Chaos breeds Conflict

From 2007 for a few years we thought about and focused on something we called ‘swirls’ and it became part of a dark area, that lasted for a long time. Swirls was our name for what we thought of as a particular ubiquitous and extremely unpleasant, painful mental state. We spent a long time trying to define and explore phenomenologically this state: I feel helpless I feel helpless and worthless isolated and overwhe­lmed by something … in despair and afraid … in a dark space devoid of hope… Swirls is a metaphor Swirls is a metaphor to describe the painful experience of feeling sucked into an empty space, a vortex, where initiative and energy are drained away, replaced by helplessness and despair, panic and anxiety.  When someone is in a swirl, that particular space constitutes their environment. What we were trying to do was to get inside the pain, we were attempting to see it, to describe it from the inside. The swirl...

We thought it would be useful, well important, for us to review our blogosphere. We have been blogging for a long time and have changed the names of blogs, moved to different sites, changed our minds and no doubt have lost the few readers we had. This is not so much where next as where have we come from and are there useful links that exist from blog to blog, subject to subject. So, I am going to try to do this chronologically. In 2005 and 2006 we thought about and worked on an online therapy site. We called it Reflective Psychotherapy Online (RPO) but I notice that the image on the Internet Archive WaybackMachine has the heading as follows: The site never went public, for two reasons. At about this time, 2006-7 there were lots of online counselling sites, and they too ceased to exist because of Skype. The increasing reach of Skype made such sites as ours redundant. Increasingly therapists who wanted to be in contact with people who lived in another town or country could easily use ...

.....or how do fantasies fill the void? And how do these fantasies function as distractions? We have been trying to make sense of our social and political context for a long time. We are both psychotherapists who invariably return to the problem we have in trying to think about and think through something that invariably seems to resist our paltry efforts. Trump and all that the name now represents, has amplified this resistance to thinking. So we go round in circles and in so doing forget our original starting point. IN which case the image is not of a circle but a spiral or some such so as we move we end up somewhere that seems a long way from our starting point. The other day I wanted to name this sense of resolute difficulty and resistance to any conclusion. I thought of a void. That somewhere in our social imagining there seemed to be a void that also could be posited as something, symbolically, that seemed to reside in our democratic society. And now I remember the French polit...

For the last few months all discussions between Ron and Ken have not surprisingly centred on Trump. Yesterday our conversation moved in a slightly different direction. Is chaos the absence of a pattern? Or is chaos the absence of an observed pattern? For some Trump represents chaos, but what if the chaos is intentional? In which case chaos here hides something. What it has to hide is a pattern. That's to say something has been thought out here, not just on the surface but, so to speak, underneath as well. So we intend to seek the pattern(s) in what appears to be our chaotic world, at the moment, symbolised by Trump. If we consider Trump as not just a man-child fool; if we consider that he like anyone else is controlled by both his unconscious and outside forces then we can begin to look for connections. If we look at what he does rather than ponder what he says then a pattern emerges. We can begin to join the many dots. To begin with, what he has said can be seen as a distractio...

Contemporary philosophy of mind is centrally concerned with the viability of the reductionist approach so prevalent in present-day psychiatry and neuroscience. The philosopher Thomas Nagel has contextualized this trend. In his writing, Thomas Nagel defends the claim—found in classical psychoanalytic theory—that while the human mind is tied to the physical brain, there is something irreducibly perspectival and subjective about human experience, both conscious and unconscious, such that it cannot be wholly explained in terms of, or reduced to, neurophysiological processes in the brain. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0003065116647053?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_term=&utm_content=An+Exchange+with+Thomas+Nagel%3A+The+Mind-Body+Problem+and+Psychoanalysis&utm_campaign=Resend+of+7J0405&

There is a moving essay on the philosopher Daniel Dennett, in a recent New Yorker. It's by Joshua Rothman. This excerpt is near the end: "Then, late last year, my mother had a catastrophic stroke. It devastated the left side of her brain, wrecking her parietal and temporal lobes and Broca’s area—parts of the brain that are involved in the emotions, the senses, memory, and speech. My mother now appears to be living in an eternal present. She can say only two words, “water” and “time.” She is present in the room—she looks me in the eye—but is capable of only fleeting recognition; she knows only that I am someone she should recognize. She grasps the world, but lightly. As I spent time with my mother, I found that my intuitions were shifting to Dennett’s side of the field. It seems natural to say that she “sort of” thinks, knows, cares, remembers, and understands, and that she is “sort of” conscious. It seems obvious that there is no “light switch” for consciousness: she is ...

Is consciousness just an illusion? Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett believes the human brain might not be that special. Is the human brain really just a collection of complex machines? http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39482345