"fully" and "judgment"

[thana ag]

Dear Adam,

I am all too aware of nit picking..It is what makes it diffuiculrt for me to put stuff in writing. A  word reveals and comceals at the same  time.Your point is well taken.

 

" as long as  the therapist fully accepts this notion -there is no possibility of  judgment-...

It would 'v e  been more accurate to say: 

As long as the therapist fully accepts this notion - that   we each have only a particular  view of  reality-it  follows   LOGICALLY  that we cannot judge another person's reality. .

Which  does not mean that we don't : we do!    Our egocentricity is too entrenched to keep such awareness  24/7- What we experience as an aversion to another's view is expressed as critisim,a neat way to not deal with our  aversion. (and consequently a possibility of evolution)I One can only hope that  we can be aware of it  egocentricity  during the  therapeutic encounter. .While I am capable of such feat during therapy hour (i think),I suck at it on a daily basis,where I function on a lower state of awareness.

Which makes me critical of what i write....

warmly,

anath





From: ablatner at verizon.net
To: anathga at hotmail.com
CC: list at grouptalkweb.org
Subject: "fully" and "judgment"
Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2010 07:59:28 -0600





Hi Anath, please forgive me for nit-picking, because on the whole I agree with you... but on this line I would offer mild modifications:
      AG: " as long as  the therapist fully accepts this notion -there is no possibility of  judgment-there is a possibility of suggesting different beliefs to  "reshape reality " of the person: whether shamanism,ritual,  etc-does not matter,as long as therapists do not confuse consensual reality, with "Reality".
 
     AB: In general in intellectual discourse I've become more sharply aware of words like "fully," "completely," "totally," and variations of this, which seem to me to be reaching for degrees of perfection that are impossible---they represent asymptotic limits. Such words are common in new age discourse and they are in that sense quite misleading, because we rarely get even near that degree of high-skill- ness. 
        Second, no possibility of judgment is I think misleading. We do judge all the time, in our preferences, in resonating with values. We may not affirm our judgments once we become conscious of them, we need not think everything we feel (nor feel everything we think, as the cognitive therapists point out), but biases just happen. Your point has validity in that we should not too easily and uncritically accept our judgments as valid. On the other hand, it may be wise to comment on values, as discussed in Karl Menninger's book in the 1960s, "Whatever Became of Sin?"  He wasn't talking about getting saved through believing in this or that myth, but rather responding to the current in mid-century psychoanalysis to be non-judgmental. At certain points in therapy it may be wise and helpful to note that a person is overly nurturing attitudes that are anti-social, overly egocentric, unkind, etc. 
 
     These points are less for you, Anath, because I know you think about such things, but I am making them on this forum because I agree with the need to really think about the complexities of our work and its resistance to easy formulation. Warmly, Adam 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469230/direct/01/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://grouptalkweb.org/pipermail/list_grouptalkweb.org/attachments/20100307/ba72215f/attachment.html>