metonymy4u

The problem with our approach to racial violence is that we have misunderstood the problem. Saying that black lives matter is completely, self-evidently, irrefutably, 100% true and indisputable. It is, unfortunately, also completely irrelevant. It is an attempt to logic people out of their emotional behavior. It is attempting to change a behavior with logic that has absolutely nothing to do with logic and everything to do with emotions that, evolutionarily, have had all logic bred out of them. Also unfortunately we in the western world have all been lied to for nearly 2000 years. The truth will not set us free. My hypothesis is that we need science, not truth. Fortunately a science of emotional change has already been well validated in individual and small group contexts. What we need  is a global version of this science. And we need it now.

Recently I recalled a memory of attending a conference on mental illness led by two prominent members of the local mental health community. One of the speakers asked a question about the classical Greek mythology of Asclepius, the god of medicine. I raised my hand and answered the question based on my memories of reading (when I was 17) Plato’s Phaedo, in which Socrates mentions his debt to Asclepius just before drinking the hemlock. After my comment, the other conference leader responded by observing “Wow, you really have to get out more.” The memory to me is a token emblem of what I think we daily face: an environment that immediately punishes exactly what it previously evoked. Invites followed by un-invites. In group seduction and out group derogation. Baits and switch, teases and feints. Ridicule, the normal reward for the curious. Invalidation upon invalidation upon invalidation, creeping along its persistent pace to some final bastion of double binds and a limit of infinite dismay. Is it any wonder then that we are all completely insane?

All that can be judged must be given in experience. Theory without sensation is empty.

These days I’ve been wondering: if light cannot be a part of the universe we live in, how can we see it so easily?

There is one thought that is often a harbinger of disaster in therapy: “This patient is too fragile for therapy.” Many variations are expressed: “too much resistance,” “too fixated,” “too much unconscious hostility,” “too manipulative,” “no motivation,” etc. I find it interesting that I can remember only 1 or 2 patients about whom I’ve had that thought, but countless colleagues and professional peers about whom I’ve had that thought. As if we reserve our special words only for the “other,” and never for ourselves.

Oughts, being derived from is’s, are just as contingent as any is that is or may be. It seems to me.

It seems to me that many modern psychologists (Freud, Beck, Chomsky, Hayes) have done what Descartes did: they have started looking for causal powers in something that is manifest to humans and not to animals. These authors have also, like Kant, renamed the name of the given and transferred its home to the mind, to the social order, to language, to cognition, etc. They want you to believe they have climbed a new mountain, returned with a new in-sight, or dis-covered a new rule. But a relational frame is no more interesting, as a cause, than the id, original sin or a dream visited demon. All are events given in experience, none more or less real than my computer or the hills outside my window.