Tag: quotations

Social organisation without authority

Colin Ward (1966), Anarchism as a Theory of Organization:

“[…] ‘anarchy’ means the absence of government, the absence of authority. Can there be social organisation without authority, without government? The anarchists claim that there can be, and they also claim that it is desirable that there should be.

“Anyone can see that there are at least two kinds of organisation. There is the kind which is forced on you, the kind which is run from above, and there is the kind which is run from below, which can’t force you to do anything, and which you are free to join or free to leave alone. We could say that the anarchists are people who want to transform all kinds of human organisation into the kind of purely voluntary association where people can pull out and start one of their own if they don’t like it. I […] attempted to enunciate four principles behind an anarchist theory of organisation: that they should be

“(1) voluntary, (2) functional, (3) temporary, and (4) small.

“They should be voluntary for obvious reasons. There is no point in our advocating individual freedom and responsibility if we are going to advocate organisations for which membership is mandatory.

“They should be functional and temporary precisely because permanence is one of those factors which harden the arteries of an organisation, giving it a vested interest in its own survival, in serving the interests of office-holders rather than its function.

“They should be small precisely because in small face-to-face groups, the bureaucratising and hierarchical tendencies inherent in organisations have least opportunity to develop.”

“I abandoned psychoanalysis. But I am a psychoanalyst”

MaraSelviniPalazzoli

“I am in a certain way a psychoanalyst – I am still a psychoanalyst from a certain point of view. From another point of view, I am not a psychoanalyst, because I refuse in my work with the family to use the psychoanalytic model. The psychoanalytic model was developed by Freud in the last century and Freud could not know the systemic way of thinking. Also, in my opinion, it is not true that the psychoanalytic model is only intrapsychic. A certain part of psychoanalysis is intrapsychic. For example, what Freud calls the parts of the psyche-the ego, superego, and id-are intrapsychic because they describe the way in which the psyche, the mind of a person, functions. But in therapy, the psychoanalytic model is not intrapsychic; rather, it is dyadic when it is correct, because it is in analysis that the relationship between the therapist and the patient, the transference, is analyzed. So Freud‘s ego, superego and id and so on are intrapsychic. Freud’s transference is dyadic.

“[…] Dyadic thinking is not enough, because the family is at least a triad. It is necessary to remember that a system is not the sum of dyads or the sum of individuals-mother and father, son and mother, father and son, son and daughter, daughter and mother. It is necessary to observe all systems functioning at the same moment. So psychoanalysis continues in the Aristotelian way of thinking and has no way of looking at other concepts, such as coalition of two people against a third person and so on; it remains an intrapsychic or dyadic model. It is necessary to go beyond even the triad.”

“[…] according to the model, I abandoned psychoanalysis. But I am a psychoanalyst according to the rigorous study of continuity which my psychoanalytic mentors taught me.”

References

Barrows, S. E. (1982). Interview with Mara Selvini Palazzoli and Giuliana Prata. American Journal of Family Therapy, 10(3), 60-69.

Emma Goldman on equal rights

“The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved. Indeed, if partial emancipation is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be sweetheart and mother, is synonymous with being slave or subordinate. It will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds.”

“.. woman’s freedom is closely allied with man’s freedom, and many of my so-called emancipated sisters seem to overlook the fact that a child born in freedom needs the love and devotion of each human being about him, man as well as woman. Unfortunately, it is this narrow conception of human relations that has brought about a great tragedy in the lives of the modern man and woman.”

Emma Goldman  (1911), The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation

Making an effort to meet your students’ needs

“Most of his students were young apprentices in the building trade, and when he walked in to teach his first class he asked them what it was they wanted to learn – what difficulties did they face in their lives that he could really help them with? It turned out that their greatest concern was with lack of sleep. So Colin duly crammed his brain full of the scholarly literature on sleep and set about teaching a term of classes on the art of sleeping. It is a story that has always stayed with me as a teacher, the ultimate example of making an effort to meet your students’ needs.”

– Roman Krznaric on Colin Ward

Independent thought

“If we wished to analyze how much in all our own concepts and imagination is ours, and how much is socially suggested, the analysis would perhaps have a discouraging result. The independent thinker too would become aware with shame how like he is to the sponge that has sucked itself full of water; for in just the same way his own ideas, images, and concepts are suggested to him by his social surroundings.” (Ludwig Gumplowicz, The Sociological Idea of the State, 1902, cited in Martin Green, 1999, Otto Gross: Freudian Psychoanalyst 1877-1920.)

Psychotherapy techniques – beyond the brands

The therapeutic brands are misleading as there’s a lot of overlap in techniques.

I like this simple table from Mick Power (2010, p. 49) of the different techniques, expressed in a cross-brand way.

powertherapytypes

Power argues that

“… therapy heightens access to cognitive–emotional structures and processes that relate to past and present significant objects and significant others including the therapist. In the context of this heightened access, there is the common therapeutic goal that patients will relearn, cope more successfully with, view more realistically, reinterpret or reconstruct; that is, in some way view more constructively the object, person or situation that has been the source of their distress or conflict.”

Fonagy and Bateman (2006, p. 425) go somewhere similar with the interrelationship part of this:

“It is possible that psychotherapy in general is effective because it arouses the attachment system at the same time it applies interpersonal demands (psychotherapy technique), which require the patient to mentalize, to confront and experience negative affect, and to confront and review issues of morality (superego). Why might this be helpful? We speculate that thinking about feelings, thoughts, and beliefs in the context of attachment is helpful because in this “paradoxical” brain state there may be more access to modifying preset ways of conceptualizing the contents of one’s own and other’s minds, as well as issues of morality and social judgment. Activating the attachment system harnesses brain biological processes partially to remove the dominance of constraints on the present from the past (long-term memory) and creates the possibility of rethinking, reconfiguring intersubjective relationship networks.”

Both are jargon heavy, though.

References

Fonagy, P., & Bateman, A. W. (2006). Mechanisms of change in mentalization‐based treatment of BPD. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 62, 411-430.

Power, M. (2010). Emotion-focused cognitive therapy. London: Wiley

Each investigation is an original research project

“There have been many studies of social factors in relation to schizophrenia. These include attempts to discover whether schizophrenia occurs more or less frequently in one or other ethnic groups, social class, sex, ordinal position in the family, and so on. The conclusion from such studies has often been that social factors do not play a significant role in the ‘aetiology of schizophrenia’. This begs the question, and moreover such studies do not get close enough to the relevant situation. If the police wish to determine whether a man has died of natural causes or has committed suicide, or been murdered, they do not look up prevalence or incidence figures. They investigate the circumstances attendant upon each single case in turn. Each investigation is an original research project, and it comes to an end when enough evidence has been gathered to answer the relevant questions.” (Laing, 1967, Politics of Experience.)

Total administration

“Total administration corresponds to that historical moment when technical rationalization and instrumentality, in the service of capital, spreads beyond subject-external social and political relations to penetrate and determine at a fundamental level individual psycho-interiority. This process, operating at the level of individual psychology to determine schema development and formation, has an integrative, regulatory function, affirming subject commitment to, and compliance with, capital and commodity form.”

From Downie, G. (2004). Aesthetic Necrophilia: Reification, New Music, and the Commodification of Affectivity. Perspectives of New Music, 42, 264-27.

It’s so rambling it’s musical.

Spotted thanks to The Chap (The Band).

words, words, words

[…] there is no end to it, words, words, words. At best and most they are perhaps in memoriam, evocations, conjurations, incantations, emanations, shimmering, iridescent flares in the sky of darkness, a just still feasible tact, indiscretions, perhaps forgiveable….

City lights at night, from the air, receding, like these words, atoms each containing its own world and every other world. Each a fuse to set you off….

If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, If I could tell you I would let you know.

– R. D. Laing (1967). The Bird of Paradise.

 

If I could tell you

If I could tell you
Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

– W. H. Auden (1907 – 73)