Dive into the archives.
- “Recession Psychosis”
My psychotherapist colleagues knew it was coming, but Saturday’s Times confirmed it: the severe symptoms of anxiety, despair, and even sucidality they’re calling “recession psychosis”— not a formal DSM diagnosis— but descriptive enough. Studies of unemployment reflect that downsizing is the only traumatizing life event which prevents sufferers from returning to their pre-morbid ‘setpoint” of [...]
- Retirement Tsunami
Those of us who have worked in organizations know that as individuals leave their roles in departments, or on committees, vital knowledge is often lost. With single departures, we find that certain problem dimensions are not addressed. My colleague Angela, for example, paid particular attention to economic trends in the staffing of R&D departments. With [...]
- Daily Maintenance: The Job of Curating
Having spent much of the day at my desk, I look back and reflect on what’s been accomplished. Not much on the face of it. It is clear once again, but won’t remain that way. The bills will once again begin to accumulate, anxiously demanding their due. The receipts and slips from purchases and services [...]
- Obama Spring
January 28, 2009 is a “snow day” in New York: school is out (kids whoop!), New York City’s arcane “alternate side of the street parking” rules are suspended. Cross-town buses creep through Central Park. The harsh winter weather also has its delights: the dogs sniff the snow in curiosity, the cross-country skiers intrepidly take on [...]
- The CEC: Stacking the Middle-Aged Deck To Failure
The developmental effect of the “Current Economic Climate” upon the under-employed middle aged worker, is to force the normative later-life crisis of generativity vs stagnation before its time. The crisis itself is to be expected– worked through across the years in contemplation of one’s lifetime of accomplishments and failures. But the additional external pressures of [...]
- The Real Shift in Middle Age Development
The current economic climate in the United States serves as a catalyst for a shift in the normative developmental tasks of middle age. The popular twentieth century pattern of career leading to retirement has ended. Partly obscured within the spiraling numbers of unemployed workers of all ages, is the high incidence of professional knowledge workers, [...]
- Financial Regression in the Service of Banking
Very rarely does Finance so precisely mirror Psychoanalysis. Yet, this week, the financial world both in the UK and in the US achieved a milestone: the peculiar mixture of positively valued and negatively valued assets upon the balance sheets of our quickly failing banks— an unsteady blend which might be seen as “ambivalent”—is to be [...]
- Organizational Coaching for Individuals During Unemployment
The dialogs between the blog writer and the reader begin in the blog post’s generalization and develop according to increasingly particular themes. These are initially signaled by the reader/respondent who brings them to the essayist’s attention. They are then elaborated through successive pairings of letter and response between correspondents. Thinking about this process along the [...]
- Passivity,Activity, and the Current Economic Climate
The reframing of problem as opportunity is the mantra of the current economic climate (CEC). And from within our chanting, whether through gritted teeth or genuine optimism, we have the choice of passivity or activity. Passively, we may be mesmerized by our decrements: in spending power, in the small luxuries we’d become accustomed to, and [...]
- The Current Economic Climate
The Irish, in their euphemistic wisdom, have a term for our shared, global situation: “The CEC”. The term seems to have originated in the early years of this millennium, as the Celtic Tiger began its run; and judging from the bitterness about the CEC on blogs from that time, it must have begun as a [...]
