Monday this-and-that

Let's see. Today's guest lecturer in Issues was Pam Birrell, an expert on Dissociative Personality Disorder, which used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder. She sees it as a adaptive response to trauma and helps her clients learn to live with it or to integrate the personalities, according to their personal goals. She's also a feminist scholar concerned to point out the cultural specificity of various pathologies, like eating disorders, although her overarching goal is to address the ways our culture is pathological and individuals within it are merely doing their best to adapt. This was an interesting backdrop for what I did next, which was brainstorming with GS about what generally might make worldviews qualify as pathological. Then I played some in the library, then came home and worked.

Tidbits: One of my officemates had an entire book with the intriguing title, Folk Physics for Apes. Also I got an e-mail from a Portuguese professor, wanting one of my publications. Neat. Oh, and someone decorated a branch of the huge beech tree on campus, with dangling daffodils and Easter eggs.