simcha's postings about love, connection, parenting & personal growth
Part 1: Shared power is the only power
In a recent article entitled “Love and Power” in Psychology Today, Hara Estroff Marano interviews marital therapists and psychologists from across the nation, and shares their conclusion that only equally shared power creates happy individuals and satisfying marriages. Increasingly, shared power is the passport to intimacy.
As we connect more and more through social networks, are we becoming more and more social? A video entitled The Innovation of Loneliness, produced by talented digital artist Shimi Cohen, addresses the question of whether our over-indulgence in social media is at the expense of real and vulnerable conversation. The video has been spiraling its way rapidly through (you guessed it…) the internet.
The clinical abilities of psychologist and sex therapist David Schnarch attract clients and students from across the globe. He has written several landmark books on intimacy, sexuality, and relationships. Unlike other master therapists who speak of long-term relationship in terms of rebuilding “attachment,” Schnarch speaks of differentiation.
18th-century poet Alexander Pope notes: “The proper study of mankind is man, but when one regards the elephant, one wonders.”
Writes Rich Lowry this week in the New York Post: “One wonders particularly after reading an extraordinary essay, “Do Elephants Have Souls?” published in The New Atlantis (Winter/Spring 2013).
Harville Hendrix, author of the best-selling Getting the Love you Want (1988), and founder of Imago Relationship Therapy, coined the term “conscious marriage,” referring to a relationship that fosters maximum psychological and spiritual growth. Such a relationship, he taught, can be created by “becoming conscious” of, and consciously cooperating with, the fundamental strivings of the unconscious mind for safety, healing and wholeness. How does one do this?
In 2001 the American Psychological Association named Paul Ekman (b. 1934) one of the most influential psychologists of the entire 20th century. In 2009 Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Lisa Barrett, professor of psychology at Northeastern University, is not impressed by the research that has made Ekman famous.
In the TED talk shared below, psychotherapist/sex therapist Esther Perel presents with her usual brilliantly nuanced approach to love, sex and desire. She notes that our era is the first time in human history that couples are looking to sustain love and desire across decades; in that quest, they often “ask of one person what was once asked of an entire village.”
I loved my Barbie doll growing up in the sixties. My daughter loved HER Barbie doll growing up in the eighties (offers to play with Barbie were made to my sons as well, but they weren’t interested). Did I fail to live up to my excellent feminist college education in the seventies by not banning Barbie from my home?
Author Sloane Crosley*, in the following article from Smithsonian Magazine, suggests that it’s time we cut Barbie some slack, and asks whether the doll really represents such a menace to society.