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New Existentialists

R. D. Laing’s Take on Authenticity

05/01/2013

What I am about to say is not based on Ronald Laing’s published work, but on what I have gleaned from my personal relationship with him over the course of nearly 20 years, from 1973 when I first came to know him when I moved to London to study with him at the Philadelphia Association, then subsequently after returning to California in 1980 where I enjoyed occasional visits to my home in San Francisco, up until his death in 1989. So I knew Laing in a variety of contexts: as my boss when I worked for him at his institute in London, my teacher, supervisor, friend, house guest, and...

Posted at 10:00 AM

New Existentialists

Journeying Home: In Search of Identity

04/30/2013

I have recently completed a six-day short trip back to my late grandfather's village in Shantou, China. It was a trip that began in an almost touristy way: landing at the airport, checking in, and marvelling at the comforts of the hotel, having a feast of a dinner for the price of a smaller meal back home. My extended relatives, whom I have never met before in my 30 years of existence (they live in China, while I was born and bred in Singapore), welcomed us with a mutual awkwardness; almost like tour guides. Perhaps it was the familiar foods we grew up hearing about but were getting...

Posted at 10:00 AM

New Existentialists

Tough on Crime

04/29/2013

If you want to run for public office, you have to be tough on crime. The people demand it, sometimes stridently. In an unsafe world, we need to feel safe. We want guns in our homes, armed guards in schools, and criminals in jail. Sometime in the 1980’s during Reagan’s administration, tough on crime seems to have become tough on criminals. We react—and overreact—to crimes especially of violence with a bloodthirsty mindset. Execute them! Cut off their hands! Make them do useful work for society—make them slaves! This is an outgrowth of the personal responsibility...

Posted at 10:00 AM

New Existentialists

Anne L. Francis-Okongwu, Ph.D., 1940-2012: Social Worker, Anthropologist, Teacher, Mother, Sister, Friend

04/26/2013

Anne and I met at the gym 18 years ago when I was fortunate enough to choose an exercise bike next to the one she was peddling. We soon became fast friends. We worked out at the gym, did volunteer work, went shopping, visited museums, talked on the phone, and enjoyed one another’s company. Most of all we shared our deep cares, concerns, and what we hoped for the future—for ourselves, our children, our families, our country, and our world. Anne died last November after struggling with Alzheimer’s disease for 10 years. Because I had gradually been losing the Anne I knew and...

Posted at 10:00 AM

New Existentialists

The Future of Existential Psychology: The View From an Existential Bywater

04/25/2013

If you are a psychologist, you can expect to make about $60,000 a year in practice, more or less whatever is your practice, on average. If you are in academics, you are likely to make a lot less. As schools go for-profit or need to compete with schools that are for-profit, more and more faculty find themselves stuck outside the tenure track, outside reputable universities. A member of adjunct faculty can be paid substantially less and, in addition, save money on benefits and insurance costs. Highway faculty, or people who work as adjuncts at multiple universities, might make $40,000 a year...

Posted at 10:00 AM

Rethinking Complexity

Conscious, Aware Humans and Human Systems

04/24/2013

This is not a book review. It is more like a question that I put out to all who read this. I think it is an important question, because it addresses the Saybrook OS PhD enterprise, as well as our roles and relationships with the world in which we live. The question is prompted by an essay/book review that I am writing for Integral Leadership Review (June 2013). The book, Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business, by John Mackey and Raj Sisodia (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013.), was moving and inspirational in several ways that are probably of little relevance here. I...

Posted at 05:26 PM

New Existentialists

Normal, Natural, and Predictable

04/24/2013

I recently sat on the other side of the table for some psychological assessments. For several years now, I have been experiencing some vision problems, and my neuro-opthamologist wanted to make sure there were no neuropsychological issues contributing to the problem. Being the assessment taker made me much more anxiety ridden than I first expected. As my wife and I sat through the initial interview, I felt the palms of my hands get moister and moister, the churning in my stomach became more significant, and the desire to flee grew exponentially. These responses were heightened even more when...

Posted at 10:00 AM

New Existentialists

Dialogue and a Tanka

04/23/2013

Merleau-Ponty (1993) wrote, “For the speaker no less than for the listener, language is definitely something other than a technique for ciphering or deciphering ready-made significations” (p. 80). He is ever insistent that being-in-the-world is an embodied event, an ongoing discovery, and he relentlessly examines the ways in which experiences are given to us, prior to our labored formulations about them. This careful seeing yields jewels of description, for example: Language is much more like a sort of being than a means, and that is why it can present something to us so well. A...

Posted at 10:00 AM

New Existentialists

The Right to Be Shot

04/22/2013

Existential and Depth psychologists are aware that there are shadow forces working beneath and behind almost anything that has a positive name to it. This might account for the skepticism that E-H folks have for “positive psychology,” which seems to have an implicit philosophy that if you want a “good life,” study what is good and add more of it. So, maybe it doesn’t surprise this group that these mass shootings have multiplied in a time when one of the hot topics in psychology is “happiness.” How do we make sense of these acts of violence? How has...

Posted at 10:00 AM

New Existentialists

The Challenge of Living a Satisfied Dissatisfaction

04/19/2013

Our human nature and cultural conditioning tend to pull us in opposing directions, constructing illusory dualities and false dichotomies within which we are forced to choose between apparently contradictory ways of being. However, if we look deep enough, we discover that these seemingly negating modes of existence are in fact complementary, representing extreme ends of a unified continuum that is foundational to our health and growth. This is strikingly evident in the dynamic tension between satisfaction and dissatisfaction within human experience. On the one hand, it is not too difficult to...

Posted at 10:00 AM