For the Love of Cybernetics

This narrative is a response to an invitation to share my story regarding cybernetics. I begin with an exploration of what “for the love of cybernetics” means to me. Tracing experiences and connections to cybernetics over the course of 50?years I explore how I observe and give voice to my relation with people and situations both personal and professional. I explore life and how it is enriched by knowing cybernetics. Recent projects to encourage systems and cybernetic literacy building on work with ocean, earth, air, and energy literacies are described.     

On Becoming a Cybernetician: Highlights and Milestones

In this article, I describe how I encountered cybernetics and how it became an important part of my life. I begin with an account of my time at Brunel University and also describe how I came to work with Gordon Pask, one of the few intellectuals and researchers in the UK who styled themselves as cyberneticians. To enrich my story, I include an overview of the story of cybernetics as I perceive it. Given the importance I attach to cybernetics as an intellectual tool, I end with a plea for it to be included in all educational curricula.     

Becoming (and Remaining) an Analyst in Latin America

The following overview of the development of psychoanalysis in Brazil and in Porto Alegre outlines the current situation and the challenges to psychoanalysis in my country. I will explain my own experiences on becoming an analyst, the main reasons for my choice, my main influences, and my evolution as a clinical psychoanalyst and as a member of psychoanalytic and psychiatric institutions. I include my main contributions to psychoanalysis and consider two broad areas of interest: psychoanalytic technique and its teaching, and the relationship of psychoanalysis and culture. As for the former, my main interests are studies on countertransference and analytic neutrality, to which I will propose a comprehensive concept. As for the latter, I discuss a culture that contrasts vividly with the one in which Freud created the discipline, psychoanalytic views on violence and perversity, psychoanalytic institutions, and the application of analytic ideas for the understanding of some artists and their work.

I will also describe some general features of my country and the development of psychoanalysis in it; report my experiences as a candidate and an analyst; and offer some information about my evolution as an analyst through papers I have written over the past 30 years.     

My Scholarly Life in Cybernetics

This article narrates how I discovered cybernetics, who inspired me to make the contributions of which I am proud, and the ideas that led me to recognize the importance of understanding the social world we live in as a consequence of what we do in language. It took me some time before I recognized that circular causality and digitalization that made cybernetics the driver of the current revolution toward a computationally autonomous information society had serious limitations. When used to explain human involvements, the mathematics of cybernetics trivializes what we do to each other and blinds us to recognize how cybernetics transformed society. Studying conversations and discourses made me aware of how cybernetic vocabularies, guiding concepts, and computational metaphors were enacted. By contrast to (first- or second-order) cybernetics, I learned that a cybernetics that is practiced in conversations and acknowledges the social consequences of what it generates had to be reflexive. Shifting attention from causal circularities to reflexive circularities opens up huge new areas for exploring socially meaningful contributions and criticizing the epistemologies of mindless discursive practices (e,g., of claiming the superiority of artificial intelligence and the power of computers). Such claims merely entrap their believers into inaction.     

Privileged access

That everyone has some privileged access to some information is trivially true. The doctrine of privileged access is that I am the authority on all of my own experiences. Possibly this thesis was attacked by Wittgenstein (the thesis on the non‐existence of private languages). The thesis was refuted by Freud (I know your dreams better than you), Duhem (I know your methods of scientific discovery better than you), Malinowski (I know your customs and habits better than you), and perception theorists (I can make you see things which are not there and describe your perceptions better than you can). The significance of this rejected thesis is that it is the basis of sensationalism and thus of all inductivist and some conventionalist philosophy.     

Pastoral care is evangelism

Conclusion I consider the years which I spent in the study of pastoral psychology as the wedge which opened the door to genuine ministry for me. I doubt if I would have stayed in the pastorate without it. Furthermore, the disciplines of that study have been the basis for continued growth. I am conscious of the need to constantly develop deeper understandings of human nature, of the methods by which people can be helped, and to become more effective in using the resources of religion in meeting human need. I am aware of the importance of supervised examination of my own early experiences in order that I may understand their relationship to my pastoral and administrative work.Pastoral psychology has helped me acknowledge the relationship between my personal emotional handicaps and my vocational function. Furthermore, I am learning to remember that most religious learning is not conceptual but experimental. Faith is caught, not taught. If persons are to know the love of God, then they need a pastor whose maturity of faith, spirit of consecration, and integrity of life incarnate God's love.     

Owning It

What is the distinction, if any, between who we are as people and what we believe and how we practice as psychoanalysts? For me, art played a vital affirmation that there was a world full of larger ideas and feelings in contrast to the desiccated environment my parents had created. From grade school, through my training as an analyst to the present, art has not only elucidated who I am but expanded my sense of being a creative individual. From the procession of viewing art and engaging with it, to making and acquiring art pieces, the discovery was not only that I owned these pieces but that their impact challenged the ‘who’ I thought I was if I was willing to own up to it. The information that informs our personal beliefs and practice in psychoanalysis comes from such an openness to new experiences from many directions in our daily lives, and challenges who we believe we are. Art adds to analytic knowledge, not by giving us an interpretation for our lives, but by stimulating the genuinely creative process of self-reflection.     

Making Our Hairs Stand on End—A Call to Psychoanalysis to Look Outside Itself: Response to Commentaries

I am grateful for the rich commentaries of Ogden and Ferro and Civitarese, and wish we could continue this discussion, as it speaks to the importance of psychoanalysis looking outside itself to the arts and other disciplines to enrich and expand our ways of hearing. In my response I take up Ogden's discussion of the resistance of the medium of psychoanalysis and the necessity of “changing the terms.” I present a short sequel to the clinical material presented in my paper to illustrate what Ogden is discussing. I also agree with the importance of Ferro and Civitarese's focus on the primacy of incarnate emotional experience and the necessity of moving in and out of integration and nonintegration as we struggle to register what is going on in the analytic encounter and how we may all generate meaning out of these experiences.     

Physical education and fostering relationships

Rather than presenting an academic paper, I wanted to simply examine my own perspective as a physical educator and classroom teacher and the importance of creating relationships with children. As a relatively new physical educator and recent Masters of Education graduate of the University of Toronto at OISE, but experienced classroom teacher working in a Toronto public school, spirituality at first appeared to be the farthest thing that affected both my life and the life of my classes. During the last two years, I became increasingly aware of the connection between physical education and feelings of enthusiasm and perseverance that have helped my students to see themselves in positive ways. The relationship developed between teacher and student had been apparent to me but I had not realised how important until I began graduate school and reflecting on both my classroom practice and how it had extended into the gymnasium. I often thought that physical education teachers tended to focus on the physical aspects and skills, but instead I found that it was indeed making a shared connection with my students through the various physical and everyday activities as of the highest importance. The shared connections encourage feelings of perseverance, and fit together between mind, body and spirit, which also encouraged active participation and success. What I had suspected to be true for the classroom really was true anywhere in the school community. My experiences as a physical educator and classroom teacher helped me create positive learning environments for children as they struggled with academic and physical activities. With this paper, I am asking academics to help teachers such as myself to understand the correlation to something we as teachers take for granted as part of our everyday teacher–student relationship.     

Researching learning across cultures

The aim of this paper is to invite readers to share the uncertain beginnings of my PhD in which I am seeking to hold reflexive conversations about learning with a group of international postgraduates studying in the UK. As a higher education lecturer in counselling I want to be able to understand the learning stories of such students, how their stories are affected by the learning experiences they encounter in the UK and how my own story is changing as a result of my involvement with them. My struggle to develop an appropriate conceptual framework within which to conduct cross‐cultural research will be described, paying particular attention to the reflexivity of the research activity and how it relates to the counselling process.     

Virtue Ethics, Theory, and Warrant

Are there good grounds for thinking that the moral values of action are to be derived from those of character? This ‘virtue ethical’ claim is sometimes thought of as a kind of normative ethical theory; sometimes as form of opposition to any such theory. However, the best case to be made for it supports neither of these claims. Rather, it leads us to a distinctive view in moral epistemology: the view that my warrant for a particular moral judgement derives from my warrant for believing that I am a good moral judge. This view seems to confront a regress-problem. For the belief that I am a good moral judge is itself a particular moral judgement. So it seems that, on this view, I need to derive my warrant for believing that I am a good moral judge from my warrant for believing that I am a good judge of moral judges; and so on. I show how this worry can be met, and trace the implications of the resulting view for warranted moral judgement.     

The League

About painting, cybernetics, and shared purpose, this article is partly a story, in part a memoir, an adventure in cybernetics, happening 30 years ago, in snow, in the small Swiss city of St. Gallen. A conference of the American Society for Cybernetics meets there. It is 1987. The author, a painter, searching for a new understanding of painting, encounters a convergence of the art of painting and the art of cybernetics through principles of second-order cybernetics in Pask, von Foerster and Maturana, dissolved in Kathleen Forsythe’s poetry. The form, as well as the content of this article, reflects cybernetics.     

Transcendence of the Ego (The Non-Existent Knight)

I exist, but I am not a thing among things; X exists if and only if there is something such that it=X. This is consistent, and it is a view that can be supported. Calvino’s novel The Non‐Existent Knight can be read so as to illustrate this view. But what is my relation to the things there are if I am not identical with any of them – things such as my arms, my garden, the city I live in? I name this the Gurduloo problem, after the Knight’s page. This relation must be one that admits of degrees; I suggest that we say that I manifest myself through the things thus associated with me. Several pseudo‐problems, pertaining to volitional action, supervenience, observability, and the emergence of consciousness, dissolve upon inspection.     

Does “Making a Difference” Still Make a Difference?: A Textbook Author’s Reflections

Drawing on my experiences with teaching Psychology of Women and writing three editions of a textbook across two decades starting in 1990, I reflect on the core feminist call to make the personal political. By tracing the chronology and interplay of my textbook writing with my teaching, research, and editing, I speculate about an apparent disconnection between my experiences and research with students (who embrace the feminist call to make a difference) and the textbook market to veer toward less women-centeredness and activism in the pursuit of gender studies. I make my case that the activist goal of making a difference continues to make a difference in individual women’s lives, in women’s relationships, and in a social justice agenda.     

Functions of parent-child reminiscing about emotionally negative events

Parent-child reminiscing about negative experiences influences children's developing "emotional self-concept", which comprises three interrelated functions: self-defining (this is the kind of emotional person I am), self-in-relation (this is how I express and share my emotions with others), and coping (this is how I cope with and resolve negative emotion). In this study, we examined how 70 mostly white, middle-class mothers discuss three negative experiences (fear, anger, and sadness) with their 4-year-old children. Conversations about fear elaborate on the facts of the event and emotional resolutions, thus focusing on coping. Conversations about sadness contain evaluative feedback and emotional resolutions, thus focusing on self-in-relation and coping. Finally, conversations about anger highlight the emotional state itself, thus focusing on self-definition. Mothers are also more elaborative and more evaluative with daughters than with sons, and place emotional events in a more interpersonal context with daughters than sons. Thus girls may be forming a more elaborated and more interpersonal emotional self-concept than boys.     

“There Must be Mouse Dirt with the Pepper”: A Lutheran Approach to Choosing Songs1

Abstract : This paper stems from my doctoral research on the question, “What is a good song?” It is a response to the Praise and Worship movement, which started within the charismatic churches, but also has spread to many mainline churches, including my own in South Africa. While I am supportive of much that is good in this movement, I am also critical of the content and theology of many of the songs. This paper focuses on what we as Lutherans can learn from our founder when it comes to choosing what and how to sing in our services.     

Recognising the role of emotion in the classroom; an examination of how the psychoanalytic theory of containment influences learning capacity

This paper begins with personal reflections about my work in school which began over forty years ago, outlining how the different roles of teacher and therapeutic practitioner have contributed to my interest in the role of emotion for children’s capacity for learning in the classroom. I suggest that focusing too heavily on achievement risks losing sight of the experience of the individual child and argue that a psychoanalytic framework informs us of the significance of relational aspects of teaching and learning. My aim is to alert educationalists to the complexities of the classroom context, particularly the conscious and unconscious elements at work there. I have chosen to examine containment, as one aspect of the psychoanalytic, developmental framework, as a way of thinking about relational influences in the classroom and the importance of the relational context of learning. These case studies relate to my workplace, an Infant and Nursery school with a high British multi-ethnic population, where I am employed as a teacher/therapeutic practitioner. Two brief child studies are included to illustrate this examination. The first, Hamzah, concerns a young child entering formal learning without the expected relational skills and therefore unable to connect with staff and children in any meaningful way. The second, Isa, demonstrated well developed relational skills but at times found it difficult to manage his feelings when his needs took second place to the requirements of the curriculum.     

A psychologist grows in Brooklyn: reflections from the past

In this autobiography, I begin by describing how I made many important decisions in my life without much conscious or verbalized thought. I cover information about my parents, grandparents, early school experiences, and both college and graduate school. The autobiography also includes a detailed discussion of my 41 years of teaching at the University of Tennessee. I discuss important experiences that helped me to become a clinical psychologist and a teacher. I conclude the article with a personal experience concerning the death of my mother and an early memory.     

Double narrative of a researcher and the researched: the journey of English-language learning

As I embarked on my PhD study in Australia, I felt excited because my study was born out of reflection on my own journey of English-language learning. I decided to use my experiences as a touchstone for an understanding of the experiences of others like me. The study presented here is part of a larger study and is a double narrative that explores the researcher’s and the four participants’ experiences of learning English language in their home country contexts and also in Australia while they are studying in an Australian tertiary context. Through a reflective practice, I have reflectively studied my and the participants’ experiences with language learning strategies (LLS) to improve English-language skills and to better socialise into Australian academic and social discourses as international students. By linking the researcher and the researched closely, this research makes a contribution to English learning and teaching on the development of English-language skills of international students through the use of LLS. It provides some implications to institutions and advice to students like me.     

Countertransference revisited

A female patient of mine recounts her week. I listen with interest, waiting for her to arrive at particular conclusions. She has suffered a great deal and still does, but prefers not to dwell on it. My interest turns into patience as she continues to talk but circumvents her discontent. She is adroit at avoidance, but easily offended when I point such things out. "I'd better wait" I think. I grow more aware that I must encourage her digressions. I feel frustrated. Getting further and further away, she skirts the issue with supple grace, then strays off into tangentiality. I forget her point and lose my focus, then get down on myself. The opportunity is soon gone. I glance at the clock as her monologue drones on into banality. I grow more uninterested and distant. There is a subtle irritation to her voice; a whiney indecisive ring begins to pervade my consciousness. I home in on her mouth with aversion, watching apprehensively as this disgusting hole flaps tirelessly but says nothing. It looks carnivorous, voracious. Now she is unattractive, something I have noticed before. I forget who my next patient is. I think about the meal I will prepare for my wife this evening, then glance at the time once more. Then I am struck: Why am I looking at the clock? So soon? The session has just begun. I catch myself. What is going on in me, between us? I am detached, but why? Is she too feeling unattuned, disconnected? I am failing my patient. What is her experience of me? I lamentingly confess that I do not feel I have been listening to her, and wonder what has gone wrong between us. I ask her if she has noticed. We talk about our feelings, our impact on one another, why we had lost our sense of connection, what it means to us. I instantly feel more involved, rejuvenated, and she continues, this time with me present. Her mouth is no longer odious, but sincere and articulate. She is attractive and tender; I suddenly feel empathy and warmth toward her. We are now very close. I am moved. Time flies, the session is soon over; we do not want it to end.