'Dreams are seen as being projections of parts of oneself. Often these are parts that have been ignored, rejected or even suppressed. One aim of gestalt dream analysis is to accept and reintegrate these. As with all gestalt therapy, dream analysis involves much dialogue and acting out. The dreamer is encouraged to enter into dialogue with the various aspects of the dream. The dreamer will also be encouraged to take the part of the dream elements, to act out the dream from their perspective. This applies as much to inanimate as to animate objects. So, for example, if you dream of being chased across a field you might begin a dialogue where you turn to face the pursuer and start asking him/her/it questions. Then you might take the place of the pursuer and start describing the chase from that point of view. This process could then be repeated from the perspective of a tree in the field overlooking the chase - a new perspective that could bring unexpected realisation.'

'Jung proposed two basic approaches to analyzing dream material: the objective and the subjective.[22] In the objective approach, every person in the dream refers to the person they are: mother is mother, girlfriend is girlfriend, etc. In the subjective approach, every person in the dream represents an aspect of the dreamer. Jung argued that the subjective approach is much more difficult for the dreamer to accept, but that in most good dream-work, the dreamer will come to recognize that the dream characters can represent an unacknowledged aspect of the dreamer. Thus, if the dreamer is being chased by a crazed killer, the dreamer may come eventually to recognize his own homicidal impulses. Gestalt therapists extended the subjective approach, claiming that even the inanimate objects in a dream can represent aspects of the dreamer.'

'When you recognize a motif as potentially interesting, it is your stored memories sort of getting excited about company. “Interesting” is a lot of existing ideas in your head clamoring to meet a new idea. That’s why you are sometimes captivated by an evocative motif but cannot say why. You won’t know until your old ideas have interviewed the new idea and hired it. Motif recognition is a screening interview conducted by the ideas already resident in your brain. Or to put it in a less overwrought way, old ideas act as a filter for new ones. Badly tuned filters lead to too-open or too-closed brains. Well-tuned ones are open just the right amount, and in the right ways. Recognition must be followed by pursuit. This is the tedious-to-some laundry-folding process of moderated free association. It is all the ideas in your head interrogating the new one and forming connections with it. Finally, the test of whether something interesting has happened is whether you can extract a narrative out of the whole thing, once the interviewing dies down.'

'As the old Zen proverb tells us: Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Even spiritual enlightenment can't eliminate life's tedious tasks. The tasks always remain the same. What changes is the attitude taken toward these tasks. And the mindful presence with which they are quite deliberately performed. In our efforts to avoid anger, pain, boredom or anxiety, we avoid being fully present in the moment. But this avoidance of what we feel in the present actually exacerbates symptoms and diminishes our quality of life. When we ignore, reject or remain unconscious of our inner child, he or she is unhappy, resentful and influences our lives in negative and significant ways. But becoming conscious of and better relating to this same sad, neglected inner child can turn this all around. Once they can conceptualize the problem in terms of a conflict between the little one within and the often underdeveloped or absentee adult self, some reconciliation, negotiation and cooperation between the two can be established. Then the adult self can deal with adult things, and the valuable and lovable inner child, no longer needing to be in control of the personality or trying to do adult things it cannot, can happily contribute to our playfulness, creativity and innate capacity for wonder, awe and joy. The secret is to spend some quality time each day together, much like a good parent does with their outer child.'

'Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them. In "Alone Together", MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It's a nuanced exploration of what we are looking for—and sacrificing—in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools...' -- "...Alone Together is about human vulnerability and technological affordances. People are actually willing and wanting to substitute robots – that seem to care – for people... Nurturance is the killer app for sociable robotics. Human beings are programmed to love what we nurture." -- "'I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text.' When we use other people in this way, you can get used to seeing them as spare parts; as ways to support our too fragile selves."

'Psychological resistance is the phenomenon often encountered in clinical practice in which patients either directly or indirectly oppose changing their behavior or refuse to discuss, remember, or think about presumably clinically relevant experiences. ...[psychiatric] symptoms represent an unconscious tradeoff in exchange for the sufferer being spared other, experientially worse, psychological displeasures, by way of what Freud labeled a "compromise formation": "settling the conflict by constructing a symptom is the most convenient way out and the one most agreeable to the pleasure principle". The compromise ... is to achieve maximum drive satisfaction with minimum resultant pain (negative reactions from within and without). Freud theorized that psychopathology was due to unsuccessful compromises – "We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality" ...'

'From McKee: "Story begins when an event, either by human decision or accident in the universe, radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist's life, arousing in that character the need to restore the balance of life. To do so, that character will conceive of an "Object of Desire," that which they [believe] they need to put life back into balance. They will then go off into their world, into themselves, in the various dimensions of their existence, seeking that Object of Desire ... and they will struggle against forces of antagonism that will come from their own inner natures as human beings, their relationships with other human beings, their personal and/or social life, and the physical environment itself. They may or may not achieve that Object of Desire; they may or may not finally be able to restore their life to a satisfying balance." -- Everything that happens in your life is digested by you through this process, so it would be worth your time to memorize it.'

'Fritz Perls presented his theory of dreams as part of the holistic nature of Gestalt therapy. Dreams are seen as projections of parts of the self that have been ignored, rejected, or suppressed. Jung argued that one could consider every person in the dream to represent an aspect of the dreamer, which he called the subjective approach to dreams. Perls expanded this point of view to say that even inanimate objects in the dream may represent aspects of the dreamer. The dreamer may therefore be asked to imagine being an object in the dream and to describe it, in order to bring into awareness the characteristics of the object that correspond with the dreamer's personality.'

'Gestalt therapy is built upon two central ideas: that the most helpful focus of psychotherapy is the experiential present moment, and that everyone is caught in webs of relationships; thus, it is only possible to know ourselves against the background of our relationship to the other.'

'This video is an introduction to working with your own parts based on the IFS (Internal Family System) model of the personality. The accompanying PDF document is available here:' -- http://www.yourtherapist.org/www/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Exploring-Your-Own-System.pdf

'This video describes the pioneering work of Dr. Richard Schwartz in outlining how the personality system operates and how to heal distressed parts by bringing curiousity and compassion from your own Self to them.'

'...what of our post-modern society, in which father are very often unknown, or simply absent? Then there is no father with whom to have an Oedipal conflict, and no resulting internalization of the superego. ...the ego never forms, and the socialization—the internalization of the Oedipal conflict between desire and reality–never takes place. ...when the superego is not internalized, it is sought externally. The individual opens themselves to messages from outside, from the media, peer groups, gangs, tribes etc. to serve this ego function. And the group seeks a master to impose the reality principle. They seek a leader. The leader imposes the ego, functions as the ego for the half-formed members of the group, navigating their collective desires through the rules and limitations of reality and society. ...structure and authority have given way to immediate gratification, peer pressure, and groupthink.'

Gisted/Quoted -- On the Mecosystem: When you demonize the mecosystem, all you do is project it into the world, into things which other people control, into things which you can buy from people to gain their approval and so delay inevitable self-attacks. -- On Happiness: "The only way that I know of to gain the greatest happiness is to serve mankind in the cause of the truth."

'The last decade has witnessed a revolution in our understanding of infants and young children. Scientists used to believe that babies were irrational, and that their thinking and experience were limited. Recently, they have discovered that babies learn more, create more, care more, and experience more than we could ever have imagined. And there is good reason to believe that babies are actually cleverer, more thoughtful, and even more conscious than adults. A new baby's captivated gaze at her mother's face lays the foundations for love and morality. A toddler's unstoppable explorations of his playpen hold the key to scientific discovery. A three-year-old's wild make-believe explains how we can imagine the future, write novels, and invent new technologies.' -- Discussion on imaginary friends and the mecosystem.

'A core tenet of Minsky's philosophy is that "minds are what brains do". The society of mind theory views the human mind and any other naturally evolved cognitive systems as a vast society of individually simple processes known as agents. These processes are the fundamental thinking entities from which minds are built, and together produce the many abilities we attribute to minds. The great power in viewing a mind as a society of agents, as opposed to the consequence of some basic principle or some simple formal system, is that different agents can be based on different types of processes with different purposes, ways of representing knowledge, and methods for producing results. This idea is perhaps best summarized by the following quote: What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle. – Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind, p. 308'

'A live action example of how to take down your inner Nazi.' -- "With great power comes great responsibility."

'Ways to stop self attacking and free yourself from your inner critic.'

'Defiance. Procrastination can be an unconscious bid for autonomy. If a task is given to you by your boss or your teacher, for example, a part of you may be angry at being told what to do. This part resents being told to do something boring or difficult. You may not be aware of the resentment because another part of you knows that you have to do the task, and that is the part you identify with. You are consciously planning to get the task done before the deadline, so you push your anger into your unconscious. But you do this at your peril because the time keeps slipping away and you aren’t getting enough done. The resentful, procrastinating part is the one in charge. It is defying your teacher or your boss by avoiding the task, because it wants to be autonomous, and all this is happening without your being aware of it. This dynamic often gets created when there was a parent who frequently told you what to do in a way that didn’t respect your own needs and desires.'

On self-assertion and procrastination... (Paraphrased) Bullies bully people because they don't believe they're worthy of receiving positive responses or of being treated well. Internalizing a bully also internalizes their lack of self-esteem. Bullies don't have the self-esteem to risk rejection by being vulnerable with people by simply asking for their help, so instead they bully them. If you have internalized a bully, you will likely find it hard to ask people for help because when you ask for help you are asking to be treated reasonably, which is something your internalized bully doesn't believe they're worthy of. Also, if you have internalized a bully, you will likely have a hard time asking yourself for help in discovering what your true preferences are—and expressing those preferences—both because that requires you to be vulnerable with yourself, and also because your experience of preferences was that you were trained to always wait until they were inflicted upon you by a bully.

'Two kinds of protection: #External Protection: Some protectors try to keep an exile from being harmed by other people, e.g. an enraged protector that wants to prevent an exile from being controlled. These protectors see an exile as being vulnerable and unable to protect itself. Consequently, they will take whatever actions they think are necessary to keep people from harming it. #Internal Protection: Some protectors try to protect you from feeling the emotion an exile carries, such as an intellectualizer that keeps you in your head to numb emotional pain. These protectors close you down or distract you to block out the pain or trauma that an exile feels. Or they may try to provide you with comfort or pleasure or self-esteem, to override the exile’s suffering. External protectors care about the exile and want the best for it, so they protect it from the world. Internal protectors think that the exile is dangerous because it might flood you with pain, so they judge it and push it away.'

@02:08:23 -- “It’s really important to break apart that which is us and that which is inflicted upon us. We internalize what we should externalize (abusers): we internalize the dark side of the people who abused us and imagine *we* have a dark side. And then we externalize what we should internalize (projections): we project out onto the world those abusers which live internally inside our minds.” -- Quote: “The feelings that we get that are overwhelming to us are never our own feelings; they are the feelings of other people.” — Stefan Molyneux -- [IFS: An internal protector protects you from the dark pain of an exiled internalized abuser?]

@00:46:00 -- “We internalize all personalities around us. There is no boundary possible – ever – for the internalizing of external personalities. It is an automatic process. If you spend any significant time with somebody, there is no way to avoid internalizing their personality. This is why it is so important to be discriminating in who you spend your time with. The reason that the unconscious gets so contradictory and so split is because when we are in situations where our own intentionality is attacked, we have to repress our own preferences, and we also have to internalize and repress the intention of others that our intentions should never be expressed. This results in significant splitting within the personality.” -- Quote: “The feelings that we get that are overwhelming to us are never our own feelings; they are the feelings of other people.” — Stefan Molyneux

"...differences between acting out and working through. ...using these environments to explore and work through some aspect of the self... putting different aspects of yourself out there."

Order out of chaos -- '#1. Heroes are introduced in the ORDINARY WORLD, where #2. they receive the CALL TO ADVENTURE. #3. They are RELUCTANT at first or REFUSE THE CALL, but #4. are encouraged by a MENTOR to #5. CROSS THE FIRST THRESHOLD and enter the Special World, where #6. they encounter TESTS, ALLIES, AND ENEMIES. #7. They APPROACH THE INMOST CAVE, crossing a second threshold #8. where they endure the ORDEAL. #9. They take possession of their REWARD and #10. are pursued on THE ROAD BACK to the Ordinary World. #11. They cross the third threshold, experience a RESURRECTION, and are transformed by the experience. #12. They RETURN WITH THE ELIXIR, a boon or treasure to benefit the Ordinary World.'

'A Peace Corps volunteer or perhaps it was an anthropologist in Africa was in a village when satellite TV made it’s debut there. For a period of time, normal village life came to a halt as people watched (slack jawed I imagine) Then slowly, things began to return to some semblance of normality. When asked why people were not watching as much TV, a villager replied, “We have our storyteller." "I understand said the volunteer, “but your storyteller knows a hundred stories, the television knows thousands of stories.” With a gleam in his eye, the man quickly responded, "That is true, but the storyteller knows me!”'

'Dr. Schwartz developed Internal Family Systems in response to clients descriptions of experiencing various parts—many extreme—within themselves. He noticed that when these parts felt safe and had their concerns addressed, they were less disruptive and would accede to the wise leadership of what Dr. Schwartz came to call the Self. In developing IFS, he recognized that, as in systemic family theory, parts take on characteristic roles that help define the inner world of the client. The coordinating Self, which embodies qualities of confidence, openness, and compassion, acts as a center around which the various parts constellate. Because IFS locates the source of healing within the client, the therapist is freed to focus on guiding the clients access to his or her true Self and supporting the client in harnessing its wisdom. This approach makes IFS a non-pathologizing, hopeful framework within which to practice psychotherapy.'

'...we are all "multiple personalities", organized by a "self" that is compassionate, curious, and expansive. These sub-personalities, or "parts", are all good and are with us from birth. They are kept in balance and harmony through self-leadership. When the self is threatened by trauma or devaluation from the outside world, the parts protect the self from harm; in doing so, they also lose trust in the self's ability to provide leadership and safety. In "exiling" the self for its own protection, these parts become extreme and polarized; the parts that were hurt carry the burdens of pain and suffering ("exiles") that other parts (i.e., "managers" and "firefighters") try to keep out of conscious awareness through various roles and operations. This becomes a recursive system which feeds upon itself to create symptoms when a person is under stress. ...the parts that have taken these extreme roles, when released from these roles, become non-extreme, valuable, and helpful to the person.'

'IFS sees consciousness as made up of various "parts" or subpersonalities, each with its own perspective, interests, memories, and viewpoint. A key understanding of IFS is that every part has a positive intent for the person and is trying to help the person or protect against pain, even if the actions/effects of that part cause dysfunction. This means that there is never any reason to fight with, coerce, or try to get rid of a part; it allows the IFS method to promote internal connection and harmony. Parts can have either “extreme roles” or healthy roles. IFS focuses on parts in extreme roles because they are in need of transformation through therapy. IFS sees the therapist's job as helping the client to disentangle themselves from their parts and access the Self, which can then connect with each part and heal it, so that the parts can let go of their destructive roles and enter into a harmonious collaboration, led by the Self.'

'A vanishing mediator is a concept that exists to mediate between two opposing ideas, as a transition occurs between them. At the point where one idea has been replaced by the other, and the concept is no longer required, the mediator vanishes. In terms of Hegelian dialectics, the conflict between thesis and antithesis is resolved by a synthesis of the two ideas, although the synthesis represents the final solution, whereupon the mediator vanishes. In terms of psychoanalytic theory, when someone is caught in a dilemma they experience Hysteria. The conceptual deadlock, exists until the resulting Hysteric breakdown precipitates some kind of resolution, therefore the Hysteria is a vanishing mediator in this case.'

'We all pretend we have a mind of our own. But actually few walk the path. It means literally to form our own perspective, feelings and opinion about every moment of life. But we don’t do that. We’re talking on the cell, to our friends and acquaintances, blogging, blurting, shouting, face-booking, emailing… etc. almost all the time. We’re too busy watching each other, being like each other, bragging to each other, keeping somebody around all the time – merging into one people… except in how we style our hair or tattoo, dress, prance around, have a life style… all of which have the outward appearance of specialty without the substance. So what is this substance? To have our own opinion… alone, without any need for companionship, including convincing everyone else to agree with us. Just naked aloneness for some length of time, to notice, feel, think, see the contradictions in our self… to commune with us. Indeed one has to have a passion for self-discovery or it will never happen.'

'The huge advantage of addressing human problems in the individual form is beyond comprehension. The most obvious boon of this altered way of coping with human suffering is the elimination of violence. It’s true even today that the extent to which people address their emotional experience internally, instead of inflicting it together, socially upon some issue or cause, measures the extent to which violence has already been partly defeated. Eventually we will realize that studying the self as an ecosystem, which contains both beneficial as well as contradictory parts, is the most important kind of education we will ever undertake or accomplish. This self-learning will no longer have the sting that “illness” attaches to it; thus it will no longer be called “psychotherapy”. Instead it will become the core of all education, funding every other kind of exploration with the wisdom of self-knowledge.'

'...information of a traumatic nature has been forced to bury itself where even the symptomatic person can never find it – that is without skilled assistance. Why? Because this information is very dangerous to know, particularly in the mind of a small child who is still alive within an adult person – who believes anything, most particularly an idea – can magically kill people, and even destroy whole worlds. The fact that this person has grown into adulthood doesn’t change the secret, buried inaccessible-to-awareness aspects of that still hidden information – i.e. that mother is a dangerous person who might poke my eyes out if I don’t stop seeing her meanness, and learn to pretend that it’s not real, that she’s just wonderful. Such buried key information that defies what good sense would perceive, holds conflict within a psyche. That’s what creates symptoms… that parts of the psyche are operating against other parts, keeping secret what the mind needs to know in order to heal.'

'#Level 1: Pathological (delusional projection, denial, distortion, splitting) #Level 2: Immature (acting out, fantasy, idealization, passive aggression, projection, projective identification, somatization) #Level 3: Neurotic (displacement, dissociation, hypochondriasis, intellectualization, isolation, rationalization, reaction formation, repression, regression, undoing) #Level 4: Mature (altruism, anticipation, humour, identification, introjection, sublimation, thought suppression)'

'THE INTERNET DISCONNECT -- You feel in a zone that is private and ephemeral. But the Internet is public and forever. -- The psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson argued that adolescents needed an experience of "moratorium," a time and space for relatively consequence-free experimentation. They need to fall in and out of love with people and ideas. I have argued that the Internet provides such spaces and is thus a rich ground for working through identity. But over time, it has become clear that the idea of the moratorium space does not easily mesh with a life that generates its own electronic shadow. Over time, many find a way to ignore or deny the shadow. For teenagers, the need for a moratorium space is so compelling that they will recreate it as fiction. And indeed, leaving an electronic trace can come to seem so natural that the shadow seems to disappear. We want to forget that we have become the instruments of our own surveillance.'

'What is it about cyberspace that loosens the psychological barriers that block the release of these inner feelings and needs? Several factors are at play. For some people, one or two of them produces the lion's share of the disinhibition effect. In most cases, though, these factors interact with each other, supplement each other, resulting in a more complex, amplified effect: #You Don't Know Me (dissociative anonymity) #You Can't See Me (invisibility) #See You Later (asynchronicity) #It's All in My Head (solipsistic introjection) #It's Just a Game (dissociative imagination) #We're Equals (minimizing authority)

"Is the real self always the naturally occurring one? If a patient on the antidepressant medication Prozac tells his therapist he feels more like himself with the drug than without it, what does this do to our standard notions of a real a self? Where does the medication end and the person begin?"

"We construct our objects and our objects construct use." -- "Online experiences of playing multiple aspects of self are resonant with theories that imagine the self as a multiple and fragmented, or as a society of selves."-- "Appropriable theories, ideas that capture the imagination of the culture at large, tend to be those with thich people can become actively involved. They tend to be theories that can be 'played' with. So one way to examine the social appropriability of a given theory is to ask whether it is accompanied by its own objects-to-think-with, objects that can help theory move beyond intellectual circles. For Freud's work, dreams and slips of the tongue carried ideas... today computational experiences carry ideas."

'... we "project ourselves into our own drama, dramas in which we are producer, director, and star... computer screens are the new location for our fantasies, both erotic and intellectual."' -- '... once we take virtuality seriously as a way of life, we need a new language for talking about the simplest things. Each individual must ask: What is the nature of my relationships? What are the limits of my responsibility? And even more basic: who and what am I? What is the connection between my physical and virtual bodies? And is it different in different cyberspaces? These questions are equally central for thinking about community. What is the nature of our social ties? What kind of accountability do we have for our actions in real life and in cyberspace? What kind of society or societies are we creating, bot on and off the screen?'

'"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."'

"We relate to [computational objects] as psychological machines, not only because so many of these new objects might be said to have primitive psychologies, but because they cause us to reflect upon our own." -- 'In some ways, Case's description of his inner world of actors who address him are capable of taking over negotiations is reminiscent of the language of people with MPD. But the contrast is significant: Case's inner actors are not split off from each other or his sense of "himself." He experiences himself very much as a collective self, not feeling that he must goad or repress this or that aspect of himself into conformity. He is at ease, cycling through from Katherine Hepburn to Jimmy Stewart. To use [Philip] Bromberg's language, online life has helped Case learn how to "stand in spaces between selves" and still feel one, to see the multiplicity and still feel a unity.'

"If I were of a mind to launch a Web 2.0 business today, I wouldn't rely on advertising or subscriptions or try to maximize my page views. I wouldn't worry about technology at all, in fact. I'd become a personal avatar consultant, helping nervous people construct and manage their menagerie of online selves. Or else I'd become a psychotherapist specializing in "avatar issues," ... I would, in short, find a way to capitalize on what promises to be a lucrative epidemic of avatar anxiety."

'"The goal of healthy personality development is not to become a One, not to become a unitary core, it's to have a flexible ability to negotiate the many - cycle through multiple identities. A lot was done in my mother's generation to keep experiences at home and at work, motherhood and social life - to keep it easy for you to seem to be one person. Around women you couldn't use certain language, for example. And for men too: you were boss at work, you were boss at home. When you came home, you weren't supposed to be sensitive and nurturing with your child. People's life experiences encouraged them to think of themselves as a One." Men's lives, especially, have been socially constructed along unitary lines, which, she speculates, may be why so many of them are having a hard time just now. But women today... cycle through these different roles, and we're trained to keep them a little bit separate, but not so separate that you can't negotiate them.'