So much to write about...so little time...
My fellow baby-boomers can perhaps appreciate more and more with me the 'ticking away of time'...
Here are some of the things I want to write about in the near future...in no particular order because I have to stay within myself each morning and write what I want to write about that morning because otherwise, Hegel's Hotel goes down in flames...or simply doesn't get finished. Writing has to come upward from The Self, not downward from the conscience, the censor, the Superego, the Topdog...
I remember many years ago in my early adulthood driving down the Don Valley Parkway (DVP)from Don Mills to downtown, Toronto, and as I was turning the corner of the DVP to head into the downtown corridor of Toronto, around about Thorncliffe Park, there used to be what they called this big 'White Elephant'. It was a fairly tall white building overlooking the DVP on the hill that stood empty and unfinished for years and years. The story I heard was that the owner had built the main framework and structure of the building but that he had 'forgot' to get a municipal permit to build a driveway into his building. When he went to get this permit, the city said 'no', and there was nothing the builder could do to change the city's mind. Thus, the building was never finished. It stood there, overlooking the DVP -- its main structure in place -- but totally unfinished and abandoned inside -- to eventually become nicknamed 'The White Elephant'.
We don't want Hegel's Hotel to become a White Elephant.
So let us press on -- and press on with passion -- until we have the inside Hegel's Hotel finished, and finished with substance and style -- a 'Five Star Wellness Hotel' complete with fully functioning telephones at a decent hotel price where you can call anywhere in the world at a moment's notice (that is a little sarcastic jab at my girlfriend of ten years who just spent a week in The Dominican Republic without calling me; she said the phones in the Hotel didn't work properly and/or they were too expensive; she bought a phone card and it didn't work. And they were charging her something like $2 a second to use it. She said she didn't phone anyone while she was down there -- not even her mom and dad -- although she tried phoning me until the phone card thing screwed up. How does that sound for a reason/excuse? Do I buy into it? Or say its Sophism and Hogwash? Or somewhere in between? Do I drop it or continue to give her the cold shoulder for a week like she just did to me?)
Incidently, here is my '5 Step Recipe for Marital and/or any Relationship Disaster':
1. Instigation (One side provokes a confrontation.)
2. Retaliation (The other side strikes back, usually verbally, rhetorically, with or without the beginning of 'trash-talk'.)
3. Escalation (More back and forth 'verbal bashing' that is leading nowhere positive, everywhere negative.)
4. Explosion (Completlely out of control trash-talking that may or may not result in 'physical aggression and violence').
5. Implosion (Impasse. Loss of contact. Loss of passion. Alienation. Separation. Divorce.)
This formula can be applied to my only partly written section at this point: 'DGB Dialectic Theory, Domestic Violence, and The Law.'
So where do we go from here? What do I want to write about?
1. I want to finish to my satisfaction my work on epistemology. The problem is that my goal here -- to re-write my Honours Thesis, 'Evaluation and Health', which was largely a work on epistemology and it relationship to psychology -- is partly boring work unless I can somehow breathe new life into an old paper. However, this paper is important because it gives the strongest connection between epistemology, General Semantics, and Psychology, more partcularly Psychotherapy, and most particularly Cogntive Therapy.
2. I want to write more about Freud and my DGB interpetive evaluations of the different theories contained in the evolution of Freud's work and the different dimensions and offshoots of Pre-Classical Pscyhoanalysis (Traumacy-Seduction Theory), The Evolution of Classical Psychoanalysis (Screen Memories, The Interpretation of Dreams, Infantile and Childhood Sexuality, The Oedipal Complex, Freud's evolving ideas on Transference Theory, Freud's Theory of Narcissism, Beyond The Pleasure Principle, The Ego and The Id,), Object Relations (that is foreshadowed by Freud's paper, 'The Splitting of The Ego' right at the end of his career and life...), Object Relations (Klein, Fairbairn...) Self-Psychology (Kohut), Transactionsal Analysis by Eric Berne (an offshoot of Object Relations and 'The Splitting of The Ego')...
3. I want to start writing about DGB Dialectic Theory in relation to the evolving 'co-operative-competitive' relationship between the evolution of Orthodox Western Prescription Medicine and the more recent Western evolution of Alternative/Natural/Nutritional Health Science and Medicine -- and how they best can be integrated...
I have one essay in mind that is capable of introducing all three different subject matters at the same time. You see, epistmeology is intimately connected to Science and Medicine. And epistemology is also intimately connected to Freud's 'life' and 'death' principle which is also connected to Science and Medicine (as well as Psychology and Philosophy).
The paper I have in mind is called 'The Fitting Game' -- an idea that I am borrowing and extrapolating from Fritz Perls and Gestalt Therapy.
After I write 'The Fitting Game', then I will decide which way DGB Philosophy-Psychology will build next: 1. Epistemology; 2. DGB Post-Freudian/Psychoanalytic Theory; and/or 3. DGB Dialectic Theory vs. Science and Medicine.
-- dgb, April 6th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain.
