The Sigmund Dream App, the Ego Trip and the Elusive Soul

The phrase “There’s an app for that” might be seen as a cultural assertion that everything can be measured, rendered and expressed in code.  This is a little more muscular and perhaps insidious than my mother saying there is nothing new under the sun.  Today, the tech sun shines deep inside our souls.

The application, keeping with its binary root, seems best suited to delivering information or providing step-by-step instructions with a big dose of social.  It was only a matter of time before this business would push its way into our interior lives.  Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the 99-cent Sigmund dream app is available to help people program their dreams, using a list of 1,000 pre-selected key words.  A female voice reads the word or words, up to five, while you are in REM sleep.

John D. Sutter, writing at CNN.com, states that “if you take a look at the list of words offered by the Sigmund app, it’s pretty easy to imagine some dreams that would be totally creepy, if not downright terrifying.  A dream, for example, that includes ‘mountain,’ ‘meadow,’ and ‘rain’ might be soothing, but throw in ‘tiger’ and ‘anaconda’ and, depending on your sub-psyche, things could turn south.  I tried the app last night and didn’t sleep well at all because I was so worried that the ‘panda’ I selected would attack me instead of being cute.”

The sound you are hearing is Sigmund Freud turning over in his grave—again.  This movement is no cause for alarm.  Every time he hears someone say a snake is a penis and a cave represents a vagina, he takes another turn for the worst.  This has been going on for fifty years, about the time it has taken the practitioners of depth psychology to codify dream imagery into a neat book of symbols handed out like candy by a therapist to a willing patient who is somehow assured that the narrative of her inner life has already been written by wiser souls. And now there is an app for that. 

The CNN quote seems quite representative and is consistent with our belief in cultural nominalism: we want to name our poisons.  With an able assist from technology, we expect to be authors of our fictions and writers of our dreams. The interest in becoming masters of our fate and captains of our soul did not begin with nineteen century American Exceptionalism.  The ego has a long and glorious past.  So have dreams, held by our distant ancestors to represent messages from the gods and by some present-day neurologists to represent neural dumping.

Long before SEO and our key word consciousness, we have been naming and classifying things, including psychic complaints.  In Revisioning Psychology, James Hillman writes that in the eighteenth and nineteenth century it was high psychiatric vogue to isolate specific disorders by inventing new names. The list is familiar:  alcoholism, autism, catatonia, claustrophobia, exhibitionism, homosexuality, masochism, schizophrenia, and psychopathology.  A famous dispute between French and German doctors regarding hysteria lasted into the 20^th century.  Germans insisted that hysteria could only apply to women because the word meant uterus and if French psychiatrists found hysteria in men, this told us more about Frenchmen than about hysteria.

I’m not certain what Hillman would say about the Sigmund app.  He would say that the psyche or soul is not under our control.  It is “autonomous.”  He is emphatic that we should not take our dream images literally. In the earlier quote, John Sutter is concerned about the panda turning ugly and perhaps tearing off his face.  This is understandable, but nonetheless reductionism.  If we find our dreams populated with weird mythological figures, better we accept them as fictions and perspectives.  It is no more surprising that mythological figures would invade our dreams than they do the big screen and popular culture.  After all, this is our cultural and psychic history, however much repressed.  Why do Thor, Hercules, Eros, Venus and the rest of the zodiac still resonate with us in the 21^st century, if only as cinematic parodies of themselves or throwaway additions to a Happy Meal?

That the panda might go postal in my dream is of course a concern.  We all want to be rocked to sleep with the sound of a babbling brook.  But depth psychology reminds us that dreams are also about pathology, what we hide and what we fear.  Among those things we fear, as individuals and as a nation, is death.

And, if there’s an app for that, I haven’t seen it.    

  

   

War, Political Fictions, & the Making of Pulitizers

These days war seems to reach us through the back doors of culture, long after Dancing with the Stars shows even more bodice and yet another reality show offers the next cadre of ginned up beauties who scratch their way into the popular imagination. This is pumped up tribalism at its campiest and probably best described by animal imagery or better yet, cartoons. I can think of no better presentation of the pain in our national psyche than the cartoons of Matt Wuerken, of Politico, who just won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartoons. Of the twenty cartoons offered on Politico to celebrate this amazing achievement, my favorite is the one asking cartoon subjects to raise their hands if they think we are involved in too many wars. Everyone does, of course, including the politicians and peaceniks. The heavy-burdened soldier also raises his hand but apparently does not have a vote. On a street corner not far from my house, small, competing war and anti-war groups ask motorists to honk their approval. They have been drowning each other out for about ten years.

We do our best to deny war and its consequences. After all, only about 1% of the population has direct involvement in our military campaigns. Most media outlets don’t have the time, money or resources to explore “our terrible love of war” and its consequences. And the public is weary. These realities make the Huffington Post’s receipt of the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting on war all the more noteworthy. Senior Military correspondent David Wood wrote a ten-part series, “Beyond the Battlefield,” examining the effect of war on the seriously wounded after they return from battle and on their families.

Enough will be written about an online news service winning this prestigious award after only seven years. It represents an enormous breakthrough. Most print publications would not have the stomach or the space for this kind of coverage. More than any account I am aware of, Wood has captured the physical and psychic cost of war, a story told with restraint and compassion from inside the families. Every American should read this series that grows in importance as the drumbeat for a war with Iran grows louder.

War has long been a part of America’s mythology—and politics. Whether one has served in the military doesn’t matter much now in a quest for political office. The last time military service seemed to be an issue was when George W. Bush was running for president and his service in the Texas National Guard came into question. Dan Rather of CBS put the issue in the national spotlight on a 60 Minutes broadcast September 8th 2004, providing documents that cast doubt on Bush’s service. The documents were attacked by conservative bloggers as forgeries, and twelve days later, CBS issued as retraction. Dan Rather apologized on the Evening News and six months later would leave the network. John Kerry, a genuine Vietnam hero, would be savaged by the Swift Boat crowd as a fraud and a phony and would lose a close election to Bush.

That might have been the end of the story. Dan Rather, ever ferocious in his reporting, wanders the world for HDNet, chasing a variety of stories. Sometimes I watch these reports, marveling at the tenacity of this eighty-year-old warrior who still thinks CBS caved due to pressure from the Bush family.

Rather might take some comfort in the Joe Hagan’s current Texas Monthly story, “Truth & Consequences,” that takes a fresh look at the Bush Texas National Guard years, an effort helped by the availability of new documents and less reticence on the part of observers now than Bush is out of office. This is a fascinating account and underscores that long-form journalism is alive and well. This piece is worthy of a National Magazine Award, at least.

Hagan does not come to any definite conclusions but sketches the intricate, complicated, shifting mosaic of Texas politics. Whether or not Rather got snookered by fake documents or a plant from a political operative, as the Texas Monthly coverage makes clear, the story was always about the chummy, clubby, back-scratching nature of Texas politics and how these influences found their way into appointments to the National Guard and government in general. Rather and his producer went for the smoking gun when the whole state was on fire and very smoky.

As Hagan points out, there are enough holes in Bush’s account of his Guard tenure to drive a tank through—my term. Did the elder Bush intervene to get his son in the Guard when he was three months away from being drafted and the Tet Offensive still resonated in the national consciousness? Once in, why did he stop flying? Why was he allowed to take a leave from duty to work in a political campaign? Why was he collecting pay for Reserve duty when he didn’t seem to be on base or even in the state? These issues remain important because they raise serious questions about Bush’s elaborate political narrative or fiction. And what will his Presidential Library say about these years when for a time he seemed to be missing in action?

But as Hagan notes, this might be as much about privilege as anything else. Many of the sons of the Texas wealthy and powerful found a home in the National Guard: Connolly, Bentsen, Bush, the grandson of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, and members of the Dallas Cowboys. Maybe Bush was just lucky to win a spot in the coveted 147 Fighter Interceptor Unit known as the “champagne unit,” which was destined to keep the local Gulf waters safe for democracy.

I recall President Bush landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. He announced that the mission in Iraq was accomplished under a banner bearing the same words. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the Huffington Post, Texas Monthly and Politico for not allowing our wars to become fictions, photo ops or mere video games.

And as a veteran, I salute you.

Dreams, Digital Swagger and the Endless Conversation

It’s a pleasant Renaissance notion that the best response to a work of art or a poem is another work of art or poem. Modern-day depth psychologists, some of whom use the language of the Renaissance masters, suggest the same advice when it comes to the dream. Carl Jung suggested we dream the dream onward, using “active imagination” to deepen and extend the dream. The idea is not to kill the dream as if it were a snake in the grass, by instant analysis and categorization. The snake is question is not necessarily a penis or a link to the Garden of Eden. After all, I’m not the author of my own dreams.

We are living in the age of the Continued Conversation, where the responses to magazine and newspaper articles are often more interesting than the original entry. In our world of social media where sharing and commentary rules, we are in a dynamic state of co-creating, whether we are talking about a business project or a work-of-art. Digitally speaking, the conversation might never stop, even when we are dead. There are indeed apps for that end state. Technology makes every permutation possible. Google just posted through its Google Art Project 32,000 renowned works of art using its street view technology. The pixel density is just incredible, taking the viewer back to the painter’s brush strokes. Perhaps this is the final solution to dreaming the dream onward and moving backwards to artistic intention.

I come from a background of the solitary writer/artist. Whether a dissertation, a self-help book, a novel, or a poetry collection, the work has been solitary and individual. I just published a book-length poem, In the Shadow of the DMZ, where the zone is physical, psychological and theological and the subject matter is war. I wrote this on countless trips to Asia, especially to China, but the zone of creation was one of isolation, even on crowded planes at 35,000 feet surrounded by a Babel of tongues.

I will do the usual: sell the book on Amazon and the Kindle; market in select urban book stores; give public readings and the like. I’m thinking about putting on a one-act play dealing with that zone between the hotel Americana and the land of pimps. But this is so, yesterday, so 20th century.

I was completely pulled into an interview with Wired contributor Clive Thompson at Findings.com because, while I was ruminating, Thompson was putting down some very interesting fence posts. He mentions reading War and Peace on his iPhone and writing 16,000 words in notes and clippings. He printed these out “as an on-demand book. In short, I have a physical copy of all of my favorite parts of War and Peace that I can flip through, with my notes, but I don’t actually own a physical copy of War and Peace.”

The interviewer, sounding very much like a psychologist, asks Thompson, is he is having a conversation with the text, and perhaps even with his future self? Yes, it is all that, with all these characters present in what could be a lifelong conversation.

Paidcontent’s Mathew Ingram notes that “books remain stubbornly anti-social.”  He had a point, and this is one reason people love their Kindles that are far from the madding crowd.  I count myself among this congregation.  But Thompson is a little less dogmatic.  He sees the opportunity for the book-comment stream to be a turn-on option.  “You’ll have a digital book, and if you want, you’ll turn off all the comments, read in solitude-‘everyone shut up’-or you can say, show me the most awesome comments, show me the highest rated comments, show me everything, show me the fire hose.  What have my friends or people I care about said about a book?  Are there any actual people reading this page right now that I might want to have a live conversation with about it?  There is so much fun someone could have with these layers, ranging from classic, total isolation to like rollicking bar-party conversations.”

Freud famously wrote that even the slip of the scribe is significant.  If books go social we might have to retire that bromide.  Or rewrite it.  With so many people watching, sharing and commenting, no slip or stumble by the scribe will go unnoticed.  Everything is public.

Show me some mercy; show me my mistakes.

Freud, the Cult of the Personal, & the Trayvon Martin Case

NPR provided the delicious starting morsel: “A woman entered the room.” Viewers were invited to finish the sentence. And there were some good endings and flourishes. The starting point had something to do with it. After all, we were not dealing with a dark and stormy night or the car turning into a driveway.
This is all very human. We like to finish stories and video games. If not finish, we like to concoct. If we do concoct, we sometimes mistake the map for the territory. If we do this at the water cooler, little damage likely done. If we are the captain of the Concordia and miss an island that’s been off the coast of Italy for thousands of years, people die.

Jesse Singal, writing in the Daily Beast about the Trayvon Martin, case says, “We are inherently bothered by an incomplete story.” When we see holes in the narrative, we want to fill in the details. This penchant has more to do with our psychology than running out the grammatical string or finishing someone’s sentence. The subject/object world is straightforward, inviting and insufficient.

With all deference to Freud, we seem hard-wired to write fictions as well. This giant of psychology did not only bless us by putting our fictional in-laws in the room when we have sex, he also gave us a writing style that depends heavily on literature and mythology. Oedipus has occupied a chair in the consulting room for more than a hundred years along with a handful of his mythological friends and enemies. The master acknowledged as early as 1934 that he owed more to fiction writers, including Heine, Zola, and Goethe, than to scientific writing. He was not writing case studies; he was writing fictions. Freud earned the Goethe prize for literature.

We learn early on the difference between report, inference and judgment and how to avoid confusing levels of abstraction. We know from both hard research and the delicious and improbable CSI series that seeing is absolutely not believing. To paraphrase semanticist S.I. Hayakawa, we all have a tendency to see the “little man who wasn’t there.”

We don’t just fake our resumes, we fictionalize our biographies, our lives. The media is full of stories of remembrances of past lives and especially of sexual abuse. The former is a con; the latter more complex but still wide open to our imaginings. It has become a celebrity rite of passage, an affirmation of victimhood. Since the abolition of the draft almost forty years ago, the number of those faking their military resumes—stealing valor—has skyrocketed. Why earn a medal when you can buy one on eBay?

We will have our stories, one way or the other. I am writing a book about my Navy experiences in and around Yankee Station in the Tonkin Gulf. My fantasy is that it will be a cross between Mr. Roberts and Catch-22. As part of my research, I visited the Naval Archive Center in Washington, DC, and got some of the actual log books from the ships I served on. I was stunned by the mundane entry accounts of setting Condition Yoke, for watertight compartments, of standing down from a simulated atomic blast, and the captain’s mast for Seaman Mixed Hair. Except for Mixed Hair, the other items were routine at sea activities. But what about the typhoon that almost killed us, the on-board arsonist, the dust-ups off Vietnam, the suicide, etc.?

Those sailors weary of documenting their travels across the Atlantic and Pacific will talk about “gun-decking the log.” “The sea is always calm, the moon is high, and the chronometers have been wound and repaired.” Should my memory and imagination play second fiddle either to the facts or to the scribe who is writing his own case study about a private voyage inside his head?

A plot is a narrative of events. A story tells us what happens next, such as after the king dies. We want to nail down the plot; then we want the full story. What should or must happen next? By now this is as much about me as the characters in the drama.

What apparently troubles many of us about the Trayvon Martin case, other than the tragic death itself, is that the narrative lines and graphics keep changing. The first photo of Martin shows him as an angelic teenager. The shooter George Zimmerman appears in a mug shot. Later photos show Martin in a hoodie or with gold teeth. This time Zimmerman is in coat and tie and smiling.

Eye witnesses, videos, and leaks from the media and police come and go, adding to an increasingly complicated narrative thread. We are collectively writing a script and this plot is well on its way to becoming a film, whether we like it or not. That Martin’s mother is reportedly trying to trademark some of the familiar chants offered at rallies for her son, will not change the trajectory of the story.

Some judicial authority will write the official script, as in the OJ Simpson case, but that might not change a lot of minds. This narrative has been too juicy with too many invitations to enter the creative door for us to defer. Why let facts stand in the way? I’m not about to turn my back on that contract.

I haven’t seen or heard much understatement and humility, except from the funeral home director who prepared Martin’s body for burial.

The body showed no signs of a struggle. Just a 9-mm bullet hole in his chest.

End of plot.

Soccer, Media & the Culture of Restraint

Soccer, or more accurately football, is my first game. I played in high school, college, and with club teams. I began my training on the streets of North London with a tennis ball. This proved excellent for hand/eye co-ordination.

I realized long ago, even with the gutsy attempt by Pele in 1975, that soccer was not America's cup-of-tea, though I marvel at progress in youth soccer, especially for young women.  My guess is that professional soccer does not appeal to the American sports psyche that demands much more muscle, bombast, and smash mouth. I am not talking about civility and aesthetics here. British soccer attracts its share of louts and miscreants who would be right at home at many tail gate parties in America. When my father took me to Arsenal games, he occasionally asked me to cover my ears because the chants of the crowd were so brutal. And not so long ago the derogatory racial chants in English football stadiums should have shamed the nation.

So soccer has its brutish, loutish, shadow side.  History is filled with accounts from Britain and around the world of crowds rioting in soccer stadiums. I shared too many trips with soccer fans on the ferry from London to France and back to understate how badly behaved these fans can be. No wonder they have been banned from attending matches in Europe on more than one occasion. 

Soccer might have its divinities but its not exactly like going to church. I find myself returning to that shrine called Premier League Football, primarily to watch Tottenham (where I went to school) and Arsenal (where I lived) and resolve the psychic tension I have been wearing all these years. I assume young New Yorkers are faced with the same panic when deciding betwen the Yankees and the Mets. Maybe not.

The other day I watched on Fox Soccer a Football Association Cup quarterfinal game between Tottenham and Bolton. Through halftime the game was fast, tight, and tied 1-1.  A few minutes before halftime Bolton player Fabrice Muamba fell face down on the pitch. Soccer players fall all the time but not in this manner. The camera showed a player trying to turn him over on his back but failed. Then it became clear that this was not a usual soccer "dive" that players often exaggerate, hoping to draw a penalty.

This was different. Medics rushed onto the pitch and started chest compressions. The crowd became silent; some in tears as the reality set in. The announcers by and large held their tongues. Cameras did not focus on the events in mid-field, except for showing a long, shadowy view. After about ten minutes Muamba was carried off the field while the medics continued to perform chest compressions.

The crowd chanted his name. The players from both sides seemed stunned. The game was "abandoned" as was at least the next scheduled match. Football officials and sites such as ESPN provided sparse information. There were some complaints on social media about this lack of information. One post suggested that, if this had happened in the US, Muamba would have gotten a round of applause and the game continued. His team might have worn black arm bands for the following match. Life goes on.

NPR Radio suggested this was unusual behavior for the often rabid British football fan and the outpouring of religious goodwill a little surprising given England's very secular status. Whether the crowd had its own intimations of mortality one can only guess. But the fans behaved well, Fox Soccer behaved well, and the local press behaved well. After all, it was only a game.

Most impressive to me was the respectly media silence after someone has suffered cardiac-arrest on national television and in plain view. Fox made no attempt to drag in a medical specialist to explain what had just happened. No mikes pushed in faces.

Fabrice Muamba, a very fit 23-year-old, had a heart attack and was near death.

And millions knew it and showed it.

(At this writing the Associated Press reports that Mr. Muamba is breathing independently and showing "encouraging signs").

(As of this writing Muamba
       

Health, Pink Slime, and the Making of Soul

So I learned today that male fruit flies shunned by their female counterparts are attracted to food that is spiked with alcohol. This is courtesy of the Journal Science. The finding makes a great deal of sense. When a man's March Madness bracket collapses or he gets dumped or realizes that he had been caught in a Mother Complex all his woeful adult years, he probably turns to booze. Probably should turn to booze.

Earlier in my career I wrote health articles and books for a number of publishers, including Prevention magazine. I wrote about what I knew and didn't know. As a runner I was comfortable writing about the activity. How can I forget the first sentence of an unremarkable article: "Like a deer I told myself so quick and nimble was my gait." I must have been reading Wordsworth and chasing his cloud on my daily trot. My chief editor forgave this mix of hyperbole and vanity and let me keep my job another day. Thanks Mark.

For another piece I nosed around pharmacies in Bethlehem and Allentown, Pa., asking people about their drug purchases. Some actually provided the information, apparently unaware that there must have been a HIPPA law for journalists.  Legal restraint didn't prevent me from writing a self-indulgent piece, "Under a Rainbow of Drugs." At that time I hadn't introduced myself to the pharmaceutical industry who would later become my new best friend.

I was on even less solid ground when writing about use of the trace element selenium to protect against prostate cancer, though that is what the medical literature suggested at the time. And therein is the rub. Sorry guys.

Prevention got an early and healthy leg up on the competition, such as it was, by subscribing to the dozens of available medicals journals available at the time. We mined this gold and used it to bring new, topical advice to milllions of readers in a timely manner fit for Middle America. But this kind of insight and editorial policy was a breakthrough and became a basis for Rodale's powerful health franchise.

But that was then. Now everyone gets the journals in digital form on the same day and we can all pontificate about trending fruit flies or why men's brains change organically when a woman enters the room. The more thing change, the more I stay the same.

I am reading a book, One Hundred Years of Therapy and the World Is Getting Worse," by Dr. James Hillman. The recently-deceased Hillman is a provocateur and occasional thorn in the side of Freudian and Jungian psychotherapists. But his provocation has a purpose. In his opinion Freud and Jung, both products of the 19th century and who knew something about neurosis, tied therapy too closely to the science-of-the day, to the detriment of soul (psyche = soul). So we have the Id, Ego, and Superego--whatever they mean--and little time for other aspects of psyche, including creativity, the imagination, and even a healthy appreciation of death. Think of B.F. Skimmer and company. But at least we have the pharmaceuticals to help us over to the other side.

I rarely watch the network evening news having long ago realized that all the stories are basically the same, no matter who is sitting in the anchor chair. And TMZ happens to broadcast in the same time slot.  But I broke my own rules the other night and wandered from ABC, to NBC, to CBS. I can't remember a single story but remember all the pharmaceutical advertising, confirming that my expensive sales training is finally paying off.  Though I wasn't employing a set-top box I think every major advertisement on the three networks was from pharmaceutical companies, whether to counter gas, indigestion or RA.  Advertising for Cymbalta and other anti-depression drugs hang over the evening news like a dark could and must tell us something about the American psyche. Throw in sleep medications, usually delivered on angel wings, and we are really in trouble. The key is in not listening to the Rosseau-like fable and watching graphics that celebrate the brand but to the sobering list of side effects that roll off the narrator's tongue like water over perfectly timed rocks. I know; it's just advertising. But I also know dealth when I hear, smell and see it.

I don't know the intended demographics but assume, given the profitable love affair with pharma, the networks must be talking primarily to the Baby Boomers who are quickly aging here. Dr. Hillman has suggested that psychotherapy, including the "inner child" movement, has created a population of self-centered. juvenile adults who are riding into the sunset on their comfortable solipsism. Seventy is the new fifty. This allows me much more time to be Peter Pan and go the way of the fruit fly.

The democratization of health and fitness coverage is an abolute blessing and is hardly restricted to America.  But you don't have to ride the #1 train in the Bronx to realize that we are going on fifty years of the health and fitness movement and parts of our world are getting worse.  New York is probably more aggressive and in-your-face about serious health problems, including obesity, diabetes, and heart problems and this effort is indeed salutary.  The #1 train is itself a gallery of warnings and what some would call the accoutrements of the Nanny state.

Hillman might suggest this is only half the problem. The real issue is the state of our food, the structure of our neighborhoods, and loss of a sense of place. The Bronx is a perfect example of an area that  has been violated by the network of highways that have sliced mainly low income areas, the inaccessibility of fresh fruits and vegetables, and the sheer danger of walking in a city that prides itself in being a "walking city."

Pink slime, that odorous side product of industrial meat production, is getting a lot of attention lately, thanks to an attentive social media population who have turned up their noses at this offering, largely because the pink slime slop is fed to school students.

Perhaps it's better that this concoction does not go away so fast. If we keep it under our noses for a bit longer, we might realize this is not only about the texture of my sloppy, Sloppy Joe. It also tells us something about the world a lot of us live in.

Hillman suggests we get back our animal noses and move out of the perfumed gym.

He calls this soul-making.

This might be a good and healthy start.

  

The Psychology of Technology

At least three million people have watched the video of a father shooting his daughter's laptop with a 45 mm revolver because she had posted a disparaging message on her "hidden" Facebook wall. Not hidden enough because her IT father found it and took sweet, if un-fatherly, revenge by shooting the computer with nine exploding hollow point rounds, one apparently for each transgression. Whether he knew nine was a symbolic number and highly charged, one can't be sure. He certainly knows cats have nine lives and maybe that Dante's Divine Comedy had nine circles. If so he might have sentenced his daughter to that rung. We will forgive him if he doesn't know that nine is a very good number in Chinese because when pronounced it sounds like the Chinese word for long life. One hopes the daughter has a similar fortune.

As expected this trigger happy gentleman made the morning television rounds and came across as  educated and reasonable. He simply took umbrage at an un-daughterly insult delivered by a technology he had spent $130 and half-a-day upgrading, thus rubbing more salt into the wound. The thumbs up/thumbs down polling, like Nero in the coliseum, stacked up favorably for the father who played to his base by hanging onto a cigarette too long.

In psychological terms this was his shadow side erupting, dressed up for morning television, over which he had little control, even though his language seemed measured. He simply showed his dark side where he was joined archetypally with the rest of us, mainly men, who have wanted to put a foot through a television when our horse didn't come in as ordered.

I worry about whether there are enough guns in America to control or silence the wash of devices that are coming to our shores, driven by upgrades every six months or so. The tech blogger are already anticipating when the iPad 19 will be released.

During the day I frequently spend time with OEMs, device manufacturers and carriers and they like the sound of the surf. By and large their business models are predicated on the proposition that consumers in the West (and increasing in BRIC nations and the developing world) will upgrade their electronics on a regular, predictable basis. The fear that the tablet would kill the PC and certainly the netbook and perhaps take a chunk out of high-end smartphone category has not proven to be true to date. A rising tide lifts most boats. IGR research shows that by 2014 families will own 5-8 devices and probably more. We contiinue to be surprised at how the tablet is much more than a lean-back, media consumption device. Nielsen reports that American families increasingly consider the tablet as playmate, teacher and babysitter. I haven't seen many babies leaning back.

You can't shoot what you don't see.  I recently attended a fascinating Big Data Sandbox event at Forbes. Data sets are certainly getting larger and we are becoming much more efficient in "scrubbing" raw data.

Whether following Twitter feeds or another big data source, we can visualize global traffic, tastes and passions by latitiude and longitude. And we can watch the movement of data in real time, including when apps are clicked on. We can watch how memories and ideas spread across New York City. The data tells us that people movement within a metropolitan area is 90% predictable.

Of course, this kind of analysis is the backbone of Foursquare's business that is led by 1.5 billion check-ins. The company can use data visualization to track the rhythm of nations, to see ideas spread and chart friendship connections. We have become or will become data points.

Stephen Wolfram's blog, "The Personal Analytics of My Life," shows how the author developed his own archaeology of data by charting along a distribution model his emails, key strokes, phone time, text revisions and even steps taken in the last two decades. He acknowledges such an extreme interest in personal analytics might seem a little nerdy but suggests there are stories and meaning to be found in personal data. And he hasn't even gotten to curated medical informaiton, GPS tracking and room-by-room sensor data.

I read that old Twitter tweets are being mined by companies, presumably for advertising purposes. So every key stroke is forever alive, meaningful, and probably worth something.

During the day I drown in data. At night I have been taking depth psychology classes, with a focus on C.G. Jung and  the post-Jungian, James Hillman. The Freudians can address whether we are spending too much time with devices and what that says about our mothers, sex lives and dark caves.

Jung and Hillman spoke of the collective unconscious, the metaphorical home for thousand of years of cultural images. This is a imagistic rather than metaphysical or physical zone.  For example, the Greek gods, including Zeus, Aphrodite and Venus, who appear in our day talk and customs, dreams and nightmares, are not real and provide no theology. They are fictions, fantasies and represent an imagistic way to reach the deeper part of ourselves. They are a way "in," a perspective.

I'm trying to better understand the impact of social media and Big Data on depth psychology. What happens to consciousness and cognition when digital in the most universal sense disrupts our psychologies in ways that we have not experienced before. This is a long way from what now seems the orderliness of the Industrial Revolution and the various incarnations in the 20th century.

Descartes gave us the mind/body dualism and this has hobbled our religion and politics for four hundred years. The cultural historians provided the same kind of reductionism, represented by the man/machine dualism. Poetically speaking, the machine would be represented by the pure high-flying Apollo and his crowd.  Man or the soul of man might be represented by Hermes, our guide through the muck and lower levels where the stuff of analysis is found.

But how will Zeus and his crowd stand up to Facebook and Twitter?

Just what is Trending and Pending, psychologically speaking?