The Church and the Trinity II: The Church of the Son

The second part of the trilogy which we are publishing to mark the tenth anniversary of Geoffrey Preston's death.     

The Church and the Trinity I: The Church of the Spirit

We are commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of the outstanding young preacher Geoffrey Preston by publishing this trilogy. It was written not very long before he died and has not appeared in print before. Its other two parts, 'The Church of the Son' and 'The Church of the Father', we will be publishing in our July/August and September numbers.     

The Rediscovery of the Human Mind: The Discursive Approach

The demise of behaviorism was followed by a period of cognitive model building, on Cartesian lines, invoking unobservable cognitive processes, then "mind behind the mind". This has been followed by a second cognitive revolution which emphasizes the idea that mind is a flow of private and public symbolic patterns, created according to local norms. Basing psychology on this insight requires the preservation of the psychological concepts of ordinary languages as part of the basis for scientific psychology. The concept of 'skill' can be used to link individuals with the matrix of interpersonal symbolic and practical interactions. The second revolution can be illustrated by recent work on emotion displays as discursive acts, and by studies on the role of pronouns in the expression of a sense of personal identity.     

The Bully Inside Us: The Gang in the Mind

Bullying is a pervasive phenomenon in human relations, in groups, and in societies. It literally, figuratively, and psychologically, is a phenomenon both in the outside world and mentality of the leader as well as group member. Bully/bullied motifs prevail in our clinical theorizing, thinking, and behavior—interwoven into the fabric of psychoanalytic culture and process. I present 5 key ideas: (1) Bullying/bullied dynamics originates and remains in the domain of the paranoid–schizoid position, involving shifting, bipolar perceptions of self and others as good or bad. (2) Bullying–bullied dynamics emerge immediately and unmediated by thought in situations of emotional intensity, i.e., frustration, anxiety, threat, challenge, and competition. (3) These dynamics represent an aspect of our inheritance as a herd animal, which play out in all societies and groups, families and dyads, psychoanalytic and otherwise. (4) Bullying is linked, metapsychologically, to the creation and sustenance of the superego (Freud, 1921). (5) Each individual is both the bully and bullied, and an aspect of “mutual recognition” resides in acknowledging the pleasure as well as the pain in our co-participation.     

The Creative Tripod: The Stitching and the Unstitching Revisited

The Psychological Record - There are no undebated definitions of “creativity,” and any definition will reflect how this rich topic is treated. Nearly 20 years ago I discussed how...     

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

The Psychological Record -     

The Holy See: The Individual and the Group-Intersubjective Meetings

The analytic group is a space where powerful meetings between the various selves of its members occur. These meetings have the potential to facilitate processes of mutual recognition and the development of multiple selves, on one hand, but may also lead to collapse of the potential space and experiences of destruction, on the other. Group and individual processes of recognition and destruction may be dramatic and require special coping on the part of the leader (mainly in situations of impasse), or they may be more subtle, almost unnoticeable. Both in the case of the big dramas and in the case of the little dramas, the possibility for surrender, for movement toward unfamiliar areas within one or more of the participants, is what furthers the group's development. In the current paper, I apply intersubjective concepts to group work and, more precisely, propose a way of looking at how the group and the group leader can act to expand the intersubjective space in order to enable processes of destruction and recognition to coexist without the potential space collapsing.     

Movies: The Land of the Free

Abstract

Modern woman in search of a spirit

Oh to be ravished!

Puer psychology and nazism

Von franz reflects

Steps toward receiving woman

To communicate or not to communicate