Junk Brexit Stories from Information is Beautiful

The best shave-One for the guys! And one of my favourite reviews! Hail to the Badger!

Review of BOAR HAIR SHAVING BRUSH BY THE Gentlemens Face Care Club

So gentle reader-Full disclosure.  I ordered a jar of the Premium Shaving Cream from the Gentlemans Face Care Club GFCC (which I strongly recommend to my wet shaving community by the way-soft, thick and luxurious) and was contacted by them asking if I would review their Boar hair shaving brush to which I agreed without hesitation given that they would send me a free brush for review with no strings attached.

As a hardcore wet shaver guy of many years I research any advantages from new products in order to find the ultimate shave kit to leave me post-shave happy, energised and ready to take on the World.

One big hook was that the Company sell this little brush as an alternative to badger hair brushes and refer to the un-ethical farming of badgers to produce these products.  Now I have to say I was strongly motivated to find an alternative if indeed my badger friends are farmed to produce such brushes because I was completely unaware that such a vile practice could be considered.  The badger is a creature I particularly love and feel an affinity for.  Here in the UK I have protested strongly against a culling policy by the environmental agency of our government which state sponsors the destruction of badgers due to their tenuous link with contributing to TB in cattle.  A link I should say that is not supported by scientific research and appears only to be made policy to appease the farming community who are not known (with some heroic exceptions) for their appreciation of our wild creatures and their habitat.

I am also guilty as charged because I have used a super badger hair shaving brush for the last ten years and enjoyed it immensely and, therefore, inevitably use it as a comparison with the boar hair version.

First I researched the farming of badgers.  They are wild creatures and will not submit to domestication, wild creatures die when they are confined.  After a cursory internet search I can find no evidence that brushes are the result of farmed badgers.  So then the question becomes-where does badger hair come from?  I have to own to a degree of stupidity here.  I assumed badger hair came from roadkill, but when I thought it through, it was obvious that this would be ridiculous.  Are there teams of badger roadkill specialists helicoptered to fatal accident sites to remove the hair from dead badgers?  No there are not.  Such an enterprise would require electronically chipped badgers flipping a switch on a massive computer database resulting in a quick response team heading to the accident site, rappelling down from black hawk helicopters scissoring the required hair and high tailing it back to site to produce said brushes.  Ridiculous.  Silly.  It does not happen.  There is no Rapid Response Badger Hair Recovery Team, sadly.

It does however appear that most badger hair comes from China, where badgers are hunted and eaten.  (Thanks, I’ll have the Badger noodles and Salt and Pepper Badger ribs with Peking sauce please.  Is that Badger dim sum on the specials board?)

The brushes are gathered into knots of hair and shipped to be glued to their faux ivory handles in the UK and elsewhere.  There is something faintly unnatural about such an industry, like farming cats or pulling bicycle trailers with Llamas.

Boars on the other hand are hunted widely and spend their allotted time, one hopes, completely wild and snuffling in the woods for truffles, having sex and teaching their little ones general boaring skills.

So with a view to this actual review, how does badger fare against boar?  Well, a super badger brush is like being stroked with an angel’s wing, a soft enveloping massage, a gentle kiss on the face whereas the Boar bristle is a tad gristly, a wee scratchy.  The badger hair is much more expensive and it must be said that the Boar brush with the GFCC’s Face Cream was perfectly adequate and a splendid alternative to those awful aerosol driven gels from the supermarkets.  It lathers well and gives a good shave.

The super badger brush with the Premium Face Cream however lathers to peaks of soft fluffy meringues and enables the razor to glide effortlessly over the craggiest of jaw chops.

I’m sorry but there’s no contest.

If you want the best shave in the world, pair a super (or even silvertip) badger brush with the Gentlemens Face Care Club Premium Shaving Cream and some good quality shave oil and show the world a face as shiny as a newborn baby’s bottom.  Happy shaving mates!

ALL HAIL THE CHUBBY 2 SUPER BADGER BRUSH.  THE KING!

ON THE OTHER HAND DON'T BE DUPED BY OBJECTS AND THE PLAGUE OF MATERIALISM.

ON THE OTHER HAND AS WILLIAM MORRIS OPINED, HAVE NOTHING IN YOUR LIFE THAT IS NEITHER USEFUL OR BEAUTIFUL

My MP's response to my query that she would not agree to voting for a no-deal Brexit. Is this based in reality?

CAULFIELD, Maria
to me

Dear Anthony

Thank you for contacting me about the Withdrawal Agreement which we are due to vote on in Parliament next week. I see from your email that you are unhappy about that we are leaving the EU but given that we are due to leave in March it is important that we leave with the best possible deal.

The Withdrawal Agreement is part of the process of leaving the EU and will ensure that the UK takes back control of its laws, borders and money. This means an end to free movement, the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice coming to a close and vast budget payments to the EU ending once and for all. We will also be out of the Common Agriculture Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy. EU and UK citizens will have their rights protected, including for healthcare and pensions. They will be able to continue to live their lives broadly as they do now.

The Political Declaration on the UK and the EU's future relationship has also been agreed. Both sides have agreed to create a free trade area that will mean no tariffs, fees, charges or quantitative restrictions for goods. This is a unique deal. No other advanced economy in the world has such a relationship with the EU. At the same time, the UK will be able to negotiate its own international trade deals from the start of the implementation period. This will allow us to take advantage of the estimated 90 per cent of world growth that will come from outside the EU in the future.

New arrangements for financial services will ensure that access to EU markets cannot be revoked on a political whim. Further provisions will be made for digital, intellectual property, mobility and transport.

Our new security and defence partnership with the EU will be more extensive than any other, with continued cooperation in Europol and Eurojust. Sharing of data on DNA, passenger name records and fingerprints will continue and there will be a surrender agreement to ensure that criminals are brought to justice.

I do however have concerns about the backstop contained within the agreement. Along with many other MPs I made know these concerns to the Prime Minister before Christmas. Since then the PM has been renegotiating this aspect of the agreement and we await to see the details of any changes that are to be made and I will look closely at the amendments being made before deciding how I will vote on the deal. I will of course take on board the points you have raised in your email when considering my decision.

Thank you again for taking the time to contact me.

Maria Caulfield

Member of Parliament for Lewes

BOOK REVIEW BY JIM DAVIS: 'FORMS OF VITALITY' BY DANIEL STERN

My lovely mate, Jim, has written a stunning review of this important book by the late and much lamented Daniel Stern.

To be unaware of developments in interpersonal psychology and psychotherapy is to miss a big trick about how to be a better human being.  Yes, some of it is nonsense and some of it is wish-fulfillment writ large.  But as I have personally experienced in my own training as a psychotherapist and, most particularly in my many discussions with Jim, there is also here the beginnings of a map about how to be more authentically, human.  Anything contributing to such knowledge is most welcome here!  Enjoy!

‘Forms of vitality: exploring dynamic experience in psychology, the arts, psychotherapy and development’, by Daniel N. Stern, Oxford University Press, 2010

Review by Jim Davis, TSTA

One of my fundamental beliefs as a transactional analysis psychotherapist is in the value of being open to influence from other approaches and other areas of study, in order to elaborate and enrich our body of knowledge and practice.  The work of Daniel Stern (see bibliography below) is one of the most significant examples of this for me.  His oeuvre spans infant observation research, neuroscience, psychodynamic and phenomenological psychotherapy, behavioral psychology, and the performing arts!

I first encountered his writing during my training as a transactional analyst in the 1980s, when I found his book ‘The Interpersonal world of the infant: a view from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology’ lying on the floor of my trainer’s rooms.  I read it with a passion – if my trainer was reading it then it must be good - and since then it has provided me with one of the most important foundations of my understanding of child development and the nature of the self, with significant implications for my work as an adult psychotherapist.  It was therefore an especial delight and felt privilege when asked by Celia Simpson to review his most recent book ‘Forms of Vitality’. 

As you may know Daniel Stern died in November this year, and as I write I feel a sense of loss – even though my acquaintance with him is solely via his writing – in remembering the warmth, handsome looks, aliveness and wisdom that I saw in the photographs of him in the flyleaf covers of ‘Interpersonal world’ and his later book ‘The present moment’, and also the fact that this book will be his last gift to me.

To be honest I have struggled to do justice to the breadth and depth of his book in the space allotted to me in this review.  Maybe the first thing to say, not unlike Mr. Bean’s naïve description of the painting ‘Whistler’s mother’ to the New York art cognoscenti, is that it is big!  In his introduction to the book Stern expresses his hope that it will be useful for understanding emotion theory, memory structure, social communication and psychotherapeutic theory and practice, and in developing his ideas on ‘vitality’ he draws upon this broad range of areas of study.  This breadth of ideas is matched by the depth of the book’s focus on the deep structures that shape all human experience and expression – whether that of human evolution, early infant development, neurophysiology or here-and-now phenomenological experience. 

What makes the book original, impressive and thoroughly integrative is the way Stern addresses the topic of ‘vitality’ from phenomenological, cognitive and psychodynamic perspectives, from both the science of neurophysiology and the aesthetics of artistic performance, not to mention infant observation research and the implications for psychotherapeutic work!

The books breadth and depth of its scope, is, paradoxically, not reflected in its length – merely a hundred and fifty A5 pages!  The result, for me, is an inspiring and ambitious, if at times intensely detailed and demanding - but worthwhile - read.  It will I am sure be of deep interest to anybody wanting to understand more about the fundamental nature of human subjective experience, intersubjectivity (particularly in the sense of the sharing of internal states), implicit relational knowing, non-verbal communication or, to use transactional analysis terminology – stimulus and recognition hungers, ulterior transactions, second and third order ego states, physis or the advantages of games.

The key idea in this book of Sterns is that of ‘dynamic forms of vitality’, a development of an idea he first introduced (as ‘vitality affects’) in ‘Interpersonal World of the infant’.  Stern added the new term ‘vitality affects’ both to describe a quality of experience of the infant different from categorical affects (or feelings as conventionally understood) and in order to understand the non-verbal experiences involved in affect attunement of early infant/mother interactions. In addressing the question of how mother’s attune (or not) to their babies within an intersubjective relationship (ie one in which there is a sharing of internal states as opposed to simple imitation) Stern introduces the idea of cross-modal attunement.  Thus where a mother is attuning to her baby Stern suggests that this is accomplished by a sharing of a corresponding response in a different modality to the baby’s expression.  For example, the mothers gesture (eg sudden raising of arms) or change of facial expression (eg raising of eyebrows, widening of eyes) in response to the rising pitch of the baby’s vocal exclamation. 

Vitality affects comprise the form of expression ie sudden raising, widening, rising pitch in different modalities (gesture, facial expression, and vocalization) and it is in responding from a different/cross modality that the mother provides affect attunement. What is important is whether the mother matches the dynamic features of how the baby acted, the same form of vitality, but in a different modality.  This assures the baby that she grasps what he did.  She does not match the content and modality of the infant’s action.  Instead she makes her own choice of modality and content.  This assures the baby that she understood within herself, what it felt like to do what he did.  It is not an imitation because she put it ‘into her own words’ - it carries her signature, it is something she felt too, and conveys the message that she wants a matching of inner states in order to ‘understand’ and be impacted.  Thus the mothers frequent attuning re-establishes the intersubjective field between them, using vitality forms. 

Affect attunement is different from empathy in that it is largely out of awareness, almost automatic, and unlike empathy which involves the mediation of cognitive processes.  Affect attunement shares with empathy the initial process of emotional resonance, but then does something different, namely recasts the experience into another (non-verbal) form of expression. Similarly emotions are not adequate to explain this process, because discrete emotional interactions occur only occasionally, and affective tracking couldn’t occur as a continuous process if limited simply to emotions.  Metaphors and symbols work in a similar way, an example of which Stern gives as ‘I was so anxious about how she would greet me, but when she spoke it was like the sun came out – I melted’.

What is novel and intriguing in Stern’s way of understanding the (dialectic) process of experiencing and  intersubjective sharing of the content of experience (eg the baby’s experience of pleasure or joy in the example above) is that it occurs via the form of the experience (raising, widening in relation to gesture, vocalization, and facial expression) – where the ‘form’ refers to forms of vitality.

In his writing since ‘Interpersonal world’ Stern develops the idea that vitality affects have a much wider application than understanding the mother’s affective attunement to her infant.  In ‘The present moment’ he points out, regretfully, that his idea of vitality affects has not been picked up by clinical, behavioral or neuro-sciences, despite his view of its value in understanding phenomenological experience as it unfolds, is remembered, and shared. It seems to me that this book may represent Sterns attempt to remedy the situation?

His focus in ‘Forms of vitality’ is on understanding the rarely talked about human experience of vitality, aliveness – loosely a phenomenal equivalent of Freud’s drives, and perhaps not unlike the some aspects of the form of physis? In essence ‘dynamic forms of vitality’ are the basic underlying forms of experience, for example the force, speed and flow of a gesture, the stress of a spoken phrase, the way one breaks into a smile or the speed of it’s decomposition, the manner of shifting in a chair, the shift of a gaze, the explosion of anger, and rush and tumble of thoughts – the italics here emphasizing the form of the expression.  These examples also illustrate how all human subjective experience – feelings, actions, thoughts etc have a dynamic form of vitality, and that this form is the most fundamental building block of human subjective experience.  Like with his description of the mother’s attunement to the baby, Stern suggests that all human subjective experience is composed of, remembered, expressed and shared primarily via, dynamic forms of vitality. Whilst we can communicate our internal worlds via language and emotions, it is vitality forms that are the earliest, easiest and most direct path into another’s subjective experience.

In this book Stern develops his idea of what forms of vitality consist of further than before, and in doing so he emphasizes movement – including physical bodily movement, but also mental movement and imagined movement – as the key feature of vitality.  He adds what he calls the four ‘daughters’ of movement, namely force, temporal flow, direction/intentionality, and space.  The elusive quality of the domain of experience referred to in forms of vitality is probably explained by the fact that these aspects are usually obscured by both the intensely felt quality of emotions, and the way in which they are absorbed into the explicit/cognitive meaning given to the experience.

Having introduced vitality forms, Stern goes on (in part two) of the book, to suggest a neuroscientific underpinning for forms of vitality, in relation to recent advances that suggest that the arousal system is the fundamental force for all bodily and mental activity – a force that throws the motivations (eg sex, hunger, attachment) into action, triggers emotions, starts up cognitions and initiates movement.  He suggests that once an experience activates the brain, it will leave an encoded vitality dynamic representation of form, and a content representation, and that the dynamic vitality strand is the most fundamental and primary. The mothers cross modality attuned response will share a similar envelope of neural firings to that of the infants, albeit in different parts of the nervous system depending on the modality chosen.

In part two he also explores vitality forms in relation to the performance arts – music, dance, theatre and film, which provide an excellent example of how arousal-related vitality forms affect us, and he suggests that these arts have paid more attention to this aspect of experience than has psychology.  Like the sharing of experience between mother and baby, via the form of vitality affects, so is ‘vitality’ and ‘effect’ created by ‘form’ in art. 

I wondered why painting hadn’t been included in his chapter on the arts, since in a way this art form also is fundamentally about movement – the movement of the painter in painting, but even more so in the way in which the form of the painting ‘invites’ the eyes of the viewer to move, and how this invited movement creates the effect.  In this vein my spontaneous association to Mr. Bean and the painting ‘Whistler’s mother’ intrigued me, and I did a little research.  It turns out that Whistler actually entitled the work ‘Arrangement in grey and black’, but the art world didn’t accept what was apparently a portrait being exhibited as a mere ‘arrangement’ and so the painting was renamed.  Claude Debussy, however, apparently described the painting as ‘an experiment in the effect that can be obtained from different combinations of one colour’.  The cognoscenti focused on the content - a portrait of Whistler’s mother.  Debussy (and Whistler?) focused on the form ie the effect created, for example, by shading, line and contrast between very similar but different ‘colourless’ colours (grey, black) not unlike musical ‘colouring’ created via, for example, orchestration or harmonic variation.  Perhaps this is another example of the elusive quality of forms of vitality (composition, line, shading, contrast, colour) being obscured by content (portrait of a mother). 

This takes me back to Stern’s emphasis that the essence of vitality forms of experience and expression are about the ‘how’ not the ‘what’ or the ‘why’, and about the communication of content via form.  If we then shift to the realm of the sharing of experience in the psychotherapy room, it leads me to wonder about psychotherapeutic practice as essentially about form more than content, and how this relates to Robin Hobbes’s idea of psychotherapy as an aesthetic experience?

In the final section of the book Stern takes a developmental perspective in terms of where vitality forms begin, and addresses the question of the implications of vitality forms for the practice of psychotherapy.  He poses the question of why nature planned for babies not to speak and not to understand words for the first year or so of their lives.  His answer is that infants have too much to learn about the basic processes and structures of interpersonal exchange.  In particular they have to learn about dynamic forms of vitality that carry social behaviours, and they have to learn this before language arrives to ‘mess it all up’.  In this respect I highly recommend a (re-) reading of Stern’s account of the expansive, and at the same time limiting, effect of the emergence of language in the child’s development (in ‘Interpersonal world’, pp 170-182).  As Stern puts it, these basic processes (involved in vitality affects) are ‘all non-verbal, analogic, dynamic gestalts that are not compatible with the discontinuous, digital, categorical nature of words’. 

It is only in the final chapter that Stern turns his attention to the implications for psychotherapy with adults.  He questions the place of language and symbolization as the only, or even primary, creator of meaning, and explores the idea of dynamic forms of vitality in relation to prosody (ie the ‘how’, manner and process) of speaking, eg finding the ‘right’ words, the hit-and-miss manner of telling, and how a focus on vitality forms can uncover the experience of defenses well before the explicit conflict underlying the defenses is uncovered.

Other fascinating explorations in this chapter include vitality forms as paths to memory, reconstructing phenomenological experience from subsequent verbal presentations, the place of imagined movements in narrative forms of therapy, focusing on micro ‘local’ level events in therapy as opposed to a larger psychodynamic forces/ meanings, vitality forms and intersubjectivity, the role of vitality forms in internalization and identification, and the development of aliveness and authenticity.

Stern himself acknowledges that most experienced psychotherapists recognize the significance of movement and non-verbal communication, and attend to the sorts of implications listed above, particularly movement and body based, and phenomenologically oriented (eg Gestalt) approaches.  He himself stresses that his book represents primarily an attempt to identify, conceptualize and give a name to such experiences, in order to better understand and use them, and thus whilst this final chapter is brief and suggestive it is nevertheless an interesting attempt to do just that.

This (final?) book of Stern’s, perhaps more than in any of his earlier work, exemplifies his breadth and depth of vision and his ability to bridge such diverse worlds - infant development research, neuroscience, and the performing arts – and all in the service of a more embracing, integrated and creative practice of psychotherapy.  Thanks Dan!

Selected bibliography

·  The First Relationship: Infant and Mother (1977)

·  The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Development (1985) and (1998).

·  Diary of a Baby (1990)

·  Motherhood Constellation: A Unified View of Parent-Infant Psychotherapy (1995)

·  The Birth of a Mother (1997)

·  The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (2004).

·  Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology,  the Arts, Psychotherapy and Development (2010)

Jim Davis (TSTA) has a psychotherapy and supervision practice in Manchester.  He also runs CTA trainee, CPD and PTSTA training programmes – see www.psycheinstitute.com.