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Thought of the Week Archives
May 2000
May 7
The universe is real; it is happening all the time; it is integral
and it is open to piecemeal interpretation. Different men construe it
in different ways. Since it owes no prior allegiance to any one man's
construction system, it is always open to reconstruction. Some of the
alternative ways of construing are better adapted to man's purposes than
are others. Thus, man comes to understand his world through an infinite
series of successive approximations. Since man is always faces with constructive
alternatives, which he may explore if he wishes, he need not continue
indefinitely to be the absolute victim either of his past history or of
his present circumstances.
- George Kelly
A Theory of Personality: The Psychology of Personal Constructs
May 14
Truamatic events destroy the sustaining bonds between individual and
community. Those who have survived learn that their sense of self, of
worth, of humanity, depends upon a feeling of connection to others. The
solidarity of a group provides the strongest protection against terror
and despair, and the strong antidote to traumatic experience. Trauma isolates;
the group re-creates a sense of belonging. Trauma shames and stigmatizes;
the group bears witness and affirms. Trauma degrades the victim; the group
exalts her. Trauma dehumanizes the victim; the group restores her humanity.
Repeatedly in the testimony of survivors there comes a moment when
a sense of connection is restored by another person's unaffected display
of generosity. Something in herself that the victim believes to be irretrievably
destroyed -- faith, decency, courage -- is reawakened by an example of
common altruism. Mirrored in the actions of others, the survivor recognizes
and reclaims a lost part of herself. At that moment, the survivor begins
to rejoin the human commonality.
- Judith Herman
Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence--from domestic abuse
to political terror (p. 214)
May 21
All cultures have as one of their most powerful constitutive instruments
a folk psychology, a set of more or less connected, more or less normative
descriptions about how human beings "tick," what our own and other minds
are like, what one can expect situated action to be like, what are possible
modes of life, how one commits oneself to learn them, and so on. We learn
our culture's fold psychology early, learn it as we learn to use the very
language we acquire and to conduct the interpersonal transactions required
in communal life.
...["Folk psychology" is] a system by which people organize their experience
in, knowledge about, and transactions with the social world....Since its
organizing principle is narrative rather than conceptual, I shall have
to consider the nature of narrative and how it is built around established
or canonical expectations and the mental management of deviations from
such expectations. (p. 35)
...Personhood is itself a constituent concept of our folk psychology,
and as Charles Taylor notes, it is attributed selectively, often withheld
from those in an outgroup. Note that it is only when constituent beliefs
in a folk psychology are violated that narratives are constructed...[Folk
psychology] summarizes not simply how things are but (often implicitly)
how they should be. When things "are as they should be," the narratives
of folk psychology are unnecessary. (pp. 39-40)
- Jerome Bruner
Acts of Meaning
Comment
In the context of the Heroic Journey, our "Folk psychology" would be
the ground which not only shapes, to a great extent, our individual, but
which is also the ground against which our individual lives can take their
shape. In other words, our folk psychology shapes our concept of self
and then becomes the ground against which that self can grow and individuate.
Bruner later discusses the idea that when an event falls outside the "canonical"
parameters of the folk psychology, is narrative which accounts for it
or pulls it into the canon.
There is here, I feel, a key point about the Journey pattern. The pattern
is clearly based on narrative, a "story." In a sense we situate ourselves
within within the canon of our folk psychology and are called to a Journey
(the creation of a new narrative, a new story) when something falls outside
that canon. As Bruner writes, "it is only when constituent beliefs in
a folk psychology are violated that narratives are constructed...When
things "are as they should be," the narratives of folk psychology are
unnecessary."
It is interesting to note here, as well, the elements or structure
of a story or narrative and how they parallel the structure of the Journey
pattern. Even essays tend to follow the general pattern (see my short
article on "The Journey Pattern and the Essay).
Narrative lies at the core of human experience. It is the process which
shapes our perception and understanding of the world, and it is the process
by which we are shaped by those perceptions and understandings. Myth and
ritual are elements in this process in that they are explicit representations
(in language and in action, respectively) of the implicit order, and the
Journey pattern, which is foundational in both myth and ritual, is the
symbolic representation of this narrative process at its most fundamental
level.
- Reg Harris
May 28
Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves
to obscure or deny real facts of our life history. Without free access
to these facts, the sources of our ability to love remain cut off. No
wonder, then, that even well-intended moral appeals -- to be loving, caring,
generous and so forth -- are fruitless. We cannot really love if we are
forbidden to know our truth, the truth about our parents and caregivers
as well as about ourselves. We can only try to behave as if we are loving.
But this hypocritical behavior is the opposite of love. It is confusing
and deceptive, and it produces much helpless rage in the deceived person.
This rage must be repressed in the presence of the pretended "love," especially
if one is dependent, as a child is, on the person who is masquerading
in this illusion of love.
- Alice Miller
The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self.
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