Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall

• Introducing Shame Language to Clients by Brett Schur - Havertown, PA - bschur@msn.com, 3/12/96
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    • affect vs. script by Don Nathanson, 6/19/98
      
      

The heart of Tomkins' description of the salient character of affects as from "certain basic variations in stimulus density and gradient" is also a key factor in dance/movement and music therapies and other adjunctive forms to cognitive therapies which reach back to preverbal expressions, helpful especially to clients which resist verbal therapies. Life, the universe, all that is, is some form of enerygy, which energies work by rhythms of density and gradient. Rudolf Laban (1879-1958) confimed some similarites of this independently concerning body movements and assessments.

And, of course, these are part of many scripts which have many meanings which inhabit every human and community, including their responses to the meaning of life versus death.

What I seek is some clarification that, in the use of therapeutic theory of infant affects, how the dynamics of attempts to maximize positive affects and minimize negative affects help to resolve rather than simply collude with denial and pollyanna-ism, albeit a style of meaning but also can be in itself a type of pathological unstable narcissism and fiction of hope.

I value and appreciate your comments.

• Where affect fits in psychotherapy by Don Nathanson, 6/25/98
  • Thank You: To Strike a Pose by Chuck Yopst, 6/25/98