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Great Music and Quick Fingers
Had a call from Tom with an out of the blue to join him and his son Shane at a gig in town -part of the Ireland Guitar Festival. Josco Stephan and his band and later joined by Tommy Emmanuel were the bill for the night. I have to confess that I had not heard of these before and was not sure what to expect. As the small theatre filled up (The Suger Club) I was convinced that everyone attending was a guitar head and was a little worried that the show would be my taste. How wron I was! These guys were brilliant! and one of the freshest sounds that I’ve heard in years. Technically the musicians were awesome but more than that they lived every note and made the music meaningful engaging. Have a look at the you tube videos and see what I mean and watch out if they ever come your way. Afterwards Tom, Shane and I had a really interesting conversation over dinner on whether music and art were historically situated in culture or more fundamentally rooted which minds me to point the reader toward this podcast from Benjamin Zander http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion.htmlwhich addresses the same issue.
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Ed Tech 2008
Attended EdTech 2008 held in Dundalk IT (DKIT) and presented my own paper on Conceptions of Digital Literacy posted on slideshare. Quite an excellent conference and a good blend of practical and research content. Of note the GOAL project on adult learning http://www.belfastmet.ac.uk/goal/index.asp
and the extensive use of www.screencast.com in other institutions. -
The Web and the Unconscious
Most psychoanalytical models of the human mind use a depth metaphor to suggest the division between the conscious and the unconscious. Typically Jungian approaches use the idea that the mind is like an island jutting out of the sea with only so-much showing above the surface. The visible component represents the conscious, the tidal zone the personal unconscious and the zone below the collective unconscious.
A sense of depth is itself a value laden construct. We envisage the bottom of the sea with ugly fish and black darkness. That’s a scary unconscious.There is another way of looking at this what I think is a more useful metaphor.
Look at the following system -the Internet. We could, metaphorically, view this as a form of cognitive consciousness. Alongside this we have individual and societal processes that build, shape and grow the Internet system. This other system is not overtly evident on the Internet it is only accessible through the symbol system of the net. If we were to imagine an alien species that had no way of contacting humans but by some fluke of science could find access to the entire Internet we could ask -what way would they ‘model’ human beings from the evidence available to them? How accurate would this be?
In the same way we do not have direct access to our unconscious and we rely on language and symbol systems to model it. -
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Storytellers
We are all storytellers and we are the stories we tell
The above is a quotation (in fact it’s the opening line) from a book I’m reading called Identity and Story Creating Self in Narrative by McAdams Josselson and Lieblich (2006) APA Washington.
Why do we tell stories about ourselves?
There are always at least two people involved the storyteller and the listener. I like to think about a self-story as a type of connection between two points in time and place. A bridge between two sets of events the narrative and the present -the moment of telling.
Self-stories are constructed in the telling and they are an important fabric in the perpetual process of self-identity formation. -
Jacques Lacan
1901-1981
French psychoanalytical theorist who’ s influence continues today most notably advocated by Slavoj Zizek.
Lacan in turn, reinterprets Freud and in particular, the difficult concept of the unconscious. Lacan links language and the unconscious and suggests that the unconscious is structured like a language. This resonates with some of Freud’s ideas as articulated in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious and his earlier work on The Interpretation of Dreams.Lacan is also known for his theory of the Mirror Stage. This occurs in infants who at that stage develop a capacity that is evidenced by their reaction of recognition when they see their own image in a mirror. What is this capacity? It is a conceptual act, the establishment of ‘I’ (the ego) and an essential foundation for social functioning and a precursor to language. (Why do we use language? To communicate with others!)
Lacan proposes that reality for humans is comprised of a trilogy of levels the Real, Imaginary and Symbolic orders.
I see these as registers of the mind ways of knowing.
Zizek provides a useful analogy – consider the game of chess: at one level, corresponding to the Symbolic, we have the rules of the game, at another level we have the representation of the pieces as, for example, a knight or a pawn, this is the Imaginary and at the third level we have the actual game itself, all aspects of it, including the thinking of the players , the physical surroundings etc..
Language works at the level of the Symbolic and it is always influenced by the big Other.
Language is not a passive exchange – when we communicate we operate within a frame of reference (a concept from Mezirow in turn from Habbermas). Lacan reifies this as the big Other – he gives it a form that recognises how we think. For example, a religious person may process thoughts as what God would like me to say or do, or perhaps a person has a strong ideological framework as with communism – this will shape all that is uttered.
What then of the Real and the Imaginary?
The Real is usually recognised by an absence rather in the same way that we respond to a disequilibrium. We don’t perceive it directly but rather through our responses.
So here’s an example of my own making that gets at what I think Lacan was attempting to point to. I met a colleague recently and I said “Isn’t it terrible what’s been happening in Limerick yet another gangland murder yesterday”
He responded “Shocking when will it ever stop”.
This is just a small part of a typical verbal exchange that takes place between people every day. Look at the levels or registers, or as Lacan would say ‘orders’ of the discourse.
There is the Symbolic order this comprises the words exchanged and our shared cultural understanding of, for example, what we mean when we say ‘gangland’ and further our shared collection of connotations for Limerick.
I would describe the Symbolic order as a form of literacy.
The next level is the Imaginary order. When I say “Isn’t it terrible I am referring to a specific recent murder the most recent in a spate. I have a way of imagining a murder it’s certainly a very sanitized format.
Let me call it a visualization but note that the perception may not all be visual in nature. This visualization for me is tame, very tame for a murder. I leave out a huge amount of detail – so my imagined form is constructed by me in a way that I can use it and not get too upset by it. Notice, that the Imaginary order is not a complete picture, such a picture would be unworkable in everyday life.
Now consider the Real order. This is everything that is not part of the Symbolic or the Imaginary. I call it the inconceivable. What’s our way of knowing this? We indirectly detect by imbalance or absence-as in when we use the phrase ‘the breakdown of law and order‘. There’s lots left out – the fragility of life, the sociological crisis in areas of Limerick, injustices, capacity for evil.
This is as far as I will go for now with Lacan.
There is a link to a good web site on Lacan above.
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Jung
Some notes Carl Jung and Motivation
Jung and others emphasise the unconscious.
The suggestion is that we need to question the contribution of the unconscious to motivation. Jung uses the terms psyche and psychic rather than mind and mental.
Jung sees the unconscious aspect of the psyche as different but complimentary to the conscious. Jung sees the psyche as a dynamic system, in constant flux and self-regulating . He calls the psychic energy libido acting out a form of opposition and compensation. Forward (progression) and backward (regression) movement of the libido -think of adaptation (to one’s environment) and accommodation (change in mind). Some idea of flow between the conscious and the unconscious. And by the way regression (which often gets a bad press) is not a bad thing.
Jung also talks about symbols and signs. A sign as a substitute or representation of a real thing while a symbol is a wider representation.The conscious aspect of the psyche may be compared with an island jutting out of the sea. The island could be seen as the ego the bit above the water. Now there’s lots of stuff that we either forget, have repressed or suppressed; all of these occupy the personal unconscious. The island metaphor places the personal unconscious as just beneath the surface theoretically recoverable.
What lies deeper still is the collective unconscious.
The tendency to experience the world in a manner shaped by the collective past history of mankind is what Jung called archetypal and archetypes are a form of human blueprint for intuition.A complex is a type of grouping of ideas around a basic nucleus.
There are dispositional and environmental contributors to complexes. Complexes can arise in the conscious and unconscious. Unconscious complexes can appear to act or drive independently of the ego.So what is the drive through life -the propulsion?
Jung found the answer to this question gradually evolved itself during years of work with patients, and borrowed the word ‘individuation’ to describe it. There were, he found, a relatively large number of people who, while cured in the ordinary sense of the word, either persisted in continuing their analytical treatment, which he defined as ‘the dialectical discussion between the conscious mind and the unconscious’, people were seeking a goal, something like a quest for wholeness.Conscious and unconscious do not make a whole when one of them is suppressed and injured by the other. If they must contend, let it at least be a fair fight with equal rights on both sides. Both are aspects of life. Consciousness should defend its reason and protect itself, and the chaotic life of the unconscious should be given the chance of having its way too — as much of it as we can stand. This means open conflict and open collaboration at once. That, evidently, is the way human life should be. It is the old game of hammer and anvil: between them the patient iron is forged into an indestructible whole, an ‘individual’. This, roughly, is what I mean by the individuation process. 15
15. ‘Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation’ (C.W., 9, i), pars. 522-3
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The Question of Psychoanalysis
I face a challenge every time I engage with psychoanalytical theories and theorists. I’m never really sure as to the substance and value of the approach. I remain detached and skeptical and tend to apply a higher degree of critical appraisal. On the other hand I sense that there are some very important ideas in this field and that part of the challenge is the complex and intimate nature of what’s being studied.
In this series of blogs I propose to review psychoanalytical thinkers and their theories and to work through their ideas to see what stacks up in. To begin with, I intend to look closely at three of the founding theorists Freud, Jung and Lacan and to provide an overview of their main ideas and work. -
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No Country for old Men
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Adult Learning
Adults learn what they want to learn and what they perceive as useful to them;
Internalisation involves the construction of new meaning based on passed experience and new stimuli;
Learning can be understood as always involving cognitive, psychodynamic and societal/social aspects;
Communities of practice embody all three of these aspects and as such are powerful drivers for adult learning;
Engagement in critical discourse is a likely outcome of successful adult learning in the long-term the reverse is also true adult learning is the inevitable outcome of critical discourse.
Transformative learning can arise in adults where appropriate conditions exist for questioning assumptions, critical discourse, reflection and restructuring of perspectives.You May Also Like
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