Two moths and a butterfly
David van der Want
Two moths are hanging out on a street corner when a beautiful butterfly
flutters by. One moth lifts a wing, nudges the other and signalling in the
direction of the rainbow coloured creature says;
"Weirdo"
I have purchased a laptop computer and so I'm coming to you from my garden
in the eastern suburbs of Pretoria under an Acacia tree. The garden table in
front of me is a tableau of technology and the arcane, the luninous display
of the sleek black machine and the flicker of a parrafin lamp illuminate the
sunflowers on the delightfully kitch plastic tablecloth and makes a yellow
and white plume of the smoke from a Benson and Hedges Special Mild in the
ashtray at my elbow. I have good rock and roll tickling my wrists as they
flick across the keyboard, the idiosynchrasies of my self taught typing
setting off this very sensitive touchpad . From time to time I look up and
see that I'm randomly resizing my desktop. I expect that I will get used to
it. I have babyshit under my fingernails. I expect that I will get used to
that too.
I had better introduce some relevance into this post before it falls foul of
moderation.
I love my work. Through it I find a reflection of myself that is very
satisfying. I love its variety, from the training room to the consulting
room, to the lecturing. I love that it offers me time to think. I love that
it provides an intensity of intellectual and emotional stimulation that
makes me feel alive. I love what it allows me to see and do and be.
That having been said, I am concerned about the state of the profession in
which I work. I agree with Silke that (American) academics ignore certain
lines of thinking at their peril. I would like to expand on this warning; it
is not merely academics who risk losing face or finding that their thinking
is not relevant. I believe that the failure of the modernist and in
particular the empiricist and positivist traditions that are, as Nancy
points out, so frimly entrenched in psychology, to acknowledge the
productive effect of the knowledge that they produce has far reaching
ramifications. I do not wish to re-establish the argument supporting the
assertion that the process of theorising and researching is a productive
one, that knowledge can be seen as created in the context of ideology,
economics, politics, social relationships and a host of other relational
variables. This has been done variously in this group and in the academic
literature and I would like to take this as read. Various strands of
scholarship that support what Kenneth Gergen has called the reflexive turn
are represented in this group. Silke through philosophy, literature, Lacan.
I owe my thinking to my undergraduate English literature lecturers, Szasz,
Laing who I found in my adolescence, my introduction as a trainee therapist
to the systemic and ecosystemic approaches of the family systems movement
and latterly to critical social psychology and the social constructionist
movement represented by Burr, Parker, Kenneth and Mary Gergen, and to an
extent the narrative approach represented most ably by Carlos Sluzki. My
point is that the basis for these ideas is well and heterogenously
establshed.
Moving on to the danger that has been mentioned. Briefly the danger
implicit in blind adherence to modernist epistemologies is that it renders
researchers vulnerable to becoming unwitting pawns in the propogation of a
way of understanding the human condition that is the foundation of economic
and social power of selected groupings.
More perniscious but related to this I see ramifications of the dismissal of
the reflexive turn impact the everyday lives of the citizens that our
profession seeks to serve. The belief that our research and probings of the
human condition discover the reality of the "way things are" leads us to
prescribe courses of action and ways of understanding experience for the
citizenry of our various lands that are not always useful. I read in a local
newspaper that close to 50% of American children under the age of 16 are or
have been on a prescribed psychoactive medication at some point in their
lives. I don't have a reference for this unfortunately. If this is the case,
does it not suggest that something is seriously awry? Start asking questions
such as, "Who makes money out of this?." "How has it come to pass that in
the 50 odd years since the arrival of the neuroleptics, psychoactives have
so burgeoned?" I ask you, is it not naive to assume that this widespread use
is the result of their efficacy. If this were the case, surely we would be
well on the way to eliminating depression, ADHD, schizophrenia and so on. In
fact, quite the contrary is happening. With each revision of the DSM the
number of possible diagnoses of mental disorder grows. More and more
children take methylphenidate. Is this that we are discovering new syndromes
or are we inventing them? WAKE UP!
Open your eyes to the possibility that subjective experience can be
understood as arising in relationship, that relationships are structured
with reference to ideology, that what we regard as fact is drawn from a
cultural basis. The assumption that we can know the world in a way that is
about a singular absolute truth, that given enough technological
sophistication, that by controlling all of the variables we can eventually
corner a definitive explanation for anything is dangerous. It is the
arrogance which gave colonial powers license to screw Africa so badly. At
its heart it is the foolish foolish foolish notion that we will ever
understand how a human being works. This I pray to God almighty will never
come to pass.
You are not being asked to relinquish quantitative inquiry or even the use
of psychoactives or research into the effects of colour on digestion or into
the biological correlates of hallucinations or orgasm or depression or
homesexuality or any of the stuff that has been argued as being socially
generated. The computer before me is the result of good, empirical
invesitgation. We can safely administer a substance to someone who runs
through the main road of town ripping his skin from his body because he
believes that red ants are eating him from the inside. This pleases me. You
are being asked though to look beyond our capacity to do these things to the
ways in which the blind adherence to the mindset that produces this capacity
becomes constitutive of our citizen's expereinces of their lives.
I was on the radio today. A psychiatrist was being interviewed and was
suggesting a program to take a touring pharmacy, stocked like a candy store
of drugs, to the local schools. This was a good idea he said because it
would make the medication of problem children that much easier and more
accessible. My goodness I gave him short shrift. This in a context where the
governing body of my profession is considering making it legal for
psychologists to prescribe medication after completing a 9 month course in
psychopharmacology.
It makes me want to blaspheme.
Every child who shows any deviation from ridiculous notion of normality is
diagnosable and can be given a chemical to treat his disorder. The mother's
subjectivity is informed by crap such as this idiot was spouting. A teenager
strikes his father. A week later he is on an anti-depressant. A 6 year old
girl masturbates in public and behaves in an unruly way in the classroom,
painting pictures of her house and her cat on the wall while the teacher
wants her to sit with her head on her hands for a nap. She's been on Ritalin
for a year. The ordinary everyday capacity of our populations to see and
respond to these behaviours is being rapidly and I believe disastrously
eroded. I told the mother of this child, who was not a client but an
acquaintance that the girl's unruly and sexually inapropriatte behaviour was
her daughter's immature attempt to tell her something about what she was
doing with her own creativity. (Are sex and painting when you are supposed
to be doing something boring not expressions of creativity?) I advised the
mother, who in her youth was an accomplished musician and, when she was
first married used to spend her days doing water colours between breast
feeding this same daughter, to join a painting class and arrange to move the
family piano out of her mother's house and into her living room. "Ja but my
husband likes peace and quiet and I'm not really that good" was the
response. I also told her to take her daughter for an icecream and to tell
her that masturbation is OK, that it feels good and that it feels good for
everybody and that everybody does it but that its a private thing, something
that everybody does alone. This she did. Her daughter apparently just said
"OK". She didn't move the piano but she took her paints out of the garage
and set up her easel and started painting again. Three weeks on, no further
masturbation, good reports from school. I told her that the problem might
come back but that if it did that it probably meant that she herself was
stifling and not using her creativity. In this way she could use her
daughter as a barometer of the extent to which she herself was realising
something that is in her and that is seeking some kind of expression.
Which is the more useful set of distinctions to draw; that the behaviour is
evidence of some chemical or neurological abnormality or that it indicates a
surfeit of creativity, a child attempting to tell her mother something.
Or did the Ritalin suddenly reach the requisite levels in her blood?
The effect of the discourse is to distance people and obscure from their
experience, relational, locally anchored understandings of what is going on
around them. This is the danger and it is a cultural one. Our investment in
privileging metaphors of disease and in propogating beliefs that behaviours
that are worrisome or troubling can be treated is constitutive of individual
subjective experiences of the world that strip us of our capacity to respond
in a way that is about humanness and connection with ourselves and one
another. I appeal to practitioners of my profession to consider the
possibility that as the shamans, soothsayers, story tellers of our culture,
we may be leading our society up the garden path here.
So here's an appeal to the profession and all of you so far away from this
acacia tree at the southern tip of Africa:
Let's move past the dichotomous thinking, the endless debates about society
and biology, subjectivity and objectivity, medicine and conversation and
find a way to reconstitute our conversation in a way that generates
knowledge that fosters relational knowing. So that we can use medication or
conversation or MRI or conversation or all of them or something else
entirely.
One suggestion: let's play a game. Let's invent fictional cases, let's make
up transcripts of therapy sessions and suggest interventions. We could write
a collaborative therapy session, someone takes the role of a client and
writes what (s)he presents in the first 5 minutes of a session. Others can
write possible therapist behaviours.
Any ideas?
Its late, the battery on this marvellous machine is now flat, which is what
the service manual said I needed to do. I have thrice lost this document and
found it again.This touchpad may be a real problem, perhaps I could cover it
with something. I think I'll cut my old mouse pad into a square and put it
over the pad while I'm typing.)
Goodnight
David van der Want
http://home.global.co.za/~dvdwant
'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`''`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`
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Tim McNamara
der Want" <dvd...@global.co.za> wrote:
<snip>
> Open your eyes to the possibility that subjective experience can be
> understood as arising in relationship, that relationships are structured
> with reference to ideology, that what we regard as fact is drawn from a
> cultural basis. The assumption that we can know the world in a way that is
> about a singular absolute truth, that given enough technological
> sophistication, that by controlling all of the variables we can eventually
> corner a definitive explanation for anything is dangerous.
Err, "open our eyes?" This isn't axactly new, it was covered in a number
of undergrad courses I had 20+ years ago, and from a number of different
theoretical perspectives. So were Szasz and Laing, even John Weir Perry
(who you'd probably really enjoy- try "The Far Side of Madness" if you
haven't read it already; Stanislav Grof, too).
Singular absolute truths mostly don't exist in a relativistic universe.
However, all science is dedicated to identifying fundamental principles
and to this end psychology must continue. For all of your railing
against empiricism and phenomenology, those approaches have been
effective throughout human history and continue to produce results that
are valid, verifiable and repeatable.
<snip>
David, if you really want to have effective discussions in a newsgroup,
you really might want to consider limitng your posts to a few sentences,
maybe a paragraph, instead of writing dissertations. The overwhelming
page after page of commentary, most of it couched in overly complex
structure, a tendency towards circular reasoning and excessively arcane
language, is really impossible to respond to. (Sorry about the grammar).
fang...@my-deja.com
ill people are more likely to come from the science side or the
constructivist side?
If you don't want this dichotomy, I ask you to show me an alternative.
Even though I am relatively poor and have mental illnesses, I respond to
many of the things you do. Your description of using your new computer
is beautiful; your awareness of light and shadow; the play involved; the
lack of control and its cuteness of the windows changing. These things
are poignantly human. But there are many people who are too tired or
feel too bad to enjoy them. You and I are privileged to be able to.
In article <SPPM1010123...@internet1.cmhcsys.com>,
"David van der Want" <dvd...@global.co.za> wrote:
a lovely and lengthy familiar essay. I recommend it. FW
Sent via Deja.com
http://www.deja.com/
David van der Want
"smw" <sm...@umich.edu> wrote in message
news:SPPM1010124...@internet1.cmhcsys.com...
>
>
>
> [most of lovely post snipped]
Thanks for the compliment. >
>
> This paragraph reminded me of a very poignant moment in a graduate class I
> taught last year, called "The Body and Its Disciplines."
How wondeful to be teaching such a seminar. The graduate courses at
University Pretoria have far more prosaic titles; the usual clinical psych
stuff with a few additions; the most advernturous being Perspectives on the
Family. I know why this is the case but it is a long story. I really think I
must qualify myself and see if I can find a way to live and work in a
country that has such tremendous resources at tits disposal.
It was part seminar,
> part lecture series, and I brought in a neuroscientist, two experimental
> psychologists, two psychiatrists (one of them also an analyst), people
from
> philosophy, literature, dance, music, evolutionary biology, the like. One
of my
> guests was a very, very well-known psychologist who works on emotion (the
> academic psychologists hereabouts would all know his name), and since I
had
> asked every one of my speakers to briefly describe their larger goals and
> epistemologies, he started out by saying: "We want to know what emotions
> _really_ are." I seized on that, needless to say, it was so wide open to
all the
> work we'd been doing in that class, and asked him to define both 'really'
and
> 'are' in this context -- and produced utter bafflement and, after some
very few
> words, silence. This was a vastly intelligent man who has done what all my
> friends in the know describe as vastly important work on the physiology of
> emotion, and a lovely guest to have, and he didn't know what I was asking
him,
> why "the real" was a term that needed clarification, rigorous attention.
Yes, this illustrates the point excellently. Most acadmics and professionals
will agree at least in part with the assertion that, as Tim McNamarra dubbs
it, we live in a relativistic universe and yet something about the
implications of this for our research and practice does not permeate the
profession. I wonder how this comes to be? I suspect the involvement of a
lot of factors, power and money leading the pack but backed up by a
perception that society would break down completely were we to realise a
vision of ourselves as collaborative meaning makers rather than isolated
discoverers of truths.
>
> After that, "but what is it _really_" became something like a running
joke
> in the class. We tried to imagine someone in art history claiming that
what a
> painting "really" was would be exhausted in the description of pigments,
their
> chemistry, and location, or someone in literature talking about books
solely in
> terms of paper and print, and wondered for a long time what had led to the
> rhetoric of the 'really is' in relation to phenomena like emotions.
"Modernity"
> isn't enough, I think, even though it's surely a start.
Indeed, a smoke enders group that I attended some years ago made us take
apart a cigarette to see what it really was. The presenter was quite
entertaining; she put up some slides of advertisements for cigarettes and we
spoke about what their intent was and what meanings they suggested for
smoking. We then did an autopsy on what was supposed to be one of our final
cigarettes and tried to see it for what it really was (dried up brown stuff,
rolled into paper with something that feels like fibreglass on the end of
it). "You may think that this is your friend, your warm companion on cold
evenings, you may think its the thing that tells the world you are chic" she
told this group of doubtful looking smokers, "but its not, look at what it
really is".
The programme was quite clever really, at all 8 meetings there was a large
garishly red ashtray dead center of each table.
I stopped for 8 months. I just couldn't see a cigarette as anything other
than a smoke.
>
> I did not mean to create the impression that we didn't learn anything
else
> that day -- it was a fascinating session for other reasons as well.
This is the point. Modernism serves us well. We know how to test for Down's
syndrome, we can ease pain, we can do a whole host of very useful things. It
is as limiting as it is enabling though.
>
> s.
para...@my-deja.com
fang...@my-deja.com wrote:
> My question to you: do you think that policies that benefit poor and
> ill people are more likely to come from the science side or the
> constructivist side?
Howzit Fang,
David vd Want here on a different account. From whithin the dichotomy I
believe that both have a lot to offer. To imagine a different
framework; imagine that the billions of dollars spent researching
schizophrenia for example were guided by metaphors of soul.
>
> If you don't want this dichotomy, I ask you to show me an alternative.
>
> Even though I am relatively poor and have mental illnesses, I respond
to
> many of the things you do. Your description of using your new
computer
> is beautiful; your awareness of light and shadow; the play involved;
the
> lack of control and its cuteness of the windows changing. These
things
> are poignantly human. But there are many people who are too tired or
> feel too bad to enjoy them. You and I are privileged to be able to.
Indeed so. Already here is an alternative description to the medical
one; I believe that thinking and speaking about someone who is "sick"
as someone who is struggling to find his capacity to enjoy beauty is
different. We use terms like anhedonia to refer to this but the meaning
changes if our response to the person is about finding ways to allow
them to connect with aesthetic rather than curing an illness.
Also, to turn the appreciation on its head, perhaps through this
process we could dissoleve the us/them .... you/me polarity implicit in
the conceptualisation of therapist/client or doctor/parient and in so
doing find ways to talk about so-called mental illness in a language of
appreciation. I believe that the experience of insanity is also a human
one and it too like making love, or sadness or joy can be poignant.
Someone once told me that the thing that he had been told was bi-polar
disorder felt like a friend who had walked a long way with him. But
that's a long story.
>
> In article <SPPM1010123...@internet1.cmhcsys.com>,
> "David van der Want" <dvd...@global.co.za> wrote:
>
> a lovely and lengthy familiar essay. I recommend it. FW
Thank you for the compliment.
David van der Want
"Tim McNamara" <tim...@mr.net> wrote in message
news:SPPM1010124...@internet1.cmhcsys.com...
> Err, "open our eyes?" This isn't axactly new, it was covered in a number
> of undergrad courses I had 20+ years ago, and from a number of different
> theoretical perspectives. So were Szasz and Laing, even John Weir Perry
> (who you'd probably really enjoy- try "The Far Side of Madness" if you
> haven't read it already; Stanislav Grof, too).
Indeed, while a spotty teenager I was also lectured on this. IT is not new I
agree. Howcome is it then that our research is predominantly informed by
notions modernist notions. We pay lip service to reflexivity. Your
recitation of the holy trinity, valid, reliable and repeatable is evidence
for this. As a teacher of mine once said, "follow the money honey"
As to the far side of madness; I haven't read it .... been there though.
>
> Singular absolute truths mostly don't exist in a relativistic universe.
> However, all science is dedicated to identifying fundamental principles
> and to this end psychology must continue. For all of your railing
> against empiricism and phenomenology, those approaches have been
> effective throughout human history and continue to produce results that
> are valid, verifiable and repeatable.
>
> <snip>
<what I experience as a patronising paragraph snipped>
Tim McNamara
der Want" <dvd...@global.co.za> wrote:
> "smw" <sm...@umich.edu> wrote in message
> news:SPPM1010124...@internet1.cmhcsys.com...
> > part lecture series, and I brought in a neuroscientist, two
> > experimental psychologists, two psychiatrists (one of them also an
> > analyst), people from philosophy, literature, dance, music,
> > evolutionary biology, the like. One of my guests was a very, very
> > well-known psychologist who works on emotion (the academic
> > psychologists hereabouts would all know his name), and since I had
> > asked every one of my speakers to briefly describe their larger
> > goals and epistemologies, he started out by saying: "We want to know
> > what emotions _really_ are." I seized on that, needless to say, it
> > was so wide open to all the work we'd been doing in that class, and
> > asked him to define both 'really' and 'are' in this context -- and
> > produced utter bafflement and, after some very few words, silence.
> > This was a vastly intelligent man who has done what all my friends
> > in the know describe as vastly important work on the physiology of
> > emotion, and a lovely guest to have, and he didn't know what I was
> > asking him, why "the real" was a term that needed clarification,
> > rigorous attention.
Didn't Bill Clinton spend a fair amount of time debating the meaning of
"is?" It was a red herring when he did it, too.
> Yes, this illustrates the point excellently. Most acadmics and
> professionals will agree at least in part with the assertion that, as
> Tim McNamarra dubbs it, we live in a relativistic universe and yet
> something about the implications of this for our research and practice
> does not permeate the profession. I wonder how this comes to be?
How does the theory of relativity *not* permeate our research and
practice? I see it in every branch of psychology. For example, to pick
on psychotherapy, let's look at REBT/CBT. Cognitive distortions are
often learned and need to be "unlearned" and replaced with more
functional cognitive patterns. The therapist and client negotiate what
those "more functional" patterns are.
> suspect the involvement of a lot of factors, power and money leading
> the pack but backed up by a perception that society would break down
> completely were we to realise a vision of ourselves as collaborative
> meaning makers rather than isolated discoverers of truths.
You'll get no argument from me that we are "collaborative meaning
makers." I have no "perception" that "society would break down
completely if" etc. The role of society as a collaborative process
generating meaning attributed to events is hardly a well kept secret.
For example, public TV in America has been hammering away on this for
years, probably never more lucidly than the Moyers/Campbell series a few
years ago. Most Americans probably do not accept this viewpoint, and the
rejection of the relativistic viewpoint is particularly evident in the
conservative political voices.
You will get an argument from me when you assert that we are
"collaborative creators of reality" as you have done in previous posts.
I don't buy that for a moment. But "collaborative creators of meaning?"
Yes, I can go with you on that.
Tim McNamara
der Want" <dvd...@global.co.za> wrote:
> "Tim McNamara" <tim...@mr.net> wrote in message
> news:SPPM1010124...@internet1.cmhcsys.com...
>
> > Err, "open our eyes?" This isn't axactly new, it was covered in a
> > number of undergrad courses I had 20+ years ago, and from a number
> > of different theoretical perspectives. So were Szasz and Laing,
> > even John Weir Perry (who you'd probably really enjoy- try "The Far
> > Side of Madness" if you haven't read it already; Stanislav Grof,
> > too).
>
> Indeed, while a spotty teenager I was also lectured on this. IT is not
> new I agree. Howcome is it then that our research is predominantly
> informed by notions modernist notions. We pay lip service to
> reflexivity. Your recitation of the holy trinity, valid, reliable and
> repeatable is evidence for this. As a teacher of mine once said,
> "follow the money honey"
I am afraid that I utterly fail to follow your logic. How is "valid,
reliable and repeatable" following the money?
John M Price PhD
: In article <SPPM1010126...@internet1.cmhcsys.com>, "David van
: der Want" <dvd...@global.co.za> wrote:
:> "Tim McNamara" <tim...@mr.net> wrote in message
:> news:SPPM1010124...@internet1.cmhcsys.com...
:>
:> > Err, "open our eyes?" This isn't axactly new, it was covered in a
:> > number of undergrad courses I had 20+ years ago, and from a number
:> > of different theoretical perspectives. So were Szasz and Laing,
:> > even John Weir Perry (who you'd probably really enjoy- try "The Far
:> > Side of Madness" if you haven't read it already; Stanislav Grof,
:> > too).
:>
:> Indeed, while a spotty teenager I was also lectured on this. IT is not
:> new I agree. Howcome is it then that our research is predominantly
:> informed by notions modernist notions. We pay lip service to
:> reflexivity. Your recitation of the holy trinity, valid, reliable and
:> repeatable is evidence for this. As a teacher of mine once said,
:> "follow the money honey"
: I am afraid that I utterly fail to follow your logic. How is "valid,
: reliable and repeatable" following the money?
And if something is valid, how is that bad, per se?
Conversely, if something is invalid, but 'feels good', how is that not
delusion?
--
John M. Price, PhD jmp...@calweb.com
Life: Chemistry, but with feeling! | PGP Key on request or FTP!
Email responses to my Usenet articles will be posted at my discretion.
Comoderator: sci.psychology.psychotherapy.moderated Atheist# 683
This house of peace shall stand while men fear not to die in its defense.
- Vestibule to the Supreme Court of California and
the California State Library
Pogo Possum
>
> David van der Want wrote:
>
> [most of lovely post snipped]
>
> > the reflexive turn impact the everyday lives of the citizens that our
> > profession seeks to serve. The belief that our research and probings of the
> > human condition discover the reality of the "way things are" leads us to
> > prescribe courses of action and ways of understanding experience for the
> > citizenry of our various lands that are not always useful.
>
> part lecture series, and I brought in a neuroscientist, two experimental
> psychologists, two psychiatrists (one of them also an analyst), people from
> philosophy, literature, dance, music, evolutionary biology, the like. One of my
> guests was a very, very well-known psychologist who works on emotion (the
> asked every one of my speakers to briefly describe their larger goals and
> epistemologies, he started out by saying: "We want to know what emotions
> _really_ are." I seized on that, needless to say, it was so wide open to all the
> work we'd been doing in that class, and asked him to define both 'really' and
> 'are' in this context -- and produced utter bafflement and, after some very few
> words, silence. This was a vastly intelligent man who has done what all my
> friends in the know describe as vastly important work on the physiology of
> emotion, and a lovely guest to have, and he didn't know what I was asking him,
> why "the real" was a term that needed clarification, rigorous attention.
>
This illustrates yet another misunderstanding between those
in the humanities and those in the sciences. The goal of
science is not to define anything, and an a priori attempt
to define something in advance of study (or in this case
discussion) is called "essentialism". Research scientists
understand something by studying it, not by defining it. You
seem to be implying that this person, who you keep calling
"vastly intelligent," was somehow remiss because he was
baffled by your demand for definitions, in this case,
definitions of the terms used in such definitions "really"
and "are."
> After that, "but what is it _really_" became something like a running joke
> in the class. We tried to imagine someone in art history claiming that what a
> painting "really" was would be exhausted in the description of pigments, their
> chemistry, and location, or someone in literature talking about books solely in
> terms of paper and print, and wondered for a long time what had led to the
> rhetoric of the 'really is' in relation to phenomena like emotions. "Modernity"
> isn't enough, I think, even though it's surely a start.
>
Here you confuse reductionism with science. It is one of the
means used to explore a phenomenon, but not all science is
reductionist. Do you make fun of painters who paint only one
person instead of the whole crowd, only one tree instead of
the whole forest? THAT is a more accurate comparison. Are
you really unaware that people who study art do in fact
focus upon the paper and paint, etc., in exactly the manner
you ridicule? They do so not to understand what art really
is, but to understand more about a particular painting or
artist.
There are important questions about what emotion really is
because there are strong hints that the subjective
experience of emotion may be very different than the way it
is implemented in the neural substrate. There have been
arguments about whether there are unitary emotions produced
by discrete systems or whether there is a generalized
arousal system which becomes interpreted as different
emotional states in different contexts by cognitive
appraisal mechanisms. Perhaps your speaker explained some
of that? We now know that many mental phenomena (including
memory, reasoning, vision) involve far more in terms of
processing than what is accessible to conscious awareness.
So too, emotion. When we ask what emotion "really is," we
are trying to go beyond folk understandings, not engaging in
philosophical rumination.
Do you think that man will be accepting future invitations
from you? I wouldn't, if someone pulled that kind of stunt
with me.
> I did not mean to create the impression that we didn't learn anything else
> that day -- it was a fascinating session for other reasons as well.
>
How do you foster openness to other ways of thinking about
things if you permit your students to ridicule divergent
viewpoints?
Pogo Possum
>
> John M Price PhD wrote:
>
> > In sci.psychology.psychotherapy.moderated article <SPPM1010126...@internet1.cmhcsys.com> Tim McNamara <tim...@mr.net> wrote:
> > : In article <SPPM1010126...@internet1.cmhcsys.com>, "David van
> > : der Want" <dvd...@global.co.za> wrote:
> >
> > :> "Tim McNamara" <tim...@mr.net> wrote in message
> > :> news:SPPM1010124...@internet1.cmhcsys.com...
> > :>
> > :> > Err, "open our eyes?" This isn't axactly new, it was covered in a
> > :> > number of undergrad courses I had 20+ years ago, and from a number
> > :> > of different theoretical perspectives. So were Szasz and Laing,
> > :> > even John Weir Perry (who you'd probably really enjoy- try "The Far
> > :> > Side of Madness" if you haven't read it already; Stanislav Grof,
> > :> > too).
> > :>
> > :> Indeed, while a spotty teenager I was also lectured on this. IT is not
> > :> new I agree. Howcome is it then that our research is predominantly
> > :> informed by notions modernist notions. We pay lip service to
> > :> reflexivity. Your recitation of the holy trinity, valid, reliable and
> > :> repeatable is evidence for this. As a teacher of mine once said,
> > :> "follow the money honey"
> >
> > : I am afraid that I utterly fail to follow your logic. How is "valid,
> > : reliable and repeatable" following the money?
> >
> > And if something is valid, how is that bad, per se?
> >
> > Conversely, if something is invalid, but 'feels good', how is that not
> > delusion?
> >
>
>
If you are going to label something good or bad, you need to
make your criterion explicit.
Many, if not most, psychologists accept that our brain and
behavior developed in response to evolutionary pressures, so
one important criterion is whether it aids survival of an
organism or not. Many, if not most, psychologists consider
one important function of brain to be sensing and permitting
flexible response to the environment, most importantly
sources of reward and threat in that environment. To the
extent that a delusion interferes with that function, it
will permit less effective seeking of reward in the outside
world, and less prompt avoidance of threat. That will have
obvious consequences in terms of survival. For example, if
someone has the delusion that they are immune from physical
harm and behaves as though they could not be hurt, would
that person avoid crossing busy streets against the light?
Would they then be more or less likely to be killed by an
oncoming car? Would that be a bad thing, if it were to
occur?
If delusions did not have consequences like the above, would
it matter whether they were good or bad? Would anyone ask
that kind of a question about them?