From: Andrew Phelps <phelps@cwnet.com>
To: RadPsyNet-Members@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thu Dec 4 2:03 PST
Subject: Re: [RadPsyNet-Members] Wrangling over psychiatry bible & detraumatizing strategies
Hi
I don't agree with this assessment. By Freud's ideation it makes sense, and "affect regulation" related to "character dynamics" is "science." But .. it isn't science. It's based on denial of the "oceanic feeling" and more deeply it's based on turning one's back on the politics of humanism. The work of Grassi and the "New Science" project of Vico, the present political advocacy of Italian Democratic Psychiatry, all bear witness to the fact that this ideation is insufficient to match the phenomenology.
Where you are tending in a sensible direction is that the key "psychosomatic unity" of mind and body must be explained sufficiently. And our efforts to describe what you call "de-traumatizing strategies" do not currently meet that standard.
Andrew Phelps
Pon wrote:
thank you.
Vwx wrote:
Affect regulation develops naturally in an infant within a family structure of tenderness, respect and emotional contactfulness, whose parents promote self-regulation. Development of affect regulation by authoritarian methodology, including the teaching of affect suppression through cognitive means, as in some behavioral strategies, serves to create an unhealthy neurotic character. In adulthood, this unhealthy character type has difficulty in experiencing the extremes of tenderness, expressiveness and awareness of other’s emotions essential in contactful, tender, long term relationships.
Utilizing strategic de-traumatizing strategies is not necessarily equivalent to affect regulation.