TAXONOMIC SCHEMA DISORDER

....................................... by Stanley

.....What the hell is that?
.....And well you may wonder.
.....It was the ironic label given to a well known and respected literary critic who tried to divide literature into ultimate categories: comedy, irony, tragedy and romance. The term really comes from classifying things in biology – but the compulsion to classify (Taxonomic Schema Disorder) is a very widespread intellectual illness.
.....Jung suffered from it quite badly: there had to be four ego functions, eight psychological types, and four stages of eroticism – not three or five – FOUR !!
.....In the bible there are seven deadly sins – how come there are not eight? By what feat of intellectual perspicacity do we arrive at just that number?
.....In astrology there are four elements – in physics there seem to be quite a few more. Searching the internet I find Stages of Life are quite popular. Two, twelve and three stages are favourites and are each announced by their proponents with magisterial precision and certainty.
.....Descartes said there were two fundamental substances in the universe: mind and matter – and we’ve been stuck with that ever since. The Catholic Church tells us there are three conditions of life after death: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven.
.....All though the Middle Ages they believed that everything above the moon was Godlike, pure, perfect and divine and everything below the moon, including all earthly things, was demonic, foul and corrupt.
.....There is no end to the compulsion to classify.
.....Transactional Analysis tells us we have three internal parts, The Parent, The Adult and The Child... Oh, sorry, we’ve found two more subdivisions. The parent is now either Nurturing or Controlling and The Child either Adapted or Free. Of course, one could probably further classify different types of ‘Free Child’ such as Free Wild and Free Reasonable. And no doubt there are different types of Free Wild.
.....Steven R.Covey found Seven Habits of Highly Successful People and Ken Wilber found four ‘quadrants’ to explain human beings.
.....The Myers-Brigg Type Indicator is based on Jung’s Psychological Types. It tells us there are 16 personality types measured by a person’s preferences, using four basic scales with opposite poles. The four scales are: (1) extraversion/introversion, (2) sensate/intuitive, (3) thinking/feeling, and (4) judging/perceiving. The various combinations of these preferences result in the 16 personality types. It is understood that no matter what your preferences, your behavior will still sometimes indicate the contrasting behavior of the opposite pole. Thus, no behavior can ever be used to falsify the type, and any behavior can be used to verify it.
.....Then there are ways of taxonomically categorising the emotions. Did you know there are 22 negative emotions on self-worth; 14 negative emotions on control; 24 negative emotions on love; 17 negative emotions regarding justice; 14 negative emotions on safety; and 6 negative emotions on trust?
.....And now we come to the Granddaddy of them all: the DSM IV (The Psychiatric Bible). The rationale is based on imaginary classifications. If you can describe a set of symptoms, then you can name a disease. There are always a certain arbitrary NUMBER of symptoms that make up a disease or disorder. The exact number of symptoms required to constitute a disorder is decided by a majority decision of the DSM committee – (a procedure unique in the annals of science). So, for example, the so-called ‘Factitious Disorder’ DSM-IV-TR specifies THREE criteria for factitious disorder:
1. The patient is intentionally producing or pretending to have physical or psychological symptoms or signs of illness.
2 The patient's motivation is to assume the role of a sick person.
3 There are no external motives (as in malingering) that explain the
behaviour.
The patient has to have all three symptoms – not two of them or one – to be diagnosed as suffering from Factitious Disorder.
.....There actually should be one further criterion; only this one should be about the psychiatrist not the patient:
4 That the psychiatrist really knows the patient is
‘pretending’ and that he really does know what the patient’s
motivation is.
.....Now, once we have named and established the disease, we can then claim it exists as a distinct ‘entity’ and that the patient has it. Where we go from there is anybody’s guess.
But I guarantee that Taxonomic Schema Disorder will never be on the DSM list because that is precisely what it suffers from.

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Note: I am indebted to William Deresiewicz who described the famous literary critic Northop Frye as having an ‘excessive attachment to taxonomic schemas’.

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SERENDIPITY

..................................by Stanley

.....Delightful word, isn’t it? It dances off the tongue as though it enjoys life. And rightly so – ‘serendipity’ means chance events that have a happy outcome.
.....Wisdom tells us there is a time to plan and a time to let chance have a go. The value of planning and making goals is highly stressed in our action culture; but in some way we know that ‘letting things be’ can produce novel outcomes that are serendipitous in a way that the best laid plans would never even think of. Plans can disrupt serendipity, interfering where we would best let things fall out the way they would. Even in the middle of action there is a mode of letting things be.
.....Our fear is that in doing nothing, nothing will happen – or, that the worst will happen. So life becomes too active lest we will lose out. In Taoist philosophy the term ‘wu-wei’ means literally ‘nonaction’. Chuang-tzu says: ‘Nonaction does not mean doing nothing and keeping silent. Let everything be and allowed to do what it naturally does, so that its nature will be satisfied.’
.....We could note here straight away that one of the main characteristics of person-centred therapy is non-action on the part of the therapist. I always say that any success I have is not in what I do, but in what I don’t do! It’s not about doing nothing and keeping silent, but about allowing things to happen by themselves, about giving nature a chance. If I can give my client’s nature a chance then perhaps they too can learn to trust it.
.....But what is this nature we are giving a chance?
.....One of the main difficulties for many people in understanding Darwinism is the picture it paints of the complete lack of purposeful action in evolution. No one is controlling things or making plans. Organisms evolve by random, chance mutations, some of which are favourable. Over time, as a species gathers and keeps favourable changes, it becomes more complex and more adapted to survive. It moves forward by virtue of its own unintended variables, its heedless creativity, its accidental innovation. One variation may work – only then is it selected and retained. Not selected by the organism, but by the conditions of life it finds itself in. This has been called the principle of ‘blind variation and selective retention’
.....Bernard Shaw expressed a typical revulsion to Darwinism saying that there was a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly reduction of strength and purpose, of beauty and intelligence, that made his heart ‘sink into a heap of sand’. And yet there is no question that this very process has produced the overwhelming variety of life on our planet, everything from viruses to dinosaurs, from daisies to redwoods, sardines to blue whales, from bacteria to Bach. And with the discovery of DNA, the process of Darwinian natural selection is no longer a theory, but as indisputable a fact as you can get.
.....There is no guiding hand in evolution, no supernatural intervention. Isn’t that a perfect example of ‘letting be’ in the best Taoist tradition? When nature is given the chance it does a spectacular job. It produced us didn’t it !
.....When we give the evolutionary principle a chance in our personal lives by letting something be the outcome can be quite serendipitous, so we call upon strange spiritual mystiques like ‘synchronicity’ or ‘laws of attraction’ that really explain nothing. But there is a very precise way natural selection works. The key idea is ‘piecemeal’ – a little bit at a time. Small steps.
.....In a risky and unpredictable world we ourselves are constantly changing, randomly – one could say we are ‘blindly variable’. So many aspects of our being are constantly shifting: our moods, hormones, digestion, infections, our judgements, needs, impulses, our values, loves and passing obsessions. If we are open to the world, the world seeks out our piecemeal variables and selects those that mesh with the world we live in, enabling us to go on. The world educates us; what it gives back is a validation of our unintended creativity – a reward for ‘letting be’ all our variables and clashing complexes. That’s why we feel serendipity ‘happens’ to us – as indeed it does.
.....Evolution is ‘a little bit at a time’, steps that are so small that I do not notice them. And the world is giving me feedback every moment, shaping me, slapping me when one of my ‘variables’ clash; and giving me a cuddle when I unknowingly get it right. And when I do get it right it tells me loud and clear with that lovely, warm feeling that good luck and fortune are on my side !