psychosocial development

Tue Apr 1 14:02:29 CDT 2008

Howdy Ivo and all,

    I am moved to respond and expand on the end of Ivo's email yesterday (see below-- and mainly the last paragraph of his email and the poem-song lyric).
     I have become increasingly dis-illusioned (not altogether a bad thing---by no means cynicism--just loss of idealizing illusions) about what constitutes normality. I've demoted most people from rational to marginally and intermittently rational---a major difference. Rational suggests to me that a person thinks about life, politics, love, etc. with (I'm making this up) at least 55% rationality. I don't think most folks do much more than 34% and much of that is about ordinary life requirements like figuring out the rational sequences in cooking breakfast or driving a car. Even then there is a surprising degree of lapse of true logic.
    In other words, I find that the major feature of psychology in most people to be a variation of compensation: It is as if the program says, "If I can maintain an appearance of being grown-up, reasonable, mature, and competent, then the real game is how far can I go in indulging in all the opposite elements while keeping up that appearance?" The answer is: Lots. People can be amazingly (appallingly) unreasonable, immature, incompetent, flaky, and insert all these regressions in the service of the id in the nooks and crannies between just enough grown-up gestures and seemingly adult statements so that the appearance is maintained---as well as the conscious illusion (or, perhaps better, delusion?) that one is in fact a grown-up, responsible citizen. 
    I think the real gift of psychoanalysis, beyond the 74% misleading particulars of early dogma / theory, is the deeper sensibility of calling oneself into question, of knowing---really knowing deeply---that one is afflicted with temptations to be less-than-rational, and one gives in to these temptations at least some not-insignificant proportion of the time. I'm not talking about regression in the service of the ego, of consciously chosen times to indulge the inner child. I'm talking about when there is unconsciousness about this regressive process.

        True maturation involves knowing distinctly that this process is operating and instituting a psychological program of quality assurance, of pro-active error-maintenance. In other words, know that you are inclined to sacrifice true rational goals in the quest for short-term illusory goals, that this occurs in a hundred subtle different ways, and the best we can do is to learn to detect and minimize these lapses to a gradually increasing degree. (I figure I bring down my folly at a rate of 1-2% per year in the last forty years, but that's required continuous self-analysis, aided by my wife who offers loving yet critical feedback as we review matters.)

         As to the song lyric or quasi poem cited below, that involves another complex---related, but more insidious: The capacity also to lose grounding, to lose meaning. I question that the protagonist has in fact been searching---or if he has, it's been an illusion, the kind of effort a surly teenager says when he sulkily yells, "Leave me alone! I'll work this out on my own." What this maneuver does is offer the illusion that one is working meaningfully on an issue when in fact all is going on is episodes of self-pitying rumination mixed with other moments of escape and avoidance. Real work requires that bringing to the surface of consciousness process that involves having a live, slightly critical (in contrast to enabling) audience, such as a therapist. Can you admit your secrets openly to another and review them in the space of consensual reality (rather than the inner space of subjective reality---a space prone to self-delusion)? 

   Anyway, I wanted to share this contemplation---thanks for stimulating my thinking, Ivo. Warmly, Adam 
----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Ivo Banaco 
  To: Adam Blatner 
  Cc: Peter Howie ; Rosa Cukier ; list at grouptalkweb.org 
  Sent: Monday, March 31, 2008 1:26 PM
  Subject: Re: child development and world realization

  In healthy development, as Robert Kegan refers, the subject of one stage, becomes the object of the subject of the next stage. Everybody born at level 0 and than…well than everything human can happen. But one thing we don't need is to absolutize a particular level of existence as being the most important level. All the development dynamic is important as we transcend and include lower levels of existence embracing newer ones. When Peter says "the child is interested in world realisation... and it is us that stop at self-realisation" it seems that "us" and "the child" are two different entities. This can in fact be true when our development is repressing lower levels where pathologies enter in this story. But this is different than saying that us, adult bad guys, don't aim for world realisation, just self-realisation. Does the child really aim world realisation. We have to define very well what we mean by "world realisation". In my opinion, the child cannot be interested in world realisation because simply the child level, in a loose sense, is an egocentric stage of development with no good understanding about what others think and feel - in this phase it lacks multiple perspectives. However the child is magical, the child is typically spontaneous, definitely one of the things we have to preserve as we go along in our own development.

  I think Moreno, as Jung and others genius of our modern time, tended to make a subtle but important fallacy that sometimes is called the pre/post fallacy. To put it simply, this is the mistake of elevating pre-conventional wisdom to the ultimate glory; it is the return to the child spontaneity or magic thinking that is the goal and not an embrace of our own child as a fundamental part of our being. 

  Although of course, we have to put things in context: One of the real problems of relatively normal adults is that they in fact repressed those magical inner wisdom, embracing a cold rationality (even Freud was caught up with that, or at least could not solve that problem with his system) and a conventional and for some post-conventional thought) and one of the genius of Moreno was to manage to put adults to dream again, to be spontaneous again, reowning parts that we repressed early on. 

  A man lies in his bed in a room with no door
  He waits hoping for a presence something anything to enter
  After spending half his life searching he still felt as blank
  As the ceiling at which he stared
  He is alive but feels absolutely nothing
  So is he?

  When he was six he believed that the moon overhead followed him
  By nine he had deciphered the illusion trading magic for fact
  No tradebacks...
  So this is what it's like to be an adult
  If he only knew now what he knew then...

  Lying sideways atop crumpled sheets and no covers he decides to
  dream...

  Dream up a new self for himself... 

  Lyrics: Eddie Vedder  leading vocals of the American music band Pearl Jam

  On 3/30/08, Adam Blatner <ablatner at verizon.net> wrote: 
    Dear Peter,  you wrote 3/28/08  ... "Moreno suggested in one of his books on Sociometry that - something like - " the child is not interested in self-realisation - the child is interested in world realisation"... and it is us that stop at self-realisation."

        ab: I don't remember Moreno saying this, but I haven't pored over Moreno's writings that carefully. I find so much of what he says to be redundant, over-blown, excessive. Yet there are many gems scattered about! True wisdom or at least the seeds of valid insight.

             So it's an excellent point you and perhaps Moreno make.

    However, the term "self-realization" (it's spelled with a z in the USA) is misleading, I think. Self is such a, well, selfish, egocentric term. 

    Yes, there are those who try to expand it, talk about expanding the self by putting a capital S in front of it and making it seem like our Greater Source or something. I don't object to that idea so much as the need to stay with the word "self."
             The Committee of Angels who are arranging my life (there are perhaps 30 - 50 of them, I estimate---playful imaginitation-wise) are part of that complex that overlaps with "my" creative unconscious (is it mine, really?); and they, we, the greater flow, well, it unfolds and it doesn't really require that I tease out how much They have done and how much "I did it my way" (as Frank Sinatra sang it). 
         But self is too narrow.

            World realization? Well, I don't think kids are doing world-realization. They don't have a wide-enough circle of caring, enough maturity or sophistication. Indeed, I think relatively few adults even imagine this goal.

           But I do think there's a germ of an idea, which is that neither are kids as egocentric as Freud seemed to imply. They just want the whole game to be fun, and if that includes having nicer trees, and cleaner air, if that includes having other healthy kids to play with and mom and dad not worrying, if that includes having interesting toys and a sense that the world is a peaceful, safe, fun place to grow up, well, all that is included. 

    So the terms, "Self-realization" or "World-Realization" doesn't capture it for me. 

       Aside from "self," "realization" is also a problematic term for me, because I'm not about to agree with anyone (much less myself) about any statement about reality. Realization in the sense of really having reality become more real... it becomes pardoxical and nonsense.
         Realization in the sense of achieving its full potential?  Maybe, as Amazing Grace verse says, "When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun..." 
            But as for now, I perceive humanity to be somewhere between the equivalent of six to fourteen years old in its overall maturity as a species. Old enough to think it knows what it's doing, young enough to easily give in to childish and savage temptations. Civilized? Only the veneer of civilization and some few protected islands.

       Anyway, your point is good and important, that we should recognize child development as being more than just egocentric. This is also in keeping with what the Humanistic Psychology movement was trying to say. 

              Warmly, Adam 

      ----- Original Message ----- 
      From: Peter Howie 
      To: list at grouptalkweb.org 
      Sent: Friday, March 28, 2008 6:02 PM
      Subject: Re: Role Reversal, etc. (response to Peter H)

      Dear Ivo,

      First up I am not a Wilber fan or anti-fan. But I wanted to put a small counter to his idea of the 3 major development levels from a Morenian perspective. Maybe not a Morenian perspective but a Morenian expression at least.  I think also implied is that the child with all their capacity for spontaneity and creativity is pegged back to only self-realisation.  This I guess has more to do with the interests of the child - while what you are bringing up is the capacities of the child - but interesting nonetheless.

      Cheers

      Peter  Howie
      www.morenocollegium.com.au

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