Recently in Adlerian Psychology Category

After reading the quote from Thich Nhat Hanh, I came across this TED interview with Krista Tippet. She is the host of NPR's Speaking of Faith.

http://www.ted.com/talks/krista_tippet_reconnecting_with_compassion.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2011-0216&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email

Science Daily reports that psychologists have found that infants less than a year old can understand social superiority/inferiority by using the relative size of people to guess at who will prevail when the two people are in conflict. (Read details here)http://www.sciencedaily.com/release/2011/01/110127141653.htm

This research that supports the idea that from the earliest time of human life we are aware of what social position others have on the basis of a gross sense of superiority and inferiority. One can easily imagine the infant noticing that “big” people are more likely to get what they want than “small” people could choose to strive to be bigger.

We can see this infant growing up and noticing all the varieties of bigness that reveal themselves in the human community- gender, intelligence, money, attractiveness, dress, speech, aggressiveness, athleticism, skin color, and so on. By the time she reaches school age the child is well-equipped with the knowledge of other people’s inferiority and superiority. Not only that, she is aware of her own position relative to other people.

If parents, the school, the community, religion, and the larger society teach that one’s social position on the inferior/superior continuum is of relative significance the child will grow into adulthood and be able to cooperate and contribute to others well-being as a full member of the evolving human community.

If; however, this child grows up in a world where she is told only those who are deserving get to be superior, she could develop a profound sense of inferiority making it difficult or impossible to cooperate and contribute to human flourishing. Such a child may just go along as she does not have the looks, smarts, skin color, education, money and so on the “superior” people do. That is to say, she could accept her alleged “inferiority” and not strive to make her unique contribution to humanity. Conversely, she may compensate for her perceived inferiority by striving extra hard to be the “superior” person who is able to dominate others.

http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j17/stein.asp

Here is an interview with my mentor, Henry Stein, PhD, that appeared in the magazine, What is enlightenment.

I had written a short peice on the value of overcoming in human development. Alas, the computer crashed and my draft was lost and my Muse has left me. So, I am going to include the quotes from two seminal Adlerians that inspired me to write my post just the same. Perhaps my Muse will return at a later time. The quotes are from the Alfred Adler Institute of Northwestern Washington

"It is through the striving to overcome difficulties that the child learns to trust himself, and to fight and solve problems in childhood and during his later life" - Anthony Bruck

People are accustomed to consdering difficulties as something negative, (Alfred) Adler made difficulties something positive, because the desire to overcome the difficulties develops the striving (for significance) in the individual. The individual who had no difficulties willlack the disposition to face and overcome other difficulties" - Anthony Buck (parentheses for clarity)

"A really courageous individual with self-confidence will seek out difficulties because he enjoys overoming them." Anthony Bruck

"If children did not find difficulties, we would have to invent them in order for the child to experience accomplishment and growth, to experience that he is now getting along and can do soemthing. From where should they get this experience? Suddenly they are expected to have it? If you protect the child completely and then send him out inot the school world what can he do?" Lidia Sicher

"Overcoming difficulties leads to courage, self-respect, and knowing yourself"- Sophia de Vires

"A person needs to get a feeling of self before he can give to and cooperate with others. A person gets a feeling of self by making steps to overcome his difficulties"- Sophia de Vires

Positive Discipline is a version of Adlerian Parent Guidance. Worth a listen. As is her talk on Positive Discipline for Teens:

http://www.ted.com/talks/breene_brown_on_vulnerability.html

A facinating talk by a soical worker and researcher on the human need for belonging and human connection.

Milay Csikszenalmihalyi uses the term flow to describe an internal state where a person is completely absorbed in the task at hand. When a person derives a positive experience from striving to move beyond their current performance they are more likely to further their skill development, invent something new and useful, perform better, contribute to others and so on. The flow state is a positive experience in terms of the feelings it produces and skillfulness it develops. It can be even seen as a reward for sticking one’s neck out beyond their comfort zone. In turn this “reward” increases the desire for further development. In fact, one can view flow as a reward for striving to go beyond what is and what one has to what one might become. One can see that our species has depended on flow to enhance the survival and flourishing of the human community.

Perhaps our wandering minds are not simply a reflection of the human condition but a reflection of our attitude toward life. Anthony Bruck, a student of Alfred Adler, wrote that “people are accustomed to considering difficulties as something negative. Adler made difficulties something positive, because the desire to overcome the difficulties develops the striving of the individual. The individual who had no difficulties will lack the disposition to face and overcome difficulties. A really courageous individual with self-confidence will seek out difficulties because he enjoys overcoming them. No only face the difficulties that come his way, but also, seek out difficulties.

It would seem that much of contemporary culture tells us that if one only had sufficient talent one would lead a problem free life where you would be happy and have it easy. If we listen to Anthony Bruck, contemporary writers on performance, and the findings of neuroscience we may discover flow in our daily challenges at work, relationships, and in the community at large. In fact we could come to appreciate our contact with the present moment accepting the difficulties as not only OK but useful to our natural strivings.

Perhaps this would be a more fruitful approach to discovering happiness for ourselves and others.

In this week’s issue of Science, Killingworth and Gilbert report on research with 2250 people ranging in age from 18 to 88 indicating that our wandering minds are the source of our unhappiness. These psychologists gave the studies participant’s an iPhone application that asked them to record how happy they were, what they were doing, and whether they were thinking about what they were doing or something else.

The findings showed that participants reported that their minds were wandering 47% of the time! Only making love had significantly less mindlessness. Our minds are often not on what we are doing. Killingworth & Gilbert conclude that our contact with the present moment is a better predictor of happiness then the particular activity that we are engaging in.

Perhaps this mind-wandering explains our appetite for self-improvement books and programs that promise to uplift and lead us to actualization, empowerment, and happiness. If we are unable to contact the present moment everything we do is likely to be unsatisfying. We blame the activity for not being good enough but perhaps it is our attitude and attention to that activity that leaves us hungry.

Recently, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated, and Dan Coyle’s The Talent Code have offered the intuitive idea that hard work and persistence are the ingredients of high achievement. For some years we have assumed that high achievement was a function of genius and talent. However, without deliberate and mindful practice high achievement is elusive. Findings in neurology and psychology show that it takes approximately 10,000 hours to truly master literary, musical, scientific, sport, and business skill. These 10,000 hours are commitments a person makes over at least a decade. Gladwell cites the Beatles as an example. Early in their career they left Liverpool and played in Hamburg strip clubs eight hours a night, seven nights a week. Before their “overnight” success they had logged in more performances than most bands had in their entire careers.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

In my last post on 9/11, Terror Management, and The Need to Belong, I discussed the role of mirror neurons in the development of imitation and empathy. Knowing that we can learn from others and feel what they feel (to a degree) allow humans to cooperate and contribute to each other’s survival. These imitative and empathic abilities are developed in our earliest relationships.

John Bowlby, the founder of attachment theory, states that humans are at their best and able to use their talents when they know that significant persons are there if they need them. For Bowlby this included memories of our relationships with our parents. These intimate attachments to significant others provide us with focus in which our lives revolve. The more we feel we belong, are accepted, and cared for the more we can move toward others in a cooperative and contributing way.

Similarly, if we do not form a healthy attachment to our parents we are likely to have trouble learning to cooperate and contribute as we move through life. We can come to see the world as a non-accepting and non-caring place that encourages competition and uncooperativeness. We can cultivate an attitude of, “well, if you are not going to cooperate with me, I’m not going to cooperate with you!” We can develop an egocentric approach to living where we are number one and others, if they are lucky, are number two.

One only has to look at the world as it appears in the daily news to see examples of our need to belong. Can one honestly look at our political process and discern a striving to cooperate and contribute? For mutual benefit? What we see is a pervasive lack of cooperation and contribution. What we see is self-centeredness, depreciation, hostility, and overt aggression. Project this lack of belonging out into the larger world and one can become quite discouraged, or one can be even more encouraged to contribute to human flourishing.

In sum, Terror Management Theory holds that much of human behavior is geared to keeping one’s faith in the cultural stories that we have been shaped by and expecting that if we live according to those stories we will be rewarded. When we experience threats to those stories our sense of death is triggered and we struggle to maintain the story.

Terror Management Theory (TCM), is often not cited in psychology as many find the idea of death mortality as an insufficient cause for human action. The positive psychologist, Martin Seligman once said, that while the results seemed significant he could not imagine that death anxiety could contribute to human flourishing. Recently, TMT received support from another quarter. R. Coleman Curtis in his Desire, Self, Mind, and the Psychotherapies (2009) proposed that the varied and myriad human desires can actually be reduced to two primary drives- the desire for biological survival and the desire for psychological survival of the meaning making system. He concludes that if these are drives that motivate human action then we have two fears: actual death and loss of meaning.