Hope the reading is going well. Just to clarify with the dates - each reading week starts on a Wednesday and date shown is the day that reading week begins. Please post comments as and when during the week. You can also post comments to previous sections if you are running a bit behind.
Here I am posting the first comment, am I just a showoff or what?
The intro is all about Creative Adjustment and growth, being the "artist of life" as an active self.
1. Experience is a boundary function, perceiving unified structures through sense organs. Psychologically anything else is abstract or construct (fantasy). Higher organisms always show cooperation of sense and movement, which I take to be a reference to awareness and mobilisation in the contact cycle.
2. Interaction. No function is possible without the environment (breathing needs oxygen), organism/environment field interact at all levels. Any problem will always have a historical and cultural element.
3. Psychology is a combination of experience (contact) and all human function, living relations at the boundary, which contains and protects and also touches the environment (interaction).
4. The organism as difference rejects dangers, overcomes obstacles and assimilates the novel - unlike becomes like = change + growth.
5. The definition of psychology is the study of Creative Adjustment which functions for growth. All contact is creative and dynamic, only the novel is nourishing and its the aware response in the field that triggers the process.
In the first part of the reading I liked the part on contact and novelty. This quote made things a bit clearer for me: "What is pervasive, always the same, or indifferent is not an object of contact".
The second part laid out the coming chapters of the book which seem mainly to do with discussing neurotic dichotomies of theory (many that are universally held) eg. mind and body; infantile and mature; biological cultural.
It's interesting that the book was first published in 1951 and I was wondering if any of the postmodernist or post-structuralist writers in the 60's and 70's were influenced at all?
I was also interested in the part regarding their method of argument (II/6 "The Contextual Method of Argument) and I'm wondering if that is the way we should be reading the book.
Hope the reading is going well. Just to clarify with the dates - each reading week starts on a Wednesday and date shown is the day that reading week begins. Please post comments as and when during the week. You can also post comments to previous sections if you are running a bit behind.
ReplyDeleteHere I am posting the first comment, am I just a showoff or what?
ReplyDeleteThe intro is all about Creative Adjustment and growth, being the "artist of life" as an active self.
1. Experience is a boundary function, perceiving unified structures through sense organs. Psychologically anything else is abstract or construct (fantasy). Higher organisms always show cooperation of sense and movement, which I take to be a reference to awareness and mobilisation in the contact cycle.
2. Interaction. No function is possible without the environment (breathing needs oxygen), organism/environment field interact at all levels. Any problem will always have a historical and cultural element.
3. Psychology is a combination of experience (contact) and all human function, living relations at the boundary, which contains and protects and also touches the environment (interaction).
4. The organism as difference rejects dangers, overcomes obstacles and assimilates the novel - unlike becomes like = change + growth.
5. The definition of psychology is the study of Creative Adjustment which functions for growth. All contact is creative and dynamic, only the novel is nourishing and its the aware response in the field that triggers the process.
How am I doing?
Thanks FG - brilliant.
ReplyDeleteIn the first part of the reading I liked the part on contact and novelty. This quote made things a bit clearer for me:
"What is pervasive, always the same, or indifferent is not an object of contact".
The second part laid out the coming chapters of the book which seem mainly to do with discussing neurotic dichotomies of theory (many that are universally held) eg. mind and body; infantile and mature; biological cultural.
It's interesting that the book was first published in 1951 and I was wondering if any of the postmodernist or post-structuralist writers in the 60's and 70's were influenced at all?
I was also interested in the part regarding their method of argument (II/6 "The Contextual Method of Argument) and I'm wondering if that is the way we should be reading the book.