iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Richard Gipps

Anna Beer @annabeerauthor.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

You know when you suddenly decide to change direction, take a leap into the new, and become a beginner again? Well, I do. And it's been wonderful: challenging but oh so satisfying. The result? My first novel, out next month. More to follow, but for now - I'm just going to enjoy this moment!

Book cover, with title Death of an Englishman: an Oxford mystery, author (me), and an image of a fictional Oxford college with a woman on a bicycle in the foreground.

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

Just followed Jesse Singal on here to earn the badge of honour!

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

maybe it can be more successfully rewritten as a double negative: a country doesn't not have the right to police it's border. or better: a country requires no legitimisation by anything or anyone to police its border.

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Reposted by Richard Gipps

Awais Aftab @awaisaftab.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Congrats to Stephanie Foster ( @bitesizetherapy.bsky.social) on receiving honorable mention in "Excellence in Journalism" award by American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA) for her article "The Remaking of a Therapist" (Psychiatry at the Margins, Sep 2023) www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/the-remaki...

psychiatrymargins.com

The Remaking of a Therapist

Guest Post by Stephanie Foster

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Atheism and theism, if that's its opposite, look equally mad. But what then is faith? It is at least to not suffer the meaningless doubt that God exists; it is at least to not go spiritually cold; it is at least to live trustingly in Him; it is at least to heed His word.

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

I will own that I find it hard to know what to make both of the idea that one could really *believe* one's friend Jones exists and of the idea that one could believe or doubt that the ground of being, being itself, truth and love itself, the logos, exists.

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Now Anscombe is obviously talking about religious faith. To have faith, I think she says, is to trust that what's written or spoken or heard within comes from God and so also to believe it.

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

I might, *in certain circumstances*, muster a genuine doubt that this letter was from him, or believe he died after posting it. Or Jones may, as Anscombe later suggests, be a stooge: a bunch of friends were all along masquerading as a pen friend. But this changes the subject.

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

I don't mean we could believe him whilst yet disbelieving or doubting his existence. I do mean that it's not clear what sense "doubting Jones' existence" (and therefore, believing that he exists too) would have here (vide On Certainty).

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

In 1975 Anscombe talked of faith qua taking what someone says for true. Jones, a friend, writes to say his wife died. We believe him. In believing him, Anscombe says, we *presuppose* that he exists; it's a *conviction* or *assumption* we have. This strikes me as wrong. 🧵

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

I feel like it's ok for me to just say that I'm ill, when I've got a cold, without having to specify that I'm physically as opposed to mentally ill.

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

wanna put a plug in for beginning with general human wretchedness!

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

Thank you :). And yes, it's pleasingly indiscriminate in that regard. I was a little reluctant to take the psychological route re biblical healing at first lest it be seen as post-enlightenment miracle-bashing. But really what's more miraculous than the possibility of restored love thru forgiveness?

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

A blog post on conversion disorder. What does Habib Davanloo have in common with Jesus Christ?! Well, plausibly, IMO: they both cured FND by the derepression of previously intolerable guilt and other affects. ... "Conversion and Conversion": clinicalphilosophy.blogspot.com/2025/02/guil...

clinicalphilosophy.blogspot.com

conversion and conversion

Philosophy, psychiatry, clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, psychosis, phenomenology, Wittgenstein, existentialism.

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

I guess one can do a nazi salute without intending to. ... But only, I think, if one knows what one is? ... A further question again is what one does or doesn't mean by doing it.

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

I saw a man on the underground hail a cab the other day :)

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

It’s what I perceived as the conflation of righteousness with self-righteousness that was a turn off for me. (Much of the content to my ear, in itself, wasn’t so bad). By the way, and more philosophically/ less psychologically, “self-“ is here as elsewhere such an interesting prefix.

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

What's the difference between a poisoning and an allergic reaction? Is it just a matter of *how many* people react badly to the substance in question?

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Reposted by Richard Gipps

Dr Kate Womersley @katewomersley.com · 12/01/2025

In 2010s Cambridge it was déclassé to talk about authors’ biographies as if they had any relevance to their work (this may continue). The connection is indirect & complex, but we ignore it at huge cost: in Alice Munro’s case, naivety about her partner’s child abuse www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

newyorker.com

Alice Munro’s Passive Voice

The celebrated writer’s partner sexually abused her daughter Andrea. The abuse transformed Munro’s fiction, but she left it to Andrea to confront the true story.

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

What I typically find more helpful from psychology, than general claims of a sort which would please Meehl, say, is new concepts. These, qua concepts, don't make predictive or causal claims - but they give me ways of bringing someone's disturbed function into view.

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

The statement about the poison was supposed to characterise the very concept; but the generalisations of which you now write appear to be empirical in form. ... But I agree that they are not often sound. ...

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

To be pedantic (no!), it seems to me, by contrast, a quite peculiar sentence! Does a poisonous liquid really have the DISPOSITION to kill (those who drink it)?

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

My thought is that talk of either personalities or symptoms being 'real' is only meaningful when we've a contrast class *within* those respective domains. e.g. a fake personality, a non-dissimulated symptom. (I will also own that I've never understood what a construct is supposed to be!)

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 11/01/2025

a cold misty grey day; spiders' webs on the gates, covered in ice

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Reposted by Richard Gipps

Dr Kate Womersley @katewomersley.com · 07/01/2025

Wondering how to spend International Women's Day (Fri 7/3/25)? Join @rebecca99.bsky.social , @suzypuss.bsky.social & me by the fireside at The Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh from 6pm, as we discuss their new books, An Improbable Psychiatrist & Out of Her Mind www.rcpe.ac.uk/events/conve...

rcpe.ac.uk

In Conversation with...

Join us for an evening in the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh on two important books for psychiatry, women’s health, and reflections on being a medical professional.

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

We might define training in terms of someone getting better at doing good therapy. Or in terms of going on a course. The latter might be fruitless (as Rogers thought iirc).

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

If I understand it correctly, this involves a pressure to feel optimally admixed with a mentalising recap. Here the technique is said to be used optimally when the patient is helped to do the mentally healthy thing. So there’s now no empirically ascertainable relation between technique and outcome.

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

The research was looking at whether knowing techniques leads to good outcomes. So long as they are defined separately, then the question looks empirical to me. … FWIW tho I do however think we Should make it non-empirical, and I think this important! Take, say, the ISTDP technique of ‘bracing’. …

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

Are they definitional? We may define "good psychotherapy" in 1) instrumental terms (what leads to good outcomes) or 2) methodological terms (what conforms to a methodological ideal). If we've 2) in mind, then yes, the Qns are empty. But if 1) then we can surely ask empirical Qns like these?

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

Johnson's claim that, if he says a sentence has a meaning for him, nobody has the right to say it's senseless, is a solipsistic Humpty-Dumpty-ism. With it he insulates himself from critique, ignoring the fact that it's very hard to not fall into illusions of sense in philosophy.

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

then gave, as an encore, the piano accompaniment of a Beethoven violin sonata which was of course quite meaningless without the violin part. "This gesture seemed to please and amuse Wittgenstein." [Drury: Conversations with Wittgenstein p.103]

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

Drury and Wittgenstein later attend one of Johnson's admirable Bach piano recitals. But on the way back to Trinity Wittgenstein tells Drury of how at an earlier recital Johnson had played badly, and how everyone had anyway greatly applauded, which annoyed Johnson so much he ...

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

Wittgenstein: "I admire Johnson as a man, he is a man of real culture. His life's work has been his three volumes on logic. You can't expect him now to see that there is something fundamentally wrong with what he has written."

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

Johnson: "I consider it a disaster for Cambridge that Wittgenstein has returned. A man who is quite incapable of carrying on a discussion. If I say that a sentence has meaning for me, noone has a right to say it is senseless." ...

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

because don't you know conditions with psychological aetiologies are somehow mysteriously all made up

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

ooh, interesting! I liked her 'all in the head' or whatever it was called, and how it drew all the nuttier elements of the cfs IS REAL dammit crowd out the woodwork

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

I was being ironic. On no interpretation ever of the TLP would it make sense to think that myth making, singing, etc refuted (either an ineffablist or a resolutist reading of) TLP’s 7th proposition.

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

Who'd have guessed that Wittgenstein could so easily be refuted, or that he'd overlooked such an obvious possibility?

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Richard Gipps @drgipps.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

“But of one thing I am certain – we are not here in order to have a good time”. John King, “Recollections of Wittgenstein”, Rush Rhees (ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein. Personal Recollections, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1981, p. 90.

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