My current fieldwork is about rituals in Jungian psychology and I am very excited about it.
A definition of ritual that I really like is: a series of acts that a person engages in to achieve an indirect result.
Right now I am conducting interviews with therapists about rituals, reading case stories and have completed a Jungian analysis which I will be using for my field report which is due February.
Preliminary results are that there exists rituals on the level of interaction in the therapy session as well as on a very broad scale of the therapist journeying together with the client to find a part of themselves which has been denied expression, confronting the pain that caused the exclusion and gradually negotiating if and how to integrate and live with this lost part of the self.
When asked the question why is Jungian therapy not a ritual, the answer is that the individual content that can roughly fit into the aforementioned pattern and a good analogy of the ritual being the finger, but the individual therapy having its own thumbprint is quite meaningful to me.
When asked about faith in regards to therapy being a sacred or secular ritual a therapist said that he believed it to be most important that the therapist believes in the therapy and that the patient does not need to know the dynamics or believe in them, in order for them to work on the patient, which is an answer that completely defies research question.
I will be posting the new events of this fieldwork regularly
tirsdag den 20. december 2011
søndag den 18. december 2011
Machiavellian Families
In my fieldwork with borderline patients, I have noticed several traits in dysfunctional family interaction which I will describe here.
First a little Goffman and Machiavelli
Aggressive facework is interaction in which the tabu´s of normal interaction are not observed. The participants will try engage in a zero sum competition for points resulting in gradual escalation of hostilities until one participant leaves the interaction or a physical fight breaks out. This is the rule of conflict for dysfunctional families. Machiavelli formulated that the purpose of power is to fortify and protect the holder of power by identifying threats and manipulating social relations in order to serve powers purpose. If we combine these two points we get a machiavellian interaction theory.
Now lets look at some dysfunctional strategies of dependency and zero sum face work the names are just for remembering them.
The provocateur
I have observed that certain family members (A) will attack other family members (B) face by bringing up embarrassing, troubled or traumatic events in order to facilitate a emotional response and advantageous social role.
The wounding Samaritan
I have seen a strategy where a person, often parents offer financial or practical aid to their children, whom gladly accept, resulting in the parents withdrawal of support, the children then become frustrated as the aid offered is often critical, such as housing and financial aid for education, the parent has then constructed dependency and emergency and then steps in with some form of aid resembling the original aid and rescues the then gratefull children thus reconstructing the vertical relationship of infant - parent and securing power and influence.
The intimacy leech
Like the wounding Samaritan I have observed a strategy in which a family member (A) will take great interest in another family members hobby (B), such as hunting. This will eventually result in an invitation and or mutual arrangement of A participating in B´s hobby. A will then cancel in the last moment due to more important egocentric events in A´s life leaving B with a strange sense of his hobby being unimportant. A does it to affirm that A has access to intimacy.
The victim
A family member will engage in face work and position himself as a victim of interaction.
The outlooks of changing the interaction are pessimistic as these primary relationships are the building blocks of identity they are highly resistant to change and the work needed done requires a assertive mode of non threatening communication, the lack of which is obviously a hallmark and causative element in dysfunctional families.
Such a family may well be a major contributor in the development of paranoid schizophrenia as a person will transfer this zero sum game to his own personality in regards to conflicting wishes and personality traits and thus be unable to contain conflicting interests in one ego complex, he will literally be at war with him self and project this conflict into the world. Subsequently a person will engage other people in zero sum face-work and perceive normal face work as threats.
So what to do?
Well psychology perceives intelligence and new primary relationships as deal-breakers here. Simply put by engaging in normal social interaction with mild or no zero sum elements a person will be able to relate to himself and his social world in a more constructive way. But it is very important to stop the dysfunctional social dynamics, either through family therapy or if need be, by distancing one self from the dysfunctional social relationships or when other options are not available terminating the relationships.
Intelligence on the other hand is in my opinion a misconstrued factor. I have inspired by cognitive psychology been able to teach the above to people with normal ability for abstract thinking and believe that it is a matter of using examples and training by application to the specific clients situation. I have spent 9 years mapping out normal well adjusted social behaviour in different social-relation-distances and encourage that other people do the same.
Thankfully most people are able to be cordial and polite with strangers or their therapist, and this is where I help them find the building blocks for how they should be communicating with their families.
Lastly one should bear in mind that these people love each other and are suffering from bad habits of interaction, this needs to be the outspoken fuel for the long road to change where everyone will occasionally fall back into their bad communication habits. But in many cases Machiavellian families are simply better off not being at war with each other and not having any contact.
First a little Goffman and Machiavelli
Aggressive facework is interaction in which the tabu´s of normal interaction are not observed. The participants will try engage in a zero sum competition for points resulting in gradual escalation of hostilities until one participant leaves the interaction or a physical fight breaks out. This is the rule of conflict for dysfunctional families. Machiavelli formulated that the purpose of power is to fortify and protect the holder of power by identifying threats and manipulating social relations in order to serve powers purpose. If we combine these two points we get a machiavellian interaction theory.
Now lets look at some dysfunctional strategies of dependency and zero sum face work the names are just for remembering them.
The provocateur
I have observed that certain family members (A) will attack other family members (B) face by bringing up embarrassing, troubled or traumatic events in order to facilitate a emotional response and advantageous social role.
The wounding Samaritan
I have seen a strategy where a person, often parents offer financial or practical aid to their children, whom gladly accept, resulting in the parents withdrawal of support, the children then become frustrated as the aid offered is often critical, such as housing and financial aid for education, the parent has then constructed dependency and emergency and then steps in with some form of aid resembling the original aid and rescues the then gratefull children thus reconstructing the vertical relationship of infant - parent and securing power and influence.
The intimacy leech
Like the wounding Samaritan I have observed a strategy in which a family member (A) will take great interest in another family members hobby (B), such as hunting. This will eventually result in an invitation and or mutual arrangement of A participating in B´s hobby. A will then cancel in the last moment due to more important egocentric events in A´s life leaving B with a strange sense of his hobby being unimportant. A does it to affirm that A has access to intimacy.
The victim
A family member will engage in face work and position himself as a victim of interaction.
The outlooks of changing the interaction are pessimistic as these primary relationships are the building blocks of identity they are highly resistant to change and the work needed done requires a assertive mode of non threatening communication, the lack of which is obviously a hallmark and causative element in dysfunctional families.
Such a family may well be a major contributor in the development of paranoid schizophrenia as a person will transfer this zero sum game to his own personality in regards to conflicting wishes and personality traits and thus be unable to contain conflicting interests in one ego complex, he will literally be at war with him self and project this conflict into the world. Subsequently a person will engage other people in zero sum face-work and perceive normal face work as threats.
So what to do?
Well psychology perceives intelligence and new primary relationships as deal-breakers here. Simply put by engaging in normal social interaction with mild or no zero sum elements a person will be able to relate to himself and his social world in a more constructive way. But it is very important to stop the dysfunctional social dynamics, either through family therapy or if need be, by distancing one self from the dysfunctional social relationships or when other options are not available terminating the relationships.
Intelligence on the other hand is in my opinion a misconstrued factor. I have inspired by cognitive psychology been able to teach the above to people with normal ability for abstract thinking and believe that it is a matter of using examples and training by application to the specific clients situation. I have spent 9 years mapping out normal well adjusted social behaviour in different social-relation-distances and encourage that other people do the same.
Thankfully most people are able to be cordial and polite with strangers or their therapist, and this is where I help them find the building blocks for how they should be communicating with their families.
Lastly one should bear in mind that these people love each other and are suffering from bad habits of interaction, this needs to be the outspoken fuel for the long road to change where everyone will occasionally fall back into their bad communication habits. But in many cases Machiavellian families are simply better off not being at war with each other and not having any contact.
onsdag den 30. juni 2010
Principles.
Today I will be writing about my principles of "life fixing" that I personally have had success with and have used to help others around me.
First off I would like to say something about the "natural" level of physical and social activity and its relationship with modern psychological and physiological problems. I argue that at least two enjoyable voluntary hours of physical and social activity is the prerequisite of physical and psychological diagnosis. I believe this to be true due to the fact that humans have lived in social working or hunting groups for hundreds of years making the new physically inactive and socially independent individual a modern phenomenon that may have significant psychological consequences such as anxiety and depression and more obvious physical consequences such as muscle infiltrations and obesity.
2 hours of fun training:
Psychologically it seems that + two hour workouts trigger the release of rewards chemicals in our brains for example "runners high" and all the physical benefits of cardiovascular and strength training have been documented abundantly.
2 hours of quality socializing:
Identity is not something that should be taken for granted one might say that it is constantly negotiated in social interaction, if this is true it will be important to reconstruct identity on a daily basis and do so in supportive and positive relationships. I call it having a team, something that is important to me. Having a team means that a group can pool their resources, practical, emotional and social and help each other out without an expectation from anyone team member to deplete their resources and with constant advantages for all involved. To put it simple my team philosophy is that I only have people with strong integrity, passion, and competence on my team so that they they strengthen these values in my-self; of course everyone has periods of introspection and distress, which makes having a team all the more important as one can discuss the challenges of living an active life as well as the challenges of being human. Personally I like to socialize until I want to be alone and have the opportunity to hang out with people when I want, I have tried being alone with very little social contact and it makes all the difference to me when being alone is a choice.
Live the dream:
For some reasons that one may be able to discern parts of based on analysis of childhood, social and, economic situations most people are fascinated by something. Never mind why this fascination is precious and having your everyday life structured around these fascinations gives one drive and passion about what ones is doing, it also presents you with a lot of real challenges victories and failures when trying to live out your dreams making them a real part of your life in stead of an escape from your current situation.
First off I would like to say something about the "natural" level of physical and social activity and its relationship with modern psychological and physiological problems. I argue that at least two enjoyable voluntary hours of physical and social activity is the prerequisite of physical and psychological diagnosis. I believe this to be true due to the fact that humans have lived in social working or hunting groups for hundreds of years making the new physically inactive and socially independent individual a modern phenomenon that may have significant psychological consequences such as anxiety and depression and more obvious physical consequences such as muscle infiltrations and obesity.
2 hours of fun training:
Psychologically it seems that + two hour workouts trigger the release of rewards chemicals in our brains for example "runners high" and all the physical benefits of cardiovascular and strength training have been documented abundantly.
2 hours of quality socializing:
Identity is not something that should be taken for granted one might say that it is constantly negotiated in social interaction, if this is true it will be important to reconstruct identity on a daily basis and do so in supportive and positive relationships. I call it having a team, something that is important to me. Having a team means that a group can pool their resources, practical, emotional and social and help each other out without an expectation from anyone team member to deplete their resources and with constant advantages for all involved. To put it simple my team philosophy is that I only have people with strong integrity, passion, and competence on my team so that they they strengthen these values in my-self; of course everyone has periods of introspection and distress, which makes having a team all the more important as one can discuss the challenges of living an active life as well as the challenges of being human. Personally I like to socialize until I want to be alone and have the opportunity to hang out with people when I want, I have tried being alone with very little social contact and it makes all the difference to me when being alone is a choice.
Live the dream:
For some reasons that one may be able to discern parts of based on analysis of childhood, social and, economic situations most people are fascinated by something. Never mind why this fascination is precious and having your everyday life structured around these fascinations gives one drive and passion about what ones is doing, it also presents you with a lot of real challenges victories and failures when trying to live out your dreams making them a real part of your life in stead of an escape from your current situation.
lørdag den 12. juni 2010
The reality of feelings.
"I feel that" nothing annoyed me more as a undergrad student than these three words. They signified subjective irellevant opinions of people who had not bothered to take the time to read the text and sourounding texts and now wanted to exist by uttering some useless chitter chatter.
As an academic I am currently engaged in the field of social and neuroscience. The academic dicipline it seems to me, is about researching new subjects as well as acounting for their relationship with excisting academic theories within the respective dicipline. Whether one engages a nature, culture or artistic academic dicipline, one is, or should be, trying to describe reality as accurate as possible. As Rorty said reality is the most effective means of describing an event in relation to a certain intent.
As a psychologogy student I am currently engaged in the shared reality of feelings, that is collective patterns of emotional reactions to certain events. Take for instance "big" feeling such as love, loss, hatred, fear. These are emotions that are for a large part triggered by the same events in many if not all humans; the loss of a loved one, fear of death and so on, what is interesting about psychology is that it to some extent measures and quantifies feelings, tt objectifies the subjective by enagaging feeling with intellectual scrutiny. This raises the question of whether intellect is at all more objective than feeling. We are able to use intellect and enginering to send men into space and split the atom but the shared experience of being human, the physics that give way to emotions are global perhaps one should have a little more respect for the annoying " I feel that" argument that is scorned in academics.
Actually I do not think so I believe that what makes psychology a science is that it employs sientific methods to make sure that when addressing feelings it does so above the individual level to a more collective level of emotions associated with a specific event.
Thats what I feel:)
As an academic I am currently engaged in the field of social and neuroscience. The academic dicipline it seems to me, is about researching new subjects as well as acounting for their relationship with excisting academic theories within the respective dicipline. Whether one engages a nature, culture or artistic academic dicipline, one is, or should be, trying to describe reality as accurate as possible. As Rorty said reality is the most effective means of describing an event in relation to a certain intent.
As a psychologogy student I am currently engaged in the shared reality of feelings, that is collective patterns of emotional reactions to certain events. Take for instance "big" feeling such as love, loss, hatred, fear. These are emotions that are for a large part triggered by the same events in many if not all humans; the loss of a loved one, fear of death and so on, what is interesting about psychology is that it to some extent measures and quantifies feelings, tt objectifies the subjective by enagaging feeling with intellectual scrutiny. This raises the question of whether intellect is at all more objective than feeling. We are able to use intellect and enginering to send men into space and split the atom but the shared experience of being human, the physics that give way to emotions are global perhaps one should have a little more respect for the annoying " I feel that" argument that is scorned in academics.
Actually I do not think so I believe that what makes psychology a science is that it employs sientific methods to make sure that when addressing feelings it does so above the individual level to a more collective level of emotions associated with a specific event.
Thats what I feel:)
tirsdag den 2. februar 2010
Goffman a sociologist or an anthropologist?
So what I would like to diskuss in this blog today is Goffmans and wether he is a sociologist or an anthropologist.
First of all from an anthropologist point of view Goffman might be called a sociologist and one might criticise him for being to general as well as the main goal of his work being that he look for theories which can be stated to apply in general.
But he has also been called to emperical and micro social by sociologists, so which one is it?
Well if we go way back to what anthropologist Franz Boas suggested in the early 1900 in "the limitations of the comparative method", as you might guess from the title he is a particularist and thus we might expect to find a standpoint with wich we can criticize Goffman. But the thing is that Goffman uses so many emperical examples and leaves us under the impression that he has done a massive amount of emperical work prior to his general theories on "face" and "frame" so he actually does excactly what Boas suggests when he says that one should first describe a sufficient ammount of cases before one begins to compare them.
Another point, made by Hastrup among others, is that anthropology´s hallmark is its relatively long fieldwork, an argument that is perhaps made in order to make anthropology destinct from our sometimes more philosofical sibling sociology. If that is the case then ceartaintly Goffman is a sociologist unless doing fieldwork within ones one culture and gathering data herin is also anthropology?
First of all from an anthropologist point of view Goffman might be called a sociologist and one might criticise him for being to general as well as the main goal of his work being that he look for theories which can be stated to apply in general.
But he has also been called to emperical and micro social by sociologists, so which one is it?
Well if we go way back to what anthropologist Franz Boas suggested in the early 1900 in "the limitations of the comparative method", as you might guess from the title he is a particularist and thus we might expect to find a standpoint with wich we can criticize Goffman. But the thing is that Goffman uses so many emperical examples and leaves us under the impression that he has done a massive amount of emperical work prior to his general theories on "face" and "frame" so he actually does excactly what Boas suggests when he says that one should first describe a sufficient ammount of cases before one begins to compare them.
Another point, made by Hastrup among others, is that anthropology´s hallmark is its relatively long fieldwork, an argument that is perhaps made in order to make anthropology destinct from our sometimes more philosofical sibling sociology. If that is the case then ceartaintly Goffman is a sociologist unless doing fieldwork within ones one culture and gathering data herin is also anthropology?
onsdag den 2. december 2009
Motivation
So I am currently on my way to Copenhagen, and I am reading my mens health magazone, which I haven´t subscribed to in 5 years on the way.
And just by the mere reading of guys that are successfull I to become more motivated about my kickboxing and my academic carreer.
The social certaintly has its impact, I have studied books about idolizing a bit, and it seems that a lot of coaches are using it as a tool of motivation. Anyway I will have to look into the "sorround yourself with inspiring people" bit some more.
And just by the mere reading of guys that are successfull I to become more motivated about my kickboxing and my academic carreer.
The social certaintly has its impact, I have studied books about idolizing a bit, and it seems that a lot of coaches are using it as a tool of motivation. Anyway I will have to look into the "sorround yourself with inspiring people" bit some more.
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