Dr. Michael Levin
Here is a talk I gave recently focusing on the implications of diverse intelligence research for the future of the mental health field (and its future impact on somatic medicine).
And here are the downloadable slides:
Featured image by Jeremy Guay of Peregrine Creative.
To push back against the (required and funny) cliché of the old wise father-Freud analyzing the child-patient, a post-Freudian image of the psychologist might be less about ordering authority and more about accompaniment. Not the man who knows your hidden truth before you do, but a careful mirror, a temporary shelter where a some-one can discover what is truly theirs and what has been formed into them by genotype, phenotype, family, fear, institutions, technology, or the world. The therapist not being there to reduce every embodiment to a childhood wound, but to help each one become more legible to itself, to discover what is the latent space freedom the algorithm their running on allows.
Interesting to think about all this from a clinical perspective. I love the fractal nature of top-down influence… and thinking from this perspective the implications of planting bad metaphysical beleifs in a human. Wish we could have heard the Q and A.
They will put up the entire talk, including Q&A, at some point. I can only put up my own content here, and I have no control of when (or whether they restrict access) others do it, so I try to make it available asap. Hopefully the Q&A will be out soon.
sometimes Mike reminds of a kind of Thomas Dolby of biology, just sayin.
I was on that talk until my internet connection quit just as the Q&A was about to start. I think your discoveries will be immensely valuable for psychotherapeutic clinicians. Particularly in opening up possibilities and encouraging clinicians to look beyond their training whenever it has shut their minds to the unusual. (in a way, some of those exotic patients are already in the waiting room.) whenever the commonly accepted training says x or y phenomenon is “impossible”, a door closes. – Looking forward to experiencing the Q&A. Thanks for giving the talk.
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