Speaking of doubt, here’s a link to a new article of mine from the September issue of Harper’s. It’s about the way that psychotherapy has been taken captive by the bureaucrats and the positive thinkers. It also has a chilling story about the way Martin Seligman is trying to inoculate soldiers against PTSD.
The article is behind a pay wall. I’m sure someone will steal it soon enough and it will be available on the net. I’m also sure that I sound sanctimonious when I say this, but I do want to point out that sooner or later there won’t be anything left to blog about besides other bloggers. And that a subscription to Harper’s, or the New York Times, or any other “content provider” is relatively cheap, especially if the alternative is not to have them around. Plus it’s nice to actually hold something paper in your hands, even if it is bad for the trees.
Hi Gary.
Me again.
Just subscribed to Harper’s and read your most recent article:
“I’m wondering now why I’ve always put such
faith in doubt itself; or, conversely, what it is
about certainty that attracts me so much that I
have spent twenty-seven years, thousands of
hours, and millions of other people’s dollars to
repel it. What reminiscence of my own makes
that lust forbidden? What drives me to recoil
from the ecstasy of this audience?”
Yup – get this. I was raised in a fundamentalist household that had the throne on truth and when that truth did not correspond to the world as I was beginning to see it in adolescence, certainty came tumbling down. Then it arose again in science and philosophy – another couple of regimes – and now, oh some 20 years later of living and at least ten years of listening to young people in crisis, truth is possibility for me at this point. At the least, its created or brought forth through dialoque.
Your article is terrific and speaks to the same kind of skittering bandwagon approaches in education which can conceal more than what is worth re-directing or revealing (more like redirection), I think. All the focus now is on resilience, of course, after it is assessed against risk in student lives…
I think that I become more grateful to Foucault, and hermeneutics, the more I read your work. One keeps us vigilant and the other keeps us talking.
Thanks!
Chris
I’m glad I picked up the Harper’s issue with your article in it. It was a great read for someone who has zero experience with Freud and psychotherapy, and I was happy to discover the origins of the dodo effect. It even inspired me to write something on my blog about it.
Look forward to your next article in the magazine or elsewhere.