http://psyberspace.walterlogeman.com 

Not sure what I’ll do.

???

Hari Kunzru, Into the Zone .

You will get introduced to ‘Teddy’ i.e. Theodor Adorno.

Its always sunny in the dialectic

Look on the bright side! In a country obsessed with positivity, Hari traces the path of exiled German intellectual Theodor Adorno to sunny California, where he gets stuck in traffic with the British writer Geoff Dyer. How this positivity relates to church and state? Turns out there’s a lot to complain about.

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Revolutionary Left Radio

for some political clout.

The Principal Contradiction: Applying Dialectical Materialism

Torkil Lauesen joins Breht to discuss his newest book “The Principal Contradiction”. In this discussion, Torkil and Breht discuss dialectical materialism, how it is applied in real world situations, and the role that contradiction plays in it all. In the 1970s and 80s, Torkil Lauesen was a member of a clandestine communist cell which carried out a series of robberies in Denmark, netting very large sums which were then sent on to various national liberation movements in the Third World. Following their capture in 1989, Torkil would spend six years in prison. While incarcerated, he was involved in prison activism and received a Masters degree in political science. He is currently a member of International Forum, an anti-imperialist organization based in Denmark.

Find more of his writings HERE

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The Partially Examined Life.

For a through philosophical analysis by people who can’t make up their minds about anything.

Episode 136: Adorno on the Culture Industry

On Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), plus Adorno’s “Culture Industry Reconsidered” (1963). How does the entertainment industry affect us? Adorno (armed with Marx and Freud) thinks that our “mass culture” is imposed from the top down to lull us into being submissive workers.

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OK, listen to the lot and makes some comments!!

The Power of Intimacy

A Couple Therapy Training Day
with Walter Logeman

Saturday, 10 October

This one day workshop is for people who work
with individuals and/or couples.

❋

I’m pleased to announce this one day couple therapy training. The focus will be on engaging the couple.

Right from the start it is usually ONE person who makes contact. How to address that initial difference? There are so many ways and so many different scenarios.

This is where a sociodramatic approach comes into its own. The life in the group will bring forth the collective wisdom. Yes, we trust the power of intimacy in the group for learning about the power of intimacy in the couples we work with.

And what if you don’t see couples for some reason?
Counselling, if the matters raised include a partner, means it is relationship therapy. How to work with the power of love in that relationship?

There is a lesson in the relationship to learn, and one partner can transform a relationship. It’s better if they do that together.

Go here to see more and to enrol:  Psychodrama.org.nz

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This one day workshop is a lead-in to Psychodramatic Couple Therapy Training
https://psychodrama.org.nz/couple-therapy-training/  the next four-day event is Wednesday 18 – Saturday 21 November 2020, you can enrol now.

This brief summary is the basis of psychotherapy, of the unconscious and we work with these patterns in psychodrama.  I’m  pleased with the crisp summation.  I’m  satisfied that it captures the relational nature of our being. The relationship nature of the unconscious, or self.  It is alive as this pattern “repeats and persists”.  And does so even as repair and grapple with the tendencies as they persist.

However the summation is not as soulful or as wild as the process.

So How about:

We are born into a fiercely
swirling and churning
relationship whirlpool.

Shrouded and invisible,
the relationship swirls and eddies
fight to repeat and be born gain. 

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To edit:

We are born into a fiercely
swirling and churning
relationship whirlpool.

Shrouded and invisible,
the relationship swirls and eddies
fight to repeat and be born gain. 

Planning a workshop for Saturday 17 October

A series of six prints on thick A2 cotton paper selected from

https://walterlogeman.co.nz/gallery-earth-crosses/

The Earth Crosses images are a series that began as my Thousand Sketches project ended. The last image of the 1000 was #1000 Departing Force and it is part of this exhibition.

The images are a dialogue between the horizontal and the vertical. Opposites. All the images in the series are square. The vertical, perhaps the landscape, has as much space as the horizontal, perhaps the portrait aspect. Think dialectics, yin yang. I expect I’ll get to elaborate on the opening night. (Date TBA)

A painting for our time!!

If you are on a big screen – right click to get full Image in next tab.

From Wikipedia:

 

Robyn Kahukiwa (born 1938) is an artist, award-winning children’s book author, and illustrator from New Zealand. Kahukiwa has created a significant collection of paintings, books, prints, drawings, and sculptures.

Kahukiwa was born in Sydney, Australia in 1938. She trained as a commercial artist and later moved to New Zealand at the age of nineteen.

Part Māori on her mother’s side, Kahukiwa is of Ngāti Porou, Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti, Ngāti Hau, Ngāti Konohi and Whanau-a-Ruataupare descent.

ISSUE 140 / SUMMER 2012-13

For Moreno spontaneity was “a new response to an old situation or an adequate response to a new situation” (1953, p. 336), with creativity adding the element of inventiveness.

Moreno, Zerka T. (1987) “Psychodrama, Role Theory, and
the Concept of the Social Atom.” in Zeig, Jeffrey K., Evolution Of Psychotherapy, first Conference. Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

Zerka is quoting from the definition that is on the same page in the 1978 edition, 366.

Here is another quote from “Who Shall Survive?” 1978 edition, Page 42:

Spontaneity operates in the present, now and here; it propels the individual towards an adequate response to a new situation or a new response to an old situation. It is… the least developed among the factors operating in our world; it is most frequently discouraged and restrained by cultural devices.

So is spontaneity the response, or that which propels the response?

A response is a complex concept, tending towards behaviour in a context. Being adequate or new it is evaluated in some way, by self or others.

I think Moreno had more in mind than response.  He places spontaneity and creativity as ontological entities in the cosmos.

John Nolte looks at these entities and validates them as being parallel to quantum physics notions of Bohm. There may be something in it, but no-one really understands quantum physics, and it is all too easy to have quantum physics validate anything at all.

Understanding Moreno is to take him at his word:

My contention was that religion should be tried again, a religion of a new sort, its inspirations modified and its techniques improved by the insights which science has given us-and by no means excluding some of the insights which Marxism and psychoanalysis have brought forth. My position was threefold: first, the hypothesis of spontaneity-creativity as a propelling force in human progress, beyond and independent from libido and socio-economic motives which does not deny the fact that they are frequently interwoven, but which does deny the contention that they are merely a function and a derivative; second, the hypothesis of having faith in our fellowmen’s intentions-outside of obedience resulting from physical and legalistic coercion-the hypothesis of love and mutual sharing as a powerful, indispensable working principle in group life; and third, the hypothesis of a superdynamic community based upon these principles which can be brought to realization through newer techniques. It may be said that I tried to do through sociometry what “religion without science” has failed to accomplish in the past and what “science without religion” has failed to accomplish in Soviet Russia .

“Who Shall Survive?” xv 1978

His contention that spontaneity-creativity is not “merely a function and a derivative” is probably aimed at both Freud and Marx. I guess for  Freud everything is derived from sex. In the case of Marx, Moreno is in a camp that thinks of Marx as an economic determinist. (I don’t think Marx is that but it is easy to see why one might think that.). Moreno is the true “idealist” however.  There is something out there from which economics is “derived”!  See the next quote:

“Who Shall Survive?” page 58 in a section called the Sociometry and Economics page 58

But no one [i.e. Marxists] stops and thinks and asks the more fundamental question: “What are the forces underlying a universal system of creative economics?” In order to answer this question we have to analyze the situation before production begins, and define the locus and status nascendi preceding all production. What is it that is necessary to have on hand before production of goods is possible? First, there must be in existence the natural resources (n) of the planet, the mountains and the rivers, the mines in the depth of the earth and the unleashed elements of the atmosphere . They are there before they are touched by any labor, before they are discovered by any man and they would be there even if mankind would not exist . Next to the natural resources are the generators of production, the creative ideas (c) . They are the fountainhead of all technical and social inventions, of the instruments and the blueprints ; without them the processes of production could not be contemplated . Without creative ideas the most abundant natural resources of all the universe could go on for eternities unharnessed.  Then there is another factor in the genesis which must exist before any production can start. It is spontaneity, that all-pervasive plastic element which begins to warm up out imagination as soon as the natural resources and the creative idea meet. These three phenomena, natural resources, creativity and spontaneity pre-exist and condition the labor process. They belong to the universe . They do not belong to the capitalist class, they do not belong to the labor class, they do not belong to any particular individual or any particular group. They are universalia.

So now we see how Moreno is not only anti Marx’s revolutionary process, but a philosophical idealist.  He says spontaneity-creativity is “a propelling force in human progress” which makes it sound like there is some guiding force for good.  He says these forces C and S exist before humans.  He does not quite get the religion out of his science.

Yet the physics or behavioural psychology explanations do not suffice.  Nor does the orthodox, dogmatic marxism.

More…

The cornerstones of sociometric conceptualization are the universal concepts of spontaneity and creativity. Sociometry has taken these concepts from the metaphysical and philosophical level and brought them to empirical test by means of sociometric method . A presentation of these concepts is the first step within the sociometric system .

“Who Shall Survive?” p39

So idealist on the one hand and empiricist on the other…

Yet, I think he is grappling to say something more subtle.

It is thus the sociometric action experiment which links sociometry with scientific socialism and separates them both from sociology.

“Who Shall Survive?” 20

This is what I think unites them — praxis.  One at the micro level of the social atom — the other at the level of class.  While he might go on abt universals…

Let us start with time, one of the great universals. What has happened with the function of time in the course of psychotherapy in our century? I do not speak of time as a philosophical, mystical, or phenomenological concept, but as a therapeutic concept.

Fox Chapter 1