03.29.08

On Specialization and the Liberal Arts

Posted in Miscellaneous at 12:21 pm

This is a brief presentation I wrote for Duquesne’s Interdisciplinary Symposium. I read it to kick off the conference.

The liberal arts are seven branches of knowledge: the trivium of arts pertaining to the mind– logic, grammar, and rhetoric (or, reckoning, reading, and writing), and the quadrivium of arts pertaining to matter (or, quantity and number)– arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Bachelor of Arts is the degree awarded to those demonstrating proficiency in these arts, Master of Arts to those with greater proficiency. The liberal arts are “liberal” in the sense of free; they constitute the education proper to a free person. They are prerequisite for any number of more particular arts or disciplines since they are tools for any number of other disciplines and because proficiency with them means one has developed her own capabilities in preparation for all sorts of tasks. Though these arts are foundational to our educations and historically to our educational programs and institutions, the liberal arts have stopped being central to our educations– even our so-called liberal arts educations. Rather, much of the liberal arts are left by the wayside while what we study becomes more specialized. No one expects that a “liberal arts” education will involve arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Similarly, those in the so-called “hard sciences” may regard studies derived from the trivium as mere intellectual luxuries. The trivium and quadrivium have been pulled apart and are then subdivided even farther into specific disciplines.

Here I’ll say a little about the problems that come with the increase of academic specialization, and how this process breaks up the whole formed by the liberal arts. I’ll also discuss how interdisciplinary studies help to rebuild the liberal arts and show that the trivium is not trivial, but that it provides a basis for original ideas. In other words, interdisciplinary studies do not break boundaries of “traditionally defined disciplines,” but rather reveal that these boundaries broke up a prior unity.

***

The development of academic specialties mirrors, and sometimes overlaps with, the development of jobs– not only of particular jobs, but of the idea of a “job” at all. Beginning in the fifteenth century, “there is a steady progress of fragmentation of the stages of work” (McLuhan, p. 20). These stages of work are mechanized– a certain set of rules govern them, and the tasks of the job are specific. The person carrying out the job becomes more and more of a specialist; eventually she is an “expert” at her particular task. She is a part of a system (as Pink Floyd puts it, a “brick in the wall”). David Schwartz references this process when he describes his experience as a psychologist attempting to help those who have been institutionalized or labeled developmentally disabled. He explains that professionals each have “a box in the organization chart” (p. 21) in which they are forced to stay and relate in a prescribed role with particular tasks as well as a particular way of doing them. They get in trouble when they stray from their role since this inevitably means invading someone else’s box in the organizational chart. So, she fits herself to the task. As our technology develops the capability to do more and as we become more specialized in our tasks (or in a sense, to do less), we have to consider the possibility of some strange results. Marshall McLuhan presents these possible results in the form of a joke: “’Come into my parlor,’ says the computer to the specialist.” The secret is, human beings are not very good specialists (not like computers), and the more precise we become, the less suited we are to our tasks. We don’t fit into boxes on organizational charts.

Another approach to work, thought, academia, and living– one represented by interdisciplinary studies and which existed outside of gradual developments in specialization– is to fit one’s task to oneself. Think, for example, of Blaise Pascal, whose activities ranged from composing philosophical and theological writings to making contributions to the geometry of conic sections to inventing a calculator. Or perhaps think of Gottfried Leibniz, an inventor of calculus, a theory of motion, and a series of metaphysical ideas; or Goethe, whose many activities made him a playwright, poet, and theorist on colors and plant morphology. What is truly amazing about these thinkers and the many like them is not the breadth of ideas into which they delved– that’s missing the point. Rather, what is amazing is the way their ideas fit together into a whole, and they inadvertently reveal that these “disciplines” are not so disparate, at all. Each of these thinkers has a way to see the world. They don’t think of their activities as belonging to different disciplines per se– rather, their various ideas have been divided their views up into categories from without. To see what I mean, read Pascal’s Pensees while thinking of his interest in mathematics (many of the pensees have an intricate mathematical structure– it’s like reading a proof), or Leibniz’s calculus while keeping his “monadology” in mind. It is not only in the minds of individual thinkers that these various aspects of thinking about the world come together.

One might also think of the whole formed by Euclid’s geometry books and Plato’s dialogues: Euclid reveals the structure of the world and making it “mathematical” (from ancient Greek “mathema,” or learnable) by reconstructing the world in steps. Plato’s dialogues discover forms, such as the Good, the Just, and the Beautiful, and through steps in argument which make them it knowable. Another example is Isaac Newton’s discovery that the same natural laws that govern the planets govern the earth, alongside Kant’s assertion that there is a single moral law which applies to all of humanity. Examples like these reveal that ideas are better thought of as aspects of a whole than as truly separate disciplines. Specialization is an attempt to know more by going deeply into a piece of the whole, but at some point these specialties or disciplines become farther from one another until we forget they make up a whole or until they truly no longer fit together and there isn’t a possibility for dialogue between specialties. Why is it that humanities students think it doesn’t matter whether or not they know any mathematics?

Interdisciplinary studies, then, are not so much about opening up paths between different disciplines but removing barriers between them. The interdisciplinarian develops abilities which transcend a particular discipline. She finds common strands among disciplines rather than becoming a jack of all trades. She develops a unique and informed perspective, as only a human being can do. This is the aim of a liberal arts education; it is what a person educated in the liberal arts should be able to do.

References

Joseph, Mariam. (2002). The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books.

“Liberal Arts.” From Encyclopedia Britannica Concise. Retrieved 2pm 2/12/2008. http://concise.britannica.com/ebc/article-9370154/liberal-arts

McLuhan, Marshall & Fiore, Quentin. (1967). The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam Books.

Schwartz, David. (1997). Who Cares?: Rediscovering Community. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Snow, C.P. (1959). The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge University Press.

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11.02.07

On Goal-Setting

Posted in Miscellaneous at 9:16 pm

On 43 things goals (written for 43 Things now defunct”ideas” page which invited suggestions from users on how to improve the site– I wrote this entry for the most popular idea on the page: “Create a hierarchy”).

1) On goals contained by other goals: Some of the goals one may set are contained by other goals. For example, if I “feel better,” I may also “stop procrastinating” and then I might “learn German” and “find something to do next year.” Perhaps a hierarchy of goals might solve this problem. The ability to order goals implies a hierarchy of importance, but not an order of achievement. Perhaps something like freemind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) might be a solution, since it would indicate which goals are contained by other goals. Tagging is sort of like this– perhaps it could be more explicitely so if there were tags like “meta-goal, primary goal, secondary goal, hopes, plans.”

2) On the appropriateness and achievability of goals: Not surprisingly (and not altogether wrongly), 43 Things presumes that people work like computers. If we program ourselves correctly, any goal may be met. This is the cognitive/behavioral model of psychology– if your life isn’t going the way you’d like, learn, practice, and habituate yourself to do better. This makes me think that only goals that can be achieved by working at the behavioral level should be allowed on 43 Things. If I want to “feel better,” and I think I can do it through practice, it’s a good goal. If, however, it’s a problem that doesn’t lend itself to a particular method, and I feel bad not because of the way I’m acting (and acting differently wouldn’t make me feel better, or I may not be able to act differenlty because of feeling bad) but more because of deep, inner conflicts involving my self-concept, early childhood impressions, etc., it means that A) this is not one goal (it might be split into various behavioral goals like “get therapy,” “sleep more”, etc.) and B) that it may not be solvable through behavior modification alone. Perhaps after achieving other goals I might find that I feel better, but I can’t simply “feel better” the way I can “learn German” or “visit Chicago.” This is probably why “stop procrastinating” is such a popular goal– it is the meta-goal, what it means is “figure out how to set achievable goals and achieve them” or simply, “achieve my goals.” Setting a time-limit to goals might help this. It will encourage people to set goals that can be achieved by acting differently according to a plan. Not being able to set infinitely many goals is a step in this direction– you must achieve something before you can add another thing to your list. To reiterate my point: all goals on 43 Things ought to be solvable directly by behavior modification as long as there is no built-in hierarchy, and one should be able to write an entry with a plan to achieve the goal. “Crochet better” is a pretty good goal, because I know exactly what I have to do to achieve it, and it’s more or less one thing. Even that, though, might be divided into “sign up for crochet class,” “buy some yarn for crocheting,” “buy a book of crochet projects,” etc. This makes 43 Things more of a “to-do” list than a set of hopes and dreams, and it would contain only lists of goals one can achieve by one’s own will. Then again, I understand the desire to list what one hopes for, and that all the tiny behavioral goals are for the sake of these greater ends. Some of those ends aren’t even goals– fall in love, for example. That’s an event that isn’t entirely dependent on one’s own will (at least not directly– although one is more likely to fall in love when one is happy, and more likely to be happy when one is secure, and more likely to be secure when one is employed, etc.– so set the goal to get a job and have a place to live on your own if your goal is love). If your goal is to “be in love,” or “have someone fall in love with me,” then adding it to your list won’t help you get it done (unless, you know, you meet some hottie on 43 Things who wants to help.) It seems that the best solution is a hierarchy.

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08.28.07

What I Do as a Psychotherapist

Posted in Psychology at 12:35 am

I am writing this entry in preparation for my clinical work in my second year of graduate school in clinical psychology, having completed around seventy hours of work with individual clients and some as yet uncalculated sum of hours of supervision, training, and clinical writing. My program provides a background in the philosophical and theoretical background of psychology, particularly the existential-phenomenological and psychodynamic traditions; qualitative research; and clinical practice. These three pillars more or less relate to one another, and it is, of course, up to the individual to find a golden thread. One of the important connections to make is between how one acts as a therapist and what one believes about the nature of man and the good life. (One is eventually asked to lay this down officially as part of the comprehensive examinations, in the clinical position paper.) This is not the place that I will go deeply into what I believe about what we are or ought to be, nor will I even discuss whether therapy is possible. This paper will simply give a description of what I find myself doing in therapy sessions, and perhaps an attempt at explanation of why I do these things.

I will discuss what I tend to notice and respond to when I am in the position of the psychotherapist, what I recoil from, what I feel during sessions in general, and my evolving “theory of therapy.” I’m not sure whether I fit into a certain school– I am probably closer to the humanistic therapies than anything else, although I feel I regard patients with a psychoanalytic eye. By that, I mean that I see many parts of an individual hidden from that individual, and many motives that are not clear to the person enacting them. There is an unconscious force at work. On the other hand, the unconscious is not hidden at all, expressing itself in every gesture, in the person’s comportment toward every situation. It is hidden on the surface. Anyway, theories of psychology should arise from clinical practice, so here is what I tend to do and to notice:

When I first talk with a new patient, and for our first sessions (sometimes for a while), I find myself listening for ways that the person “makes sense.” For example, I had a patient who felt unconfident in making decisions for herself. She related a few times when she had attempted to make her own decisions and encountered negative consequences from others, primarily the loss of support. Thus, her anxiety surrounding making more decisions makes sense. Her difficulty did not arise from nowhere– it is situated. This is also a way I establish rapport with my patient. She sees that I am attending to her closely and that I don’t think she’s “crazy,” but that what she’s doing somehow “makes sense.”

Related to this, I try to get a sense of my patient’s world. What is her experience like? What are some essential components of her life? I learn this by looking for patterns. I look/ listen not only for patterns in events she relates, explicit or oblique (here is a loose example of what I mean: explicitly, she might date the same “type” of man, more obliquely, she may date men who are in some way like her father), but for patterns in words and phrases she uses, in her body language, or in other styles she uses. I had one patient who often said “I’m done with that/ them,” but then would continue on in the situation/ with the person nonetheless.

Another way I try to get a sense of my patient’s world, at a more advanced level, is to discover ways that the pattens manifest themselves. I try to look at the therapeutic situation, and more the assessment session, as a microcosm. The patient’s world will be recreated in the therapy room. How she deals with some situations will reproduce itself in the assessment. The patient has a particular world, this world is structured in a particular way, and this structure will reproduce itself on micro- and macro- levels.

I also tend to remember a lot. I remember general and particular things my patient tells me, including words and phrases she uses often. I remember events in her life, including former challenges and problems. I sometimes remember exemplary events– “the time the worst thing happened,” or “the time what you were afraid would happen did not happen,” and so on. In this way, I treat therapy sessions as somewhat continuous. What the patient brought up three sessions ago may relate to what she brought up in this session. I often point out connections– “that sounds like the situation from your dream” or “it seems like you experienced disappointment about not getting the job in the same way you experienced it when you didn’t win the game” and so on. Sometimes this forms a narrative or whole that was not present before, and helps with “making sense.” Sometimes it helps the patient feel understood. Sometimes it helps to consider events in light of other events. Overall, doing this ends up helping the person to notice patterns, and perhaps to observe these pattens in action.

I try to point out ways that the structure of the patient’s world is reproduced in the therapeutic situation (I think this may legitimately be called transference). The first time I do this might be in the assessment session. For example, if the patient has an angry outburst when she is unable to put together a WAIS block design, and has come in to therapy concerned about a possible break-up with a partner due to her angry outbursts, this would be an opportune moment to observe and discuss what happens in these moments. Other opportunities may come up in therapy sessions, such as how a patient reacts to the therapy room, contingencies like noises outside or a lack of air conditioning, or for a particularly dramatic example that happened to one of my patients, finding her ex in the waiting room. I also sometimes point out a patient’s reactions to me– how she seems to feel about me, what our relationship is like– but I find this more difficult, both because it’s intimidating, especially when a patient is angry or disappointed with me, and because I don’t want the patient to feel unsafe or invaded. This last move requires a great deal of trust and rapport.

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08.13.07

Observations from Psychotherapy on How Using Social Software Influences How We Structure Our Worlds

Posted in Psychology, Social Software at 12:33 am

Through a surge of new acquaintances who quickly dispersed to their separate locations across the continent (colleagues from a brief summer job in New York), I’ve been pulled back, hard, into the Facebook. I want desperately to keep in contact with these wonderful people, and this is the way I know how. (Letters? Too slow– and who writes letters? Phone calls? Too personal– and what if the sentiment wears off? And what if I’m there for one of social softwares’ less noble uses, such as observing/ spying on my new friends and trying to learn about their other identities/ who they are in their real lives?). Anyway, one thing leads to another (as they say), and now I’m one hell of a participant-observer.

Social software keeps coming up in my clinical work. It appears in two major ways: 1) as an extension of my client’s social life, i.e., an ex-boyfriend made a change on his profile intended to publicly humiliate her, and 2) as a manifestation of neurosis or self-perception. What I mean by those rather vague expressions may be illustrated by a client who is perpetually dissatisfied with what his social software profile expresses. It is either too honest and revelatory of his faults, or conceals too much, making the imagined audience (people with whom he might end up becoming romantically or sexually involved) suspicious. He is displeased with his digital body, as he is with his “real life” expressions of identity and his physical presence. Nothing outward seems pleasing.

I was disappointed at first when I concluded that there’s nothing new under the sun– that more or less, the internet recapitulates what’s out here. Sure, there’s no need to express class/ race/ age/ gender/ whatever on the internet, and you can choose not to state those things, purposefully deceive or get around giving a straightforward answer about your categories, or perhaps somewhere out there create an identity that doesn’t rely on these categories at all (yes, this is why I’m interested in the furries); BUT for the most part people get as close as they can to making a digital representation of what they are out here, consciously or no. I realize, though, that the representation itself is quite interesting and can be a great metaphor for how one views oneself/ wants to be viewed by others. The second client I mentioned above gave me a great image for his neurosis when he described changing his profile a few times a day. What an incredible resource for a psychotherapist.

There is one real change I’ve noticed that follows the widespread use of social software. A serious social-software user has a different sort of lifestyle than a person who does not participate. This makes knowing about social software not just a fun bonus or a resource for a therapist, but an essential piece of knowledge if she is working with the youth (anyone in the youth culture) and is to understand his world. I’m a little confused about the phenomenon I’m about to describe, as I think a lot of people who have noticed this phenomenon are, as indicated by articles I’ve read about how damn narcissistic the youth are these days. Social software promotes living a public, externalized life. Facebook is the worst at this– I still hate the newsfeed, which is a stream of gossip and an implicit privacy invasion (for more elaboration on how the newsfeed invades privacy see danah boyd, here: http://www.danah.org/papers/FacebookAndPrivacy.html). What goes on the internet– one one’s profile, blog, etc.– is subject to an audience. We get used to acting for an audience and displaying ourselves. Profile pages are advertisements for ourselves, even when we’re not using the network for dating or getting to know students at the college we want to attend (how people used the Facebook back in the day before everyone was allowed on, so I’ve heard).

Is this a cultural change or an opportunity for narcissists/ a promotion of the pathology known as narcissism? I was creeped out earlier this year by a friend who had this whole relationship online– his partner lived in the same town, and yet it still seemed that most of their relationship happened on Facebook. I knew their every move through heart/ broken heart symbols, wall posts, and the like. Facebook became the primary way he communicated what was up with them, meaning that something would be announced on the internet, and the next day people would ask him how he was doing. I thought there was an implicit contract where a piece of information spread through “real life” social channels and then one’s profile was made to match– the representation follows the actual. For him, the representation was the actual. This odd shallowness is social software narcissism. Clearly, it still creeps me out a little, and I like to think I’m beyond it (see my earlier post called “pending,” referring to the then-pending deletion of my facebook profile).

On the other hand, the semi-anonymous audience of one’s peers may be the great contribution of social software. MySpace presents you with a bunch of kids your age who you know in “real life” to various degrees, and definitely does not include your mom. What better place to experiment with a developing identity? What safer place to out yourself, as whatever you can’t be in high school? How awesome is it that so many people can be impressed by my taste in books and film, and that people I barely know can write congratulatory notes on my “wall” when I get my M.A.? I feel like I’m tapped directly into the zeitgeist, updated to the minute. I wonder, though, whether this is a good way to engage with others, as a gigantic mirror. Back to the old question of whether the internet marks an evolution of how humans live and communicate, or whether it just gives us a way to indulge ourselves that we couldn’t before.

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02.26.07

A Teleological Exploration of Anorexia Nervosa

Posted in Psychology at 9:58 pm

This is a “weekly reflection” paper written for my psychopathology class.

What is the experience of an anorexic person? In the case of anorexia, as with other disruptions and disorders, I find this a more interesting and precise question than asking about the origin of the disorder and more useful for transforming it. How is it that the anorectic perceives the world (what sort of a subject is she, and what sort of an objectivity does the world have), and as an extension from this question — as we often ask in class — what is it that she is trying to accomplish/ what is the telos of her disorder?

To get closer to this question, I have been watching video diaries and “thinspiration”¹ video clips on youtube.com put together by young anorexic women who label themselves “pro-ana.” Their videos have an idealistic, cold, militant tone. Members of the community leave comments on one another’s productions, encouraging one another to keep up the hard work. They speak aggressively about outsiders and “posers” — those who do not meet the criteria for anorexia. I see evidence of the stubbornness Gabbard and Malan describe — the difficulty of establishing and maintaining a therapeutic relationship, her unwillingness to begin to speak, hiding suicidal wishes, etc. They seem to mistrust outsiders and speak constantly of others’ misunderstanding or weakness as shown by their inability to be anorexic themselves. The young women in this community typically have a great deal of knowledge about the diagnostic criteria for eating disorders (which they use to debunk posers) and the medical risks, which are taken as the price one must be willing to pay rather than as deterrents. Accepting these risks is a sign of one’s seriousness. To these anorectics, as if they were spokespeople for the anti-psychiatry movement, anorexia is a lifestyle choice and not a disease equivalent to a cancer on the soul in terms of the freedom and ownership involved for the sufferer. Having anorexia, or rather, being anorexic, is a source of pride and strength.

I sympathize and even agree with them to some extent (indeed, to the same extent that I agree with anti-psychiatry). It does not seem that one can ever experience mental illness as one experiences cancer — as we have discussed, we make meaning from our mental lives, the experience is simply not equivalent, even if a mental illness is similar causally to cancer as a product of biology/ genetics or the environment. As such, this manner of being in the world is worth understanding. (This is another reason why etiology does not interest me nearly so much as, and sometimes even seems irrelevant in light of, a subject’s interpretation of her experience.) However, there seems to be at least one essential misunderstanding at the core of anorexia and simply leaving it unresolved does the anorexic person a disservice and makes it clear that her disease is not so much a matter of choice as a conclusion based on faulty premises.

In the case of eating disorders, as with most (if not all) of the disorders we have discussed in class thus far, there seems to be some kind of a split involved. One part of the patient is not communicating with another part which becomes an unknown influence, one bit of ego is split off and pitted against another bit, or a process has started that was not carried out, leaving part of the patient’s soul lingering in the past, in all cases presenting an un-integrated human being/ soul. An anorectic seems to live under a similar split, and it seems key to bring this split to her conscious attention for her to see that anorexia is not as much a matter of choice or control as she thought and thus paradoxically to stop choosing anorexia.

I am drawn to the “pro-ana” community as a source of understanding anorexia because they display a different side of anorexia than the one I typically hear described by observers (though they may not be representative of all eating-disordered persons). Szekely and DeFazio discuss how most accounts of anorexia “fall into either psychological or sociological reductionism,” (pg. 374) simplifying or distorting the situation. Observers sometimes paint the anorectic as someone who is an utterly passive victim of her society damned to attempt to achieve impossible beauty standards (really, anorexics reach beyond these standards, making a mockery of American ideals). From her side, the anorectic is not nearly so weak — in fact, she is powerful, strong, superior, engaged in a mission few dare to undertake (as I will discuss shortly, this seems to be based on a bad understanding, though this does not seem to mean that anorexic women are passive or weak). Observers also seem to make anorexia into a perceptual disturbance — the anorectic “thinks she is fat” and even “sees herself as fat.” The image here is an emaciated woman looking at an obese reflection in the mirror, as in Seligman’s interpretation of her patient’s distorted self-portrait.

Based on the evidence I have gathered from internet field observations of “pro-ana” young women, they are highly sensitive and aware of how they look and place an enormous amount of significance on it, but do not seem to misperceive their appearances. As one of the anorexic women in Lintott’s article describes it, bony knuckles are a sign of strength. It seems that the anorectic’s body is magnified or distorted in terms of significance, but not that the body is literally seen as fat. This is to simplify the anorectic’s perception.

The misunderstanding for the anorexic person, rather, seems to be based on the divide between the visual/ objective/ symbol-laden body and the felt/ subjective/ personal body. While I find Boss’ essentialism and rigidity in terms of what is normal/ right/ good as disturbing here as I have found it in his other writings, the case histories I read for this week helped me sort out the distinction between the specular body and the felt body, and what seems to differentiate eating disorders from psychosomatic disturbances. Psychosomatic symptoms are displaced from the soul to the body, revealing that the boundary between them is permeable if present at all. “How else could the intestines of our patient have been so completely in accord with her attitude or her world-relationship…?” (Boss, 152). These are disorders of the felt body, the body that is me. Anorexia seems to be a disease of the specular body, or the body that is other — indeed, the disease may be that subject-body is replaced by the object-body.

While some of the readings point to this conclusion in terms of a young girl who does not differentiate into a true subject because her mother is too close to her (superficially, this seems to be the explanation for just about every disorder we’ve studied so far!), Lintott’s Sublime Hunger provided the most help in my teleological examination of anorexia. The body is the source of disease because the appearance of the body is highly important in our culture; it is a carrier of symbols, so overdetermined that one may wish to leave it behind (this is part of my support for internet communication, as I discussed in my last reflection — it actually provides the opportunity for us to abandon or re-create our specular bodies, by which others impugn us with stereotyped identities, so that we might communicate more authentically, for instance, without limitations others impose on our race or gender). As Lintott describes it, anorectics work on their objective bodies. They transcend their bodies and work on them from beyond, disconnected from them and living in a transcendental Kantian realm. The moral rigidity, alexithymia, and perfectionism all point to a beyond-human existence in which the body is “other.”

An eating disorder is purposiveness without purpose: a way of being that is blind to its true telos. As Lintott says in reference to the concept of the sublime from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, “The sublime is not meant to be a way of life” (pg. 6). Forever reveling in the divine disrupts (eventually ends) being. I once asked a friend who had just written his undergraduate thesis on that book what stopped people from staring transfixed at beautiful objects, and he said, “they get hungry.” In other words, earthly needs take over, the body in its mortal/ felt/ subjective sphere commands attention. The telos of an eating disorder seems to be, as Lintott states, “complete perfection — total domination of will over matter” (pg. 6). The impossibility of this telos is the blindness of an eating disorder and the logical error I referenced above. As one of the anorexic women in Lintott’s article states, “’I just can’t win for losing.’” Here is a moment of identification: in a way that she was not before, this woman is her body. Felt body comes to life. She sees that “to use an eating disorder to perpetuate the feeling of the sublime is to foreclose on the future possibility of that feeling” (pg. 6) and “strength and freedom cannot be sustained in a body too frail to hold itself up” (pg. 8). This identification and integration is the beginning of healing.

1. These show images of very thin women and words of encouragement to support one in her quest to “stay the course” of anorexia. Statements about what one may accomplish by being thin — popularity, power, being a “symbol of perfection” — accompany the images. [back]

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01.15.07

pending

Posted in Social Software at 12:51 am

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12.21.06

I want, I want, I want!

Posted in Psychology at 4:24 pm

There is too much to want!

My professor told me a story about her son when he was two years old.* They were in the toy aisle, and he picked out a toy, saying “I want it.” She refused and calmly put it back. He repeated this with another toy. Each refusal led him to pick a new toy, in greater frenzy until he began running through the aisles yelling “I want, I want, I want!” before she caught him and he began sobbing. Her interpretation is that the toy aisle, plus her repeated refusal or foreclosure of particular toys/ possibilities, suggested so many possibilities—so much potential for future action—that there was no one choice. She says “He felt overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities of all he could want.” Here is a model for Heideggerian resoluteness that presents the mammoth nature of this task; one must choose in the face of infinite possibility, and to the annihilation of all other possibility. Eva’s son was awash in the future possible, transforming him into desire without an object.

My God, how I don’t want to foreclose! (How I want to live forever!) To the point that on occasion I wish I hadn’t been put in a position to choose at all—the fearful neurotic position, as Otto Rank** describes it, “A neurotic is one who refuses the loan of life in order to avoid the debt of death.” I have the freedom to be anything (a god), fewer bars surround me than ever historically—in the world’s history and my own history. My activity so far, generally, has been about opening more possibilities. Though these shut down others (had a disturbing conversation with Mr. Sinnett early in my freshman year on the topic!), none has felt conclusive. I want to do everything, in lieu of that, the best thing… when that isn’t available, I am subject to the madness of decision, and often resign to a “tentative existence,” equivalent to refusing the loan of life, and simply going forth, zombie-like.

(Do you see why existential psychology?)

*Dr. Eva-Maria Simms, in Phenomenology of Human Development at Duquesne University, fall 2006 semester, and in her paper “Because We are the Upsurge of Time: Toward a Genetic Phenomenology of Lived Time”

** Will Therapy, p. 19 See more progress on: read everything (from 43 Things)

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11.22.06

On Two Experiences of Looking

Posted in Psychology at 5:16 pm

This post first appeared on my St. John’s alumni blog on 10/11/2006. It describes an early encounter with phenomenological thought here in the clinical psychology program at Duquesne. Since I began the program a few months ago, I’ve been trying to reconcile the kind of thinking that goes on here with what goes on at St. John’s. I’ve been meeting it with variations of ambivalence and delight. Here’s a taste:

Is anyone familiar with the history of how Erwin Straus’ “Upright Posture” ended up in our freshman lab manuals? I’m reading this paper again next week in my Phenomenology of Human Development class. There are a lot of connections between this class, which in part aims to teach phenomenological observation (teach our vision to unfold all the meanings in an appearance, to “really look!”), and freshman lab. Drawing flowers and magnolia trees is certainly an exercise in retraining vision, with the message that the first step in building a science or making the world comprehensible is perception. In my first lab class, Mr. Sinnett dropped a book in the middle of the lab table and said, “What do you see?” In our bewilderment, what recourse did we have but honest looking, and to take note of the meanings, the schemas we employed, and to discard them (or at least, put them in parentheses)? Especially when answers like, “I see that the book is on the table,” yielded responses like, “What do you mean by ‘on’?”

This is like and unlike the experience and lesson of my first day of Phenomenology class. Dr. Eva-Maria Simms put a rock in my hand and said, “Tell me about the rock.” Meanings unfolded, associations, memories, perceptions, desires and actions. A few of us wanted to hold onto the rock, or throw it, or pass it between our hands slowly. I put the rock on the desk in front of me and revealed my inclination to observe the world from a reasonable distance and with a pen in my hand before testing it’s weight, size, shape. The rock was ripe. It produced infinite associations– it belonged to as many worlds as we could name.

I’ve been trying to articulate the differences between these two instances of looking. The rock observation was all about what was happening between me and the rock. It was certainly a more romantic exercise. I was much bigger in that room, and as our looking went on, the space between the observers and the observed diminished. Eventually we were discussing co-existentiality, the ways in which we reached toward or “intended” the rock. We discussed embodiment, how being in a body changed how we saw the rock– we were intensely present in all our details, the phenomenon was happening in the (perhaps illusory) space between us. It was impure, frustrating in its fluidity, inconclusive/ unconcludable, and admitted felt silly or childlike. This exercise was, in fact, partly intended as an introduction to the experiential world of the infant and young child…

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Aphorism

Posted in Philosophy at 5:05 pm

Rare is the life that is not a quiet tragedy.

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05.09.06

Reading Habits.

Posted in Philosophy, Psychology at 10:17 pm

Witness this phenomenon in my reading habits: While reading one book (in this case, Philip Rieff’s “The Triumph of the Therapeutic”), it occurs to me that it would be advantageous to my understanding and ability to work intellectually with this book to have read some other book (in this case, Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents,” referenced frequently in Triumph of the Therapeutic, and probably on Rieff’s mind throughout). Thus, I will put reading the first book on hold, and begin the other book. This book marks the place of the first book, since when I finish it, I will return to the first book where I left off.

Since no better name comes to mind, I’ve deemed this the book taco.

Now, book tacos are but the visible endpoints of a much greater construction. I could have a few book tacos going at once on various topics; one taco perhaps wedged in another taco, or more than one book wedged into another book at different points. In fact, that Rieff book (of the psychology and/or psychology+culture taco) is “tacoed” (coin!) in Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex,” which I began reading independently of the other books as part of a separate topic, on feminism. When I got to chapter two in The Second Sex, however, the topics merged, since that chapter is about psychoanalysis. I realized that it may be preferable to complete my psychology book taco before going on to further my readings on feminism. You see the emerging effect—initial books will get further and further away, and primary information will continue to build.

Many items, visible and invisible, books and information, online articles, films, certain discussions I’ve had, even plans and future events are tacoed in such a manner. Some objects encountered in the past are half-digested: they await their proper context. AllConsuming.net helps me keep track. I can list books (and other media—hence the “all consuming”) I’m “consuming,” have consumed, or intend to consume. I can name the order in which I intend to consume them, and tag them with their topic/ taco title. It’s a rudimentary brain organizer, allowing better organization than just making physical tacos can (for practical purposes—you know, the books fall out once you go so far). But it can only do so much, as I’ll explain below.

The building of book tacos tends to follow some trends. The newer books get moved backwards, and the older books that supported them move closer (the inside of the taco). I’ve been lead back to Plato more than a few times. Specific information gets further away, and more abstract information gets closer. I had to pause to consider that one for a moment, but it makes sense—you’re studying a specific topic, find that the specificity is better understood from a broader frame of reference, and find the more abstract information that surrounds the specific before you return to it. Information becomes a means to greater information. Everything is considered in context.

There’s also a symbolic connection. Looking at information this way makes it possible ask someone, “What is your taco shell?,” which means, “What is that for which you aim; what is your sense of the last thing?” or even, “In what context are you considering everything else?”

This mode of operation creates a sense of urgency. The builder clambers to get to the outside, and to consume the new item before the one that inspired its consumption fades from mind (especially with regard to the connection it has to the new item, or why it inspired the consumption of the new item in the first place). In a way, each new book is less and less significant. They are all efforts to get to the outside and stand in the way of reaching that furthest information, the one toward which they build.

I must admit, this can be a pretty miserable state—the distance from the truth, the urgency/ anxiety, the uneasiness, and the perpetual state of inconclusiveness are tiring, and the journey takes increasing amounts of work. The inability to keep up with it all and the fading connections that have not been transferred to long-term memory can give one the sense of having poor memory (Method will attest), or not feeling quite in touch with things, or all there. One has a lot of tentative information in one’s head—a lot of remembering context, or knowing something in such a way that it can be readjusted. External storage systems (e.g., AllConsuming, your PDA, the huge mind map on your bedroom wall [though I’m thinking more about that last one], etc.) can only help so much, because this information has to be held in mind to some extent because it’s so fluid. It can’t be filed anywhere permanent because it awaits its ultimate place in the developing system, i.e., it only has a true place once the item that contains it has a place, and on upward to that taco shell that grants meaning to the rest of it all.

I was surprised when I found out that a lot of philosophy works that way, more as time goes on. Instead of going further, the philosopher claims that the one he refutes has found his beginning in an appearance, mistaking it for the ground, the true beginning. His biases have caused him to make a false attempt and his entire investigation is crippled. The refuting philosopher takes a big step back and builds from his true(r) beginning. The tendency, as I’ve noted, goes from the specific to the general, from the particular to the abstract, and from the contemporary to the prior shaping events. In short, away from what is most desirable and useful.

But to get to those better things, to return to the here and now where we are most powerful and present and all the information is more significant, we have to navigate through the rest. There are some shortcuts. Certain items can be eliminated due to insignificance (There’s a margin of error here, of course. Some things can be judged irrelevant pretty accurately, others might just barely lose out, and you can’t really be certain about those.) Some are adequately contained in other items and don’t really need to be tacoed in. Some things can be taken in fast or in a condensed form. Organizational tools make for the most efficient order of consumption, and allow one to make a plan. It’s always better to do these things in order—makes for less loose, floating bits of unattached information, if things can be filed as you go into bigger chunks of unattached information. Maybe there’s some way to defrag, if you will.

I think that sometimes the frustration and buildup can become so much that people go crazy or just stop. And stopping does clear the air—one has to take a meditative moment to remember the outermost layer, what one is aiming for. (Going crazy means something like falling out of the system altogether; leaping totally out of any context to be free of it.) Then again, another strategy is simply not to aim. Then each piece of information takes on its own significance; in a way, that individual has reversed his book taco, since each book leads him not away from the first book, but to new ground. Indeed, this is the construction of the St. John’s program—beginning at the beginning (until you get impatient and start aiming, or shaping up to aim… when the outermost layer becomes political philosophy, say, and everything is accepted or dismissed, and interpreted, based on that context). Working this way seems to require a guide, though, to tell you where to go next. Otherwise clueless floundering/ library surfing is all you’ve got.

One common solution is to choose a stopping point. Find an ultimate context that isn’t too broad—specialize. The temptation to stop short has a formidable opponent in the desire to know everything, but that in turn has an even more formidable opponent in death. Everyone hits this point sometime, it might be wise to choose it so as to gain some compromised satisfaction. Again, early retirement is the accusation the new philosopher makes of the old.

I’ve also seen a response to the whole system taken as a blur. An insight into the universe precedes. All that stuff looks unmanageable, unbearable, a vast mystery that is too much for an individual (so judges that individual). Taken in all at once, it’s terrifying and amazing. He lives in wonder—a blur, perhaps momentarily latching onto certain points of entry, and then giving up again. A tedious person; though he may possess true wonder, most of his output consists of description or regurgitation without synthesis, and exclamations akin to “Fascinating!” The more honest ones may develop a wide-eyed, mystical attitude about the incomprehensibility of the universe and radiate unsubstantiated appreciation. (Note to self: This can’t be the same as phenomenology, can it? See below.) At best, endearing and childlike, at worst, cynical and blasé.

Now, this is a curiosity: what about the one who claims this fluidity as a principle, the one who rejects an ultimate context, whose information extends to infinity? The one who, even when given immortality, would not be able to satisfy his ends? The taco shell is contextlessness. Whoa. More later.

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