3-1-05
Topic: Class Notes
Elementary and Transformative Women
-One's initial sense of women is of the mother figure; nurturing etc.

Positive Elementary:
-Nourishing, earthmother, magna, feeding, mother is comforting.
-Also, part of one's life is to detach from one's mother.
-Separate psychologically
- "Momma's Boy" cling to thier connection with their mother.
Steatopygic-Very large buttocks

Negative Elementary:
-Devouring, death, takes away, witches
-Freud: the need to get rid of the villians and demons and eruptions from the unconscious.
-Jung: the need to realize that they are there.
Individuation- Psychological process

Positive Transformative:
-Platonic ideal, sophia
-a woman who can only be admired and idolized
-Place the woman on a pedestal and admire her as the idealized female.

Negative Transformative:
-Temptress
-What believes to be truth is a trick
-What one sees is not what one gets

2/24/05
Topic: Class Notes
WOMEN
-Women have the ability to move people without physically moving themselves. Their inner quality and beauty is a strong motivating force.
-Archetypes are psychological whereas stereotypes are sociological.
-According to long standing religious or cultural traditions women are expected to fulfill a certain role.

DREAMS
-Depth Psychologists (Jung, Freud)believe that the unconscious is a zone of psychic ability and all people are sexually repressed.(Electra complex)
-The subconcsious is easily revealed and brought to the surface or activated.
-The unconcsious is very deeply embedded and difficult to bring to the surface.

Freud
-Believed there were three parts to a brain: the ID, the Ego, and the Super-ego.
-The ID is a zone of supressed powerful feelings such as desire, energies etc. (Libido)
-Typically people divert their energy or frustration to more socially acceptable activities such as watching t.v. or driving around.
-Fantasy is also a way in which to take the edge off of repression.
-Dreams are the ways in which one's subconscious expresses itself.
-Dreams come from things that you have experienced or known... one can remember everything that has happened to him/her.

Jung
-Believed in the collective unconscious stating that it influences us more than the social unconscious and that people do dream about things that they have had no previous knowledge of.

-Archetypes are easily found in the language of dreams, fantasy, fairytales,and myth or the collective unconscious.
-Joeseph Cambell says: Dreams are personalized myth, and myth is depersonalized dreams.
-The more one moves away from the dream and into the myth the more it applies to everyone else and the more collective or general it becomes.
-Closer to myth the more impersonal it becoems.

2/15/05
Topic: My e-Journal
Gender Specific Roles

Stereotypically, a woman's place is in the home; taking care of the children, preparing food, and keeping domestic matters under control and in order. My family is limited to my immediate family (mother, father, and brother) because my parents were only children and their parents have since died; therefore, during the holidays, although we have our own traditions or habits, I have not been raised around traditional people who have been practicing the same tradition for many years. My family is very adaptive and we are constantly doing different things over the holidays. Traditions do not tie us down to feeling that we have to be at a certain place at a certain time doing a certain thing. We are always doing different things. I suppose that that, in a way, is a tradition. Also, in my family everyone helps out. Typically my mom does the cooking by herself simply because she is a perfectionist and can not bear to have someone else in her kitchen doing it differently than she would. My dad and brother are typically outside attending to any manual labor required. Therefore, I suppose, my family does conform to the stereotypical, gender specific roles traditionally defined.

2/3/05
Topic: My e-Journal
Is Ignorance Bliss?

I believe that the statement that ignorance is bliss is a relatively circular question. One always seems to have something to worry about. A perfect example of this is the movie "The Truman Show". In this movie a young boy is brought up in a world in which he believes everything is real and as it is supposed to be yet odd things begin happening and he discovers that his world is made up of actors and everything he had known had been staged for a t.v. show. My point is that once he discovers the deception of course he is shocked and hurt yet in light of the new information a whole new world of possibilities presents itself. Therefore, I suppose that one's response to new information depends on thier attitude towards life. For most, the past hold a special place in ones memory and one may tend to believe that past times are better or more blissful than the time of the present. Myths help people stay in touch with the past times and may perhaps make it difficult to move on to new things while still appreciating the past.

Myth and legend is alive and well in present society through the fact that people depend on it consciously or unconsciously in everyday life. Habits and traditions that people participate in all the time for the sake of ritual and comfort are demonstrations of these myths. Additionally, it gives them a connection to the past. It allows one to be able to relive a piece of his or her past. Perhaps the reason why myth is still so prevalent in society is because of the comfort it brings. If it has worked in the past then it will also benifit the present.

First Memory
My first memory, that is unassisted by a photograph, was when I was somewhere between the age of 2 and three. My brother was very little and still riding in a pack on my mother and we were all outside on a blanket picnicing in some very tall grass. I was laying on one of our golden retrievers while I ate pickles and chips and watched my mother make a sandwich. The only other things I remember was that it was warm out and and the dog I was laying on was panting and flies kept landing on my fingers.

1-27-05
Topic: My e-Journal
Etiology

As a child I remember listening to my father read me cautionary tales and warning me that if I were to participate in the same undesirable activities as those characters in the stories I would most likely suffer the same fate as they. However, I did not necessarily believe that if I were to make faces my face would inevitably be stuck in that ugle face, but I did believe that something equally devastating would occur to me. Stories that are told as "just so" serve. I believe, essential roles in the developement of a child's perception of the world. Clearly, most children do not literally believe most "just so" stories; however, they do take away from it the understanding that some things in life must just be accepted. Asking "why" is the tool with which young children develope their boundaries and their place in the world.

1-25-05
Topic: My e-Journal
"IN ILLO TEMPORE"

Indeed, memories of time past do seem to approach the ideal of perfection more closely than the moments of the present. Perhaps this is because memories change over time and in most cases fade away entirely unless that memory is of some monumentous, life altering event or revelation. When one believes he or she remembers a certain event it is interesting to discover that in most cases these memories are attached to some surviving visual aid such as a photograph. Therefore, do we, in fact, remember these events of the past or are we remembering the photograph and the stories told to us by our parents or friends?
Upon looking back through one's life, one will most likely consider their past to be much more desirable and more enjoyable compared to the life or challanges he or she is currently facing. Most likely this is the simple desire to have what one does not.