Eric Francis’ presentation at the APA Friday (MP3)

4 thoughts on “Eric Francis’ presentation at the APA Friday (MP3)”

1. Congratulations Eric on presenting your work at the conference and on how well it was received! I thought the presentation was fascinating.

   Christine’s comment that really resonated within me was the one about how once women break through the mental and emotional barriers (and issues) and claim our own power, then we often have the work of letting go of the guilt and anger of not having taken our power, not having stood up for ourselves, valued ourselves, given ourselves that self-love and self-acceptance, or whatever is was that we had not done and then have to work on feeling good about actually doing those things in the future. I’ve experienced this, and am still experiencing this in my own life.

   Also, listening to your presentation got me thinking about how I feel about myself every time I look in the mirror. I even spent some time lying in bed naked looking in a handmirror at myself just feeling how I feel about myself – truly being honest with myself about the areas in which I don’t feel loving about myself and confronting those negative thoughts and feelings in a compassionate, healing way. I just thought I’d give it a try on a whim and I was amazed by what a deep experience the simple act of looking in a mirror naked can be.

   I second Half De Witte’s statement – keep Flying the flag for Planet Waves!! Your work is truly thought provoking and ground breaking, asking the questions that need to be asked to progress forward as individuals and as a human race!

2. Oh for a world where the boundary-crosser is cherished, rather than treated with suspicion (sigh).

   Please pass on fondest regards to Christine for her ardent commitment to her therapeutic mission – in the face of all the strangulating pressures. It is both bold and comforting.

   The reduction of applied psychology to narrow treatments of personality and behaviour is lamentable. How amazingly this whole notion of ‘credentials’ operates! Oh for the day when it can be replaced with something far better.

   Here’s trusting that you are nonetheless experiencing a very interesting time at your core, Mr Coppolino. 😉 It was good to hear your embodied voice reaching out..

3. One of the reasons that Christine had me here is her deep desire to yield the therapeutic ground to other disciplines. She often says she wishes she could be as direct as I am in my work, but cannot due to the rigid rules of her profession.

   When I chose a therapist in 1992, one of my qualifications was that the person not hold a Ph.D.

4. What strikes me here, not for the first time, is how far psychology as a discipline has ‘stolen’ the therapeutic ground. By a discipline, I do not mean a body of theory but a practiced profession – and this is significant. The boundaries which exclude other disciplines as having explicit therapeutic merit (such as say, critical social theory) are merely professional, rather than theoretical and this bequeaths consequences.

   Such issues are often those of theoretical looseness. Psychologists doing inadequate cultural criticism but appearing radical because the other psychologists are sticking rigidly to traditional disciplinary boundaries, ends up as both deficient cultural criticism and bad psychology!

   This is all down to the pragmatic difficulties nowadays with the practice of operating eclectic. It’s largely frowned upon and so ends up being done covertly, while maintaining the appearance of normativity (and you get to supervision and pray that your supportive manager remains in post indefinitely).

   Several times I heard Eric’s co-presenter talk about women being “taught not to feel good”. This fits the psychology of self-esteem conceptuality. But, in terms of cultural criticism, which understands the actual problem better, women are “taught how to feel good”. The difference is not arbitrary and the species of guilt ensuing is different.

   This is not simply a plea for careful use of language or jettisoning inadequate paradigms but rather a plea to open the debate out as widely as possible. There needs to be a multi-disciplinary approach for maximum effect since, at root, we are examining once again the irreducible issue of ‘self as construct’.

   There is no self apart from the construct(s) we use to mediate a sense of it. Therefore, the more constructs we are empowered to draw upon, the better.

   Indeed, as Marcel Mauss of the Annee sociologique school proposed “…our seemingly natural and self-evident conceptions of our selves, our persons, are in truth artefacts of a long and varied social history stretching bacl, at least in principle, to the earliest human communities.”

   And so, anthropology, philosophy and history must all participate too, in the quest to understand the self, the person, human identity. Because, photographs or not, what comes out when listening to the seminar was very much one of participants trying to get the material packed into their operational/functional constructs of personhood. It appears that these will have to be worked on a credible and consistent, theoretical level, just as much as any resistance to the artistic project and spirit; if the true kernel of abiding value is to acquire ‘popular’ currency.

   It is for this reason that Mauss commented on shifting paradigms of being human in the 1930s, that “A comprehensive knowledge of the facts is only possible through the collaboration of numerous specialists…. Only mutual supervision and pitiless criticism can yield firm results.”

   Keep up the fantastic work, Eric – Flying the flag for Planet Waves!!