Monday 23 August 2010
thoughts on Onam
Onam is probably one of the quietest and most secular Indian festival and every time I get to celebrate it I discover something new. I wont tell you the story of Onam you will find it anywhere on the net. What I like about Onam is how inclusive it is and how dignified the celebrations are. Men and women wear their traditional clothes, which are in lovely creamy shade of white lined with gold. Most Indian festivals are characterised by bright clothes and loud celebration Onam is quiet and people of all faiths are included in the celebration, which is getting rare in India. The boat races, graceful dances, and pookalams are inclusive. I recall some of the celebrations from years ago when I must have been around four and it still held the same magic the food wasn’t a big attraction then and most of the time I just ate banana chips. The white and gold sarees had something magical about them. Even today when I see women on onam I find it magical there is something about the simplicity of a white and gold saree that almost seems ethereal.
Friday 13 August 2010
The baggage of being good
Ian Parker once spoke about how psychology students join the field bursting at the seams with good will and a desire to help humanity. If only it were so easy to help a world waiting for the benevolence of a mental health professional. If only it were so easy to clean up the world and rid society of every little distress.
Dr Parker isn’t a cynic, neither is he a misanthrope who was harmed by psychology he questioned the motives with which a lot of students (me included) take a course in psychology. Our motives to play the fairy godmother or agony aunt to a world waiting to relive its suffering can be quite naive and even misplaced. Dr Parker in Revolution in Psychology described the hopes and disappointments of a psychologist and their career path. Once the initial charm of helping people has worn out psychologists must look out for their own interests.
The discipline of psychology has been criticised on various theoretical and methodological and even ethical points yet these debates hardly touch those who choose to join the field who believe in the benevolence of everything they heard during their training. Helping someone isn’t necessarily a bad thing but what is distressing that most psychologists walk into the field like soldiers marching into battle amidst the fanfare. And like all soldiers fighting a war they realise the futility and see the ugliness of battle. Unlike soldiers who desert the army psychologists carry on still hoping for miracles. Helping people is good and perhaps primeval at some level, but this manufactured condition of artificial illness and cure is quite alarming.
To quote Dr parker once again “ The discipline is very adept at identifying particular abnormalities in individual behaviour, and psychological descriptions unfortunately chime all too well with commonsensical views of who is ‘mad’ and who is ‘bad’.” It is with these notions that each generation of psychologists expands the field. To put it mildly most of our observations can be inane and so obvious that they can be quite amusing at times. Except we feed the minds of millions and have fueled popular imagination of what it means to have a slight anxiety and how it can hamper your productivity. We see rather than hear our clients and paradoxically see our symptoms by listening to them looking for them earnestly. I can understand and sympathise with suffering what I cant agree with is disorder and definition.
In our bid to help we mystify disorder and create causes and supply elaborate explanations as to why people do what they do or feel the way they do. I just received this text and feel I must add it here to validate my point. –
Read carefully
Here’s a personality test. This was devised by a team of famous psychologists around the world.
Imagine you walked into a hut by the river in the jungle. You get in and find that there are 7 beds to your right, 7 chairs to your left and a small table in the middle. On the table there are 4 different fruits apples , bananas, strawberries and peaches which fruit will you choose?
Your choice reveals something about you!
Results
If you choose apples you like apples.
If you choose bananas you like bananas.
If you choose strawberries you like strawberries.
If you choose peaches you like peaches.
Need I say more?
Dr Parker isn’t a cynic, neither is he a misanthrope who was harmed by psychology he questioned the motives with which a lot of students (me included) take a course in psychology. Our motives to play the fairy godmother or agony aunt to a world waiting to relive its suffering can be quite naive and even misplaced. Dr Parker in Revolution in Psychology described the hopes and disappointments of a psychologist and their career path. Once the initial charm of helping people has worn out psychologists must look out for their own interests.
The discipline of psychology has been criticised on various theoretical and methodological and even ethical points yet these debates hardly touch those who choose to join the field who believe in the benevolence of everything they heard during their training. Helping someone isn’t necessarily a bad thing but what is distressing that most psychologists walk into the field like soldiers marching into battle amidst the fanfare. And like all soldiers fighting a war they realise the futility and see the ugliness of battle. Unlike soldiers who desert the army psychologists carry on still hoping for miracles. Helping people is good and perhaps primeval at some level, but this manufactured condition of artificial illness and cure is quite alarming.
To quote Dr parker once again “ The discipline is very adept at identifying particular abnormalities in individual behaviour, and psychological descriptions unfortunately chime all too well with commonsensical views of who is ‘mad’ and who is ‘bad’.” It is with these notions that each generation of psychologists expands the field. To put it mildly most of our observations can be inane and so obvious that they can be quite amusing at times. Except we feed the minds of millions and have fueled popular imagination of what it means to have a slight anxiety and how it can hamper your productivity. We see rather than hear our clients and paradoxically see our symptoms by listening to them looking for them earnestly. I can understand and sympathise with suffering what I cant agree with is disorder and definition.
In our bid to help we mystify disorder and create causes and supply elaborate explanations as to why people do what they do or feel the way they do. I just received this text and feel I must add it here to validate my point. –
Read carefully
Here’s a personality test. This was devised by a team of famous psychologists around the world.
Imagine you walked into a hut by the river in the jungle. You get in and find that there are 7 beds to your right, 7 chairs to your left and a small table in the middle. On the table there are 4 different fruits apples , bananas, strawberries and peaches which fruit will you choose?
Your choice reveals something about you!
Results
If you choose apples you like apples.
If you choose bananas you like bananas.
If you choose strawberries you like strawberries.
If you choose peaches you like peaches.
Need I say more?
Tuesday 10 August 2010
who's afraid of Sigmund Freud?
Why isnt psychoanalysis so popular today?
This is a question I raised as a student so many years before and today a student asked me the same. Over the years I had lost touch with psychoanalysis and to keep up with the zeitgeist gone the cognitive behavioural way. Though I never truly could fully accept that every problem arose out of faulty beliefs and a cure was changing one’s beliefs. Somehow this to me this represented a kind of impassive indoctrinated complacency – don’t ask don’t fight be happy keep smiling. Conflict isn’t a necessarily bad thing so why did I have to magically and benignly make my clients problems vanish?
Someone said CBT represented a kind of dodo bird verdict; it is always effective in treating everything. My own conflict with the apparently empowering psychology left me disenchanted so much so that I felt there had to be something that acknowledged the bad bits of humanity or said things everyone was too scared to say. It never occurred to me psychoanalysis could hold the answer. Psychoanalysis is so much other than therapy or a school of psychology.
Psychoanalysis as I am discovering it holds a possibility – of getting to understand the human mind, disorder, society, power differentials. It may not be happy but it certainly is liberating. If psychoanalysis can do so much why is it that it that it is always sidelined or discarded as the brainchild of an old perv and his cronies (excuse my French). Apart from the Nazi book-burning spree, which helped partly silence Freud, there are bigger issues that need to be looked at. Psychoanalysis we were always told was an expensive and lengthy process so only the rich can afford it – granted but then again there are ways to get past that barrier if people wanted. Where there is a will there’s a way right?
I guess psychoanalysis represents something that we are in denial of. A denial of huge proportions. Now that I am sounding quite Freudian let me go that way. I feel we as a society like to believe that things can be made all right with a few pills and a quick dash to the therapist. Getting to acknowledge hate, anger or just acknowledging the dark side of human nature gets us jittery. We have come to believe that everything negative should be banished and the world will function well. Unfortunately that is perhaps why most of us need to see a therapist – we need to get rid of negative feelings and as fast as we can. It’s like getting rid of your shadow. Not that I condone outbursts of anger or hatred, I feel a repressed feeling tends to manifest itself in ways that can become ugly.
Psychoanalysis acknowledges our collective insanity as a civilization and does not claim to have a perfect or even an absolute cure. Perhaps in an age where instant and permanent cures are possible psychoanalysis seems out of place. But look at it this way psychoanalysts don’t carry the baggage of being all-powerful all-knowing as some of their counterparts do. A psychoanalyst treads carefully with a client without the all-knowing demeanour their scientifically trained counterparts do. They acknowledge their shortcomings, their attraction to their clients. Any therapist who did that would have their licence revoked and become the object of national television. For a therapist to acknowledge their own stance as only a facilitator and the client as the best descriptor of their problems is almost sacrilege.
Above all I think psychoanalysis holds a mirror upto our flaws, as a race and lightens the blow mental illness hits some of us with right in the face. No one is immune all of us are living an illness called life riddled with our own pathology. Treat one anther appears. Who would want that ? well some of us and we enjoy our symptom :)
This is a question I raised as a student so many years before and today a student asked me the same. Over the years I had lost touch with psychoanalysis and to keep up with the zeitgeist gone the cognitive behavioural way. Though I never truly could fully accept that every problem arose out of faulty beliefs and a cure was changing one’s beliefs. Somehow this to me this represented a kind of impassive indoctrinated complacency – don’t ask don’t fight be happy keep smiling. Conflict isn’t a necessarily bad thing so why did I have to magically and benignly make my clients problems vanish?
Someone said CBT represented a kind of dodo bird verdict; it is always effective in treating everything. My own conflict with the apparently empowering psychology left me disenchanted so much so that I felt there had to be something that acknowledged the bad bits of humanity or said things everyone was too scared to say. It never occurred to me psychoanalysis could hold the answer. Psychoanalysis is so much other than therapy or a school of psychology.
Psychoanalysis as I am discovering it holds a possibility – of getting to understand the human mind, disorder, society, power differentials. It may not be happy but it certainly is liberating. If psychoanalysis can do so much why is it that it that it is always sidelined or discarded as the brainchild of an old perv and his cronies (excuse my French). Apart from the Nazi book-burning spree, which helped partly silence Freud, there are bigger issues that need to be looked at. Psychoanalysis we were always told was an expensive and lengthy process so only the rich can afford it – granted but then again there are ways to get past that barrier if people wanted. Where there is a will there’s a way right?
I guess psychoanalysis represents something that we are in denial of. A denial of huge proportions. Now that I am sounding quite Freudian let me go that way. I feel we as a society like to believe that things can be made all right with a few pills and a quick dash to the therapist. Getting to acknowledge hate, anger or just acknowledging the dark side of human nature gets us jittery. We have come to believe that everything negative should be banished and the world will function well. Unfortunately that is perhaps why most of us need to see a therapist – we need to get rid of negative feelings and as fast as we can. It’s like getting rid of your shadow. Not that I condone outbursts of anger or hatred, I feel a repressed feeling tends to manifest itself in ways that can become ugly.
Psychoanalysis acknowledges our collective insanity as a civilization and does not claim to have a perfect or even an absolute cure. Perhaps in an age where instant and permanent cures are possible psychoanalysis seems out of place. But look at it this way psychoanalysts don’t carry the baggage of being all-powerful all-knowing as some of their counterparts do. A psychoanalyst treads carefully with a client without the all-knowing demeanour their scientifically trained counterparts do. They acknowledge their shortcomings, their attraction to their clients. Any therapist who did that would have their licence revoked and become the object of national television. For a therapist to acknowledge their own stance as only a facilitator and the client as the best descriptor of their problems is almost sacrilege.
Above all I think psychoanalysis holds a mirror upto our flaws, as a race and lightens the blow mental illness hits some of us with right in the face. No one is immune all of us are living an illness called life riddled with our own pathology. Treat one anther appears. Who would want that ? well some of us and we enjoy our symptom :)
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