Tag: identity

Finding Your Self: Desire Paths In Identity Space

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Desire path at Ohio State University. Image credit: dankeck, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

If you spend any time in a place with public parks, gardens, or simple green areas fenced in squarely by concrete walkways, you’ll be familiar with the sight of trampled paths cutting across the grass, tracing a muddy connection through that which the street would lead you around. Depending on your mood and disposition, you might be annoyed by the sight: can’t people spend the extra few minutes to go around? Is their time really that valuable that they desperately have to cut their walk short by a few minutes? Can’t they just, well, keep off the lawn?

Or you might have perused such shortcuts yourself. Perhaps slightly sheepishly and with a vague sense of doing something forbidden, you reasoned that going all the way around to get to the bus stop is really too much of a bother—and besides, what if you miss your bus? Better to quickly dash through; it’s not like your own footprints will do all that much to deepen the path, anyway.

Or perhaps, you paused a while to wonder. Why is there a need for such a path? Evidently, enough people at point A wanted to go to point B using the shortest route to defy city planners by voting with their feet. Why wasn’t that path there in the first place?

From this point of view, such a desire path represent a failure of top-down planning to anticipate the bottom-up reality of the person in the street, so to speak. They’re a design flaw: after all, cities and the streets traversing them are (or ought to be) designed for the convenience of the humans inhabiting them. The layout the city planners intended is not a divine law, but an all-too-human best guess at what works; and desire paths are ways to demonstrate what doesn’t, not transgressions against the way things must be. In a design perfectly attuned to human needs, desire paths would be unnecessary. It’s not the people who cut across the grass that are at fault, it’s the layout of the streets that fails to conform to human needs. Read more »



Monday, March 25, 2024

On Identity: Erikson, Freud, and Sartre

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

I recently listened to a podcast of Dr. Louis Cozolino, a neuroscientist and psychoanalyst, discussing what he would teach if he were training psychotherapists. The first year would be phenomenology:  the power of Carl Rogers’ perspective to train how to develop an alliance through reflective listening while keeping countertransference out of the session. The second year would be physiology: developmental neuroscience and the evolutionary history of brains and bodies. The third year might be called intersectionality: the interpenetration of the spectrum of options that affect clients – brain, mind, family, culture – and a reaction against therapy as a mere opiate to calm the oppressed and exploited. The final year would be on narratives and stories that we live by and on that half second that it takes our brain to construct our experience of the present and feed it back to us.

Cozolino insists that it’s not enough to just sit and listen to people vent. After developing a non-judgmental alliance with the client, therapists need to be “amygdala whisperers,” to be able to down modulate amygdala activation to stop any inhibitory effect on the parietal system that enables problem solving. In other words, they need to soothe anxieties while arousing enough interest for clients to be able to learn new information. Then it’s time to challenge the client’s old system of thinking, slowly and delicately, a little at a time, to help them expand previous conceptualizations of themselves and the world. There’s a necessary plan and a strategy to the sessions.  Read more »

Monday, January 22, 2024

Against Self Improvement: The Negative Capability of Everyday Life

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason… —Keats.

To become mature is to have regained the seriousness one had as a child at play. —Nietzsche

Why do we want to know ourselves? Self knowledge seems like an obvious thing to want, perhaps because ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, or because self knowledge will make us into better people. Self knowledge, the desire to understand who we are and what we really want can be valuable if it makes us kinder, less prone to arrogant dismissal of others when we see our faults reflected in theirs. Philosophy, psychoanalysis and  literature have a lot to do with the pursuit of self knowledge and the self improvement we suppose will accompany it. They seem self evidently good things to want to achieve.

The Trap

Yet sometimes self knowledge can be the wrong thing to aim at. This is when we are dominated by an itch to achieve a stable sense of who we are, or what we ‘really want’ that will bring an end to all that striving. Our myth of personal betterment has a prize glittering before it of the achieved self, the better person we could be, more authentic. The problem here, I’d suggest, is that this itch for the knowledge of the truth about ourselves is a mixed thing: in many ways a valuable part of what we think of as growth and maturity, but also a kind of trap.  Read more »

Monday, December 9, 2013

Food Fights: Are They about Mouth Taste or Moral Taste?

Posted on by Dwight Furrow

by Dwight Furrow

Human beings fight about a lot of things—territory, ideology, religion. Food fights play a special role in this fisticuff economy—they fill the time when we are between wars. Beans or meat alone in a proper chili? Fish or fowl in a proper paella? Vegetarians vs. carnivores. Locavores vs. factory farms. These are debates that divide nations, regions, and families. But they are nothing new. Taboos against eating certain foods have always been a way of marking off a zone of conflict. Kosher and halal rules have little justification aside from the symbolic power of defining the Other as disgusting.

PizzaConflict persists even when food is intended as entertainment. The competition for global culinary capo continues to heat up. The French jealously guarded their supremacy for centuries until supplanted by the upstart Spanish with their molecular concoctions, only to be cast out by the Norwegians who have convinced us of the savor of weeds. Meanwhile the Italians wait for the fennel dust to settle, confident that in the end we always return to pizza and pasta.

The dishes we consume or refuse express our style, our values, and the allegiances to which we pledge. And so it has always been. “Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are,” wrote the gourmand Brillat-Savarin in 1825. Food not only has flavor; it apparently has a “moral taste” as well that informs our self-image as individuals and as members of communities or nations. This “moral taste” is no fleeting or inconsequential preference. It matters and matters deeply. The vegetarian not only prefers vegetables and sees herself as a vegetarian but is taking a moral stance, takes pride in the stance, sees it as a project, a commitment superior in value to the alternatives. The Italian feels the same about eating Italian. It means slow eating, communal eating, la dolce vita. A Genoan's taste for pesto is not merely a preference for the combination of garlic, olive oil, basil, pine nuts, and Parmigiano Reggiano but a moral taste that carries meaning. Contemporary foodies exhibit a similar zealous commitment. The search for the best barbeque in town is not merely a search for a good meal, but a quest for a peak experience, a realization of a standard, a moral commitment to refuse the taste of the ordinary.

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