Ferguson, Missouri has a history that is worth exploring when looking at the 2014 incident between 18-year-old Michael Brown and Darren Wilson, a policeman with Ferguson Police Department. 

A guest post by Dr. Erel Shalit, Ph.D.

Ever since I began practicing, now more than forty years ago, I have been drawn into the unique features of the intimate encounter in the sealed analytical vessel.

Simultaneously, however, I have always felt the need to look out, observe and partake in the currents and happenings in society, and the interaction between the individual and the world. Regarding the intense and conflicted Israeli society in which I live, wavering between periods of euphoria and despair, between constant strife and eternal images of wholeness, this has been the subject of a couple of my books.

At 8:19 this morning, the Montecito Fire Protection District sent notification that the evacuation warnings have been lifted.

Dear Pacifica Community,

"Mining the Myth from Memory" from the Introduction to Our Daily Breach: Exploring Your Personal Myth Through Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (2015) by Dennis Patrick Slattery

It may seem strange to speak of literary classics as ancestors, but they are. Akin to voices from the past, they have the capacity to shape our present by helping us to discern what in our contemporary world we continue to struggle with: power, violence, murder, vengeance, fidelity, homelessness, excess, slavery, resentments, prejudice, love, family, order, rebirth, fate, destiny, freedom, the power of the past, to name a few. Contemplating these human qualities, gifts, weaknesses and action through poems like Moby-Dick can be as initiating as they are illuminating and enjoyable.

This week we send warm wishes to faculty members Mary Watkins, Lynne Layton, and alumnae Deanne Bell who are presenting at the Association for Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society’s  annual conference, Border Tensions: Troubling Psychoanalysis.

From Deserved Shame to Reparative Solidarity: The Role of Psychosocial Accompaniment

Chair(s): Mary Watkins (Pacifica Graduate Institute)

Presenter(s): Mary Watkins (Pacifica Graduate Institute)

From a decade of work on the borders between Anglos and Mexicans in the U.S., Watkins has tracked the role of deserved shame in psychological and community life. She defines deserved shame as feelings of shame that arise in the aftermath of individual or collective actions that have caused harm, differentiating it from undeserved feelings of shame experienced by innocent individuals. She asserts that if deserved shame is given psychological and community space, it can be a transformative emotion, capable of helping us move toward greater integrity in our relationships with those we or our cultural group has aggrieved.

What does the new BIC Fight for Your Write campaign/pledge and Dennis Patrick Slattery have in common? While BIC may be thinking of their famed products, studies have shown that "taking notes by hand requires different types of cognitive processing than taking notes on a laptop, and these different processes have consequences for learning."1

The way in which a company conducts business is constructed by the culture of the people who have built the corporation and continue to operate under those cultural beliefs. As businesses move towards a global platform it is important to understand the myths and stories behind different cultures in order to fully understand the history behind such business models as well as how one engages with a customers holding different cultural beliefs. This understanding of cultural mythologies enables us to be more empathetic to differing ideas and perspectives, allowing us to understand that we may live in one subjective truth, but so does the other person sitting across from you.

In an insightful TED Talk Devdutt Pattanaik explores the mythologies that exist behind east and west thinking and how these stories have shaped differing nation's business models and company culture.    

At this time of year Pacifica welcomes 11 new groups of students to campus for their first year of graduate school. We are excited to share some personal stories from Pacifica faculty members who reflect on their first days of graduate school. 

Psychotherapy.net has added three new videos by Virginia Satir to our online streaming collection: Blended Family with a Troubled Boy, A Family at the Point of Growth, and A Step Along the Way: A Family with a Drug Problem. The Pacifica Library's Exclusive Collection now contains 136 titles (220 hours), including several by prominent psychologists such as James Hillman, Irvin Yalom, Carl Rogers, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Albert Bandura, Peter Levine, Virginia Satir, Ernest Rossi, and more. The Psychotherapy.net database allows you to view videos online, with each video broken down by chapter for quick navigation. Synchronized transcripts and subtitles are available for many of the videos, with the spoken words highlighted on a transcript as a video plays. Many videos also come with instructor's manuals. We welcome you to explore the collections and contact the Pacifica Graduate Research Library with any questions.