Luzes, câmera, acção: [Precipitating Crisis]

"In the film 'Wild Strawberries', Marianne, the pregnant daughter-in-law of old Isak Borg, travels with him to Lund, where he is to receive the highest honor of his medical profession. She is returning to end her marriage, given her husband Evald's position that she must choose between him and the child. Hoping to avert this decision, she went to his father for help, impelled by 'some idiotic idea' that the old doctor would heal the division. Instead, she found 'well hidden behind [his] mask of old-fashioned charm and friendliness,' the same wall of 'inflexible opinions' that encircled his son's opposition, a lack of consideration for others and a refusal to 'listen to anyone but [himself].' Just as Evald claimed to have made absolutely clear his wish not to have a child, explaining that he had no 'need (for) a responsibility which will force me to exist another day longer than I want to,' so his father wanted no part in Marianne's marital problems, saying that he did not 'give a damn about them' and had 'no respect for suffering of the soul.' Yet when in the car, Borg offers the opinion that he and Evald are 'very much alike. We have our principles... and I know Evald understands and respects me,' he is startled when Marianne replies, 'That may be true, but he also hates you.'
With this counterpoint between the old man's principled withdrawal and the young woman's efforts to sustain connection, the action of the film begins. The link established between Borg's 'evil and frightening dreams' and Marianne's realization that 'it would be terrible to have to depend on you anyway' ties the despair of his old age to the ongoing failure of family relationships. Erikson (1976), taking Bergman's film as his text for explicating the cycle of life, cites Marianne as the catalyst who precipitates the crisis that leads to change. He compares Marianne to Cordelia in driving to the surface an old man's despair, confronting him with the source of his discomfort by revealing the disturbing but liberating truths of relationships. And Erikson shows how this confrontation spurs the sequence of memories and dreams through which Borg retraces his steps through the stages of life, arriving at intimacy, the point where he failed. He dreams of an examination in which he forgets that 'a doctor's first duty is to ask forgiveness,' and he cannot tell if a woman is dead or alive. The examiner pronounces him 'guilty of guilt.' The sentence: 'loneliness, of course.' Thus connecting the present with the past, Borg comes to acknowledge his own defeat ('that I am dead, although I live') but in doing so, he releases the future, turning to offer Marianne his help.
Erikson, defining Marianne's role in breaking the cycle of repetition that had extended across generations a cold loneliness 'more frightening than death itself,' identifies the 'dominant determination to care' in this 'quiet, independent girl with her naked, observant eyes.' Yet in tracing the
development of the virtue of care, which he views as the strength of adult life, he turns repeatedly to the lives of men. Since in life-cycle theory, as in the film, Marianne's story remains untold, it is never clear how she came to see what she sees or to know what she knows."
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice

A arte, a música, a filosofia, as emoções, os sentimentos e a neurociência

aqui

Jejuar faz bem ao cérebro

Sobre Mark Mattson

A Palestina em 1896

Busquei aqui

Vem Noite

Vem, Noite antiquíssima e idêntica,
Noite Rainha nascida destronada,
Noite igual por dentro ao silêncio. Noite
Com as estrelas lantejoulas rápidas
No teu vestido franjado de Infinito.

Vem, vagamente,
Vem, levemente,
Vem sozinha, solene, com as mãos caídas
Ao teu lado, vem
E traz os montes longínquos para o pé das árvores próximas.
Funde num campo teu todos os campos que vejo,
Faze da montanha um bloco só do teu corpo,
Apaga-lhe todas as diferenças que de longe vejo.
Todas as estradas que a sobem,
Todas as várias árvores que a fazem verde-escuro ao longe.
Todas as casas brancas e com fumo entre as árvores,
E deixa só uma luz e outra luz e mais outra,
Na distância imprecisa e vagamente perturbadora.
Na distância subitamente impossível de percorrer.

Nossa Senhora
Das coisas impossíveis que procuramos em vão,
Dos sonhos que vêm ter connosco ao crepúsculo, à janela.
Dos propósitos que nos acariciam
Nos grandes terraços dos hotéis cosmopolitas
Ao som europeu das músicas e das vozes longe e perto.
E que doem por sabermos que nunca os realizaremos...
Vem, e embala-nos,
Vem e afaga-nos.
Beija-nos silenciosamente na fronte,
Tão levemente na fronte que não saibamos que nos beijam
Senão por uma diferença na alma.
E um vago soluço partindo melodiosamente
Do antiquíssimo de nós
Onde têm raiz todas essas árvores de maravilha
Cujos frutos são os sonhos que afagamos e amamos
Porque os sabemos fora de relação com o que há na vida.

Vem soleníssima,
Soleníssima e cheia
De uma oculta vontade de soluçar,
Talvez porque a alma é grande e a vida pequena.
E todos os gestos não saem do nosso corpo
E só alcançamos onde o nosso braço chega,
E só vemos até onde chega o nosso olhar.

(…)
Apanha-me do meu solo, malmequer esquecido,
Folha a folha lê em mim não sei que sina
E desfolha-me para teu agrado,
Para teu agrado silencioso e fresco.
Uma folha de mim lança para o Norte,
Onde estão as cidades de Hoje que eu tanto amei;
Outra folha de mim lança para o Sul,
Onde estão os mares que os Navegadores abriram;
Outra folha minha atira ao Ocidente,
Onde arde ao rubro tudo o que talvez seja o Futuro,
Que eu sem conhecer adoro;
E a outra, as outras, o resto de mim
Atira ao Oriente,
Ao Oriente donde vem tudo, o dia e a fé,
Ao Oriente pomposo e fanático e quente,
Ao Oriente excessivo que eu nunca verei,
Ao Oriente budista, bramânico, sintoísta,
Ao Oriente que tudo o que nós não temos.
Que tudo o que nós não somos,
Ao Oriente onde - quem sabe? - Cristo talvez ainda hoje viva,
Onde Deus talvez exista realmente e mandando tudo...

Vem sobre os mares,
Sobre os mares maiores,
Sobre os mares sem horizontes precisos,
Vem e passa a mão pelo dorso da fera,
E acalma-o misteriosamente,
Ó domadora hipnótica das coisas que se agitam muito!

(…)

Vem, Noite silenciosa e extática,
Vem envolver na noite manto branco
O meu coração...
Serenamente como uma brisa na tarde leve,
Tranquilamente com um gesto materno afagando.
Com as estrelas luzindo nas tuas mãos
E a lua máscara misteriosa sobre a tua face.
Todos os sons soam de outra maneira
Quando tu vens.
Quando tu entras baixam todas as vozes,
Ninguém te vê entrar.
Ninguém sabe quando entraste,
Senão de repente, vendo que tudo se recolhe,
Que tudo perde as arestas e as cores,
E que no alto céu ainda claramente azul
Já crescente nítido, ou círculo branco, ou mera luz nova que vem,

A lua começa a ser real.

Alvaro de Campos
30 de junho 1914

A Vida Examinada

"The responsible being is the one who thinks they've never been responsible enough. They've never taken care enough of the other. The other is so in excess of anything you can understand or grasp or reduce. This in itself creates an ethical relatedness. A relation without relation. Because you don't know, you can't presume to know or grasp the other. The minute you think you know the other, you're ready to kill them. You think: 'Oh, they're doing this or this, they're the axis of evil, let's drop some bombs.' But, if you don't know, if you don't understand this alterity, it's 'so' other that you can't violate it with your sense of understanding. Then you'll have to let it live, in a sense."
Avital Ronell

Uma delícia

Girls will be girls

"Jean Baker Miller (1976) [...] finds in psychology no language to describe the structuring of women's sense of self, "organized around being able to make and then to maintain affiliations and relationships ." But she sees in this psychic structuring the potential for "more advanced, more affiliative ways of living — less wedded to the dangerous ways of the present," since the sense of self is tied not to a belief in efficacy of aggression but to a recognition of the need for connection. Thus envisioning the potential for a more creative and cooperative mode of life, Miller calls not only for social equality but also for a new language in psychology that would separate the description of care and connection from vocabulary of inequality and oppression, and she sees this new language as originating in women's experience of relationships."
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice

Life stages

"The problem that female adolescence presents for theorists of human development is apparent in Erikson's scheme. Erikson (1950) charts eight stages of psychosocial development, of which adolescence is the fifth. The task at this stage is to forge a coherent sense of self, to verify an identity that can span the discontinuity of puberty and make possible the adult capacity to love and work. The preparation for the successful resolution of the adolescent identity crisis is delineated in Erikson's description of the crisis that characterize the preceding four stages. Although the initial crisis in infancy of "trust versus mistrust" anchors development in the experience of reletionship, the task then clearly becomes one of individuation. Erikson's second stage centers on the crisis of "autonomy versus shame and doubt," which marks the walking child's emerging sense of separateness and agency. From there, development goes on through the crisis of "initiative versus guilt," successful resolution of which represents a further move in the direction of autonomy. Next, following the inevitable disappointment of the magical wishes of the Oedipal period, children realize that to compete with their parents, they must first join them and learn to do what they do so well. Thus in the middle childhood years, development turns on the crisis of "industry versus inferiority," as the demonstration of competence becomes critical to the child's developing self-esteem. This is the time when children strive to learn and master the technology of their culture, in order to recognize themselves and to be recognized by others as capable of becoming adults. Next comes adolescence, the celebration of the autonomous, initiating, industrious self through the forging of an identity based on an ideology that can support and justify adult commitments. But about whom is Erikson talking?
 

do patriarcado / Virginia vestindo as vestes de Psique

imagem tirada de aqui

"Life for both sexes — and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement — is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority — it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney — for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination — over other people. Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power. But let me turn the light of this observation on to real life, I thought. Does it help to explain some of those psychological puzzles that one notes in the margin of daily life? Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some books by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, "The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!" The exclamation, to me so surprising — for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex? — was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and battering flints for sheepskins or whatever simple ornament took our unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have existed. The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn their crowns or lost them. Whatever may be their use in societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic actions. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgment, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is? ...The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine. Under the spell of that illusion, I thought, looking out of the window, half the people on the pavement are striding to work. They put on their hats and coats in the morning under its agreeable rays. They start the day confident, braced, believing themselves desired at Miss Smith's tea party; they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind."
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Not Waving But Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

 Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
Stevie Smith

Girls and Boys

"The problem that female adolescence presents for theorists of human development is apparent in Erikson's scheme. Erikson (1950) charts eight stages of psychosocial development, of which adolescence is the fifth. The task at this stage is to forge a coherent sense of self, to verify an identity that can span the discontinuity of puberty and make possible the adult capacity to love and work. The preparation for the successful resolution of the adolescent identity crisis is delineated in Erikson's description of the crisis that characterize the preceding four stages. Although the initial crisis in infancy of "trust versus mistrust" anchors development in the experience of the relationship, the task then clearly becomes one of individuation. Erikson's second stage centers on the crisis of "autonomy versus shame and doubt," which marks the walking child's emerging sense of separateness and agency. From there, development goes on through the crisis of "initiative versus guilt," successful resolution of which represents a further move in the direction of autonomy. Next, following the inevitable disappointment of the magical wishes of the Oedipal period, children realize that to compete with their parents, they must first join them and learn to do what they do so well. Thus in the middle childhood years, development turns on the crisis of "industry versus inferiority," as the demonstration of competence becomes critical to the child's developing self-esteem. This is the time when children strive to learn and master the technology of their culture, in order to recognize themselves and to be recognized by others as capable of becoming adults. Next comes the adolescence, the celebration of the autonomous, initiating, industrious self through the forging of an identity based on an ideology that can support and justify adult commitments. But about whom is Erikson talking?
   Once again it turns out to be the male child. For the female, Erikson (1968) says, the sequence is  bit different. She holds her identity in abeyance as she prepares to attract the man by whose name she will be known, by whose status she will be defined, the man who will rescue her from emptiness and loneliness by filling "the inner space." While for men, identity precedes intimacy and generativity in the optimal cycle of human separation and attachment, for women these tasks seem instead to be fused. Intimacy goes along with identity, as the female comes to know herself as she is known, through her relationships with others.
  Yet despite Erikson's observation of sex differences, his chart of life-cycle stages remains unchanged: identity continues to precede intimacy as male experience continues to define his life-cycle conception. But in this male life cycle there is little preparation for the intimacy of the first adult stage. Only the initial stage of trust versus mistrust suggests the type of mutuality that Erikson means by intimacy and generativity and Freud means genitality. The rest is separteness, with the result that development itself comes to be identified with separation, and attachments appear to be developmental impediments, as is repeatedly the case in the assessment of women.
  Erikson's description of male identity as forged in relation to the world and of female identity as awakened in a relationship of intimacy with another person is hardly new. In the fairy tales that Bruno Bettelheim (1976) describes an identical portrayal appears."
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice

Boys Dance

To be a Girl

"This psychological seclusion of girls from the public world. The dissociation of girls 'voices from girls' experiences in adolescence, so that girls are not saying what they know and eventually not knowing it as well, is a prefiguring of many women's sense of having the rug of experience pulled out from under them, or of coming to experience their feelings and thoughts not as real but as fabrication. [...] [Jean Baker] Miller and I have been struck by the fact that although we have approached the study of women and girls from different ways, we have arrived at much the same insight into the relationship between women's psychology and the prevailing social order. A new psychological theory in which girls and women are seen and heard is an inevitable challenge to a patriarchal order that can remain in place only through the continuing eclipse of women's experience. Bringing the experiences of women and girls to full light, although in one sense perfectly straightforward, becomes a radical endeavor. Staying in connection, then, with women and girls — in teaching, in research, in therapy, in friendship, in motherhood, in the course of daily living — is potentially revolutionary."
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice

Cultura

da morte / The Passing

da não-prática do diálogo

'Neutralise your feelings', algo mesmo muito difícil para mesmo muita gente. Tenho constatado.

'Involve yourself by responding', também.
Há aqueles que se retiram de cena achando que estão a ser alvo de alguma conspiração ou insulto subliminar, sem se darem ao trabalho (porque aparentemente dá muito trabalho) de aprofundarem mais ou questionarem mais o interlocutor.

A prática do diálogo, pelo simples prazer do diálogo, é algo em vias de extinção. Fala-se muito e procura-se muito a concordância (dos 'like-minded' believers). Há muitos 'reforço positivo seekers'.

O que as pessoas esquecem é que se pode aprender imenso quando nos predispomos a escutar aqueles que a priori afirmam coisas que nos parecem absurdas ou descabidas.

Spock

"struggling to maintain a Vulcan attitude, a Vulcan philosophical posture and a Vulcan logic, opposing what was fighting him internally, which was human emotion".

Look at me, not at me!

"The birth of pleasure in itself is simple, but staying with pleasure means staying open, and this is where history tends to kick in. Volumes of psychology have been written about the ways we defend ourselves against love and loss, often giving up what we most wanted. [...] But when something impedes the process of repair, the core sense of self [palavras de Damásio] recedes from relationship and begins to build a wall of protection."

[...]

"It is a women's nightmare to discover that although she feels loved she doesn't fit the image: her breasts are too large, too small, some part of her is not right. And most women have a ready script for blaming themselves for why they are left."

Carol Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure

A meditação e o cérebro

“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day.”

dos 'Likes'

do desassossego

"Skepticism is a resting place for human reason. Where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wonderings. But it is no dwelling place for permanent settlement. Simply to acquiesce in skepticism can never suffice to overcome the restlessness of reason."
E. Kant

lidando com o desassossego...

"I have to issue a warning. And the warning is this: to read these books in this way, as an exercise in self knowledge. To read them in this way carries certain risks. Risks that are both personal and political. Risks that every student of political philosophy has known. These risks spring from the fact that philosophy teaches us and unsettles us by confronting us with what we already know. There's an irony. The difficulty of this course consists in the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what we know from familiar unquestioned settings and making it strange.

[...] "Philosophy estranges us from the familiar. Not by supplying new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing. But, and here's the risk, once the familiar turns strange, it's never quite the same again. Self knowledge is like lost innocence. However unsettling you find it, it can never be unthought or unknown. What makes this enterprise difficult, but also riveting, is that moral and political philosophy is a story and you don't know where the story will lead, but what you do know is that the story is about you. Those are the personal risks."

[...] "Philosophy distances us from conventions, from established assumptions and from settled beliefs. Those are the risks. Personal and political. And in the face of these risks there is skepticism."

E tu?

"A Isabel estava a ler um livro mas eu interrompi-a:
— Isabel, porque é que as pessoas falam?
Ela juntou os lábios como se fosse assobiar e depois respondeu devagar:
— Acho que, se as pessoas falam, é porque querem que as outras pessoas saibam o que elas pensam e sentem.
— Mas supõe que elas não querem que as outras pessoas saibam o que elas pensam e sentem — repliquei.
A Isabel pensou um bocadinho e depois concluiu:
—Então, talvez, deixem de falar."

Matthew Lipman, Pimpa

...

Some things are so dark that woe betide the light that shines on them
I swear to god I thought it was a sign
This shallow grave recedes with every darkened patch of sky
The withered, wearied features start resembling mine
And in the disparate clamour of the chaos that surrounds you
It's hard to know which of the voices that you hear
Are your own

Some things scar your heart so deeply that a howl is not enough
To adequately purge the soul of pain
Still you yearn for contact but the burden that you shoulder means
you'll never trust a living soul again
And in the disparate clamour of the chaos that surrounds you
It's hard to know which of the voices that you hear
Are your own

This is how it feels to be alone, just like we'll die alone

This is how it feels to be alone
This is how it feels to be alone
This is all that we can call our own
Dust flesh and bone
This is how it feels to be alone
Just like we'll die alone