Existential psychology

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[quote="ixochiyo_yohuallan
To anyone who lives in the USA: happy Thanksgiving!:) Before I signed in, I had remembered that it is Thanksgiving today, but then it totally evaporated from my head until I returned and saw you mention it in your posts. [/quote]

Thank you for thinking of Thanksgiving! While you are at it, give thanks too! It generates a lot of good feeling for the general universe.

Merle

This thread has a nice feeling to it. I think the Thanksgiving has produced a good vibe!

Your turkey sandwich sounds scrumptious Merle. Tell me more about Thanksgiving as I know so little about it. Do you send cards to friends, like at Christmas? Is it the day when you have the famous pumpkin pie? (And what is that like? I've never tried it.) Do you decorate the house?

ixochiyo_yohuallan -

Have you read any James Hollis? I just love him! He is like a wise Jungian friend and easier to read that pure Jung. I am still struggling with 'Mysterium' one day, maybe, I'll get there, lol.

Well, cognitive-behavioral modalities are not the same as behavior modification, but both categories of treatment are becoming popular because they appear to work better.

Traditional psychodynamic methods, which are reflected in the first few editions of the DSM, are increasingly being viewed as more philosophy than science. However, given the recent rapprochement between psychiatry and neurology, and even the possibility of a merger between the fields, the more effective (as in empirically tested) modalities are the ones which are becoming more dominant.

between September 21 and November 9, 1621, the Plymouth Pilgrims dined with the Wampanoag Indians for the First Thanksgiving and it lasted for three days. Squanto worked with the white settlers teaching them to bury a fish under each corn hill to fertilize and taught them to use wier fish traps. When the next autumn rolled around they were in much better shape to face the winter so they had a harvest feast of Corn ,Barley Fowl including Wild Turkeys and Venison,

This was not an annual event and the one held by the Continental Congress in 1777 wasn't either.
it went back and forth between presidents till Lincoln proclaimed it the last Thursday in November.
and it gets proclimated every year since. It is a national day of Thanksgiving for the American People. It is a dinner and revolves around that, and in the 1950 it started to incorporate the 'start of the Christmas Shopping Season.

Traditional food for Thanksgiving is the Turkey, of course. Mashed Potatoes and gravy, bread stuffing or dressing, yams (candied, usually) green bean casserole, and cranberry sauce. My turkey sandwich with mayonaise and cranberry sauce is so traditional but so radically cool.

Families really get into Thanksgiving. It is a 'big deal' for them and everyone celebrates it, so it isn't like a religious holiday where someone is always leftout.

Merle

It does.



No, I haven't, though I may have heard about him before (I don't really remember). Thanks a lot for the suggesstion - I'll see whether I can locate any of his books in the bookstores here, or maybe online.

I'm very interested in the symbolism of mythology on the whole. I remember reading some Mircea Eliade before, something on the concept of "eternal return" I think. In places it felt sort of tangled, with lots of things dumped together into the same heap without enough explanation and/or going in depth, and it was not nearly as engaging as Jung's writing, but it was interesting all the same.

I've also read about John Weir Perry's experiment involving acute schizophrenic patients, where he placed them in a special facility with access to analytical therapy (including methods such as the Jungian sandbox, etc.); however, apart from that, they were allowed to do anything they liked, and were never restrained or given medication. Many calmed down a lot after just a few days of staying there (Perry noted that when they were sitting at the table having dinner, it was often impossible to distinguish between staff and patients), and the recovery rate was remarkable - after about three to six months, most of the patients were fine again, and many of them actually became better, warmer and more balanced people. On the basis of his observations and the Jungian theory on the nature of psychosis, Perry came to the conclusion that the so-called "acute schizophrenic break" was in reality a very intense transformative process which had to be encouraged and facilitated, rather than stunted. If it was allowed to run it course, provided there was a therapist at hand who could help the individual interpret the experience, it usually ended soon and caused the personality to become much more harmonious. However, if attempts were made to terminate it by large doses of antipsychotic medication, it went down into the subconscious, becoming the debilitating chronic variety of schizophrenia that could last for years.

At some point I used to be really interested in this; basically, I also obsessed over it.

Merle, thank you for explaining the meaning of Thanksgiving. It is something I’ve always been curious about. That’s what I love about technology, the way it can bring people together from all over the world, to share their culture.

I like the fact that Thanksgiving is for everyone and doesn’t exclude people, like Christmas does, especially in multi-cultural societies. It would be great to have something like this in the UK, for everyone to get together. I have problems with Christmas for a number of reasons…but maybe that is a topic for a future thread.


ixochiyo_yohuallan, I too love symbolism and mythology, especially Greek. I can ‘lose’ myself in it for days! I loved it even before I read Jung and understood it to be stories to explain the archetypal patterns of human behaviour, then it all sort of clicked into place.

The experiment by John Weir Perry sounds so positive! I wish this type of treatment could be used more often, instead of the medication only approach.
I have read schizophrenia described as an imbalance between the conscious and unconscious, that the ego; the conscious personality, has been swamped by the unconscious, but that it too has something to say and is just as ‘valid’ as the ego, and that this is a positive event (although, of course may not always be seen that way whilst going through the experience) Often the ego is too ‘narrow,’ too restricted, and it takes this huge upheaval to break through to a much larger version of oneself.

This can happen too with severe depression. I can speak from personal experience with this as it happened to me and reading Jung was the way I made sense of it, and helped me to put the scattered pieces of myself together again afterwards.

I think you might find “Alchemy” by Marie-Louise von Franz interesting, if you’ve not read it. It is the interpretation of alchemical writings in a Jungian way, whose symbols were actually metaphors for their working to find balance and wholeness within themselves.

I think I’m obsessed with Jung I have been for some years now. But it’s probably a necessary obsession in my case, lol. I am an intuitive type, not a thinking type, so the kind of intellectual work Jung requires to understand him, I find very difficult indeed. But very rewarding.