Psyberspace

I posted about the Locus of Psychotherapy here. Today it occurred to me that the whole notion of Psyberspace is about the locus of communication.

I write about relationships, forms of communication, the therapeutic frame, the shape of the seating arrangement, and the difference between a typewriter and PC. All these things matter to me. The space creates the psyche.

And in that sense the psyche evolves, and manifests in various ways in different places. Religion and therapy have strong hold on the word soul or psyche because they are so focussed on spaces. Then Marshall McLuhan comes along with the huge exploration of the impact of communication on the psyche. Medium is the message, global village via electronic communication. beautiful insights. Then in the sixties, the importance of set and setting on the impact of hallucinogens becomes understood (and severely misunderstood as they create an impossible set and setting called war on drugs).

This thinking I am sketching here is highly systemic. It means context is integral to the meaning. I’ve been very insistent that in my psychotherapy online I use only email. This is to keep the constancy of set and setting and medium. Is that important? In the earthquake here I see how it tests our metal as the contexts are focibly changed, new rooms, new modes, I’ve for the first time conceded to phone sessions in addition to f2f work. Its ok, but id sooner stick to the one context.

The original ‘locus’ discussion was to distinguish between two very systemic approaches, both of which value set and setting; Psychodrama and Imago Relationship therapy. When it comes to that discussion I am well beyond the question of the need for valuing context, medium etc. Now it is a case of which medium is good for what sort of communication? There are two modes, group and dyad. Not mutually exclusive, there can be dyads within a group.

I’m not sure if a group, or a dyad is a medium? Perhaps the actual distinction here is between a social atom and an imago. These categories of the psych are such slipery things. We only know them backup being with them, in them, as they are ‘virtual’ in some sense. Of course there are real people in real actions, but the social atom or cultural atom is the pattern that exists in that realm. the Imago is much the same, these are patterns of the soul we can be with, attend to, but they come up, arise in certain contexts. OK maybe that is the question then, what is the set and setting required to evoke the Imago? What is the set and setting to evoke the Original Social Atom? Conversely we may ask does the set and setting of the Freudian couch evoke?

What is this blogging doing? I am typing on a PC (in XP if that matters?) in a blog (WordPress) that is hosted on a server (DreamHost), and apart from one or two people I don’t know who reads it. About 30 hits a day probably people googling (the wrong) stuff. For all that it is one to many. It is also possibly going to be around for a long time, so somebody some Time may find these musings of interest.

I’ve been thinking of cross posting to an online community I am in. There it would feel very different. The locus would immediately transform. Blog posts, entries like this in the context of this Psyberspace blog are not the same in the context of a connected community. This blog is not a community, though some may be.

I’ve written it here. I could quote it elsewhere, I could use it in an essay (as I did with the original post, which led to a section in this Paper, I could use it in a book or podcast. Perhaps there is an optimum place, perhaps one unique space in the world where it grows and builds and yields fruit. I can ask this as is see one-to-one psychotherapy as totally the wrong place for relationship psychotherapy, it is detrimental to it. Group work might be too. Both could be adapted, but with out the benefit of an Imago style relational paradigm they are counter productive. Could there be a parallel here? Is this idea I’m returning to time after time better places elsewhere? Sometime I yearn for a department in a university where they would love this stuff and I could expound all day and it (I) would be part of some sort of community of practitioners pounding this stuff together.

Specific media are needed for specific tasks. Where in the landscapes of the psyche is there the right psyberspace for psyberspace discussions.