Apprehending the other as a principle

One the most fundamental principles of the work with others in Psychology is the notion of trying to understand the Other in his or her uniqueness. Some call this empathy but in a way is more than that.

Empathy is the movement that starts in ourselves and that tries to acknowledge the experiential nature of the Other, on how they feel and how and why their emotions and feelings are presented.

In the book from Laing (1965) about the existential analysis of sanity and madness, the author makes the point that underpins the existential and experiential studies of humanistic theories. Laing draws our attention to the fact that (us who work with individuals in psychology or psychiatry) the Other should be apprehended totally and completely. This is not to say that they should be removed from their uniqueness, on the contrary.

We should try to love the other person, love their lives in their uniqueness form and subtract. This means not to just be empathetic about their depression symptoms or their inability to write as well as other children do but, primarily, the individual and their complexity. This deceivingly simple argument yet powerful has the potential to transform do way we work.

Loving the existence of another, or as I prefer, to apprehend their existence, is to not only be empathetic about their symptoms and guided by their signs but mainly to see them according to their uniqueness in the scope of their self-development.

Several examples in my work as a Psychologist could be discussed. A simple one could be the case of a kid who doesn't engage in classes and doesn't care about marks or success. We can be empathetic about his life story and understand the pain that he experienced in his early years. We would also make notes of the signs, for instance, the lack of engagement and frequent externalising behaviours. We may identify speech and language difficulties or emotional and social interactions difficulties. They have our empathy. However, that's not enough.

Either focusing on mental health issues or educational and learning difficulties, we need to take the Other in their existential position and to acknowledge that what separates us from them and also what unites us to them is part of the dialogical nature of existence. In that intersection, we are related but also isolated, although closely linked in the fabric of being.

Going back to the example, this implies acknowledging the signs we see as part of the bigger picture that their existence is, where truth is the only fact, because uniqueness can't deceive. By apprehending the other, we could learn about the processes and experiential subtracts that made this kid to be who he is now and to frame signs as expressions of his uniqueness. This doesn't exclude working to help him overcome his difficulties in specific aspects of his learning but to see them as an intrinsic part of his being in the process of self-organisation.  

Apprehending the other is the process that allows you to identify and understand the complexity of the self and the nature of its different expressions.

Laing, R. D. (1965). The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Middlesex: Penguin Book, Ltd. 

What are teens hoping to feel when they self-harm?

There are few things as disturbing as self-harm, which in extreme can lead to suicide or suicide attempts. Self-harm has many functions and the authors focus on the following two:

A common motivation teenagers give is that non-suicidal self-harm provides a way to escape unpleasant thoughts and emotions. Another motive, little explored before now, is that self-harm is a way to deliberately provoke a particular desired feeling or sensation.

Escape and seek. Escape pain, seek resolution. Pain because adolescents that self-harm are, to simplify, experiencing existential suffering or depressivity and eagerly looking for ways to cope with it. One of those ways is the downward spiral  of depressivity, which revalidates the main causes of depression - this leads to the annulation of the self; the other, is to seek an alternative to the pain that one is feeling, which is, more often than not, hardly meaningful, or impossible to signify - this leads to creative destruction through meaning-making processes.

The most common sensation the teenagers sought was "satisfaction" (45 per cent of them), followed by "stimulation" (31 per cent) and "pain" (24 per cent). 

Excruciating pain, psychological pain, can take many routes in order to be materialised and addressed but I question the meaning of satisfaction that it is attributed to this word. I believe that what is tried to symbolise here is the abject need to seek closure, to diminish activation, to give a sense of control to the experience of existential suffering. 

To seek pain is not in contradiction with seeking satisfaction or stimulation; they seem to be expressions of an experience of pain in the spectrum of making sense of the same pain. Different avenues to signify different aspects of this process of questioning the fabric of which one is made of. 

The meaningful construction of personal sense in the scope of one's identity in the maze of depressivity. This is quite interesting. The  experiencing of self-harm is, no question about it, intrinsic to its author, the individual. So, in that sense, the aggregation of meaning in categories proves to be less than ideal.

For instance, one explanation for the more frequent self-harming observed among those who say they self-harm because they want to experience pain, is that the act triggers pain-relief mechanisms in the brain - a form of euphoria. And yet, self-harming was less frequent among those who said they self-harmed for satisfaction. 

This is why. Contradictions emerge rapidly if the words are used to capture so powerful experiences without consolidating first the narrative constructions and experiential expressions of self-harm in the intersections of the basics of the pain that is experienced. 

Lastly, self-harm is tool, instrument, is expression, is an apparatus of the self to symbolise the need to create...destroying. But it is not the cause that leads to its reinforcement. It isn't cause and consequence but it can further aggravate the main issue, the ontological basic insecurity of the self. 

Here

How Much Do Parents Determine Their Children’s Success?

The author presents the following main conclusions:

• parents put too much on their short-run comfort and too little on long-run satisfaction. 

• “parents picture kids as clay they mold for life, when they’re actually more like flexible plastic that responds to pressure, but pops back into its original shape when the pressure is released.”

I think the author completely fails to address that the self-other patterns of functioning are tremendously important variables that determine the impact that parents have on their children. Just think for a minute on the cases where parents have anxiogenic patterns of functioning with their children and how that can impact their self-development; or, on the other extreme, parents that teach principles in a robust manner, where the child feels empowered by a vicarious experience that makes sense. 

There is so much to this discussion that the points addressed just feel short of enlightening the questions that they are supposed to answer.

Here

Late Sunday Reading

Some really nice gems from around the web. 

Drowned in a Stream of Prescriptions: psychopathologizing the human being. 

When did life itself become a treatable mental disorder? Idem

Where The World Lives, By Latitude [Infographic]

I still love Kierkegaard: He is the dramatic thunderstorm at the heart of philosophy and his provocation is more valuable than ever

Portugal é um dos melhores países do mundo para se ser mãe (in Portuguese): Portugal is one of the best countries to be a mother. Yes, ahead of Canada, the US and others. The report is here.

Change is good by Thomas Hawk, a well known photographer. An analysis about the intersection between the social narratives and technology. I don't agree completely but there are some really good points here. 

On the road: Leaving LA? Forget the scenic route along the coast: hit the Five instead and see what’s on California’s mind

Late Sunday reading

Or maybe for the week. :)

A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life: it's all about the love and your relationships.

Consciousness After Death: Strange Tales From the Frontiers of Resuscitation Medicine: what is death? When do you become dead?

How Ray Kurzweil Will Help Google Make the Ultimate AI Brain: living in intersections.

Arriving at Auschwitz, October 4, 1944: From the Diary of Helga Weiss: History will never forget. 

Helga's Diary: Holocaust survivor Helga Weiss relives her story (video)

In the dark: Dark matter is the commonest, most elusive stuff in the universe. Can we grasp this great unsolved problem in physics?

Exploring the therapeutic effects of yoga and its ability to increase quality of life

There is no mental illness (or maybe there is)

Mad, or bad? : Even in the decade of dissent, Thomas Szasz stood alone when he attacked the concept of madness from the political right

The case of Szasz. Read it carefully.

The end of sleep?

Following other posts (here and here) about sleep and all that it entails, here's an excellent article on the illusion and trendable movement towards living without sleeping, kind of.

The end of sleep?: New technologies are emerging that could radically reduce our need to sleep - if we can bear to use them

Reading suggestion

Another great piece about this that makes us humans. 

This is humankind: if my grandfather could survive the Siege of Leningrad and still distinguish between a German and a Nazi, then so can I

Sunday reading

Here is a good selection - I'm biased, of course - of some really interesting articles on different topics.

An instant cure: The latest edition of the psychiatrists’ manual has decided that my personality disorder is not so bad after all.

Voices from Solitary: A Sentence Worse Than Death: I have served a sentence worse than death.

Don't worry - an anxiety wheel of misfortunate

This wheel of worry, violently copied from the last Brain pickings newsletter, explains how one individual organized his circadian states of anxiety. I find the wheel type of presenting the focus of anxiety during the day as a powerful instrument to reflect upon how we live our emotional states. 

There also a nice quote:

We should make ourselves stop trying to explain our own difficulties. Our first impulse is to try to account for them, figure out why what has happened. Sometimes such an effort is beneficial: more often it is distinctly harmful. It leads to introspection, self-pity, and vain regret; and almost invariably it creates within us a dangerous mood of confusion and despair. Many of life’s hard situations cannot be explained. They can only be endured, mastered, and gradually forgotten. Once we learn this truth, once we resolve to use all our energies managing life rather than trying to explain life, we take the first and most obvious step toward significant accomplishment.

My questions are:

• although it makes sense that we probably can't explain everything, we are lead to think that we should. Is that positive? Does it have to be explained as being positive or negative? Probably just a sign that we need to make sense of ourselves. 
• do we have to start to reason before we understand why a specific emotional state dominates us? What is anxiety and what are the emotions that characterize the way we position ourselves toward the Others, the World?
• Is this quote based on the assertion that thoughts are our experiences? There's no cognitive mark when experiencing events that have a significant impact; there's a bodily experience that modifies our emotional state, which we will use to create meaning of a specific event but also about ourselves, the fabric of our being. 

Sunday reading

Here is a good selection - I'm biased, of course - of some really interesting articles on different topics.

From the New York Times

Looking for a Lesson in Google’s Lavish Perks

Is There Life After Work?

Living With Less. A Lot Less.

And the Aeon Magazine

The science of love

Walking on oil

Losing my voice

Enjoy! 

Emotion-focused therapy: Les Greenberg and Robert Elliott talk about its features, influences, training and effectiveness

Les Greenberg (York University) Robert Elliott (Strathclyde University)

Adding two more videos from Robert Elliott. Note the good definition of Self in the second talk.
 

Sleep and memory consolidation

We all know that sleep is very important for our mental and physical health, as seen here and here. Now there is research that looks into the processes of consolidation of memory during sleep.

Authors have found out that...

the mechanism that enables the brain to consolidate memory and found that a commonly prescribed sleep aid enhances the process. 

Here.

Sanity and fulfilling work: redundancies

I'm starting with the "How to stay sane", which is something that sometimes is not as easy as we might think. :)

Rating agencies, Markets and Psychology

If the rating agencies merely state an opinion about the financial health of a company or a country, why is that investors credit their decisions so vehemently?

1- the rating agencies do not emit merely opinions; and/or

2- their decisions are only opinions when they lower ratings or when the ratings are proved to be inaccurate; and/or

3- investors don't trust other sources of information; and/or

4- investors assume an opinion as a short term determination rather than an information provided to understand a larger picture; and/or

5- self fulfilling prophecies are fed by opinions, not by facts; and/or

6- the so rational financial markets are incredibly permeable to group dynamics and structural psychological processes of decision-making deviation.

I still believe that Psychologists and Sociologists should play an important role in the big financial houses of investment, as well as in the rating agencies. They would provide alternative frameworks of understanding, much more solid and sensitive to the full range of psychological and social dynamics that are formed in the society in a particular context.

Efficiency and chaos

Is efficiency directly linked to a durable and wide loss of jobs across every sector of society? Where is the point where you leave "good" efficiency and get "extremely harmful" efficiency? Will this "bad" efficiency lead to the equation efficiency=social void=unhappiness=social unrest?

Dyslexia: the phonological impairment

Some excerpts: 

Individuals with dyslexia have trouble recognizing (...) phonetic differences, whether a person is speaking a familiar language or a foreign one.

Individuals with dyslexia were significantly worse at being able to consistently recognize the voices of the English speakers.

It is remarkable that individuals with dyslexia are no better able to identify voices speaking a familiar language than a foreign one.

The result reaffirms the theory that the underlying deficit in dyslexia isn't about the act of reading per se, but instead involves difficulty with how sounds of spoken language are heard and processed in the dyslexic brain.

What theories of dyslexia have not been able to convincingly explain, say the researchers, is why there is no evident difficulty in the ability to perceive and produce speech among people with dyslexia. This is especially curious if the ability to recognize phonological sounds is impaired.

The results suggest that the source of a phonological deficit might be in dyslexic individuals' difficulties learning the consistent properties of speech sounds as spoken by an individual talker.

"Lots of research has shown that individuals with dyslexia have more trouble understanding speech when there is noise in the background," says Perrachione. "These results suggest that trouble following a specific voice might be part of the cause. Teachers and other educators can be sensitive to this during classroom instruction where noise from other classmates might make it disproportionately difficult for children with dyslexia to follow what is going on in a lesson."

Here. 

Stanford experiment: 40 years later

For all the Psychologists out there, give it a look. Impressive report!

The unimaginative relation of an I and a Me

We are eminently set up to relate. Naturally equipped with the relational tools to engage with different people and different selves in our inner audience. Automagically predisposed to build bridges of mutual agreed meaning. But something is utterly overwhelming in how we relate with ourselves: I is vague and Me is deeply unimaginative. This leads to violent spin in our axis of diversified personal positions. Our different Me's battle with our different views of an I that lives in complete solitude.

When you think of yourself you realize that not only you think of yourself but also about all the mixture of different views and meanings of I's and Me's. This eventually creates a spectrum of unintelligible movements towards personal meaning. I is not an I when the Me's are chosen to replace an I. This means that the views of oneself, either by our distinctive personal perspective or by other's perceptions of oneself, are glued in our consideration of personal intelligibility. Full of different and concurrently perspectives of being, one tend to fall in pieces, having no ability to clean what belongs to the I and what doesn't. This is particularly acute with people that have a tremendous difficulty reading the entire scope of their feelings. The complete confusion of space, time and self leads to an undisputed battle ring. One decision comes out as a superlative form of adaptation to chaos, leaving all the polyphony with a lowered volume and significance.

We struggle to make sense of our lives; we battle to make our decisions meaningful; we strive to persist. But we don't fully understand what the I includes and what relations it has. We don't fully understand the origins or justifications of your personal movements of meaning construction because we are constantly redefining our coordinates.

Violence and abuse: electronic library

The mission of the Minnesota Center Against Violence and Abuse (MINCAVA) is to support research, education, and access to violence related resources.