John Day IV's Archive

It has been great to hear about Carl Rogers over the past few classes because I was beginning to wonder if nearly all therapists felt that creating a better relationship with the client is not in either party’s best interest. I also have heard little to nothing about Carl Rogers in my previous classes. He is a breath of fresh air in a sea of deterministic psychological theories. I do not find much value in telling a client something like you have a subconscious that is extremely difficult to control/change, but I do see value in Rogers telling the client they have choice and a say in who they are. Not only does Rogers believe that clients and therapists have a stronger relationships but he also has things to say to encourage the further development of the relationship even after they start to open up. I love how Rogers uses lines/sounds like “hmm,” which I have always been told is rude and improper speech, to successfully bring out more from the client. Rogers’s style is as if he is trying to get down on the same level and learn what it is the client is experiencing, rather than lessening objectively, leaving himself almost venerable to the client. I do feel that Rogers’s method requires some kind of similar experience to your client to effectively work. There is some concern to me about how deep this client and therapist relationship goes especially the part where the therapy comes to an end one way or another. I do have to worry about the idea of centering therapy to the point that the client controls the direction and the method so much, but I can appreciate how not putting more consideration into their feelings can hurt rather than help.

Hergenhahn states “a main goal of science is to discover lawful relationships, science assumes that what is being investigated is lawful”. Determinism operates under the assumption that something can be determined because it is operating under a set of laws. So we must operate under the assumption of determinism in order to better understand the world around us. Especial as Christian we are faced with the issue of wanting our faith and the faith that others to be of our choosing and not determined.

In many societies it was believed that everyone had a fate and many believed that this fate was either unavoidable or severe consequences would follow had you not gone with fates plan. This is amazing to me because in early societies even before social sciences had developed people had already started to form the ideas of determinism. Although external forces like events in peoples lives appearing to be out of their control people had still conceived that their was an order to the chaos that we live in. Thinking back through those old tales that I would have to read for English every time the theme was about defying fate it was as if it was a miracle of some kind a one in a million chance, but their were countless about the hopelessness of avoiding fate.

I feel like the issue is not backing up determinism because we are swimming in a sea of it but rather finding ways to support non-determinism. I liked the thoughts of William James on the topic of free will as he tried to deal with the over whelming evidence in favor of determinism that psychologist must face. James writes “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will…” What really gets me about this quote is the context of it prior to this James had not be productive and in a depressive state however following this James was extremely productive. I cannot say that I am on board with determinism but I do like indeterminism because it seems to me that there are limits in terms of method not to mention ethics to be fully either non-determinism or determinism.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau had some odd ideas about human nature along with society and its social structures. I found of quote of him saying “The first man who had fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes…” (Wiki). He clams that mans problems are rooted in the hierarchies that rule over us and that without them we would live in harmony. Basically Rousseau believes it is our assessment that something is our and ours alone that causes our eternal strife.

Rousseau ideas on society make me think of two somewhat opposing sociologist Weber and Marx. Weber because Rousseau talks about the supposed need for authority like Weber’s rational authority, which comes from governments in order to maintain order. Marx felt that conflict is created by those with the means imposing their will on those without means like when Rousseau used the example of the first man to build a fence. One thing that did bother me about Rousseau is that although he proposes the elimination of government he does not give historical or empirical evidence of his reasons. Rousseau suggests causality between means and death/suffering but not with government from what I could tell.

This may be a bit of a stretch but I would speculate the Rousseau early life involvement with the church could have help to create the idea of no government, the Garden of Eden and the request for a king over God’s people. Overall I feel that Rousseau writings give an interesting perspective on how giving/sharing we should be with one another.

REF: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau

Freshman year of college dreams were something of great interest to me and one of the reasons I switched majors to psychology. For the most part this was because the constant nightmares I used to have. I found it interesting that Aristotle connected conscious imagination with unconscious dreams saying that dreaming was just unorganized imagination. To have made that kind of conclusions despite the influences around him impresses me. I would speculate that this was one of the foundational blocks to the concept of a subconscious mind, that we think in our sleep and have no control over it. This might give the impression that there are aspects of our own thoughts when we are awake that are out of our control.
It was only recently that the idea controlling your dreams has started to gain momentum. The major marker for this would be the recent hit Inception which was similar to the ideas of lucid dreaming only some how they can enter other peoples minds. I must note that I have never full gained control of a dream so I am a bit of a skeptic as to how much control you can have without waking up. In a book by Stephen LaBerge Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, Published 1990, he give the reader instructions how to have better dream dreams by controlling them. One of the first steeps he gives involves better awareness of our surroundings while awake, which is based off of the same concept presented by Aristotle that dreams are the product of our awake experiences. LaBerge believes by paying more attentions to our surroundings that our dreams will become that much more vivid and memorable helping dream recall.
One thing that bothers me about Aristotle’s idea of dreams being a product of our experiences would be why do some of us, mostly children, have night terrors without being exposed to particularly traumatic experiences. I like it better how Montague Ullman puts it “Real events can be replayed in a dream, but their importance for us goes beyond the limits of what they literally seem to be.” Dreams are something that we have fun talking about because of what interesting things happen in them, but I like the thoughts of Freud, Jung, and Ullman that dreams could be the products of versions of ourselves we have yet to explore.