28-31th of May, 2004 – Bath, England

Humour and Sickness Unto Death and Sickness Unto Hope:

Last data generation, piece of writing and originality of mind before wrapping up, completing and getting the hell out: one more cup of coffee before I go….. completely and utterly insane

Tuesday the 1^st of June, 2004, post-writing that I am compelled to write after a most bizarre Monday group conversation where I have failed completely and was angered and frustrated by this failure. So I now write

We can ring the bells. We can do so decisively, forcibly, aggressively and loudly, with no regrets, nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be quiet about, nothing to apologise for. This is the end of an era for me. Something that launches me straight into saturation, angst, fatigue, exhaustion, ecstasy, thrill, euphoria, intolerance, bursting-up, complete and utter absorption and immersion in myself and this moment of completion and ending and inability to reach anything and anyone else. I have done it. I am all shaking, my physiology alters. My cardiacmascular bit rate are very much increasing. I am in some sort of a traumatic shock, mainly ontologically. I am hysterical. I am wrapping up the most important project and achievement of my life/existence/being thus far, second only to that, concluded and successfully achieved, of making sure my grandfather has dignity, pleasure, aesthetic, ethical and authentic life, good spirit and sense of humour right to the last second of his existence. I am about to emerge incredibly positively powerful, a true superman (Nietzsche, 1964a, 1964b 1967), empowered, strong, fulfilled, gratified, healed, realised, achieved, knowing, understanding, comprehending and making the impossible/improbable possible and actualised. This leads to this state being that was described in the fourth sentence of this paragraph.

I am reaching the end of nearly a decade and a half now in which I was protesting with everything I got, with all my being, all my burning and bursting passion, all my enormous strength, all my immense courage and courage to be, all my vast resources, all my humanity, all my vast experience in and of life and these worlds (internal and external), all my fighting spirit and my limitless and endless ammunition, all my intelligence and modesty, all my fitness into the mainstream and institutions, all my squareness and my orthodoxy, originality, uniqueness and conservatism and all my ability to touch and reach others and to communicate myself. I was protesting against the killing and destruction of humanity and human existence. Killing by science, order, structure, collectivism, empiricism, abstractions, social mannerism, universalism, fake, artificial decorum, categorisations, philosophy, analysis, explications, judgements, excuses, self-excuses, justifications, romantism, labelling, tagging and turning human beings into cricket teams (John Waugh, ), objects, collectives, organism, words, language, context/s, isolated/ive/ing entities, beings and units and the like.

I have written so much about it. I immersed myself so much into it. I have protested and fought so hard. I have given so much tears, blood, sweat, passions, emotions, myself, my being, everything I had and got. I am about to offer it now as a doctorate to the academic world by choice for I could have simply written personal journals and diaries, books, novels, poetry, papers and articles in journals, newspapers, magazines, websites, web pages, movie scripts, television series scripts and the like. This pays far better than academia. And I have done that already, to my full ontological satisfaction, gratification and saturation. Yet I needed something else for my ego, myself and my ontology. I needed the most traditional, restricted, restrictive, controlling, conventional, mainstream, boring, dull, square, dry, orthodox, established, institutionalised, paradoxal, contradictory, challenging, difficult, rewarding, hell-giving, accepted mode of interchange, interaction, convincing and interlink of and for the type of thing that I am trying to achieve and to call for.

The level of risk, self-trust and challenge are so great that the respect, satisfaction, love, gratification and pleasure that I know and have for myself are at their greatest level possible and imaginable. And therefore so is the sense of meaning and sense of ontological being and security that I have for my existence in the world and my being as me and as Alon (Serper, 2004) and for myself and my self. I can really feel, touch and sense my existence. I really can. I can really say to myself that I am that I exist. Now, all I need is for this work/thesis/dissertation to be accepted by academia and rewarded as a Ph.D. and I am home and home free and released and ready to go on and proceed and really enjoy the years I have left here in the words.

Out of this special state of being I write

28-31th of May, 2004

A note for my readers: Grabbing the poor sods [amazed, overwhelmed, backing up and running away social others] who are yet to know with whom they are dealing with by the throat, wrestling them to the ground, all shaking (Camus, 1942a), and shouting at them at the top of my voice. Indeed, quelque chose est en train de crever en moi – something is bursting inside me (Camus, 1942a).

This is first story that hopefully would catch you very unprepared (especially due to the fact that my own appearance and the appearance of this thesis are very much traditional, conservative and conventional). It is my mission, my objective in life. I live for that. I hope and aspire to. To remove you from your indifference and academic/scholarly/scholastic detachment and apathy. I wish this story would lead to a snowball effect and the gushing and accumulation of different, changing, confusing, contradictory passionate and constructing stories that would transform and fit in and complement the ensemble. The overall, gestaltian picture of an integrative, comprehensive, dynamic, constantly moving, changing, transforming, emerging, becoming and gushing and living and reacting, passionate, sometimes irrational, wholly subjective and biased, personal, unique, amorphous, embracing, thorough whole that is greater than its incongruous, ambiguous, contradictory, parallel, lenient and flexible, adapting parts that nonetheless form it.

Here is the direct, rough crude and raw unfolding of a humane, authentic, firsthand depiction and display of human existence as it really is with as little as possible refinement, easing up, softening and gentling, intervention, interruption, reducing, fake/artificial decorum, dehumanising, mechanising and disengaging which have been carried out in order to make it easier to swallow, comprehend, engage, communicate, present, analyse, structure, examine, inquire into, absorb and take in altering and inauthenticating it in the process, thereby making it unbiased, reduced, inhuman, unreal and untrue. Here is a being and a being in the world. A being full of contradictions, struggles, both internal, with the being and with the being in the world, external. A being full of living contradictions (Whitehead, 1989, 1993, 2004). A being full of raw and crude, passions, raw emotions and innermost feelings. A being full of reflections, actions, reactions.

A being full of gushing, rushing, grotesqueness, despair and hope, aspirations and sickness unto death, absurdity, chaos and complete sense and meaning in this chaos. A being full of weak points [points faibles] and strong points, aquiles heels and utter indifferences and apathy. A being full of love, good, compassion and care for himself and others. A being full of interrelationships with these constantly moving, changing and transforming worlds (inner and outer). A being full of anger and frustration, hatred and self-hatred. A being full of copings, survival and meaningful contributions. A being who sits in a body consisted of eighty percent water and traces of minerals, all costs about four pence and, although failed miserable to be reduced/turned into a usable soap (as the Nazis tried to do and failed) or a fur, or decent leather (again the Nazis tried and failed) yet is all of the above.

A being who is there and is gushing and is transforming towards his death in a passionate manner, a very much an heroic fashion, striving to make every and any fragment of a second of it counts, contributing, hopeful and meaningful. A being who is striving to make the most of it, make full sense of it (of this chaotic mess). A being who is constantly and continuously struggling to locate itself, find itself, engage with itself, assure itself, love and tough love itself and yell its existence to itself. A being who is endeavouring to constantly ameliorate itself, to constantly and continuously develop, invent, transform into, reconstruct and create a better version of itself for itself. Using everything it got, using the world, using the social other/s, using the ecology, using itself, using its living contradictions, using all its resources, using all its energy, using all its passions, using all its heroics, using all its despair. Using its tears, its fears, its angsts, its dreads, its yearning, saudade, its hope, its heroism, its hatred, its sickness unto death, its frustration, its love, its anger, its compassion, its humanity, its mechanism, its animalism, its transcendence, its divinity, being God, its interrelations, its interrelationships, its struggles, its life-long learning, its learning, itself again, its being, its being in the world.

I am very passionate. I am shivering with passion and I am all shaking. And indeed, after those three paragraphs I can see my academic/scholar readers (especially those British ones who have invented the great invention of detachment and coldness and passion killing in the form of understatements and all the other ways of mechanistic killings of passions, {unless of course they are drinking or travelling the trains or smoking dope}) nodding their heads in tears and compassion. Poor Alon. He has worked himself so extremely hard on this project. He is finally cracking up and is experiencing some sort of a nervous reaction and breakdown. So, I’ll put my scholarly hat and glasses and expose my intelligent bald spot (I even gained a few pounds lately to have air of a typical short and round Jaket, German Jew, professor) and say and explain what this project is all about.

One of the greatest debates, questions and problems in the area of rational, academic and scholarly approach (see Winter at al., 2000) to human existence throughout its entire existence is around those lines: What do we do with those bursts of crude, raw, confusing, passionate, subjective and sometimes irrational and gushing emotions and feelings, living experiences and interrelationships with both the inner and outer worlds that are thrown into us and very forcefully sweep us away? How do we deal with them in an authentic manner? How do we approach them genuinely? How do we accommodate them as they are experienced without fiddling with them for the sake of structure, sense-making and social communication and living and of course academia (Winter et al., 2000) and academic career, belonging and sense of belonging? How do we remain true to and with them?

How do we convey and present them whilst still feeling and experiencing them as they are? How do we communicate and share them as they are firsthand? How do we make them understood as they are firsthand and directly? How to we order and dress them for the sake of study, our and their well-being, quality of life, self-improvement, social formation (Whitehead, 2004), community life and its improvement (McNiff, 2000, 2004)? How do we make sense of them? To what extent do we force and impose on them without running and interfering with their authenticity and strength and genuinely? To what extent do we let them be and live and proceed as they are? To what extent do we try to control them, manage them, restrain them and interfere with them? To what extend do we externalise and alienate them, for the sake of order and structure and fitness and sense-making, thereby dehumanise them and making them biased (Serper, 1999)? By this I means, judging them and imposing foreign/alienate/ing bodies on them from the outside? To what extent do we let them grow wild, as they are in nature, unorganised like a British garden or constantly cultivate and trimmed and shaped and put them under strict control like a French garden where we can have them in our hands and to our aesthetic and ethic taste?

And what are they really? Raw passions and beings that are just lived and experienced and are needed to be comprehended and grasped as such with tolerance, love and respect as such? Or defined, judged, ordered concepts and conceptions to be dressed and tailored, restricted, cooled down, rationalise for the sake of fulfilling a good order in this world into which they are too chaotic and messy to fit in as such – being a good citizen, a good social being, a good subject, a being, a being in the world – as opposed to an unproductive, anti-social, anarchist, isolated/ing, disengaging chaotic mess of wild passions and contradictions and confusion (Serper, 2004) that are just gushing and messing all over the place – that is not good and pleasurable and in fact wholly dangerous physically (for individuals would normally starve to death this way) and ontologically (social and human starvation and deprivation, much hostility and tension and further chaos as both a being in the world and as a being) for neither the being nor the being in the world as I have seen, observed and experienced myself firsthand all my life.

Human subject is a passionate being, a chaotic being, a feeling and experiencing being, a living being, a confused (Serper, 2004) and confusing being, an irrational being, a wholly subjective being, a moving and constantly transforming and shaping being and incomprehensible and ungraspable being even by itself (Serper, 2004). This is what makes us subjects rather than objects (Sartre, 1943) and daseins rather than non-daseins (Heidegger, 1927). This is what makes us beings and beings in the world rather than thermostats and processing objects. Still, human subject loves order and clarity and explanations for everything. Human subject does not like and enjoy and in fact wholly dreads and is scared to death of confusions, contradictions, internal paradoxes, uncertainties, internal dilemmas and conflicts and chaos. It leads to what I have already discussed above. Societies and ordered collections and collectivisms of beings feel threatened and are frown upon confused, passionate individuals who are menace to the good order that are absolutely essential for their formation. They, thereby isolate them, dehumanise them, disengage with them, dehumanise them, lock them, destroy them and send them away (Foucault, 1961, 1972, 1976; Laing, 1959, 1967, Elden, 2004). Human beings themselves are scared to death and horrifically and utterly dread and anguish losing grip and control to their passions and raw and crude modes of beings and being humans, subjects and daseins. It is most disagreeable.

Yes, indeed, human subject feels and is torn apart by those feelings and emotions, irrationalities and uncertainties and confusions and puzzlements. He/she/it wants to be, to exist to be able to become. This is what makes him/her what he/she is. And human subject is forced to find and invent himself/herself explanations and explications to order and rationalise the confusion, the vast mystery and the chaotic anguishing being in the worlds (both inner and outer). This is double-fold, to be and construct himself/herself as a being on the individualistic level as a self. And to be able to form social formation and to enjoy and relate to others as part of the being in the world which is essential for the being. And this is the greatest living contradiction of it all. One that has been bothering me all my life, that I cannot solve and really and authentically live with. One that I am devoting this doctorate and my entire life and living here to. I wish to show it through my own own life/living/existing/emerging/becoming, my own human existence.

Yet it is a Ph.D. I am an academic scholar. I really am and I have to create and shape myself as such throughout this/my doctorate thesis and my life and work as an academic. Well, I cannot be more academic than summoning and calling upon Comte to back up what I am arguing. He is my greatest enemy and anti-thesis. So I need him (Popper, ). Comte (1830) said that the search for clear, rational explanations and reason is all part of human progress. The human subject progressed and got increasingly intelligent so he invented himself/herself many gods to try to clarify, order, make sense and explicate this chaotic, irrational, mysterious worlds into which he/she was launched and compelled to live and to make sense of. Then, this grew into a single God that has created it all and it is all up to it and due to it and explained by it. Then, metaphysics (aesthetics, ethics, morality, naturalism, epistemology, ontology etc, etc, etc) came along and was designed by the human subject to explain it all and to make sense of it all. Then, with the advancement of technology and tools and moderna, science and positivism came along and made the theories and natural philosophy practical and implied and have permitted the question of ‘how’ and in ‘in what way’ to join and complement the ‘what it is all about’ that have become secondary. It was not good enough for Comte. There was still some wonder and still some mystery and still things difficult to explain.

Thus, then numbers and mathematics have become the salvation. Everything will be explained by numbers for numbers and quantities are hard to refute. They are either there or are not there. There are clearly two birds on the tree, ninety percent satisfactory or sixty percent success or eighty percent of individuals who can immediately recall up to seven items and without rehearsal (Miller, 1956, Serper, 1999). The numbers say it all. Anything which is not numbers is obviously not important and therefore not worthy of thinking about and take into account. Only numbers can explain and order. And whatever is not ordered and explained does not count. Go refute and say that there are not. And find yourself excluded, burnt and sent away.

Ordering, explaining, answering and clarifying have become an obsession for the human subjects. The world has been hijacked by this obsession and became an attempt to explain and order it. And academia was invented and is a good refuge for those, like myself, who seek order, sense-making and structure amidst all this confusion and mess. An attempt that has led to an interference, intervention and mediation with it rather than being with it and embracing it. The passion, the irrationalities, the confusion, the crude, the raw have become the worst possible enemy that must be destroyed at all costs, even at the cost of a complete self-destruction and ontological suicide. Which is as I have already argued above also the outcome of following and being dragged by and after the crude, raw passions.

There was a battle between romantics, idealists and phenomenologists and rationalists, materialists realists and empiricists to name just very few. A battle between the domination of the human need to feel, to move and be moved, to passionate, to hope, to grieve, to rejoice, to anguish, to delight, to despair, to love, to hate, to live and to be and the human need not to be confused and puzzled, the need to clear-cut order, the need to structure, clarify and sense-make, the need to explain, the need to have, to seek and to find a clear and non-refuted answer and solution and the need to solve and clearly unravel.

Ordnung [order - place]

- Recht und Ordnung [law and order]

In empirical and theoretical psychology, my field of expertise and acquaintance, scholars like Gibson, James, Husserl, Merleu-Ponty and Brentano have strived to fight this self-destructive obsession against Wundt. Psychoanalysis was created to order, make sense and structure those burning up passions that it has very much acknowledged. It has, initially, done so in the form of the limited medical model of psychosis and neurosis (Freud, 1935). And indeed, most aspects of Freud’s work, both beautiful, sensitive, compassionate poet and a positivistic medical doctor and natural scientist (who was equally torn between the two elements but was forced to choose the domination of the rational and order out of a need to eat, coming from a poor family) or its interpretations are about those battles, giving the need for the structured, rational, ordered and explainable to dominate the agreement with the raw confusion and compassionate (see, for example, Freud, 1900, 1912 of the mechanistic attempts to explain and rationalise). Radical empiricists, like the behaviourists, especially operant behaviourists, radical representational cognitivists and radical social constructionists and poststructuralists have completely taken this into extreme and killed the raw and crude and wholly human passion (Serper, 1999, 2003, 2004). Still, those challengers have tried to show a clear-cut, non-refuted ordered, rational manner to deal with the direct, raw, passionate and dynamics and were condemned to lose. Phenomenology has become either abstraction or another form of order. Come to think of it, chaos is also form of order and chaos. So, perhaps there is no way to win, save living contradiction. Yet it may be entertained that is an authentic, crude and first hand order.

Then, indeed, came Whitehead (1989, 1993, 2004) and argued that it is possible to have both contradictions in an argument/thesis without one fighting the other and using the actual contradiction for progress and sense making in the form of questioning and living it/ implementing it in practice rather than answering and solving. There is no need to choose or impose one on the other but a possibility to have both, acting next to each other, for the enrichment of the practitioner’s practice, which in my case it is living, becoming and emerging. I gave him a hard time, a real hell, for that and accused him for being evasive and scholastic and for giving up and in. I’d now admit I may have been wrong, too constructed and deautomasised by my past living and emerging and learning.

I was, indeed, stuck for a very long time on this very question how do we accommodate and account for the rawness and firsthand passion and humanity in a systematic, scholarly manner so as to be able to repair and amend the injustice carried out to the conception and study of human existence and the human subject in scholarly academia, in general, and the social sciences and the humanities, in particular.

I, myself, am a living contradiction of a moody and irrational poet and artist and a rational scientist, as the accompanied CD Rom with my engagements, interrelationships, writings and web pages will demonstrate and illustrate. I am burning up with passions, raw emotions, that I sometimes cannot handle and clarify to myself and that sweep me off my feet and lead to great tensions and immense ontological frustration in my being in the world and with my worlds. And I am also and often simultaneously a very detached and cold scholar and sometimes to rather unpleasant, yet pleasant in this unpleasant, sensation and anger and frustration and ontological self-dissatisfaction from myself a confused and passionate and irrational being who can even understand and make sense of himself. I am a scientist who strives to conceal and control those burning passions and irrationalities. I try to be happy and ontologically secured, stabled and assured for as long as possible and as consistently as possible. Can you blame me for that? Would you like me to be unstabled, insane, angry, contemplate suicide and possibly committing it? What are you sadistic being? Do you hate me that much?

I do so in a desperate attempt out of self-love to protect myself from myself, my self-hating self (for you cannot have great love without great hatred) from self-destruction and ontological self-harm and suicide that harm my well-being. Thereby leading to misery and immersion with this misery in some sort of a masochistic pleasure of anguishing pain that is so painful that it is pleasurable, like the picking at an open wound, smoking and tearing picking the skin. I wrote the paper me, me and me – the fight of the self with the self in order to account for it. To make things worse, I was designed and predestined to continue my grandfather’s legacy and to become a famous and legendary doctor, a human being and a scientist and at the same time was forced to suck in my grandfather’s passion and incredible fascination and obsession with human beings and their lives, livings, well-beings, healing and quality of life and being. I have also led an usual life and living and have developed a special mode of observing, sensing, sense-making and interrelating. I identify with Freud, with Nietzsche, with Kierkegaard, with all those torn apart poets who strive and are eager to find rationality. And I despise Kant and Hegel for trying to universalise and simplify by universalising, collectifying and generalising.

By communicating and writing my passions in both narratives as they have occurred and in some sort of a grotesque, surreal writing where I play with language, with words, with raw pain and passions. Writings where I employ grotesque and surreal metaphors and allusions. I convey and place, publicise and unfold my human existence. I am hoping to make others think, be moved, deautomatise, deconstructed and feel. I wish to brusquely, grotesquely, violently and viciously tear, rip and sweep them away and apart from their fake, artificial, constructed comfort, apathy and indifference. I wish to make them attentive to those passions and this humanity of theirs, this miserable yet wonderful/formidable raw and crude human existence of theirs. I wish to make them engage with it and relate to it. I wish to make them laugh and cry. I wish to make them feel pleasure and pain at the same time and pleasure in the pain and pain in the pleasure. I wish to make them feel good about themselves, their pain, their passions, their despair, their hope, their humanity, their human existence and their existence as humans and human beings.

I wish to make others transcend and deconstruct for about the few hours that it takes to talk to me about it and read me, the need to choose between burning passion, questions, confusions, puzzlement irrationalities and clear-cut order, structure and answer, rationality and coldness and detachment. I have been doing it all and throughout my entire life – all thirty-three years of it – and there is no reason in the world why they cannot do so for a couple of hours. Normally, this leads to pathology and to the Laingian divided self (Laing, 1959) to become schizophrenia, that for Laing’s (1967) information is a very unpleasant condition, beside the wholly unjustified, sadistic and unfair and vicious social stigma, as I have fought against and observed from a several years’ attempt to understand and relate to it though working with schizophrenics in Jerusalem. I am so strong I can simply not become pathologised myself. I am always in control and am able to transcend myself, dereflect and to be very self-aware and self-critical. And I do so through laughing at my pain in the most grotesque and vicious possible manner. I also do so by softer and most agreeable humour and self-humour.

As Bateson (1980) and Freud have conveyed, humour is essential for human evolution (see discussion of Comte, 1830, above) and human relationship and healthy, non-pathologised mental being. The ability to laugh at the face of this malaise and sorrow is essential for the derelection and sense-making, despair-killing and hope conveying. Frankl (1978) has recounted how he has taught the inmates of the death camps to transcend and dereflect their most horrific torture and ordeal, and to prevent them from running to the electric wires/fence (the most popular way of suicide there), using humour. Telling the medical doctors, for instance, how after their release, the head nurse would enter their operation room with shouts Aktion, Aktion, when the senior doctor enters, just like their foreman did to them when the company man has entered their force labour work. Or how they would forget themselves, when attending a fancy, gala dinner and would beg their hostess, when being served soup out of fancy china, for a serving from the bottom of the pot with life saving peas or cubage rather than just water. Indeed, humour is essential for survival, for hope, for authenticity, for sense-making and for meaningful existence and even for physical existence. Those with sense of humour are able to cope with almost anything, against all ordeals and to secure a more meaningful and hopeful existence for themselves.

This is something that I have done my utmost to introduce to those miserable individuals with pathology who knew no sense of humour and no ability to laugh at themselves and at their own extent, taking the world, their worlds and themselves far too seriously for their own good. And able just to cry in agony without laughing at their own crying and pain and anguish. An ability that I refined to perfection myself in the course of my own existence/emergence, being and being in the world. A capacity that has given me the possibility to live my life to its fullest, to cope, to succeed, to do well and to progress. And hopefully to relate and engage and make a significant contribution to the area of academic interrelationship and engagement with human existence.

about

By telling the stories of how I cope with this living contradictions for my own survival I am hoping to account for human existence.

I am using some sort of sick humour that cause some sort of an hysteric laughter that combines pain, absurdity and grotesqueness that move individuals from their feelings of indifference and make them feel, think and contemplate.

I hope to capture my audience, to torture it, to make it bang its head against the wall, to make it feel very much at unease, so unease that is very at comfort and pleasure, to make it laugh and cry hysterically, to make it wish I were sedated, to make it abandon my reading for a bit only to think and reflect upon it and to come back later on after digestion, contemplation, ponding and internalisation. I surely hope to make it think, make it love itself, make it feel good about itself. And to truly engage with his/her/their/my humanity and ourselves.

This project is very difficult for me as you can see. It involves tears, sweat and blood and hysterical laughter and self-laughter. I attempt to do several things simultaneously at the same time. First, I try to make sense of my entire being here, to clarify things for myself, to learn from my past, to figure things out for myself and to make sense of myself to myself. Secondly, to reconstruct, to live, to emerge, to become, to use my learning for my present actual becoming, emerging and living out of the emerging here and now and transforming and unfolding myself to and at the future. Third, to catch up on lost ground and to construct, reconstruct and place the foundations for my future and my future becoming. Fourth, to do so as a clear heuristics and epistemology of and for human existence. Fifth, to analyse, reflect and publicise how I do so. Sixth, to do so as a doctorate thesis and the highest scholar qualification as a theory/conception/methodology/heuristics/epistemology of human existence and ways to tackle and approach it as both ontology (theoretical psychology, philosophy) and an epistemology/heuristics (social sciences). Seventh, to use this as the beginning of the formation of an integrative model of human existence. Eight, to lay the foundation of an independent, autonomous milieu, niche, space, forum and framework in academia that would be completely open, tolerable, susceptible, devoted and dedicated to human existence as it is perceived and conceived by me and my like-minded, namely as a whole, dynamic, constantly moving and transforming and interrelating, self-constructive, individualistic, personalised and unique being in the world. Nine, to convince, to entice and to seduce others to be part of this shift and movement and reaction in academia. Ten, thereby to constructively critique and show, introduce, implement and act out an alternative in practice rather than merely critique the existing/ed and the historical/theoretical/philosophical. I am in anguish, pain, angst, dread, agony and hope and optimism.

I am so scared and passionate and angst that I become hysterical and I need to laugh at that or else I’d

1. Bang my head against the wall very hard.

2. Go insane, a remote possibility for I have attempted so hard to do so and have failed and was left entertaining the possibility that I am too inane to become insane and that this is my insanity. I have shared this reflection with many psychiatrists acquaintances and left them utterly confused and puzzled and in accordance with one of my friends too confused to relate and engage and far too wiling and happy of giving up on their economic livelihood for the sake of complete dismissal of this trouble and chaos.

3. Isolate myself completely, despair, quit, self-pity, give in and launch myself into some sort of bad faith (Sartre, 1943), like most individuals unfortunately do, being dragged by life and living rather than taking it by the throat and wrestling it to the ground.

4. Laugh and make sick jokes at it and its/my expense and thereby relax and transcend the angst and use this sensation as a lever for the completion of this project from hell that nonetheless gives me meaning and satisfaction, gratification and self-gratification, empowerment, self-realisation/fulfilment and a hope and a possibility for a hope for a great, truly self-fulfilling future for myself as a true and authentic, direct, empowered and real existence in the world and being here, being here as me and a true me for myself.

It does not take a genius to see which one I would choose and immerse myself completely into. I expect this doctorate to stir, move, launch into passions and hysteria and burst of very powerful emotions – anger, hatred, compassion, love, crying, laughing, hysteria etc. I expect law sues, psychiatrists to make a lot of money (and naturally cutting me in the profit). I expect difference and shuttering of the indifference and the apathy. I expect change and movement, dynamism, passion and awakening. I expect emotions. I expect individuals and friends who love me to walk away from me and my life in anger. I expect cris de hain (cries of hatred) – Camus, 1942.

And I expect humanity in its purest form of subject and daseins. I expect losing the mechanism, the objectification, the organism, the dehumanisation behind and I expect the being of humans all too humans – feeling, crying, agonising, being, existing, emerging, despairing and hoping. In practice and in the field – the being in the world – not just in abstractions words. I do expect bursts of tears, of hysterical laughter, panic, angst, despair and then hope and authenticity and true living and existing. And breaking down, at least of tables and chairs if not of people and individuals and my own head and body.

I bring you my papers ‘me, me and me’ and ‘human existence’, my accounts, my reflections, my stories, my writings, my innermost beings and feelings and contemplations that are attempts to order and structure my passion, my pain, my anguish the feelings of ‘self’ and of my very complex relationship with a very complicated yet special woman in me, me and me, with another one and others, other ones and the very special relationship I had with my grandfather. I bring you correspondences with the LAR forum with Clare H, with Jack, with Paulus, with Karl, with endless others. I can now place all of those in a CD Rom, or a whole bunch of them.

Let me start or start, having joked at the expense of this country, I cross to the mainland continent and pick up at the Germans a bit. It is no surprise that empirical psychology and rationalism was invented by the Germans. Everything must have an order and be in order, - yes order order, Ordnung, ordnung, uber alles. Ordnung, Disziplin, Recht und Ordnung.

Recht und Ordnung [law and order].

There is a joke that the French, British and Jaket (German Jew) are condemned to the guillotine. The French, the inventor of this machine, goes first and the knife stopped millimetres next to his throat and he goes/walks away. Then, the British/t goes next and undergoes the same exercise, with the same exact outcome result. When it comes to the German Jew, the Jaket, he becomes very upset, saying I am not going on this machine, unless it is fixed and is arranged to a good order. In other words, this order-seeking moron was willing to die and destroy himself physically and existentially for the sake of good order, Recht und Ordnung Ordung, Diszipline.

My grandfather, in the last years at the private elderly home had a Jaket neighbour who kept saying how much he and his ethnicity are superior to the Polish Jews, my grandfather’s ethnicity, although Galician, from what used to be the Habsburgian Austro-Hungary, to whom (the ethnicity) he called primitive and backward in comparison to the enlightened German Jews who indeed have flourished in western, enlightened Germany, especially the Weimar Republic (what happens next and why is the question that entertains every Jew and human beings in the last decades) in comparison to the persecution and anti-Semitism in Poland in between the two world wars.

My grandfather, to whom his small town, was a great source of pride and nostalgia, innermost core and identity, although he merely spent his early adolescence there, spending the first world war in Vienna and then going to Paris, to specialise in medicine, epidemology and internship and to become a true man of the world, a very well-refined, cultured professor of medicine and epidemology and a great doctor and human being with great modesty, did not enjoy this. As a revenge, I told this joke and to make sure they all understand I asked my grandfather in front of them to translate it into German from the French I told it in and I also told it in Hebrew and English. We got the upper hand. The German was humiliated back, though too prod and old to grasp his humiliation. Still, my grandfather’s integrity and pride was restored by humour and jokes, rather than informing the social worker or yelling and discussing/explaining at and to the much younger Jaket, further degrading my grandfather. For what use is order and structure without living and life and passion and humour?

Second relevant anecdote, the whole project of human existence and finding an alternative to the existing heuristics that I devote my life to was inspired by Frankl’s amusing tale of the rabbi and the cat. As I gave in my introductionary presentation to the Psychology Department at Bath in 2002, in section/part 4 of the presentation – see Brief Presentation at the University of Bath 2002 at http://www.bath.ac.uk/%7Epspas/present.htm. This time, my psychoanalysts friends and rivals get it and whilst I still attend their monthly meeting I am afraid after the publication of those next lines this would come into conclusion.

4) What is meant by Reductionism and Mechanising: Illustration

There is a nice story that I used years ago to tell about reductionism.

The story goes like that

Two people go see the rabbi because they have a quarrel. Reuben claims Shimon’s cat has eaten the pot of butter he has left on the balcony. How much butter was there asks the old and tired rabbi. Five pounds answers Reuben. We shall soon see, mumbles the rabbi, and so he grabs the cat [like so and I raised my hand in a pick up gesture and sometimes even pick up some sort of a doll of a cat], picks it up by the neck, weighs it, and finds out that it weights exactly five pounds. Now, says the rabbi staring at the cat, we know, where the butter is, but where has the cat gone?

Now imagine the cat is the human subject and the rabbi is empirical psychologists and (as a humanist I cannot resist the temptation) psychoanalysis.

Empirical psychology was so busy defining itself as conscious experiences, behaviour, representations, neuro-physiology methodologies and quantitatives that like the rabbi it sees only those things, the human subject has been mechanised, reduced and disappeared. Those elements consumed him.

The psycho-analysts are especially great at this. 'Now we have found unconscious desires, repressed feelings, childhood and infant events and whatever else we have been seeking', they shout in great ecstasy, staring at the shadow in the human form which is sitting on their couch, like the rabbi, who is holding the cat, but wait a minute where has man (namely the patient whose fees have just got me this lovely jaguar that is parked outside) gone?".

I used to have many psycho-analysts friends. Then I told this story. Now I have none.’

Figures that I am now in Education, working with an anti psychologism.

Even there/here, I kept doing that. And I told amusing anecdotes about living contradictions, in the forms of two jokes.

I attacked Jack in public in both the Monday group forum and the Living-Action-Research forum.

I said

Secondly, please engage with my allegories and stories (based on and in
light of the article that you have asked me to read, you know what I am
talking about)

The first one is the story of the golden penny under the street light.  I
brought it up in the forum yesterday. And was ignored.


And the story goes like so: A man was looking for something under the
street light.  He was asked what he is looking for and replied he has lost
his gold penny.  Did you lose it here? He was asked.  No, he replied, I
have lost it miles away.  But it is very dark there.  There is no way I
can find it there. And here it is lightened and bright.  And, therefore,
much easier to find things.

Isn't it evasive?

Isn't it too easy?

Isn't is scholastic?

Logic and contradictions – Living contradiction

The second one is the tale of the rabbi and the three agreed
contradictory arguments

Two individuals quarrel, with two contradictory, different and opposite
arguments. One brings argument A to the rabbi and the rabbi tells him 'you are right'

The other one brings his own argument (argument B) and the rabbi tells
him you are right. The rabbi's wife intervenes and asks her spouse – How can they be both right? One of them must be wrong.

You are right, too, is the rabbi's reply to his dear wife.

So, it is too easy, too evasive, too nice.  Where are the sharp teeth?
Where is the argumentative argument?

My grandfather taught me this. He used humour as a means to improve a situation, to constructively critique and to lead to calm and release tensions. And as a means to transcend and cope an extremely difficult life. To transcend the despair and to fully realise himself and his remarkable potential. This is the potential for despair that I do not see how a reader, especially a British one (despite all their consistent protest against this assertion) can truly comprehend in practice rather than theory of universalism. A complete and utterly wiping up of the past, a difficult one, nonetheless, of anti-Semitism and unsuccessful humiliation attempts, and the self, who he was by the holocaust and the second World War, a complete destruction of the present and most of the future by the death of my mother, his only offspring and family left and continuous attempt to take advantage of the very special relationship that was formed between him and me. I will permit myself to save a lot of it for writing in Hebrew and my post doctorate work and personal, intimate work to be left within my inner world and only to be exposed on a very intimate and selective type of relationships and interrelationships.

Here I will say that his ability to deeply touch, penetrate and connect with the most profound layers and innermost core of human beings, an ability that I inherited was well noticed and used. In the end of 1948, in the conclusion of this part of the war of independence he was made in charge of Jaffa, the most sensitive place and was made to leave another very difficult place in the southern outskirts of Tel-Aviv of oriental, unfortunate immigrants, where he has kept a clinic, before and after his normal practice at the state’s practice and later on after his retirement from his state’s, institutionalised position. Working full time, twenty-four hours a day, or as he, himself, jokingly used to say working twenty-five hours a day. Waking up everyday an hour earlier. And indeed he was working days and nights with no rest whatsoever (except for three weeks of a leave for cure in Vichy and a week of travelling that were still used for conferences and lectures attending and for helping ill acquaintances all over the world after my mother’s illness nearly killed him of severe Jaunenis B and hepatitis) as human malaise and suffering is the one thing in the world that knows no rest and sick leaves. A clinic that has soon to become an institution of care and community medicine and that lasted until his last days where I shut it down myself.

Despite all the protests and riots that his assignment and shifting/promotion caused he went to Jaffa. And Jaffa was a place where new immigrants from the Balkans, Central Europe and the orient have taken the place of the Palestinians who fled, made to flee and went away to their summer houses in Lebanon, never to be able to return. In short, Jaffa was a dynamite ready to be exploded and blown up in any second, far more than any other place in this beloved, bloody, tearful land of milk, honey, tears and blood (Rabin, 1993).

Israel and its medical institutions, after its creation from the British mandate, was a very sensitive place full of high tensions. It was a miracle of birth. Miracle made by despair and hope and necessity to live, go on and survive. Jews from 200 countries of every and any religious affiliation, ethnicity, colour, shape, ideologies, values, history and contexts (Edelman, 1996), illness and malaise have joined whatever there was left from the Palestinians who for one reason or another has chosen to stay. Holocaust, war, conflict, destruction and hope for a better future. Doctors who came from the same chaotic mess as everyone else and who were part of it. Tension, chaos, anger, suffering, malaise, post-holocaust, post-death and destruction, post-a very bloody war of liberation and in order to be liberated, a destruction of another people and their livelihood. And my grandfather who tried to order, sense-make, heal, improve, construct and hope and fulfil and realise. Come to think about, this very practical practitioner, at/with heart, was doing extremely successfully, what my, the thinker of human existence, declared mission is to do to academia, academic work, accommodation and conception with/of human existence and social sciences and the humanities. Construct after the destruction, alienation and disengagement.

Jaffa’s medical institutions, under my grandfather’s rule was the only place in Israel and its medical institutions in those impossible circumstances not to have scandals, riots and severe tensions. Jaffa, now, is part of Tel-Aviv and where a harmony reigns and is the only place in Israel where Palestinians and Jews live together in the same buildings in total harmony, in the midst of all this horrific war and bloodshed, which still leads to many Arabs to be harassed and attacked as soon as they leave Jaffa to main Tel-Aviv-Jaffa. I was born in Jaffa. Except for my launch, I have never actually lived there. I am a man of the world. I have lived in many places/countries. I am welcome everywhere and everywhere I live becomes my home. Jaffa is the one place in the world I feel most at ease in and with, although many of my Jewish visitors from abroad refuse and are too frightened to enter Jaffa and have made promises to their spouses not to follow me there. Windows-Channels of Communication’s stronghold is in Jaffa.

In his biography, written by Sharet (1990) he discussed in great details how he did and managed it. I choose a few episodes that I know them from many others individuals’ accounts. I decided to describe it in the first form of the ‘I’.

1. ‘One morning, I enter my consultation room and find it full of people. I entered and commenced handing out medical equipments and tools to every/any one present, without saying a word. Finally, when this handing out operation was put to conclusion, I shouted “and now work”. This taught them to calmly wait for their turn and to know that with Dr. Prof. Beer it is impossible to play games”. Still, they loved and adored me and thus respected me and my volition. Why? Not because of me. This quality to be loved by people, I inherited – perhaps from my father; perhaps from my grandmother ”Hana the mother of orphans”. Some said once about me, Dr Beer loves and adores people and thus people love and adore him. I heard and I did not deny.’

2. I worked – and a lot: In my [state/institution AS] practice from eight in he morning to one in the after noon and in those few hours I have attended to about hundred patients. I worked fast. At one o’clock in the after noon I went out on home visits [voluntarily - AS] all over the region. On ten AM there was a compulsory break. All the medical staff drank tea together and told jokes and amusing tales. There was a good spirit around us. One of the doctors at my practice was Jacob Kaufman, from Lodge, who only spoke Russian and Polish. He was sent and dismissed from one clinic to another. And I decided to leave him in my practice. Since he could not write Hebrew, I wrote all his official correspondence for him and he signed them without being able to read them. One day, I have decided to have fun with him and have given him to sign a letter in which he asked that all the amount received after selling his home, save Israeli five pounds, would be placed on my name. Naturally, he signed this letter. Jokes like that I have frequently played on my entire staff. And thus, despite the quite harsh conditions that characterised my state’s practice, there was an amicable and pleasant, agreeable spirit in it.

3.

4. ‘I have never known any bias, favourtism and partiality. I have always expressed what I felt and sensed. Although many times, I have regarded the right manner in which to do so as a critique by virtue of humour and humourising, out of certainty that my engagers would know precisely what I mean. I remember that in one of the staff’s meetings I have said of Dr. Tova Berman-Yeshoron, who conditioned her attendance in my delivering a talk/speech, that she is the only man in the social security headquarter, as she has employed district doctors who are working as well..… ..

Flotkin, the head accountant, who has been given very hard time to the doctors and to my staff, has also received his piece. “I am not at all surprised that you hate doctors so much – I told him – had I been married to your doctor wife, I would have also hate every doctor…”….

They were terrified my responses and engagement, ads they have know that I have biased towards no one, but have received my words in good spirit [as a constructive critique AS], as I have always delivered them with smiles and in good humour, jokingly, in a Shalom Aleichem [a Jewish satiric writer in Yidish] manner.

Until I have arrived at Jaffa, there was a great tension there between Jews and Arabs. My practice that has served the entire population, has made a modest [his testimony, in fact it was a huge contribution AS] to release this tension and to lead to a positive communication between the different sectors in the city.

And about optimism

‘The increadible natural beauty in Asino, Siberia, has profoundly impressed me. In the summer there was never darkness as we were at the beautiful north pole zone. In the winter everything was covered with snow but the sun shone. In the late spring, when the snow melted, everything looked like a magical fairt tale. The tree branches that have frozen during the night looked remarkably beautiful during the day , reflected by the sun’s rays. My wife used to frequently tease me in regard to my ability to enjoy the beauty of nature amidst all this horrific sea of human suffering. You have the character of – [and here comes the Polish words that I do not know how to write for I can understand Polish but not write it. The closer term I can think of – and I hope the reader is likely to understand French, the second most important language in the world – ‘Imbecile Heureux’ AS]. She used to tell me that time after time after time.

5. And from an email to Paulus and Jack [AS] in Bath, England, the end of 2003.

I just like to respond to your enquiry and to give you a feel of what kind of a person/educator my grandfather was. I have a number of biographical, by hundreds, maybe even thousands, of different authors, and autobiographical, self-reflective, studies, on my grandfather's life to support this narrative of mine and to show it is very much how it was and not contaminated by my own admiration and subjective feelings.

My grandfather was an incredibly practical man. He came from a very uneducated, formally that is, and poor Jewish family from very anti-Semitic Polish Galicia. He needed to constantly improvise, get by somehow, manage overcome and fight hardships so as to survive and make someone/somebody of himself, a mench, decent human being as he called it.

He was very socialist, though experienced firsthand Stalinism and truly detested it. He regarded himself, firstly, as a worker who worked all his life to support himself and to make a good life for his family and children. Constantly forced by wars and atrocities to lose everything and all his possessions, he continuously needed to start everything anew/afresh. He never gave up being an optimist.

He worked days, evening and nights in his hospitals/private practice/charity work and also devoted his life to his fellow humans, preferring and concentrating on treating the poor for free as he knew that the wealthy patients would be able to get a doctor of this rank by paying him/her money, yet few doctors will make private visits for free (not only my grandfather did that but he also paid for the medications/food/house amendments/rent etc from his own money).

He was very self-confident, sure of himself, charming and physically and spiritually incredibly handsome and attractive. He was incredibly strong man both physically and mentally/spiritually. He was very sensitive and proud, full of dignity and in the horrifically anti-Semitic ambience of the 1920's and 1930's used to physically nock down any attempt to insult and/or assault a fellow Jew or himself. I based the euthanasia I had to do to him based on this characteristic of his.

To be honest, I do not think he would be able to engage in this type of jargon and would ask for a more practical one. He would say he is merely a practitioner/practicing doctor, not a theoretician nor a thinker. He had/has no time for theories/non practical things. He needed to work and practice and worked twenty-five hours a day as he got up an hour earlier (one of his famous jokes). He would say that he respects this jargon and envy those who can engage in it. Yet he is unable to. He was very hones admitting to his defaults and weaknesses. He excused his inability and regards this as a weakness. Couple of times, my grandfather admitted and confessed to me that he regrets very much that he was unable to spend time training in more medical specialties. He said he regretted, after long years reflecting about this decision, leaving his post at Tomsk.

And this is the point I want to make. In Israel there was a big unrest among the doctors for forcing them to attend a weekly training, catching up sessions. They regarded it as a move against their ego and even an act of humiliation. My grandfather, on the other hand, from his position as chief district doctor, claimed that on the contrary he is never able to find time to read and study the current literature properly. This weekly training enable him at last, to become aware and to get to learn and know what he does not know and how little he does know and aware of and of what he is not aware of. Having heard that from my grandfather, there was a long silence and then a professor, the chief rebel against this training sessions, got up and said that he has been lying previously and he actually thinks exactly what my grandfather thinks. One after the other, all the doctors, present at that meeting got up and admitted that they think exactly like my grandfather. The weekly sessions resumed and were a great success. Humour, integrity and humanity prevailed against angst, fears, arrogance and pretentiousness.

I inherited this remarkable ability. Paulus has been known for his inability to communicate his passion and to severe communication when discussing political issues or post-colonialism, racial issues and work. My own views have and are, especially as a Jew and Israeli-mainstream who lives away in complete a non-Jewish environment (Edelman, 1996) and can experience and feels anti-Semitism firsthand, that all discourses that emphasise race, ethnicity and particularly a specific ethnicity, is racist because philo is anti and anti may be concealed within the philo and there is no way to distinguish between the two (Edelman, 1996).

My own believe is to have race/gender/ethnicity free discourse where individuals are regarded based upon their self-constructive endeavours, values, hopes, intentions, life, living, interrelations, dreams, ill-behaviours and good-behaviours, morality and ethnics as self-creating individuals and as beings and beings in the world. I have always called upon the individuals to deconstruct themselves completely and to define and construct themselves in accordance with what they wish to become and be and upon others to completely tolerate and to accept those individuals’ self-constructing/ion missions and ontology. I constantly have been saying and writing that if ‘I’ as individum choose to be a chicken, or a messiah, or a Napoleon (for Laing’s, 1959, influence upon me is well-evident) than I am and no one can and has the right and possibility to tell me that I am not.

This is a complete anti-thesis with that of Paulus. I believe that deeply and passionately. Yet, Paulus has been known to act violently and aggressively and passionately to burst, accuse the challenger with racism and to severe the relationship. Whilst, I am very much known, like my grandfather above, to always be authentic and to loyal and true to my beliefs and feelings and values and to never have any partiality and bias to anyone, I saw no point in an inevitable conflict, just for the sake of barking my views and to challenge. I do want to engage, influence and to make individuals think, dereflect and reflect, if not immediately, then over time and following the inevitable first shock where some of their existed beliefs, values and ideologies are challenged and then crumble and deconstructed and then they are open and free to think about them and about my own suggestions.

Paulus and I returned from a workshop in Bristol on narratives and healing and anger-managements to the Monday group at Bath. Paulus invited me to join him in his car back. We were empowered and relaxed, patient, tolerant and open, susceptible and free. We started a discussion, starting from personal, intimate details of our lives and the suffering and pain, as well as the yearning that they involved, that the workshop was all about. Them moved on to discuss the issues in conflict between us. I dreaded it and was thinking how to be authentic and true to myself and my beliefs and values without conflict and severity and without pathetically bringing my Judaism into the discourse, which is precisely what I argue against.

I decided to use humour as a softening bombardment before I launch a massive surprise attack. I looked out of the car’s window and saw we have just existed the city to the highway to Bath, which would mean no public transport or stop. I said to Paulus. There is something that has been bothering me inside about your ideas and mode of thinking and I am too scared to convey it to you now for fear of being thrown out of the car, especially as I have no clue where I/we currently am/are and do not see any way now of what to do in such an event. Paulus grinned, assured me he would not do such a thing and asked me to be honest and to speak my mind.

I believe, I said, that you are playing into the hands of the racists by being so preoccupied with race and ethnicities. I believe the answer lies within the deconstruction of collectivism, racism and ethnicity and the creation of individualistic self-creation in accordance with what he/she wishes to become and be. In short, you are racist if you are preoccupied with racism and it does not matter if you are philo and anti. The answer is to deconstruct and show that you are no a black, white, yellow, green, Jew, Muslim, Arab, Israeli, European, African, etc but a you. A you, a being who transcends this external/outer categorisation, is, lives, emerges and as a being and constructs itself as itself. The answer is for all others to tolerant and accept ‘you’ as the being you wish to construct for yourself, as one of course that you are no threat to them. Paulus was thinking very hard. And I reached him. As Meursault (Camus, 1942a) told us something ‘a creve en lui’. And Paulus has engaged in a massive correspondence with me and the Living Action Researchers at Bath, with who he has made a complete peace and embraced. I started a complete era of an atmosphere of all love, harmony, acceptance and tolerance, that has lasted for about three months.

At that time I started courtship with a most incredible woman and used a very special type of humour to attract her to me. She is a clinical psychologist. And we were discussing my work with individuals who diagnosed with pathology and my fights against the horrific social stigma.

Indeed, I used humour with my support groups and taught them to laugh at their own expenses and at their own ordeals. I was amazed that within every short time the students have outgrew their master and they have so much perfected this art that I felt sick and grotesque when they have made fun of their own horrific experiences and all laughed very hard in pain. The results were nonetheless, remarkable. They were able to find employment, publish books, find and live lasting and true relationships and know less pain and suffering. And I felt good about that whilst experiencing my own ordeals fighting so hard with biology, human existence and life for the sake of my grandfather’s well-being and happiness.

Now, trying to win this over this woman’s heart I wrote her in the first week after our initial acquaintance at the Bath’s conference.

I know them (especially Milton Erickson and Bateson was part of
anti-psychiatry) very well of course.

Incidentally, Frankl wrote (I forgot exactly where now, I think in the
beginning of Psychotherapy and Existentialism, 1985, I think, really not
sure):

1. That he showed students written extracts from Heidegger and a
schizophrenic and they got it wrong, seeing Heidegger as the
schizophrenic one and the schizophrenic as Heiddegger.

2. He asked them to identify a psychiatrist and a schizophrenic that
engaged in a psychotherapeutic session and they got it wrongly.

In the groups I (Alon) led, I was the only one not on medication and the only one without a history of hospitalisation and 'psychotic' crises (I
used to laugh about it with the group, saying that in this group I am
the only one to be abnormal, since the group's 'norm' is to be 'psychotic'),
I very much doubt that if we will ask an outsider to identify the only one in
the group who was never 'psychotic' and is 'mentally healthy', he/she will
be able to identify me.

Me with the immense passion, with the shiny eyes and passionate gestures
whilst speaking about my life's ambition for 'psychosis' to be lost and
disappear as a stigma, label, definition, categorisation, and for those
suffering individuals to be treated like everyone else, with a small
problem/weakness in their distant past, irrelevant to their
definition/identity,/who/what they are, and personas just like the rest
of us (different problems/weaknesses/strengths to us all).

Most likely, the outsider will pick someone else as the so-called
'normal'. Although I do very much fit with 'society', respected by/in the
community, and very much in mental 'health'. I felt really comfortable in/with this group.  I regard most of them as friends (some I really like, some less
but still like, few not at all, just like in every group of people) and we
go out together.

Juste des reflections, des pensees que je suis en train de formuler et
que je voudrais partager avec toi.  Toi, qui puises me comprendre.

I consistently use this type of humour in all my correspondences, interrelationships.

I have infinite illustrations that my engager can view in the three electronic forums that I have participate this year, my web pages and all my correspondence and my interactions.

1. Anyway, people say I am like Marmite. You either truly love me, or you hate me. You cannot stay indifferent to me and my doctrine, which is the same, as I try to leave according to this doctrine. I dread indifference, being indifferent towards me, as I dread death. I despise, fear it. Moving, touching people is my objective, ambition, becoming and being and I think I achieve this objective.

2. Thank you for this Sarah.

I will probably go to hell for writing in a double sacred day, the Sabbath

and holiday/New Year.

I went with a good friend and colleague of mine (Jewish as well) to a

wonderful Michael Nyman's concert yesterday, Rosh Hashana. It was a

concert and then an incredible first of its kind experiment in visual

effects/raw images and the international language of music using raw visual

images (from 1920's Soviet Union) and music. It had a lot to do with what

we are trying to establish here, namely showing firsthand what it is to be

human in the world, transcending nationality, religion, categorisation and

made up boxes. The very raw and incredibly moving images involved all

aspects of the human experience in the world, from child birth, to sport,

death, killing, loving, relationships, sorrow and passion and they were

interpreted and accompanied by Michael Nyman's powerful, passionate and

moving life orchestra and music. It was an incredible, moving experiment

and experience that words cannot describe.

And it seems that quite a few Jews, including Nyman, himself, were present.

When asked by a fellow Jew, how come he gives a concert in such a sacred

day? Nyman replied how come you came to watch and take part?

….

3. I am confused.  I'd like to share my views.  They can be painful and not
agreeable.  We have to think whether we want a website and forum that will
just indulge and pleasure us or one that will make us think, contemplate,
reflect and dereflect, entice us into engagement and interrelation, whilst
still tolerate and respect us. If we want the former, then I have a wonderful
computer software that I have given to former patients and friends that does
noises of very loud clapping and cheering and fireworks etc etc when engaging with.

I try to share my Me, my inner world, my inner world who interrelates with
the external world.  I wish to show firsthand what it is to be me, namely
an individual human subject, existing in the world.

Yes, humour is human. I do not know any thermostats and objects, or for that matter any other animal and organisms, that use humour intentionally. Bateson was right.

One day, we have returned from Bristol together.

I inherited this ability

that he cared about. He

Rabbi

lights

Who said

Thus the

For years I have attempted t

A strange phenomena occurs when I try to process make sense, to clarify, to explain, to structure, explicate, to word, to express verbally and analyse the very rawness unprocessed

Write about humour and sickness unto death. Jack said that my talking about pain. Bateson’s idea of humour.

Laugh in order not to cry

Self-laughter

Maybe this is what one gets when he/she tries to analyse and structure human sickness

Trying to calm down.

Yes this kind of humour and sickness unto death could be an excellent manner to approach a systematic/analytical/authentic/firsthand/engaging with human existence. Do you think I should read and engage Bateson's writings on humour. I have never read it. Where exactly is it? Humour is such a massive area from Freud to Billig and I'm afraid to drown in this stage where I hope to start producing a completion.

I shall spend a number of days, trying to relate and engage with it and account for that.

Laughing and crying at the same time. Smiling because this is the only way to relate to the absurd and pain. I am very much influenced by the absurd and groteque. Writers like Chanoch Levine, Ionesco, Becket, Genet, even Sartre and Camus.

Very possible that the future of humanity and the baby boom generation is immersed in the absurd and all those ugly buildings and construction that were built instead of the beautiful ones that were demolished by the war and are now demolished and rebuilt more beautifully. Israel and hope for a new future were constructed on the ashes of the complete destruction and the lost of the past, going to destruction and then construction, hope, despair and hope and despair in a cycle of birth and death and birth, feeding life with death and construction with destruction and deconstruction.

Maybe it is part of the self-construction. Some good things are being constructed in the hell in Israel/Palestine at the moment. Feminism knew a great flourish at the new World-Wars, so was liberation of the blacks and other races etc. Maybe through the Iraqi crises hopes will be constructed through 'respect' alternative and alternative and bigger tolerance and hope.

Frankl described this feeling/situation when he was told by an inmate in the meeting between an inmate who was in Auschwitz for a long time to newcomers who were colleagues/acquainted that he is the only one who is likely to perish in Auschwitz out of the entire group that stand a good chance of survival and have little to worry about. Frankl smiled and said he believed that everyone/anyone would have done the same because it is the only way to react to this suggestion.

Jack wrote me

Gregory Bateson (1980) has related humour to evolution. He says that the mere fact of humour in human relations indicates that multiple typing is essential to human communication. In the absence of logical typing he says that humour would be unnecessary and perhaps could not exist. The significance of the experience of humour I am sharing with you as a standard of educative relation, through the video-clip is focused on the multiple typing of white and mixed-race identities. (p. 124, Bateson, G. Mind and Nature, New York; Bantam. 1980).

Bateson, G. (1980). Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unit. Bantam Books. New York.

And I read

Found the book and Xeroxed it, pp. 124/5. When I will be able to get rid of one of the 20 library books that I am consulting simultaneously, I'll take it out and read it. I'll have to think of a way of doing so without just giving a whole review of humour from Freud to Billig, in which case the scope will be be absorbed and well over-stimulated and broad and lose its sharp bite.

--On 26 May 2004 17:51 +0100 Jack Whitehead <A.J.Whitehead@bath.ac.uk> wrote:

>

> Gregory Bateson (1980) has related humour to evolution. He says that the

> mere fact of humour in human relations indicates that multiple typing is

> essential to human communication. In the absence of logical typing he says

> that humour would be unnecessary and perhaps could not exist. The

> significance of the experience of humour I am sharing with you as a

> standard of educative relation, through the video-clip is focused on the

> multiple

> typing of white and mixed-race identities. (p. 124, Bateson, G. Mind and

Ø Nature, New York; Bantam. 1980).

Sunday, 30^th of May.

I have now reached saturation. Anymore, then really insanity, sickness and non-pleasure. That’s it. Two years of complete and utterly devotion and immersion is enough. Normally a good therapy is about hundred or hundred and fifty minutes (three session per week) over five years. Two years of twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week of utter immersion is much more than that. Enough is enough. I am saturated, fulfilled, realized. It is over. I can get the reward of a good being (and good being in the world) and a good, meaningful and contributive doctorate. I’ll continue in coming to routinely checkups every six months or so or when in severe ontological crises. But the exercise as An exercise is over. It will now do more harm than good to continue the way it is and would miss the entire point. Knowing to stop at the right point just when it is perfect, not too uncooked and not too overly cooked is an art. This is the perfect point to finish and wrap up. I do feel saturated, completed, healed, myself. I am ready to go on. I am ready to embark back or for the first time at/on life. And I am wiling to.

This correspondence with Clare has shown this to me. I have engages and was in an ontological need to engage and to connect with individuals’ about ‘self’. I now feel passed this, saturated, nothing at all, rational and am ready an willing to go on living and embarking on life. From this, the doctorate thesis will emerge as a doctorate thesis (a small book, conveying an idea (originality of mind) that is backed up, presented, shown, structured, unfolded, revealed, communicated and conveyed and hopefully contribute and enrich, thereby worthy of publication)

I am looking at my interrelationships, writings, forums, engagements, literature review, thoughts, reflections, journal, both personal and academic research I have a doctorate there that gives me great pleasure. That’s, any more will just be a repetition of myself and therefore unoriginal. The time now is to complete, wrap up, conclude, edit and get and go implement, change, practice, live, emerge and be and be as happy and as gratified and realized that I can be.

If I could combine this file [Write about humour..] with

1. ‘How do I communicate and transform my embedded values into critical standards of judgement?’ word file

2. Paper for refereed journal – 10^th of May file word file

3. Presentation for Monday the 24^th of May – word file

4. How have I become who I am – stories word file

5. My Websites and Webpages – electronic forums – correspondences

6. Working with Jack on clarifying the methodology of living action research and living contradiction and living theory

7. External reading and literature to fit in like the being in the the being in the being

Then I feel I’d have this Ph.D.

Monday, 31/05/2004 – After noon- preparing for the Monday conversation group and to discussing important things, major progress and stride for the completing of the thesis and the work with Jack

I submitted the following entry to the Living Action Research electronic forum when ‘just an ordinary day’ was discussed and conversed by participants.

J

Date: Mon, 31 May 2004 13:43:18 +0100
Reply-To: Living Action research <LIVING-ACTION-RESEARCH@JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
Sender: Living Action research <LIVING-ACTION-RESEARCH@JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
From: A Serper <pspas@BATH.AC.UK>
Subject: Re: Just An ordinary day?
Comments: cc: Jack Whitehead <A.J.Whitehead@bath.ac.uk>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.44.0405310833550.21128-100000@midge.bath.ac.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

My own contribution to the BERA workshopp/day is nearly completed. It still

requires some editing. And I think that's it. I hope to communicate real,

firsthand, direct, living/ed, contradictory, passionate sickness unto hope -

(paraphrase on Kierkegaard) through it as of forthcoming work, published and

unpublished.

This is the reason for my usual disappearance over the last few months. Much

to your grace/blessing, I am sure and positive.

hoping

Alon

Thereby, wishing my condolences to Je kan.

I/we have lost my/our own home in the first Golf war (1991), together with two

neighbours whom I/we adored, originally from Paris. I was sure I'd feel much

revenge, fulfillment, happiness and hope when Sadam was captured and

humiliated in this manner. But I just felt utterly sick and nothing at all.

And was unable to feel those former feelings that I have described in the

sentence before this one.

> I'm just getting out details of the Practitioner-Researcher seminar in

> Bath on the 19th June (10.00 - 4.00 Room 1WN 3.17 of the Department of

> Education of the University of Bath) and will send these round later in

> the week because I'm hoping to connect the conversations from living

> action researchers on our list to the conversations on the 19th June....

>

> Love Jack.

>

> ___________________________________________________________

> List membership settings and archives:

> http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/living-action-research.html

> List videoconferencing:

> http://www.groupintervisual.net/hosting/living-action-research/videoconfe

> rence.asp List help via e-mail:

> LIVING-ACTION-RESEARCH-REQUEST@JISCmail.ac.uk

> List website:

> http://www.living-action-research.net

And Identified a typing error

Date: Mon, 31 May 2004 13:49:22 +0100
Reply-To: Living Action research <LIVING-ACTION-RESEARCH@JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
Sender: Living Action research <LIVING-ACTION-RESEARCH@JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
From: A Serper <pspas@BATH.AC.UK>
Subject: Re: Just An ordinary day?
Comments: cc: Jack Whitehead <A.J.Whitehead@bath.ac.uk>
In-Reply-To: <1086007398.40bb28663f7b8@webmail.bath.ac.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Sorry, this technological spell-checker. I meant my very unusual/exordinary

shutting up, see January and September,October, entries here, especially.

Alon

Quoting A Serper <pspas@BATH.AC.UK>:

> My own contribution to the BERA workshopp/day is nearly completed. It still

> requires some editing. And I think that's it. I hope to communicate real,

> firsthand, direct, living/ed, contradictory, passionate sickness unto hope

> -

> (paraphrase on Kierkegaard) through it as of forthcoming work, published and

> unpublished.

>

> This is the reason for my usual disappearance over the last few months. Much

> to your grace/blessing, I am sure and positive.

>

> hoping

> Alon

>

> Thereby, wishing my condolences to Je kan.

>

> I/we have lost my/our own home in the first Golf war (1991), together with

> two

> neighbours whom I/we adored, originally from Paris. I was sure I'd feel

> much

> revenge, fulfillment, happiness and hope when Sadam was captured and

> humiliated in this manner. But I just felt utterly sick and nothing at all.

> And was unable to feel those former feelings that I have described in the

> sentence before this one.

>

>

> > I'm just getting out details of the Practitioner-Researcher seminar in

> > Bath on the 19th June (10.00 - 4.00 Room 1WN 3.17 of the Department of

> > Education of the University of Bath) and will send these round later in

> > the week because I'm hoping to connect the conversations from living

> > action researchers on our list to the conversations on the 19th June....

> >

> > Love Jack.

> >

> > ___________________________________________________________

> > List membership settings and archives:

> > http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/living-action-research.html

> > List videoconferencing:

> > http://www.groupintervisual.net/hosting/living-action-research/videoconfe

> > rence.asp List help via e-mail:

> > LIVING-ACTION-RESEARCH-REQUEST@JISCmail.ac.uk

> > List website:

> > http://www.living-action-research.net

>

And

Date: Mon, 31 May 2004 15:55:27 +0100
Reply-To: Living Action research <LIVING-ACTION-RESEARCH@JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
Sender: Living Action research <LIVING-ACTION-RESEARCH@JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
From: A Serper <pspas@BATH.AC.UK>
Subject: Re: Just An ordinary day?
In-Reply-To: <20040531071736.A572C3AA7@m-kg321p.ocn.ne.jp>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

I have just read this account that was hidden in my boxmail and see how this discussion was erupted.

I must confess that I am just very horrified and scared by this ordeal. And I go back to my concept/notion/being of sickness unto hope, much like other thinkers of human existence (Dostoyevsky, Camus, Frankl, Genet and the like) and say that the human subject can cope and manage with anything and everything, and to find hope in anything and everything, much more that

he/she/it thinks she/he/it can and far more than textbooks tell us.

Watch out from bees

Alon

Jack is making him engaged with George Bataille’s writing, saying he is the closest thing to my writing.

I wrote Jack

I am meeting David soon before goes on a visit to Israel. He invited me but I am afraid of getting a reality check to my idealisation/romanticing of Israel - sister issues etc.

Anyway, we discussed Bataille's work and David told me that the guy is a pornographer. Well, I hate pornography and really despise sexual perversion/fetishism. I love love, aesthetics and sophisticated erotism and beauty. The whole point of grotesqueness is for others to really and truly appreciate the beauty and the sublime. And human existence is sublime and divine by definition and essence. And this is my message.

Sense-making Alon

--

The Devil.....

References

Camus, A. (1942a). L’Etranger. Gallimard. Paris.

Elden, S. (2004). Re-placing Madness and Civilisation: The Spaces of Histoire de la Folie. Retrieved on the 31th of May, 2004, from http://www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/govn/research/DISCUSSI.PDF

Foucault, M. (1961). Folie et Deraison: Histoires de la Folie a’ L’age Classique. Plon. Paris.

Foucault, M. (1972). Histoire de la Folie a’ l’Age Classique Suivi de mon Corps, ce papier, ce feu et la Folie, L’absence d’Oeuvre. Galimard. Paris.

Foucault, M. (1976). Histoire de la Folie a’ l’Age Classique. Gallimard. Paris.

Frankl, V. E. (1978). The Unheard Cry For Meaning; Psychotherapy and Humanism. Simon & Schuster Publisher. New York.

Heidegger, M. (1962, originally 1927). Being and Time. Harper and Row. New York.

Kierkegaard, S. A. (1968). Fear and Trembling and Sickness Unto Death. Princeton University Press. Princeton.

Laing, R. D. (1959). The Divided Self. Tavistock Publications. London.

Laing, R. D. (1967). The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. Penguin. Harmondsworth.

Nietzsche, F. (1964a). The Will to Power; An Attempted Transvaluation of all Values. 2 volumes. Russell and Russell Inc. New York.

Nietzsche, F. (1964b). Human, All Too Human; Book for Free Spirits. Russell and Russell Inc. New York.

Nietzsche, F. (1967). Ecce Homo; How One Becomes What One Is. Vintage. New York.

Sartre, J. P. (1943). L'Etre et le Neant, Essai d’Ontologie Phenomenologique. Gallimard. Paris.

Serper, A. (1999). A Study of the Conception of Man in Empirical Psychology by Using Textual Analysis. Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Individual Graduate Programme at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Thesis supervised by Prof. G. Motzkin. The Hebrew University. Jerusalem.

Serper, A. (2003). Self-Reflexive, Self-Narrative, Self-Constructive, Individualistic Living Accounts As Post-positivistic Heuristic Tools for the Questions of the Human Subject and the Human Existence in the World. Paper presented at the International Conference of Critical Psychology. University of Bath, 31^st of August, 2003. Bath. United Kingdom. Retrieved 6^th of May, 2004 from http://www.bath.ac.uk/%7Epspas/critpsy.htm

Serper, A. (2004). http://www.bath.ac.uk/~pspas/. See the Introduction, the enclosed writings of human existence and the attempt to study it and the ideas, writings and work of the present paper’s author.

Whitehead J. (1989). Creating a living educational theory from questions of the kind , " How do I improve my practice”? Cambridge Journal of Education , 19, 41-52.

Whitehead, J. (1993). The Growth of Educational Knowledge; Creating Your Own Living Educational Theories.. Bournmouth. Hyde

Whitehead, J. (2004) What Counts as Evidence in the Self-studies of Teacher Education Practices? In Loughran, J. J., Hamilton, M. L., LaBoskey V. K & Russell, T. (eds). (2004). International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Dordrecht

Winter, R., Griffiths, M. & Green, K. (2000) The 'Academic' Qualities of Practice: what are the criteria for a practice-based Ph.D? Studies in Higher Education, 15 (1), pp. 25-37.