Studies + Considerations

I am spending the summer immersing myself in reading all things psycho. I came across a statement which, if you can get past the academic tone, provides a key interpretation of how the relational approach (which is what I'm studying) is divergent from classical psychoanalysis' emphasis on a one-person psychology.

"The relational-perspectivist approach I am advocating views the patient-analyst relationship as continually being established and reestablished through ongoing mutual influence in which both patient and analyst systematically affect, and are affected by, each other. A communication process is established between patient and analyst in which influence flows in both directions. This implies a "two-person psychology" or a regulatory-systems conceptualization of the analytic process. The terms transference and countertransference too easily lend themselves to a model that implies a one-way influence in which the analyst reacts to the patient. That the influence between patient and analyst is not equal does not mean that it is not mutual; the analytic relationship may be mutual without being symmetrical."

- Lewis Aron, A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis

The author proceeds to develop this distinction between relational and classical (two-person vs. one-person psychology) as it pertains to intersubjectivity (the mutual awareness of what the other is thinking/feeling in a therapeutic environment and how this field of awareness affects both the patient and analyst). The quote above is a brilliantly distilled proposition which may seem commonsensical on first reading, but with a broader understanding of the history of psychoanalysis I can see how revolutionary a statement this is.

“If you don't get what you want, it's a sign either that you did not seriously want it, or that you tried to bargain over the price.”

– Rudyard Kipling

Man invented mathematics in order to demonstrate that memory alone is inherently faulty.

Repeat after me:

there is no such thing

as mind control.

Master: "May the wind always be behind your back. "

Student: "What, and fuck up my hair?"

quote

"The major philosophical problem with the block-Universe interpretation of four-dimensional spacetime is that it appears to be fatalism disguised as physics. It seems to be a mathematician's proof of determinism and a denial of free will dressed up in geometry."

- Paul J. Nahin, from Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction

Perspectives on Percentages

"Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it."
- Lou Holtz, American football coach


"Eighty percent of success is showing up."
- Woody Allen


"Ninety percent of everything is crap."
- Theodore Sturgeon, fiction writer


"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."
- Thomas Edison


"Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable."
- Buckminster Fuller

quote

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

- attributed to Mark Twain

quote

"The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."

- Steven Pinker, from My Genome, My Self

quote

"If you're looking for a deeper meaning, I'm as deep as this high ceiling"

- Lou Reed, Images

"Somehow, the painting soothed him. It verified his fears. But it also informed him that fear was wonderful."

- Timothy Findley, writer

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. "

- Bertrand Russell

"I like to fare forth fresh, if only for the alliteration."

- Peter De Vries, Slouching Towards Kalamazoo

"Enter late, leave early."

- advice to writers, origin unknown.

"A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read."

- Mark Twain

"Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve."

- Karl Popper

"The thing is, Morris dancing and incest aside, it's hard to criticise something unless you've tried it."

- Jay Rayner, restaurant critic, on his week-long vegan diet

"Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check."

- M. C. Escher

"Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth."

Alexander Solzehnitsyn

"I said, 'Saul, I am a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists and good ones, but when we talk I keep feeling we are in two very different businesses. What makes me feel that way?'

Six seconds passed, and then he said, 'It's very simple. There are two sorts of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself.'"

- Kurt Vonnegut, from A Man Without A Country