«Wittgenstein’s methods are for loosening the grip of misleading pictures and analogies, which hold our thinking in a cramp and stand in the way of our recognising the extraordinariness of the ordinary. The particular pictures that we fix on are rooted in our human way of life and culture, and therefore connected to our desires, fears and aspirations. They may be the expression of a wish to control the seemingly arbitrary world, especially if our childhood experiences were chaotic and unjust. […]

When we seek knowledge and explanations of mental conflict, we are caught in a confusion whose character is not transparent to us. We are driven by a wish to find an explanation for the conflict, as if that will enable us to cure it. But this search for an answer is also the driving force in the conflict; we need to be liberated from the persistent inclination to seek answers to all questions.»

— John Heaton. The Talking Cure: Wittgenstein's Therapeutic Method for Psychotherapy

не такая смешная, как две предыдущие в этом списке, но тоже хорошая книга. По крайней мере обложка

Оказалось, автор фразы “Every time I find the meaning of life, they change it” —Reinhold Niebuhr. Ему же приписывается знаменитое “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

«It is not lack of intelligence but the presence of pride that gets in the way of genuine understanding in much philosophy and therapy. For pride involves lying to oneself because we may want to be something we are not, or conversely, not want to be something we are.»

— John Heaton. The Talking Cure: Wittgenstein's Therapeutic Method for Psychotherapy

«As has been said, confusions between concepts and objects are endemic in psychoanalysis and in neurosis. One confusion it leads to is the nature of the inner and outer world. The distinction between them is endemic to psychological theorising. Psychologists tend to take opposing camps. Psychoanalysts and their offshoots emphasise the inner world – the unconscious. Behaviourists and many cognitive therapists emphasise the outer world. To Wittgenstein: ‘The world and life are one’ (TLP ¶5.621) and much of his work was to show this. The problem is a very old one. Thus Heraclitus in about 500 BC wrote: ‘Although the account (logos) is shared, most men live as though their thinking were a private possession’. (Heraclitus 1979, Fragment 3)

[…]

Confusions between concepts and objects can be further illustrated in confusions about thought. One is the widespread belief that we think with our heads. If people in Western society are asked where they think they often point to their heads. Now teachers sometimes say ‘Use your head’ which roughly means attend more closely, and we all know that we must have a brain to think. But is thinking a process in the head? Or is this belief a symptom of dissociated thinking in which we imag- ine that thoughts are ghostly entities in the head, in the inner world, dissociated from language use?

‘One of the most dangerous of ideas for a philosopher is, oddly enough, that we think with our heads or in our heads.

The idea of thinking as a process in the head, in a completely enclosed space, gives him something occult.’

[…]

Thinking does not take place anywhere inside the mind or brain although it is a necessary condition of thought that we have human brains. It is people who think and report or express thoughts. The thinker will be somewhere when he thinks, in his bath perhaps, and that is where he thought. Of course to report a thought requires very complicated processes occurring in the brain but these are not the same as the report of a thought. […]

Thinking is a very varied concept. It is interchangeable with belief, imagine, mean and calculate. It is not a definite mental process that occurs privately in our mind. We can ‘have a thought’, a thought can occur to us, it can cross our mind, we can confess one, we can keep it to ourselves, tell someone what we think, express one, be tortured by them, have our head full of them, be thoughtful and so on. It is totally misleading to impose unity on this diversity; it leads to elevating one aspect of thinking to a defining principle of all thought. Instead of forcing it into the Procrustean bed of theory, it requires careful attention to the use of language in the particular situations in which the concept is used. […]

Thinking is not an activity of the mind, as speaking is of the mouth. When we talk about the activity of the mind all we are doing is using a mental image and probably forgetting that the mind is not an entity and thinking is not a process.»

— John Heaton. The Talking Cure: Wittgenstein's Therapeutic Method for Psychotherapy

«…a student was asked to see someone who was paranoid. The patient had received a lot of treatment and felt that therapists were trying to steal her mind. For some weeks she would come into the room and just search it, as she thought it was bugged; in psychoanalytic terms she was projecting her suspicions into the room. Instead of interpreting this, after a bit the student joined in and searched too. Soon the patient began to see the ludicrousness of the situation and they both began to laugh. There was a change of aspect and so a meeting between them became possible.»

— John Heaton. The Talking Cure: Wittgenstein's Therapeutic Method for Psychotherapy

«Thurman (1980) notes the uncanny parallel between the philosophical strategy adopted by Candrakīrti and Tsongkhapa on the one hand and by Wittgenstein in his later work on the other. He refers to this strategy as “non-egocentrism,” although the terms “conventionalism” or even “communitarianism” have become more popular. Candrakīrti and Tsongkhapa argue that our conventions—including both linguistic and customary practices and innate cognitive commonalities—constitute our ontology, and that the very possibility of any individual knowing anything, asserting anything or thinking anything requires participation in those conventions. (See also Thakchöe 2013.) Explanatory priority is located at the collective level, not the individual level. In a similar vein, Wittgenstein argues that meaning is constituted by collective linguistic practice enabled by shared innate propensities; that intentionality is parasitic on linguistic meaning and that knowledge depends upon epistemic practices that are in turn grounded in conventions regarding justification, doubt and so on. Once again, while there is considerable overlap in perspective, the Buddhist traditions that anticipate Western ideas are distinct enough in their approach to merit serious attention.

The very practices that constitute our world and the practices of justification and assertion are conventional through and through. And those conventions are rough, dependent and variable enough that when we try to specify essences—sets of non-trivial necessary and sufficient conditions—for things, we almost always fail. Conventional reality for Wittgenstein, as for the Mādhyamika, cannot withstand too much analysis. Not despite, but because of that fact, it works for us. And for Wittgenstein, like the Mādhyamika, who and what I am, and what I can think and talk about depends upon who and what we are, and what we can think and talk about. Convention runs deep.»

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

Результаты исследования: искомый лес обнаружить не удалось, помешали густо растущие в той местности деревья.

“нежить” это глагол или существительное?

«It is, I believe, extremely difficult to breed lions. But there was at one time at the Dublin zoo a keeper by the name of Mr. Flood who bred many lion cubs without losing one. Asked the secret of his success, Mr. Flood replied, 'Understanding lions'. Asked in what consists the understanding of lions, he replied, 'Every lion is different'. It is not to be thought that Mr. Flood, in seeking to understand an individual lion, did not bring to bear his great experience with other lions. Only he remained free to see each lion for itself.»

— John Wisdom. Paradox and Discovery

«в приемной, где сидят пятьдесят пациентов, ко мне обращается женщина лет сорока. Минут пять она несет что-то невразумительное, а затем спрашивает: „Что со мной, доктор?“

Некогда было сесть и побеседовать с нею обстоятельно и разумно, поэтому я просто ответил: „Вы сумасшедшая“. Она обрадовалась: „Слава Тебе, Господи! Я так и думала, была у пяти врачей, но никто мне не сказал об этом. Большое спасибо. Что же мне теперь делать?“

„Почему бы вам не найти работу, и тогда у вас будут деньги на частного психиатра, с которым вы можете пару лет позаниматься вопросом о том, как вам жить в этом мире“. Через несколько лет я узнал, что она так и сделала.»

— Карл Витакер. Полночные размышления семейного терапевта

«Laing believed that it was essential that therapists did not collude with the phantasy system that clients would almost inevitably be projecting onto them – phantasy systems in which clients would often construe themselves as powerless, and ‘the other’ as responsible and in control. Laing was unequivocal that such invitations to collusion should be rejected; and not, in the psychodynamic manner, with tentative interpretations over a period of time, but with direct and honest challenge. Resnick (1997: 378) reports that a typical ‘Laingian’ ‘construction’ might be: ‘You seem to feel that you are unhappy because I am not giving you what you want. But if you look closely at what leads you to this expectation I suspect you will find its origins entirely within yourself.’ Laing, himself, puts it more bluntly: ‘I might say “Do you realize that by virtue of what you’ve just said you are treating me like your father. Now I want to point out to you that I’m not your fucking father”’ (Mullan, 1995: 319). Laing (1969) believed that such non-collusive therapy would almost certainly be experienced by the client as frustrating, but he felt that therapists needed to be able to tolerate a client’s basic hatred as a way of evoking a more genuine human relatedness.»

— Mick Cooper. Existential Therapies

«Indeed, Laing believed that the decisive moments in therapy were often the ones that were unpredictable, unique, unforgettable, always unrepeatable and often indescribable – moments of I–Thou encounter, which, as Buber (1958) states, cannot be ordered or planned. Laing gives the example of a seven-year-old girl who was brought to him by her father because she had stopped talking. Without any plan, Laing sat down on the floor in front of her and touched the tips of her fingers with his …

And for something like forty minutes or so, nothing [happened] except a gradually developing movement/dance with the tips of her fingers …. After about forty minutes, I opened my eyes and as I opened my eyes I found her eyes opening just at the same moment, without a word having been spoken. So we withdrew our fingers from each other, and went back to my chair. I said to her, bring your dad along now if that’s all right with you, and she nodded. (Quoted in Schneider, 2000: 596)

According to Laing, when the father subsequently asked the young girl what had gone on between her and Laing, she had replied ‘It’s none of your business!’ – the first words she had spoken for approximately two months (in Schneider, 2000).»

— Mick Cooper. Existential Therapies