#psychoanalytic journal that came out daily..

[catominor]

c. martinus and l. furius camillus scholarship part FOUR!!!

Greenbough, Gerald. "Philosophical disputes in Lucius Furius Camillus' De Virtutibus". Connecticut University Classics Journal 30, no. 3 (Winter 2015): 34-65.

Smith, Corinne. "What's in a name? Lucius Furius Camillus and Marcus Furius Camillus' long shadow." Roman History 217, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 24-46.

France, Adrian. "Laughing at the stoics: Lucius Furius Camillus and Cato the Younger in Martial's Epigrams." in Stoicism in Roman Literature, 120-152. (Newark: John Wiley & Sons, 2019)

[zerogate]

Ana-Maria Rizzuto is one of the few who have dared walk that line between religion and psychoanalysis. She arrived in the United States from Argentina on the eve of the Dirty War. In Córdoba she had taught in a Roman Catholic seminary, and she had become curious about the vicissitudes of faith and about the way a person’s understanding of God could shift over the course of their life.

In Boston she retrained as a psychiatrist and then as a psychoanalyst, back in the era when psychoanalysis still dominated psychiatry and when inpatient stays could last for years. She spent a year on an inpatient unit, serving officially as the chief resident but also talking to the patients about God, and she had access to all the rich data that such wards then collected on their patients: records of hours of extensive evaluation, notes on their daily psychoanalytic psychotherapy, notebooks of observations by the nursing staff. She asked patients long, probing questions about the way they experienced God and the way they experienced their families. She went out to meet some of their family members.

She concluded that God is not simply a projection of some idealized father, as Freud had suggested. (“A personal God is, psychologically, nothing other than an exalted father.”) Instead, she argued that a person’s internal representation of God is nearly as complex as an internal representation of a parent; that it draws on the important relationships and powerful experiences in the life of the individual; and that, once formed, it has all the psychic potential of a living person, even if it is experienced only in the privacy of the mind. When The Birth of the Living God came out in 1979, it upset the psychoanalytic community so thoroughly that only one disciplinary journal reviewed it and did so negatively, and the rumor circulated that the author was a nun.

-- T.M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back

[bobby-gujral-blog]

Five Ways To Keep A Journal By Bobby Gujral

If you’re one of those writers who’s been meaning to jerk a journal for years but doesn’t get motivated by the idea of stream-of-consciousness-ing your thoughts each day, you may not have found the right ideal for you, but with the help of Bobby Gujral you can now.

Here are five ways to keep a journal that are particularly suited to writers:

1. Do it Steinbeck-style

When writing The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck kept a journal re-counting his progress on the novel. Each time he sat down to work, he’d also record his experiences—his hopes, fears, anxieties, and so on—in the journal, which wrought as a kind of acquaintance to his manuscript. Learn more about Bobby Gujral journal, which came to be called Working Days, here or even read the journal yourself.

2. Big-picture it

The fact that you get a reading and writing experience puts your brain to work in dissimilar ways than if you were only jotting down your thoughts this will help you keeping it professionally. For further information, read Bobby Gujral blogs and journals.

3. Tweet a poem

If short-form is your favorite writing style, Twitter is your friend—and so is capsule journal writing. Boil each day into one succinct sentence that sums up everything you want to remember or express about the past twenty-four hours. At the end of each week, syndicate all the sentences—feel free to rearrange as desirable—to create a poem. The best way introduced by Bobby Gujral.

4. Keywords

As you anticipate your recent experiences, jot down any pertinent words or phrases pop into your mind without trying to connect them to one another. In this alteration of the psychoanalytic method of free association, there are no rules except to write down whatever comes into your head. If you keep this type of journal numerically, it can be skimpy to use a word cloud tool to see what words come up most recurrently for you during definite periods of your life.

5. Snapshots

Try selecting one moment from your day or week to write about in your journal. It can be one of high emotion when something most important happened, or one that was more contemplative. What matters is that you designate your chosen moment with lots of detail, as if it were a scene in a work of fiction or memoir. Dig into your five senses and generate a fully fleshed-out snapshot that takes your fantasy readers and places them right there.

Want to write in your journal every day? Do it at the same time as something you by now do daily. Do you take a medication, supplement, or vitamin? Tie your journal to when you take it. Linking your journal-writing habit to any daily habit will help you make it part of your humdrum. This is how Bobby Gujral writes first thing in the morning or right before bed. So start writing now and let the writing of many renowned writers inspire you thoroughly.

[starnova-between-two-worlds]

Things that do not work, so stop suggesting this crap to me.

Music: Ghost in the Shell: SAC’s soundtrack 

Everytime a mental illness or disorder is brought up there will always be armchair doctors and psychologist trying to get you to try their “it really works!” bullshit. Or well-meaning therapists who are trying to help but are using the wrong methods that just don’t work with me. Here is a list of things that do not work with me, so as I said, stop suggesting this crap (and attached to each point is an alternative that actually does work). 

1. Meditation. A lot of people in the psych sphere will swear by just how amazing meditation is for making you feel more aware of your surroundings, more in touch with your current physical reality, releasing stress and tension, keeping the nightmares away, etc. It does not do any of those things for me. All it does is make my mind wander. And then there’s absolutely NOTHING to halt the nightmares from creeping in. All meditation does for me is erase everything else from my mind so it can open the door and shout “HEY, NIGHTMARES! PARTY IN STAR’S MIND! COME ON IN!” And then of course that effectively ends the meditation.

      -WHAT DOES WORK: Letting me zone out to music for a while. Even better if I’m pacing or moving around the room while doing so, as the movement helps me focus entirely on the music and nothing else. There’s a reason I have to have music on while I blog. The lyrics allow my mind to hyper-focus on them so I have something to zero in on that is not the chaos in my own mind. Having to switch songs gives me an additional focus of “This is the song I want to listen to next” and then I’m forced to think about the songs instead of whatever the fuck my head is doing to itself at that point in time. 

2. “Go keto/gluten free!” Fuck no. You know why fuck no? Well, first of all keto would be disastrous on a training martial artist who need carbs (I tried going carb-less before a session and nearly fell the fuck asleep right there. Had to bow out to go eat a banana real quick). Second of all, no, me having autistic behaviors and meltdowns does not have anything to do with a secret gluten or carb intolerance. I know what it has something to do with. It has something to do with my mind trying to process its world and sometimes failing (right now there’s gonna be a lot of that. We’ve reached that hellish period of unpredictable weather patterns and “Indian summers” known as February-March. WORST time of year for me). Eating cardboard (gluten free tastes pretty much exactly like cardboard) isn’t going to do anything for that. Nor is cutting my carbs and falling asleep during my training sessions or my runs or my HIIT sessions. In fact that will make it worse because then I’ll fuck up all my training sessions and that will make me furious. 

           -WHAT DOES WORK: Those daily martial arts training sessions I mentioned, along with daily HIIT, weightlifting, running, and when it stops being as cold as Jack Frost’s butthole outside, some sort of daily outdoor play like biking, skating, ball games, etc. Exercise is so mega important for me. Getting my 60 to 90 minutes a day in is so mega important for me because not only does it keep me healthy when the nature of my conditions means I’m very prone to sliding into unhealthy behaviors, but the martial arts in particular works WONDERS for pent-up aggression and allows me to control it and practice discipline. Exercise helps me burn through the constant energy and gives me an outlet for my restlessness, while also giving me a focus (even outdoor games present some sort of objective to focus on). 

3. Mindfulness techniques. I’ve had therapists try this shit with me and then give me questioning looks wondering why we’re not making any progress. Apparently, they’re supposed to be for trauma victims and those with chronic mental illness to remind themselves of reality and call themselves out of a nightmare or a flashback or a bout of aggression by reaffirming the reality around them. We’ve done “visualization,” “breathing exercises” (those are ACTUALLY useless to me Like, “it’s the equivalent of doing nothing” useless), logging/journaling (I do journal, but it’s meant to be a personal journal for me and not for any sort of therapeutic reason. More of a writing practice than anything at all). We’ve tried these stupid twee little games where I write down what’s happening in the nightmares and put them in a box to “lock them away” (you know what that doesn’t do? Keep them from re-entering my mind, just because they’re now on a paper sitting in a box). One therapist actually told me that whenever I feel like I’m going to have a meltdown, I should play with rocks. I handed the rock back to her and outright told her, “No. That is not going to work at all.” The reason was that the physicality of the rock was supposed to bring me back down to normal, or something. It doesn’t work. 

             -WHAT DOES WORK: Just put a 3DS in my hand and call it an hour. Give me Youtube videos. Music, as I mentioned up in the first point. I have several mindless, colorful game apps on my phone (things like Bejeweled and Bubble Shooter) where I can just sit there mindlessly manipulating little colored icons for a while, giving me objectives like “match up 20 clouds” or “clear 10 red bubbles from the screen” that are really stupid objectives but still give me SOMETHING for my mind  to hyper-focus on: “Okay, so the best way to match up 20 clouds with that amount of moves would be to...” Coloring books and toys; sitting there playing with a beloved doll of mine who I know and am familiar with is not the same as sitting there playing with a rock that means nothing to me. My dolls mean security and comfort to me. I can make my toys comfort me. My Mulan doll can hug me and my Elena doll can hold my hand. I can’t make a rock comfort me (well, I suppose I can, but why would I want to? It’s a damned rock). VIDEO GAMES. I cannot stress this enough. VIDEO GAMES ARE IMPORTANT. Video games ARE my world. Just leave me alone with Pokemon Moon or Hyrule Warriors or Guilty Gear Xrd for a while and I promise you, I will be okay. Those characters are my FAMILY. Those characters ARE my reality. They are familiar figures that I associate with safety, security, love, and every single happiness I’ve ever experienced in my life. If I’m not okay after watching Lara Croft be awesome or after watching Nariko cut herself through legions of mooks, I’m not going to be okay. 

4. CBT and DBT. They don’t work. :( I’d been in CBT since I was in middle school and after years of it, there came a point when both me and the therapist realized we’ve hit a wall and we’re going nowhere. She told me I needed something much more intensive. We didn’t even get to start DBT--we were supposed to try stuff out of the handbook and see if they worked first. They didn’t. None of it worked. I don’t know why those particular forms of therapy do a whole lot of nothing with me (I don’t know enough about the combination of autism-schizotypal-reactive-attachment to know why they wouldn’t work). But they just don’t. 

           -WHAT DOES WORK: Whatever my current psych is doing. He calls it “narrative therapy” but I think it is a mix of narrative, psychoanalytic, and talk therapy combined into one. It’s very, very, very “patient-first.” It involves active listening and listing off several bits of advice and suggestions at once, not just “try this one thing. It works. I promise.” This psych understands that every patient is different and “that one thing that works, I promise” is always going to have at least one patient it does not work for. He’s god-tier when it comes to dealing specifically with personality disorders, and because he is autistic himself, he knows autism like the back of his hand because, well, it kind of is the back of his hand. When we do find something that works for me, he encourages it instead of telling me why it shouldn’t work and why I should be doing this other thing that doesn’t work instead. Every mind is different, and if it works, it works. He keeps me very involved in exploring my options and in figuring out the best possible things that work. He’s awesome.