My 2021 book, Not Quite Fine: Mental Health, Faith, and Showing Up for One Another, attempts to take a systems look at mental health, suggesting that communities of meaning, belonging, purpose, value and hope are foundational to good mental health. That the individualization inherent in therapeutic culture can not just fail people but perpetuate their problems.
I’m so intrigued by this series. I feel that in some ways, this therapeutic language/framework has offered what I felt as an absence in the communities I grew up in, and yet, I also see the dangers you are pointing out.
Thanks Andrea. I wonder if some of the language can be helpful in small doses but as a framework, or a totalizing paradigm, it's harmful. That's what I'm noodling around.
Yes, McGilchrist gives evidence for eastern/collective cultures have more right-brain reliance (eg writing from right to left is right-brain mediated). And your definitely right about the role the internet has played. In McGilchrist’s terms, the right brain is “present” to reality (eg the body and physical senses are primarily right-brain governed), whereas the left brain “re-presents” reality. The internet and social media are entirely representational, taking reality and “re-presenting” it in digital form.
Seeing problems through a systems lens is a difficult problem in our day. Nothing has helped me more in thinking about that than Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. I wonder if what you describe as the therapeutic age and the systemic effects of social media are nested within a larger and deeper reality of what McGilchrist describes as the world according to the left hemisphere. I say that in part because I can identify with a lot of what you write in this post, but I myself have never been on social media (at least until very recently, I use Twitter a little bit now). McGilchrist argues that Western society as a whole operates from a perspective that is dominated by left-brain modes of attention and deficient in the crucial strengths of the right-brain. Here’s one quote that might sound pretty familiar and similar to what you are describing:
“I believe the essential difference between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere is that the right hemisphere pays attention to the Other, whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself in profound relation. It is deeply attracted to, and given life by, the relationship, the betweenness, that exists with this Other. By contrast, the left hemisphere pays attention to the virtual world that it has created, which is self-consistent, but self-contained, ultimately disconnected from the Other, making it powerful – but also curiously impotent, because it is ultimately only able to operate on, and to know, itself.”
Thanks for this Aaron -- and for providing that quote from McGilchrist. Is there the sense that the left and right hemispheres tend to be broken down into western and eastern (or more collectivist) cultures?
I do wonder too, how it might be that the internet age has shaped our thinking (social media just sped it up). I think in the early 2000s there was an article about Google changing our attention spans (when we don't have to wonder or think back and then have Google or Siri now to answer every question, we do get a bit lax with ambiguity). Thanks for this thought.
Congratulations on the new producer role, Ashley!! And this series you’re doing is fabulous.
Thank you!
My 2021 book, Not Quite Fine: Mental Health, Faith, and Showing Up for One Another, attempts to take a systems look at mental health, suggesting that communities of meaning, belonging, purpose, value and hope are foundational to good mental health. That the individualization inherent in therapeutic culture can not just fail people but perpetuate their problems.
I’m so intrigued by this series. I feel that in some ways, this therapeutic language/framework has offered what I felt as an absence in the communities I grew up in, and yet, I also see the dangers you are pointing out.
Thanks Andrea. I wonder if some of the language can be helpful in small doses but as a framework, or a totalizing paradigm, it's harmful. That's what I'm noodling around.
Yes, McGilchrist gives evidence for eastern/collective cultures have more right-brain reliance (eg writing from right to left is right-brain mediated). And your definitely right about the role the internet has played. In McGilchrist’s terms, the right brain is “present” to reality (eg the body and physical senses are primarily right-brain governed), whereas the left brain “re-presents” reality. The internet and social media are entirely representational, taking reality and “re-presenting” it in digital form.
Seeing problems through a systems lens is a difficult problem in our day. Nothing has helped me more in thinking about that than Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. I wonder if what you describe as the therapeutic age and the systemic effects of social media are nested within a larger and deeper reality of what McGilchrist describes as the world according to the left hemisphere. I say that in part because I can identify with a lot of what you write in this post, but I myself have never been on social media (at least until very recently, I use Twitter a little bit now). McGilchrist argues that Western society as a whole operates from a perspective that is dominated by left-brain modes of attention and deficient in the crucial strengths of the right-brain. Here’s one quote that might sound pretty familiar and similar to what you are describing:
“I believe the essential difference between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere is that the right hemisphere pays attention to the Other, whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself in profound relation. It is deeply attracted to, and given life by, the relationship, the betweenness, that exists with this Other. By contrast, the left hemisphere pays attention to the virtual world that it has created, which is self-consistent, but self-contained, ultimately disconnected from the Other, making it powerful – but also curiously impotent, because it is ultimately only able to operate on, and to know, itself.”
Thanks for this Aaron -- and for providing that quote from McGilchrist. Is there the sense that the left and right hemispheres tend to be broken down into western and eastern (or more collectivist) cultures?
I do wonder too, how it might be that the internet age has shaped our thinking (social media just sped it up). I think in the early 2000s there was an article about Google changing our attention spans (when we don't have to wonder or think back and then have Google or Siri now to answer every question, we do get a bit lax with ambiguity). Thanks for this thought.