Our online history from 2005-2006

We thought it would be useful, well important, for us to review our blogosphere. We have been blogging for a long time and have changed the names of blogs, moved to different sites, changed our minds and no doubt have lost the few readers we had. This is not so much where next as where have we come from and are there useful links that exist from blog to blog, subject to subject.
So, I am going to try to do this chronologically. In 2005 and 2006 we thought about and worked on an online therapy site. We called it Reflective Psychotherapy Online (RPO) but I notice that the image on the Internet Archive WaybackMachine has the heading as follows:

The site never went public, for two reasons. At about this time, 2006-7 there were lots of online counselling sites, and they too ceased to exist because of Skype. The increasing reach of Skype made such sites as ours redundant. Increasingly therapists who wanted to be in contact with people who lived in another town or country could easily use something like Skype. And they did.
The other reason we never went public with the site is that we were increasingly interested in the meta aspects of our model. We spent many months discussing the nature and therapeutic intricacies of reflection, and all the while wondering in what way reflection might be of therapeutic relevance, and in what ways and whether it was or could be transformative.
But above all we tried to integrate a reflective process in an online site. Here is what we wrote as an introduction for prospective clients:
"There are several ongoing elements in our methodology. We ask you to tell us what you would like us to reflect on with you, and what you felt and thought as you wrote. We also ask you to give feedback on what the psychotherapist has written to you.
For RPO the reflective process focuses on your feelings and thoughts. There are several reasons why we think this is important. Most important, your feelings and thoughts give depth to what you have written. When you write about what is on your mind, together with the feelings evoked, you are giving us more to reflect on with you.
In reflecting together we aim to help bring about fresh thinking. This may lead to change.
For example: "I am caught up with myself and I feel stuck".
This person cannot observe himself or herself, and therefore goes over and over the same ground. The feeling of stuckness may be a function of not being able to think about the self from another position.
We, Ken and Ron, think of the reflective process as one that enables a person to move from the state of mind represented by the initial statement, to something like the following:
"I can think about myself and what I am doing".
Here there is some freedom because there is a space between the I that is thinking and the object of thought."
We imagined that the interchange between us and our potential audience would be conversational. Somehow the conversation was intended to contain or allow for reflection. This is what we wrote on our site:
"We, at Reflective Psychotherapy Online, provide an online conversation where you engage with one of us. A clearly structured process enables you to reflect with a trained and experienced professional on issues and/or problems which are bothering you.
Our objective is to provide a confidential psychotherapy service using the privacy and convenience made possible by the internet.
We are interested to reflect with you on your thoughts, feelings and imaginings. We converse together, through online dialogue, to understand the meanings that flow through and around what you write.
You consult with Ken or Ron using an internet connection, within your own time and space, independent of any location or travel constraints, to consult with a psychotherapist.
You decide how many sessions you want.
Our process provides an archive of the conversations, accessed only by you and your psychotherapist. Feedback from you and from your psychotherapist is a key feature of the process."
And in addition:
"We all have conversations with ourselves going on in our heads. Some of these help us to deal with daily choices. Some don't help, because we tend to repeat the same patterns of thought and feeling, and they become part of a closed loop which leaves us going around in circles.
RPO offers the opportunity for two people to talk together using the internet, a written conversation which explores what one of them finds to be a bother, issue or problem, and the other seeks to help clarify, explore and reflect on.
We use the word conversation because we want to avoid the model of an expert prescribing solutions to a client.
We respect the capacity of those who use this service to reflect on their issues, and hope to help that process by engaging in a particular kind of conversation with them.
The pause between each sequence of the RPO conversation provides a space for reflection and choice, which can introduce positive changes. In reflecting on a problem, one gains a different view of it, and this new perspective allows a changed approach. So the conversation itself moves with its changes and finds new ground to explore."

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Distraction and the void

.....or how do fantasies fill the void? And how do these fantasies function as distractions?
We have been trying to make sense of our social and political context for a long time. We are both psychotherapists who invariably return to the problem we have in trying to think about and think through something that invariably seems to resist our paltry efforts. Trump and all that the name now represents, has amplified this resistance to thinking. So we go round in circles and in so doing forget our original starting point. IN which case the image is not of a circle but a spiral or some such so as we move we end up somewhere that seems a long way from our starting point.
The other day I wanted to name this sense of resolute difficulty and resistance to any conclusion. I thought of a void. That somewhere in our social imagining there seemed to be a void that also could be posited as something, symbolically, that seemed to reside in our democratic society. And now I remember the French political theorist Claude Lefort. He does not use the word void, but something linked. For him the centre is empty. He writes in the 'Logic of Totalitarianism' about democracy as follows:
".....power emanates from the people; on the other hand, it is the power of nobody." And he writes, "If the place of power appears...as really empty, then those who exercise it are perceived as mere ordinary individuals..."
This is society which lacks at its centre, absolute power and authority or ground. In which case there is a void that is both the strength of democracy and weakness.

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Pattern seeking

For the last few months all discussions between Ron and Ken have not surprisingly centred on Trump. Yesterday our conversation moved in a slightly different direction.
Is chaos the absence of a pattern? Or is chaos the absence of an observed pattern? For some Trump represents chaos, but what if the chaos is intentional? In which case chaos here hides something. What it has to hide is a pattern. That's to say something has been thought out here, not just on the surface but, so to speak, underneath as well.
So we intend to seek the pattern(s) in what appears to be our chaotic world, at the moment, symbolised by Trump.
If we consider Trump as not just a man-child fool; if we consider that he like anyone else is controlled by both his unconscious and outside forces then we can begin to look for connections. If we look at what he does rather than ponder what he says then a pattern emerges. We can begin to join the many dots. To begin with, what he has said can be seen as a distraction, both during the election campaign and subsequently.
A distraction against his political naiveté, his diminished place in the Washington community, and his subservience to the coal and oil lobby which prompted his withdrawal from the Paris agreement.
Maybe, but maybe not. The pattern that can be discerned in his various pronouncements may be perceived as the truth according to him.   It possibly is the media class that is distracted. They don't take seriously enough the network, the crisscrosses between the right wing gun and fossil fuel lobbies on the one hand, and the out of work men in the rust belt towns, the working class families that feel disenfranchised and diminished by poor health and poverty on the other.     It is not hard to imagine how this latter disparate grouping might construct a fantasy of a 'strong man' who will express for them their anger and resentment and direct it at the very groups they mistrust, the East Coast elites and Washington.    In which case, the constant deprecation of Trump in the media only serves to strengthen the disconnect between the middle class intellectual elite media culture and this large disparate group which believes it lacks any representation except that offered by the angry father figure; someone like Trump.
But is this the pattern we are seeking?
It is of course possible to regard the daily articles on the Trump regime, Brexit and so on as distractions. That it is the distraction which is part of a pattern, that obfuscates and takes attention away from something else. The something else is the breakdown or collapse of neo-liberalism.  There is no side in the present political firmament that is able to deal with this.

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The view from where?

Contemporary philosophy of mind is centrally concerned with the viability of the reductionist approach so prevalent in present-day psychiatry and neuroscience. The philosopher Thomas Nagel has contextualized this trend. In his writing, Thomas Nagel defends the claim—found in classical psychoanalytic theory—that while the human mind is tied to the physical brain, there is something irreducibly perspectival and subjective about human experience, both conscious and unconscious, such that it cannot be wholly explained in terms of, or reduced to, neurophysiological processes in the brain.



https://audioboom.com/posts/4373596-japa-the-mind-body-problem-and-psychoanalysis

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Sort of

There is a moving essay on the philosopher Daniel Dennett, in a recent New Yorker. It's by Joshua Rothman. This excerpt is near the end:

"Then, late last year, my mother had a catastrophic stroke. It devastated the left side of her brain, wrecking her parietal and temporal lobes and Broca’s area—parts of the brain that are involved in the emotions, the senses, memory, and speech. My mother now appears to be living in an eternal present. She can say only two words, “water” and “time.” She is present in the room—she looks me in the eye—but is capable of only fleeting recognition; she knows only that I am someone she should recognize. She grasps the world, but lightly.

As I spent time with my mother, I found that my intuitions were shifting to Dennett’s side of the field. It seems natural to say that she “sort of” thinks, knows, cares, remembers, and understands, and that she is “sort of” conscious. It seems obvious that there is no “light switch” for consciousness: she is present and absent in different ways, depending on which of her subsystems are functioning. I still can’t quite picture how neurons create consciousness. But, perhaps because I can take a stance toward my mother that I can’t take toward myself, my belief in the “hard problem” has dissolved. On an almost visceral level, I find it easier to accept the reality of the material mind. I have moved from agnosticism to calm conviction."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul

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Mind

Is consciousness just an illusion?
Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett believes the human brain might not be that special.


Is the human brain really just a collection of complex machines?

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39482345

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Representation

How might one represent the 2016 US presidential election? Well, here is one response, published in Artforum:



Joan Miró’s The Policeman, 1925

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