59 min
💔Healing the Modern Soul: Finding Meaning in a World of Broken Images The Taproot Therapy Podcast - https://www.GetTherapyBirmingham.com
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Healing the Modern Soul is a series about how clinical psychology will haave to change and confront its past if it is to remain relevant in the future. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Healing the Modern Soul Appendix
#nietzsche #jung #philosophy #adorno #walterbenjamin #frankfurtschool #simulacra #simulacrum #eikonosphere #psychology #anthropology
Read the Longform Article on the Blog: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/4777-2/
Navigating Uncertainty, and Finding Meaning in a Fractured World
Our era is characterized by the dominance of hyper-rationality and the relentless pursuit of objective truth, production, accomplishment and consumption. The human psyche finds itself adrift in a sea of fragmented images and disconnected meanings as the previous myths that used to give us purpose are exposed as hollow or erroneous. I see patients everyday that describe this phenomenon but not in these words. It is as if they are saying that they do not know who they are anymore. Not because they have changed but because all of the nodes and references points that used to contextualize their identity are stripped away or have been made foreign and incomprehensible. However the world still looks the same to them, despite its alienating effect. It is not the aesthetics of the world that are different, but the effect that it has on us. Because the world looks the same we feel crazy. Really it is our feelings telling us that the world is crazy even though it looks the same.
Effective therapy in the modern world needs to get over its insecurities of feeling or looking crazy. If we don’t let ourselves as therapists admit to patients that we also feel in pain, that we also feel crazy from these same forces, then how can therapy do anything but gaslight our patients more. When I see the news I feel like I am on drugs, even though I am stone cold sober. I know that the people on tv do not believe the things they say and are not acting for the reasons that they tell me as a spectator that they are. I am not a politician or a god, I am a therapist. I am as paralyzed against these forces as my patients are and yet I must help them recon with them. I must help them reckon with them even though I do not know how to reckon with them myself.
I didn’t understand it at first but have come around to the line of W.H. Auden that the Jungian analyst James Hillman liked to quote at the end of his life.
“We are lived by forces that we pretend to understand.”
-W. H. Auden
Auden’s line highlights how the frameworks and philosophies we resort to for certainty and order are often little more than self-delusion. The grand meaning-making systems of religion, science, politics, etc. that have risen to such cultural dominance are but feeble attempts to exert control over the ineffable complexities of being.
Yet we cling tenaciously to these conceptual constructs, these hyper-real simulations, because the alternative – admitting the primacy of ambiguity, contradiction, and the unfathomable depths propelling our thoughts and actions – is simply too destabilizing. The simulacrum proliferates these hyper-rational facades and simulated realities precisely because they defend against having to confront the “forces we pretend to understand.”
The philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacra, or a copy without an original – a realm where simulations and representations have become more “real” than reality itself – aptly captures the sense of alienation and dislocation that pervades contemporary culture. In this world of surfaces and appearances, the depth of human experience is often lost, and the quest for authentic meaning becomes increasingly elusive.
Appearance of the Unreal
The simulacrum is a conceptual framework proposed by the philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard in his book “The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact” (2005). It refers to the realm of images and
Healing the Modern Soul is a series about how clinical psychology will haave to change and confront its past if it is to remain relevant in the future. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Healing the Modern Soul Appendix
#nietzsche #jung #philosophy #adorno #walterbenjamin #frankfurtschool #simulacra #simulacrum #eikonosphere #psychology #anthropology
Read the Longform Article on the Blog: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/4777-2/
Navigating Uncertainty, and Finding Meaning in a Fractured World
Our era is characterized by the dominance of hyper-rationality and the relentless pursuit of objective truth, production, accomplishment and consumption. The human psyche finds itself adrift in a sea of fragmented images and disconnected meanings as the previous myths that used to give us purpose are exposed as hollow or erroneous. I see patients everyday that describe this phenomenon but not in these words. It is as if they are saying that they do not know who they are anymore. Not because they have changed but because all of the nodes and references points that used to contextualize their identity are stripped away or have been made foreign and incomprehensible. However the world still looks the same to them, despite its alienating effect. It is not the aesthetics of the world that are different, but the effect that it has on us. Because the world looks the same we feel crazy. Really it is our feelings telling us that the world is crazy even though it looks the same.
Effective therapy in the modern world needs to get over its insecurities of feeling or looking crazy. If we don’t let ourselves as therapists admit to patients that we also feel in pain, that we also feel crazy from these same forces, then how can therapy do anything but gaslight our patients more. When I see the news I feel like I am on drugs, even though I am stone cold sober. I know that the people on tv do not believe the things they say and are not acting for the reasons that they tell me as a spectator that they are. I am not a politician or a god, I am a therapist. I am as paralyzed against these forces as my patients are and yet I must help them recon with them. I must help them reckon with them even though I do not know how to reckon with them myself.
I didn’t understand it at first but have come around to the line of W.H. Auden that the Jungian analyst James Hillman liked to quote at the end of his life.
“We are lived by forces that we pretend to understand.”
-W. H. Auden
Auden’s line highlights how the frameworks and philosophies we resort to for certainty and order are often little more than self-delusion. The grand meaning-making systems of religion, science, politics, etc. that have risen to such cultural dominance are but feeble attempts to exert control over the ineffable complexities of being.
Yet we cling tenaciously to these conceptual constructs, these hyper-real simulations, because the alternative – admitting the primacy of ambiguity, contradiction, and the unfathomable depths propelling our thoughts and actions – is simply too destabilizing. The simulacrum proliferates these hyper-rational facades and simulated realities precisely because they defend against having to confront the “forces we pretend to understand.”
The philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacra, or a copy without an original – a realm where simulations and representations have become more “real” than reality itself – aptly captures the sense of alienation and dislocation that pervades contemporary culture. In this world of surfaces and appearances, the depth of human experience is often lost, and the quest for authentic meaning becomes increasingly elusive.
Appearance of the Unreal
The simulacrum is a conceptual framework proposed by the philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard in his book “The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact” (2005). It refers to the realm of images and
59 min