Playing catch-up for class 1: I thought Tina's story, together with some of the other readings (especially Teenagers Are Telling Us Something is Wrong with America), gets at a deeper issue of undervaluing childhood and the opinions of those going through it. There's a larger cultural sense of childhood as a time of high transience and adaptability, and the context that Perry gives for the field in the 80s was of one that had a difficult time ascribing permanent or semi-permanent qualities to young people (as evidenced by the DSM-3 lacking diagnostic criteria for childhood PTSD). However, I also think that Perry introduced a good tension early on between the conventional wisdom of the field and the practice intuition of service providers: there are limitations to the extent to which categorizations, diagnoses, conceptual frameworks, etc. inform our work with individuals and there is also no substitution for developing a deep understanding of the key influential factors in an individual or group's experience in and outlook on the world.
For our second meeting, I found the idea of temperament very interesting. I think I've exerted a lot of wasted energy in my own life rebelling against the idea of having semi-fixed characteristics or patterns to my own detriment when many were fairly obvious and would have been helpful (would be helpful) to have come to terms with and understand earlier and more intimately. It also creates an interesting tension with so-called "change work," and the way we as individuals and clinicians ought to understand to balance between deeply rooted, faily fixed traits (that we can work to understand and potentially temper when they affect a client negatively), and things that we ought to understand as more fluid or dynamic (things that can actually "change".) I'll be honest, from the standpoint of identity all the way up to social organization I struggle with the static and dynamic elements of complex systems--when to apply analysis to understand things as they "are" and when to apply imagination and creativity to think of potentially better alternatives. I appreciated the historical context from the Rettew reading to get a sense of how psychology and social work have shifted views over time on the idea of temperament and I look forward spending more time with the idea moving forward in the course.