Introduction
INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY
In my four years of tertiary education and training I studied psychology three times, that is, I took three courses in psychology of the many courses I studied. In the 1970s and 1980s I taught psychology perhaps half a dozen times as part of social science and behavioural studies programs. Twice I taught courses in psychology itself at the Ballarat College Advanced Education in 1977 and 1978. The notes from all these courses are lost to me now. From 1992 to 1994 I taught an 'introduction to psychology' unit/course/subject at the Thornlie Tafe College now part of the Swan College of Tafe in Perth. I have kept a core of the notes from that course and they are found in a file in my study here in George Town Tasmania.(note: Tafe is an acronym for Technical and Further Education in Australia)
In the more than 15 years since last teaching that course I have widened the scope of those notes, especially since my retirement in 1999. Here, then, are nearly twenty years of notes and note taking, photocopying and printing, mostly from the internet: 1992-2011. I have found psychology to be a fertile field of study during these initial years of my retirement. As was so often the case when I taught a subject, I never really had a chance to get my teeth into it with one eye on the student and another on just getting "up" on the basic course content. For I was a generalist as a teacher never specializing in one subject. That is still the case, but for quite different reasons. Now an interest in a host of other subjects as well as psychology, subjects that occupy my attention across a wide spectrum of disciplines, prevents me from getting my teeth into any one of them. It seems that circumstances have destined that I be a generalist not a specialist. This has been true from my tertiary studies when I was in my 20s in the 1960s to my studies during my retirement as I headed into late adulthood, the years form 60 to 80, in this 3rd millennium.
There is always so much to learn and the focus on a special subject, a specialization as it is sometimes called, seems to be determined by some practical requirement or some special interest rising sometimes quite mysteriously. A focus on one subject in only partly explainable from life's mix of subjects. It has been nearly fifty years since I first came across the subject of psychology at university in the autumn of 1963 and it would appear this interest will continue well into the future. There are, of course, wider influences on the study of psychology than its formal study: family, religion, employment, etc. Perhaps at a future time I will comment on these influences in this general introduction to this set of 4 arch-lever files and 2 two-ring binders.-17/5/'11.
Some internet links for my posts and the posts of others on aspects of psychology:
This one link below has many of my posts on psychology, but: (a) readers will have to single out my posts from other 'Prices' at some sites, and (b) some of my posts are a little or a lot tangential to the subject of psyhology.
http://www.google.com.au/#q=ron+price+psychology
http://bahaistudies.net/self
http://bahai-library.com/momen_psychology_mysticism
http://news.bahai.org
http://www.bahaibookstore.com/showproducts
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic
http://www.helium.com/items/-the-mafia-and-the-bahai-faith
http://athenism.net/forum/topics/search-for-meaning-page
http://www.designcommunity.com/forums/search.keywords=&terms=all&author=RonPrice
Bi-Polar Disorder and Anger:65 Years Worth
In recent years there has been observed by researchers a corelation between bipolarism and anger. I am 67 and rarely get angry any more in the sense of loss of control. When I do get angry I am highly conscious of the pre-conditions that led to the anger and I take whatever action I can to ensure that I am not placed again in the situation that caused the anger. I did get angry at least 2 or 3 times a year until I went on a pension at the age of 65. Anger has been part of my life from the age of 2 or 3. It has only been in the last decade or so that I have seen a relationship between my anger and my bipolar disorder. This prose-poem tells some of my story.
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ELECTROPHYSIOLOGICAL RECORDINGS
Recently I have been thinking about the anger component of my bi-polar disorder(BPD). Various studies on the subject indicate that some 40 to 60 per cent of sufferers from BPD experience anger attacks. Sometimes the anger is seen in the context of a quite separate illness called "intermittent explosive disorder." Sometimes, too, it is seen as related to, a part of, BPD; sometimes it is seen as a normal part of life, everyone's life. My intention here is not so much to analyze anger and its several typical expressions, but to get an overview of it in my own life from 2 to 67.
The first time I remember getting angry was just before my 20th birthday in the spring of 1964, just before finishing my first year of university. My cousin informed me on a recent visit to Australia from his home in Canada that my mother, my cousin's aunt, used to take me to her brother's home when she could not cope with my disobedience at about the age of 2 or 3. But I do not remember this. As I say I do not remember getting angry at all until I was nearly 20. The last time anger found a niche in my psyche was in 2011, a dozen years after retiring from full-time work. I was 67. Being able to successfully release the tiger of anger from its cage by buying a few precious seconds, recognizing the destructive potential of angry feelings as they emerge and bringing them down to manageable portions is something I can now do most of the time. But I am not able to do this every time. It has now been nearly 50 years from the ostensible onset of BPD in 1964 to a final medication treatment with fluvoxamine. Since this new package of meds I have enjoyed much more peace. If I include those early childhood experiences I will have to extend that half century to nearly 65 years. I can say with some pleasure and a degree of contentment that I never had before: "peace at last, peace at last, thank god-almighty, it's peace at last," -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 6 September 2011.
Such a long, long story
punctuated by slices of
a bad dream on a stony,
tortuous road, never felt
like a message from the
gods......perhaps it was!
A too-conscious memory
now leaving in its wake
unease, fears, anxieties,
hopes, poetic resource
and electrophysiological
recordings in confusion.
Part of a cobweb, semblance
of reality in the theatre of life,
I am left now with feelings,
pictures & meaning looking
back in reflection, with the
gathered associations by
the remarkable mechanism
of the brain and that gentle
and delightful tyrant which
is memory dominating us
softly and ethereally until
the last syllable of our life
with its content of events
of bliss and life's tragedy.
Ron Price
17 May to 5 September 2011
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Not making use of the lighter side of life, not laughing at oneself and others in a country like Australia will make one's experience here very difficult. As my years in Australia advanced incrementally from 1971 to, say, 1979, humour became a more overt part of my daily life. But readers won’t find much to laugh at here in this writing.(1) They will find irony in mild amounts and even enough of that Benthamite psychology of the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain to satisfy some of the value-systems of readers, at least in Australia(2). I came to write the 4th edition of my autobiography, or memoirs, after living for more than three decades in Australia. Part of this book of memoirs necessarily, unavoidably for my particular sensibility, analyses the things, the culture, around me.-Ron Price with thanks to (1) J.K. Galbraith in Harry Kreisler, Conversations With History: Intellectual Journey--Challenging the Conventional Wisdom, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996; and (2) Ronald Conway in The Great Australian Stupor, Sun Books, 1971, p.17 points to this as “the highest value” and “the most vital of stratagems.” This was how Conway saw it and expressed it in his book in 1971, the year I arrived in Australia.
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I think that some may find my autobiography peculiar. Such was the view of the autobiography of the nineteenth century novelist, Anthony Trollope. Late Victorians found his book cantankerous and they had trouble absorbing its contents. For many reasons, not associated with cantankerousness in my case, I don't think many will find this book of mine absorbing. Although, like Trollope, I chronicle some of life's daily lacerations upon the spirit. I also move in channels filled with much that comes from flirtations with the social sciences: history, psychology, sociology, anthropology and several literary studies. My book or rather what is now five volumes and 2600 pages, has come to assume what many, I'm sure, will experience as unmanageable proportions. Five hundred pages and more is a big read for just about everyone these days. and 2600 pages is impossible. Readers need to be especially keen to wade through a great deal of print. Perhaps at a future time I will divide the text into parts, into a series of volumes, chapters, or pages on the internet. But even then, in the short term, this world is a busy place and lives are confronted with so much to read, to watch, to do and to try to understand. This work will, I think, slip into a quiet niche and remain, for the most part, unread. I hope I am proved wrong. But I will not hold my breath waiting.
I like to think, though, that should readers take on this work they may find here the reassurance that their battles are my battles, that we are not alone and that the Cause is never lost. Most readers coming to this book, I'm inclined to think, already believe these things. But what I offer here could be seen as a handrail, if that is desired, a handrail of the interpretive imagination. Here, too, is a handrail informed by my experience, my life's basic business of shunting about and being shunted about, carelessly and not-so-carelessly, for more than half a century in the great portal that is this Cause. Finally, I like to think this handrail is coated with an essential compassion and what Anthony Trollope’s wife Joanna says is the monument of a writer, a hefty dose of humility. That's what I'd like to think and, with Plato, I’d like to think that I am "a good writer, who is also a good man writing.” But of course one never knows this sort of thing for sure. And, if one aims to acquire any genuine humility in life, it is probably better not to know but, rather, just to keep on aspiring.
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In my poetic opus, my epic, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, I like to think that, with the American poet Walt Whitman(1819-1892), the reader can sense a merging of reader and writer. But I like to think, too, that readers can also sense in my epic a political philosophy, a sociology, a psychology, a global citizen--something we have all become. There is in my poetry a public and a private man reacting to the burgeoning planetization of humankind, the knowledge explosion and the tempest that has been history’s experience, at least as far back as the 1840s, if not the days of Shaykh Ahmad after he left his homeland in the decade before those halcyon, if bloody, years of the French Revolution.
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If J.D. Salinger is right in his claim that “there’s a marvellous peace in not being published”(1) it looks like much peace lies in waiting for me. Some readers find my writing a little too subjective or should I say introspective. Like Henry David Thoreau I seem to be more interested in the natural history of my thought than of the bird life, the flora and fauna that I find here in Tasmania, in the Antipodes, the last stop on the way to Antarctica if you take the western-Pacific-rim route.
I read recently that Thoreau took twelve years to identify a particular bird. I found that fact comforting. I understand, for I have the devil of a time remembering the names of the birds, the plants and the multitude of insects that cross my path and my horizon from month to month. But what I lack, what interest is deficient with respect to the various forms of plant and animal life Downunder in the Antipodes, I make up for in my study of the varied humanities and social sciences. In the three decades of my teaching career I acquired, if I acquired nothing else, a passion for certain learnings, certain fields of study. My study, the place where I read and write, is littered, I like to think ordered, by files on: philosophy, psychology, media studies, ancient and medieval history, modern history, literature, poetry, religion, inter alia. I move from one field to another from day to day and week to week and I can not imagine ever running out of gas, of enthusiasm, interest. Thus, I occupy my time. -Ron Price with thanks to (1) J.D. Salinger in "A Review of the Book ' The 627 Best Things Anyone Ever Said About Writing,'" Deborah Brodie in BookPage, 1997.
Like Samuel Johnson’s dictionary published over 250 years ago, my memoir of 2600 pages is an ambitious work. But whether it will influence future generations as Johnson’s work did, I can only hope. Johnson wrote, among other reasons, to escape the pain of life. I wrote, too, for many reasons among which was to escape society’s endless chatter because I seemed to have run out of social synergy to keep up the chatter beyond a modicum of it every month. Some may see my insensible and sensible exit from the social domain into solitude during the years 1999 to 2005, the last years of my middle age, an exit from the extensive social activity that had characterized my life from 1949 to 1999, as an “inability to make the social adjustment expected of mature members of society.”
Such was the way literary critic Warren French described J.D. Salinger’s withdrawal from public life back in the 1960s. Still others, among the few who would concern themselves at all with my raison d’etre for writing as I myself do, might find my insistence on personal privacy difficult to understand; I experience a certain estrangement which inevitably results from withdrawal; the sympathy and empathy of others are sometimes experienced in smaller apportionments than once they were. Still others may hypothesize that I possess a hyperactive cortex or that I have achieved the same privacy, peace and quiet that they too want in life but, for various reasons, have been unable to attain.
There are several dozen people in my life now at the age of 65 whom I interact with physically, in person, but this interaction is rarely in excess of about three hours maximum at any one time and most of the interaction with any one person is for less than one hour. I rarely use the phone unless I am taking messages for my more socially connected and involved wife. I use emails extensively for the vast majority of people in my life who don’t enjoy the advantages of propinquity in relation to where I live in northern Tasmania, the island state of Australia.
We all have to work out our modus operandi and modus vivendi. Salinger worked out his for the last half of his life, say 45 to 90. And it was quintessentially a solitary one. I, too, have freed myself, as I say, from most of that endless chat which for forty to fifty years, and with other factors of wear and tear, wore down the sinews of my soul and strained my nerves or, more likely, the chemicals, in my brain, making me desire a life above syllables and sounds if not words and letters, a life in which much is merged into nothingness before the Revelation of a splendour the threads of Whose gold caught my eye and my ear over fifty years ago.
Unlike Salinger whose social and publishing history ceased at the height of his career, I now publish extensively on the internet in the evening of my life. I have never achieved the heights of literary prominence neither Salinger’s heights nor anyone else’s—and I probably never will. In the last nine years I have published several million words on the internet. I engage in an extensive correspondence with the wider world via the internet, emails and letters. I have a more limited social involvement as I have indicated above, not as limited as Salinger’s became, but certainly more limited than I had in the years of my life up to the age of 55 when I took an early retirement. My quiet withdrawal is somewhat like the pattern of withdrawal and return Toynbee writes about in his A Study of History. It is a conscious intellectual and spiritual stance based on sober critical reflection and attention.
It is a withdrawal partly based on a fatigue, as I said above, with the social domain; it is partly based on the great religious event in my time--the growing influence of the prophetic figure of Baha’u’llah, an influence which is the most remarkable development of contemporary religious history--and my personal need to translate this development into some personal intellectual and creative response, a different response than the one that occupied me in varying degrees in the half century to the year 2000 and that engaged my life’s energies as a student, a teacher, a husband, a parent and as a member of community.
The psychic event that has given rise to this new, this literary, response in the latter years of my middle age and the early years of my late adulthood had developed sensibly and insensibly over decades. My watchful muse wanted to seize the fleeting opportunities of the hour and gain access to my mind and what seemed like divine or perhaps just obsessive promptings. Such promptings, divine or otherwise, have always been difficult to define and assess. They were promptings that occurred more extensively at first in my fifties, promptings to what had been my usually inhibited and fatigued, literary and mental state, occupied as it had been for so long with so many of life’s other demands and activities. But during the 1990s, as I began to psychologically wind-down from many of these activities, I experienced a release of energy, perhaps a ripeness of intellect, that was new and very refreshing. But this release of energy required of me a new form, a new modus operandi and vivendi in which to work.
I have felt capable of apprehending no more than a fragment of the mental wealth that has poured into my lap as a result of the energies that have been progressively released in these last twenty years. Perhaps these energies have been created as a result of pouring over many questions in the long years of generativity that Erik Erikson says characterize middle adulthood, the years 35 to 55 or 65. Erikson says these are the years in which the ego development outcome is generativity. If generativity is not achieved the ego stagnates in self-absorption. The basic strengths of this second-to-last stage of life are productivity and care.(2)
The last stage in Erikson’s model of psycho-social development is late adulthood, the years from 55 or 65 to death, the years I have just entered. The ego development outcome is integrity. If this is not achieved the ego despairs. The basic strength of this stage is wisdom says Erikson. Erikson felt that much of life before the age of 40 is preparing for the middle adulthood stage(40-55/60) and the last stage is recovering from the middle stage. Perhaps that is because as older adults we can often look back on our lives with happiness and are content, feeling fulfilled with a deep sense that life has meaning and we've made a contribution to life, a feeling Erikson calls integrity. Our strength comes from a wisdom that the world is very large and we now have a detached concern for the whole of life, accepting death as the completion of life.
On the other hand, some adults may reach this stage and despair at their experiences and perceived failures. They may fear death as they struggle to find a purpose to their lives, wondering "Was the trip worth it?" Alternatively, they may feel they have all the answers, a feeling not unlike going back to their adolescence. This results in the experience of a strong dogmatism that only their view has been correct. The significant relationship is with all of mankind, "my-kind," says Erikson. It is interesting to reflect on J.D. Salinger using Erikson’s model of psycho-social development and I leave this further reflection to readers here.-Ron Price with thanks to (1) Warren French, J.D. Salinger, Twayne, New York, 1963; (2) J. D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction, Penguin Books Ltd., Middlesex, England, 1976, pp.82-84; and
