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Paul Grobstein's picture

Education, therapy ... and science parallels

Out of lunch with Sarah today came an intriguing set of further parallels. One of the underpinnings of a possible new approach to early science education is a recognition of the need to help people develop the skill of distinguishing observations from interpretations (or stories). Its this skill, and the associated recognition that a give set of observations can give rise to different stories (and that a given story can arise from different sets of observations) that frees one to imagine new possibilities and gives science its ability not only to discover but also to create.

If one equates feelings/intuitions/other outputs of the unconscious with "observations" then successful therapy frequently has the same effect. One comes to recognize that the "life story" one has at any given time is distinguishable from what is going on in the unconscious, and may be discordant with it. The ability to distinguish feelings/observations from stories gives one the wherewithal to recognize that one's current way of being (the combination of the unconscious and the existing life story) isn't inevitable, that one may conceive, explore, implement other possibilities.

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