What Do We Know, Anyway?

This may be a bit of a ramble.

Writing about my "act" (in Landmarkese) got me to thinking about what we seem to have learned about the mind in the last century or so. [BTW, I'm not giving up that particular line of inquiry just yet.]

When I was coming of age Freudians still held sway and the apparently approved course for an enlightened being was to spend years in analysis unpacking their particular formations of ego, id, and super ego. Like so many "schools" following a founding guru, the followers ended up being more doctrinaire than the founder and eventually the "school" began to fracture.

We've seen this since with other approaches--neuro-linguist programming (NLP)--Rogerians, who seemed nothing like Carl Rogers, and most of the others, no doubt. When I worked in an administrative capacity in a treatment facility in the 70s behaviorism was the big deal. I have no idea what is currently in vogue, but I do read that the field of psychology is pretty fractured, to the point where the DSM-5 is not likely to make its publication schedule in 2013.

Advances in genetics and neuroscience are having some kind of impact, but from my vantage point it does not seem like clarity is emerging, and things seem to get caught in political agendas all too easily. Take the "gay gene" research for example.

So while Landmark may have something in this business about how we wrap our lives around an early self-defensive self-protective injunction, I'm pretty sure it is not "the way" anymore than thousands of other "the ways" that have preceded it. There are lots of pathways to self-awareness and each will have its values along the way, detours, and even dead ends. Doesn't mean you can't turn the car around and go a different way.

More recently the variation of inquiry that has most intrigued me is narrative studies. The idea being that perhaps what we are more than anything else is the stories we tell about ourselves or that we discover about ourselves. I am particularly fond of this quote:

“He probably should be an old storyteller, at least old enough to know that the problem of identity is always a problem, not just a problem of youth, and even old enough to know that the nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.”

                                            --Norman MacLean, Young Men and Fire