Wednesday 26 September 2012
Sunday 23 September 2012
Thoughts that make me feel good
One of the most feel good thoughts that I return to again and again is the idea that there is no failure only feedback. On of the difficulties that people experience is that they are so afraid to fail that they do not do anything because they are paralyzed with fear. The thought that not getting something right the first time or discomfort are all part of the natural course of life is a very helpful thought to have.
Another thought that causes me to feel good is something that I read in Carl R Rogers' book. In those Rogers suggests contrary to the Freudian notion that at bottom we are base ids all selfishly pursuing our own end we possess an 'organismic rationality' that inclines towards advancement, maturity and sociability.
Another thought that I return to when I needs a lift is the palliative effect of nature. Near my home there are hospital grounds which are covered in trees and there is an arrangement of rocks where people sit and have coffee I presume. In nature one can think that particular natural phenomena have existed before and will exist long after our problems.
Another idea, this time from Rogers again, that is helpful to me is the notion of viewing all people as units of inherent worth and dignity. The problem with the Purely Freudian and coldly analytical model of looking at people is that it leaves no room to experience the other person's potential and leaves no room to actually be there with the person at that particular moment. I like to think of it as being a bit like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle which states that you cannot know the speed and position of an electron at the same time except in this instance it is you cannot be there with the person experiencing at the same time as treating them as a series of mental phenomena of which you can work out the causal roots.
Other ideas that I get from Rogers are that I need not be anxious about difficulties in the way that I constantly ruminate about what may happen in the future. I take from Rogers that all of the things that I need to approach problems is contained in the moment in which I have to deal with and experience those difficulties. Also I learn that I can place a trust in my own feelings and experiences in that moment as things that will bring me in the right allbeit spontaneous direction.
I also take from Rogers that there is something inherently valuable and worthy in the way that I directly experience the world. The way of perceiving that is sometimes thought of as a problem also can be the source of the most inspired creativity. I also take that I must accept myself and other people and this means that I no longer label things that I do that are unsavoury as being instances of 'not me'.
Another idea that makes me feel good is a feeling that I sometimes feel that we are passing tests in areas of life that we don't even know we are passing. We definitely seem to recognize all of the tests that we fail in life be they academic, social or otherwise but we do not seem to see a whole lot of ones that we pass that just pass us by. Also there are so many different areas in which there are tests. The tests do not just exist in a few areas that we think of as big areas. They exist in all areas.
Wednesday 19 September 2012
Method to Madness part 2
The last blog entry (method to madness part 1) should have been clearer as to what it meant. The basic underlying thesis of that piece was the notion that can be found on nearly every page of Frank McLynn's biographies of historical figures there is method to madness and rationality to irrationality.
Perhaps I was running away with that idea. I presented an example of Carl Jung's clear Fordham lectures as coming from seemingly the same internal source that produced his largely inaccessible and self-indulgent book about symbols. I suggested that a delusory red man the visited Napoleon was an example of an irrational element that provided rational advice. ie. do not invade Russia. I further selected what were described as 'blundering and inept interventions' on the part of Napoleon during the 18 Brumaire coup as being involved in a greater rationality.
The problem with all of this was that I should have been tighter with my concepts. I was a little too comfortable in eliding different strands together to present an almost alchemical notion of personality change. I should have focused more on the underlying process concerning this rationality. What inspired me to write the original piece was the Jungian concept of enantiodromia. Perhaps it is to that idea that I should return in an effort to save the original post. The idea of enantiodromia suggests that the superabundance of one force necessarily produces its opposite within the personality. The absolutism of conscious attitudes produces absolutism of the opposite sort at the unconscious level. The point to be drawn from this concept is actually that the opposites exist together in the organism and do not lend themselves to ready separation. In the same sense the dichotomy between rationality and irrationality is a false one and it is that to which the preponderance of examples in the original piece point.
Another helpful thing to do would be to lay out the different instances of the ideas of rationality used in the last post and in my thinking more generally. First of all there is rationality in the sense of the thought processes of the individual and then there is rationality in terms of the actual actions of people as considered by history or in a more objective sense at the very least. There is further what is described as organismic rationality by Carl Rogers. This is the underlying rationality of the total organism. This organismic rationality is supposed to basically drives towards advancement and maturity in the person who is open to all of his experience and feelings.The original post then ends up supporting the notion of this false dichotomy between the rational and the irrational. The Red Man in the original post can be taken as being an instance of both rationality and irrationality at the same time. The Red Man is rational as related to the historical sense of not invading Russia (or rational in that they took Moscow, or perhaps even more rational if the tide of military events had continued to roll in Napoleon's favour) but on the level of the individual's thought processes it could be considered both as an irrational thought process or alternatively as a thought process that while being irrational produces rational ideas. But then are not all rational thought processes beholden to some basic underlying cognition which could be viewed as irrational.
The books Incognito and the social animal help to smash the false dichotomy that perhaps came across in the first blog entry. Underneath what one might call level 2 cognition or conscious cognition (dealing with what you can quanitfy, formalize and understand) is what you might call level 1 cognition (which is cloudlike, non-linear, hard to see and impossible to formalize). Anotonio Damasio's tests of decision making failures in persons with reduced emotional responses illustrate the inseparability of emotion and cognition. Damasio developed the 'somatic marker' hypothesis' on the role of emotion in human cognition. Basically what he said was that emotions measure the value of something and help to unconsciously guide our decision making. 'Reason is nestled upon emotion and dependent upon it. Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations.' Kenneth Dodge says that 'All information processing is emotional in that emotion is the energy that drives, organizes, amplifies and attenuates cognitive activity, and in turn is the experience and expression of this activity. The line in the Napoleon book about reason being the servant of Napoleon's imagination then fits perfectly with the notion of a false dichotomy or 'of one substance' idea.
Now one might refute the blending of emotions and cognition by saying that surely I can make decisions on the basis of the direct empirical evidence as presented to me by my senses. We might say that sure some thought processes are compromised by emotions but there are some sensory inputs which are free from such interference but if we read icongnito and the social animal we find we cannot actually be as sure of the senses. In Incognito various forms of sensory looping and sensory compensation are described. The brain for example fills in the gaps in relation to sight and the senses themselves actually change the way in which other senses are actually perceived. A visual image of a mouth moving in a particular way can change the way in which a sound is actually heard. When one answers the phone to an unknown person and they announce their name we then recognize the voice and hear it differently. If we try and identify a suspect from a police line up and then try to help the police by giving a description of the suspect's physical appearance or vice versa we find that we are compromised in whatever function we undertake second. So to the person who thinks that they can take refuge in the 5 senses as a logical bastion they must face the inherent changiness of the human organism to use Carl Rogers terminology. Furthermore it is suggested in The Social Animal that peripheral vision actually improves with mood and it has been established in many studies (none of which I care to look up or cite) that memory is extremely labile and we are essentially re-remembering things every time we recall them and this is a process that is again driven by emotion. So in short if you think that you are the paradigm of logical thinking (Ahem! Krishna.) you might be somewhat persuaded by this that like everybody else you are hopelessly compromised/ enhanced by emotions.
So at this point I have revised or reframed what I was saying in the original blog entry. I seem to be talking about the dialogue or the interaction between the level 1 and level 2 types of cognition described above. Jung talked in terms of a conscious dialogue with the unconscious and others refer to it as metis. I thought I might finish this piece by taking a look at some of my own thoughts where I feel this interaction between the conscious and the unconscious is evident and talking up that interaction rather than talking up some pure non-existent strand of irrationality. I have a joke that I respond sometimes to the emotional truth of social interactions rather than the social or logical truth. What this might mean in my hyperbolic joke is that someone might tell me to get my own ketchup from the fridge and I might hear something along the line of I am resentful of your happiness and am angry and unwilling to discuss this anger.
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In Carl Rogers' book on becoming a person he speaks at length about accepting ourselves and about unconditional positive regard. In one part of the book he talks about the artist El Greco and says isn't it great that he thought this is not how good artists do things but this is how I do things. He mentions Einstein in the same context this is not how physicists behave but this is how he behaved and aren't we very thankful that that is the case because of all of the achievements they both accomplished. In the same vein I suppose the peculiar dialogue between the unconscious and the conscious is part of me or rather part of the way in which I see and experience the world and it is to that I turn to give you a small taster of.
So here goes. When I talk to people I like to watch the references and allusions that are made consciously or otherwise throughout the conversation. I will take them to be a part of the conversation even though I must pretend that they are not part of the conversation. This goes down to anything as little as the symbolism and imagery contained in words. For example if someone says something like 'he's some buck' I start thinking how would deer or stag or buck imagery relate to this does it make me think of something apt to say. If as has happened we are all jokingly comparing ourself to early psychoanalytic figures and someone chooses 'Adler' I take it that that person possibly meant to get at the exclusion of Adler from the movement and perhaps make some sort of hint at the inferiority complex that he was heavily involved in developing theoretically. If I am talking with someone and I look at a billboard and it says something that makes me think of a conversation topic there is a part of me that thinks that this is the most inspired and appropriate choice of topic.
If I hear people use the same words or phrases in conversation with me that I use in conversation with somebody else I will for a moment think that those two people have been talking. I am fully aware that this is a form of paranoid thinking but that does not detract from its usefulness. It is something which can be used or not used and it makes me think of the concept of functional paranoia as I think it is referred to in Bentall's madness explained which I intend to read.
I also think that there is a value in terms of drawing people to you if you let them inside your thought process. Another thing that I watch when I am in conversation with someone is the juxtaposition of thoughts. If they talk for an extended period about a car accident and then go on to talk about a horse at length I will wonder if the car crashed into the horse, if the horse was driving the car, if the horse was meant to be in the car but stayed at home that night and is secretly being held responsible for the car accident. If someone uses the same types words to describe different things I will wonder whether there is a relationship between them. The words thing, in particular, was reinforced by watching the drama in treatment to do with analysis where Sunnil is talking about his daughter in law. He relates a dream about a dead dog or something but uses the same words to describe something else thus linking the concepts. Now I know that the genesis of these ideas should really be something sturdier than in treatment but it provides me with what I need in little 20/ 30 minute chunks. Other things I have taken from In Treatment including that things to do with paying for things and making a show of paying for things assert dominance. In the episode introducing April to the show Paul reinforces another lesson for me. He suggests that the stories that April is telling are not just stories from her life but instructions to her therapist on how she wants to be treated. So this is another thing that occurs with me if somebody tells me a story about how they beat up people giving them grief they are saying don't mess with me.
This is just a small taster of some of the things that go on under the hood of me but the real fun part is that you are not supposed to say any of these things because they are 'crazy' and they are. There is no objective proof for any of the conclusions these processes lead me to but they are nearly always bang on. They can be debilitating and feat and anxiety inducing and you can let them go and you can be happy. You can turn down the volume sort to speak but you can't deny the value of these imaginative processes. It reminds me of the Red Dragon scene in which Hannibal Lecter is telling the protagonist that what they share in common is that fear is the price of their instrument.
Perhaps I was running away with that idea. I presented an example of Carl Jung's clear Fordham lectures as coming from seemingly the same internal source that produced his largely inaccessible and self-indulgent book about symbols. I suggested that a delusory red man the visited Napoleon was an example of an irrational element that provided rational advice. ie. do not invade Russia. I further selected what were described as 'blundering and inept interventions' on the part of Napoleon during the 18 Brumaire coup as being involved in a greater rationality.
The problem with all of this was that I should have been tighter with my concepts. I was a little too comfortable in eliding different strands together to present an almost alchemical notion of personality change. I should have focused more on the underlying process concerning this rationality. What inspired me to write the original piece was the Jungian concept of enantiodromia. Perhaps it is to that idea that I should return in an effort to save the original post. The idea of enantiodromia suggests that the superabundance of one force necessarily produces its opposite within the personality. The absolutism of conscious attitudes produces absolutism of the opposite sort at the unconscious level. The point to be drawn from this concept is actually that the opposites exist together in the organism and do not lend themselves to ready separation. In the same sense the dichotomy between rationality and irrationality is a false one and it is that to which the preponderance of examples in the original piece point.
Another helpful thing to do would be to lay out the different instances of the ideas of rationality used in the last post and in my thinking more generally. First of all there is rationality in the sense of the thought processes of the individual and then there is rationality in terms of the actual actions of people as considered by history or in a more objective sense at the very least. There is further what is described as organismic rationality by Carl Rogers. This is the underlying rationality of the total organism. This organismic rationality is supposed to basically drives towards advancement and maturity in the person who is open to all of his experience and feelings.The original post then ends up supporting the notion of this false dichotomy between the rational and the irrational. The Red Man in the original post can be taken as being an instance of both rationality and irrationality at the same time. The Red Man is rational as related to the historical sense of not invading Russia (or rational in that they took Moscow, or perhaps even more rational if the tide of military events had continued to roll in Napoleon's favour) but on the level of the individual's thought processes it could be considered both as an irrational thought process or alternatively as a thought process that while being irrational produces rational ideas. But then are not all rational thought processes beholden to some basic underlying cognition which could be viewed as irrational.
The books Incognito and the social animal help to smash the false dichotomy that perhaps came across in the first blog entry. Underneath what one might call level 2 cognition or conscious cognition (dealing with what you can quanitfy, formalize and understand) is what you might call level 1 cognition (which is cloudlike, non-linear, hard to see and impossible to formalize). Anotonio Damasio's tests of decision making failures in persons with reduced emotional responses illustrate the inseparability of emotion and cognition. Damasio developed the 'somatic marker' hypothesis' on the role of emotion in human cognition. Basically what he said was that emotions measure the value of something and help to unconsciously guide our decision making. 'Reason is nestled upon emotion and dependent upon it. Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations.' Kenneth Dodge says that 'All information processing is emotional in that emotion is the energy that drives, organizes, amplifies and attenuates cognitive activity, and in turn is the experience and expression of this activity. The line in the Napoleon book about reason being the servant of Napoleon's imagination then fits perfectly with the notion of a false dichotomy or 'of one substance' idea.
Now one might refute the blending of emotions and cognition by saying that surely I can make decisions on the basis of the direct empirical evidence as presented to me by my senses. We might say that sure some thought processes are compromised by emotions but there are some sensory inputs which are free from such interference but if we read icongnito and the social animal we find we cannot actually be as sure of the senses. In Incognito various forms of sensory looping and sensory compensation are described. The brain for example fills in the gaps in relation to sight and the senses themselves actually change the way in which other senses are actually perceived. A visual image of a mouth moving in a particular way can change the way in which a sound is actually heard. When one answers the phone to an unknown person and they announce their name we then recognize the voice and hear it differently. If we try and identify a suspect from a police line up and then try to help the police by giving a description of the suspect's physical appearance or vice versa we find that we are compromised in whatever function we undertake second. So to the person who thinks that they can take refuge in the 5 senses as a logical bastion they must face the inherent changiness of the human organism to use Carl Rogers terminology. Furthermore it is suggested in The Social Animal that peripheral vision actually improves with mood and it has been established in many studies (none of which I care to look up or cite) that memory is extremely labile and we are essentially re-remembering things every time we recall them and this is a process that is again driven by emotion. So in short if you think that you are the paradigm of logical thinking (Ahem! Krishna.) you might be somewhat persuaded by this that like everybody else you are hopelessly compromised/ enhanced by emotions.
So at this point I have revised or reframed what I was saying in the original blog entry. I seem to be talking about the dialogue or the interaction between the level 1 and level 2 types of cognition described above. Jung talked in terms of a conscious dialogue with the unconscious and others refer to it as metis. I thought I might finish this piece by taking a look at some of my own thoughts where I feel this interaction between the conscious and the unconscious is evident and talking up that interaction rather than talking up some pure non-existent strand of irrationality. I have a joke that I respond sometimes to the emotional truth of social interactions rather than the social or logical truth. What this might mean in my hyperbolic joke is that someone might tell me to get my own ketchup from the fridge and I might hear something along the line of I am resentful of your happiness and am angry and unwilling to discuss this anger.
.jpg)
In Carl Rogers' book on becoming a person he speaks at length about accepting ourselves and about unconditional positive regard. In one part of the book he talks about the artist El Greco and says isn't it great that he thought this is not how good artists do things but this is how I do things. He mentions Einstein in the same context this is not how physicists behave but this is how he behaved and aren't we very thankful that that is the case because of all of the achievements they both accomplished. In the same vein I suppose the peculiar dialogue between the unconscious and the conscious is part of me or rather part of the way in which I see and experience the world and it is to that I turn to give you a small taster of.
So here goes. When I talk to people I like to watch the references and allusions that are made consciously or otherwise throughout the conversation. I will take them to be a part of the conversation even though I must pretend that they are not part of the conversation. This goes down to anything as little as the symbolism and imagery contained in words. For example if someone says something like 'he's some buck' I start thinking how would deer or stag or buck imagery relate to this does it make me think of something apt to say. If as has happened we are all jokingly comparing ourself to early psychoanalytic figures and someone chooses 'Adler' I take it that that person possibly meant to get at the exclusion of Adler from the movement and perhaps make some sort of hint at the inferiority complex that he was heavily involved in developing theoretically. If I am talking with someone and I look at a billboard and it says something that makes me think of a conversation topic there is a part of me that thinks that this is the most inspired and appropriate choice of topic.
If I hear people use the same words or phrases in conversation with me that I use in conversation with somebody else I will for a moment think that those two people have been talking. I am fully aware that this is a form of paranoid thinking but that does not detract from its usefulness. It is something which can be used or not used and it makes me think of the concept of functional paranoia as I think it is referred to in Bentall's madness explained which I intend to read.
I also think that there is a value in terms of drawing people to you if you let them inside your thought process. Another thing that I watch when I am in conversation with someone is the juxtaposition of thoughts. If they talk for an extended period about a car accident and then go on to talk about a horse at length I will wonder if the car crashed into the horse, if the horse was driving the car, if the horse was meant to be in the car but stayed at home that night and is secretly being held responsible for the car accident. If someone uses the same types words to describe different things I will wonder whether there is a relationship between them. The words thing, in particular, was reinforced by watching the drama in treatment to do with analysis where Sunnil is talking about his daughter in law. He relates a dream about a dead dog or something but uses the same words to describe something else thus linking the concepts. Now I know that the genesis of these ideas should really be something sturdier than in treatment but it provides me with what I need in little 20/ 30 minute chunks. Other things I have taken from In Treatment including that things to do with paying for things and making a show of paying for things assert dominance. In the episode introducing April to the show Paul reinforces another lesson for me. He suggests that the stories that April is telling are not just stories from her life but instructions to her therapist on how she wants to be treated. So this is another thing that occurs with me if somebody tells me a story about how they beat up people giving them grief they are saying don't mess with me.
This is just a small taster of some of the things that go on under the hood of me but the real fun part is that you are not supposed to say any of these things because they are 'crazy' and they are. There is no objective proof for any of the conclusions these processes lead me to but they are nearly always bang on. They can be debilitating and feat and anxiety inducing and you can let them go and you can be happy. You can turn down the volume sort to speak but you can't deny the value of these imaginative processes. It reminds me of the Red Dragon scene in which Hannibal Lecter is telling the protagonist that what they share in common is that fear is the price of their instrument.
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