Today I went to classes. They were about the same as yesterday. Islam = amazing, culture = normal, Grammar = crazy.
Yes, today in grammar we did psychoanalytical exercises. In one, our teacher drew several random shapes on the board. We copied those shapes onto a piece of paper, then had a few minutes to flesh them out in drawings. Each of those drawings then represented something about our psychology. For example, the diamond shape was supposed to represent how we viewed love. Almost everyone drew a kite, and a few people drew baseball diamonds. I drew a ring. Obviously this shows I plan to be completely loyal and faithful. J The strangest one of mine was this hook shaped thing -- it looked kind of like this, all connected – “ _n “ – which was supposed to symbolize our thoughts on death. One girl drew an igloo, another a lifeguarding whistle. I drew an Islamic-style arch. What on earth does THAT mean?
The other activity was identical to one I’ve done before in English. It’s fashioned in a “choose your own adventure” mode. You go into a forest, and then you run into a wall in the forest, and then you have to choose whether to stay in the forest or go down a road, and then you find a key, and later you stumble upon a house, and eventually you hit a lake…and at each of these points you have to describe in huge detail what your lake, or your house, or other object is like. (The house is old, rickety, and abandoned, the house is a quaint little cottage, the house is a log cabin where moonshiners lurk…etc.) At the end, each of those symbolize different things about you. The wall, for example, symbolizes problems in your life; the way you get around the wall is how you view these problem).
Regardless of whether or not anything these “symbols” said about our personalities ended up being valid, I want to question the entire premise. When I’ve read these studies before, in English, I’ve at times discounted them at bogus, and at other points been legitimately intrigued. When conducted in a proper setting, I can see how such exercises are useful – like inkblot charts.
But, running this same simulation in a different language opened up a whole new world of thoughts to me. The Forest/Lake one, which I’ve seen before, may well be psychologically valid. But…is it only so in the western world? I have a sneaky suspicion that a forest and lake allegory would not work nearly as well in Saudi Arabia. In other cultures, where water or trees are short, I would suspect that answers would more frequently focus on the idyllic – their vision of verdant splendor – rather than on the known. Thus, prevailing ideas of a crystalline lake would not represent a valid reflection into one’s love life.
Do psychologists address these issues? They must. If they don’t, they’d be repeating a grave mistake the early pioneers of anthropology and religious studies have already made. Mircea Eliade, I believe, tried to construct a universal set of symbols across religious traditions. (Water = life, Trees and things pointing upwards = heaven, etc). But all attempts to make this work fell apart. Thus, Clifford Geertz developed his definition of religions as “ A system of symbols…” . SYSTEM being the key word there. Different cultures, we have learned, are really quite different. Any forest/lake analogy is operating off of a presumed system of symbols which won’t have anywhere near the same application in other countries, or even within regions of the same country. My Brown County-based description differed greatly from the girl form Texas – is this truly due to our varying personalities, or more to our varying familiarities with the narrative’s foundational atmosphere?
Any thoughts lurking out there, in the world of my highly-educated readers?
2 comments:
*strokes beard in a Freudian gesture*
I agree that symbols differ by culture. On My Most Memorable (and worst) Date, a certain young man asked me how I felt about the sea, and what my favorite animal was, and...one other I forget.
Mark Griffis memorably put pop psych questions on his application forms for state officers. ("If They came and locked you in a white room, how would you feel? What would you do?") I thought it was silly and argued that if questions about religious beliefs were illegal, pop psychology questions administered in writing and evaluated by an untrained "analyst" were ridiculous.
I remember when Sara ran a simulation in KODT where she asked similar questions to the Knights and got amusing hack factor answers. ("You come to a lake. What do you do?" "I look around. Are there any orcs? No orcs? What kind of idiotic adventure is this?")
Not that any of that is relevant to the Deep Philosophical Questions you have raised, but I thought I'd share. For fun.
(No doubt this demonstrates my insouciant, insincere, immature, adolescent-author perspective.)
One of the reasons this exercise entertained me so much in Spanish (where it took itself seriously) was because it was IDENTICAL --question for question-- to the one Sara ran in KODT, which was of course completely for the humor factor.
Post a Comment