Intersubjective consciousness
"Open Dialogue" is an approach to psychosis andSchizophrenia that has had better results by a country mile than Anglo-American intervention styles. Here's a nice film, and some other stuff.
Then there is: Becoming Dialogical: Psychotherapy or a Way of Life?Jaakko SeikkulaUniversity of Jyväskylä, Finland
... from which two extracts follow.
All this is very congenial to my own way of looking at what is going on in a philosophy discussion site. Or what I would like to be going on, anyway. In psychiatry, the (usually unrecognised) difficulty is that the process of diagnosis, by which I mean both the particularity of authoritative identification - 'you are/have (insert DSM label of choice)', and the whole social structure, whereby from the beginning the utterances of the 'client' are treated as manifestations rather than communications, is already an intervention. That is to say, diagnosis is treatment, or rather more often, mistreatment. The parallel here, is the form of response, 'you said X, therefore you are a Y'ist, and also think Z, which is clearly E (where E is an epithet of dismissal and delegitimisation).'
But my particular interest in this thread is to explore the notion of intersubjective consciousness, if anyone is up for it. And the particular thing that I want to keep to the fore, that I take from all the above, is the way in which the manner and tone as well as the content of our contributions actively shapes what I have elsewhere indicated as our morale, but here will call the intersubjective consciousness we are and will be constructing.
Edit. If you are insufficiently baffled by all this, and need a few more philosophical snakes in your dinner, this might provide them.
Then there is: Becoming Dialogical: Psychotherapy or a Way of Life?Jaakko SeikkulaUniversity of Jyväskylä, Finland
... from which two extracts follow.
For as I see it, dialogue is not a method; it is a way of life. We learn it as one of the first things in our lives, which explains why dialogue can be such a powerful happening. Because it is the basic ruling factor of life, it is in fact very simple. It is its very simplicity that seems to be the paradoxical difficulty. It is so simple that we cannot believe that the healing element of any practice is simply to be heard, to have response, and that when the response is given and received, our therapeutic work is fulfilled (Seikkula & Trimble, 2005). Our clients have regained agency in their lives by having the capability for dialogue.
How does this happen? For therapists the main challenge becomes being present in the moment, as comprehensive embodied living persons, and responding to every utterance, and thus living in the ‘once-occurring participation in being’ (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 2).
In dialogue an intersubjective consciousness emerges. Our social identity is constructed by adapting our actions to those of others; and even more, knowing me myself as such is only possible by me seeing myself through the eyes of the other (Bakhtin, 1990). Living persons emerge in real contact with each other and adapt to each other, as in a continuous dance in which automatic movements occur, without controlling and deliberating on their behavior in words.
The intersubjective quality of our consciousness is shown in the mother–baby communication studies conducted by Trevarthen (1990; 2007). Trevarthen’s careful observations of parents and infants demonstrate that the original human experience of dialogue emerges in the first days of life, as parent and child engage in an exquisite dance of mutual emotional attunement by means of facial expressions, hand gestures and tones of vocalisation. This is truly a dialogue: the child’s actions influ- ence the emotional states of the adult, and the adult, by engaging, stimulating and soothing, influences the emotional states of the child.
Bråten (1992, 2007) describes the Virtual Other as an innate part of the baby’s mind that, in a way, waits for a dialogue with the Actual Other. If the Actual Other is not present, the dialogue emerges with the Virtual Other. Near relations take place in the mode of felt immediacy, in feelings that are felt in a pre-linguistic form (Seikkula & Trimble, 2005).
All this is very congenial to my own way of looking at what is going on in a philosophy discussion site. Or what I would like to be going on, anyway. In psychiatry, the (usually unrecognised) difficulty is that the process of diagnosis, by which I mean both the particularity of authoritative identification - 'you are/have (insert DSM label of choice)', and the whole social structure, whereby from the beginning the utterances of the 'client' are treated as manifestations rather than communications, is already an intervention. That is to say, diagnosis is treatment, or rather more often, mistreatment. The parallel here, is the form of response, 'you said X, therefore you are a Y'ist, and also think Z, which is clearly E (where E is an epithet of dismissal and delegitimisation).'
But my particular interest in this thread is to explore the notion of intersubjective consciousness, if anyone is up for it. And the particular thing that I want to keep to the fore, that I take from all the above, is the way in which the manner and tone as well as the content of our contributions actively shapes what I have elsewhere indicated as our morale, but here will call the intersubjective consciousness we are and will be constructing.
Edit. If you are insufficiently baffled by all this, and need a few more philosophical snakes in your dinner, this might provide them.
Comments (188)
I liked their program very much. It suggests to me that communication is more than the exchange of information. That in communication the language used also reflects the constitution of the individual, that the individual is shaped by the language they use.
The structure of the Oedipal Complex is sometimes a useful frame of reference, but it is simply a structure for classification, it does not constitute the individual in whom it is manifest. The people in the film suggest that the power relationship in a group which includes the person requiring help and those trying to help is much stronger than I thought.
My guess is that the power of inter-personal relationships enables the results these doctors are getting. Clearly they are skilled and experienced with what they do, but their ability to transfer the patients's problems into a group dynamic enables them to achieve the high level of their results. They convert the way a person thinks about themselves by means of their equal status in their conversation.
Their method overcomes one of the central issues in talk therapy, the power of the analyst over the patient, where the patient looks to the doctor to come up with all the answers. The patient must change their way of thinking and talking about themselves, not as the product of an interpretation, but as part of their interpretation of themselves.
I don't know how hard or easy it would be to replicate their methods in larger areas, such as the US. I can't remember the last time a doctor came out in 24 hours to the home of a patient. That kind of medical service seems like something from many years ago.
Too bad they could not share an actual session with a patient.
Yes indeed, and I cannot find much patient testimony either. It's understandable. The best I can find so far is a couple of case histories here, and this newspaper report.
In simpler terms you have the American patient wondering if the pills are working yet, and the unimaginable contrast with patients who don't need the pills at all and don't need to be put in psychiatric institutions. Two entirely different frames of reference.
Though, I don't see what's wrong with prescribing the pills and engaging in more dialectical therapy, do you?
Of course if the notion of a shared inter-subjectivity implies the co creation of new shared reality (a third kind), as integral, then unconsciously our relationships must also develop a third kind, perhaps as our automatic, unconsidered reactions in our relationship with others.
Interesting academic article. Sounds like their methodology has been very successful and they are now seeking to ground it in a model (I like M Bakhtin and Lacan).
Since I rarely if ever talk to anyone, that's my general mode of being.
I think this is a gross underestimate. These guys are curing the incurable, and you don't do that just by being soothing. It is quite difficult to see though, because their talk is so practical and mundane, and there appears to be no theory or dogma. And the practice, as Cava, complains, is not available to us.
One has to imagine the difference, between me telling you what your problem is, and me asking you what our problem is. This is what I think is happening out of the idea of intersubjective consciousness. So if X is depressed and suicidal, this is not a malfunction of X, but a manifestation of a malfunctioning social environment. So the 'doctor', in entering that social environment is taking on the whole. I think this gives a hint of why there are at least two therapists - one to fully immerse themselves in the social environment, and one to anchor them in a more healthily functioning environment.
But even here, in trying to characterise it, I am imposing my own language, of 'malfunction', 'therapist' and so on. This is fine, because I am not doing that therapeutic job here, but it inevitably misses the openness, the presence, that a real encounter provides. That immediacy of response is what I think is missing from the relations of someone who is psychotic. If whatever I say or do, I get a mechanical, stock response, my need to become visible to the other increases to the point where extreme and almost random - because effectively meaningless - behaviour is the only way to communicate one's existence. One acts out the feelings imposed...
So the restraint of the therapists is the vital factor; not to impose a theory, a diagnosis, a course of treatment, but to allow the opening of negotiations, perhaps for the very first time.
I think that 'new' is out of place.
[quote=Quincey]According to this "stronger" meaning, intersubjectivity is truly a process of cocreativity, where relationship is ontologieally primary. All individuated subjects co-emerge, or co-arise, as a result of a holistic "field" of relationships. The being of anyone subject is thoroughly dependent on the being of all other subjects, with which it is in relationship. Here, intersubjectivity precedes subjectivity (in the second, Cartesian, sense, but subjectivity in the first sense, of experienced interiority, is implicit throughout). The fact, not just the form, of subjectivity (in the second, Cartesian sense) is a consequence of intersubjectivity. Here, the "inter" in intersubjectivity refers to an interpenetrating cocreation of loci of subjectivity-a thoroughly holistic and organismic mutuality.[/quote]
If this is correct, that consciousness is made of relationships, and refer back to the edit link in the op for details, then all that is new is the understanding that individuality is born of sociality. The newest reality is the sense of self, that develops from being treated by an other as a subject and not an object. One learns to treat oneself as a subject by being treated as a subject. And the circumstance that one is not so treated - not fully - is what 'drives one out of one's mind'.
And this simple principle immediately transforms the whole approach to the patient and implies that the 'objective view' taken by Western psychology is itself the epitome of the maddening process, which explains why it has so little success.
Cool. But I'd like to drag you out of your virtual world (says the internet philosopher ;) ), and insist that you not occupy the role of patient and object of discussion more so than that of therapist, philosopher. We are real others, virtually present, with whom your mode of being must necessarily be more dangerously co-creative.
Well, I think that this mutual co-creation is clearly the case with peers. The question for me is if such a relationships between, like patient and therapist could ever be one of peers. I think that we have something that tracks that sort of thing. Potential competitors, lovers, friends, which are peers. A lot of it has to do with just age alone. We are socialized, and grow together, and can get stagnated through one form of isolation or another. Usually there is something someone isn't talking about, isn't dealing with with others, and this remains unsocialized, undeveloped, grows wildly without being checked with feedback, and it is this sort of thing that therapy is for. The sorts of things no one will talk about, or can talk about.
The question is, can it be developed, and socialized like it naturally would be in a peer to peer relationship?
Something like that is my diagnosis.
'What sorts of things are they?', he asks unfairly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one acts out.
Before peers, there are parents. Which is to say that to have peers, to see peers as peers, is already to have established the identity of the intersubjective self; I am like you, in that we are individuals. So it is parents that educate (literally lead out) one into the mystery of selfhood, that teach one a language of interiority and thus a repertoire of expressible feelings. For virtual other, I think Wilson in Castaway, or any child's doll or imaginary friend. Or historically, the multitudinous gods and goddesses and spirits, which is why the psyche is expressed in mythological terms: Psyche, Narcissus, Oedipus, etc.
Anyway, there is a historical, cultural foundation to interiority, that can be for whatever reason impoverished in a particular case. Say my parents brought me up with sufficient physical care but little emotional care. Their lack of interest in my subjectivity leaves me unable to relate to peers as peers, but only as objects, and that is also how I relate to myself; my own feelings and those of others are like the weather - stuff that happens for no reason. I might find myself killing someone because I don't like Mondays.
The relationship one has with one's parents is quite a different thing. There are of course some horrible parents, but mostly there is no fear of rejection, only reprimands. When you go to a therapist, at least where I'm from, you're asked to not show up early, so as to give their other clients enough time to gtfo of there before anyone sees them. They're first to talk about all of the confidentiality, and how it all stays with them. They then tend to hold quite strongly to the notion that a hell of a lot of problems stem from shame, and social rejection and what not. Why do they do all of that? Why do their clients care for such secrecy?
Similarly, why are parents embarrassing? Why can't they walk you right up to the school as a kid? Why can't they come to your cool parties?
Authority figures are not nearly as dangerous, nor interesting as peers are. Not that they aren't important, or influential, but not nearly as much as peers.
With antisocial children, I've read that they seem to be done by four. If they aren't properly socialized, so that they're too mean, violent, or prone to withdrawal at four, so that their peers reject them, then they're pretty well done. Arguably all of the most important parenting takes place just up until they can talk.
Yes indeed it is. That is because it is primary. Authority figures are like gods - personified objects. Woe betide if your parents are authority figures! They will tell you when you are hungry and when you are not, instead of responding to what you tell them. The intention of the parent to understand enables the child to learn to talk, and learn to be conscious.
Quoting Wosret
Yes again, at four, one can engage with peers to the extent both have emerged into consciousness, but one does not have the stable security of self to properly parent another, which is what would be needed.
Yet, the theory is the foundation upon which the therapist stands in relation to the patient. I've never head of psychosis without BPD or SZ, and bipolar disorder or schizophrenia are quite devastating diseases that need to be treated with something more than talk therapy. Perhaps, I am wrong, but a therapist cannot give you a plane ticket to the Scandinavian countries, where welfare for the people with disorders or diseases is quite well handled. Meaning that socially, the conditions are well acknowledged and therapy can be more effective.
So, are you, in saying this, the patient?
If you were the patient, and I was the Open Dialogue therapist, and you were talking about your own experiences in terms of devastating diseases and bipolar, and so on, then my understanding is that I would not be trying to re-educate you into talking about social identity or some such. They quite explicitly do not do that in that situation.
What they might do, that I will do here, is suggest that your response seems to be saying more than one thing; advocating for a patient who cannot access such a treatment, advocating for 'something more than talk therapy', which might be taken as being a defence of conventional treatment, and also suggesting an inconsistency in what I have been trying to describe and come to an understanding of. So in a way, you are apparently speaking as a patient, as a conventional therapist and as a philosophical critic, all in one post.
But to answer my own question unequivocally, you are not the patient, because I am not an Open dialogue therapist, and we are doing philosophy, not therapy. So my attempt here to reframe the issue of mental health in a new language and theory with other philosophers is not in contradiction with the principles of open dialogue. I have suggested that there are parallels between what we do here by way of dialogue, and what they do there, and that the way we do it can be more open or closed, and might even at times be therapeutic, at least in the Wittgensteinian sense. But this is not me treating anyone for anything, but trying to learn philosophically, from this therapeutic practice that has been reported.
Open Dialogue as a practice stands on its record of effectiveness as measured conventionally by studies of medium to long term outcome. And from what I have read, it is defensible in comparative economic terms as well. I would like to find a socio/psychological philosophy that is compatible with this practice, and possibly apply that understanding appropriately to our own dialogues here, and that is quite enough of a job for an old loony like me, without taking on anyone else's problems.
There is a way to think of this as a narrative process starting with the initial narrative we tell our selves, the difference between "I"(Author) and "me"(Narrative). This initial differentiation gets the ball rolling. My social construct has to be related to that social group with whom I am most closely associated. The social constructs I make for myself are based on the relational parts of close social networks. I think we assume roles from the context we develop in, male, female, animal, environmental, economic .... this process of creation of narratives goes on through out our lives.
The open dialogue method utilizes a dialogic circle , in which values and new(I think the values and meanings which are developed are new in a way similar to how two narrative can be combined to form a new narrative) meanings can be co-created. Not so much causal, but a system of relationships: a's act affects b, which affects c and changes its relationship with a. I think it is metonymic; how closely related, but separate parts are related,
The therapists and their assistants do not try to change anyone's mind. The do not try to instill more normative thoughts, rather their effort is to assist the patient's dialogic circle to construct new pragmatic narratives, that enable the patient to see new possibilities from within their circle, values that pragmatically change meanings for the patient.
One of the differences in thinking about the dialogic process as a narrative is the need for an author in the narrative approach, A dialogic circle as a dynamic social system which does not need any author. Much of the Laplander's efforts can be seen as an attempt to get away from any hierarchical structure in therapy. which is why I suspect for the people up in Lapland the person who takes the initial phone call becomes responsible for the case.
Now consider a dialogic therapy. The person would be clearly identified, such that there would be no hiding of the "who" is saying what. If the person is afraid to express one's true feelings out of fear of some sort of judgement how can that person be encouraged to express oneself honestly? I ask this because if you are talking about diseases like schizophrenia, I believe the capacity to be honest with oneself may play a role in the development of the disease.
So it appears to me like honesty is a key component of the parent/child relationship. The child is encouraged by the parent to be honest, though the child may develop devious tendencies. And if the parent is found to be lacking in honesty by the child, the bond of trust might be broken. How is honesty encouraged in such a therapeutic method?
I don't understand. Are you attempting to reject, or downplay the notion that parents are authority figures? That adults in general are to a less extent, and even elders are to adults? It definitely isn't like a logical necessity or anything, and they definitely aren't authorities on every single thing, but this is still clearly the case. The relationships differ. If you disagree then I don't know what to say, other than that I think that people believe that they have more control over their perceptions and sentiments than they actually do. Vastly less. Take for instance racism. Some deny that they're racist by denying racism, or that there is anything other than totally justified behaviors going on. Others only deny that they are racist, but attempting to be all on their side, and not say or do the wrong things, and learn how to behave to not give that perception. But perception is not reality. Same with sexism. Both just deny that it's true of them, just with differing strategies.
That's an obvious one, but less obviously, we have prejudices about what form a therapist takes as well. Their dress, their demeanor, their age, their level of hygiene and a million other things prime your apprehensions, and how you will understand them, and find them credible. There will be variation, but it's still always true (even when people find someone interesting or credible for subverting their expectations, the opposite is the same thing). I'm not even positive that infants are free of prejudice, as we may very well be born with unconscious archetypes.
Point being, that we can't just decide to see things anyway we want to, or feel any way that we choose. That's a recipe for denial and self-loathing in my view.
I would say so, yes although I am trying to be pragmatic here. As a patient who actively receives medical care, I've been taught that my condition can be ameliorated with medicine. The fact that we don't hold patients nowadays in institutions is a testament to the effectiveness of drug based psychotherapy. And, I firmly believe that medication for BPD or schizophrenia are effective strategies.
What I'm trying to bring out is your preference to not treat patients with drugs and instead use the mentioned techniques to deal with the disorder. That seems to be a personal motivating factor in light of some disdain or resentment at drugs not being effective enough on your part, as I see it.
Instead, I would like to advocate more talk therapy in combination with drugs to increase the effectiveness of therapy. I don't think big pharma, as much as they love the current status quo (in the West), or medical professionals would want to abandon the effective drugs in therapy seeking and treatment.
Quoting unenlightened
I have no issues with that, it just seems beyond the capacity for a country like the UK or United States to implement. I could be wrong, and hopefully am.
So, this seems, according to the paper, to resolve not only the individual conflicts of the patient (as pigeonholing the patient into their diagnosis seems to be a common trend in pharmacological based therapy). So, therapy extends from the dialectical patient therapist setting to a broader category.
Before this flies out of my mind, I was wondering about this open dialogue therapy and restoring patient functionality in the workplace and society. Does this only mean that the family now understands the disability and are working to accommodate the patient with their new situation or just simply ignores that? I'm asking because it could simply mean that the end-measure or success of said therapy could be considered different in the case of Western psychology and psychiatry than in Finland where the studies were conducted.
Ok, so this seems to have answered my previous questions. That's quite profound and I now see the merit to acknowledging said therapy technique in real world practice.
The patient comes in an tells the therapist that I have a disorder.
Therapist replies, 'says who?'
Isn't this therapy essentially against psychiatry? Everything psychiatry is built on is rejected in this form of therapy. There is a divide between psychiatry and psychology that seems to be brought out hereabouts. Is anyone else seeing it?
Un, I am very interested in this from the philosophical perspective. The philosopher you quote briefly, Christian de Quincey, seems since to have wandered off into stuff about spirituality, consciousness and mind. But the very idea of re-examining anglo-american philosophy from the second person point of view is, I'm told, quite a hot topic in some corners of academe. This summer I've been reading Stephen Darwall's 'Second Person Standpoint', (written in 2006) which proposes basing analytic ethics upon our mutual regard and respect. (One odd thing about it is how reluctant he is to use the word 'you', as if that wasn't part of the point)
There is also a whole strand of Continental thought issuing mostly from Mikhail Bakhtin about dialogue. I'm interested in how to apply this, not so much to ethics as to the philosophy of language. A Swedish guy called Per Linell has been working away at this for years, rethinking things dialogically. Everything we talk is talk-in-interaction, on this reading. We bring our presuppositions to the table, adjust as needed to communicate, act or not as we fancy and move on to the next interaction.
It does involve re-imagining a lot of ideas from the ground up, because you are not an 'I' thinking about a world out there, you are an 'I' talking to a 'you' about a shared world.
To me this not only makes sense, I suspect it just is how I feel about how I am in the world. 'Objectivity' to me has always been a point of view, one we can both, or several of us, can agree to adopt for its utility, but which none of us need mistake for 'reality', something fundamental. This probably links to having been a dramatist/scriptwriter for much of my life :) To me there is only drama ('action').
Posty, glad to see I've returned from holiday and you're still about. I regard the idea is not so much anti-psychiatry as taking a step back to ask what the context is. At any given place and time there are norms about how mental distress gets named and alleviated. The very idea of 'psychosis' for instance was invented in the mid-Victorian era out of a Latin vocabulary as the right sort of way for how experts and sufferers could name certain experiences. At other times and places different names are used.
Then one steps back into the present, armed with contextual understanding. The label 'psychiatrist' covers a multitude of sins and virtues. It may be as some maintain that the invention of Largactil in the 50's turned most psychiatrists into pharma peddlers rather than talk therapists, but there's still quite a range. Open dialogue can still happen while someone is a 'therapist' or 'psychiatrist', can't it? (On a personal note my ex still remembers fondly her uncle Denis Martin, who ran a hospital called Claybury in the 50's to 70's: he was most definitely a psychiatrist and he ran a 'therapeutic community', as he saw it. There can and probably will still be experts, whatever one's base assumptions about mental distress)
Dog Whisperer "Cesar Milan" gets these troubled hounds and take them to his dog farm and they all run around together. He doesn't fix the dogs, the other dogs do. They quickly ascertain if the aggressive dog is all bark and no bite, or if its the alpha, or if it just needs the pack for security. The dogs find their position relative to each other. Once they all know where they fit in, and a sense of belonging has been established in the that group, a sense of harmony normally overcomes the troubled dog.
So, I would suggest this interaction has more to do with belonging in a accepting social group than with language. The personality profiles of these people, do they struggle generally in group settings? Do they feel alienated and isolated in their everyday lives. Do they feel that nobody understands them? Are they the bottom of their social heap?
An issue with this type of therapy might be if the person in the group is not perceived the way they want to be - which is possibly the cause of many troubled minds. You would need to run the group for an extensive amount of time, and certainly abolishing the independent judge is important.
How successful is the method when the patient interacts with other more novel groups? Is there a successful transference?
I'm not sure I understand this initial distinction, but the notion of narrative self seems to have potential, that I will exploit anyway.. Perhaps you can say more?
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverThis is a really hard question. It seem absolutely vital, and central to the whole approach - of discussing the patient in the presence of the patient. But then I hear Cava asking 'what is the truth of a narrative?' Here's a story:
Human beings are more or less dysfunctional computational machines that have no other function than to produce more dysfunctional computational machines with no function.
This is a story that gets told - let us presume honestly - in which case it uncovers, declares, narrates, how that person relates to themselves, and to others in some meaningful way. People think it is true. Now my own point of view is that this story has about the same truth as The Pilgrim's Progress, which is also an honestly told story of human nature.
Quoting Posty McPostface
Yes indeed. This is a narrative you are relating that outlines a relationship being established between two people or characters. In this sense, psychiatry and anti psychiatry are competing narratives. One of the themes of conventional psychiatry is that if the patient is right in their claim, then their judgement should be dismissed. This is the logic of the order/disorder narrative, that it establishes a hierarchy of ordered and disordered, and hence reliable and unreliable narratives. The conventional therapist would reply, 'I'll be the judge of that.' Whereas the anti psychiatrist would say, that's not you, that's the society you are in that is disordered.
but I'm not so sure that an OD therapist would reply 'says who?', because the patient has just declared his identity in the form of a disordered relation to themselves, which from the OD stance, is taken to be an honest, valid and true depiction of their relations with significant others.
Which takes me back to the beginning of this post, that I cannot quite make sense of the distinction between the narrative and the author - honestly, they feel like the same thing.
I'm trying to characterise, in your own language, the process of individualisation. The relation of parent to infant necessarily begins as a person-object relation, in which the parent is the author and authority, and the infant is a dependent object. The task is to conjure from this relation a new relation between individuals, by invoking the interiority of the infant, just as God created man in His own image. One teaches a child to talk by talking to them as if they can talk already. In a sense one acts in defiance of the reality of power relations and thereby creates a new relation with a new being, a subject. The rejection of the parent as authority is a necessary part of the process of individualisation, just as the Fall is a necessary part of the creation of humanity.
And just as the OD therapists defy the reality of psychosis by insisting on treating the psychotic as an equal.
Are you seriously suggesting that "open dialogue" can extricate a pyschiatric patient with a severe psychotic disorder like schizophrenia from the jaws of madness and harmful dysfunction?
Are you actually suggesting that this form ( or any form) of intersubjective "talk therapy" can be efficacious in remediating the symptoms of, for example, acute schizophrenia such as : hallucinations ( auditry, visual, tactile, etc), delusional thinking ( paranoid, grandiose, etc), cognitive derailment ( the "word salad" spoken in schizophrenia), negative affective traits ( anhedonia, amotivation, anergia, etc) ? Are you honestly suggesting that the gross, organic structural/functional neurobiological abnormalities commonly associated with diagnosed chronic schizophrenia can be renormalized through a process "open dialogue"?
If so, you are talking arrant nonsense !
I'm not a big believer in teaching, only in learning. One has a capacity for learning, not for teaching. With a capacity for learning, one can learn from a broom stick, if it has anything worth learning. I can't imagine a capacity for teaching that could teach a broom stick anything. For this reason, I believe only in the former.
That said, no one speaks to a child as if they can already talk, they lower themselves to their level. They mimic them, and learn from them, and make baby noises, and attempt to get them to say single key words through enough repetition eventually. They never just speak to them like they would a peer, and it would be pretty bad parenting to do that as well, I would think.
The reason that the parent is an authority figure is because they can observably, manifestly operate, and interact with the world in ways that result in responses that work, and bring the results that they desire. Like magic, like god, to the uninitiated. So that the child plays at mimicry, in an attempt to raise themselves to the parents level, and the parent attempts to lower themselves to the child's, in order to communicate, or play, or whatever.
No, I'm not. I'm reporting with references that other people have studied what is being done in Finland, and have found that it has far better results than conventional interventions. Now if you want to call this arrant nonsense, and be taken at all seriously, you had better put forth something at least as substantial by way of evidence and argument, because authoritarian fulmination alone cuts very little ice round here.
It doesn't have to be different. I'm just saying what I think of what I'm gathering. Though I don't have the greatest amount of faith in communication, if I did I'd probably talk more.
This is all very new to me, so thanks for the homework assignments. I'd speculate that Darwall's reluctance could be to do with a notion that a publication is a format in which the use of 'you' to address the universalised reader would be somewhat dishonest posturing - that that sort of writing is not dialogical, but monological.
It doesn't have to be different, but I sense that it is different. But I'm not clear about the difference. I feel I am not quite being understood, and from what you say here, you feel somewhat the same way. Perhaps that is the best we can manage at the moment, to communicate that there is a disagreement or a misunderstanding that neither can quite articulate? Perhaps we need a third party to help us, or perhaps we should just leave it there for now?
I'll go back through, and watch that video that you linked, which I haven't done. Try to find what I'm missing. A third party intervention is always welcome. You can always just ignore me if you think what I've said or am saying is too unrelated, left field, or mark-missing. That's what I'd do.
Pardon me, I'm about to plunge back into the academic fray so I'm thinking that way :)
I'm not that familiar with dogs, or the dog whisperer. Do dogs suffer from psychosis? What you are describing seems more like neurosis at a guess. Regarding social groups, there was an interesting experiment (I forget the reference) where researchers pretended to be ill, and got themselves admitted to mental hospital. They had no difficulty fooling the doctors, but the real patients were not taken in at all. Which indicates that contact with reality is not divided such that the sane have it all and the insane none. What I imagine the dogs have in common with OD therapists is 'presence'. Certainly it is not all about language, but language is fairly dominant in human relations.
This brings me back to the pragmatics of said therapy device. There's little hope that despite how effective this therapy might seem, it will never take any hold in countries where the mainstream narrative or course of action is to refer a schizophrenic or bipolar to the psychiatrist and prescribe the pills. I lament over this status quo.
Quite frankly, many therapists hereabouts and psychiatrists would call this homeopathy. Sadly enough.
Then by definition, this would be anti-psychiatry. This is because (due to the economics of the situation and the prevailing idea and mainstream thoughts in psychiatry) psychiatry can't address the context and only considers the resultant behavior or symptoms arising in the individual.
What I think may be more enlightening is considering why do people choose psychiatry over psychological therapy?
It's being trialled in the UK by the National Health Service, and there is a training course.
I don't know where the US is a the moment, and from the pov of one seeking help, it's going to be a very slow process rolling it out, because of the need to properly train and also adjust the institutions. But in the longer run, I am quite confident that if it is as effective as it is claimed to be, it will be taken up everywhere, because although it is expensive in terms of commitment of resources, if it gets people off drugs, out of hospitals, and working and contributing, who would otherwise be sucking up resources for a lifetime, then it is an absolute bargain. Money will convince even a scientist. ;)
Edit: In the meantime, there is apparently other stuff going on in the US of A ...
There do seem to be initiatives in north America. Like this one: http://www.dialogicpractice.net
The documentary seemed pretty wild and slanted, so I couldn't help but look for some support for its claims, of which there is nothing substantial, and things that indicate that their results are not different at all for schizophrenics, and half as good for psychotics as the standard treatment.
I thought that it was about just mental illness is general, and talk therapy is definitely great with respect to that, I didn't realize that the claim was that it was revolutionary for even the most extreme of psychotic disorders as well...
Fee fie fo fum
I smeel the blood of an Englishman.
Be he alive or be he dead
I'll grind his bones to make my bread.
Quoting unenlightened
See, the stories that the parents tell are intended to make the child reject the parent as the authority. But that's how authority generally works, no one wants to take that responsibility, so it's passed off, and someone else is the author of that.
Language is good for misleading people too and creating false impressions and the person with the fast tongue can frustrate the person without, causing all sorts of expressive bottlenecks.
I have interacted with a lot of different personalities over the years, but not in a clinical setting.
From my experiences it seems that people often aren't looking for solutions to their problems when they come to me. They are wanting to tell someone their problems and are wanting to know that the world hasn't changed for having told them. The world goes on and they are still accepted in it despite the trauma they have faced. They are still part of the pack. (They also often want justice)
I find when dealing with people that are extremely upset for instance a big key is to not show a lot of emotion. To listen closely and nod- to show you are listening. Once they have told me their problem they almost invariably look me very strongly in the eyes to watch my reaction to what they've said. If I react like its all under control and in the scope of my everyday experiences (regardless of how much it is not), they relax almost immediately.
You can tell them of course things like, "well that is horrible", or "well let me see if I can do something to make that right for you" (justice), but without too much emotion. You can isolate them with a strong focus of attention, causing them to believe they really do have a problem. - Just you and them in a psychiatrists office for example - they know before they even go in they have a problem, they just don't know how big it is yet. They'll wait for your reaction before they make their mind up on that one.
I love studying animal relations. We all use the same gestures and the same pattern of gestures.
Sounds are important in conveying intent - warm intent or hostile intent, as much as gestures are. Language may explain it a little clearer, may allow you or them to pop the blister of pain.
If I go out into my backyard and there is a bird there, I will look at it- show it that I see it - and then look away and show no interest. All animals do it, including humans. Animals do this to establish you can share a domain with them and vice versa. Its a mutual non-aggression pact: They yawn, lick themselves, scratch themselves and look away - these all show awareness of your presence and a disinterest in threatening you or seeing you as a threat. Tensions are immediately dissolved. Proximity is of course important, but it's never a direct approach unless you know the animal. Smiling and tongue lolling works.
Of course, when they don't do that stuff, you know you're in trouble.
In what I saw of the group therapy session there was a high level of general awareness and disinterest. They responded to each other initially and then showed little interest. The patients would be free to express themselves, be heard and then blend into the group without thinking they have singled themselves out for scrutiny. There is a mutual non-aggression pact in a group dynamic, so, many social disorders would benefit enormously from this approach I would think.
But, I am not trained in psychiatry.
Links?
This is the basic claim:
Source.
If this is substantially true, it is remarkable, and if it is false, it should be very easily falsifiable.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/marvin-ross/schizophrenia-treatment_b_4254350.html
That's what I read. Why I find it persuasive is because those numbers are remarkable, and if it were true why isn't it quickly becoming the standard treatment? Why it is not even really being substantially investigated? The article suggests that it's simply because the results aren't nearly as remarkable as that documentary claims. Not in fact as good as the standard treatment from what it looks like.
I was attempting to discuss it in a wider fashion. I of course was attempting to find points of disagreement, as that is where views are honed. Nodding in agreement isn't the super bestest path to refinement in my view. My basic idea that that talk therapy is unquestionably great, definitely the best kind (though I was thinking generally, and not in the most extreme psychiatric cases.), but it just isn't the same thing as peer to peer dialogue, and probably can't be. What I saw you suggesting is a narrowing of the gap between kind of teacher and pupil. Doctor and patient, and I wished to explore exactly how harrow that gap could get, while being skeptical that it could be closed.
If that makes sense.
Yeah, it makes sense. But this makes a tad less sense.Quoting Wosret
If the remarkable figures were true, it would have become standard practice.
If the remarkable figures were true, they would have been investigated.
They haven't been investigated, therefore they are not true.
It is not standard practice, therefore it does not work.
There is an open-ended scepticism, and then there is a closed-minded scepticism. Well there is enough hope that this...
[quote= your link] if we assume that they were the ones with schizophrenia then only 53 per cent of those with schizophrenia were medication free. And this is roughly consistent with the Merck Manual and the definition that outcomes for a simple psychosis are better than for schizophrenia.[/quote]... is overly pessimistic an assumption, especially taken in conjunction with the fact that we are talking about early intervention and a diagnosis of schizophrenia requires that, "Continuous signs of the disturbance must persist for at least 6 months, during which the patient must experience at least 1 month of active symptoms (or less if successfully treated), with social or occupational deterioration problems occurring over a significant amount of time.", to justify some replication elsewhere and further trials.
It's odd, that. It almost seems to define schizophrenia as incurable - if it got cured, it wasn't schizophrenia. Kind of like death - if you come back to life, you can't have been dead.
Firstly those two propositions are not accurate representations of what I said, and clearly the second should come first to bring them even close. Why would I have some deep investment in the antithesis anyway? Like a closed-minded adherence to the standards?
I don't think that it's fair to reword what I said to sound sillier, and then call me dogmatic as a response. Furthermore, to go on to undermine the definition of schizophrenia seems silly. Also consider that it is genetic, and highly heritable. People that have never even met their parents, or had socialization problems still manifest the condition, from what I understand. I read an article about a dude that discovered that he was part of a eugenics project that tried to foster genius progeny, and his father ended up being a paranoid schizophrenic that lied about his credentials, and background (when the programs creator couldn't get Nobel laureates he shot a little lower in seedy hotels), and he had fostered many children. The article was about his experience as his condition began to manifest itself in his twenties.
Not that I know a lot about it, but I just noticed that the success rate claimed is nearly twice that of what should be expected. That ought to get a lot of attention. Why hasn't it? Because they cure them so fast that their condition becomes undiagnosable? The mainstream are all too dogmatically attached to the standard treatments and closed minded to care?
There isn't much I can say to any of that. The claims are apparently both unconfirmable, and denied out of closed-mindedness...
Your justifications for not accepting the criticisms, and maintaining the position seems clearly motivated. Whereas, I don't give much of a fuck at all about this, and just like you, and reading and interacting with you. That's my motivation. I may even be motivated to argue with you, but I'm not particularly invested in any positions of this subject.
Why does this topic have to be about 'me'?
I didn't make it about me... I was clearly discussing only what I understood to be the topic, although my first post was indeed a passing comment about me, and then I was asked to engage the topic, which I did without talking about myself.
Then my motives were questioned, so it seems fair to address them. How else am I supposed to respond to the accusation of investment, and close-mindedness? If it was merely goading, then I'm immune, if it was sincere, then I'm entitled to defense. Entitled like a princess.
It is just that the whole purpose of this therapy is to not get the individual to conform to their diagnosis, accept the meds, and live on disability, speaking as a paranoid schizophrenic myself who is doing all three. Changing the mindset of your closest ones (family) about your diagnosis and what that means can lead to greater outcomes in therapy in terms of living a more fulfilling life.
Ideally I'll go undiagnosed with anything until I'm forcefully committed, and plan to only stay on this job until I can get unemployment, and then go back to school (not the same thing, as I'm paying for that). I have to avoid stress though, as my control is always precarious.
I used to try and medicate and alleviate my boredom myself. I'd take a bunch of research chemicals online and try my best to solve my issues myself. Nothing good came from that despite being a decently functioning individual myself. Now, I'm waiting for my first welfare check and trying to figure out what to do with my life. The figuring out phase is kind of over and I intend to go to back to college while on disability, which thankfully is possible here in the states. I didn't know I could go to college AND be on disability at the same time, but that combination of affairs is really relieving, as I don't have to live as if on early retirement on a measly monthly pension is now out of the doors. I have some future to look forward to, which brings me back to Open Dialogue.
It seems to me that half of the battle is due to social circumstances. In places like Finland where welfare isn't stigmatized, people are allowed to freely live on some form of disability and go through the necessary therapy and other life lessons, like not taking drugs and adhering to what's good for you instead of what you think is good for you. Here in the states, the welfare isn't as great as in some Scandinavian countries, but the quality of therapy is quite high, so that makes up somewhat for the difference. My mother, who now understands my situation, doesn't treat me as someone who should be the bread winner, and instead views me affectionately as a person with a problem who is in the process of trying to get better, which helps tremendously with how I view myself also due to the fact that I live with my mom. Things are getting better than worse, and that's important to know. People are predominantly unaware of their circumstances in life and knowing your place in the grand scheme of things is a relief. Getting better isn't anymore defined in terms of how well I feel (say due to how much I make or what drugs I want to take) but instead obtains an objective sense once engaged in dialectical therapy or therapy in general. So, yeah. I'm not complaining. Only times, I feel bad is when I have cravings and urges for the feel better drugs, like Ritalin or Adderall. Pot helps as a stopgap measure, also. But, I try to limit that. I haven't had a psychosis in a while, so that's a benefit, as psychosis kind of retards psychological development.
So, all in all, I'm happy there's a social safety net that grabbed me, and I feel safe in my environment. Things, which I am grateful for and combined with the fact that I desire some positive change in terms of educating myself and building up my human capital, well then I have no complaints.
So, philosophy has been also a safety net for me, that has helped me stay afloat in times of distress. Keeping my thoughts in check, which I think many people feel that sense of relief for overactive or sensitive minds, to engage in philosophy and be entertained endlessly. I plan to become a subscriber once I can financially.
Safety? Comfort? Lack of negative stigmatizing judgement? Sounds awful.
I don't much believe in mental illness beyond the functional kinds. You can talk, and walk, then you're pretty much fine. Not like everyone else is perfectly connected to reality. Not like everyone else maintains perfect control, or has deep insights into their emotions and motivations. All that matters is that they're able to get the job done. If they want a sandwich, so walk outside and maw the lawn, then something is up, but if a sandwich comes to them as a result then things are working smoothly.
I don't want to have other people pay my way, or take care of me. I don't want sympathy, or pity. I want respect, and high regard, which for the most part, I definitely get. Get less making less money, but it was never where I got my self-respect from in the first place. I was just using the extra money on recreational drugs, and helping people that were unwilling to help themselves, and ultimately resented me for it anyway. I couldn't take the competitive stress, or needy attention anymore, and minus those expenses, and I don't really have less. Bills are paid, food in the fringe, new games in the console, what more could I want? I can't afford too bad of habits now, which is better for me.
I just naturally gravitated to intellectual pursuits since I was young, because everyone always told me how smart I was, and even though no one around me is interested, or knows fuck all, I still do it. Reached a point where my cultural capital is rarely matched.
These are the worries that run about in a schizophrenic mind. To think that you are fundamentally flawed, as many schizophrenics think about themselves is a label that's hard to get rid of yourself. Once some understanding or therapy takes place, or even meds for those that need them, then recovery can take place.
I wonder if now we've begun to practice the topic, rather than discuss it abstractly?
I rather turn it around, and think that thinking that I was too entitled, and beyond reproach would be worse than thinking that I was fatally flawed. Great philosophers and religions are predicated on this notion. Not much room for improvement for the already perfect. Though no point in improvement for the completely worthless and broken. Somewhere in the middle is best, I'd think.
Gotta think you're worthy in order to be comfortable with owning anything, including negative things. Are you entitled to asshole status? (as an example, not calling you one). The trick is to earn it, and not just rationalize it, but take the judgement of those around you in order to ground you in your entitlements, good and bad.
I work hard at all of my jobs, even this one, so that those around me will feel that I'm entitled to it. I behave so as the world witnesses my entitlements.
Ultimately, that's a solipsistic philosophy of mind, don't you think?
The one I outlined for myself? Or the one I criticized? The latter yes, the former clearly no.
Well, I don't mean to insult your Protestant worth ethic; but, yes the latter, although the former wasn't all that clear.
I am game to talk about it. :) Per LInell, whom I mentioned earlier, talks about the inter-world. In his online 'dialogical notebook' which you can find by Googling, he has (pp 46-49) sections on this and intersubjectivity, they are little more than stray thoughts like ours but illuminating to me! Part of the dialogical approach is that ideas rarely happen in an 'inner world' but rather in the inter-world. Conversation for instance doesn't happen in the way fragments of talk are exemplified in philosophical textbooks. People just don't talk the way they are quoted as talking. All those neat sentences from Frege onwards are idealised-into-written-language sentences. Most actual talk is a flow between people who anticipate each other, fill in gaps, take things off at a tangent, speechify for a bit, grunt, explain with gesture and mutual touching.
Well, that's the rough outline of the approach. Does that speak to you?
I meant to say that it is of utmost importance to be in agreement with those around you about what you aren't, and are not entitled to.
What do you mean about, 'what you aren't'? That seems to be like wanting to prove a negative like 'Unicorns don't exist', quite futile.
Edit: And, if we attempt to try and prove a negative, then we need to know all about what we are in the first place.
I don't think that it's possible to love yourself without the support of others, unless it comes at the cost of resentment, and disregard of others. Their ultimate devaluation, as they have devalued you.
Like, most people would agree that you aren't entitled to kill the neighbors... for instance...
I feel like I've said something you don't like, so communication is breaking down now.
Well what it's supposed to be about is how 'me' is a social construct, so this ...Quoting Posty McPostface ... is exactly on topic.
Quoting Wosret
Hey, dude, I'm only shooting the messenger, because he seems to have bought the message wholesale. It's not clear, it's not confirmed, it's not been properly investigated. It is interesting, and particularly so because it seems to come out of, or play into, a rather interesting philosophy, which is what I would rather be looking at than defending a practice I don't have any experience of from summary dismissal.
I think we're talking about two different things. On the one hand, there's the self-serving asshole, and on the other, there's the good Samaratin that needs no praise or feelings of resentment to do good, who is filled with self-love.
Different things, no?
How do you know what's good unless you're getting feedback? Need others in order to send you sanity, and socializing feedback. Isn't that the very suggestion of open dialogue? That sanity arises out of intersubjectivity, and erodes in isolation?
Perhaps, we need someone to chime in from the Finnish experiment, but I would assume that the unmentioned, all important, factor in any form of recovery or therapy is for the patient to love and accept themselves before they can acknowledge any sort of positive feelings. I would go as far and say that this is the end goal of Open Dialogue. Fostering a sense of self-acceptance at the very least, through intersubjectivity. There can be no dialogue where there is no subject or an unresponsive, cold, close minded, dogmatic, and insensitive subject at least.
The article I linked doesn't deny that it is interesting, and worthy of investigation, but just notes that the claims don't really seem true, and warrant further investigation. They have more information, like how many of their research subjects that required medication a year later were of the schizophrenic group. Just releasing that information would make all the difference. Otherwise, one can assume that since the subjects that had schizophrenia made up a minority of the total subjects, then the numbers may be less impressive than the standard treatments. It's implication alone that makes their claims seem extraordinary, not even explicit data.
But it's apparently I, who've bought it wholesale.
This is clearly only true if there is an imbalance between guilt and responsibility. I'd think that a narcissist, or megalomaniac needs to love and accept themselves less. As anyone that is wrong does.
I'm highly skeptical of the idea that it all comes down to self-esteem anyway. It probably does if the goal is just to feel good all the time. Mine though, is to be healthy, and right.
Is that a truism?
Why have you become senselessly critical?
Well, if you want to think about this logically, then let's assume that the goal of every therapy is to increase self-esteem, something that is notoriously low in people with schizophrenia, psychotics, and major depression, barring some bipolar mania. Then, the efficacy of said therapy can only be increased by including the ones closest to you in an open dialogue therapy? Don't you think?
Anyway, I'm deviating, I think.
That would depend on the goal of the therapy, to think about it logically... if one is going to treat low self-esteem, then for sure, but if one is going to treat schizophrenia and psychosis, then unless they are caused by low self-esteem, then clearly no. Obviously no.
Then, how may I ask one treats schizophrenia and psychosis? And what does that even mean, 'to treat it'?
That ultimately doesn't matter to the logic of your suggestion without the entailment that low self-esteem is causal.
I don't fucking know, ask an expert. The topic is about that. My position is that I put my faith in the experts, and am open to new and alternative angles as long as they support their claims with hard data, and not insinuation, wishful thinking, personal investment, or motivated reasoning.
Well, all people have to go about are the symptoms, that's just how the shit works in psychology and psychiatry. If self-esteem is a core issue for people with schizophrenia, psychosis, and major depression, then I think it's worth investing resources in trying to quell all the negative thoughts about having the label of each or in combination; 'schizophrenia, psychosis, and major depression' that are put down on you by a psychiatrist. One them becomes the diagnosis.
I'm don't think that categories are all motivated power games, or completely whimsically constructed, and even if they are, we still gotta live with others, so deal with it.
That seems pretty reckless, don't you think?
Like I said, I'm not the only one that thinks that childhood diagnoses, particularly when not completely clear and undeniable is highly controversial, and may do more damage than good.
Ultimately it was up to her to go or not though, and she didn't want to. Though I also didn't support, or couch my opinions and words about her various homosexual and trans identities either, as just phases. My position was that she indeed, did just have an extremely low self-esteem, and wanted to escape herself, and rebel against convention. So my goal indeed was to give her a lot of support and praise and space, but without any lying or lip biting.
It didn't work... lol. She was just too high maintenance for me, and I didn't feel like it was my responsibility to take all that on, so when she made up with mom, I made her go home. She got to my house with schemes anyway, and was constantly lying, and extremely rebellious, and only filled with resentful confidence, and felt others were dumber than her because she could fool them... just the things she learned from my mom, that I couldn't break... and all the work. Couldn't deal man. Not my problem.
I tried for a year.
None of the groups were worse off at the end of the experiment, but the group "treated" by the lay people felt better than the other two groups.
My guess is that the laypeople just talked to the patients, maybe went for walks with them on the hospital grounds, spent time with them. Maybe ate with them in the hospital cafeteria. They were 'nice' to the patients. If psychiatric hospital staff are not cruel to their patients, they are often not "nice" to them. They keep their clean crisp distance.
People who become psychotic by way of mania (bi-polar) or schizophrenia are likely to recover their sanity through medication and good psychiatric care (talk therapy)--and/or maybe by the passage of time.
I don't have any reason to doubt that the Finnish patients liked the interaction they had, and benefitted from it. But the kind of fast fix that an American insurance company would love, I'm not so sure.
[quote=Linell]Individuals are not there (in any strict sense) before interaction; they are constituted, in important respects, in and through interaction. Intersubjectivity (partial sharedness) comes about on the basis of interactivity:
• Persons, social beings, are partly constituted in/through self?other relations.
• A person (self) can embody ”dialogical” emotions: shame, guilt, pride, complacence, complaisance,
conscience, consciousness, compassion, empathy/sympathy, morality (right/wrong), etc. are all emotions that would be impossible without direct or indirect relations to others (situationally but above all culturally).
• The distinction between individual freedom (at the expense of others ? subordination) and solidarity (actions in others ? best interest) are based on dialogicality and interactivity. Searle (2008) discusses other related notions like the phenomenon of human civilization, and monologisation with the consent of others (e.g. in some democratic organisations).
There are many other issues associated with intersubjectivity. I will mention a few here, and refer to Linell (2013e):
• There are several levels of intersubjectivity, different in degree of awareness and other dimensions. One distinction, with intermediate degrees, concern taken?for?granted (unreflected) intersubjectivity vs. reflected intersubjectivity. Rommetveit (1974: 56; RETH: 81) says about this: “Intersubjectivity has to be taken for granted in order to be achieved.” That is, we must trust that there is some common ground to begin with, if we want to achieve more reflected types of intersubjectivity, e.g. through negotiations or through bringing something into language. This raises the issue of the relation between intersubjectivity and trust: everything that we cannot know for sure but must take for granted or shared (intersubjective). Trust is a phenomenon closely linked to dialogicality; it is at the same time elusive and ubiquitous (Linell & Marková, 2013a, b, and references there).[/quote] from here
I need to read some more, so this is a directed random fragment of fragments. Let me just remark that there seems to be a foundational, unreflective immediacy of intersubjectivity that is prior to language that can be exemplified by mother and child relations that are non-verbal in the first instance. And this bodily immediacy persists in dialogue generally as 'body language', and is only eliminated as a major factor in virtual worlds such as this.
Here, I am my utterances and nothing else, except for the social world of dead white males and occasional others that I sometimes invoke by link or quote. This disembodiment weakens the connectedness of our relations here, and the freedom of expression that confers - at least you cannot interrupt and finish my sentence for me - only serves to amplify our disconnectedness. Nevertheless, there are, I think still, to a limited extent, possibilities of the most abstract coming together in a mutual understanding, of 'being of one mind' about something. This one-mindedness is still embodied, of course, and if circumstances permitted, might result in our clapping each other on the back and heading for the pub.
I guess the same. The way I would put it, that is closer to the intersubjective model, is that being treated humanely is humanising, and being treated as mad is maddening.
By an amazing coincidence (!) this relates to work I did on 'mood' last year. I partlyused the work of Edward Tronick (E Z Tronick in the academic world) who is a lifelong researcher into infant cognition, meaning-making and mood.
I am thinking here of deep mood, of the way one is in the world, as well as of passing mood, the way the world currently moves use and those around us. There seems to be very little work on shared adult mood, because so much literature is focused on the individual, so writing about mood and emotion assumes we are talking about an individual's mood or emotion. To me mood is often a subtle intersubjective set of relations. One sulker, or zealot, or powerful person, or bully or clown, can make their mood permeate a group of people. Moods can feel like patterns in water, with ebbs and flows, undercurrents and stiff breezes.
Anyway regarding infancy Tronick has this to say:
Excellent! It's always reassuring to find that one is not alone in one's fanciful ideas. Ha! I'm almost saying that individuality is madness... Anyway here's an anecdote.
My birth family was typical middle-class English cool, unexpressive, non-touchy-feely; 'not bad' is the highest accolade in our language. I remember, I must have been 4 or 5 yrs, going to my mother, as children do, for a reassuring cuddle. Nothing significant was said, but the cuddle was - it's hard to explain because it wasn't verbal - somehow exaggerated, almost sarcastic. "You're too old for this" was somehow conveyed to me, and I never went back for another. Ever since then, my blood has run cold, like a true Englishman. My traumatic initiation into the solitary cerebral self. I wonder how such a rejecting acceptance would be seen by @Metaphysician Undercover in relation to trust and honesty?
Sorry, can't participate in conversation... Irma done me wrong.
[jumping on plane Friday to Portugal get the hell out of Florida it's way too hot with no AC].
The "I", "me" distinction is based on William James discussion namely ‘I’ (self-as-knower) and ‘Me’ (self-as-known)
Yes, I can't help but feel that as being true in light of intersubjective therapy.
I don't think that this is correct to say that ideas rarely happen in the inner-world. We spend some time talking and we spend some time thinking, but for many of us, we're not doing too much thinking when we're talking. We're all different with respect to our thinking habits, and some are constantly thinking over problems, working out one's own plan, and saying very little. This is the inner-world. There are people, whom for one reason or another, have difficulty in the inter-world, they become shy and retracted, spending much time in the inner-world. It would not be fair to classify these people as mentally ill, just because they produce a vast imaginary world for themselves, some may turn out to be geniuses.
Quoting unenlightened
I like mcdoodle's terms of "inner" and "inter". We could oppose inner-subjectivity with inter-subjectivity, and see how these two are really entwined, and that the way we each approach them varies immensely from person to person. Suppose my mother was spending too much time talking to my older siblings, and I disdained this, feeling a lack of attention. I could shy away from this inter-subjective world, realizing that I could hide things from the others within my inner-subjective world. Knowing things which others do not, holding secrets, gives one a certain position of power. Being younger than the others, I'd enjoy this taste of power. For those who have come to love and cultivate this power, the unity of "one-mindedness" has a completely different role. The appearance of one-mindedness coming from these people is an illusion, created with the motive of deception. Look, we think alike, you can trust me on this (but I'll screw you when the time is right).
Holding secrets from one another is a form of dishonesty. We all do it, some more so then others. After all, there is no moral code which dictates that we must tell each other everything. Some talk more than others, but if it's just blab the talkers could be holding more secrets than the non-talkers.
Quoting unenlightened
We do not know exactly what drives a young child away from the inter-subjective toward the inner-subjective, the reasons for this I think can be infinite. The fact is that it does happen to us all, to an extend, some more than others. I do not think that we can say whether it is something good or bad, moderation is the goal I suppose. But like many aspects of our personalities, we can develop the same trait in a good way or a bad way. I think Plato said something about this, a person's potential can go either way, toward bad or good. An individual's perspective toward the inter-subjective and the inner-subjective, is developed at a very young age, as you say. When we grow through childhood and adolescence, we must learn to cope with what is already there. The coping determines the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What I was hoping to illustrate with my anecdote was that intersubjective communication is - in the beginning at least - nonverbal. And I wanted to ask you because you asked,Quoting Metaphysician Undercover, whether the notion of honesty could apply to my mother's nonverbal communication, and if so, whether it was honest or dishonest?
I'm inclined to think that she did not any more want the intimacy I presumed, and conveyed it by subtly ridiculing me for wanting it, without actually denying me by pushing me away. And I cannot say in this situation, and in so many others, whether this is honest or dishonest, because it is the relationship transforming itself, and in the transformation, both my and my mother's identities are transformed (mine more so). I suppose one could translate this into English as the instruction, "Grow up." where being grown up has a particular social meaning, of physical separation with attendant implications of emotional independence.
I think such emotional independence is an aspiration of modernity at least; Facebook is full of exhortations not to let the bastards grind you down, but to be happy in you private enlightened bubble. And yet one sees even on this most cerebral and disembodied of sites, that the emotional tone of posts communicate themselves such that some threads become frivolous, some fractious, some fairly serious some fairly congenial. As if in each thread one is participating in and contributing to an intersubjective emotional being. Whether it is good or bad to be influenced or uninfluenced by the emotions of others rather depends what those emotions are, and what they are about, but moreover, our agreement or disagreement about goodness and badness is itself a matter of intersubjective emotion.
'Honesty' is interesting, MacIntyre for instance sets much store by it as a virtue, and its virtue is not something I understand.
My equivalent moment to yours about your Mum was when I was being bullied at school at the age of 9 and my Dad found me crying late at night. But he couldn't bring himself to be comforting, and he told me I had to learn to fight back and be a man. Even now, all these years on, this appals me, for I think he was saying, this is who I am, I'm not going to comfort you, I'm going to Tell You The Truth As I See It. (and he knew more about bullying than being bullied)
It's a lack of good emotional education that brought them to this. It seems to me part of the very culture that values propositional knowledge and honesty over-highly, and I speak as one who greatly values propositional knowledge.
Interestingly, its another case where there seems to be no application for 'truth' or 'honesty', because it is a command - 'Be a man' = 'Stop snivelling and learn to fight'. And the same kind of command is hidden in every external declaration of one's nature. Here is a simple slipknot that will suffice to hang any dog with its bad name:
" You're always defiant and argumentative."
"No I'm not."
"See? You're doing it again."
I'm not sure what the Catch number of that is, but there is a hidden command, or at least an unhidden provocation, to be the thing that is being complained of, to the extent that the opposite response, "Yes, I suppose I am." is equally, if not more so, argumentative and defiant.
I think there are too many subtleties and unknown factors to judge the honesty of your mother in that particular situation. As I said, I think that even to hold a secret is most likely to be dishonest. So if she thought that your days of being a baby were through, it would be dishonest for her to hide this from you, and her actions were an honest expression. But we cannot even say that keeping a secret is always being dishonest, because sometimes the situation in which the secret needs to be disclosed does not ever arise. When this is the case, then how can keeping a secret be dishonesty? If the secret is irrelevant to everyone else then there cannot be dishonesty. But if the situation does arise, and the person does not disclose the secret, there is dishonesty. Sometimes, I find that in my shyness I do not say what I should say. Later, I may feel discomfort, a sort of guilt, for not saying what I should have said when the time was right. So I can only interpret this feeling of guilt as being derived from a type of dishonesty which I see in myself.
I believe honesty and deception go far deeper than verbal communication. You can sometimes witness dogs being dishonest with each other, and these actions are probably pervasive in the animal kingdom, perhaps in the actions of hiding food from each other. Dishonesty, I believe, is easier to identify than honesty because it mostly involves hiding something from others. When the hidden thing is disclosed the dishonesty is exposed, and the evidence is often conclusive. But where is the evidence of honesty? How can we know that the other person is not hiding something, when the hider may be just very good at it?
Right. I might have recourse to my stick insect example. The poor stick insect is genetically condemned to, all unknowing, pretend to be s stick. Or a cat is instinctively programmed to stand sideways, raise its hackles, and arch its back under threat in a pretence of being bigger than it is. I remember a schoolfellow who, whenever he was frightened by 'the authorities' broke into a placatory smile, and got into lots of trouble because it was often (mis)interpreted as 'dumb insolence'.
In my mother's case, I never talked to her about the incident, and I very much doubt she was aware of what she did, attached any significance to it, or even remembered it. so my story is all there is of it. But in all these cases, my own feeling is that honesty/dishonesty is not even applicable. Cats, stick insects, the schoolboys, my mother, seem to be 'doing what come naturally'; there is deception perhaps, but no intention to deceive.
Where I find a more agonising grey area, is the notion of self-deception. I can wonder, for example if @McDoodle's father might have been deceiving himself that he was 'doing the right thing' and 'helping his son to grow up' and so on, when in fact he was recoiling from the expression by his son of his own feelings of hurt.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I do understand that shyness can inhibit honest expression, but one could also say that forced expression can cover up honest shyness. So basically you're fucked either way. :D There was this thing a few years ago 'assertiveness training'. It was aimed at women mainly. One of my sisters was into it for a while, and it would have been great if she had actually had anything to assert, but as it was, it became selfish bitch training, I'm afraid.
Anyway, honesty - vitally important but I don't really know what it is. Perhaps we have to say that it is your best effort to respond fully in the moment, in the condition that you're in, as far as you know. And then your second-guesses afterwards are perhaps self insights, or perhaps deceptive self-flagellation, and it will take your best third guess to decide which.
Everyone needs some selfish bitch training. People are deeply mistaken about what is moral, in my view. Or to put it bluntly, their morality is ridiculously egocentric. You should be unthreatening, kind, and helpful. That's what's being moral. Bleed, bite your lip, and don't challenge me, or take care of yourself leaving useless fucking me high and dry!
You must give what it is possible for you to give, and there to be no mention of the means by which one acquires things to help with. So that as long as I am unthreatening, and full of shit kind all the time, I can be the most useless, leech about, and how I take care of myself, and by implication my entire community is never to be brought into question.
These views, vantage points on the issue are clearly seen only from certain real world positions. People that are helping are subject to the demands of kindness, tongue biting, and more and more help. Those being helped are subject of the demands to look at themselves, tell the truth, grow a thick skin, conform to the stereotypes they bemoan and hate because they don't already represent them, as if the people that gain from the social mobility of their possession put not effort in, and were just born that way...
Unfortunately, I don't even think that both sides have a point, I think that one side is just wrong, and harming everyone around them.
I thought about Interventions when I read MU's post. How people who got sucked into a cult, were then abducted, restrained, by those concerned, and set upon by the conscious deconstruction of their belief patterns. A brainwashing or a kind of spiritual gang rape.
The Lapland study suggests that they use drugs as necessary, which was in the minority (30% ?) of the cases. There is a difference between a functional disorder which may be treatable and a physiological disorder which may be only treatable by some regime of medication. Apparently small physiological disorders are not the uncommon, but our brain is plastic enough to wire around them.
The doctors in Lapland have established procedures, which are meant to sort things out from the start. They attempt to position the patient for the best outcome, whether that is in a hospital or not, and they have 30 years experience doing this with apparently very good results. Their methods suggest that people have a strong inclination to participate in solving their own mental problems in cooperation with a group which is not hierarchical structured, but gives them say in their treatment, a group they can trust.
A child identifies with its mother (or surrogate) until approximately 1 year old or perhaps even earlier. I think that the child's physical separation from the mother (she has to get back to work or something similar) generally coincides with the child's separation of itself from the world and its obtainment of self awareness. Where self awareness is thought of as a functional process of consciousness. The child also picks up language around this period, which enable it to identify and differentiate internal and external perceptions. The child learns to associate words with what they signify, and eventually they learn the arbitrary nature of words. I think this learning becomes the basis of a child's value system, where the child's immediate context, the inter subjective roles they learn have a direct impact on the meanings the child associates with its experiences, a process which evolves as the child develops. Perhaps the Laplanders are able to tap into a similar process, in the development of their patients.
The doctors in Lapland are skilled at handling patients who have lost their way mentally, they work with the patient as part of team, in which the patient particulates in the outcome. My guess is that the doctors are able to help their patients by tapping into the power of their combined group effort. They indicate that they have had setbacks, but their 5 year stats were pretty good.
Unlike the cult prisoner, the Laplander's patients either asked for help or a family member of the patient asked for them, Unlike the reasoned arguments of the deprogrammer, the therapists in Lapland seem to be able to bring the patient into their process as an equal participant to create pragmatic new meanings that enable the patient to live a normal life.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/schizophrenia-henry-cockburn-mental-illness-father-son-patrick-art-folkestone-triennial-art-festival-a7940126.html
Maybe this is why deception is easier to identify than honesty, because acting deceptively is often what comes naturally. It is a selfish behaviour which we might be naturally inclined toward. But if honesty is what is conducive to inter-subjectivity, then inter-subjectivity might not really be natural, it might be created artificially. If so, then it is something which could only come into existence through intentional effort.
Quoting unenlightened
Such a self-deception would be one step beyond the intentional act of honesty. If one convinces oneself that X is correct, when it is not, this is self deception. So when the intent is to act honestly in the inter-subjective environment, but the individual is mistaken, then we have this odd sort of self-deceptive situation. The person is not acting deceptively in the natural selfish way, but is trying to act in an honest (inter-subjective) way, without knowing the proper etiquette. The result is this odd form of deception. It is self-deception because one freely chooses to act this way, believing it is the socially acceptable way.
What I think is important here is that inter-subjectivity, which is derived from honesty, must be learned, it does not come naturally. So it will always involve a certain amount of suppressing one's own natural feelings. Mcdoodle's father was suppressing his own natural feelings of sympathy (being natural feelings, they are different from the artificialness of inter-subjectivity), in order to say what he thought was the proper thing to say in the situation (honest inter-subjectivity), but he may have been mistaken in that decision. Notice the different levels. We must always suppress our natural tendencies in order to choose what is right, because the natural tendency may at any time be wrong. But sometimes the natural tendency might already be what is right. So if in the conscious decision making, we are inclined to believe that the natural tendency is always wrong, this would sometimes mislead us into making the wrong choice. Therefore we must respect at least three levels, the natural tendency, the chosen action, and the action which is correct in the inter-subjective environment.
Quoting unenlightened
I agree it is very difficult to say what honesty is, and that was the point in my first post. If staying true to one's natural tendencies was honesty, then quite often acting deceptively would be honesty. So we normally define honesty in relation to how others would want us to act. Honesty is defined by the inter-subjective realm, such that we must make an effort to suppress some natural tendencies in order to be honest. Then what does it mean to be honest in therapy? Should we follow the inter-subjective definition which requires that we suppress some natural feelings, or ought we allow natural feelings to flow freely in therapy? Each would be a somewhat opposing sense of "honesty".
Do you know of Client centred therapy (Rogers) at all?
Congruence here is equivalent to honesty. So if it is the case that you do not in fact have unconditional positive regard for the client, then there is no point in pretending that you do, or trying to have a therapeutic relationship. The equivalent in traditional psycho analysis is that one has to have been analysed to do psychoanalysis, the presumption being that analysis frees one from such conflicts, at least to the extent of being able to lay them aside for a hour.
I would say that hearing voices is a very minor problem, though. I could say that my fingers are taking dictation from a voice in my head, and it would hardly raise an eyebrow, but if I make the trivial mistake of locating this voice outside my body, suddenly, I am dangerously deluded, and suffering from an organic disease. Now suppose, instead of getting in a panic when someone hears trees talk, one interests oneself in what the trees say, then one is focussing on the meaning of one's relationship with that person, rather than the trivial argument about the location of the voice. It is as though someone wants to talk through the agency of a sock puppet to distance themselves from the pain of what they are saying, and the psychiatrist's response is to run about in a panic saying 'socks can't talk, socks can't talk'.
I'm not really familiar with client centred therapy at all. I don't read much psychology. But the honesty which I am referring to is honesty on the part of the client. This I think would be the top priority, and honesty on the part of the therapist would be for the purpose of inspiring honesty in the client. So for example, in your mother/child analogy, honesty by the mother would be for the purpose of culturing honesty in the child. But I don't think we can say carte blanche, that honesty is always the best policy for the therapist. Sometimes the mother sees reason to be dishonest. Bear in mind that I define dishonesty as being secretive in any way. We often act dishonestly when it's for the good of the other. And when the situation is complex, the individual with a higher degree of intelligence concerning the issue will not always be honest with the other. For example, we have to trick the cat to get it into a cage in order to take it to the vet for its own good. When the individual is not capable of understanding the situation it is pointless to try to explain, so it is necessary to be dishonest. Perhaps this occurs sometimes in the medical field.
The deeper question though is the one you alluded to when you said "I don't really know what it is", in reference to honesty. If the intent of the therapist, in being congruent, is to inspire honesty in the client, then we should have some idea of what honesty is. What are you looking for from the client? And as I tried to explain, there are two somewhat contradictory interpretations. One can be true to oneself, which means acting according to one's own inner feelings, or one can be true what one thinks is expected of oneself, by others. The former implies that the person, while being true to oneself, would be selfish, and might be dishonest to others, while the latter allows for self-deception. Which type of honesty do you think that the therapist wants to inspire in the client?
We're always directed. Affected, and affecting, and for this reason I think that our normal mode of cognition, and speech is inherently deceptive, in that it is always aiming, and trying. Making the world, and ourselves out to be this way or that, because of what those things imply, and the stakes in them. I think that honesty has to always be entirely, one thousand percent, completely irrespective of that.
It's like a possession, where what comes from it is outside of all of the ideals, perceptions, and affecting modes of being, and is just what appears. What is genuinely felt, perceived, conceived.
Definitely the former. Part of the ethics of therapy is that the therapist should make clear from the outset, the limits of his support. So one might say, if you tell me of any crime you have committed, or give me reason to think that your own life or that of another is in immediate danger from you, then I must tell the authorities. This is an invitation to deceive the therapist where it is advantageous. "If you want to kill yourself, don't tell me because it is my duty to stop you by force if necessary. If you tell me you're buggering your niece, I'll have to call the cops."
Of course for the competent therapist, being true to oneself is 'congruent' with being true to the client and being dishonest to neither.
I thought I'd leave this here just to indicate that the ideas under discussion are not light years away from the official/scientific understanding of the matter.
Good to see the second-person perspective getting some play in that de Quincey essay. I hope to give it a look sometime.
Meanwhile: I think it's a great idea to focus on one's own comportment in philosophical conversation, as in every activity. My pursuit of mindfulness is informed by encounters with Stoic, Buddhist, and Christian philosophy, for instance. I say the capacity to maintain psychological and emotional poise in a wide range of interpersonal situations is an important component of well-being and personal responsibility. That's one of my motives and aims in conversation: It's an opportunity to practice mindfulness, sincerity, and compassion.
It's also an opportunity to engage other human beings in a sort of shared trance, much like playing music, or dancing, or sparring together.
I'm not sure what's meant by "intersubjectivity", and I'm confused by some of the terminology in the passages you cited.
This one makes good sense to me:
That sort of attunement is a fact of life. It's not limited to parent-child relations, it reaches us everywhere.
We're tuned by the garbage they feed us on television, the angry talking heads gnawing on the same three talking points all day. We're tuned by the voices we encounter in online spaces like this one. The more balance we bring to our interactions, the better off we'll all be for it. These interactions accumulate in collective trends that wash across the whole planet now in waves.
The internet connects us at a distance. Some of us tend to get riled up and belligerent in these online spaces in ways we wouldn't in up-close and personal interactions. It's similar to the way some drivers fly into road rage. It's similar to the way some hurried walkers are frustrated when they're impeded on crowded streets.
Every experience of frustration is an opportunity to practice patience and release. Every confrontation is an opportunity to practice sincerity and compassion.
Every waking moment is an opportunity to practice mindfulness.
That's the sort of trance I prefer to get into with my interlocutors.
Hey Un! Interesting topic.
It comes as no surprise that talking to someone diagnosed with mental illness can and/or does result in effectively curing the problem. Of course, not just any talk will do. I mean, that's clearly supported by the fact that everyone who becomes mentally ill has talked with someone or other countless times before. Mental illness is the result of not having had the right kinds of talks. It's an effect/affect of how one has come to terms with the world. Madness is the utter confusion resulting from one's worldview when it's found sorely lacking in it's ability to make sense of much of anything at all. Of course not all mental illness is equal to madness. However, I do strongly believe that all forms have the same thing in common, a basis of false thought/belief.
It would make perfect sense to me that placing one's mental issues in a communal framework, as a communal problem, would serve to eliminate the problem moreso than framing one's mental issues as one's personal problem to be treated individually. There are several different reasons for that, all of which involve how the individual is affected/effected by how the dialogue itself is being framed. That framework makes all the difference for one who would be otherwise completely unable to change the way that they think/believe, feel, and/or act as a result. The only way to change how one thinks and/or feels about the world and/or themselves requires being able to come to acceptable and different terms with it. One cannot do that alone. One cannot arrive at the need to do that alone. Mental health is a communal problem with a communal origen.
Truth and trust underwrite every bit of this, and the role that they play in thought/belief and language is imperative to understanding the efficacy of talk, and how many become distraught and/or mentally ill.
I want to say quite a bit more, particularly regarding the importance that honesty has in all of this. The way that it has been framed heretofore bears witness to an inadequate criterion for what counts as honesty and/or being honest. It is inextricably entwined with trust and truth within one's worldview, without exception. Here, it is appropriate for me to remove the hat of unapologetic criticism and don the pen of a much more considerate and therefore approachable public assistant. That seems to be the intended spirit underwriting the thread.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
I'm glad this has gotten revived. Just suppose, that we take a really radical, far-out psycho-ceramic view of psycho-ceramics ... entertain it for a moment ...
There is in the first instance, no such thing as the individual mind. One is always 'in' some state or other 'with' others. Mind is responsive sensitivity, and the fundamental unit is the relationship, not the organism. The individual is an epiphenomenon if you like, of the group mind, or perhaps, mind is the product of culture, rather than culture the product of mind.
This is such a radical, unfamiliar way of looking at oneself and at human nature and the whole of philosophy, that I want really to just stop there and see if it will sink in at all, if it begins to make sense of, for example, what seems to be a global Zeitgeist that sweeps us willy-nilly from Socialism to Fascism, from war to war, from atheism to fundamentalism, and so on.
One can see at once from this perspective that personal identity of the form of I am this nationality or this religion, or this race or football club, is a fragmentation of the mind, and also that a lack of truth and trust, is not just harmful to our sanity, it is the very fabric of madness. To be mad is nothing more or less than to be incommunicado, to have reached the point where no communication can be trusted - to have lost contact with the world.
Identity is fragmentation, and dishonesty is insanity. That alone is enough to rock my world.
Trust is of two kinds, the naive, unknowing, at the mercy of kind, and the position of strength, when you know perfectly well what people are like, and how dangerous it is, but do it anyway, and not out of wanting something, or needing something from the other, but for the purposes of facilitating the growth of what is within them which is worthy of trust. This in no way differentiates "good from bad" people, or imagines some wicked and harmful, and others harmless. The only harmless ones are simply incapable.
Isn't this a lie though? We experience ourselves as individuals, with our own individual thoughts, with freedom to think what we want in secret, fundamentally, and much more so than we experience ourselves as a part of a "group mind". The "group mind" has to be created within our individual minds, we have to convince ourselves that we are part of such a thing, and such a convincing can be rejected as self-deception by a person without good social skills. Being such a "part" requires having particular necessary social skills, and one lacking in these will reject as a lie, the idea that the relationship is more fundamental than the organism.
Quoting unenlightened
So, how do you expect that we can build a relationship of honesty from a premise which will be seen by the antisocial person as a lie to begin with? This will only drive the antisocials away, making them madder.
It seems to me, that I am always totally alone in my mind, because everyone else is outside it. I've learned to accept the gap, and make efforts to understand others. But this doesn't let the others into my mind, it just allows me to maintain relationships.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well some people hear voices, and some people think they are alone. "We experience ourselves as individuals" Is this not performative contradiction? Who is this 'we' that is being given voice to? I am asking you in good faith to at least imagine the implications of it not being a lie, one of which is that the experience of individuality is an hallucination - that what we assume to be normal is itself a madness. Then one has an explanation as to why a social creature spends so much time organising conflict.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, we have been taught it all our lives; the gap is central and essential to capitalism, to competition, to the whole of society for thousands of years. You have been taught that it cannot be questioned. But how do you maintain relationships? Do they not depend on what is beyond the gap? I'm asking a lot here, and I don't have that much of an argument, but only an experiment - to entertain the notion and see where it leads.
This is the way I would frame it. Are all of your thoughts and feelings unique and original to you (if they were they would be inexpressible)? Has no one else ever had those thoughts or feelings? Based in a beastly discernment, having been in that position, understanding the temperaments, feelings, and cultural artifacts that make up your thoughts, you don't think that it is possible for someone to have the experience and empathetic prowess to discern the contents of your mind? Private suggests that they are no where else to be seen, but if they have been seen in a different place before, could they not be recognized again?
There are various levels of experience, intelligence, discernment and self-awareness, as well as biology temperament, circumstance, education which implies that as long as the contents of your mind exist anywhere at all outside of your mind as well, sometimes occurring in different minds, in different places, and have anything to do with your physical circumstances, it is possible to correlate your thoughts to those circumstances.
"We" here refers to a generalization. I know myself as an individual, so I, believing that others are like me, think that others know themselves as individuals. Perhaps I am wrong, and others do not. If so, then this leaves me as different from others. Doesn't that just reinforce my position that I am an individual, other from others? How do I get out of this trap?
Quoting unenlightened
Sure, I am willing to entertain this as a possibility. My individuality is an hallucination. But what can you give me to help me accept this. Others have said that this is a beneficial way of looking at reality, it would be beneficial to think of myself as part of a whole. Why should I give up on the way that things appear to me, for the sake of what others say will be beneficial?
By the way, I really don't see the relationship between seeing oneself as an individual, and the desire to organize conflict. I see organized conflict as the product of things like nationalism, in which individuals see their group, "us" as being opposed to the thoughts and expressions of another group, "them". Organized conflict is not the result of personal differences.
Ok, let me try an analogy. Left Hand cooperates with his brother Right Hand to bang a nail into a post to hang Stomach's tucker bag out of reach of the ants while Brain and Eyes go off duty for a few hours. Unfortunately, Right Hand accidentally hits Left Hand's thumb with the hammer. Fortunately, Left Hand and Right Hand do not suffer from the illusion of separate identity, and therefore no fight between them ensues. If you have ever hit your thumb with a hammer, this is a familiar and true story.
If my limbs fail to cooperate and coordinate to any great degree, then I have an illness - parkinson's, perhaps, or motor neurone disease. If the fingers of my left hand went to war with the fingers of my right hand, it would be a body gone mad. "We are the Left Hand, Death to the Right Hand digits." The group arises because there are individuals, and groups then conflict. And the claim is that the individual is the real. But What is the reality of it? Is my identity more real than the identity of my left hand?
I think that every thought is unique, just like every snowflake, and every person is unique. I have never had the same thought twice, (I've experienced deja vu but this is similarity, not the same thought or feeling), so why should I think that someone else has had the same thought as me?
Quoting Wosret
I see no reason to believe that the same thought has been in a different place before, How would it get there?
So now you want to make it a conflict of right versus left? You know that such strife exists. But I don't see this as right hand against the left, or one person against another, I see it as one ideology against another. So I don't think your analogy of the right hand versus the left hand works. You need to consider competing ideas instead of competing physical parts of the body. Say that a person wants to do X, and also wants to do Y, but X and Y exclude each other mutually. Now we have an analogy for competing ideologies, competing ideas. How would the person decide which is the better option, X or Y? The person would use reason.
Let's say some people claim A as the better ideology, and others claim B, just like part of me wants to do X, while the other part wants to do Y. It is not really the case that "part" of me wants to do Y, and "part" wants to do X, all of me wants to do X and all of me wants to do Y, but it is impossible to do both. So why is it that part of society wants X ideology, and part wants Y ideology? If I cannot divide myself in this way, how is it that a society can be divided in this way?
How is it that conflicting ideologies can effectively divide societies into parts, whereby they will attack each other, but conflicting ideas within my mind cannot divide me into parts? How is it that I have this very strong unity within myself, which society does not have? This unity which makes up society is deficient compared to the unity which makes up myself, because it will allow different parts with competing ideas to attack each other, but my mind will always use reason to work out such problems without resorting to the destruction of myself. If I were to fall to this level, then clearly I would be ill, but that supposed unity of society is always at this level. Why would I accept this unity of society as a higher unity than the unity of myself?
Yes, that is the question, how come the unity of self?
But when you ask "Why would I accept this unity of society as a higher unity than the unity of myself?" your reason, which you say is the governing factor, has led you astray. The 'I' that is not accepting the unity of society is like the hand that refuses to accept the unity of the body. 'Why should I work with that bloodthirsty hammer-wielding right hand?'
Given the boundary of self, self-centred behaviour is rational behaviour. But I have removed the given, and suggested it is an hallucination, as the voices some folk hear are said to be hallucinations. So far, your reason has come up with the equivalent of 'why should I doubt the voices?' and 'the voices are very strong'.
Just to point out, unity of self isn't boxed off into conceptual parts like the right and left hand, but is a measure of motor unit recruitment, and the contralateral motor cortex also plays a big role in distinguishing self from other. There is no unity of self without unity of other.
https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/22/12/2894/306843/Distinguishing-Self-and-Other-in-Joint-Action
Snow flakes aren't unique and original either, that's also a myth, just like people their formation is correlated to their physical circumstances.
http://thescienceexplorer.com/nature/snowflakes-are-not-unique-we-thought
If we can't be of one mind, and think the same thing, then how can we possibly communicate?
Don't give me any of that BS. The article you referred me to very clearly states that at the molecular level it is true that snowflakes are unique. Just because they can class them into a number of different types, just like someone could class human beings into a number of different types, this doesn't mean that they are not all unique. Classing things into different types for the purpose of saying that each is not unique, is the argument of a sick mind which propagates racism.
Quoting unenlightened
So you're telling me that I should listen to the reason of others rather than my own reasoning. I can see how that might be good in some instances, but bad in other instances. How should I distinguish between these two? And if the others keep feeding me BS like Wosret just did, then why shouldn't I tune out those other voices altogether, and trust only my internal voice, the one true voice which I know never has the motivation to deceive me?
Quoting Wosret
Huh? Communication is by definition between individuals, communion, a sharing of ideas. If the separation between individuals was removed, making them one, there would be no such thing as communication, no need to share ideas because my ideas would be yours.
You seem to be forgetting the fact that to have numerous people thinking about the same thing, requires effort on the part of those people. Without that intentional effort, people will think about all sorts of random things. Do you really believe that people just naturally all think the same thing, being lead (or mislead) by whatever they hear, without putting any effort into deciding what they ought and ought not believe?
I see this as a big problem with social media. Someone can post to a massive public, some random, sick, and ill-conceived thought, and instead of getting shunned by the people around them, or told to shut up and act properly, as would happen if the person spoke up in a small group of people, that posting can find acceptance and following. Amongst the massive number of people who have access to it, a small percentage will like it. Out of a huge number of people, there will always be a small percentage of people who will accept something, and follow it without giving thought to that decision, just randomly deciding, that's something different, it's an idea I can get involved in.
So in a society such as ours, where there is an unbelievable amount of information coming from all different types of groups and individuals, with all sorts of motivations, it is more essential now, than ever before, to be trained in our own powers of decision making. It is necessary to use our own inner voice more than ever before in the past. So instead of denying the inner voice we need to learn how to bring it out, cultivate it, and put it to work where it is desperately needed.
Quoting unenlightened
The question is, which voices are the most trustworthy, the ones coming at me from outside, which I have little or no understanding of their motivations, or the ones coming from within, which I have at least some understanding of their motivations. The issue of whether or not the voices are illusions, delusions, or hallucinations is irrelevant, because the voices are there regardless, and cannot be ignored based on some random determination of "hallucination". The issue is the motivations behind the voices, because that is what gives them meaning, intent, what is meant by those voices. If the motivations can be determined, they can be judged. If the motivations cannot be determined, then it may be wise to ignore them as potentially misleading.
Well... obviously snow flakes, nor people are literally identical, like superman and Clark Kent are. For them to be precisely identical, none of their attributes can vary, and nothing that can be said of one, cannot be said of the other, including temporal and spacial location. That doesn't mean that a clone isn't pretty much the same, without being literally identical, as they share many many attributes, with less difference than sameness.
Whole picture, and discrete details are two ways of looking at things, blurring the individual parts into a whole, or zeroing in on the discrete details, which themselves can be further broken up into discrete parts, that can be called a unity, at different levels of analysis. Calling one more true or real just demonstrates a lopsided, or one sided view of things, in my view.
Responding to me that there could be no communication either if we were literally identical, and literally the exact same person is not to actually respond to anything I've said. Saying that your thoughts are unique, and only individual to you, and no one else, and me asking you then how it is that communication is possible is to respond to what you've said. You can't have both, whereas I don't propose the position you espouse in your objection, you do propose the one I suggest in mine.
No, not at all. I'm inviting you to question an assumption and apply your reasoning, which I assume is not different from anyone else's reasoning.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I am an external voice, talking to your internal voice, and saying that seeing external and internal as separate is a deep mistake. I cannot give you a reason to listen, unless you listen.
If you use the word "same", then I expect that you mean same. If you want to say that people have similar thoughts, then say that they have similar thoughts, don't say that they have the same thoughts.
Quoting Wosret
The same goes for the word "unity'. If you say that people fighting amongst themselves are unified, united, as a unit, or a unity, then I have no idea of what you mean by "unity", which to me means undivided.
Quoting Wosret
You said, that unless we have the same thoughts, communication would be impossible. I said that if we had the same thoughts communication would not be necessary. One, or both of us, misunderstand what "communication", or "same thought" means.
Quoting Wosret
Communication is always incomplete, it lacks perfection, that's why there is different interpretations of the same spoken words. That's how it is possible that there is communication without different individuals having the same thoughts. Communication is an imperfect thing. If communication were perfect, without doubt or misunderstanding, then communication would imply the same thoughts in different people. Communication is not perfect though.
Judging by the way you use words like "same" and "unity", and the way that I understand these words, it is very obvious that communication is far from perfect.
Quoting unenlightened
I'll listen, but as I said, unless I can determine your motivation in telling me this, I cannot trust you. I perceive a huge difference between internal and external. So you telling me that this is a deep mistake is apprehended by me with great suspicion, I have no idea what you are up to. And so I will ignore your plea, as an unreasonable external voice, asking me to join it in who knows what kind of adventure. That is, until you demonstrate your motivation, what kind of adventure are you taking me on? I suggest you proceed in making your point, then perhaps I can judge your motivation.
Quoting unenlightened
Back to this point. How do you convince the person who suffers from hallucination, that what they experience is hallucination? I think that this requires a clear understanding, and agreement between both parties, as to what exactly constitutes an hallucination.
.
I did mean "same", same doesn't mean completely absolutely identical, nothing is even self-same under the notion of completely in every imaginable way identical, no one ever means that.
When someone tells you that they have the same shirt, it doesn't mean "hey, that's my shirt!"
I also said plainly that communication is unnecessary if I've already seen the types of thoughts, and know the circumstances in which they arise, and that's why you aren't alone in your own mind. Remember how I began with that?
I am not a snake oil salesman. I am saying what I think is true, and my motivation is that the truth is liberating. I do not want or need your trust, but I am asking you to engage that reasoning you go on about.
" I perceive a huge difference between internal and external." Ok, and here is an external (to you) voice, (but internal to me), saying that you are misperceiving. But here already is some evidence; we assume, we agree, that my voice is internal to me and external to you, and your voice, vice versa. What then is this huge difference? Externality is internality, seen from elsewhere. It seems a huge difference because it is a matter of perspective, but it is no difference at all; certainly not one to bear the weight of total trust on one side and total paranoia on the other that you seem to place upon it with no justification I can see.
This is a philosophy forum, and there is such a thing as the law of identity. It is fundamental to logical proceedings. If you were using "same" in a casual way, such as the way that someone might say that they have the same shirt as another, then you should have indicated this. Now that you have indicated this, I don't see that you have the grounds for any logical argument. You say that some people have similar thoughts, just like some people have similar shirts and similar cars, and they call them the same but you acknowledge that they aren't really the same thoughts. according to any principled law of identity. So I must conclude that you have no argument.
Quoting unenlightened
You are a different person from me, and we have different interests.
Quoting unenlightened
I am willing to accept this. You believe that what you say is true, and you are motivated by what you believe is the truth. And perhaps, believing this is liberating for you. But I don't see how submitting my mind to your beliefs, would be liberating for me. What is liberating for me is to believe in my own determinations of the truth, just like it is liberating for you to believe in what you have determined as the truth.
See, you have a way of turning the table on me, such that you now describe "liberating" as the exact opposite of how I understand "liberating". To be liberated means to be freed from such social conventions, so I can only see your claim that to be tied to social conventions is liberating, as an attempt at deception.
Quoting unenlightened
I don't think that you quite understand the relationship between externality and internality. Imagine that a person is a point in space. Within that point is the person's internal private thoughts. Outside that point is what is external. External to the person is another person, another spatial point, with a private, internal aspect. Person A can view person B, through the external, and communicate through the external. But for person A to get to person B's internal, person A must respect the fact that this is the internal of person B. Therefore to think of person B's internal as the external of person A is false it is really the internal of person B.
All things have an internal and an external. When we describe the internal of one thing as the external of another thing, rather than respecting its true nature as the internal of that thing, we make a grave ontological mistake.
Your voice is external to me, but it is external to you as well. Your thoughts are internal to you, but they are also internal to me as well, because I have respect for the difference between internal and external, and I understand your thoughts as being internal to you. You apparently have no respect for this difference.
Quoting unenlightened
As I said, I will listen, because I'm interested to understand your motivation. Although you say that your motivation is truth, and liberation, I find it impossible to believe that at this point.
Well if my thoughts are internal to you, then, ... no I'm not going there. I have to shrug and say never mind at this point.
There's something clearly right about this.
I wouldn't go so far as to say there's no such thing as an individual mind. I'd rather say... no human mind is independent of other minds. The human organism as we know it is dependent on care in its early years. The provision of care at the outset transmits culture and informs the individual mind, and we may characterize this as a sort of attunement that persists in some way even if the more fully developed human animal finds some way to separate itself from all other traces of humanity.
The remote possibility of that sort of isolation aside, ongoing interaction with other human beings and other traces of human culture continue the process of attunement. More generally, the activity of minds in the medium of culture involves attunement with the whole world as it appears to us in experience....
I agree. Also, the relationship between individual, environment, and group forms the basis of a continuous, circular, process of communication which produces cultural development.
Each thing has its own internal. The internal of you is not the same as the internal of me. However, I agree that there is likely a way by which we are united through the internal. So we may have grounds for agreement. But I'll maintain that being united through the internal is completely different from being united through the external (by spoken word etc.), as a priori is different from a posteriori.
So we need to dismiss reference to the external (communications etc.) when speaking about this unity. The unity you speak of is not the result of communication and such things, but prior to them, and perhaps the cause of them. We are united from within and it is our claims of external properties which divide us. Therefore an hallucination is not of the internal, an hallucination is of the external.
This is definitely taking it to an extreme. However, there's quite a bit to be gleaned from an examination of extremes, I think.
I'll mention, but only briefly elaborate upon something that I think rightfully applies to many a philosophical pursuit, this one notwithstanding. Dichotomies are popular and easy to construct, particularly with the notion of true/false being at the root of our thought/belief system. However, I've come to learn and/or find that frameworks based upon most dichotomies are found sorely lacking. So, with that in mind, I suspect that when it comes to the mind, there are three distinct categories of content with regard to the origen thereof. In terms of existential contingency:Individual; societal; both.
That said, what intrigues me regarding this thread is the effect/affect that this particular 'method' of therapy has upon those folk who otherwise had found themselves unable to cope.
Indeed. There is so much power packed within a worldview. If that worldview is shared by an overwhelming majority, then we have common goals powerfully packed by the multitude. That's key, on my view. Common goals. Common beliefs. Common ethics/morality. A community of people working together for what's in the best interest of the community. In the case you're examining it's the community writ large. I am my brothers keeper. Genuine vested interested in the group. Teamwork. What's good for you is good for me. The measure of the categorical imperative. Etc.
Interesting how that notion of teamwork, and all for one, is used by and in large in American society, shamefully in many(perhaps most) instances.
If we work from the notion of a collective thought/belief system, a collective mind, then yes; breaking away from the collective would amount to fragmentation. I wouldn't say that dishonesty is insanity, but I catch your drift.
That is the baseline which serves to filter our experiences throughout our life in acceptable understandable terms. When life no longer makes sense by viewing it through this filter, we either come to different terms or we go mad.
Trust and truth is at the core, for during language acquisition - during this initial worldview being formed - there is no baseline from which one can doubt that which is being learned/taught.
That is true of everyone regardless of individual particulars.
I think this is an almost but not quite response. I have a goal, and you have a goal and if we have a common goal then we have a team. It still starts from the individual as the atom from which in aggregate, society emerges. But I am suggesting that it is the individual that emerges from society, goals that emerge from relationship.
Thus there are only 'I's in 'team'. To put it another way, politics is a manifestation of the fragmentation of society, which is the fragmentation of the mind. No wonder it is the most competitive, most individualistic, most divided countries that idealise teamwork, patriotism, and so on.
However, I do not want to argue for that position so much, at least not here and now.
How's that for a change?
X-)
That said, the portion of my earlier reply was meant to elaborate upon the zeitgeist portion of yours. The bit about how a society gets to fascism from socialism. It's been called 'hive mentality' by some. Not everyone is capable of thinking for themselves...
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I want to attempt to ascertain, determine, and/or set out what exactly an individual adopts from the collective, particularly with regard to self-worth, self-value, self-awareness, etc. It seems to me that that would be a good method for working towards your aim, as well as perhaps helping to explain some of the reasons why that particular style of therapy is and/or would be so effective/affective.
Is that in line with what you had in mind(pardon the pun)?
Un has quite openly set out the course. The odd thing, to me at least, is the depth of Meta's resistance. It's as if entertaining the notion that an individual could be a product of the collective rather than the other way around has struck very deep dis-chord. I personally find no reason at all in this thread to question Un's goodwill. There is most certainly no evidence of ill-will. I mean, he found a study which flipped the very idea of an individual's personal issue(s) on it's head. The therapists framed the issue as a societal one, and not a personal one, and that - for whatever reason - seems to be an operative element of the success of the therapy. Thus...
Un's reasoning for entertaining the notion on a deeper philosophical level is obvious enough to those who presuppose the sincerity of his speech. That is the default 'position', by the way.
On the one hand, Meta holds on to his own notion regarding what counts as his being an individual, with unique thought and belief and mental ongoings all the while citing one ancient thought/belief or another as justification for his unshakable certainty regarding his own position on the relationship between individual and society. On the other hand, Meta claims that these thoughts, beliefs, and statements thereof are not the same thoughts, beliefs, and meanings(?) as anyone else. In fact, s/he made the very strong assertion during an exchange with Wosret that s/he could not have the same thought as anyone else, or even have the same thought him/herself.
Heraclitus is a part of the collective mind, if by that we mean thought/belief andor statements thereof that transcend individual human life. I put it to the reader that Meta has shown few, if any, original thought/belief. Parroting another's ancient argument or extrapolating upon it without overt mention doesn't count as a private mental ongoing, unless that which has been made public for centuries counts as being private...
Meaningless nonsense.
Collectively, we've found that such strictly applied narrow definitions are utterly untenable. Using the word "same" in that strict way would require either a complete absence of the attribution of meaning(which renders the very terms that constitute the argument utterly meaningless), or neglecting to take proper account of how words become meaningful. Neither is acceptable.
Where's the individual at in this historical regurgitation of long-since spoiled thought/belief?
Forgive me, but I want to jump quite hard on that 'not everyone'. There can be no elitism to this, no path to originality or individuality, no hierarchy of understanding. There is the herd, and there are stray sheep, perhaps, but the strays are not more autonomous merely disconnected. For example, the leaders like Trump that embody the rage and frustration of 'the herd' embody also the rage and frustration of 'we independent minded socialists'; it's just an inversion of the projection. The war on terror and the terrorising of warmongers are the same thing.
What I want to avoid, and for us all to avoid, is any suggestion in this discussion that 'I' or 'we' speak (for) the collective mind. Imagine one neurone claiming to have 'the answer'.
When members of a 'primitive' tribe visit the West, one of the things they find hardest to understand is how we can, in so much abundance wealth and power, abide that our brothers are homeless and hungry on our streets. To them it looks like an untended wound. To the disconnected individual it is not even apparent that this untended wound is the price of self regard.
My resistance is simple defence. That person, unenlightened, attacked the creative function of all individual human minds, claiming the mind is a "responsive sensitivity". It was then insinuated that as an individual person, I am not real, I am an hallucination. It is not a selfishness which I express, because defence is concerned with the motives of the attacker, not the self which is being defended.
Quoting creativesoul
Now you have attacked me personally, with the charge of plagiarism. If you have any reason whatsoever to believe that anything which I wrote in this thread has already been said by another person before me, then show me, get right to it and produce your evidence, in the form of a quote please, with reference.
No problem. I didn't suggest anything of the sort Un.
The analogy is a gross oversimplification. Humans are not equivalent to neurons in the way that we need be if this analogy is to be appropriately employed as a means to make a point about what we, as individuals, can or cannot know about the notion of a collective mind.
Again I think/believe that I understand what you're getting at, or at least what we're all suppose to be trying to get at in this discussion. However, this bit about suggesting that 'I' or 'we' speak (for) the collective mind seems to be headed in the direction of setting the collective mind outside the boundaries of the individual's knowledge capability. I mean, I'm reminded of Kant's Noumenon, or the unknown realm. If that is what you have in mind with regard to the collective mind, then it serves only as an untenable negative limit on our discourse, an unnecessarily self-imposed full-stop in this endeavor none-the-less.
Are you suggesting that knowing anything at all about the collective mind is not possible simply because we're but one part of it? Tell me that I've misattributed meaning somewhere along the line and thus misunderstood you.
Yes. It seems to me that there are a number of reasons for the discrepancy, including but certainly not limited to; population size, the size of the area/country, technological advances, and more than all else - moral thought/belief. Seems to me that from a methodological naturalist bent, the 'primitive' people, particularly those in smaller groups, have much more to lose on a personal level by virtue of another member of the group suffering. Co-dependence between trustworthy people is not a bad thing. I would strongly assert that it is utterly imperative to the survival of such groups and thus quite possibly everyone in it.
What if there was no attack? Then what?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That's just plain false.
Who needs evidence when good old-fashioned common sense does the trick just fine?
Think about it a minute Meta...
Did you invent the strict notion of "same" and/or "sameness" that you employed earlier when talking to Wosret? Seemed like it was based upon Heraclitus' bit about not stepping into the same river twice. What about the law of identity, did you invent that? Did you come up with that all by yourself, or does ancient Greek thought/belief underpin your writing?
I'm trying to show you the obvious while developing the topic.
There's something very very odd about one using language that is not of his/her own creation to claim that everything that they think, believe, mean, and/or write is entirely of their own and no one else has ever thought, believed, meant, and/or written the same thing...
That's odd, if course, because the author did not invent the language. The author has learned how to talk about him/herself as an individual solely by virtue of what those(and lots of other) words meant long before the author learned how to use them...
I didn't say anything about a river, we were talking about thoughts. That's a category difference and you're making a category mistake with your accusation.
Quoting creativesoul
There's nothing odd there. The creative person uses the material available to create something new. The creation is in the form. We make patterns. Meaning is not in the words, it is in the way that the words are used, context. A new form is a new object. So despite the fact that the subject matter, the content, might be as old as the hills, new form implies necessarily, new thought.
The issue is the question of priority. If we cannot speak other than what was spoken before, then there will never be anything new said, and we are faced with infinite regress. If it is true that we speak something new, then we must account for this newness within our thoughts. This is our individuality. To deny this individuality is to force us into the absurdity of infinite regress, with the proposition that anything which has ever been said has already been said before that.
Telling people, that they ought to conform, by following accepted conventions is one thing. But telling people that they have no choice but to conform, because they are a product of their environment is the determinist lie. I believe that the indiscriminate use of the determinist lie, which is proposed in this thread, does more harm than good.
Well I do, but only in the sense that I would put the world outside those boundaries. One can know a person very well, but it does not entitle one to speak for them.
Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world
The heart has it's beaches, it's homeland and thoughts of it's own
Wake now, discover that you are the song that the morning brings
But the heart has it's seasons, it's evenings and songs of it's own…
Another analogy - it's all analogy, trying to model of the world as a bunch of words. Thus far am I Kantian, that i acknowledge the limits of language and of thought. But there is no limit to participation.
Quoting creativesoul
It is a myth that smaller groups have more to lose, we all have our whole skin in the game, and we will all be destroyed by the people, the feelings, the consciousness that we reject. Co-dependence is the reality of individuated beings, and independence is the dangerous fantasy.
Quoting creativesoul
From my point of view, I am presenting some ancient but somewhat neglected ideas in the garb of modern speech; an image of man's place in the world. such an image can only be a threat to another image, that lays claim to reality; a claim that is attacked by the mere naming of it as an image.
[quote=Robert Graves]He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.
He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images,
Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.
Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact,
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.
When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.
He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.
He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.[/quote]
[quote]I asked:
Did you invent the strict notion of "same" and/or "sameness" that you employed earlier when talking to Wosret? Seemed like it was based upon Heraclitus' bit about not stepping into the same river twice. What about the law of identity, did you invent that? Did you come up with that all by yourself, or does ancient Greek thought/belief underpin your writing?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Offering an answer that doesn't address the substance of the questions is not acceptable. Misusing and/or abusing the historical notion of category mistake simply compounds the problems. You alone do not determine what counts as a category mistake.
You need not talk about a river to employ and/or be influenced by Heraclitus. I have not charged you with plagiarism. I'm charging you with neglecting to accept the fact that much of the language we all use was invented and had well-established meaning long before we acquired it. The prima facie evidence to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt was your own writing.
You asserted that all your thought/belief was original to your own individual and private mental ongoings. In doing so, you employed the key term "same" in a well known historical manner as a means of justifying your assertions that no one, not even you, can have the same thought. That is precisely how Heraclitus used the term. You employed the term "same" in the well known historical sense.
I simply pointed it out.
What I said directly above is true. Your belief isn't necessary. The reader, should s/he be unfamiliar with Heraclitus, can quickly research him and with quick read can ascertain for themselves - all by themselves - that you have indeed employed the term "same" in the well known historical sense.
Your awareness of that isn't necessary. However, ignorance would be the only condition under which your participation would ring honest/sincere. If you already knew, then you're not arguing in good faith.
Now, since you've made it a point to place others here under suspicion...
Are you denying using the term "same" in a manner consistent with ancient Greek thought/belief?
Are you saying that you are completely unaware of Heraclitus, and his notions of "same" and the flux as it pertains to his bit about stepping into the same river twice? Are you saying that you're not aware of and/or familiar with any of the other ancient Greek thought, such as the law of identity?
On my view the notion of codependence becomes quite a bit more nuanced when comparing the effect/affect that one individual's suffering has upon the group at large.
I think that we largely agree Un.
You've taken one end of the 'spectrum'. Meta has taken the other. I'm acknowledging some of each and more by also acknowledging neither/both.
Oh, so being influenced by someone is what you count as having the same thoughts as that person. Get real.
Quoting creativesoul
I am not asserting that all my thoughts and beliefs are original to myself, I am asserting that I have original thoughts, and therefore I have private mental ongoings. It doesn't require that all my thoughts are original to conclude that I have private mental ongoings, all that is required is that I have some originality.
The point is that unenlightened denied the reality of individuality, suggesting that it is an hallucination, that the belief in it is an illness, or something like that. I am not denying the reality of inter-subjectivity, communion, what we call "society", I am questioning the motives in giving higher priority to this perceived unity, over the perceived unity of the individual.
It appears to me like the unity of community cannot be given priority without denying the reality of the individual, whereas if the individual is given priority, then the individual may have respect for the community as well.
This is all related to the way that we conceive of the relationship between the parts and the whole. To say that something is a "part" is to imply necessarily that there is something, a whole, which the part participates in. The part cannot exist as an individual because by definition it partakes in the whole. To give the part individual existence is to divide the whole, and say that the part is no longer a part, it is an individual. So this perspective, which gives priority to the whole, in this way, denies the possibility of the individual existence of the thing which is called "the part", simply by designating it as a "part"..
From my perspective, the individual is given existence as a whole, and therefore is not necessarily a part of anything. But from within the individual, there comes the desire to be a part of a whole. The whole, which is the inter-subjective community, has real existence within the mind of the individual, as that which is wanted, but it does not have physical existence, as that which is actual, like the unity of the individual has. So my perspective allows that both unities are real unities, one being within the mind, as a desired end, unlike unenlightened's proposed perspective which renders one of the unities within the mind, an hallucination, the result of illness. So in reality, unenlightened's perspective is the illness because it renders one of the two types of real unities as unreal.
That's not what I said.
You employed the key term "same" in a well known historical manner as a means of justifying your assertions that no one, not even you, can have the same thought. That is precisely how Heraclitus used the term. You employed the term "same" in the well known historical sense.
I simply pointed it out.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That I would agree with. The earlier bit about no one, not even yourself, having the same thought was rubbish...
In opposition to this stands Levinas, who recognized the radical difference of alterity, how the Other, in a event, surprises us, or allude to there being something that is not of our comprehension or ability to assimilate into the Same. There's a horror in the face of the Other than remains Other (and not simply an other that can be assimilated into ourselves).
Really, it's this mysterious approach of the enigma that makes it patently clear that we are not the only ones who exist and that there is most certainly Others. idk is this what this discussion is about?
Rather I want to question where the idea of self, and the idea of interiority come from. Once they are given, solipsism becomes possible, the other becomes possible, morality/immorality becomes possible.
How (and why) does one come to draw the boundaries of self, so as to separate self from world? It seems to me to be just as mysterious as the drawing of national boundaries. One side of the river is self, and the other side is foreign, but if you follow the river back to its source, there is no division.
It seems to make sense to say that the world is alive; not that it is nothing but life, but there is life in the world that is the world's life. So there is awareness that is the world's awareness. So from that source, how do you and I arrive at this downstream position of radical separation? Everyone wants to say that the source is imaginary, and the boundaries are real. Everyone except me.
Suppose this algorithmic neuro-babble has some validity; that the nature of consciousness develops in historical time. Then there is strong evidence that the social mind is prior to the individual mind which emerges from it. And it turns out I'm not the only one after all.
The problem is that interiority and externality necessarily arise together. They are conceptual only, and both rely on each other. Like positive and negative, they are just opposites.
Quoting unenlightened
So there is no real boundary between interior and exterior as they are both inherently tied together within understanding, as opposing directions. One is not separated from the other, they are tied together in conception. But as two directions, up and down, toward the positive, or toward the negative, hotter or colder, they are very real. Therefore we can look toward the external, or toward the internal, and these are very real directions, without any real boundary between the internal and the external. They are just principles of orientation.
We can say that the river has a beginning and the river has an end, but the only boundary between these two is the river itself. Now the river is a real boundary. It is not the boundary between the two sides, it is the boundary between the beginning and the end, just like the self is a real boundary. It is the boundary between the internal and the external. There is no boundary between self and other, the self is the boundary, the boundary between internal and external. Therefore the boundary is not real unless the subject, as self, is real, because the boundary is completely subjective, arbitrarily produced by the subject. The real boundary is not between self and other, as the self is the real boundary between the internal unknowns and the external unknowns. Remove the subject, and there is no boundary, no internal, no external, no beginning nor ending. And as much as these opposing terms are imaginary, without the individual imagining them, there is nothing without them.
We can say it, but does it mean anything? I would; rather say that the beginning and end of things are their boundaries rather than that things are the boundaries of their beginning and end. It just sounds less like nonsense.
Perhaps it sounds like nonsense, but you are the one suggesting that drawing boundaries is not a sensible way to proceed. So now saying that the boundaries of a thing are the beginning and ending of the thing is not compatible with what you have proposed.
You propose that boundaries are not real. I've shown you how to conceive of this, and that is to make the boundary purely subjective. This means that the boundary is the property of the subject, the subject is the boundary. And this is consistent with what you say, that the subject is not real, and that boundaries are not real. There is nothing here to prevent us from saying that the subject is a boundary. We still have a problem though, because now nothing is real, as everything is incomprehensible without some sort of boundaries. So you need a principle whereby a subject, a boundary, or both, can be real.
How would you characterize the relation between "individual" and "group"? Is this just a way of speaking about the relations of various individuals in various groupings, associations, communities?
Is the "group" something more than a collection?
I'm apprehensive because it could be naive of me to tell you this but I'm a little more comfortable because of anonymity. I have a history of mental illness and I've been told I've had psychotic episodes. I am diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic and subjected to compulsory medication. Trying to ruminate. Having read some of this thread I might be willing to talk if you have any questions?
I think what Heidegger is describing is also more basic than the below Bakhtin quote since before we can adapt our actions to those of others (consciously I assume), we already are, as dasman, an other to ourselves.
Yeah I think it's just different levels of phenomenological descriptions.
Which is exactly what I've been getting at in the thread, that it is something one is told, has to be told, as one has to be told everything about oneself - to some extent. The narrative self is a community affair.
Quoting bloodninja
I'm not the expert on Heidegger, and I may have misunderstood, but he seems to be trying to describe a consciousness apart from human relations, and that to me is like trying to describe a pair of legs walking apart from the rest of the body. My thinking is that the self is the introjected other, and without the other, there would be no distinction of self and world at all.
First let me say that I am glad you shared and I hope you find this a safe place to do so, for without sharing there is no way to know one another.
I quoted you above because it made me wonder if you are trying to ruminate or trying to stop ruminating. I am the opposite in that without medication I have a great deal of difficulty in not ruminating. I have learned skills and tools to deal with through CBT Cognitive Behavioral Therapy but nothing put the ruminating to bed until the addition of medication.
I hope you read this and understand that you are in no way alone in your challenge but as long as you keep talking, keep thinking, there is no way you cannot grow to a greater understanding of yourself, which is why many of us are attracted to Philosophy.
Warmest regards,
Tiff
Oh really? >:O Is that it, dishonesty is insanity, and it rocked your world? Is that why when I told you that one of Peterson's core teachings is the centrality of honesty in the prevention and treatment of psychopathy, you laughed at me, and said it is trivial? >:O
Anyway - I've been looking at this thread, and my comments are as follows:
• The video (& articles) do not offer practical information about what actually goes on in Open Dialogue - that the process of conversation is open, transparent, honest, puts the patient in control, involves their family and social environment - that is all well and good. But that's not the secret. Many GOOD therapists (psychologists) are already doing that anyway. So these people from Finland are keeping secrets - either their results are not as great as they claim them to be - OR - they don't want to share their real secret.
• Personally, I think psychology or therapy should be about making the person stronger, so that they can better withstand the viscitudes of life - regardless of what life throws at them.
• Wosret offers some good insights in this thread.
My personal encounter with mental illness is through having suffered and being diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder, hypochondria, panic attacks, and OCD. I was given benzodiazepines, antipsychotics and SSRIs - there was very little talk therapy, and anyway, the therapists could not keep up with me, nor could address my concerns, which they would attempt to sidestep, or cast as irrelevant - they did not know how to respond to my questions - which were philosophical in nature. Like how can I address uncertainty? How do I deal with the possibility of having a life-threatening illness (or acquiring it)? Etc.
So, I decided, by myself (which I think is an important part of treatment), that I need to stop seeing my therapists and get off the pills. So I told my therapist that this is my intention, and they slowly got me off the pills, until the only pill I was taking was the SSRI at reduced dosage. Then they refused to take me off that, so I just stopped going, and cut it out myself. Some of the withdrawal symptoms were quite bad, so then I determined that I need to find a good psychologist, who can help teach me better ways to navigate in the world. Sort of like my own personal advisor, that's how I thought about it. Like Alexander had Aristotle basically, except that, you know, I'd only see them 1 hour or so a week. So then I was lucky, and found one good psychologist, who introduced me to mindfulness, got me to practice it, and helped me develop exactly along the lines that I wanted to. I would give him a task - saying, I want this - and he would have to tell me about how to get there. For example, one time I told him - look, I am bored at having to do the dishes everyday, I feel that I cannot enjoy the everydayness of life, and am always looking for something special, and this is a problem for me, and I want to get rid of it - I want to be able to enjoy the everydayness of life, and not have to look for special things, because most of life is made up of everyday things, not big things. And so, he gave me exercises to practice when feeling bored, he motivated me to stick with the mindfulness past the boring phase, etc.
So anyway, that was exceedingly helpful and got me to make what was effectively a full recovery - it got me to the point where I had overcome all the symptoms pretty much, and became relatively high functioning again. Then came the problem of dependence, because, alright, I had managed this, but I was still dependent on the psychologist to guide me. A moment comes when the student has to assert independence over the master and stand on his own feet. So then I thanked him, and quit seeing him as well. And then using the tools I got there, I slowly expanded back, and stood on my own feet again.
I can say that two things saved me - (1) my decision to take responsibility for myself, and look for solutions (which in this case involved finding the right people, knowing how to get what I wanted out of them, and deciding not to be dependent on them forever), and (2) my psychologist who was extremely helpful, and without his advice and mentorship I would not have overcome this. So part of it is individual - you need to have that grit and determination - it will make you do what it takes. Without that, I would probably still be wallowing, stuck in a rut. And part of it is also finding the right people.
But seriously, thanks for your personal account.
Quoting Agustino
Yes, I too am a bit frustrated that there is so little of the actual practice or even accounts from clients or case notes available. I think one of the 'secrets' is that they do not operate alone. The patient is seen in their community, and the therapist also brings their community with them. But in a sense, it is not having a secret - not having a theory, or a method to see through and act upon that I suspect makes the radical difference - assuming there is one.
One of the difficulties of measuring the effects of therapy is that it is personal to the extent that the character of the therapist is more important than the theory they espouse. This partly explains why there is often a guru-like emphasis on having been trained by the originator of a therapy. And it means it is impossible to separate the GOOD therapist from the BAD in terms of their method, though one knows who is helpful to one's own situation - or does one? Anyway, the focus on the therapist's own relationships as part of the whole story seems important in Open Dialogue, and that it is brought explicitly into the therapeutic encounter rather than hidden away as 'supervision' as is usual.
I don't have a personal story to relate, in the sense that I have always made myself responsible for my own madness, and so have only been a witness to encounters of others with therapy, the institution and the individuals. Which is not to say that I haven't needed and found help, as you did, but it was under the rubric of education, or friendship, or some such - and the drugs were aways illegal and sporadic.
As to what rocks my world, you missed out the first half, and it is the juxtaposition that makes something non-trivial. If identity is fragmentation, then what is honesty? Who is or isn't honest? But it may not be clear to others what I'm getting at here. I don't think Peterson would accept the first half, so the second half becomes a moralistic dogma, as if one has the truth always available.
Hmm, but I disagree with your basic premise that identity is fragmentation... and probably so would Peterson. I think that quite the contrary, a strong identity is required for good mental health. Lack of identity can lead to depersonalisation, anxiety and other such symptoms. In order to withstand the vicissitudes of this world, and the evil that exists, one must have a developed individuality. Indeed, it is the role of society to help one achieve such an individuality - and once this is achieved, it cannot be taken away, it remains the individual's. To make an analogy with a baby, it is alright if the baby is unable to walk without his mother's help at first, but there comes a point when he must stand on his own two feet, independent from the mother.
I don't see individuality as the problem, but the solution. It seems to me that your push towards the collective is the result of fear of the evil of the world. The individual, is at first terribly afraid, and the instinct is to seek to return to his mother's womb, where things were alright, and he had no responsibility. But instead of running away from the evil, I think the option of strengthening the individual so they can withstand the evil of the world, I think that's the right way.
Yes, I know. I won't argue it here, I just wanted to point out that there is a big difference between the half-quote and the whole, and so between what Peterson is saying and myself.
Sir, why are you such a gangster?
Quoting unenlightened
How do you think this contributes to better outcomes? How would you imagine this goes in a practical situation? I imagine that people with - say - schizophrenia - who have hallucinations, would be asking about what they should do to deal with those when they have them, etc. What would the therapists say?
Quoting unenlightened
I agree, obviously. The guru aspect is essential, a good therapist is, in essence, a guru. Part of this has to do with subtle features of method that cannot be articulated. For example, I know when my dog makes an "angry", "attack-ready" face, but I cannot tell you what exactly makes me know that that respective face is the "angry", "attack-ready" face - but I do know it. Likewise, the guru cannot convey his method fully - he or she is needed.
Quoting unenlightened
Hmm, so have you suffered from any diagnosable mental disorder then?
No, no diagnosis, no counselling, no therapy, no psychoactive drugs prescribed. I did manage to get myself thrown off a counselling course, a long time ago, see here, if you want all the sordid details.
Quoting Agustino
I think it is terribly important. It fosters exactly that openness and honesty - we are not talking about you behind your back, you are not being singled out and separated from your family/community before any intervention. We are all together trying to sort out a problem.
And your username and password Sir? >:O
The link you provided seems to be to the equivalent of your content management system, not to your blog, and it requests login details.
Quoting unenlightened
Okay, right. Well, I agree that that is important, however, that is just the beginning - by itself it doesn't solve any problems. That just gets the patient to be open and willing to collaborate with the therapist, and not think that the therapist is going to do something harmful to them, or that they don't agree with. That is indeed really important, but it's just the beginning. It doesn't actually address how to deal with hallucinations when the patient has them for example.
Ah. I haven't been there so long, I forgot how it works. I'll try again
I remember reading this post like 1-2 years ago or something, and I re-read it. To be entirely honest, your writing on many issues is interesting and original, but that doesn't mean it's right.
For example, the views on race that you express with regards to counselling - it's not that they are false, but they are limiting, and only apply in certain circumstances, not across the board. I've never cared when people discriminated against me for example. Eastern Europeans are often thought to be thieves by you British - so what? It would be a shame if Agustino cares what the British think, when the British don't care what Agustino thinks, wouldn't it?
This is why Peterson is right. The individual always holds the real power. It is not society, or the group that wields power, it is the individual. And when the individual surrenders this internal power onto society, that is the only time when he or she can be truly disgraced.
With regards to discrimination from me (a white man) towards other races - I never even think about it. I've had black, white, yellow - all kinds of skin color friends. Even some of my girlfriends have been of other races. All human beings are the same, why does it matter the race? I can get along with blacks, with whites, with any skin color out there.
So what if people (or my society) is racist and mocks me for spending time with people of different skin colors (for example)? Doesn't matter what others say. I can care less. Indeed, it would be a shame if I stooped to the level of caring what X or Y thinks of me.
Yeah, let's not go into the rights and wrongs of it here. "Interesting and original" becomes "madness" when you accuse the department handing out the certificates of being racist and using racist course materials. You can agree or disagree; you can go read the book I was discussing and give your own critique; that's not the point. What happened is that I got from the experts no response, no critique, no defence, I simply didn't get accepted on the next course. And that is why Peterson is wrong. Speaking uncomfortable critical things to power, true of false, is dangerous.
Quoting Agustino
This is bollocks too. If we decide you are mendacious ignorant foreigner who doesn't deserve to be here and cannot be trusted to do a job, you get no work and get sent back to from where you came. Caring or not caring is irrelevant.
I agree. But why is it that you decided to speak openly about it to them, instead of taking a more round-about way of approaching it? Is it just because you wanted to choose being honest at all costs and expressing what you think regardless of consequences? I mean, changing the system requires the right degree of give-and-take, or compromise. You can't do business (and by business, I don't mean just financial business, but any kind of business) with someone if they don't perceive that you're a trustworthy person who is willing to listen to them and compromise on things. If you don't give that impression, then you are seen as dangerous, and people don't want to have anything to deal with you (simply because they feel they can't predict what you'll do next), unless there are other circumstances that help you, like a lot of money in the game.
For example, someone like Steve Jobs can afford to even start swearing and cursing one of his suppliers because there's a lot of money in the game. Even if Steve shows himself to be a dangerous guy who speaks his mind, that guy will take it (to a certain degree of course), because the rewards are worth it. But someone like me, who is still a small entrepreneur, can't do that. Sometimes I know what must be done, but instead of telling someone "do this", I must say "what is your opinion, should we do this?" - it's a way of conveying to the other person that I will choose not to be threatening or dangerous in our relationship.
Quoting unenlightened
Sure, that will be your loss. Why do I care? It's not me losing, it's you losing my valuable talent and hard work.
So speaking uncomfortable truths to others can be done honestly, or dishonestly. I think that often speaking an uncomfortable truth honestly takes skill. It's not easy to do. Peterson is right that speaking the truth honestly is the most important thing - but it is difficult. In any regards, speaking the truth honestly should be the least dangerous alternative there is (though it may still be very dangerous).