They had to be discrete. Tongues will wag. For their idea is a slowidea, not well accepted in the world even today. Their slowidea on the human element, Hu, analogously called latentheat in physics and chemistry, generated a lot of heat by others, full of sound and fury at the time, for these other people vigorously opposed the idea:On Liberty – moral|economic. It wasn’t the fastidea at the time: the conventional wisdom of Victorian, Anglican, England: the idea of nationalised merchantilism — tariffed moral, economic, political, and social trade: locally culture restricted and centralized regulated trade of ideas and things: Oh Britannia.
The New Mills: John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill
“He was frail and drained of energy; his eyes were dull, his face contorted with pain.
— and I was, frankly, worried about his health. Was this drawn and ailing man slumped in a wheelchair the legendary healer I had read about? Had I come west on a wild goose chase? ” [The Voice (Kindle Locations 70-71)]
Yes, he was the legendary psychotherapist. Wild goose chase? — maybe, actually in retrospect, no ambiguity here.
“Dr. Erickson asked to be excused, and then, about an hour later, I was astonished to see him wheel himself back into his study, fully alert and revitalized, cheerful, eyes twinkling, ready to get to work.” [The Voice (Kindle Locations 72-73)]
“Each person is a unique individual. Hence, psychotherapy should be formulated to meet the uniqueness of the individual’s needs, rather than tailoring the person to fit the Procrustean bed of a hypothetical theory of human behavior.” – Milton H. Erickson
Brian Alman was Milton Erickson’s last student. The last student to benefit from the personal experience of The Wizard of the Desert. Brian had terrible back problems, and Erickson invited him to come to Phoenix, and work with him. Also called “the Mozart of psychotherapy,” and grandfather of modern hypnosis, Milton Hyland Erickson, MD (1901-1980), pioneered hypnotherapy and brief strategic therapy. He never promoted himself, so not many individuals know about his life, but …
Now there is a full length documentary about Milton Erickson and his life: The Wizard of the Desert: An Alexander Vesely Film.
Noted for his positive approach to the unconscious mind. A humanitarian, teacher, physician, loving husband, and caring father (to eight children), Dr. Erickson was a colleague and friend to preeminent intellectuals including Gregory Bateson, Aldous Huxley, and Margaret Mead.
The film was long and tough in the making. This documentary explores the personal life and incredible career work of Milton H. Erickson, M.D., founder of Modern Hypnotherapy. This unsung American genius was a pioneer in psychiatry using radical and unconventional hypnotic techniques to cure not only patients, but to control his own debilitating pain and paralysis.
For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Hamlet: Act 3, Scene 2
He had written a play that won him the Pulitizer Prize in Fiction.
Yet, the broken mirror of reality, bedeviled him and beguiled him.
She had become one of the most famous actresses of the age.
Yet, the broken mirror of reality, bedeviled her and beguiled her.
Make-believe and Playing are simpler than Reality. And they can serve as a safe haven for the Four Temperaments.
What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away
“She was a whirling light to me then, all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity that few retain past early adolescence.” — Arthur Miller.
She was dying and angry, but she worked on her manuscript.
With passion because she had something to say before she died.
She wasn’t happy with Jack and his party.
But she understood to a large degree, politics — since her husband had been in most powerful position for twelve years, and she had been described as the “First Lady of the World.”
“It is today when we must create the world of the future.”
The young Eleanor Roosevelt seemed a most unlikely candidate for fame; there was certainly nothing about Eleanor that suggested that an American President would some day honor her with the title, “First Lady of the World.” Eleanor Roosevelt lived for almost seven decades, and her ascendancy was slow and measured. She never led men in battle, and like almost all Idealists, she abhorred strife of any kind and hated war. [Presidential Temperament]
She was not martyred to a cause, she did not inspire crowds with her speech, she never wore the badge of any high office. But she a had voice. And she used it.
Her last book was Tomorrow is Now, published after her death,was recently rereleased with new forward by Bill Clinton.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Counselor Idealist, knew she was dying when she began this book. Yet she so wanted to complete it that she endured dangerously high fevers, tremors and persistent fatigue, a raw throat, and bleeding gums to dictate the first draft. Although she eventually yielded to family and friends who pressed her to “slow down” and cancel appointments and public appearances, Eleanor kept working on Tomorrow Is Now— even when she grew too weak to hold a teacup and her voice dropped to a whisper. She would apologize to Elinore Denniston, whom her agent had sent to take her dictation, for how much harder it made Denniston’s work— especially on those days when Eleanor’s voice was so faint that it was almost inaudible. Yet Eleanor continually struggled to make herself heard, pushing herself so hard.
She could have dedicated her last energies to an anthology of her most important works or she could have delegated the task to a trusted confidant to complete after her death. But she did not. She chose to start and finish this book because, as she told Denniston, “I have something that I want terribly to say.”
Eleanor Roosevelt had always had the need to inform people of what she thought was the truth. Like her fellow Counselor Idealists Aung San Suu Kyi and Mohandas K Gandhi, she was insistent in her beliefs — she contended to her dying days. When she was First Lady there were many death threats against her because of her radical and contentious views. Passion was on both sides, many people loved her, and many people hated her.
Counselor Idealists are Diplomatic Contenders.
“… Contending entails competition. Thus to contend with another’s work one must hold one’s ground, hang onto one’s position, stick to one’s intention, tend to one’s business, stay the course, in a word, be tenacious. It is not so much that one is bent on overtaking or outdoing others, as it is having one’s way. Contenders will have their way if at all possible.” Personology, page 77.
Blessed with vivid imaginations, Counselors are often seen as the most poetical of all the types, and in fact they use a lot of poetic imagery in their everyday language. Their great talent for language-both written and spoken-is usually directed toward communicating with people in a personalized way. Counselors are highly intuitive and can recognize another’s emotions or intentions – good or evil – even before that person is aware of them. Counselors themselves can seldom tell how they came to read others’ feelings so keenly. This extreme sensitivity to others could very well be the basis of the Counselor’s remarkable ability to experience a whole array of psychic phenomena. [Please Understand Me II]
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. — Eleanor Roosevelt
The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. In 1972, the US prison population was 300,000 people. Today it’s 2.3 million.
This includes 3,000 kids serving life sentences.
“I started representing children on death row 20 years ago, and I was struck by how desperately they wanted and needed mentoring, parenting, guidance.
They were in every sense of the word “kids,” and that surprised me initially. . . . What I saw was that not only were they vulnerable and disabled and exposed in ways that adult clients weren’t, but they were also responsive in ways that adult clients weren’t. . . . The second thing was just seeing how exposed kids are in the adult system, how victimised, how brutalised. The biggest problem we have is the profound absence of hope” The opportunities that were given to me I want to give to other people who are disadvantaged and disfavored and marginalised. And in my generation, I think the place where those needs are most compelling and most dramatic is in the criminal justice system. One out of three young black men is in jail or in prison. I go into communities where half of the young men of color are under criminal justice control, where you see states like Alabama that have permanently disenfranchised over a third of the black male population. I see real threats to the kinds of freedom and opportunities that I experienced as a result of the work that was done before me, and I feel a need to respond to that.”
“He was frail and drained of energy; his eyes were dull, his face contorted with pain
— and I was, frankly, worried about his health.
Was this drawn and ailing man slumped in a wheelchair the legendary healer I had read about?
Had I come west on a wild goose chase? ” [The Voice (Kindle Locations 70-71)]
Yes, he was the legendary psychotherapist. Wild goose chase? — maybe, actually in retrospect, no ambiguity here.
“Dr. Erickson asked to be excused, and then, about an hour later, I was astonished to see him wheel himself back into his study, fully alert and revitalized, cheerful, eyes twinkling, ready to get to work.” [The Voice (Kindle Locations 72-73)]
A Paradox.
“Dr. Erickson encouraged me to continue my studies and develop my own ideas and techniques, both for my own therapy and for my patients. This respect for my ability to find my own best solutions was fundamental to Dr. Erickson’s philosophy of healing, and was one of the most important lessons he taught me in our time together. In this and in so many ways, his tutelage and sensitivity were nothing less than inspiring.” — Brian Alman [The Voice (Kindle Locations 82-85).]
‘In reaction against the age-old slogan, “woman is the weaker vessel,” or the still more offensive, “woman is a divine creature,” we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that “a woman is as good as a man,” without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that.
What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: (…) that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual.
What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.’
“It is extraordinarily entertaining to watch the historians of the past … entangling themselves in what they were pleased to call the “problem” of Queen Elizabeth [I].
They invented the most complicated and astonishing reasons both for her success as a sovereign and for her tortuous matrimonial policy. She was the tool of Burleigh, she was the tool of Leicester, she was the fool of Essex; she was diseased, she was deformed, she was a man in disguise. She was a mystery, and must have some extraordinary solution.
Only recently has it occurred to a few enlightened people that the solution might be quite simple after all. She might be one of the rare people were born into the right job and put that job first.” — Dorothy Sayers
Dorothy Leigh Sayers (13 June 1893 – 17 December 1957) was a renowned English crime writer, poet, playwright, essayist, translator and Christian humanist. She was also a student of classical and modern languages. She is best known for her mysteries, a series of novels and short stories set between World War I and World War II that feature English aristocrat and amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, that remain popular to this day. However, Sayers herself considered her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy to be her best work. She is also known for her plays, literary criticism and essays. [Wikipedia, revised]
“Some Idealists hold certain contentions that they put forth dramatically whenever the occasion requires or permits them to do so. Even so they make sure that their ways and means conform to regional norms, wishing, as they do, to sanction in a benevolent way…the Diplomatic Contender.
Counselors are like their Mentor twins, the Educators, in that both are directive, the one giving advice, the other directives.”— [Personology pages 174-5]
“Although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning. It is as though we had taught a child, mechanically and by rule of thumb, to play “The Harmonious Blacksmith” upon the piano, but had never taught them the scale or how to read music; so that, having memorized “The Harmonious Blacksmith,” they still had not the faintest notion how to proceed from that to tackle “The Last Rose of Summer.”
Diplomatic Contenders are beyond compare as Counselors. Advisement is the side of diplomatic mediation that focuses on helping people to realise their potentials, and both kinds of enterprising Idealists have an unusually strong desire to contribute to the wellfaring and wellbeing of others and genuinely enjoy mentoring their companions toward greater personal fulfillment. [Personology, page 176]
Why do I say, “as though”? In certain of the arts and crafts, we sometimes do precisely this—requiring a child to “express himself” in paint before we teach him how to handle the colors and the brush. There is a school of thought which believes this to be the right way to set about the job. But observe: it is not the way in which a trained craftsman will go about to teach himself a new medium.”
Incidently, reknowned child’s author, J K Rowling (Harry Potter fame), also a Counselor Idealist cites and enjoys Sayer as a literary role model, while having through her own life enjoyed reading Sayer’s ‘whodunnit’ novels:
A friend of C S Lewis, (also a Counselor Idealist), Dorothy Sayers differed over the reason to write:
Dorothy L. Sayers believed strongly that one should not write mainly to please one’s audience. Certainly, audiences have needs, and many of her works were commissioned for particular populations or organizations. However, Sayers would generally write on something only if she found herself passionate about a given topic and thought she might have something to say about it—not just because someone asked her to write on that topic.
On this point, C.S. Lewis disagreed with Sayers. He often wrote for people who wanted an article on a particular subject written by a popular author because he felt a pastoral obligation to them.
…and not their only disagreement:
Sayers also disagreed with C.S. Lewis on the matter of women’s ordination. He wrote to her asking that she take a public stand against it (this defense of tradition needed to be written by a woman, he reasoned). Instead, Sayers suggested she would be an “uneasy ally” for him because she did not see any theological reason why women should not be priests. She distinguished between whether a man or a woman should be “cast for the part” of “playing” Christ in the mass (it made the most dramatic sense for it to be a man, of course) and whether a man or a woman could represent Christ to humanity. Because Christ was the representative of all humanity, not simply, male humanity she believed either a woman or a man could reflect that representation.
Sayers’ influence did not cease upon her death in 1957. Theater companies continue to produce her plays, English professors include her Dante translation in their syllabi, mystery fans still read about Lord Peter and Harriett, and hundreds of classical schools around the world owe their existence to Sayers’ small essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.”
A thriving Dorothy L. Sayers Society meets yearly, mining her work in ever-greater detail. Perhaps most significantly, many of Sayers’ theological contributions keep returning to print.
It had been 1938 when she was invited to address a women’s group; her speech “Are Women Human?” was ahead of her time and probably more than a little shocking.
This address, along with an essay called “The Human Not-Quite-Human,” was published in a slim-but-powerful volume.
Sayers asserted that there is no such thing as a man’s job or a woman’s job, but that people should pursue vocations for which they are passionate and gifted. She challenged a culture that tended to define men’s interests and human interests synonymously, while holding women apart as some sort of special species, not-quite-human.
He: “At this moment I pass a new law, unalterable.”
She: “I rejected the real, and rabidly devoured the ideal.”
Mating and Dating is a dangerous game, for those who are serious.
With the Kindle release of the Pygmalion Project: The Idealist, people have an immediate opportunity to learn about how Idealists regard their mating relationships by downloading the ebook to their Kindle App. Dr. Steven Montgomery, who directly worked with Dr. David W. Keirsey on the Please Understand Me Series, uses examples from literature to illustrate some of joys and sorrows of dating and mating of the Idealists.
