Etiquette: support, control, and social violence

My eye was caught by a BBC article on email greeting etiquette on Friday. It strikes me as a nice way into the concept of introjection. Introjection is the process of taking in something uncritically; usually in the form of messages and rules about how things ‘should’ be. Introjection means swallowing something whole instead of [...]

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The psychopathology of boredom

Psychopathology is a great word. It has three parts: ‘psyche’ (the soul), ‘pathos’ (suffering), and the suffix ‘ology’ (the study of). If you’re ever writing about something in the context of its impact on human suffering, you can’t go far wrong by dropping in psychopathology (incidentally, given those meanings, that makes the meaning of ‘psychopath’ [...]

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Baroness Warsi, bigotry, and projection

I’m seeing lots of bigotry related comments flowing through my twitter feed in response to Baroness Warsi’s upcoming speech about Islamaphobia. The interesting thing (for me at least) about the word bigot is that when I contemplate the meaning of the word, I stumble across a logical puzzle in which levelling an accusation of bigotry [...]

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experimentation in gestalt therapy

One of the things that epitomises the character of the gestalt approach for me is the therapeutic use of experimentation. Before entering training, the word experiment for me held connotations of scientists in white coats getting rats to run around mazes for their general amusement (and benefit of mankind of course). This is, I think, [...]

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on getting started

Welcome to 2011. The noughties, a term that has caused me irritation for an entire decade, is over, and the serious business of working out what to call its successor comes to the fore. My money is on ‘the tweenies’. For me, New Year invariably brings up the context of beginnings and fresh starts. Some [...]

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