{"id":31070,"date":"2012-12-15T11:22:05","date_gmt":"2012-12-15T16:22:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=31070"},"modified":"2012-12-16T14:26:21","modified_gmt":"2012-12-16T19:26:21","slug":"one-of-those-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2012\/12\/15\/one-of-those-days\/","title":{"rendered":"one of those days…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Harry Stack Sullivan was an American Psychiatrist in the first half of the 20th Century. His Interpersonal Psychiatry wove in and out of the psychoanalytic movement of the time, but there were substantive differences now little discussed in this era of pharmacology. One of those differences had to do with Freud’s concept of the unconscious<\/em>. Sullivan’s concept was selective inattention<\/em> – closer to don’t look at<\/em> than don’t know<\/em>. In everyday usage, it’s a much more reasonable way of looking at how the mind works. When I first read it, I immediately thought of my own childhood growing up in the US South in the 1940s and 1950s. There was something terribly wrong. It’s not that the impossibility and impact of segregation wasn’t known or knowable, it just wasn’t looked at – decried when it came up, but mostly not looked at. And when it was finally impossible for me personally not <\/em>to look at it, it was all I saw – defining the entire culture of my youth, my place. I recall to this day the cognitive dissonance of those moments as if it happened yesterday, knowing something you’ve always known in a different light. I tried to keep that discomfort in my mind later when I had a patient who couldn’t move forward without looking at something they’d spent a lifetime not looking at. Selective inattention<\/em> is a powerful adversary.<\/p>\n

When something like the school shooting in Connecticut happens, at least for a time we can’t not look at<\/em> the problems of living in a lethal, armed society or not look at<\/em> the inadequate and dwindling services available for the permanently mentally afflicted, but the magnitude of the problem produces a weighty dysphoria that’s hard to bear and fades too quickly into a more tolerable selective inattention<\/em> with the passage of time. If we can’t see how to fix it, we go back to not looking, but the feeling doesn’t go away. It lingers as a background gloom – a shame that discolors our morale and tarnishes our pride as a nation. There’s something terribly wrong and it takes its toll not to see it. It was the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church<\/a> in Birmingham on September 15, 1963 that killed four little girls that abruptly woke me up, moved me from sympathizer to a street marcher. And it actually woke up the country, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the following year – something that would have been inconceivable earlier. The problem was imponderable then and is still only slowly resolving, but the vector finally started pointing in the right direction that day. And as bad as this shooting feels right now, hopefully this is another one of those days…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Harry Stack Sullivan was an American Psychiatrist in the first half of the 20th Century. His Interpersonal Psychiatry wove in and out of the psychoanalytic movement of the time, but there were substantive differences now little discussed in this era of pharmacology. One of those differences had to do with Freud’s concept of the unconscious. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31070"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31095,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31070\/revisions\/31095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}