanalysis) the process whereby emotions are passed on or displaced from one person to another; during psychoanalysis the displacement of feelings toward others (usually the parents) is onto the analyst
www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn”

I have been busy with Mt Lyford Horse Treks and Otahuna Horse Riding. In addition to my psychotherapy practice I assist my wife, Kate, in these great ventures. I do a lot of the IT stuff and I am a Director of the company. Is there some connection between horses and my psychotherapy work? There sure is! Hardly a day goes by when I do not connect the “partnering up” theme based on the principles of Natural Horsemanship with some aspect of the psychodynamics I get involved with. The connection with the rider and the horse is not unlike the connection between the conscious self and the deeper, stronger forces within.

The other connection is that working on the Horse ventures keeps me away from mt psychological dabbeling here on the Psyberspace Weblog, but who knows, as we consolidate that might change somewhat.

Google Weblog a nice blog! Right now they have a good post on Google’s policy:

Google’s long-standing policy of not accepting AdWords for any site they deemed ‘Anti’, which previously banned ads for a weblog criticizing actor John Malkovich’s anti-semitism, has now been used to stifle more political speech.

It is a well thought out item, not critical of Google’s control over their ads as such, but more on how they do it.

I am still reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver – and so I was interested to sit up and watch a BBC Genius program on Robert Hooke, who features in the novel. This of course led to a bit of surfing – the man interests me as he was a great scientist & creator and then erased from history by Newton! ( I wonder if this will emerge in the Neal Stephenson novel? )

Robert Hooke

The portrait above is the only one believed to be authentic and was discovered recently after being missing for a long time.

It is from the site:
Hooke Portraits Another site I like is: roberthooke.org.uk.

I also snapped an image from the TV of a portrait a woman was reconstructing, will post that up later.

SCO, GNU and Linux – GNU Project – Free Software Foundation (FSF):

SCO’s contract dispute with IBM has been accompanied by a smear campaign against the whole GNU/Linux system. But SCO made an obvious mistake when it erroneously quoted me as saying that ‘Linux is a copy of Unix.’ Many readers immediately smelled a rat–not only because I did not say that, and not only because the person who said it was talking about published ideas (which are uncopyrightable) rather than code, but because they know I would never compare Linux with Unix.

That is the opening of a short but crystal clear article on the SCO business. I respect this man’s integrity and moral clarity. I will never use the prhase “intellectual property” again!