Accelerated Adolescence

Homework

In case any of you are interested, I wrote a reaction paper for a class that I'm taking. Some of its text is in the continue reading link. This is, somewhat, how I think and a large part of my psychological perspective. It is not a rant, as it has been previously, about biopsychology. On another note, we were invited to dinner by our downstairs neighbor. Our next door neighbor also joined us. They are, respectively, graduate students in microbiology and mathematics from, again respectively, China and the Virgin Islands.
Dinner was fabulous and we have wonderful new friends:)

The Meal
Who is that?
Oh, it's our host!
Kevin

My own interpretation of reality has been of an existential bent for a number of years. When I realized that poverty and starvation is the product of what could be termed as “choices of a collective unconscious,” I became existential at heart (for the lay reader, this probably sounds Jungian. I assure you that the collective unconscious here is not necessarily Jungian or archtypal). Poverty is not an outcome of natural, uncontrollable consequence. It is the result of a massively maladaptive construction, on an agreed scale the size of culture, that assumes that it is acceptable to allow another human being to go without while another feasts. Strangely, in the cultures which embrace such a self-centered notion there lies the greatest capacity to provide others with aid. Those who embrace this view argue that hunger is a necessary product of surplus wealth but fail to see that surplus wealth is unnecessary.
Thus, localizing abstract cultural constructions to the individual is not a far stretch of the imagination. The individual constructs its immediate reality on a level within its own reach, the aggregation of such construal across humanity being what academia terms “culture.” Thus, the individual defines its own reality by choosing (and sometimes deciding) to perceive its reality in its own unique way.
With an emphasis on “man as scientist,” it is not inconceivable that the individual, as much as the collective, seeks consistency as well as pragmatism in constructive perception. From a developmental perspective of psychology as well as of constructive systems, the individual as scientist creates a constructive structure based on the development of previously established conceptualizations. For example, a child that is neglected by its parents and siblings may see an altruistic act by a generous stranger as being rare while a child that is well cared for may see a cold interaction with a stranger as being equally rare. However, what is important to understand is that each construct of each individual serves or served a pragmatic purpose at a point in previous development. With regard to development as a lifelong process, it is not necessary that a detrimentally misrepresentative construct be developed solely in childhood or adolescence. That a number of constructively revolutionary cycles periodically mark human development (such as the famous notion of the “mid-life crisis”) is suggestive of an ongoing revelation of erroneous construct development resultant in functional reconstrual.
With regard to my favored perspective, feminism, the individual’s reality is inherently relational. As noted above in the example, the development of each child is due to its interactions with others who already have a more rigid approach to the interpretation of their environment. Within the realm of education, the educator is responsible for the provision of a verbal repertoire that defines (or demarcates) the curricula. Thus, the primary caretaker of an individual is responsible as a teacher for providing it with its first, and likely, widest range of vocabulary, emotional vocabulary. To the degree that the primary caretaker is an effective observer, it is capable of inferring internal states of the child and providing the child with a language for expressing those states.
This verbal emotional education leads the child into a state of mutually independent and interdependent constructive process. As the individual develops, it must define its own conceptualizations of reality but is never free of previous conceptual experience and must take into account previous constructions of its reality developed in the context of mutual interactions. While free to make its own interpretation, even during and previous to any education in perceptual and experiential interpretation, the process is inherently interpersonal, even in the absence of others. In the language of literature, this is termed “the presence of an absence;” in psychology it is termed, “neglect.”