A few weeks ago flipping through tv channels I re-watched Warren Beatty in the 1989 movie Bulworth which is both amusing and depressing. The movie is still relevant, 17 years later, as movie critic Roger Ebert suggests; “What it comes down to is a politician who can no longer bring himself to recite the words, ‘America is standing on the doorstep of a new millennium.’ Over and over and over again he has repeated the same mindless platitudes, the same meaningless baloney, the same hot air. Now he sits in his office, playing one of his stupid TV commercials on an endless loop. He has not eaten or slept in three days. He is sick to the soul of the American political process.” One can hear President Obama in his State of Union outline the USA’s positive stance and then next listen to Republicans paint a picture of doom & gloom – where is reality?
Beatty wrote, produced, directed, and starred in the movie and these clips describe our reality so well so, let’s rap a while.
Bulworth (1/5) Movie CLIP – South Central Speech
Bulworth (2/5) Movie CLIP – Bulworth Raps
Bulworth (3/5) Movie CLIP – No More Black Leaders
Bulworth (4/5) Movie CLIP – The Cop’s Apology
Bulworth (5/5) Movie CLIP – Little Brothers
Yesterday, Thursday 1.14.16, I went to the Turf Grill across from the NDSU campus for a beer, good for the heart, and to pick up the latest copy of The High Plans Reader to read Ed Raymond’s The Gadfly column written by my former Fargo Central High School English teacher. Ed’s article,Perfect Political Fit, was a perfect fit in presenting a beginning psychoanalytical analysis of the Trump phenomenon, which was later this evening aired on the Fox Channel’s coverage of the Republican debate. Ed’s essay uses Elia Kazan’s movie Face in the Crowd, with Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, and Walter Matthau to tell the story of the drifter Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes (Griffith) who is discovered by the producer (Neal) of a small-market radio program in rural northeast Arkansas. Rhodes rises to fame and influence on national television which turn into delusion of grandeur. The identification of Donald Trump with Larry Rhodes is sticking. Here, take a look.
A Face in the Crowd
Free Man In The Morning
Dark Night of the Soul
Ed concludes his essay asking, “What Is This Epidemic Of Affluenza Sweeping The Country?” and answers the question by stating “Research by social scientists has determined that the affluent generally lack empathy, disrespect norms and laws, and are more likely to cheat. Dr. Aaron James, a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard, has covered the disease of affluenza rather well in his serious 2012 book “Assholes: A Theory”: ‘The asshole (1) allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically; (2) does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement; and (3) is immunized by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people.” That pretty well sums up Trump and his fellow billionaires who have been the highest bidders for The Best Congress Money Can Buy. Trump, like Lonesome Rhodes, is trying to sell “chicken fertilizer” to the stupid idiots “as caviar” and are tossing the voters many dead fish. The rich will probably end up supporting their fellow billionaire The Donald to cement a victory. What will the White House look like with that huge neon sign “Trump” on the roof? Obama recently renamed Mt. McKinley to Mt. Denali. I wonder what the Alaskans would think of Mt. Trump…….
Many are now pondering the phenomenon of Trumpism – like Sherlock Holmes I am on the trail of this crime and sense the emergence of the emphatic civilization. The invisible-hand of Adam Smith’s self-interest needs to be modified with the invisible-hand of the emphatic-civilization.
David Bowie (1947-2016) died on January 10 2016 and released on his 69th birthday January 8 2016 his latest album Blackstar. This album seems to be a salute to life and also an embrace of death. We need to listen carefully to understand what David is communicating to us. Unlike The Great Houdini who communicate to us after his death, The Great Bowie is communicating to us as he departs. It remains our task to understand what his message is!
If it is Sunday, we have the morning news programs to watch. Sunday’s news still has no worthy solutions to our World’s problems – this is depressing causing a loss of psychic energy, which at my age is serious. I am currently in the process of watching The Physics of Light which has brought me again to Einstein’s equation E=MC2. In an earlier DAMan Blog post, The mathematics of faith, I explored how Einstein’s concept of energy might be transformed into Jung’s psychological concept of energy (Atom and Archetype : The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932-1958). This subject has been with me for some time now and when I woke this morning, I observed myself continuing to analyze what I had been reading during the night – Colin Wilson’s Chapter Seven Doubts and Reservation in his book C.G. Jung: Lord of the underworld. This blog entry will begin to examine Wilson’s thought on psychic energy.
I first started reading Wilson’s book on “December 22, 1988 in Beijing” and finished it then writing on the last page, “12/31/88 21:26 Beijing alone on New Year’s Eve, SAS.” I recently re-discovered Colin Wilson and am excited about his work and this morning awoke working through what his reservations regarding Jung’s thought. Wilson begins suggesting that Jung is a romantic, which is not a criticism in that a romantic is “a person who feels that the world is full of meaning – that discovery and adventure lie around every corner… The romantic recognizes that the problem lies in our own limitations, in the narrowness of our senses. So when a romantic also happens to be a realist, he is likely to devote a great deal of his life to the search for meaning – which is synonymous with self-transformation. Jung was such a person…” (124). The idea of self-transformation is Jung’s central concept of individuation, (here explained by Murray Stein) which can be compared to Abraham Maslow’s self-actualization, which Wilson also explores and we will tackle in a future DAMan Blog entry.
In line with Wilson’s first book, The Outsider, Jung can be added to the list of writers – “including H. G. Wells (Mind at the End of its Tether), Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Harley Granville-Barker (The Secret Life), Hermann Hesse, T. E. Lawrence, Vincent van Gogh, Vaslav Nijinsky, George Bernard Shaw, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky and G. I. Gurdjieff – that Wilson explores “effecting society and society’s effect on them” (Wikipedia). Wilson wrote The Outsider, his first book a world-wide best-seller at the age of 24 in 1956, and in his book on Jung we have another book modeled after this first one – Wilson says he is always writing on the same subject – romanticism, which peaked from 1800 to 1850 and was we need to note “partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution”(Wikipedia).
Wilson begins his reservations addressing Freud and Jung’s concepts of the unconscious, Jung’s ideas of the collective unconscious, and the role of archetypes. Wilson does not deny these ideas but instead questions how Jung arrived at their reality (126). Wilson then turns to the question we are focusing on in this post, “How does neurosis arise?” Besides Jung’s Theory of neurosis, there is Karen Horney’s extensive treatment in her magnum opus Neurosis and Human Growth: The struggle toward self-realization. Wilson, however, chooses to use Pierre Janet idea of abaissement du niveau mental (adnm), which is “a lowering of the mind threshold”, a psychological energy concept Jung also made use of and that we are investigating.
Janet’s work influenced many of the giants in the then evolving field of depth psychology, like James, Freud, Jung, Adler, and many later psychologists like Horney and Abraham Maslow. In varying degrees, the focus is on individual psychological health, however, we need to also focus on how our insane society (Fromm), industrial capitalism, impacts individuals as we struggle with the challenge to establish the empathic global community (Rifkin). In discussing the psychological health of mass shooters , the sanity of our industrial society is not even in the mix – just listen to how mental health is being addressed in the media and then go deeper and consider how business schools are not addressing the sanity of what they teach. The sanity of our society in not being discussed, after all, aren’t we exceptional? Zizek asks and interesting question, why is it easier for us, Hollywood, to imagine the end of the world than to imaging the end of capitalism (The perverts guide to cinema)?
Stephen Aizenstat, President of Pacifica Graduate Institute, makes three points about depth psychology moving us into a deeper understanding of an empathic global community: “It is that which lies below the surface of things, in the unconscious; 2, It has to deal with the activation of the human imagination from which myths and stories arise – here we have Wilson’s Outsiders; 3 We are all asked to see the social, political, economic, realities that face us. We are asked to look at these issues with a particular eye – a way to see, a way of being. It is seeing deeply into the structure of our institutions” (Youtube). A question to consider, which candidate for president of the U.S. is practicing depth psychology? May I suggest Bernie Sanders comes closest?
What is depth psychology?
So, Wilson’s view of psychological health is a matter of “psychological-tension”, which requires “a sense of motivation and purpose.” If psychological tension is lowered, from conditions of boredom, illness, depression, this constitutes abaissement du niveau mental and can result in one falling prey to fears and anxieties that a healthy person would not be subject to. What Wilson next writes made me understand experientially what he was proposing. Remember, I awoke in the middle of the night to read Wilson writing: “We experience a lowering of our mental threshold during the night, and we are all familiar with the experience of waking in the early hours of the morning and beginning to worry about all kinds of things” (128). How true this is for me and when psychological-tension is lowered, I tell myself to put these issues aside since in the morning my energy will be renewed with many important things-to-do, one important one for me is writing about this.
This simple model of Janet’s has additional stages like “a narrowing of attention,” which is followed by “a sense of monotony,” which leads to further lowering of mental energy needed to live fully. At 71 years with son Aaron 20 a NDSU junior and daughter Annah 17 a senior in high school, we often discuss their studies and reminding me of my days as a UND student. I wonder where does their motivational energy comes from having to sit, often passively in class, and then to hide away somewhere alone reading and writing. I think to myself, I could never do that again, I would never want to live my life again – just want to get through this one, to see if there is another side.
At first, this stressed me, thinking about what Aaron and Annah have yet to endure in order to prepare for their lives. However, is there really any difference in what they are doing and what I am doing? I am coming closer to death and am working just as intently on this as they are on preparing for life. So, why when I wake in the night is my mental energy lower? I am anxious about the future but at 20 I do not remember feeling anxious – it seems I just studied my way forward. Here I am 50 years later, with three academic degrees, a fun teaching career of 40 years, a solid marriage, some money under the mattress, and now engaged in writing about it all. So, why are you anxious in the middle of the night and also at times during the day – just do it, Steve! Carl Jung speaks about death suggests, it is as important an event as our birth and it needs to be prepared for. However, we still need to get closer to these anxieties.
Colin Wilson‘s, The High and the Low, interviewed by psychologist Jeffrey Mislove addresses an unfolding-processes of anxiety that needs tracking. There are several threads to track in this interview and we will focus on Wilson saying that for “the outsider salvation lies in extremes.”
Wilson suggests that his middle-of-the-night anxiety needs a process of working these states of despair and panic through. His approach is much the same as mine in using a journal to get them written down and then thought into. What he realized is that there are two Colin Wilsons that can be called upon to address these anxieties in order to catch the adrenaline energy before it gets a hold and pulls one down. It was the Outsiders that achieved this control by putting themselves in a crisis situation – in other words, “salvation lies in extremes.”
Wilson’s idea this that our psyches are comprised of two persons – one our real-you and the other our robot-you. His idea is that the robot-you often has the percentage of engery at 49/51% in his/her favor. Boosting one’s psychic energy to 51%, puts your real-you in charge. The robot-you is a worm’s eye, the subjective untrue view that deprives one of feeling meaning in life – the neurosis in life. In order to move beyond a balance of 50/50% energy levels, one needs a bird’s eye view, which is the true-view that provides meaning in life. Wilson says “one has to pull back and look at life through a wide-angle lens and as soon as this is done one goes into a state of optimism.” When a person is in a crisis situation, the real-you is at 51% and one is excited with meaning in life – a state of optimism.
Wilson disagreed with Maslow’s position that states of optimism, Maslow’s peak experiences, cannot be willfully induced. Wilson suggests, “It is a matter of inner strength creating the peak experience at will and then putting them alongside the experience of despair?” The path is to develop a working relationship among your selves, a Stan and Laurel exchange. Wilson insists that “peak experiences are the norm, it is a perception. It is more than thus acknowledging this depth but is the possibility of something greater, it is realizing in our own depths we possess an enormous reservoir of energy that we are unaware of.” This is the experience of the romantics – “The inner becomes outer and the outer becomes the inner.” Steven A Scherling
Thanksgiving morning I rose, turned on the Today program, and watched the breaking news for the day. I soon had my pc open and began my journal entry for the day. At 9am the New York Macy’s Parade began and I watched as its pageantry got underway wondering if this day would end without terror on those streets. I had several hours before family dinner and sitting home alone in my study, family now in Taiwan, I opened Adam Curtis’s web site Thoughtmaybe, and decided it was time to watch his newest BBC documentary Bitter Lake (2015) which: “explores how the realpolitik of the West has converged on a mirror image of itself throughout the Middle-East over the past decades, and how the story of this has become so obfuscating and simplified that we, the public, have been left in a bewildered and confused state. The narrative traverses the United States, Britain, Russia and Saudi Arabia—but the country at the centre of reflection is Afghanistan. Because Afghanistan is the place that has confronted political figureheads across the West with the truth of their delusions—that they cannot understand what is going on any longer inside the systems they have built which do not account for the real world. Bitter Lake sets out to reveal the forces that over the past thirty years, rose up and commandeered those political systems into subservience, to which, as we see now, the highly destructive stories told by those in power, are inexorably bound to. The stories are not only half-truths, but they have monumental consequences in the real world.”
I have watched all of Curtis’s BBC programs and like all writers, he is always writing versions of the same story. I quickly saw in the Bitter Lake documentary a continuing refinement of the reporting that was done in his three part series The Trap (2007) and almost every other documentary. I kept the Macy Parade playing with the sound low, turned my back to the TV, and started watching Bitter Lake, occasionally turning around to see a Disney character hovering over the avenue. I watched Bitter Lake non-stop taking notes and wondering along with Curtis’s ending suggestion that from our experience of Afghanistan we suspect something is there but “we do not have the apparatus to observe it.”
Curtis’s ending statement is thought provoking; How do we go about observing and understanding the complexity of what is unfolding in the world? At the beginning of Bitter Lake, we see a brief image of the movie Solaris and I was excited when this clip was fully presented later centering on the psychological essence of the Bitter Lake documentary. The plote of the movie is this,
“Solaris chronicles the ultimate futility of attempted communications with the extraterrestrial life on a far-distant planet. Solaris is almost completely covered with an ocean that is revealed to be a single, planet-encompassing organism, with whom Terran scientists are attempting communication.
Kris Kelvin arrives aboard Solaris Station, a scientific research station hovering near the oceanic surface of the planet Solaris. The scientists there have studied the planet and its ocean for many decades, a scientific discipline known as Solaristics, which over the years has degenerated to simply observing, recording and categorizing the complex phenomena that occur upon the surface of the ocean. Thus far, they have only compiled an elaborate nomenclature of the phenomena with an — yet do not understand what such activities really mean. Shortly before psychologist Kelvin’s arrival, the crew has exposed the ocean to a more aggressive and unauthorized experimentation with a high-energy X-ray bombardment. Their experimentation gives unexpected results and becomes psychologically traumatic for them as individually flawed humans.
The ocean’s response to their aggression exposes the deeper, hidden aspects of the personalities of the human scientists — while revealing nothing of the ocean’s nature itself. To the extent that the ocean’s actions can be understood, the ocean then seems to test the minds of the scientists by confronting them with their most painful and repressed thoughts and memories. It does this via the materialization of physical human simulacra; Kelvin confronts memories of his dead lover and guilt about her suicide. The torments of the other researchers are only alluded.
The ocean’s intelligence expresses physical phenomena in ways difficult for the protagonists to explain using conventional scientific method, deeply upsetting the scientists. The alien mind of Solaris is so greatly different from the human mind of (objective) consciousness that attempts at inter-species communications are a dismal failure.
Zezik’s comment on the Solaris movie addresses the central point Curtis makes.
Like the planet Solaris’s effect on its orbiting astronauts, Afghanistan has a similar affect on those hovering over it. Afghanistan like Solaris “has the magic ability to directly realize your deepest traumas, dreams, fears, and desires – the inner most of your inner space.” The astronaut Kelvin circling Solaris realizes not so much his desire as his guilt feelings about his deceased wife. It is quite apparent from Curtis’s film that the West led by America and Britain has not resulted in freedom and democracy for Afghanistan and, in fact, it is now apparent they are guilty of not having provided freedom and democracy for their own peoples! Happy Thanksgiving Afghanistan and America.
This morning 10.03.2015 after getting my morning cup of “coffee with cream” prepared I turned on the MSNBC program Morning Joe to watch some of the Koch Bros. on running for office, foreign policy interview. As I watched the broadcast, I thought of the previous days’ discussions on the Republican candidates’ rebellion against the questions and conduct of the debates they received, in their view mostly at the hands of liberal news persons. One of the points presented was to get right-leaning newscaster to conduct the interviews. So, this morning on Morning Joe we watched such an interview on some issues and here is the reaction that I also felt as I watched – 10 Of the Worst Moments from Morning Joe’s Fawning Koch Brothers Interview.
So, getting a third cup of coffee, I was surfing the net and here I found a direct response to the obscenity of what we have to endure for yet another year. Here is Slavoj Zizek on A New Kind of Communism. Take notes on Slavoj’s presentation on totality – we will be addressing this.
Another recent unfolding experience was when my senior high-school daughter mentioned that she was studying Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, here is the excerpt from The Republic.
As we discussed the allegory, a flood of clips that I had studied a year ago flooded in. There are many professorial lectures on this allegory and this one is informative and entertaining – Plato’s cave analysis.
When my family went to Taiwan for eight months in 2005, being home alone in Our Cave, I rented The Matrix Trilogy movies and watched them for the first time almost non-stop. This clip, The Matrix and the Cave, presents the link between The Matrix and Plato’s Cave and bring us directly into the situation we find ourselves in today – living in the matrix cave of global capitalism.
The full documentary, Philosophy and the Matrix – Return to the Source, the above matrix as cave clip is taken from, is most enlightening, if you have a philosophical curiosity – I recommend it.
It is challenging that philosopher/psychoanalyst/marxist Slavoj Žižek is calling for a third pill, besides the red and blue one offered to Neo. Let’s see, what is this third pill?
Son Aaron is a 2nd-semester university sophomore and after beginning his studies the idea of becoming an engineer is unfolding into something different. He is good at math and science and his initial idea of a major was petroleum engineering, which I suggested is old technology and that he might consider exploring renewable-energy engineering. After seeing The Social Network movie and the analysis of Facebook’s narcissistic CEO Zuckerberg hiring expert computer systems engineers to tap into and create havoc in other computers systems, I begin half-jokingly suggesting he becomes a professional hacker. With his Chinese and English languages, he ought to have two very interesting suitors bidding for his dangerous knowledge.
Aaron came home from university recently and asked to interview me on my experience choosing a profession for his career development class. To say the least, I was excited and pushed through his resistance and audio-taped our conversation. A day after, as if by the design of the unfolding self-organizing theory of life (Aziz 2007) my effort to guide Aaron into exploring his options, a friend sent the documentaryDangerous Knowledge that addresses the monumental task before him – understanding the matrices of life we are living in.
In my Blog I have slowly been letting unfold a self-organizing theory of life that surrounds me and pose this question, Is there a path through The Trap (Fuck You Buddy) we have created for ourselves. I have been a student of CG Jung’s idea of synchronicity since beginning my teaching career and was amazed when the clips listed below appeared on my internet search screen. I watched these and shared them with Aaron and now they are here. In past postings, some ideas have already appeared and in future postings, they will continue to unfold. I post them here for you to view and explore what I am experiencing as the theory of unfolding reality.
These clips are selected to watch, reflect, and think on in order to experience what emerges to guide this hacking project.
Reflection: There, this post has been cleaned and re-lived 7.11.2019. I have recently re-watched these clips but at this time will not reflect deeper on what appears to me to be ‘dangerous knowledge’ – knowing that several thinkers exploring this ‘knowledge’ went insane. Not that I think I am at their ‘thinking level’ but that it is approaching the ‘processes of thinking’ itself that can be dangerous to one’s mental health. So, I hope you will not mind my cautionary appro7ach, preferring to sneak up on these processes. The 5 blog posts listed below, begin to address this knowledge and processes. One must move carefully so as not to ‘trap’ ourselves. I am here again 9.17.2021 re-watching, proofreading, and pondering how this work can be thread forward into this blogging project? In fact, this blog project needs attending!
Hello, I have been away from blogging but not from thinking-in-writing and it is time for me to resume the processes of tracking feelings, thoughts, intuitions, dreams, and happenings as they unfold – the idea stated earlier is to be online intime – the understanding of time we will see is essential! So, I will re-begin with the idea that began this blog – to read and comment on Lao Tzu’s book the Dao de Jing which will flow into related themes of study around the issue of our day – globalization. It seems only appropriate that the West understand Lao Tzu’s important and only book as China reclaims its status as the World’s largest economy, a position it will soon hold after only 200 years of recorded history not holding it. Obama on Globalization
Introduction Chang, Chung-yuan the author of the Tao: A new way of thinking that is our main text takes the reader backward and forward in reading a current chapter, which follows Lao Zi’s effort to unravel the essence of Dao in small steps building understanding. For example, in Chapter 5 the word chung, which means the center is explained, is extended in Chapter 6 by relating it to the Chinese word ku shen, meaning spirit or valley. Another example is the multiple times’ Chang uses authors like Hegel, Heidegger, and Nishida, to help us understand by comparing the Dao to other thinkers’ thought. The concept of dialectical thinking is another example appearing before and again here in Chapter 7 that Chang continues building upon. Chapter 7’s commentary ends pushing us forward informing us that “The idea of self-determining present will be further discussed in the commentary in Chapter 28.” So, one can jump ahead to read that in an effort to think deeper into how Chang sees the Dao unfolding or we can let it unfold as we read forward. The challenge of reading Chang’s commentaries makes me think justpresenting them will help our understanding unfold. After Lao Tzu’s Chapter and Chang’s Commentary, my Dialogue² reflection unfolds.
Chapter 7 The existences of heaven and earth are long-lasting. Their existences are long-lasting because they do not conceive of their existences as existences. Therefore, their existences are long-lasting. When the wise stays back, he steps forward. When he forgets his self, he finds his self. Is it not through selflessness that one achieves selfhood?
Commentary This chapter teaches that the self becomes a self only by negating itself and identifying with the non-self. The unity of self and non-self is the self-identity through absolute contradictions through which the individual self is determined. As Nishida says:
The individual person determined through the dialectical determination of absolute negation which is absolute negation-qua-affirmation, i.e. through the self-determination of absolute nothingness. 1
Thus, through the negation of the self, the self is affirmed. Or, as Lao Tzu say: “When he forgets himself, he finds himself.” Nishida further maintains that the self is “the unity of the self of yesterday and the self of today.” It is the self of the absolute self-determining present. The absolute self-determining present is time as the “continuity of discontinuity” which is different from ordinary time. In Nishida’s words:
The individual self exists when living is dying and dying is living. But it is not that time simply flows from past to future or is simply determined by the future. Time must be seen as the self-determining present, meaning that the present, which includes past, present, and future is a self-determining present.2
The self of the self-determining present, which is time itself as the self-determination of absolute nothingness, is also expressed in Chuang Tzu’s words: “The perfect man has no self.”3 Chuang Tzu further says: “To kill does not mean death; to give birth does not mean life.”4 Thus, it is through the self-identification of self and non-self, life and death, negation and affirmation that the self is determined as the self-determining present or the unity of past, present, and future. This is close to what Lao Tzu means when he says that the existence of heaven and earth are long-lasting because they do not conceive of their existence as existence. The idea of the self-determining present will be further discussed in the commentary on chapter 28.
Notes to Chapter 7 1. Nishida Kitaro, (1970). Fundamental problems of philosophy: The world of action and the dialectical world. Trans. By David A. Dilworth. Tokyo: Sophia University. P.44. 2. Ibid., p.45. 3. Chuang Tzu, Works, Chapter I, 1:5. 4. Ibid Chapter VI3:7b.
Dialogue² The Commentary above is author Chang, Chung-yuan’s and this Dialogue² is my reflection first and yours as you choose to engage below. The idea of a Dialogue² surfaced in the previous post The mathematics of faith. Here I describe a pastor’s attempt to quantify mathematically the Christian’s faith with a closed, passive, dogmatic formula of human obedience, reflecting Newtonian physics, not realizing that Einstein’s new physics, has sublatedthe old view with a powerfully new thought, which is symbolized in Albert ‘s famous equation E=MC², Energy = Mass X Speed of Light Squared. This physics equation is extended to a psychological equation, E=SD², where E is still energy but now represented as psychological libido energy, S is still mass-like but now psychological manifesting in Jung’s concept of Soul and Lao’s idea of Dao, and where D² replicates the powerful speed of light squared C² concept as dialogue dialectic-analytically squared that takes place between individuals and the discipline of psychology.
The modern practice of psychotherapy began as a monologue with Sigmund Freud, the analyst, sitting behind the analysand laying on a couch free-associating on childhood experiences. Carl Jung moved the session into sitting across a table from the analysand in order to engage in a face-to-face dialogue involving the full psyches of both. This idea of a dialogue, communication between two persons, changes to a dialectic-analytical encounter (see Morales-Ramos book review) when the dialogue between two persons “involves a third.” Giegerich (2005: 42) elaborates:
A dialectic understanding of therapy thus implies that doctor and patient are not alone. There always is a third factor, a third “person” present. This idea of the Third characterizes Jung’s view of psychotherapy throughout. We read, e.g., in “Psychology of Transference” (CW 16 P 399), “Psychological induction inevitably causes the two parties to get involved in the transformation of the third and to be themselves transformed in the process.” It is this third “person” on which the therapy ultimately depends, the psychological induction is here not thought of as running from the patient to the analyst or visa versa, but rather as the embeddedness of both persons in the Third in “mutual unconsciousness” (CW 16 P 364). Instead of asymmetrically concentrating on the patient, both now focus their attention on this objective third factor.
What is this third person in the consulting room and how does this presence square a dialogue into being dialectic-analytical? How does the Chinese concept of time play a role? Seems we need to re-read this Chapter 7 paying close attention to the idea of time. What time is it right now? It is 2/12/2015 11:45 AM and I am wondering what is happening in our World that involves our Selves? Or, as Nishida suggests, “The individual self exists when living is dying and dying is living.” For sure, we are consumed with more dying on the horizon.
Chang, Chung-yuan (1975). Tao: a new way of thinking. New York: Harper & Row; Translation and Commentary.
Giegerich, W. (2005). The neurosis of psychology, Vol. 1. Chapter Two: On the neurosis of psychology of the third of two, pp 41-67. New Orleans: Spring.
W tried to go to the movie Interstellar last week but missed its start time so went over to Luckie’s for dinner. We got home around 7 pm with Fannie and me getting into bed to read, when you unexpectedly joined us toting the book A most dangerous method by John Kerr. I read this book when it was first published in 1993 and enjoyed it thinking I would like to direct/produce its movie. Only in my dreams; one being if I were able to re-live my life, it would be as a movie director. We saw the movie together and when it came out, I followed up reading more about Sabina Spielrein’s life by watching the movie on her The Soul Keeper (Wikipedia) here on Youtube. The Soul Keeper
I sure took notice last week when you were carrying Kerr’s book and told me you had started to read it. I had often read books with you and Aaron when you were younger and wanted to continue reading them when you were older with books like The catcher in the Rye that you recently read. However, I never got to do this with all my reading for my psychology projects. I now see that reading and examining the art of poetry and the art of the novel is at the center of where I am now in life. The other day, Fannie in response to someone said I was retired and later I corrected her saying, “I do not like the concept of retirement! I like to use Jung’s life-stage concept, I have moved to the last stage of life, one defined with a focus on writing – far from retiring. I will return to this creative stage of life later.
Yes, this is another threadthat is being tracked but for now back to you, Annah, for jumping into bed with us the other night. We all were time-traveling back-to-the-future 10 years to second grade when you first started reading in bed with us. However, I am also thinking of a time back in the fall of 1963 when I was a sophomore at UND majoring in pre-medicine and struggling with the decision to change majors to psychology. Annah, I told you about this and have wondered, if I had it to do over would have completed my medical degree and then specialized in psychiatry. I again took notice when you said you were thinking of entering pre-med at UND on your way to becoming a psychiatrist. This is a very challenging decision to discuss but first, let me continue describing the scene that unfolded the other night.
Annah, you have read Kerr’s introduction, chapter one, and had just read the first section in Chapter 2, A psychiatric monastery, which after Chapter 1 Her father’s hand, sets the scene where Sabina will enter for treatment. So, let’s start there. The Burgholzil in Zurich Switzerland was soon to become the leading psychiatric hospital in the world under the direction of Eugen Bleuler, who hired CG Jung in 1901. We briefly covered this history and the characters’ names to see them pronounced and then we focused on the key ideas. You identified the first idea as Bleuler’s “revolutionary notion that even the most severe condition could sometimes be arrested if one developed a personal relationship with the patient” (p41). This was followed by Bleuler realizing the “value of reality-oriented tasks” for patients. We read together, that when patients were pressed into helping with an outbreak of typhoid fever, they performed well only returning to their delusions and withdrawn behaviors afterward. Similar incidents brought Bleuler to the conclusion that “the challenge of dealing with reality could be therapeutic in itself” (p42) – oh really now? This led to Bleuler’s contribution of modifying Emil Kraeplein’s revisionary synthesis of mental illness into three basic groups manic-depression, paranoia, and dementia praecox (later to be called schizophrenia), by adding his important finding that with “personal rapport’ it was possible to reverse some of these conditions.
I mentioned to you, Annah, that this discovery by Bleuler is the precursor to The Hawthorne effect (also referred to as the observer effect) which refers to a phenomenon whereby individuals improve or modify an aspect of their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed. The original ‘Hawthorne effect’ study suggested that the novelty of being research subjects and the increased attention from such could lead to temporary increases in workers’ productivity” (Wikipedia). “The term was coined in 1950 by Henry A. Landsberger when analyzing earlier experiments from 1924–32 at The Hawthorne Works (a Western Electric factory outside Chicago). The Hawthorne Works had commissioned a study to see if their workers would become more productive in higher or lower levels of light. The workers’ productivity seemed to improve when changes were made, and slumped when the study ended. It was suggested that the productivity gain occurred as a result of the motivational effect on the workers of the interest being shown in them” (Wikipedia). These Hawthorne Works’ findings are central to U.S. business schools’ management education pedagogy but have significantly been truncated in order to suppress worker self-actualization – another threadbeing follow.
Bleuler’s discoveries were also a precursor to psychiatrist R.D. Laing work and explain what happened when one of his patients is told to just forget your depression – learn to whistle while you walk or work. A full documentary, Did You Used to be R.D. Laing?, is enlightening and particularly interesting is Adam Curtis’s BBC Documentary The Trap section 1/3, Fuck you buddy, where Laing’s impact on American psychiatric care hospitals is presented and which is still playing out in today’s Veterans Administration Hospital disaster. Annah, I am now irritatingly thinking about last month’s removal your healthy appendix to, I think, game the system. The family had a traumatic experience with Fargo’s Sanford Care Hospital and this description of the Fuck You Buddy has now taken on a personal aspect!
This first episode examines the rise of game theory during the Cold War and the way in which its mathematical models of human behaviour filtered into economic thought. The programme traces the development of game theory with particular reference to the work of John Nash, who constructed logically consistent and mathematically verifiable models, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Economics. He invented system games reflecting his beliefs about human behaviour, including one he called “Fuck You Buddy” (later published as “So Long Sucker”), in which the only way to win was to betray your playing partner. These games were internally coherent and worked correctly as long as the players obeyed the ground rules that they should behave selfishly and try to outwit their opponents. As the 1960s became the 1970s, the theories of a Scottish psychiatrist, R.D Laing, and the models of Nash began to converge, producing a widespread popular belief that the state (a surrogate family) was purely and simply a mechanism of social control which calculatedly kept power out of the hands of the public. This episode shows how this belief allowed economic models that left no room for altruism to look credible, and that this underpinned the free-market beliefs of Margaret Thatcher who sincerely believed that by dismantling as much of the British state as possible and placing former national institutions into the hands of public shareholders, a new form of social equilibrium would be reached. This was a return to Nash’s work, in which he proved mathematically that if everyone was pursuing their own interests, a stable, yet perpetually dynamic society could result. But as the mathematically modelled society is run on data—performance targets, quotas, statistics—it is these figures combined with the exaggerated belief that human selfishness will provide stability, that has created “the trap”.
Annah, there are several threads now being tracked. A Beautiful Mind – The Documentary John Nash is very interesting and presents the background of Nash’s life from where The Trap then outlines the predicament society is now trapped in. However, in this bar scene from the movie with Russell Crowe as Nash, the concept of governing dynamics (Nash equilibrium) is addressed in pointing out that Adman Smith’s concept at the center of industrial capitalism, needs re-thinking. Nash in this bar scene suggests:
Adam Smith said Everyone wins when doing what is best for oneself. Incomplete, incomplete okay because the best result will come from everyone in the group doing what is best for himself and the group. “Governing dynamics, Adam Smith was wrong.”
I then asked you, Annah, why Freud’s psychoanalysis and Jung’s analytical psychology are “a most dangerous method?” Of course, this is the title of Kerr’s book and this will reveal itself as story unfolds. However, from the movie we saw together, we can see what is dangerous. In this Youtube clip spanking scene we see portrayed Jung’s concept of synchronicity – the banging bookcase, a major contribution of Sabina that “ture sexuality demands the destruction of the ego” – a confrontation with Freud’s view, and the struggle early psychoanalysis had with the issue of psychological transference between the analyst and the analysand – getting sexually involved with a patient was an ethical issue just then working itself out in the early psychoanalytical community – a most dangerous issue. Does anyone suggest that we are not still in the throws of working through sexuality?
A few days ago, Annah, I went to my banging bookcase, actually when I walk by one I look and always seem to select a book that is needed, and pulled out Robert Romanshyn’s book The wounded researcher: research with soul in mind. I was looking for one of his Ph.D. student dissertations he reported on in a chapter I had not read. There I read an analytical answer to the question of what is dangerous in the section Reflection on this “most dangerous’ process (p194). I immediately read, outlined, and began testing it on several Scherling Family Research Projects being tackled with Soul in mind. To say the least, Annah, I am excited! After all, it is you, your brother, and your cousins that will inherit these projects, with a less dangerous, more conscious method underway. I am looking forward to our next reading/discussion session.
Dialectic Analytical Man 