The Saybrook Forum

Tell us your RC experience!

This week hundreds of Saybrook students, many new, will be coming to San Francisco for the fall Residential Conference – connecting with faculty, attending intensive workshops, and going to classes.

The connections that get made, the community that is formed, and the experiences they have are life changing.  Here are a few we’ve been told about:

"Saybrook rattled me to a core," said psychology alumna Monica Dixon, "and I loved every minute of it. It was the very thing I was seeking ---- a different way of operating. I began to question everything, and that has never stopped. I'm just asking bigger questions now."

"I'm always so impressed by the things that people are doing," says psychology and social transformation student Gianina Pellegrini. "At other schools people have jobs that are just getting them by, and then I go to Saybrook conferences, and I sit with other students who are on peace committees around the world and have done all this amazing work in different countries, and I'm so impressed, and I'm really motivated: I always think, this is what it's all about."

"Saybrook was the first time that I could really pursue anything that I was really passionate about pursuing,” said Human Science student Nick Rorbers. “I look at the Residential Conferences like they're a vacation."

Now, what’s your experience?  Use the comments section below to tell us about your fall 2011 Residential Conference experience.  Good, bad, or just plain interesting, we want to know. 

Leave a note below!

"To thine own self be true" is a creative manifesto

What does it mean to be authentic?  What standard do you go by?  What external standard can there possibly be, if authenticity is being true to the inner self?  How do you know?

Christina Roberts has some answers.  Her Saybrook dissertation was a study of creative older individuals, and she found a clear link between their creative work and their sense of having lived an authentic life. 

It may be, she suggests, that living authentically is itself a creative act.

She writes about her finding at The New Existentialists.  It's a must read.

Organizations repeat themselves (over and over)

Ever notice that your workplace has patterns?

Of course you have - every organization does.  In fact, understanding the "systems archetypes" of an organization -- common and usually reoccurring patterns of behavior -- can be a key to curing organizational dysfunction.

Each archetype has its own distinct storyline, and being able to change that storyline is a key leadership skill.

At the Rethinking Complexity blog, Saybrook Organizational Systems PhD student Jorge Taborga has gone over the research involving systems archetypes, listing some common types and explaining how to manage them -- even plan for them.

It's worth taking a look.

 

 

Fear doesn't build character in kids

To say that trying to get kids to do the right thing by scaring them is "common place" is like saying Christmas is a holiday.  In fact, it's EVERYWHERE. 

We try to scare kids about the dangers of drugs, about the dangers of gangs, about what will happen if htey don't get an education, about what could happen if they talk to strangers, about drinking, about driving, about drinking and driving ... you'd almost think we enjoy scaring kids, we do it so much.

But it's effective, right?

At The New Existentialists, Saybrook psychology student Makenna Berry has gone over some of the evidence -- and it turns out that "scared straight" style interventions do little to no short-term good and negative long term impacts.

Uh oh.

Fortunately, there are better approaches we can take to help children navigate a world full of pitfalls.

Read about it here. 

Why do we medicate first and ask questions later?

It's a common assumption among medical professionals that biochemical conditions must involve biochemical treatments -- you need to pop a pill for your depression and take medication for your blood pressure.

But that doesn't necesarilly follow.  High blood pressure is often best treated by diet and exercise, and depression -- even assuming it is a biochemical condition -- is frequently better addressed by talking with a therapist and changing your life. 

Writing at The New Existentialists, Sarah Kass notes that a recent study has shown that practicing yoga "helps to calm the schizophrenic mind." 

And why wouldn't it?  While the benefits of yoga have only been acknowledged by western medicine relatively recently, it has thousands of years of history behind it as an aid to meditation and a way to help unify mind and body.  The notion that this is inferior to a pill because ... because ... wait, why exactly?  Oh right, because it isn't "medicine."  Well, that's a notion that doesn't make any sense. 

Healthy approached that take the whole person into account should be medicine of first resort, not last - especially since practicing them is still a good idea when you're already healthy.  Unlike medication, the "side effects" of yoga are all positive if you do it right.  It can even serve as preventative medicine - the best kind.

Who's in charge here?

Political leaders say they way a “systemic” fix to America’s problems – but Aimee Juarez doesn’t believe them.

Writing at Rethinking Complexity, she suggests that American politicians are very good at causing system problems but not at fixing them.  The only kind of solution congress ever looks for are piecemeal solutions, with little regard to the big picture or long-term consequences.

As a result even good ideas can push us deeper into the hole we’re digging … because systemic problems require system-wide solutions.

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Is Carl Jung having an American Renaissance?

That's the question asked by Saybrook Psychology Professor Eugene Taylor, who has recently been asked to review two books about Jung's work for the APA's website.  

A recent upswing in positive reviews of Jung's work, new analysis about Jung's insights, and popular acclaim, Taylor suggests, are signs that even academic psychology - long dominated by "experimentalists" who didn't believe anything they couldn't measure under laboratory conditions - is accepting the value of depth psychology's approach to the human mind.

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