When Humanistic Psychology was first founded in the early sixties by Abe Maslow, Rollo May, Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, and others, it was defiantly individualistic in its approach while playing a role in putting an end to an era of stifling social conformity. As the fifties faded and the bonds of conformity loosened, the championing of individualism faded within the Humanistic movement. By the eighties the focus had shifted to the interpersonal aspects of psychotherapy. This was clearly manifested in the Gestalt branch of humanistic psychology where the individualistic "You do your thing, I do my thing" ethos of Fritz Perls was largely replaced by the interpersonal approach of Lynne Jacobs, Gary Yontef, and Richard Hycner.
I was inspired to write this essay after viewing the TV series "The Leftovers" and the N.Y. Times interview of its creator Damon Lindelof. The series takes place in a dystopian U.S.A. after two percent of humanity has suddenly vanished. Nobody knows where they went; if and when they'll return; and whether or not a similar event will recur.
As a result people are left grieving, bewildered, and profoundly uncertain about the why of what has happened. The many ways individuals and groups respond to this unforeseen, cataclysmic event are depicted. They include: denial and normalization; apocalyptic cults; and messianic beliefs.
I have been a Gestalt practitioner for fifty years, and am glad of it. Not only because my particular values and abilities are compatible with the practice of Gestalt, but because the approach itself is grounded in experiencing what is. One of my favorite sayings is: reality is an infinity of worlds waiting to be seen. Gestalt is directly tied into reality, and as such becomes more complex as it changes over the years.
I have seen it develop since the sixties, perhaps the most important change being the shift from intra-psychic to inter-personal Gestalt.
The paintings of episodes from the ancient Hindu epic The Ramayanathat I viewed at the Asian Art Museum impacted me in a number of ways.
First, I derived aesthetic pleasure from seeing the exquisite renderings themselves. Some of the details were so fine that I wondered whether the artists used just a single hair on their brushes in order to achieve such results. The variety and nuances of the colors was amazing.
Time was made visible in many paintings. The past, present, and future of a particular event were depicted along a horizontal axis. You follow the chronology of the event and observe no special emphasis on one time or the other.
Whether a society is feudal, capitalist, or socialist, it needs the glue of shared values and ideas in order to coalesce and continue functioning. And it needs novelty in order to evolve. Novelty has its roots in subjective particularity. Specifically, in order to evolve society needs individuals who see what hasn’t been seen before and follow that vision.
Each psychotherapeutic modality is the result of an individual expressing their unique take on human consciousness. It’s the result of a subjective particularity that saw what had not been previously seen.
Arthur Schopenhauer(1788-1860) was a German philosopher, author of On the Suffering of the World, and an angry young man who matured into an angry old one. Here’s a quote from his chapter On Thinking for Yourself :
“Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts”
...and another from Aphorisms:
“The discovery of truth is prevented most effectively, not by the false appearance things present which lead us into error, nor directly by weakening of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinions, by prejudice..”
Being with the emergent is not the same thing as being with the here and now - and it is.
What’s emerging now is this sentence I’m typing about my now. But I could just as well be writing about an email I received yesterday from a friend. What we are doing is always being done here and now, but our consciousness can be focused on any time or place.
For me the Gestalt challenge is not be here now. It is be with the emergent figure in your consciousness.
That’s sometimes harder to do than be here now.
How many ways can you split a noodle, nation, person? The author chose to title his debut novel “The Sympathizer” after the protagonist (who narrates the story) but he could have just as easily named it “The Bastard,” an appellation used throughout the book by the narrator and others to describe himself. In this case the epithet isn’t used to denote character… but rather brings attention to his mixed (split) ancestry. His father was a French priest; his mother Vietnamese.
Recently I’ve seen art and historic forces reflecting each other in dramatic ways. The HBO series “The Leftovers” and the best-selling novel by Elena Ferrante “The Story of the Lost Child” are the examples from art. The historic example is the current flood of humanity making its way from the Middle East to Europe.
Both Ferrante’s novel and “The Leftovers” are concerned with vanishings. In the novel, a beloved four-year old is last seen on a Neapolitan street corner, and then never seen again. In the TV show, two percent of the world’s population inexplicably vanish in an event called “The Departure”.
Just let the author’s name roll off your tongue a few times. That’ll prepare you for a voyage to exotic African locales. However, by the time you’ve completed this close-to-six-hundred page novel what has seemed exotic will have taken on a new normalcy, while aspects of London and America may seem strange and new to you.
This novel is hefty in many ways besides length . Adichie doesn’t hesitate to jump into issues of race; class; tribalism; cross-cultural conflict and gender. The protagonist Ifemelu writes blogs with headings such as :“Understanding America for the Non-American Black: What Hispanic Means”. They’re scattered throughout the book and are witty, perceptive, and pull no punches.
So, let us see what metaphors emerge from my unconscious to depict metaphors: – a bridge; a reflecting pond; and a card from a deck of cards. Looking at them in that order, we see that each reflects a part of what a metaphor does: it connects disparate entities, gives us a different picture of reality, and shows us a particular aspect of reality.
Metaphors are a poetic part of language and an essential part of poetry. And poetry is to reality as a song is to a sentence. Metaphors, poetry, and art itself are phenomena arising from the interaction between our consciousness and reality. How we look at reality (the bridge), what image of reality becomes foreground (the reflecting pond), and which aspect of reality we bring into relief (the particular card), are evidence of both human creativity and the mutability of reality itself.
So here we have a real, famous, old man (Ian McKellen at 76) playing the part of a fictional famous very old man – fast sliding into senility (Sherlock Holmes at 93). A not-famous old man (Frank Rubenfeld at 78) is writing this review.
The plot thickens, since Holmes is portrayed as a real detective who has become famous thanks to his companion Dr. Watson, who wrote many novels about Holmes ingeniously solving one lurid case after another.
This is a review by a man who was eleven (the age of Riley, the protagonist of the movie) back in the forties. I was a refugee from Nazi-occupied France, who grew up loving radio, Disney films, and so many other aspects of American culture. I thought my perspective might interest you.
I’ve seen a host of Disney films in my day, and regard them as reflecting and shaping American consciousness. Inside Out is a remarkable film in many respects. Created with the close consultation of two psychologists from the Bay Area, it attempts to influence how kids and their parents think about their emotions and inner lives. An animated film that ventures into that sphere is remarkable in its own right; this one does so with humor, imagination, and compassion and has gained a huge following. It deserves all the kudos it has garnered.
The Constitution changes thanks to its amendments. The consciousness of the citizenry changes over time, leading to new amendments. The Constitution as a structure allows the consciousness of the people to change it.
At the core of the Constitution lies the issue of balancing collective obligations with individual rights. That remains an ongoing, universal concern. The Constitution doesn’t provide us with definitive answers as to what that balance should be; instead it provides a structure permitting a discussion to unfold on that topic generation after generation.
This science fiction cum philosophical thriller of a movie may very well erotically and intellectually titillate a strata of the population that I would identify as “young male techies”. I do not fit into two of the three categories I just mentioned, but nevertheless I enjoyed it.
The babes are not the youngsters that Victor Herbert was referring to in his 1903 operetta. No, they are fully formed sometimes frontally nude androids, sporting female characteristics. They are the babes, and they are the toys.
This is the latest published (in English) short story by Haruki Murakami, and is part of the 90th Anniversary issue of the New Yorker. It’s the only fiction piece in that giant issue, and reflects his standing in the New Yorker pantheon of contemporary writers.
“Kino”, is the title of the story and the name of the protagonist. I’ve chosen to free-associate/write about it because I find it so mysterious and magical. Those qualities are typical in the works of the author. But this time around, I found a kind of order in the mystery.
“Her” impacted me on so many levels. And the tremors continued well after the day after I saw it.
From the aesthetic point of view, I found the color palette, the shots of the city at night, the way the people were dressed, very attractive and engaging. The acting was uniformly excellent, making it that much easier to step into this near future world.
Book One of the six volume work “My Struggle” by Karl Ove Knausgaard, begins with a two sentence description of life and death in terms of a beating (or non-beating) heart. More than the last half of the book (close to three hundred pages) follows Karl being informed of his father’s death and then together with his brother Yngve literally cleaning up the unholy mess their father left behind, while arranging his funeral. He had been an alcoholic who drank and drank until his heart finally gave out.
