Contents
Alexander Lobok, Doctor of Psychology, suggested that we hold this unusual seminar for teenagers right in the editorial office. Here’s what came out of it.
The author of this unusual master class for teenagers, psychologist Alexander Lobok, offered to hold a meeting right in the editorial office. We agreed: which of the parents does not dream of their child reading with enthusiasm! A conversation about books… which suddenly became a conversation about meanings.
Participants
- Matvey, 11 years old
- Sasha, 12 years old
- Dima, 12 years
- Vasya, 13 years old
- Sofia, 14 years old
- David, 16
- Alexandra, 16 years old
- Kostya, 16 years old
Alexander Lobok: Just rummage through the shelves and find what seems interesting to you. Judge by headlines. Take a few books, and then distribute: the most interesting – first place, second, third … All the shelves are at your disposal, start the fermentation process – wander, trust your intuition, something not very clear in yourself, take what your eye catches on . No discussion. Alone, pick and place a book next to you. The same request for adults. Even if you work at Psychologies and know everything by heart, try to look with a new look anyway … Why do we choose this particular book? For some completely incomprehensible reason. Maybe then, to effectively throw away or to show off their strength. Here Kostya takes such a big thick book, as if he says – “That’s how strong I am, Kostya!” It’s convincing! And this is a compelling reason for choosing: “I want to take a heavy book to show the people around me how smart I am.” Reasons can be very different, the most stupid, and the more of them, the more interesting. Ask yourself the question: “Why did I decide that this book would be interesting to me?” Interest is a tricky thing, we never understand why we fall in love …
Alla: Guys, there are also good books on the table …
A. L.: Alla, are books important to you or travel? It does not matter that on the shelves is non-fiction, for adults, and perhaps not very understandable to children. But is understandable interesting? All my life it seemed to me that what is incomprehensible is interesting.
Elena: But the choice is not easy to make?
A. L.: We always choose among the incomprehensible. The question is not what children will choose, but that they continue to choose. Sophia has already found two books, but still stands and looks around. This moment – looking around, looking, is the most important. Everything? Great, the choice is made, we remove the rest, throw it on the sofa, let there be confusion from everything … What are you saying?
Sasha: Yeah, nothing…
A. L.: Aloud, aloud. Everything you say to each other is very, very important. Please repeat.
Sasha: I found the book “Dictionary of Madness”, and Dima wanted to take it from me …
A. L.: You are fighting for the book. Who else would like to enter the dictionary of madness? Why are you laughing? You think he’s so insane he doesn’t even need a dictionary of insanity? Does he have his own internal vocabulary of madness? The dictionary is the ordering of our madness. We are all mad, but we do not know how to organize our madness.
Kostya: And why?
A. L.: Good question! Why can’t we organize our madness? Because for starters, we don’t know how to talk about him seriously. What is madness – your options.
Kostya: Some randomness.
A. L.: Great. More.
Sasha: Quality of character.
Vasya: Unpredictability.
A. L.: Fine. More. Remember all the cool moments of your madness.
Sofia: Something unusual, something that is different from everything else.
Kostya: Unplanned.
A. L.: That is, everything that we secretly crave. We get tired of being scheduled and planned all the time. Our parents planned and put us in cells. Here, for example, is a recent remark: “There are books for your age on the table.” But when you take The Dictionary of Madness off the shelf because you are interested (I’m not talking about the contents of the book, but only about the title), you go beyond and seem to claim that you have the right to choose what for some reason interesting. Do you have experience of insanity?
Kostya: Certainly.
Vasya: Schoolchildren always do something crazy … Probably to stand out.
A. L.: Tell me! Has there been anything in your life that has blown you away? When your parents yelled “Stop!” but you couldn’t, did you carry on? It was so? There was a feeling that you are going beyond the boundaries of a template that is predetermined? And why was it necessary?
Read more:
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Arrange the madness
Kostya: How to say why madness?
A. L.: But if it starts, then it is needed?
Kostya: But is this a planned action?
Vasya: Maybe to throw out emotions?
Elena: And if a person cannot explain why?
A. L.: A person cannot explain a lot of things. And we are doing absolutely impossible things with you now. We did not come here to exchange what is already clear. For some reason, crazy things happen to us and I want to understand – why? It’s like asking why we live. It’s not clear, but we ask anyway. So why do we need madness? Why do we need love madness? Have you ever fallen in love?
Kostya: It happened.
A. L.: I can say that thanks to the love frenzy that I fell into, I became myself.
Kostya: Madness helped you realize yourself?
A. L.: Naturally, falling into chaos … You, Kostya, said about randomness? I am measured in advance, laid out on the shelves … Here you are, Sophia, sorted on the shelves? Everyone knows everything about you, and you want to say: “But is it really me? No, I, Sofia, are different. I do not match your shelves, I do not want to match your shelves, I want to understand who I am, regardless of your shelves! Guys, are you being sorted out?
Children: Yes.
A. L.: Do you want to be outside the shelves?
Children: Yes!
A. L.: Because only beyond the boundaries of the shelves do we begin to understand something not about the scenarios that loving mothers laid in us, but about ourselves. We only exist when we don’t match the scripts that have been stuffed into us. Man is always beyond them. Sasha, can I have your hand? I shake hands – for what?
Sasha: For choosing a book?
A. L.: You chose two words that you want to talk about. Moreover, I absolutely do not know what is in the book, but these words are dear to me. I look at the title and realize that this book is about me. Including about me. Shall we look inside? Sometimes a book is only interesting until you look into it. You open it, and there are boring things … Just at random, do you think this book will be interesting?
Vasya: Unlikely.
A. L.: Hello, David.
Alla: Guys, move over…
A. L.: Quiet, quiet, it’s all right, mom. I’m completely stunned by this situation! Are you really sure that some three-year-old children came to you who can’t cope with anything on their own? Which can be located only within the framework of our shelves? .. AL: So, Vasya assumes that the book is not interesting. Is there anyone, some crazy person, who would bet that there might be something interesting there? Yeah, David and Matvey think they can.
David: It’s the dictionary of madness, and madness is always interesting.
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Commentary by Alexander Lobok
“Talk to a teenager about life”
“This is very important, but not at all easy, since the conversation must be extremely honest. After all, this is a conversation about meanings. In adolescence, for the first time, a child needs to realize his personal semantic boundaries. Realize your right to life and the right to die. This means the right to build one’s own (that is, not drawn by adults) trajectory of life. The whole point of the adolescent experience is precisely to cut the psychological umbilical cord that prevents the child from acting contrary to the intended family patterns. After all, if this is not done, a person will remain in an infantile bond with his parents for the rest of his life. For young children, parents are an unconditional and absolute value. They are their starting point. And adolescence is a time when a person discovers his own foundations of life. But parents rarely peer into this emerging world of personal meanings, they do not know how to enter into a dialogue with it – and that is why the world of adolescents remains speechless, unspoken and as if nobody needs it.
Alexander Lobok, Doctor of Psychology, Professor at the Institute of Psychology, Ural State Pedagogical University (Yekaterinburg). His website:
Read more:
- Master class for teenagers “The art of reading with passion.” Video
The ambivalence of love
A. L.: David, I assure you, the most interesting things can be written insanely boring. You can also write in a sloppy way. I take a book, I open it, basically anyone can do it. Let’s do it with our eyes closed. Poke your finger in an arbitrary place. There is! (Pause). Yeah, I’m reading this interesting sentence: “The ambivalence of love …” By the way, does anyone other than adults have an idea what ambivalence is?
Kostya: There are obviously two of them. And then, valence is something from chemistry.
A. L.: And what is “ambi”?
David: Ambitious chemical valence.
A. L.: Not bad, more options.
Olga: Duality. Manifold.
Alla: The opposite of two things.
A. L.: Ambivalence is when I love and hate, that is, translating into slang, this is when I am thoroughly sausage.
Kostya: When it is not clear whether I love or hate?
A. L.: Cooler, this is when you start to bifurcate. When you are the object of your love and love and hate. Is this what happens? It’s one thing to be romantically attracted, and another thing when she (or him) shakes, and at the same time I understand that I can’t live without her. And this discord is the state of love. Am I understandable? I’m about loving someone. It’s not the same as loving pasta.
David: It happens with pasta too. You love them, but everyone brings them to you, they carry them, and you have to eat them, eat them, eat them …
A. L.: It will not be hatred for pasta, but for those people who got you with their pasta. Read on: “The ambivalence of love is thus scientifically justified within (I don’t know how I’m going to say this, sounds like a curse) the most powerful paradigm of the XNUMXth century, which was psychoanalysis.”
Children: Yes, it was cool.
A. L.: Let’s go further: do you at least understand something?
Children: There is nothing.
David: They proved that the ambivalence of love is cool.
A. L.: Not bad. But within the framework of a certain scientific paradigm – psychoanalysis. Okay, what is a paradigm? Somebody knows?
Kostya: Ideology?
A. L.: Almost, not bad.
David: System, assumption.
A. L.: Adults, your options.
Olga: Theory.
Elena: I’m for the system.
Olga: Landmark system.
A. L.: Rules of the game. Some basic rules of the game by which culture plays. And by the way, insanity can be a paradigm. Can you imagine a civilization whose basic principle is madness?
David: Why represent? This is the world around us.
A. L.: Wonderful. Has anyone heard of psychoanalysis?
Vasya: Trying to reveal yourself? Self-digging?
A. L.: That grandfather invented (points to a book with a portrait of Sigmund Freud – approx. Ed.). Give me grandpa. Adults, help.
Olga: Scientific approach…
A. L.: Yes, we remove it immediately. What a “scientific approach”, tell me normally: that’s what teenagers are good for – it’s impossible to speak with them in such a language.
Olga: Thinking about human behavior.
A. L.: Always thought – what is special there?
Olga: We wanted to evaluate what we see in reality, with the help of what we do not see and do not understand.
A. L.: Not bad. Are there other options? It turns out that in each of us there is a certain layer, very powerful, global, an iceberg inside of us, about which we do not understand anything with our consciousness, it is sunk deep, deep … The paradigm of psychoanalysis is that everything that is on the surface … Who are you?
Kostya: Personality.
A. L.: More!
Kostya: Human, mammal, citizen…
A. L.: Here! I can build a giant garden about myself, I can say how much I love or hate, I even write a diary about myself. Does anyone write diaries in LiveJournal? Write. You write, write … But no matter how much you write about yourself, the trick is that there is a certain iceberg, a deep foundation, something deeply buried in us, and this, Sofia, is insanely much. And you, Sophia, do not suspect it. But for some reason, from time to time from there, from the inside, something crawls out and begins to rule the ball. It begins to control our actions, our actions, and that’s when all this mess about love turns out. Intellectually, I understand that I need to stay away from her, but inside something is happening and I am drawn in that direction. And then a person begins to commit a gigantic number of insane acts. But it is impossible to explain to oneself with reason why he does this. Something… inexplicable begins to come out of him. This is the paradigm of psychoanalysis. Everything. Grandfather came up with only one thing: it turns out, besides what we understand, realize, plan, there is something from which we are carried away at the corners, something for which we cannot find an explanation. Am I understandable?
Vasya: That is, you can read this book, but each line must be parsed like this. After all, we have chosen one phrase and have been sitting on it for so long. You read one such line and throw the book behind the sofa.
A. L.: But if you begin to read the meanings that I have just shown here, it begins to be read easily. The incomprehensible must be trampled, chewed, so that it suddenly becomes audible.
David: Or read diagonally – all the same, the meaning is captured.
A. L.: David is talking about something important. We read, we don’t understand something, sometimes we stop and tread paths inside sentences, and suddenly we begin to grasp the meaning … Then there are explanations, comments. I read: “An example from Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, where Hans’s love for Madame Chauchat is played out in a tuberculosis sanatorium against the backdrop of constant deaths. At the very end of the first volume, when Hans finally declares his love to Claudia, in his explanation he clearly explicates (expands) the relationship of love and death. “Oh love, you know, the body, love, death, they are one, for the body is sickness and voluptuousness, and it leads to death, they are both sensual, death and love, that is their horror and great magic.” (Pause). It is clear that this is a different world. At 12, you haven’t lived it yet. But it is somewhere nearby, all the dramaturgy of love strife is somewhere nearby. You can pretend as much as you like that it does not exist, that love is flowers, paradise gardens, and we are walking along the embankment in an embrace. Nothing like this. There is not a single person in the world who has not lived through this dramatic experience. And when this happens to you, you open the book, and suddenly it starts to give you codes, ciphers, landmarks, you rely on them and say: “Wow, but it turns out that I am not alone in this world, in this nightmare.”
The most terrible story about a person is a feeling of loneliness, when there is a feeling that I am alone and no one understands me at all. What does it look like from the outside? Adults around everything about everything is clear. Allegedly. In fact, they lie that they understand everything, they don’t understand anything, they pull the blanket of adulthood over themselves and dictate to you how to. But they are just the same sausage, they just learned to push it aside, everyone learned to cope with the annoyance in their own way. This story is really about everyone. And it is very important for me that now, in our teenage reading club, an adult finds a teenager in himself, and a teenager – an adult. And then the meeting will happen. Okay. Let’s play with another book.
Why do we have bad dreams?
A. L.: The book “The suit and the butterfly”.
DavidA: It’s something about soul and body.
A. L.: “Thus, there may be an opportunity to discover an unknown nook and cranny, to see new faces, to catch a passing smell of the kitchen.” Who thought about what? Who felt what?
Matthew: Visiting?
Dima: Walk?
Sasha: Free day?
A. L.: I read the following sentence. “So at the very beginning, barely emerging from the fog of a coma (a coma is practically death, clinical death), when I was being transported in a wheelchair, I stumbled upon a lighthouse. He appeared before me at the turn of the stairwell where we got lost, stately, strong and inspiring confidence in his outfit with white and red stripes, like a rugby jersey. I immediately put myself under the protection of the brotherly symbol that protects the sailors, as well as the sick, these wrecked poor souls of loneliness. Who understood what?
David: He ran into an orderly.
A. L.: It is quite possible that the image of the lighthouse is a metaphor in this case. “We constantly meet with him, I often visit him when I ask him to take me to the “chinechitta”, as I call the always deserted terraces of the outbuilding, – from these wide south-facing balconies a panorama opens up full of poetic charm, similar to a movie set.” So far, I understand that we are talking about a person who ended up in a wheelchair.
David: The body is a spacesuit, and the butterfly is the soul. All clear.
A. L.: Where? Did you read this book?
David: No.
A. L.: Have you seen this movie?
David: Not. And what is the name of the movie?
A. L.: Also. Have you heard something about it?
David: I do not remember.
A. L.: This is a fairly well-known dramatic story. I read the abstract. In general, what I am doing now is an example of how we rummage through book ruins. We took a random book, opened it in a random place, leafed through it and are trying to figure out whether we should buy it or not. “The suit and the butterfly are the author’s message to the world. In his frozen body, only one eye moves. With this eye, he blinks once to say yes, twice to say no. Thus, from the letters of the alphabet indicated by a wave of eyelashes, words, phrases, entire pages arise. What is a stroke, do you know? The person is paralyzed. Whole or one half of the body. This book was written by a man who suffered a severe stroke that left him completely immobilized. Do you understand what a paralyzed body is? He couldn’t move a finger or a leg. Nothing. The only thing left to him, what he owned, was one eye. The other is immobilized. And inside there is consciousness, life is happening, the life of the soul is happening, but there is no connection with the world, if not for this eye with which he can blink. And then they develop the alphabet with the nurse. She asks a question, he blinks once – “yes”, twice – “no”. And it turns out that through this subtlest bundle, you can write a whole book. Can you imagine – no channels at all. He cannot speak, move his arms, only his eyes. And he builds this crazy channel with the world, and a book is born. And after that, he lives for several more years. A movie was made based on this book. The film is stunning. About how a feat is possible. Search the Internet. More. Any book. “The Strangeness of Our Phobias”. What is a phobia?
Kostya: Fear.
David: Groundless fear.
A. L.: And at the bottom – a subtitle. “Why are we afraid to fly on airplanes.” “In one of the stories about Sherlock Holmes (do you know this figure?), the writer Arthur Conan Doyle mentions in passing a certain naked earth rat, too ugly to tell the public about it.” What is this book about, who knows?
Kostya: Explains the nature of phobias.
A. L.: More options.
David: What are phobias? About the essence of a phobia.
A. L.: A lot of different phobias are collected here. It’s a whole dictionary of what people are afraid of. In particular, they may be afraid of rats – “she is so ugly that it is scary to talk about her.” Do you have scary dreams?
Children: It happens.
A. L.: Certainly. And why do we dream of them? And why do we have nightmares?
Sofia: We dream of what we fear. Our fears. The unconscious gives us signals.
Sasha: They warn us about something.
A. L.: Our fears are our risks. When a person says that he is not afraid of anything, this is the most dangerous situation. Fears are very important, they allow you to go through a minefield. Imagine a sapper who walks back and forth and is not afraid of anything … He easily explodes. The same, Kostya, to walk through the minefield of love. Fear protects us and says – here is the risk zone.
VasyaQ: Why do we dream at all?
David: This is a working out of what happened to us in reality. If we did not have time to throw it out in real life, dreams come. For example, I don’t have dreams at all, because I am an artist. But if I do not work, for example, I travel, without plasticine, without paper, then dreams come out.
Vasya: That is, if we do not express our inner experiences, they come out in the form of dreams?
A. L.: The dream signals that there is a dense content inside that is not pulled out. And sleep does this creative work for us. That is, we can work creatively without sleep, turning our experiences into pictures, texts, or the dream itself begins to do it for us. It is insanely interesting to travel through dreams, especially scary ones! And talk through them with the unconscious. The most important question during work with sleep is what we feel at this moment, there, in a dream. Tell me a dream. A scary one is better – or is telling a scary dream too scary?
Vasya: When you return to the real world, you understand that all this was not as scary as it seemed in a dream. I dreamed that I was slowly losing my mind. This is very unpleasant. No one understood me, that is, I tried to convey to everyone that I was going crazy, but no one understood me, and this feeling was terrible.
A. L.: To all the question – what is it about? Vasya says: “I was slowly (and this is very important!) going crazy.” It was a long time ago?
Vasya: Recently.
David: Nobody understands him. All clear.
A. L.: Of course, this is about reality, about the fact that we find ourselves in a dead end of non-hearing. But here it is important that he is slowly going crazy.
Vasya: The worst thing is not that I’m going crazy, but that no one understands me.
A. L.: Who is in the dream except you?
Vasya: All from the real world: mom, brother, family.
A. L.: This is important – you are not understood in the family. For a long time we have been living in a world where it seems to us that everyone can understand us. But then it turns out that not only those around us do not understand, but we ourselves do not understand ourselves. What is adolescence? When we suddenly discover in ourselves a huge number of layers, absolutely incomprehensible. Starting with the bodily layers, when suddenly a part of the body begins to live a separate life. Boys have one separate life, girls have another. But completely separate. A man lived for a long time in the world. He controlled everything – arms, legs, head. And suddenly a new age, where the life of the body begins, which cannot be controlled, it lives by itself. Like Gogol’s nose – it has come off and walks by itself. The part of the body lives on its own. And the brains begin to live on their own. I do not understand myself, and even more so my close people do not understand. I’m slowly losing my mind. This is a sign that a new reality is coming. What else do you feel there, in this dream? Are you scared?
Basil: It was terrible after, when I comprehended everything that happened. In a dream, I was offended that no one understood me.
A. L.: A man in his madness is closed in a cocoon and separated from other people; if no one understands him, he is doomed to loneliness. It’s like a casemate. By the way, madness is very often described as imprisonment, imprisonment inside oneself, in one’s own shell… (Pause) Guys, that’s it, I have to run. Tell us about your feelings from our meeting. I abruptly end our conversation, not because I have nothing to say or I’m not interested. In fact, I just want to start. So?
Kostya: Time flew by too fast.
Sasha: It was interesting.
Sofia: A little strange. I have never talked so much about books. Usually I just read, I do not discuss with anyone.
David: I have a similar feeling. I read a lot, but I don’t talk about books with anyone. Here you can talk.
Olga: Most children do not read, and I see David’s problem, he has no one to communicate with.
A. L.: Talk about yourself. Do you have anyone to communicate with?
Olga: I post on Facebook.
A. L.: Maybe he writes too?
OlgaA: He’s not.
A. L.: Don’t, don’t, talk to yourself. Were you interested?
Olga: Yes, new thoughts, sensations appeared.
Sasha: It was unusual. I was completely captivated by your words. I really liked that this is improvisation and you are so free in it.
Dima: It was funny and interesting.
Matthew: Interesting and warm.
A. L.: The new word is warm. warm circle…
Vasya: It’s interesting how deeply we analyzed different things. In ordinary life, we would never go so deep into the meaning of words.
Alla: I wanted to say the same thing as Vasya.
A. L.: So you don’t have your own thoughts?
Alla: We just matched. The most difficult topics were raised. Everest is like that.
A. L.: We went to Everest!!! Here’s what we did.
Elena: I was curious to see how the theme that started it all, madness, developed. She never left to the end: she surfaced, fed … How well love, death, a tuberculosis dispensary fit in, everything was woven into a ball. And everything lined up, unraveled, there was no tangle of tangled thoughts left without beginning and end. Thanks!
TEENS Territory: A guide for parents of teenagers