«[Bion’s belief in the special status of psychoanalytic practice] He believed in it with the fervent intensity of a mystic who has seen the light. For him psychoanalysis as he conceived of it was the path to truth. Bion violently disliked anything that did not approach his ascetic ideal of bearing uncertainty and being capable of emptying one's mind. He interpreted much of what patients said as evidence of destructive evacuation of pain and attempts to destroy the analyst's analytic ability. This must have turned him into a fairly difficult analyst. In his seminars he time and again says that it is surprising if patients come to analysis, since they do not truly want it, since they do not want pain, and they do not want truth (Bion, 1987).

He was not particularly concerned with the fact that most people who turn to psychotherapeutic help seek neither a spiritual search for purity of thought nor cleansing of themselves through the experience of pain. He seemed to be oblivious to the fact that there might be something legitimate in the patient's bewilderment at entering a strange kind of ritual instead of a more cooperative, commonsensically intuitive enterprise.»

— Carlo Strenger. Hedgehogs, Foxes, and Critical Pluralism: The Clinician's Yearning for Unified Conceptions

хорошо бы

«Critical pluralism is different from eclecticism in one central respect. Eclecticism assumes that psychotherapy is, or should be, a collection of techniques that should be adapted to patients and symptomatic pictures. It assumes that the professionalism of a therapist is a function of his or her command of some of the existing techniques and the ability to use them appropriately. In some respect eclecticism takes psychotherapy to be a discipline that should be similar to medicine: in the same way as the medical practitioner uses tools, medications, and procedures, the psychotherapist uses techniques.

Critical pluralism assumes that techniques are somewhat incidental in psychotherapy. It assumes that no therapy can be done without having some ideals of accomplished individuality. These ideals—often cast as conceptions of mature personality— guide the therapist's understanding of the patient's problems and the nature of the process the therapist must undergo in order to come closer to the ideal of accomplished individuality.»

— Carlo Strenger. Hedgehogs, Foxes, and Critical Pluralism: The Clinician's Yearning for Unified Conceptions

статья отличная, перечитывал уже много раз, и перечитаю снова через пару месяцев. что-то в ней все время вовремя находится. большая редкость.

«The term nibbāna/nirvāṇa is chosen carefully, and is often misunderstood by Western consumers of Buddhist literature. It is essentially a negative term, and figures in an elaborate fire-based metaphor (Gombrich 2009). […]

When Buddhists think about the human being analytically it is in terms of five skandhas, or piles of phenomena. […]

The term khanda (Pali for skandha) refers originally to a very specific kind of pile—a pile of firewood on a funeral pyre. Skandhas, therefore, are conceived as burning, and as being consumed. And this is an important soteriological metaphor. In the Fire Sutta (Additapairyaya-sutta), Siddhartha Gautama is represented as saying that our life is led as though we are on fire. We are burned by dukkha, consumed by forces out of our control, and we are being depleted all the time by those forces. Nibānna is also a term with a very specific core meaning—the extinction of a flame, as in blowing out a candle or a lamp. Nibānna, or nirvāṇa, then, is not a positive attainment or state of being. Nor is it a state of complete non-being, of annihilation. Instead it is the state of no longer being driven, consumed and tormented (however unconsciously) by dukkha.»

— Jay L. Garfield. Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy

— Donald S. Lopez Jr. The Story of Buddhism

хотя с огнем в буддизме бывало и наоборот

Уже несколько лет собирюсь прочитать “The Enigma of Health” Гадамера, теперь точно пора.

—

«The fundamental task of being a human being is self-understanding in the world, in which the self is thrown into the variety of languages that cannot be reduced to one language. To understand oneself in the world means understanding the self and the other. To understand the other, one needs to listen to the other with a strong conviction that the other might be right. To help a human being find itself at home in this complex world can be seen as a genuine goal of a phenomenological hermeneutics of medicine and, in fact, medicine itself. The task of medicine is to help uncover the phenomenon of being a human being in the adequacy of one’s own vocation without a premature pressure to solve all the difficult problems that the self experiences. If medicine wishes to be an art of healing, it must be a dialogical science, an art of healing that assists in finding one’s own way to live one’s life. […]

Suffering discloses something essential about our way of being-in-the-world and cannot be reduced to a medical problem in need of being controlled or overcome.»

— Andrzej Wiercinski. Gadamer
(in G. Stanghellini et al. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology)

психотерапевтическое руководство

«Foucault started out as a student of Heideggerian existential psychiatry. His first published work, a one hundred page introduction to Binswanger's Dreams and Existence (1954), begins by setting out and defending Heidegger's account of human existence, or Dasein, in Being and Time. In this account, there is no human nature. Rather, "human being" is a self-interpreting way of being whose practices have enable it to act as if it had a whole series of different natures in the course of history. To understand Heidegger's claim, it helps to remember that, in Homeric times, there were ways of singing of heroes and so men could become heroes. Later, in Christian times, there were practices for cannonizing saints so men could become saints. At the time of Homer, there could be no saints but only pathetic losers who let people walk all over them, and, conversely, in Medieval times there could be no heroes but only prideful individuals who disrupted society by denying their dependence on God. Or, to take an example from Foucault's History of Sexuality, in Antiquity in some groups men took care of themselves by taking care their actions were in keeping with the laws of health and society, while in another, confessional practices produced a new type of man who identified himself with his desires, and then, since his desires might be the disguised work of the devil, developed a hermeneutic of suspicion to ferret out their true meaning.»

— Hubert Dreyfus. Foucault's Critique of Psychiatric Medicine