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Alice Walker

Alice Walker on Faith, Nature and Social Activism – WNYC Culture

I have not listened to it yet, but have the mp3 on my iPod.

Audio – Alice Walker

Alice Walker is known for her fierce, poetic writing and her politically charged ideas. She opened up to a Jungian analyst in front of a live audience at the Rubin Museum of Art, one of our partners in the Talk to Me series.

Walker and the Jungian analyst, Harry Fogarty took part in “The Red Book Dialogues,” a series of conversations devoted to an exploration of Carl Jung’s work. Both Walker and Fogarty were serene and thoughtful, fitting for a museum filled with Buddhist art. They talked about faith and politics, as well as the solace Walker finds in nature.

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The Return of the Repressed

Not sure if I’ve linked to this essay before? I like his style. Interesting topic! What a culture psychotherapy creates around itself. This particular paragraph is interesting on countertransference.

http://bostonreview.net/BR27.6/boynton.html

Since Freud, there have been three main attitudes towards countertransference, explains Robert Young, a Texas-born, London-based analyst who was formerly the publisher of Free Association Books and a Cambridge don. He sums up the history of countertransference for me, citing several papers he has written on the subject. “An analyst can get rid of his countertransference through analysis and concentrate on the patient’s transference. He can try to exploit it in a controlled way, as Freud says when he advocates using the therapist’s unconscious as an instrument for fathoming the patient’s unconscious. Or he can, more or less, just ‘go with it,’ and treat this unconscious-to-unconscious communication as the only authentical communication between analyst and patient,” he tells me.

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Psy War

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427381.300-psychiatrys-civil-war.html

This war is interesting as in New Zealand ACC is trying to make a DSM diagnosis madatory for treatment.

Two eminent retired psychiatrists are warning that the revision process is fatally flawed. They say the new manual, to be known as DSM-V, will extend definitions of mental illnesses so broadly that tens of millions of people will be given unnecessary and risky drugs. Leaders of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which publishes the manual, have shot back, accusing the pair of being motivated by their own financial interests – a charge they deny. The row is set to come to a head next month when the proposed changes will be published online. For a profession that exists to soothe human troubles, it’s incendiary stuff.

Psychiatry suffers in comparison with other areas of medicine, as diseases of the mind are on the whole less well understood than those of the body. We have, as yet, only glimpses into the fundamental causes of the common mental illnesses, and there are no biological tests to diagnose them. This means conditions such as depression, schizophrenia and personality disorders remain difficult to diagnose with precision. Doctors can only question people about their state of mind and observe their behaviour, classifying illness according to the most obvious symptoms.

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