The Lost Soul of the Engineer
"The paradox is that insiders capture our attention while outsiders stir the drink. Outsiders, now commonly called "outliers," write most of the books with insiders' names on the dust jackets. Outsiders write speeches, strategy briefs, and tactical maneuvers for politicians, CEOs, generals, educators, clerics, and television commentators. Outsiders remain essentially mesmerized by their nearness to power, while unaware of their own.
This is played out with finality in the engineering community. The modern world is a product of the engineering mind. Yet, while engineers created that world, it does not belong to them. It has been stolen from them."
James R. Fisher, Jr., A Look Back to See Ahead, 2007, p. 113.
There once was a man who lived on his lawn in a mobile trailer while he built his dream house. For some reason, he continued to live in his trailer after his magnificent home had been completed, leaving it empty.
After a time, opportunists noted this oddity. They took possession of the dwelling and laid claim to it as their own, possession being nine-tenths of the law.
At first, the builder was bewildered then exasperated, disbelieving what had happened. He was full of angst and found all attempts to redress this wrong driving him deeper into litigation and financial ruin. He was the odd man out.
By the accident of his circumstances, he stepped into a world not of his making, a world of words that were not his forte. He considered himself a maker, not a taker; a doer, not a transgressor. His world previously had been of predictable outcomes, not disreputable deeds; a world of moral certitude, not cunning malice.
Time passed and he took comfort in the fact that at least he had his trailer even though it had been fenced off from the rest of the property. Yet, he did nothing. Then one day while enjoying his morning coffee, he was hit with an eviction notice, giving him 48 hours to pack up and leave or be thrown off the land.
Colin Wilson, Access to Inner Worlds, 1983, Rider Publishing
His world, and all that he held dear, was suddenly destroyed, not unlike Franz Kafka's Joseph K (The Trial, 1925), who was arrested one fine morning and had done nothing wrong.
In Tracy Kidder's The Soul of the Machine (1981), we are introduced to the genius f a superb team of engineers who take on the nearly impossible task of creating a supercomputer in a finite period, only to be reduced to the equivalent of a vestigial organ once the magnificent machine — The Eagle — was completed.
These engineers put their hearts and souls into this project, sacrificing everything, only to be persona non grata in the end, and they had done nothing wrong.
They, too, built their dream house and left it in the hands of the wordsmiths and the spin doctors to legitimize ownership. Then marketers added insult to injury, rechristening The Eagle as "Eclipse MV/8000." This was followed by securing elaborate mention in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times of this singular achievement.
The final humiliation came in the form of an elegant luncheon at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. These engineers, essentially untutored in the finer social amenities connected with the elite, felt uncomfortable in their ill-fitting suits, while confused with the showy formality. They hung helplessly together as if a pastiche, not knowing whether to take the first-course salad on their right or left. They were fish out of the water and made to feel that way.
These self-conscious celebrants felt like embarrassed teenagers at their first dance, intruders being punished for what they had done. After all, once the project was completed, not interested in making waves, they packed up their belongings and left the building.
A year later, one Eagle engineer, reminisced, "I felt like a hired gun in an old Western movie, sent to rid the town of the bad guys, only to be run out of town once respectable citizens could sleep easily again."
The engineer has a fatal attraction for being punished rather than rewarded. Why? Could this be a product of the engineer's masochistic complex?
The Mystique of the Engineer
From birth, subtle forces are conditioning us to be what we become. The engineer is prototypically a product of the technological culture. His acumen is that of the problem solver of things while exhibiting ambivalence towards solving people problems.
Regrettably, we know precious little about ourselves as human beings than Plato observed in The Republic some 23 centuries ago. Education cannot put knowledge into the soul any more readily than sight into blind eyes. The soul of every man has the power to learn and the power to see, but not always the wisdom to see as the mind is manipulated to justify our biases.
Just as the eye can see light instead of darkness, the soul can see reality instead of its unchanging permanence. To see the soul's light requires one to look in the right direction from where the soul's light emanates.
Today, we refer to the soul as the psyche when discussing the self or the mind. Plato's point is that we see what we want to see. Currently, the fantastic explosion of technology implodes our senses with the wonder, "Will I survive?"
Plato would say we are looking in the wrong direction. It is not the gadgetry that is critical to a changing world, but man's relationship to man. The engineer is in the middle of this turmoil. His world of algorithms is not enough for man to survive, much less to prevail.
Thoughts are composed of ideas that are time-bound states of mind and not foolproof algorithms. Ideas distort our passions with perpetual biases. Algorithms straighten them out and spruce them up, opening ideas to the purity of mathematics and clearing the way for the advancement of science.
Yet, we are befuddled by this complex of ideas, which are derived from simple ones, as words are made up of letters, letters sentences, sentences thoughts, and thoughts a compendium or complexity. Simple ideas arise spontaneously from the sensation of inner reflection and then insert themselves into the conversation without the benefit of invitation.
The engineer distrusts words as such, but not the language of mathematics, which is itself a language of symbols that connote ideas without the apparent messiness or ambivalence of words.
We, who write essays and books compound words and divide them at will, constructing all sorts of complex ideas to suit our vagaries, inviting the danger of making a mess of things.
But the engineering mind is equally capable of generating chaos as well as order, regression as well as progression. After all, he is the creator of weapons of mass destruction as well as the marvel of the World Wide Web.
That said engineers are the preeminent builders of the modern world. They have automated the workplace, ending the factory system. Genetic engineering has revolutionized agriculture with biotech laboratories producing synthetic vanilla, coconut oil, and staple farm products. A select corps of engineers has created 24/7 financial trading across the globe. Thanks to engineers, globalization of industry and service are now standard operating practices. Unfortunately, problem-solving in the creative phase is not always problem-solving in the operating phase. Engineers move out of the picture once the problem-solving moves into the sphere of social dynamics, where the world of words and similar constructions deal with as well as produce ambiguities.
Once the systems are operational, the message engineers hear is, "Engineers need not apply!" How could this be? How could engineers be left out of the equation? How could the engineer be relegated to a homeless soul?
Technocracy & Consciousness
The engineering mind has shaped technological society and its consciousness as well. In technology, many things are going on at once in social systems (relational processes) and technical systems (technological production).
The engineer has kept in touch with the technical, but not necessarily the relational as he has an aversion to people processes. Yet, his relationship with the social is as critical to his success as is the technical. The whims of human nature differ little from those of Plato's time, while our knowledge of the universe far exceeds that known to Aristotle.
We have experienced more technological change in the past thirty years than in the previous three hundred. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that modernity has driven our consciousness to the brink of disaster. This is a failure to recognize the soul's significance in the relational aspects of technical and social systems. Denial is expressed in the statement, "Not my problem!" Then emphasized with, "Let them (whomever They maybe) worry about that. Leave me to my work!"
Engineers, gifted with special knowledge and skill, follow the laws of mathematics and physics and presume to be free of the ambivalence of people, or as a breed apart. They motor forward with "1+1=2."
They are uncomfortable working with non-engineering groups and fail to see that socialization skills (consensus building) apply to them. Such skills are for those who have nothing better to do. Likewise, they fail to see the value of reading non-engineering books or developing writing and speaking skills.
Alas, the lines are blurring between disciplines while social compression is accelerating at near warp speed. The workplace has taken on the characteristics of a social center with camp informality and personalized rhetoric echoing the refrain, "have fun at work," masking the corporate rush to the bottom line. It takes more than engineering acumen to cope in this new environment.
The mounting of non-engineering demands on the job has led to the engineer's dis-identity, sense of discontinuity, and disenfranchisement from work itself.
Meanwhile, the technocrat, the benefactor of the engineer's expertise, thrives in this ambiguous environment with political cool. This is brutally apparent with one data point. The engineer is the last to be hired and the first to go. He is treated like an indentured worker, used up and discarded, a vagabond with a modem and microprocessor, while the technocrat goes to the bank on the engineer's impact.
The engineer's loss of soul might be traced to his failure to take the non-engineering world seriously and to see engineering as part of the larger world, a world requiring a quantum leap in consciousness.
Remember, technocracy grew out of technology. Oddly enough, many successful technocrats were once die-hard engineers. They took that quantum leap coming to realize that finance is not an intrinsic but an acquired goal for the engineer-as-technocrat. Take The Eagle team. The team of engineers sets a goal to produce a supercomputer, and that was the team's end game, not the technocrats.
Imagine if these engineers had seen the completion of the supercomputer as the beginning of the marketing phase. They would then see themselves involved in the licensing agreement, the marketing contract, and the network of distribution. This is the world of technocracy where the spoils are divided.
While the fundamentals of logic dictate the technological phase, irrational gamesmanship dominates the technocracy phase. In this climate, technocracy has little choice but to acquire a sense of humor about itself. Here waste, duplication, falsity, dissent, duplicity, and chicanery are encountered. It is the price of doing business with the social group. The engineer's failure to make a connection with this world has been at his peril.
To the engineer, the focus is on problem-solving. To the technocrat, it is the solution with "nothing left out." The engineer focuses on the process and the technocrat on results. The outcome (result) is incidental to the process as long as all the t's are crossed and i's dotted. Technocrats invented documentation.
Technocracy creates its own inertia as it is governed by a discrete body of policies and procedures with a mania for enforcing them no matter how counterproductive. Consequently, to produce meaningful results, this finds technocracy growing exponentially chasing more than a few exceptional engineers out of the megacorporation. Unfortunately, the next company, should there be the next, may even be worse.
Denying the existence of this technocratic world, ignoring its penchant for wasteful policies and other non-systemic propensities, its fixation on ends at the expense of means, and its fascination with numbers, does not change the fact that technocrats are living in the house that engineers have built. How did this happen? More importantly, what can be done about it?
Profile of the Engineer versus the Technocrat
The engineer desires to bring the future into the present. The technocrat is interested in protecting the status quo.
The existing social system represents the culture of shared beliefs, values, and expectations. It is a psychological wall that resists change. Due to innovative engineering, breakthroughs however do occur, with the technocrat quickly changing course and developing a vocabulary to exploit this to advantage. These innovative engineers seldom share in the spoils. Gutenberg invented the moveable type printing press but went bankrupt.
Arrogant disregard for things, not engineering has proven a damning disease compounded by engineers seeking the comfort of like-minded individuals to lessen their angst when having to deal with technocrats.
The engineer admires those who can do what he does only better and not those who are engaged in something different. This finds the engineer difficult to manage and impossible to lead. Take his preference for managing data rather than dealing with people, or his aversion to managing himself. The measured world of the engineer with its discrete indices and lack of spuriousness does not exist beyond him if it exists at all.
Consider the following five dimensions: intelligence, support, conformity, achievement, and decisiveness. As you examine these, note how minor adjustments could restore some balance between the engineer and technocrat.
INTELLIGENCE
The engineer has an uncanny ability to analyze, digest, assimilate and utilize data, information he can see he grasps with quick facility. Information not quantifiable is unimportant and of little interest. If the information is not empirically derived, it does not exist. The engineer is interested in facts, not feelings, in hard data, not abstractions. Yet, love, hate, security, freedom, peace, and fulfillment are subjective values that can easily trip him up.
The technocrat is like the shark in water always in motion more concerned with making an impression than a difference. He lives in the world of soft data (impressions, feelings), information of little interest to the engineer. Survival warrants the technocrat to be especially vigilant to new information, who possess it, and how to leverage it to his purposes. He takes the product of the engineer (e.g., The Eagle Supercomputer) and runs with it. The technocrat's adaptive skills are not often apparent to the engineer.
SUPPORT
The engineer, by nature a technologist, expects support to emanate naturally from the nontechnical community. When it is not forthcoming, he becomes restive and petulant demonstrating his lack of maturity. Not so the technocrat. He is used to being taken for granted and slighted. Pride is a luxury he can ill afford. Therefore, he remains unmoved by insults and assaults on his character. His modus operandi is in the world of uncertainty, while the engineer operates in the certain world of first principles.
The technocrat is perpetually in the selling mode in the capricious world of power and politics. Once the technocrat identifies his needs, he rallies support for his cause, recruiting a cadre of folks of differing views, disciplines, and needs. He sees no need to be the smartest person in the room, but the facilitator of those that are to his purposes. Often this requires an ability to identify key talent, then persuade them to join his scheme usually without the requisite authority. Taking the initiative is second nature to him. He is a fan of fads and cosmetic interventions, of anything that keeps him relevant and involved.
CONFORMITY
The engineer is the consummate conformist. The technocrat is not. The difference is a matter of projection. The technocrat assumes the posture of the conformist when it suits him, while the engineer likes to think of himself as a non-conformist. Conformity is quite acceptable to management as it represents no threat to its control. While the engineer struts his stuff, he seldom steps out of line. To cover his frustration, he may retreat into passive-aggressive behaviors but is unlikely to ever be confrontational. Not so the technocrat.
The technocrat is in the face of management feigning conformity while busy pursuing his hidden agenda. Management should be leery of the technocrat but is blinded by his sycophantic zeal for its causes as he echoes management's sentiments to the letter.
The engineer comes to be used up by the system while the technocrat uses the system to fulfill his desires always alert to unexpected changes in the mindset of management. He then redirects his efforts to take full advantage of the course change, while steady Eddie, the engineer, is surprised by these disruptions to redundancy. The technocrat is untouched by management's caginess. He deals with the possible, the engineer with the ideal.
Paradoxically, it is the brilliance of the engineer who creates the necessity for change, but it is also the engineer (not the technocrat) who is usually crushed by the reality it introduces.
Conformity is an engineer's safe haven, while the technocrat’s halfway house. Seldom does radical change emerge from the ranks of engineers as radicalism is the antithesis of his discipline.
Engineering is synonymous with laws (First Principles), replicable frames of reference, inviolable structure, unfailing paradigms, and verifiable mathematical algorithms. The dogma of science is the theology of the engineer.
The engineer is apt to be more loyal to data than to his own mind and interests. Occasionally, he escapes this confinement and dances to the world of liberal arts. This is the world of the engineer as CEO.
The technocrat operates in unchartered waters while the engineer hugs the shore with his CAD/CAM blueprint. The technocrat gets the job done by bending the rules and seeing the possibility where the engineer is not likely to venture. The technocrat takes the engineer's science and makes it commercial while the engineer broods over the unfairness of it all.
The unhappy engineer, who would like to escape conformity, justifies his stance with the rationale, "I'm paid a dollar more an hour than I can afford to quit." Trapped in this psychological conformity, he deludes himself into that it is a matter of economics when it is much more.
ACHIEVEMENT
An engineer has a strong personal drive towards excellence that is not necessarily related to achievement. One of the consistent complaints of the engineer is that he is underutilized as if that is the system's fault and not his own. The engineer is the system! He created it with diligence and innovative effort. Failure to recognize this goes back to his sense of powerlessness.
The engineers on The Eagle Project were consumed with a drive to complete the task. Every action was orchestrated towards that end. It was not a drive towards self-aggrandizement, but completion. But completion for what and for whom? Why not self-interest?
Solid achievement, while spectacular, can mask a deeper dilemma, a failure to feel in control. A project becomes an engineer's life with his self-obedience to its demands. He relishes that role and not being in charge. Why? Because he doesn't want that stress. His priority and his last is the project. Panic fills the void until he is involved in the next project.
The technocrat is a spectator to the engineer's achievement, sitting in the bleachers, so to speak, calculating how to exploit the project once completed. He sees the engineer as something of a trained seal. It is no accident that the risk level of the technocrat appears considerably upscale to that of the engineer.
The persona of the technocrat in his three-piece button-down world disguises his edginess and avarice. What happened to Data General is repeated daily around the globe. Companies rise like a firecracker, light up the sky, and disappear leaving scores if not hundreds of engineers behind without jobs, while technocrats escape the carnage to latch on to the next rising company.
Sad but only too true, the engineer is invited into the house that he built, treated like a trespasser, then eventually given his eviction notice.
DECISIVENESS
An engineer is not decisive. By nature, he is tentative, and circumspect, looking for more data to verify his findings. Perfection is his bottom line. The technocrat is of a different mindset. The only numbers that matter to him are those that he can manipulate like a magician. He operates in the high-risk business of doing what makes those numbers work for him. Functioning at the gut level, the technocrat is seen by the engineer as a "loose cannon shooting from the hip." He is and he does, for the technocrat makes decisions with a flare often on the fly with little tangible data in support. He is not afraid to make decisions, the engineer is.
The thought processes of the technocrat, while seemingly orderly in retrospect, are in chaotic mode from the start. Not the engineer. Order is what he knows. The technocrat thrives in chaos, and the engineer demands order.
The technocrat gambles on his and other people's ability to fulfill his agenda. He keeps two different mental books, one for management and one for everyone else. This finds him hedging his bet, having a convenient fall guy should matters go awry, who is often the engineer. His decisions are designed to promote his career with little concern they might derail those of others.
Management sees the technocrat as decisive and intently loyal, while the keenly loyal engineer is often seen as tentative and his loyalty suspect.
THE DELICATE BALANCE
If the engineer sees himself in this sobering assessment as the pigeon in the enterprise, it is because he has demonstrated a reluctance to take charge. I was once a consultant to a high-tech company that had been awarded a $65 million systems engineering contract.
The system analysts of this program had no interest in performing the function of management. So, a technocrat was brought in to perform that function, a man who knew nothing about systems analysis, or the kinds of people who are attracted to this discipline.
Operations were barely into the first quarter of the contract when a ruckus erupted. The supervisor had downgraded one of the system analysts cutting his pay and grade level, citing "the man is incompetent and is performing poorly." The basis of his evaluation was that this particular engineer was always found to be doodling or tapping his pencil on his desk and whistling to himself, clearly an indication of noninvolvement in the work at hand, right?
This engineer happened to be the informal leader of the group and was respected by his colleagues. He had initiated key breakthroughs in simulation studies critical to the program.
When his coworkers heard of his demotion, they all threatened to quit. Abruptly, the supervisor was removed. One of the analysts reluctantly volunteered to act as supervisor "for the duration of the project, but not beyond." Even with this development, these engineers didn't see the significance of what had happened.
As Plato observed, the engineer has the power to see into his soul but must be looking in the right direction. The answer is not in the engineer's technology but in himself. He has created the modern world but spurns the responsibility for managing it. He has done this, not only to himself but to his profession as well. He has allowed the technocrat to steal his thunder. Fault, not the technocrat. He has come to this advantage by default.
The engineer has been finessed by his stubbornness, by his inability to entertain and then establish a delicate balance between social and technical demands, between engineering principles and demands of a diverse workforce. Contempt for things, not engineering has placed him in a cage of his own making. Only he can step out of that cage and enter the house that his genius has built. The first step may be to invite a technocrat to lunch.
Short Circuit Engineering Newsletter, Spring 1993.
Tuesday, December 06, 2022
Friday, November 11, 2022
GOING HOME
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 11, 2022Life is a dream walking death is a going home.
Chinese Proverb
At my advanced age with daily life becoming something of a problem I wish to thank people who have been important in my writing, especially my wife, Beautiful Betty. American novelist Thomas Wolf wrote a moving novel in 1934, “You Can’t Home Again.” He was quoting a proverb that declared that past times although fondly remembered are simply of the past and cannot be relived. Yet we know they are to the very end of our lives.
Because of health issues, writing a few lines much less completing my work has been a challenge.
I apologize for not corresponding with you for some time given all your support.
This is equally true of Sir William Livingston, IV, Charles D. Hayes, Carole Gilbert, Ken Shelton, Manfred Fiedler, and Eric Rodts, whom I genuinely admire. They like you have shared their expertise and views with me for many years. Thank you.
Each of them has worked hard and unselfishly to communicate ideas consistent with an adult perspective.
Psychotherapist Eric Berne in “The Games People Play” (1964) suggests that celebrities need the affirmation of many while scientists and philosophers need that of a few.
Someone reading my blog (peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com) anonymously suggested essays on my blog “deserved a wider audience.” I just smiled. Alas, the teacher will arrive when the student is ready, but not before.
That said literary agents recognize that traditional publishing is vanishing and are contacting Amazon and Kindle authors, among others promising all kinds of benefits before they, too, become redundant.
This amuses me as it is consistent with the games people play failing to realize many of these authors mentioned here are the wave of the future, and we found out already.
Some 60 years ago, I read Jacques Barzun’s “The House of Intellect” (1959) and knew I wanted to be a writer but had to wait. Then some 22 years ago, I read Barzun’s magnum opus, “From Dawn to Decadence” (2000) wondering how he could find the energy to complete this work at age 93 when I can barely find the energy to type these words before getting tired.
Someone reading my blog (peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com) anonymously suggested essays on my blog “deserved a wider audience.” I just smiled. Alas, the teacher will arrive when the student is ready, but not before.
That said literary agents recognize that traditional publishing is vanishing and are contacting Amazon and Kindle authors, among others promising all kinds of benefits before they, too, become redundant.
This amuses me as it is consistent with the games people play failing to realize many of these authors mentioned here are the wave of the future, and we found out already.
Some 60 years ago, I read Jacques Barzun’s “The House of Intellect” (1959) and knew I wanted to be a writer but had to wait. Then some 22 years ago, I read Barzun’s magnum opus, “From Dawn to Decadence” (2000) wondering how he could find the energy to complete this work at age 93 when I can barely find the energy to type these words before getting tired.
I’m not trying to compose a magnum opus to update In the Shadow of the Courthouse (3rd edition) and a complete profile of my works including “Confessions of an Existential Author.” My motivation is to possibly interest a university to include these works in its archives.
Clinton County Historical Society already has all of my published books but not my correspondence, published essays in periodicals, trade journals, and my blog to conclude this project. I once overheard my mother saying to my da when I was a boy, “Ray, We are all half finished when we die.” I am suffering from the same malady as he. It is why I am thankful, George and the others mentioned have been in my life.
Be always well,
Jim
Clinton County Historical Society already has all of my published books but not my correspondence, published essays in periodicals, trade journals, and my blog to conclude this project. I once overheard my mother saying to my da when I was a boy, “Ray, We are all half finished when we die.” I am suffering from the same malady as he. It is why I am thankful, George and the others mentioned have been in my life.
Be always well,
Jim
Monday, November 07, 2022
Everything Changed After 1945*
Morality in the Mind of the Times
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 8, 2022
THE NEW DIVISIVE AGE
Western society entered the 20th century on the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche's nihilism and atheism “God is dead," and Sigmund Freud’s sexuality, gender, and sex role identity. These ideas became popular after WWI and led to the unrestrained “Roaring Twenties” followed by the international economic collapse of “The Great Depression.”
British historical and novelist Phillip Kerr (1956 – 2018), best known for his Bernie Gunther crime novels, captures the essence of this in “Metropolis” (2019) published posthumously. This novel focuses on German societal decline, decadence, and obsession with sexuality after WWI, not unlike ubiquitous Western society morality today.
With the triumph of the West in WWII, Western Society transitioned from a “God-centered” to a “Man-centered” universe with the digital and analytics of the "Machine Age” driving the popular culture with the United States of Anxiety following in an uncertain world.
A quarter century earlier German-speaking Czech-Jewish novelist Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924) wrote the novel “The Trial” (1925) published posthumously. It opens with the line,
“Somebody must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.”
It is Joseph K.'s 30th birthday when two policemen arrive at his boardinghouse to inform him that he was under arrest.
Kafka, a novelist, and short-story writer is widely regarded today as one of the major figures of 20th century literature. His works fuse elements of realism and the fantastic to unmask the crushing reality of our changing times. In 1924, the year of Kafka’s death at age 40, Nazism, antisemitism, Hitler, the Holocaust, and World War Two were on the horizon.
Yet, it was Kafka, a minor clerk in an insurance company, who sensed the emerging insanity, and its decadence that historians, politicians, scholars, theologians, scientists, and people, in general, failed to anticipate as did Kafka’s Joseph K.
Throughout history, societal madness is perceived after the fact too late to avoid its damages. Seemingly, only artists like Kafka escape this limitation. Consider the vanishing of a community.
THE VANISHING COMMUNITY
By 1990 the community of Clinton, Iowa, once a community of 33,000, had shrunk by a third, the industrial community by two-thirds, and the downtown area of department stores, office buildings, restaurants, and retail stores had virtually vanished.
This was evident as Second Street snaked downtown and onto Cammache Avenue then out of Clinton onto Highway 30 with new landmarks along the way such as a Walmart, other supermarkets, motels, and fast foods stores (*The watercolor artist Carl H. Johnson of Galena, Illinois captures Clinton as it was in a series of prints, some of which are included in this book with permission).
This shrinkage was accompanied by double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment in the 1980s across the nation. A decade earlier there was the embarrassing defeat of the United States in the twenty-year war (1955 – 1975) in Vietnam where some 50,000 American lost their lives disproportionately African Americans.
The 1980s and 1990s or a quarter century after WWII suggest the United States had lost its moral compass and its way.
Ancillary to this was the Roman Catholic Church’s pedophile scandals of the sexual abuse of children in the care of Catholic priests and nuns that had not been dealt with for decades.
Once parents were aware their children had been abused, they demanded financial reparations at a time when the church could least afford such demands. Add to this less revenue was coming into the church’s coffers as fewer baptized Catholics were attending church services regularly including Sunday Mass while fewer young men and young women were becoming priests and nuns.
As society has become increasingly secular and less community-centered, voluntarism and community services have suffered. The new civil religion has made “greed good,” while paradoxically, in times of disaster (e.g., when communities are decimated by tornadoes, floods, mudslides, or hurricanes), then the collective will of the community resurfaces.
These thoughts occurred to me while researching this book. Clintonian Catholics would ask me to contact the Bishop of Davenport, The Clinton Herald, and The Davenport Democrat on their behalf while knowing I had no such influence. It was an act of desperation not unlike the fictitious Joseph K.
Many interviewed were Catholics, and echoed these sentiments, “This can’t happen, can it; it will blow over, won’t it? It makes no sense to raze our churches and schools and sell the land, does it?” It was inconceivable to the Catholic community that it could be erased as if it never existed when it had done nothing wrong, We know how denial worked for German Jews in the era of Adolf Hitler.
THE PUNDITS KNOW
Failure to face reality is like the ostrich with its head buried in the sand. Scholars are quick to tell us why after the fact. That said, as honorable as their intentions, our culture cannot imagine the evil that exists within our species.
Cognitive psychologist Canadian American Steven Pinker argues in “Rationality: What it is, Why it seems Scarce, Why it Matters” (2021) that while we are plagued with irrationality the rational pursuit of the rational can lead up illogically to crippling irrationality. Say what?
Neurologist Guy Leschzinger gives us a different slant to this dilemma in “The Man Who Tasted Words” (2022). Leschziner guides the reader through the senses and how, through them, our brain understands or misunderstands the world around us. Vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch are what we rely on us to perceive the reality of our world. He explores how our nervous systems define our words and how we can be victims of falsehoods perpetuated by our brains. Leschzinger explains how our lives and what we perceive as reality are both ultimately defined by the complexities of our nervous system and not by our thinking.
A spate of books continues to appear such as “Useful Delusions: The Power & Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain” (2021). Journalists Bill Mesler, and Shankar Vedantam argue that self-deception can do terrible harm causing us to fail to act, yet self-delusion may also be vital to our success and well-being. Say what?
Small wonder the complexities of life make it difficult to discern reality from illusion and what is prudent to do or not do.
We have gravitated to a simplistic, shallow, and reductionist corporate climate that successfully has obscured the traditional anchors of family, church, and God treating them as redundant or as if they never existed. “We have lost our moral compass and our way.”
One of the benefits of "In the Shadow of the Courthouse" is that it is possible to show how radically society can and does change over time. Yes, this is an unusual approach but one this author felt appropriate for this third edition. Morality is always in the mind of the times, even for sleepy Clinton, Iowa.
GROWING UP IN A TIME OF WAR
It occurred to me that my generation of preteens was on the cusp of monumental change. In 1945, my generation was coming of age when the role of the United States was leaving its halcyon days of isolation nostalgia to assume the uncertain role of a superpower.
Over ten year period (1993 to 2003), I felt the full impact of this as I made twelve trips to my hometown of Clinton, Iowa from Tampa, Florida a distance of some 1300 miles, staying a week or more interviewing some hundred Clintonians of my generation and those of the previous generation still alive to get a sense of this place, space, and circumstance.
In 1945, Clinton was a thriving blue-collar town along the banks of the Mississippi River with a score of manufacturing plants nestled along the southeastern part of the city critical to the industrial/military demands of WWII. Nearly all of Clinton's parents during this period either worked in these factories or on the railroad. I write:
Imagine coming of age in Clinton, Iowa in the middle of the United States in the middle of the century and the middle of this farm belt community of 33,000 snuggled against the muddy Mississippi River during World War II.
It is a working-class climate in which the author came of age “In the Shadow of the Courthouse” while the nation struggled to come of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb.
There was no television, mega sports, big automobiles, or manicured lawns. There was radio, movies, high school sports, and the Clinton Industrial Baseball League, where men too young or too old to go to the war played for the fun of it. Clintonians had victory gardens, drove old jalopies, took the bus, or rode their bikes to work.
It was a time when the four faces of the magnificent Clinton County Courthouse clock chimed on the half-hour and threw a metamorphic shadow over young people’s lives. This made certain they would not be late for meals made from victory garden staples.
The courthouse neighborhood had most stay-at-home mothers in two-parent families. Few parents managed to get beyond grammar school, nearly all worked in Clinton factories or on the railroad. Divorce was as foreign as an ancestral language.
It was a time in hot weather that people slept with their families in Riverview Park. Left windows open, doors unlocked, bicycles on the side of the house, and if they had automobiles, keys in the car, knowing neither neighbor nor stranger would disturb their possessions. In winter, schools never closed, even when snowbanks were four feet high.
This is a narrative snapshot with core neighborhood activities of young people against the backdrop of the Clinton County Courthouse, St. Patrick School, Riverview Stadium, downtown Clinton and uptown Lyons, Bluff Boulevard, Mount St. Clare College, Hoot Owl Hollow, Mill Creek, Beaver Slough, Joyce Slough, many churches, schools, and three hospitals, including the US Army’s Schick General Hospital which brought the war to this place tending battlefield casualties. There was also the USO, Chicago & North Western Railway and its boxcar manufacturing factory, Clinton Foods, Dupont, and many other industrial workplaces which were operating 24/7 in support of the war effort. This was seen through the impressionistic eyes of a boy from the ages of eight to thirteen.
It was a time when kids created their own play as parents were too tired or too involved in the struggle to make a living to pay them much mind. Clinton youngsters would never know such Darwinian freedom or its concomitant brutality again.
This is not a history of the times nor is it a novel in the conventional sense of the word but rather the recollections of a time, place, and circumstance through the author’s confessed imperfect vision. “In the Shadow of the Courthouse” promises to awaken that sleeping child in the reader of every age.
*Excerpt from “In the Shadow of the Courthouse,” © James R. Fisher, Jr. 3rd edition 2022.
Tuesday, August 30, 2022
THE PARADOXICAL DILEMMA -- DISAPPEARANCE OF THE ADULT
Those in charge have abandoned the CRITICAL PARENT and have resorted exclusively to the NURTURING PARENT. We see this in the family, the church, the school, the workplace, the government, the media, the entertainment industry, and the culture.
Society has been reduced to comfort and complacency at the expense of contribution leading to a phenomenon not sustainable where everyone is in charge resulting in no one being.
Denial is common to every generation as is human nature. We are in an era that no longer has the sting that it once enjoyed as responsibility, accountability, failure, guilt, embarrassment, and consequence has lost their purchase. Surrealism is no longer a fantasy escape from reality it is now a lifestyle.
One hundred years hence historians will be at a loss to find that many grown-ups existed during the previous one hundred years as the ADAPTED CHILD that clung to patriotism, nationalism, Americanism, and Christianity faded into the dominance of the FREE CHILD where it did not only never to have to grow up but had no need to apology for its narcissism for it looked into the mirror and saw only itself.
That image has failed to be comforting for once the mirror is put down the FREE CHILD is met with only confusion in terms of sex role and personal identity, personal worth, and role in life which results in anxiety, frustration, boredom, and a sense of being stranger to oneself. The expectation was the utopian world of Paradise and the good life without pain or failure, disappointment or unhappiness, guilt or embarrassment.
We may conquer space but we are a long way from conquering our inner space and continue to run away from ourselves. It is understandable if we are reminded of how simple humanity is as it can be reduced to a series of insightful equations.
BELIEF + BELONGING = BEHAVIOR
We are far more other-directed than self-directed in our culture as we want to belong. Our identity, comfort, and satisfaction are predicated on belonging to something bigger than ourselves. Consequently, being accepted by others takes precedence over self-acceptance.
PAIN + FAILURE + RISK = GROWTH & DEVELOPMENT
We like to think that success is a linear curve in which success follows success without interruption. Growth is actually in strategic leaps followed by a gestation period. This is a period of trauma, retrenchment, assessment, and assimilation of past failures and disappointments, a time when the learner is not concerned about letting the group down, not having to appear smart, and a time open to risks and enduring the discomfort of pain, a period critical to success but could be called the “plateau of failure.” The linear curve is the “phantom curve” to success.
The evidence that we have reached a plateau is we become knowers not learners, tellers not listeners, punishing others with our knowledge reduced to the curve of “playing it safe.”
What is often considered growth & development is that we “compare & compete” to the standards of someone else, which is imitation rather than effectively utilizing our own inherent ability. Quantum leaps are periods of success but of little real learning.
As individuals. we gravitate to the work environment often with little regard to the business of fit. We are an organization within ourselves with history, culture, and experience that molds us into the person we become. Our identity is essentially accidentally acquired but is largely organized by what we do. Purposeful performance is thus reduced to a “motivational triangle”:
FREEDOM + TRUST = CONTROL
Small wonder we are more confused given work is more ambiguous. Workers tend to hide this confusion and yes anger in nonconfrontational passive behaviors as they are likely to be treated by management as the CRITICAL PARENT and by the organization as the NURTURING parent both of which relieve them responsible for their actions as either the ADAPTED CHILD or the FREE CHILD.
In this scenario, there is no place for the ADULT for in an attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves you weaken their resolve and diminish them as individuals. This paradoxical dilemma has yet to be resolved in the complex organization and society.
Indian author Anil Ananthaswamy addresses this dilemma in “The Man Who Wasn’t There: The Strange New Science of the Self” (2015). He points out where mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes famously says, “I think, therefore I am,” current neuroscience identifies specific regions of the brain that when they misfire the self can move back and forth between the body and a doppelganger, or to leave the body entirely. So where in the brain or mind, or body, is the self located? Recent research into Alzheimer’s indicates memory creates our narrative self by using the same part of our brain for remembering our past and for imagining our future.
The Man Who Wasn’t There takes us on an emotional and scientific journey to arrive at a visceral understanding of that which is not understandable such as the senseless horrific behavior of ordinary citizens toward each other. Sociologist Erving Goffman covered this subject a long time ago in “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” (1959).
Friday, August 26, 2022
OVERVIEW – A Way of Thinking About Things
Uncertainty and the Human Heart
When I was a boy, the surprise in my reading was how often I found I thought as others did who wrote. Then it dawn on me we all have the same machine between our ears however some are perhaps better wired than others.
[An educator and historian once asked me, "Jim, what is your genre?" At the time, I couldn't come up with an answer somewhat surprised by the question. Later, after some pondering, I decided my empirical perception of my life and experience from my earliest memory to the present was my genre. Empirical knowledge (a posteriori) is empirical evidence, also known as sense experience. This acquired source of knowledge uses the senses, particularly by observation and experimentation. I have endeavored from my earliest efforts to use this methodology and convey this perception in my books and articles.]
Nobel Laureate Werner Heisenberg’s (1901 – 1976) “Principle of Uncertainty” relates to the subatomic world of quantum physics but may apply equally to the changing behavior of homo sapiens whose narcissistic detachment from reality suggests that psychopaths in our presence are attempting to create a new nervous system for justifying themselves and our departure from sanity.
In any case, whatever your perspective, people appear to be running away from freedom and themselves into an uncertain cage of fantasy, anxiety, hysteria, and conformity.
Words
Words have been the primary vehicle to convey our thoughts yet seldom if ever has it proven adequate as a replacement for action. There are exceptions. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (November 19, 1863) at the site of the new cemetery to honor the more than 50,000 soldiers who “gave the last full measure of devotion.”
The three-day Gettysburg battle (July 1-3, 1863) marked a turning point in the American Civil War for one main reason: Confederate General Robert E. Lee planned to use it to invade the North and force an immediate end to the war, but due to his colossal failure at Gettysburg the South was forced to surrender unconditionally at Appomattox two years later (April 9, 1865).
Harvard president and scholar Edward Everett (1794 – 1865) was the keynote speaker at Gettysburg while President Lincoln was asked courteously to make a few remarks. Everett, a national orator, spoke for two hours, Lincoln’s remarks of 272 words lasted three minutes.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, addressed the Congress of the United States after the Empire of Japan destroyed the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu on December 7, 1941: "Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan." Congress declared war on Japan that same day, on Germany and Italy on December 11, and on Bulgaria on June 4, 1942. World War Two would change America and the world forever for that action.
Fast forward to now: climatic agony is global with thunderstorms, hurricanes, and disappearing coastlines. Communities across the globe are plagued with heat waves, raging forest fires, and torrential rains burying communities under mudslides, yet there is little evidence the public intends to give up its toys or change behavior. Delayed gratification seems severed from our conscience.
Pandemics such as Covid-19 alert the public to the need for an immediate and drastic change in behavior with scientists and pharmaceutical manufacturers taking action to meet that need while the public continued to behave ambivalently, passively, or indifferently consistent with Freud’s spoiled CHILD.
"Fat pills" became the forgiveness placebo provided by the pharmaceutical industry to appease a gluttonous consumer society with the promise of reducing obesity without the necessity of changing poor eating habits.
Since the time of ancient Greece, people have hidden behind deep polarities of situational life confusing the one and the many; lightness and darkness; the sacred and profane; mortal and immortal; words and deeds; teachers and the taught; age and youth; male and female; choice and willpower; past and present; life and death; birth, death, and rebirth.
Polarities are palpably evident following disruptive situations such as war. It was true of the American Revolution, American Civil War, World War One, World War Two, and now the saber-rattling of Russia in Ukraine and China with Taiwan. A mortuary climate hovers over our daily existence today with those in political power often behaving like spoiled children while the general public hides behind the nebulous phantom that it is the fault of the government, failing to realize they are the government.
Collapsing societies inevitably use a plethora of words as surrogates for action, words such as those of Edward Everett. The media today often sounds “Everett-like,” which does little to appease our collective conscience. Alas, we are tired of the white noise of television that assaults our minds but fails to quiet of our situational lives.
Effective oratory is invariably succinct as it echoes the poignant sentiments first found in the Bible, Shakespeare, and the Greek classics, words that understand the human heart are key to behavior. Rabble-rousers, demigods, and oligarchs eventually fade but their toxic damage persists for generations.
Ideas – Dramatizing the Obvious
American author and psychologist Robert Linder’s (1914 – 1956) “Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath” (1944) describes the rebel as a psychopath incapable of acting for the sake of others.
American film director Nicholas Ray (1911 – 1979) created from this work the popular film “Rebel Without a Cause,” in 1955 as entertainment. That said the film illustrated that rebellious and senseless behavior had invaded our youth and was on the rise. Young people since WWII were shown to live in a state of constant narcissistic torment acting as if their own parents while pointing fingers at everyone except themselves.
Authors Linder and Ray recognize that words or the changing nature of our common American language were profaning youthful behavior and the civil tongue which had now become rough-edged with the “f” word common to language whatever the socioeconomic class. Alas, the will of society had become rudderless. Language is now visual. It is blatantly evident on cellphone screens imbued with barbaric apps. It is as if history and culture have been reduced to a microcosm of the immediate.
Authors Linder and Ray recognize that words or the changing nature of our common American language were profaning youthful behavior and the civil tongue which had now become rough-edged with the “f” word common to language whatever the socioeconomic class. Alas, the will of society had become rudderless. Language is now visual. It is blatantly evident on cellphone screens imbued with barbaric apps. It is as if history and culture have been reduced to a microcosm of the immediate.
The psychic havoc of the subconscious is prominent in past sins (i.e., Holocaust, atomic devastation, American slavery, et al) with new fears: "the fear of freedom" as Erich Fromm shows “Escape from Freedom” (1941); "the fear of death" as Ernest Becker exposes in “Denial of Death” (1973); "the fear of life" as Krishnamurti demonstrates in “You Are The World” (1972), stating:
In oneself lies the whole world, and if you know how to look and learn then the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either that key or the door to open except yourself (p. 158).
We have gravitated to a point in American history where the middle class and the upper class are now primarily neurotic conformists afraid of what they might lose when it is already lost. This is equally true of some segments of the working class. American class society is collapsing to a collective form of forward inertia in which we have become a mass media culture that appeals only to our lesser angels.
Ideas – Sigmund Freud’s "imaginings" persist culturally if not clinically.
The shadow of Sigmund Freud looms large in the climactic paucity of new ideas. Just as Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century declared the “death of God,” which introduced the public to the sweep of secular society to the “Age of Enlightenment,” Freud formulated his “seduction theory” in 1883 and published it in 1895 as a Study on Psychosexual Hysteria.
Freud believed hysteria was rooted in the repression of unpleasant emotions that caused traumatic events in the patient’s sexual life. First, in 1896, he outlined a theory that explains hysteria as a reminiscence of sexual abuse that occurred during childhood.
It is not by chance that psychoanalysis was born in Vienna (Austria), and came of age there. In Freud’s time, the cultural climate in Vienna displayed a fascination with both mental illness and sexual problems in a way unique to the Western world, a fascination that extended throughout society even into the Imperial Court of the Monarch which dominated Vienna’s social life.
Freud’s imaginings plague us today, especially his prejudices about the mental capacity of women and their sexuality confessing women to him were largely a “dark continent.” He asked, “What do women want?” He never found a satisfactory answer. His descriptive science launched a bevy of interpreters.
Eric Berne (1910 – 1970) – Transactional Analysis (T/A)
If you think we have moved on from Freud, think again. Mental illness and its treatment is a tapestry of confusion with its residence in psychoanalysis.
It is not by chance that psychoanalysis was born in Vienna (Austria), and came of age there. In Freud’s time, the cultural climate in Vienna displayed a fascination with both mental illness and sexual problems in a way unique to the Western world, a fascination that extended throughout society even into the Imperial Court of the Monarch which dominated Vienna’s social life.
Freud’s imaginings plague us today, especially his prejudices about the mental capacity of women and their sexuality confessing women to him were largely a “dark continent.” He asked, “What do women want?” He never found a satisfactory answer. His descriptive science launched a bevy of interpreters.
Eric Berne (1910 – 1970) – Transactional Analysis (T/A)
If you think we have moved on from Freud, think again. Mental illness and its treatment is a tapestry of confusion with its residence in psychoanalysis.
This is equally true of sex role identity, and psychosexual obsessions, with Freud’s theory obvious in Alfred Adler’s psychology of individualism and his theories of introversion and extroversion, Wilhelm Reich’s invention of "free love," and the ultimate orgasm, and now more recently in psychoanalyst Eric Berne’s “The Games People Play” (1964) where he changed Freud’s Superego (the Moral Principle) to the self-righteous PARENT, the Ego (the Reality Principle) to the ADULT, and the Id (the Pleasure Principle) to the CHILD.
Thomas A. Harris (1910 – 1995) – Common T/A Stages
Berne sees us displaying all three of these behaviors in our human personality at various times giving the variance the name of “transactional analysis.” Psychiatrist Thomas A. Harris developed a practical guide to transactional analysis with his “I’m OK – You’re OK” (1967):
The phrase I'm OK, You're OK is the Ego or the ADULT with four "life positions" that each of us may assume at any time in our lives although not always appropriate. The four positions are:
1. I'm Not OK, You're OK – early childhood
2. I'm Not OK, You're Not OK – later childhood perceiving something is wrong at home
3. I'm OK, You're Not OK – still later in childhood becomes judgmental of parents
4. I'm OK, You're OK – matures into adulthood and develops a tolerance for his parents and himself as he is.
John M. Dusay: T/A -- Adapted/Free Child; Critical/Nurturing Parent
Psychiatrist John M. Dusay reinterpreted and expanded on the works of Berne and Harris and developed “EGOGRAM: How I See You and You See Me” (1977). He differentiates the PARENT behavior between “Critical Parent” and “Nurturing Parent,” the ADULT remains unchanged, while the CHILD is considered between the “Adapted Child” and the “Free Child.”
Eric Erikson (1902 – 1994) – Youth, Identity and Society
Neo-Freudian psychologist Erik Erikson accepted many of the central tenets of Freudian theory but added his ideas and beliefs.
His theory of psychosocial development is centered on what is known as the epigenetic principle which is reduced to four states or conditions of human development: first, people grow; second, people grow in sequence; third, people grow in time; fourth, people grow together in a community.
Thomas A. Harris (1910 – 1995) – Common T/A Stages
Berne sees us displaying all three of these behaviors in our human personality at various times giving the variance the name of “transactional analysis.” Psychiatrist Thomas A. Harris developed a practical guide to transactional analysis with his “I’m OK – You’re OK” (1967):
The phrase I'm OK, You're OK is the Ego or the ADULT with four "life positions" that each of us may assume at any time in our lives although not always appropriate. The four positions are:
1. I'm Not OK, You're OK – early childhood
2. I'm Not OK, You're Not OK – later childhood perceiving something is wrong at home
3. I'm OK, You're Not OK – still later in childhood becomes judgmental of parents
4. I'm OK, You're OK – matures into adulthood and develops a tolerance for his parents and himself as he is.
John M. Dusay: T/A -- Adapted/Free Child; Critical/Nurturing Parent
Psychiatrist John M. Dusay reinterpreted and expanded on the works of Berne and Harris and developed “EGOGRAM: How I See You and You See Me” (1977). He differentiates the PARENT behavior between “Critical Parent” and “Nurturing Parent,” the ADULT remains unchanged, while the CHILD is considered between the “Adapted Child” and the “Free Child.”
Eric Erikson (1902 – 1994) – Youth, Identity and Society
Neo-Freudian psychologist Erik Erikson accepted many of the central tenets of Freudian theory but added his ideas and beliefs.
His theory of psychosocial development is centered on what is known as the epigenetic principle which is reduced to four states or conditions of human development: first, people grow; second, people grow in sequence; third, people grow in time; fourth, people grow together in a community.
Erikson sees all people going through a series of eight stages with this central thesis prominent in a series of books: “Identity, Youth and Crisis” (1950), “Identity and the Life Cycle” (1959), “Identity, Youth and Crisis” (1968), and “The Life Cycle Completed” (1982).
Identity seems one of Erikson's greatest concerns. As an older adult, he wrote about his adolescent "identity confusion" in his European days. "My identity confusion," he wrote, "was at times on the borderline between neurosis and adolescent psychosis."
Born Erik Salomonsen when he came to the United States, he invented the new name of Erik Erikson which his daughter claimed proved a prophetic choice signaling a new career and providential acceptance.
More surprising is that this Vienna native came to the United States without a single academic degree, yet served as a prominent professor at Harvard, the University of California, Berkeley, and Yale.
Identity seems one of Erikson's greatest concerns. As an older adult, he wrote about his adolescent "identity confusion" in his European days. "My identity confusion," he wrote, "was at times on the borderline between neurosis and adolescent psychosis."
Born Erik Salomonsen when he came to the United States, he invented the new name of Erik Erikson which his daughter claimed proved a prophetic choice signaling a new career and providential acceptance.
More surprising is that this Vienna native came to the United States without a single academic degree, yet served as a prominent professor at Harvard, the University of California, Berkeley, and Yale.
A Review of General Psychology (2002), ranked Erikson as the 12th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.
Erikson's Identity versus Role confusion (or diffusion) stage is characterized by the adolescent question of “Who am I,” during which time the youth is conflicted with dozens of values and ideas of who he should be and what he should think.
Erikson's Identity versus Role confusion (or diffusion) stage is characterized by the adolescent question of “Who am I,” during which time the youth is conflicted with dozens of values and ideas of who he should be and what he should think.
This occurs from the ages of 12-20 years and bridges the gap between childhood and adulthood. Rapid bodily changes during puberty, changing roles, and social relationships can either make the adolescent feel more responsible and ready for adulthood or make him more anxious.
[As Eric Hoffer and others have pointed out the trauma and suspension of self-regard crystallized into psychopathology after WWII roaring to the “terrible 60s” and beyond seemingly only to accelerate in the disenfranchised late 20th century and into the 21st century.]
Bruno Bettelheim (1903 – 1990) – T/A and Autism
Bruno Bettelheim was a history major in Vienna with the assumed identity as a psychoanalyst when he entered New York City in late 1939. An early writer on autism, Bettelheim focused on the education of emotionally disturbed children and Freudian psychology more generally. In the U.S., he gained a position as a professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children, leaving that institution in 1973 to teach at Stanford University.
Bettelheim's ideas, which grew out of those of Sigmund Freud, theorized that children with behavioral and emotional disorders were not born that way, and could be treated through extended psychoanalytic therapy, a treatment that rejected the use of psychotropic drugs and shock therapy. During the 1960s and 1970s, he had an international reputation in such fields as autism, child psychiatry, and psychoanalysis.
Much of his work was discredited after his death due to fraudulent academic credentials, allegations of patient abuse, accusations of plagiarism, and lack of oversight by institutions and the psychological community (see BETTELHEIM: A Life and a Legacy, 1996, Nina Sutton; and The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim, 1997, Richard Pollak).
At the Orthogenic School (1944 – 1973), Bettelheim made changes and set up an environment for milieu therapy, in which children could form strong attachments with adults within a structured but caring environment. He claimed considerable success in treating some emotionally disturbed children and wrote books on both normal and abnormal child psychology becoming a major influence in the field, and widely respected during his lifetime.
Bettelheim was noted for his study of feral or isolated children, who revert to the animal stage without experiencing the benefits of belonging to a community. He discussed this phenomenon in the book “The Informed Heart” (1960). Even critics agree that, in his practice, Bettelheim was dedicated to helping these children using methods and practices that would enable them to lead happy lives provided given proper care and attention to adapt to their environment.
Bettelheim was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971. After retiring in 1973, he continued to write and taught at Stanford University.
His most widely read book was “The Uses of Enchantment” (1976) where he analyzed fairy tales in terms of Freudian psychology. In this work, he discussed the emotional and symbolic importance of fairy tales for children, including traditional tales once considered too dark, such as those collected and published by the Brothers Grimm.
Bettelheim suggested that traditional fairy tales, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms. If they could read and interpret these fairy tales in their own way, he believed, they would get a greater sense of meaning and purpose. By engaging with these socially evolved stories, he believed children would go through emotional growth and be better prepared for their own futures.
In the United States, Bettelheim won two major awards for The Uses of Enchantment: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the National Book Award in the category of Contemporary Thought.
However, in 1991, well-supported charges of plagiarism were brought against him for this book claiming he had copied from Julian Herscher's 1963 A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales. Depressed and in ill health, the much-achieving Vienna-born psychotherapist committed suicide on March 13, 1990.
In terms of skill in creating an audience, Freud had the literary flair of a novelist being able to spin captivating tales of his psychoanalytical research that were as enchanting and as compelling as novels. Likewise, his Vienna disciples, especially Erik Erikson and Bruno Bettelheim displayed similar gifts.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) – Man and His Symbols
Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Initially, he was a great admirer of Freud's work. After meeting him in Vienna in 1907, the two talked for thirteen hours straight, resulting in an intense five-year friendship. But from early on, Jung thought that Freud placed his authority above the quest for truth. Moreover, beyond that, there lay deep theoretical differences as Jung was unable to accept Freud's reductionism with the claim that the main drive in human life was sexual.
That said Freud liked having the Swiss Protestant psychiatrist as a colleague in his Jewish federation of psychiatrists to render it legitimate beyond his ethnicity. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology. Although their collaboration was short-lived, they rendered psychology the professional status it had not previously enjoyed, having its origin in theology and philosophy.
Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. He is acknowledged as one of the founders of analytical psychology, psychological types, the collective unconscious, complexes, archetypes, the differentiation of anima and animus, synchronicity, the shadow self, extraversion, and introversion.
[As Eric Hoffer and others have pointed out the trauma and suspension of self-regard crystallized into psychopathology after WWII roaring to the “terrible 60s” and beyond seemingly only to accelerate in the disenfranchised late 20th century and into the 21st century.]
Bruno Bettelheim (1903 – 1990) – T/A and Autism
Bruno Bettelheim was a history major in Vienna with the assumed identity as a psychoanalyst when he entered New York City in late 1939. An early writer on autism, Bettelheim focused on the education of emotionally disturbed children and Freudian psychology more generally. In the U.S., he gained a position as a professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children, leaving that institution in 1973 to teach at Stanford University.
Bettelheim's ideas, which grew out of those of Sigmund Freud, theorized that children with behavioral and emotional disorders were not born that way, and could be treated through extended psychoanalytic therapy, a treatment that rejected the use of psychotropic drugs and shock therapy. During the 1960s and 1970s, he had an international reputation in such fields as autism, child psychiatry, and psychoanalysis.
Much of his work was discredited after his death due to fraudulent academic credentials, allegations of patient abuse, accusations of plagiarism, and lack of oversight by institutions and the psychological community (see BETTELHEIM: A Life and a Legacy, 1996, Nina Sutton; and The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim, 1997, Richard Pollak).
At the Orthogenic School (1944 – 1973), Bettelheim made changes and set up an environment for milieu therapy, in which children could form strong attachments with adults within a structured but caring environment. He claimed considerable success in treating some emotionally disturbed children and wrote books on both normal and abnormal child psychology becoming a major influence in the field, and widely respected during his lifetime.
Bettelheim was noted for his study of feral or isolated children, who revert to the animal stage without experiencing the benefits of belonging to a community. He discussed this phenomenon in the book “The Informed Heart” (1960). Even critics agree that, in his practice, Bettelheim was dedicated to helping these children using methods and practices that would enable them to lead happy lives provided given proper care and attention to adapt to their environment.
Bettelheim was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971. After retiring in 1973, he continued to write and taught at Stanford University.
His most widely read book was “The Uses of Enchantment” (1976) where he analyzed fairy tales in terms of Freudian psychology. In this work, he discussed the emotional and symbolic importance of fairy tales for children, including traditional tales once considered too dark, such as those collected and published by the Brothers Grimm.
Bettelheim suggested that traditional fairy tales, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms. If they could read and interpret these fairy tales in their own way, he believed, they would get a greater sense of meaning and purpose. By engaging with these socially evolved stories, he believed children would go through emotional growth and be better prepared for their own futures.
In the United States, Bettelheim won two major awards for The Uses of Enchantment: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the National Book Award in the category of Contemporary Thought.
However, in 1991, well-supported charges of plagiarism were brought against him for this book claiming he had copied from Julian Herscher's 1963 A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales. Depressed and in ill health, the much-achieving Vienna-born psychotherapist committed suicide on March 13, 1990.
In terms of skill in creating an audience, Freud had the literary flair of a novelist being able to spin captivating tales of his psychoanalytical research that were as enchanting and as compelling as novels. Likewise, his Vienna disciples, especially Erik Erikson and Bruno Bettelheim displayed similar gifts.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) – Man and His Symbols
Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Initially, he was a great admirer of Freud's work. After meeting him in Vienna in 1907, the two talked for thirteen hours straight, resulting in an intense five-year friendship. But from early on, Jung thought that Freud placed his authority above the quest for truth. Moreover, beyond that, there lay deep theoretical differences as Jung was unable to accept Freud's reductionism with the claim that the main drive in human life was sexual.
That said Freud liked having the Swiss Protestant psychiatrist as a colleague in his Jewish federation of psychiatrists to render it legitimate beyond his ethnicity. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology. Although their collaboration was short-lived, they rendered psychology the professional status it had not previously enjoyed, having its origin in theology and philosophy.
Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. He is acknowledged as one of the founders of analytical psychology, psychological types, the collective unconscious, complexes, archetypes, the differentiation of anima and animus, synchronicity, the shadow self, extraversion, and introversion.
Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation—the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual's conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best-known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex, and extraversion and introversion.
Jung was also an artist, craftsman, symbolic builder as well as a prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some are still awaiting publication.
For Freud, Jung departed from science into the metaphysical world of religion. Freud questioned Jung's use of the “shadow self” to describe the unconscious or “undercovered self” of the personality. Our conscious ego, Jung claims, refuses to identify with its collective unconscious; that is, the anima or the feminine image in the male psyche, and the animus or the male image in the female psyche. To Jung, the anima/animus represents the "true self" rather than the image we present to others and serves as the primary source of communication with the collective unconscious.
Early on Freud saw the younger Jung as the heir apparent to his "new science" of psychoanalysis. Jung’s research and personal vision, however, made that impossible for him to follow his older colleague's doctrine. A schism was inevitable. This division was personally painful for Jung and resulted in the establishment of Jung's analytical psychology as a comprehensive system separate from psychoanalysis.
Werner Erhard (born 1935) – A new identity and escape
John Paul Rosenberg was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father was a small restaurant owner who left Judaism for a Baptist mission before joining his wife in the Episcopal Church, where she taught Sunday School. They agreed that their son should choose his religion when he was old enough. John Paul chose to be baptized in the Episcopal Church, served there for eight years as an acolyte, and has been an Episcopalian ever since.
From the mid-1950s until 1960, Rosenberg worked in various automobile dealerships (starting at a Ford dealership where he was trained by Lee Iacocca, then Lincoln Mercury, and finally Chevrolet), with a stint managing a nearly defunct medium-duty industrial equipment firm. This firm became successful under his management.
Rosenberg married in 1953 with the couple having four children. In 1960, he left his wife and their four children in Philadelphia, traveled to Indianapolis, and changed his name to "Werner Hans Erhard." He chose his new name from Esquire magazine articles he had read about West German economics minister Ludwig Erhard and the Copenhagen physicist Werner Heisenberg.
He moved to St. Louis, as Werner, and took a job as a car salesman. His wife Patricia Rosenberg remained in Philadelphia with their four children relying on welfare and help from family and friends. After five years without contact, Patricia Rosenberg divorced Erhard for desertion and remarried. In October 1972, a year after creating Erhard Seminars Training (est), Erhard contacted his first wife and family, arranged to provide support and college education for the children, and repaid Patricia's parents for their financial support. Between 1973 and 1975, members of his extended family took the est training, and Patricia and his younger siblings took jobs in the est organization.
The brief history of the Erhart est seminars (1971 – 1984) attracted celebrities, movie stars, rock & roll entertainers, Hippies, and Yippipies, as well as middle-class professionals and workers who felt they had lost their personal, religious, and political identity.
L. Ron Hubbard (1911 – 1986) – Sci-fi novelist & creator of a new religion
An American author, primarily of science fiction and fantasy stories, L. Ron Hubbard founded the Church of Scientology.
Jung was also an artist, craftsman, symbolic builder as well as a prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some are still awaiting publication.
For Freud, Jung departed from science into the metaphysical world of religion. Freud questioned Jung's use of the “shadow self” to describe the unconscious or “undercovered self” of the personality. Our conscious ego, Jung claims, refuses to identify with its collective unconscious; that is, the anima or the feminine image in the male psyche, and the animus or the male image in the female psyche. To Jung, the anima/animus represents the "true self" rather than the image we present to others and serves as the primary source of communication with the collective unconscious.
Early on Freud saw the younger Jung as the heir apparent to his "new science" of psychoanalysis. Jung’s research and personal vision, however, made that impossible for him to follow his older colleague's doctrine. A schism was inevitable. This division was personally painful for Jung and resulted in the establishment of Jung's analytical psychology as a comprehensive system separate from psychoanalysis.
Werner Erhard (born 1935) – A new identity and escape
John Paul Rosenberg was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father was a small restaurant owner who left Judaism for a Baptist mission before joining his wife in the Episcopal Church, where she taught Sunday School. They agreed that their son should choose his religion when he was old enough. John Paul chose to be baptized in the Episcopal Church, served there for eight years as an acolyte, and has been an Episcopalian ever since.
From the mid-1950s until 1960, Rosenberg worked in various automobile dealerships (starting at a Ford dealership where he was trained by Lee Iacocca, then Lincoln Mercury, and finally Chevrolet), with a stint managing a nearly defunct medium-duty industrial equipment firm. This firm became successful under his management.
Rosenberg married in 1953 with the couple having four children. In 1960, he left his wife and their four children in Philadelphia, traveled to Indianapolis, and changed his name to "Werner Hans Erhard." He chose his new name from Esquire magazine articles he had read about West German economics minister Ludwig Erhard and the Copenhagen physicist Werner Heisenberg.
He moved to St. Louis, as Werner, and took a job as a car salesman. His wife Patricia Rosenberg remained in Philadelphia with their four children relying on welfare and help from family and friends. After five years without contact, Patricia Rosenberg divorced Erhard for desertion and remarried. In October 1972, a year after creating Erhard Seminars Training (est), Erhard contacted his first wife and family, arranged to provide support and college education for the children, and repaid Patricia's parents for their financial support. Between 1973 and 1975, members of his extended family took the est training, and Patricia and his younger siblings took jobs in the est organization.
The brief history of the Erhart est seminars (1971 – 1984) attracted celebrities, movie stars, rock & roll entertainers, Hippies, and Yippipies, as well as middle-class professionals and workers who felt they had lost their personal, religious, and political identity.
L. Ron Hubbard (1911 – 1986) – Sci-fi novelist & creator of a new religion
An American author, primarily of science fiction and fantasy stories, L. Ron Hubbard founded the Church of Scientology.
In 1950, Hubbard authored Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health and established a series of organizations to promote Dianetics. In 1952, Hubbard lost the rights to Dianetics in bankruptcy proceedings and subsequently founded Scientology. Thereafter, Hubbard oversaw the growth of the Church of Scientology into a worldwide organization.
Born in Tilden, Nebraska in 1911, Hubbard spent much of his childhood in Helena, Montana. After his father was posted to the U.S. naval base on Guam, Hubbard traveled to Asia and the South Pacific in the late 1920s. In 1930, Hubbard enrolled at George Washington University to study civil engineering but dropped out in his second year. He then began his career as a prolific writer of pulp fiction stories.
Scientology became increasingly controversial during the 1960s and came under intense media, government, and legal pressure in some countries. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hubbard spent much of his time at sea on his fleet of ships as "Commodore" of the Sea Organization, an elite quasi-paramilitary group of Scientologists.
Hubbard returned to the United States in 1975 and went into seclusion in the California desert after an unsuccessful attempt to take over the town of Clearwater, Florida. In 1978, Hubbard was convicted of fraud after he was tried in absentia by France. In the same year, eleven high-ranking members of Scientology were indicted on 28 charges for their role in the Church's Snow White Program, a systematic program of espionage against the United States government. One of the indicted was Hubbard's wife Mary Sue Hubbard, who was in charge of the program; L. Ron Hubbard was named an unindicted co-conspirator.
Hubbard spent the remaining years of his life in seclusion in a luxury motorhome on a ranch in California, attended to by a small group of Scientology officials. He died at age 74 in January 1986. Following Hubbard's death, Scientology leaders announced that his body had become an impediment to his work and that he had decided to "drop his body" to continue his research on another plane of existence. Though many of Hubbard's autobiographical statements are fictitious, the Church of Scientology describes Hubbard in hagiographic terms and rejects any suggestion that its account of Hubbard's life is not historical fact.
Whereas est seminars are no more, Scientology has a contentious existence to this day in Clearwater, Florida operating mainly under the radar of detractors and speculators. Its continued existence is yet another reminder that the American conscience is still far from at peace.
Thomas Stephen Szasz (1920 – 2012) – Retreat from Sanity
Freud’s world from its initial stage was strong on description and less convincing neurologically. This is changing but the shadow of Freud still lurks in our collective conscience and the practice of mental health.
Born in Tilden, Nebraska in 1911, Hubbard spent much of his childhood in Helena, Montana. After his father was posted to the U.S. naval base on Guam, Hubbard traveled to Asia and the South Pacific in the late 1920s. In 1930, Hubbard enrolled at George Washington University to study civil engineering but dropped out in his second year. He then began his career as a prolific writer of pulp fiction stories.
Scientology became increasingly controversial during the 1960s and came under intense media, government, and legal pressure in some countries. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hubbard spent much of his time at sea on his fleet of ships as "Commodore" of the Sea Organization, an elite quasi-paramilitary group of Scientologists.
Hubbard returned to the United States in 1975 and went into seclusion in the California desert after an unsuccessful attempt to take over the town of Clearwater, Florida. In 1978, Hubbard was convicted of fraud after he was tried in absentia by France. In the same year, eleven high-ranking members of Scientology were indicted on 28 charges for their role in the Church's Snow White Program, a systematic program of espionage against the United States government. One of the indicted was Hubbard's wife Mary Sue Hubbard, who was in charge of the program; L. Ron Hubbard was named an unindicted co-conspirator.
Hubbard spent the remaining years of his life in seclusion in a luxury motorhome on a ranch in California, attended to by a small group of Scientology officials. He died at age 74 in January 1986. Following Hubbard's death, Scientology leaders announced that his body had become an impediment to his work and that he had decided to "drop his body" to continue his research on another plane of existence. Though many of Hubbard's autobiographical statements are fictitious, the Church of Scientology describes Hubbard in hagiographic terms and rejects any suggestion that its account of Hubbard's life is not historical fact.
Whereas est seminars are no more, Scientology has a contentious existence to this day in Clearwater, Florida operating mainly under the radar of detractors and speculators. Its continued existence is yet another reminder that the American conscience is still far from at peace.
Thomas Stephen Szasz (1920 – 2012) – Retreat from Sanity
Freud’s world from its initial stage was strong on description and less convincing neurologically. This is changing but the shadow of Freud still lurks in our collective conscience and the practice of mental health.
Maverick psychiatrist Thomas Szasz has compared the treatment of mental illness to that of the Spanish Inquisition seeing Christian history has much in common with today's institutional psychiatry. He writes of this in “The Manufacture of Madness” (1970), and “The Myth of Mental Illness” (1974), while admiring Freud’s brilliance and his systematic style of work, Jung’s humanness and sensitivity to man’s moral and religious nature, and Adler’s common sense and directness.
Szasz writes, “It seems Jung and Adler must have been superb psychotherapists which Freud was not.” Szasz acknowledges that brain disease and brain damage, and brain defects exist but “they cannot be cured with conversation.” In terms of behavioral science, he believes that science belongs on the side of the people it studies rather than aligning itself with a society that wants to control differences. He opposes all involuntary hospitalization, pointing out “there are many crimes committed in the name of mental illness” from the abuses in private practice to our system of criminal justice.
In “Second Sin” (1973), he writes, “If a man says he is talking to God we say he is praying; if he says God is talking to him we say he is schizophrenic.” He adds, “treating addiction to heroin with methadone is like treating addiction to Scotch with bourbon.” He sees mental hospitals as “the POW camps of our undeclared war and unarticulated civil wars.”
Szasz sees fundamental similarities between the preoccupation of the people with religion and religious matters, especially with the religious deviance called “heresy,” and the therapeutic state characterized by the preoccupation of the people with medicine and medical matters, especially with medical deviance called illness.
He explains, “a symbiotic relationship developed between medicine, especially psychiatry, as the prestige and popularity of organized religion diminished following the Enlightenment. Medicine took over many of the functions formerly performed by churches. Physicians became the new priesthood and it has been psychiatrists, especially who have played the roles of priests. They are our secular and ‘scientific’ priests.”
More specifically among psychiatrists, Freud’s presence has been the most pervasive as he possesses the imaginings of a novelist with a descriptive talent to reduce many “diseases” in mental health to conversation treatable with psychotherapy.
[Notice I fail to mention the cadre of organizational efficiency experts who would return operational health to the workplace by focusing exclusively on management such as Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise (1960); David McClelland, The Achieving Society (1961); Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, The Managerial Grid (1964); Frederick Hertzberg, Work and the Nature of Man (1966); J. M. Juran, Quality Control Handbook (1974); Peter Block, The Empowered Manager (1987); Rensis Likert, The Human Group (1967); W. Edward Deming, Out of the Crisis (1986); Peter Drucker, The New Realities (1989); Michael Hammer & James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation (1999).
Szasz writes, “It seems Jung and Adler must have been superb psychotherapists which Freud was not.” Szasz acknowledges that brain disease and brain damage, and brain defects exist but “they cannot be cured with conversation.” In terms of behavioral science, he believes that science belongs on the side of the people it studies rather than aligning itself with a society that wants to control differences. He opposes all involuntary hospitalization, pointing out “there are many crimes committed in the name of mental illness” from the abuses in private practice to our system of criminal justice.
In “Second Sin” (1973), he writes, “If a man says he is talking to God we say he is praying; if he says God is talking to him we say he is schizophrenic.” He adds, “treating addiction to heroin with methadone is like treating addiction to Scotch with bourbon.” He sees mental hospitals as “the POW camps of our undeclared war and unarticulated civil wars.”
Szasz sees fundamental similarities between the preoccupation of the people with religion and religious matters, especially with the religious deviance called “heresy,” and the therapeutic state characterized by the preoccupation of the people with medicine and medical matters, especially with medical deviance called illness.
He explains, “a symbiotic relationship developed between medicine, especially psychiatry, as the prestige and popularity of organized religion diminished following the Enlightenment. Medicine took over many of the functions formerly performed by churches. Physicians became the new priesthood and it has been psychiatrists, especially who have played the roles of priests. They are our secular and ‘scientific’ priests.”
More specifically among psychiatrists, Freud’s presence has been the most pervasive as he possesses the imaginings of a novelist with a descriptive talent to reduce many “diseases” in mental health to conversation treatable with psychotherapy.
[Notice I fail to mention the cadre of organizational efficiency experts who would return operational health to the workplace by focusing exclusively on management such as Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise (1960); David McClelland, The Achieving Society (1961); Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, The Managerial Grid (1964); Frederick Hertzberg, Work and the Nature of Man (1966); J. M. Juran, Quality Control Handbook (1974); Peter Block, The Empowered Manager (1987); Rensis Likert, The Human Group (1967); W. Edward Deming, Out of the Crisis (1986); Peter Drucker, The New Realities (1989); Michael Hammer & James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation (1999).
Systemic organizational behavior, like economics, is mainly intuitive and reactionary rather than reliably effective with analytics and mathematical algorithms. Well-meaning as these experts, they collectively have failed to note the radical shift from “position power” of management to “knowledge power” of late 20th century workers, especially professionals. Ironically, the Covid-19 pandemic forced management to finally loosen the screws one turn with “Work Without Managers” (1991) finally entering the conversation.]
Legacy of Freud & his followers – Dependence on Descriptive Science
The legacy of Freud is that mental illness as Szaz has pointed out is a myth justified by descriptive science. This diagnosis has resulted too often to the branding of those so designated. To wit, children disruptive in the classroom are commonly diagnosed as suffering from ADHD or ADD, controllable by a retinue of drugs whereas nutritionists claim a more reliable approach would be to reduce the offenders' diets to far less sugar.
Legacy of Freud & his followers – Dependence on Descriptive Science
The legacy of Freud is that mental illness as Szaz has pointed out is a myth justified by descriptive science. This diagnosis has resulted too often to the branding of those so designated. To wit, children disruptive in the classroom are commonly diagnosed as suffering from ADHD or ADD, controllable by a retinue of drugs whereas nutritionists claim a more reliable approach would be to reduce the offenders' diets to far less sugar.
Likewise, children have been misdiagnosed as being dyslexic or autistic as we learn by reading the biographies of Bruno Bettelheim. The same could be said of a person being “bipolar” based on a description of observed pivotal behaviors supportive of that diagnosis. Again, a retinue of drugs is likely to be administered as a corrective measure. Medical practitioners consistent with Freud’s descriptive science continue to identify all kinds of syndromes and disorders sometimes to embarrassment.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA), DSM-I, and DSM-II pathologized homosexuality as a disease before 1973. Thereafter, DSM III and subsequent editions of the manual removed the diagnosis of “homosexuality” from the second edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).
The psychic havoc of our times subjects the individual to the calculus of the state machine that falls back on labels rather than scientific studies aggravating the problem rather than resolving the behavioral issue.
We are gluttons for simplistic explanations of what we construe as atypical behavior. Russian British philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909 – 1997) claims we are afraid of freedom preferring others to do our thinking and evaluating. He sees this as a drift toward “positive freedom” where the state takes care of everything at the expense of “negative freedom” where the individual as a private contractor trusts his situational judgment.
That said a pure state of “negative freedom” or “positive freedom” would be chaotic. The character and context of man collectively are impressionistic with an instinctual sense of survival. Behavior follows this dictum.
Americans live in a conscious climate of violence with imagined or anticipated fear. This finds us with the compulsory need to find refuge in the collective will of the state. Even so, certain citizens prefer to live on the edge marginalized in the quiet prison of the mind in primitive isolation from the boring sickness of society expressed in the rebellious imperative of the self as a literary option. British writer Colin Wilson (1931 – 2013) exploits this state in “The Outsider” (1956) profiling such artists as H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The “outsider” acts according to his desires, while the “insider” behaves as the group would insist. These polar extremes describe our world today.
Wednesday, July 20, 2022
WHAT IS THIS EXISTENTIAL AUTHOR UP TO?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Copyright July 19, 2022
This anthology covers the life and thoughts of the author, born during The Great Depression when Hitler was coming to power covering events in his life over nine decades from his early years with no knowledge of his parents until five years old, then growing up in his preteens during World War Two in the middle of the 20th century in the middle of the United States in the middle of an industrial Mississippi River community on the eastern crescent of the State of Iowa “In the Shadow of the Courthouse” (2003).
From his earliest memory, he recorded his sense of things having been born on the wrong side of the tracks, however rising in position and power through institutional life but never joining the club. Having no special allegiance, he has written more than a score of books over the last several decades on the changing morality and mind of the times seeing an increasing societal imbalance between passion and reason resulting in a rudderless existence apparent in our corporate-dominated media culture of politics, religion, education, the military, and scientific community.
Dr. Fisher is looking for a home for his existential writing in a university library. Dealing with the culture of his times, he sees it in transition with the new religion, Technology, its movers and shakers the new priesthood of this corporate society.
He confronts this chaos primarily in terms of work, workers, and the workplace differing from others who view this in terms of perception. He sees the human condition today as an ontology in existential philosophical terms, or through the science of “what is,” or reality. He is aware he may be seen as an upstart and of no consequence while taking existential angst and turning it into an art and truth forum!
Dr. Fisher is looking for a home for his existential writing in a university library. Dealing with the culture of his times, he sees it in transition with the new religion, Technology, its movers and shakers the new priesthood of this corporate society.
He confronts this chaos primarily in terms of work, workers, and the workplace differing from others who view this in terms of perception. He sees the human condition today as an ontology in existential philosophical terms, or through the science of “what is,” or reality. He is aware he may be seen as an upstart and of no consequence while taking existential angst and turning it into an art and truth forum!
Monday, July 11, 2022
WATCHING THE NEWS CAUSES DEPRESSION -- "TIT" FOR "TAT"
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 12, 2022
READER WRITES
Here are some interesting links! Wow. I couldn’t believe all the case studies and TONS of articles noting the correlation between Current Events or “News”, Reading/Viewing/Listening, AND Depression!
Here’s a small sliver, a mere fraction of a fraction, from the thousands of results using a simple Google search of (no quotes) “News +Depression”.
wowzers L
Healthline Article:
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-to-balance-staying-informed-and-not-being-overwhelmed-by-stressful-news
GoodRx Health:
https://www.goodrx.com/health-topic/mental-health/is-news-bad-for-your-mental-health
Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/29/tech-tips-news-anxiety/
Study Univ. of California San Francisco:
https://psychiatry.ucsf.edu/copingresources/politics
WebMD:
https://www.webmd.com/balance/stress-management/news/20220224/how-to-manage-headline-anxiety
Many “tips and tricks” suggested, of course, from the articles above conveying their take on news/life balance
THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER RESPONDS
These references to the media sources indicate, ironically, how much we are prisoners to our computers and app sources.
One of my books, WHO PUT YOU IN A CAGE, looks at how natural it is for us to prefer the cage to freedom.
We put ourselves in jeopardy because we con ourselves into thinking "we want to be informed" when google, Facebook, et al, play on our emotions. These sources intend to advertise us to buy something, an idea, a product, or an emotion to connect us while purporting to be altruistic.
Media has one function -- to sell us something through diffusion, acculturation, or invention.
Our minds use one mechanism to take information from the sensory field in which we exist to create new ways to act and think about the world all the time automatically, largely unconsciously, expectantly, and with error.
For a time, I watched Fox Cable News and Tucker Carlson until I came to feel he was as much a load of beans as was CNN. I do use GOOGLE as if a history book knowing many of these sources are subject to error. I use e-mail as I am using it here but I am not connected to any social media networks and use my cell phone only to keep in touch with my family.
Being an old man, I am certainly no model for the younger generations. It is their time and they are stronger, wiser, and more gifted than my generation as we experienced a much less noisy existence. God bless them one and all!
Although I have had nine years of university training in two widely different disciplines, I never bought into ideas that failed to match my empirical experiences. The filters of my prism have given me much freedom, which I believe is reflected in many of my books. It doesn't mean that I am right but it does display a reason to cherish freedom as freedom is a choice.
Often my hematologist and cardiologist and my primary physician ask me if I am depressed, given my chronic condition. I always want to answer them with a question: how could I be depressed when I, a very average person in every way, could expect the life that I have had? But instead, I simply say, "No."
THE READER RESPONDS “TIT” FOR “TAT”
“These references to the media sources indicate, ironically, how much we are prisoners to our computers and app sources”
How Ironic? Was the New York Times, circa 1950, imprisoning? Maybe… how about the NYT circa 2022?
The links w/in the original email were not solely computer or app-specific. “CNN”, “FOX”, “San Francisco Chronicle”, and “Twitter”, would all fall w/in “news sources”. i.e., potential causal agents for depression. Let’s save a Section 230 discussion for a later date :P Think in terms of “objective news”… further, “may cause depression when overdone”.
“We put ourselves in jeopardy because we con ourselves into thinking "we want to be informed" when google, Facebook, et al, play on our emotions. These sources intend to advertise us to buy something, an idea, a product, or emotion to connect us while purporting to be altruistic.”
Is there any objectivity to be found in 2022? Epistemology/Ontology aside… where can one seek objective facts (or “truths”, lol), in your humble opinion? *Also, the original email WAS NOT noting, solely, social media news sources. Like you, I too, don’t have an appetite for social media indulgence. ALL NEWS sources potential causal agents for depression.
“Media has one function -- to sell us something through diffusion, acculturation, or invention.”
BINGO! J I couldn’t agree more. Hence my question about where, in your humble opinion, can one seek objective fact in 2022. Everyone has an agenda. Everyone has “skin in the game” in their narrative called life. Who’s on first?
“Our minds use one mechanism to take information from the sensory field in which we exist to create new ways to act and think about the world all the time automatically, largely unconsciously, expectantly, and with error.”
Say more? Vacuous
“For a time, I watched Fox Cable News and Tucker Carlson”
That sucks. I’m sorry to hear. How long did you watch Cucker Tarlson before his “beans” clicked? Do you recall a singular event where you said “that’s it, bullshit”? Also, where did you leave your critical thinking skills (at first)? Why no questioning of his sources, devil’s advocate type thoughts while he engaged his (you) audience with dialogue (agenda)?
“Being an old man, I am certainly no model for the younger generations. It is their time and they are stronger, wiser, and more gifted than my generation as we experienced a much less noisy existence. God bless them one and all! “
Bullshit. Stomp the Tierra hard while you’re here. You have an audience, kind of, so stay inspired. “older, wiser, pursuit of wisdom (def. of philosophy)”. You have a lot to offer folks. J
“It doesn't mean that I am right but it does display a reason to cherish freedom as freedom is a choice.”
Lot of “grey” in the world. Right and Wrong mentalities are detrimental, absurd, and passive-aggressive (IMHO). Good questions lead to good answers (good answers lead to better questions) :P I.e., “right” is not always static (always, operative word)… a better question to the last answer is often on the horizon.
“Often my hematologist and cardiologist and my primary physician ask me if I am depressed, given my chronic condition. I always want to answer them with a question: how could I be depressed when I, a very average person in every way, could expect the life that I have had? But instead, I simply say, "No."
Time is precious, even Jeffrey Bezos can’t buy himself more time (as far as I know… so I get it). BUT, for kicks, next time say to your hematologist or cardiologist when answering a query as to if you’re depressed… “no I am not depressed, but would you kindly give me a happy ending?”
THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER AGAIN
It always surprises me when my writing gets such attention. Whenever it does, I am flattered as the reader is reflecting his or her mind and not mine. Bias is the powerful acculturation of our conditioning. For example, I find CNN as offensive as FOX however I doubt that you do.
One time a consulted client -- who withheld $3,500 owed to me -- claimed my analysis sounded too much like an academic tome. My analysis was quite critical of her management style that was preventing the operation from getting its work done and what to do about it.
This CEO was already under fire with several newspaper columns and magazine articles noting her bizarre practices.
Once my report was made public, the press bombarded me with telephone calls asking me to "give my side of the story." I didn't as a good friend had recommended me for the job and he was a director under the CEO. She was eventually relieved of her position but I had no part in that. My friend survived the ordeal. BB said, "This is a side of you nobody sees."
I would put it another way. I am not into throwing gasoline on a raging fire.
Thank you for your spirited reaction to my missive. Your keen observations are appreciated.
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