Hi Prof. Carveth. I took your Psychoanalysis course at Glendon College about 25 years ago. I was pleased to happen upon your KZread channel. I'm now an Ordained Minister, and I found this video very interesting and thought-provoking. Although you and I may come to different conclusions, I really appreciate how you engage this question with such depth, honesty and vulnerability. 25 years later, my respect and admiration for you still stands.

Dear Lorraine, thank you so very much! Your words mean a great deal to me. I’m not very happy with the way that video ends as I seem to to lose the dialectical tension I was otherwise driving to retain. But it’s OK, no one ever gets it completely right, it’s an ongoing struggle, we’re broken, we try to do our best. It’s delightful to hear from you a former student after all these years.

I’m very happy to have watched this Prof Carveth. You have answered many of the questions I have been forming around the value of Primary Process thinking and by extension the value of the Paranoid Schizoid position. Thinking of Winnicott it seems to me that his emphasis on Play and the acceptance of Paradox in Play is another way of validating Paranoid Schizoid functioning and it’s attendant Primary Processes - along the lines of Eliot’s ‘Humankind cannot bear much reality,’ and the tendency to towards religious experience. Perhaps Creativity itself, even in science is based on Play. As if the logic and rationality of the Depressive Position is too dry and empty without a connection to the Primary Processes. I’m reminded of Grotstein drawing attention to the fact that the PreConscious system abuts both the conscious system on one side and the unconscious system on the other.

@doncarveth

8 ай бұрын

Yes. And if you have not yet encountered. Loewald on regression it is a must.

I think that the word "God" can only point indirectly in the general direction of what is aimed to be talked about. I think the "Tao" is the better conceptual symbol than the western concept of "God". Fundamentally, the "belief" in "God" and or the "Tao" is based on experience that transcends rationality and logic; and it's not understandable unless you've been blessed to experience "it" again in adult life. "Transcendental experiences", as they are called, feel much truer and more real in the moment than any argument or logic. But of course, My writing this comment "covers over" that very thing/subject and is also tainted by my grandiose narcissism of being in "the know", which means I'm not in "the know"...how impossible it is to talk about this, and yet we must!

Very valuable indeed! Concerning belief in God as some super-natural phenomenon, I suggest that it would be rewarding if analysts also examined the human mind/consciousness/awareness from such a perspective. The idea of agency, free will, choice and responsibility is effectively often conceived of from a paranoid-schizoid, magical and thus non-natural understanding. The view that human beings invented God often shadows the fact that we have invented the deepest understanding of ourselves as well. So I guess we would merit from investigating the roots of such projections about human agency. Thanks

Great video Don, I agree with the sentiment that the only rational stance on the matter is to be agnostic. If everyone held this as a core belief the world would be a completely different place. Thank you for uploading.

@doncarveth

6 жыл бұрын

Thanks Ryan

Not so sure about this talk of natural vs supernatural... Yesterday's supernatural has become today's natural, thanks to science/technology. Any judgment of something being supernatural requires complete knowledge of the natural, which we have not.

@doncarveth

4 жыл бұрын

True, but until there are natural reasons to assume it is natural I will consider it super natural for the time being.

Thanks, Sir

Interesting, but the very idea that we project already presume is the existence of a mind capable of projecting. The idea that we project agency presumes an agent capable of projecting, doesn’t it?

We are primates. See the recent research on animal alltruism. The core elements of the universal Affleck need not be grounded in logic or reason for they form a part of our nature.

Universal ethic

Yes