'At its best, therapeutic love on the psychotherapist's part may be most closely compared to amor platonicus (platonic love), agape, philia or storge, the nurturing love parents feel for their offspring. But eros, which Plato spoke of as a "great daimon," is perennially potentiated in both parties. How to provide such therapeutic love without overstepping the physical or romantic boundaries is part of the art of psychotherapy. How psychotherapists deal with the unexpected and unbidden appearance of eros, in themselves or their patients, in the transference or counter-transference, can make or break the treatment outcome. So what do psychotherapy patients really need? Is love enough? No. But there is little doubt as to the potent healing power of love, both in treatment and in life. American psychologist Carl Rogers, drawing on the discoveries of psychoanalysis, identified in his "person-centered" approach the importance of what he called "unconditional positive regard" and "reflective listening" in the therapy process, both of which are loving ways of relating empathetically to another human being. And Dr. Rogers, naively in my view, believed that if this loving approach could consistently be provided to the patient or "client" as he preferred to call them, it was all that's really needed for successful therapy. Perhaps for some. But, at least in my experience, patients need more from their psychotherapist than love in this sense. They also need structure, limits, firmness, guidance, encouragement, confrontation, honesty, integrity and resolute commitment on the psychotherapist's part to accompany them on their personal journey through hell (and the unconscious) and back. ...it is only love – the right love at the right time – that can cure or heal [a] festering "love wound." No amount of technical tricks, to paraphrase the mature Jung, cognitive restructuring or pharmacotherapy will do. Love in psychotherapy, as in any healthy, mature relationship, is a two-way street: Love flows from the psychotherapist and back from the patient. So it is not just the love provided by the therapist that matters, but the love returned by the patient that is ultimately the healing factor in treatment.'

'Psychotherapy, in my view, is more soundly focused on what C.G. Jung termed individuation: the unpredictable, lengthy, labyrinthine process of becoming more whole. Psychotherapy is about finding and fulfilling our destiny: While for most this may include romantic love, marriage, parenthood, career, etc., there are others for whom fate or destiny has something quite different in store. Psychotherapy is about creativity: courageously claiming the personal freedom to express ourselves constructively in the world to our fullest potential. Finally, psychotherapy is fundamentally about acceptance: learning to accept ourselves and others, our fate, our responsibility, our existential aloneness, the unconscious, evil, the daimonic, and life on its own terms. Surely, this is a sort of love. Love of reality. Love of the world as it is. Love of all humanity. Love even of the dark and tragic, seemingly sometimes senseless side of life. And this is, for want of a better term, a spiritual love. Psychotherapy is, for these reasons, an essentially spiritual process. But it is precisely this reawakening, rekindling or stirring of spiritual love, this gradual opening up, this growing willingness to tolerate ambiguity and loneliness, this deepening receptivity to life, oneself and others during the psychotherapy process that can ready us for interpersonal love and intimacy, and which – when lacking, undeveloped or resisted - resides at the root of most mental disorders. And what exactly is the mysterious, potent, transformative power that serves to awaken this newfound or renewed capacity to love in the psychotherapy patient? Freud, Jung and others since observed that the alchemical catalyst occurs in the dynamic and uniquely intimate relationship between patient and therapist, and very much resembles--yes, you guessed it – love.'

#Contact: Perceptual Contact; Interactional Contact; Initial Assessment #Involvement: Mutuality; Testing #Intimacy: Personal Commitment; Interpersonal Commitment; Social Bonding; Anxiety: Security Anxiety, Fulfillment Anxiety, Excitement Anxiety #Deterioration: Relational Damage; Weakening Bonds #Repair: Intrapersonal Repair; Interpersonal Repair #Dissolution: Intrapersonal Separation; Interpersonal Separation; Social Separation

'Disillusionment becomes an engine for growth because it forces us to discover our needs. Knowing oneself, recognizing one's needs, and speaking up for them in a relationship are often acts of bravery, says Page. Most of us are guarded about our needs, because they are typically our areas of greatest sensitivity and vulnerability. "You have to discover—and be able to share—what touches you and moves you the most," he observes. "But first, of course, you have to accept that in yourself. ...taking the risk to expose your inner life to your partner turns out to be the great opportunity for expanding intimacy and a sense of connection. This is the great power of relationships: Creating intimacy is the crucible for growing into a fully autonomous human being while the process of becoming a fully realized person expands the possibility for intimacy and connection. This is also the work that transforms a partner into the right partner. Relationships need to continually evolve to fit ever-changing circumstances. They need to incorporate each partner's changes and find ways to meet their new needs.'

"Once we are in second circle together we are equal."

"She a made a sound. It was really embarrassing."

'The greatest danger for slave-owners is that they will lose control of the moral definitions of “slavery” and “freedom.” The worst and most terrifying aspect of slavery is that you have to pretend that you are not a slave. If you are a slave, and you want to become free, the solution is simply this: Stop acting like a slave! Slaves are not allowed to tell the truth. So – you start off by telling the truth. This is the core of the Real-Time Relationship (RTR). The Real-Time Relationship is about empiricism and curiosity – fundamentally, it is the scientific method applied to our relationships. If our emotions tell us that we will be attacked for telling the truth – and we have not been telling the truth – it is because we wish to avoid confirmation – i.e. certainty. If we wish to “avoid” certainty, it is because we are already certain. Thus it is not really “certainty” that we wish to avoid, but the results of accepting what we already know to be true.'

'To Skype or not to Skype, that is the question. But answering it invokes a larger conundrum: how to perform triage on the communication technologies that seem to multiply like Tribbles — instant messaging, texting, cellphones, softphones, iChat, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter; how to distinguish among those that will truly enhance intimacy, and those that, though pitching greater connectedness, in fact further disconnect us from the people we love. The very technology with which we choose to communicate in a relationship has become a barometer of our willingness to reveal ourselves within it. -- Short silences that seem natural on the phone become terribly awkward on video. Suddenly I understood why slumber-party confessions always came after lights were out, why children tend to admit the juicy stuff to the back of your head while you’re driving, why psychoanalysts stay out of a patient’s sightline. There is something exquisitely intimate about the disembodied voice.'

'...socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote. “They feel they can’t possibly be the person who’s going to make the useful contribution,” Evans says. So the conversation stops. Evans isn’t alone. I’ve heard this story again and again from those who’ve risen into the lower ranks of microfame. At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting. The lesson? There’s value in obscurity. -- Maybe we should be designing tools that reward obscurity — that encourage us to remain in the shadows. Sure, we’d be connected with fewer people, but we’d be communicating with them, and not just talking at them.'

'... on the whole, we know significantly less about our friends, colleagues, and even spouses than we think we do. -- ...interacting with people and sharing experiences with them doesn’t necessarily translate into knowing lots of things about them. The main hurdle is the way we talk to those we’re close to: our conversations are usually meant not so much to gather information as to establish rapport and to bond - in short, to make friends. And we do that by focusing on areas of agreement and avoiding topics that might cause friction. Our natural tendency toward comradeship makes us, ironically, leery of learning too much about the people we’re befriending. -- People naturally seek out those they see as most like them, and a falsely inflated sense of similarity may only further cement friendships. ...couples that maintained positive illusions about each other tended to be happier than those that didn’t.'

"Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn't usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Ambient is for the lightness, the atmospheric, non-directional and distributed nature of the communication. These are communications that are one to many; they're not quite broadcast and yet not exactly conversational; they flood over a somewhat defined space. Within that space is intimacy: the closeness, familiarity and warmth that this kind of communication can create and the ever-present network of friends available wherever you can access the internet, or even just send a text message." -- Four reasons why people bother with social networking: #1. anticipated reciprocity #2. reputation #3. sense of efficacy #4. identification with a group

"I published my life on the fucking internet. And it doesn’t make people wanna be with me. It makes people not trust me. And I don’t know what the fuck to do about it." -- “It was like Justin was maintaining a celebrity gossip blog about himself. Who needs that kind of cruelty in their lives?” -- 'In 1994, Justin Hall invented oversharing ...no one knew that the self-revelation he found so addictive would one day become a temptation for millions. -- the transition we’re living through today.. The struggle to draw a line between the self and the world isn’t some novelty imposed on us by technology; it’s part of human development—an effort we all face from the moment our infant selves begin to notice there’s a world out there, beyond our bodies. The Web has just made the process of drawing this line more nettlesome. In the end we’re each going to find the compromise between sharing and discretion that’s right for ourselves. If we’re lucky, it will take less than the decade it took Hall.'

'“Poor folk love their cellphones!” [Bruce Sterling] said. “Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.' -- “I wish I didn’t have obligations,” someone posted not long ago. “I wish I had somewhere to go,” wrote an­other. “I wish things were different.” “I wish I grew up in the ’60s.” “I wish I didn’t feel the need to write pointless things here.” “I wish I could get out of this hellhole.”'

On Facebook: "It’s a bit like being trapped at an elementary school talent show. People seem to be trying to hard, or are entirely unaware that they should be trying, or—like me—they have just frozen up there on the stage. -- Facebook seems to exist precisely to obviate awkward discourse. But awkwardness is inescapably necessary. It’s an almost physiological signal that something emotionally significant is taking place. If Facebook eradicates such feelings by giving us such granular privacy controls that we prevent the possibility of embarrassment, then our lives become poorer, emotionally. The people we connect with through the site seem less than real people; they seem like shadows of the real people we thought we knew—the reality of these “friends” remains offline and even more inaccessible. In the place of intimacy, we have the more convenient alternative of user friendliness, the triumph of a new, corporate-mediated politesse.'

'There is no doubt that technology is “changing our hearts and minds,” and that people increasingly attach “to the inanimate without prejudice.” Whether online or with robotic creatures, “we are lost in cyber intimacies and solitudes, and we often don’t know if we’ve been alone, together, close or distant.” Technology, she says, serves as a Rorschach for personal, political and social concerns, carrying ideas, expressing individual differences in style. It also “acts as a foil we use to figure out what it means to be human,” crystallizing memory and identity and provoking new thought. For instance, kids have at least seven radically different styles of using Legos, she says, which allow us “to see who the child is.” “For too long we have stressed that technology has affordances that constrain its use. I take it from the other side: how do different personalities, cognitive styles and desires take a technology and turn it into what that person wants to know and express.”'

"... computational objects do not simply do things for us, they do things to us as people, to our ways of being [in] the world, to our ways of seeing ourselves an others. Increasingly, technology also puts itself into a position to do things with us, particularly with the introduction of 'relational artifacts,' here defined as technologies that have 'states of mind' and where encounters with them are enriched through understanding these inner states. In the case of relational artifacts for children and the elderly, nurturance is the new 'killer app.' We attach to what we nurture. How will interacting with relational artifacts affect people's way of thinking about what, if anything, makes people special?"

'"This is more real than my real life." says a character who turns out to be a man playing a woman who pretending to be a man. In this game the rules of social interaction are built not received. Traditional role playing prompts reflection on personal and interpersonal issues, but in games that take place in ongoing virtual societies such as MUDs, the focus is on larger social and cultural themes as well. The networked computer serves as an "evocative object" for thinking about community. Additionally, people playing in the MUDs struggle towards a new, still tentative discourse about the nature of a social world that is populated both by people and by programs. In this, life in the MUD may serve as a harbinger of what is to come in the social spaces that we still contrast with the virtual by calling the "real."'

'There is a behavioral connection between the unconsciously “for show” lives of those living in glass condos and the consciously “for show” lives of those spending more and more of their time online, where domestic activities are recorded in achingly specific detail. The result is a cultural confusion about private and public.' --- Sherry Turkle: “There is real confusion about intimacy and solitude. Are we alone in these buildings, facing the anonymity of the city, or are we connected to the city? What do we show and what do we hide? That mirrors what happens when we’re on the computer, on our networks in Facebook. We are no longer able to distinguish when we are together and nurtured and when we are alone and isolated. I can be in intimate contact with 300 people on e-mail, but when I look up from my computer I feel bereft. I haven’t heard a voice, touched a hand, for hours or days. I think people are no longer certain where the self resides.”

'Children talk about an “animal kind of alive” and a “Furby kind of alive.” Will they also talk about a “people kind of love” and a “computer kind of love”? The new objects ... play ... on what they evoke in us: when we are asked to care for an object, when this cared-for object thrives and offers us its attention and concern, we experience it as intelligent, but more important, we feel a connection to it. The old AI debates were about the technical abilities of machines. The new ones will be about the emotional vulnerabilities of people.'

"All this sort-of Web 2.0 stuff is nice, but you have to type stuff in. Things are never up to date, and unless you consciously know about something, you can't put it in. Reality mining is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help you do things like set privacy policies, share things with people, notify people when you're near them, and just to help you live your life." -- !!! Everyware must default to plausible deniability.

"... children play with these objects, they are made to feel as though computers are something that might love them, that they might love, that they need to nurture, that might nurture them. How are we going to feel when our computers are relating to us at that level? Do we want that? How is that going to change our views of ourselves and of our relationship with the world around us? That's what interests me now."

'For these children, in this context, aliveness seems to have no intrinsic value. Rather, it is useful only if needed for a specific purpose. "If you put in a robot instead of the live turtle, do you think people should be told that the turtle is not alive?" I ask. Not really, say several of the children. Data on "aliveness" can be shared on a "need to know" basis, for a purpose. But what are the purposes of living things? When do we need to know if something is alive?'

"All social-networking systems, as currently designed, demonstrably create social awkwardnesses that did not, and could not, exist before. A wiser response to them would be to recognize that,“the only way to win is not to play.”

'Shelley Powers, a computer programmer who writes a blog, Burningbird, about social networking... calls the entire [twitter suicide] experience “artificial intimacy” and wonders if people were “concerned about it, or were they titillated.'

"... you can only pick fleas on one primate at the time. Language allows you to "pick fleas" on more than one person at a time. Allows us to keep track of lots of poeple and who knows what and who and how they fit together and how you fit in with them."

"it's not about being poked and prodded, it's about exposing more surface area for others to connect with - Jonnie Moore"

"Everywhere we look online we see public and private blurred... The end result is a generation confused about the roles of the public and private realms; a generation that risks sinking into self-absorption and narcissism."

"I’ve found it an odd phenomenon to feel relationships strengthening by simply reading status updates... Across not only friends, but also acquaintances and relative strangers. And there’s value in that, for both sender and the receiver."

"I want to play a game to have fun; therefore I want to play with people who are fun, and whose notions of fun align with mine. So what's the solution? Well, play only with people you actually know in RL - that's pretty much been my solution so far... "

"#6) a sense of warmth. Fires, physically create the sensation. Cells, emotionally create the sensation through human communication. #7) Stories. Stories are constantly swapped over cells. Throughout history, humans have told stories over campfires."

"The premise of Lifestreaming interests me primarily because it speaks to a basic human need. The need to make sense of our lives. The need to simplify the complex—and make it meaningful."

"to become a Cityware node and appear on Cityware... You simply need to: #Have a computer that has both Internet and Bluetooth. #Request a password from us. #Download the Cityware utility that uploads data to our servers. (GNU General Public Licence)"

I think they've cracked it!: "Using Cityware, you can identify your real-world network, see who you bump into most often, and explore how much time you spend with friend, or strangers."

"It's like some sort of love affair, stripped of the courtship phase. I feel bathed in safety."

"To discuss and take forward the idea to acquire a physical space dedicated to serving the needs of social media types in London."

Great post: "Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible."