Thursday, 13 November 2014

The pen.

Well, as we all know, these past days in developmental psychology we have learnt things about attachment, and the different types that people can have.

In groups we read four different texts, they all had one thing in common, in one way or another, they were related to attachment. I think that the trickiest one to find out the exact meaning of the text, was the one that had to do with reading. But we concluded that attachment is something that can´t be forced. My favorite part of the text was: “Qué pedagogos éramos, cuando no nos preocupaba la pedagogía”, this can be applied to many scopes of our lives. Sometimes things turn out better when we don’t make a big deal out of them or when we are not obsessed trying too hard.

As we were commenting the texts in groups, the teacher made an announcement, saying that he had a surprise for us, in this moment we all gasped happily, at first, I thought he was going to let us finish earlier (I was really tired that day), but for our surprise, he let us chose a pen from inside an orange plastic bag. There were many different colored pens, red, green, black, multicolor…etc. I took a green pen, as I don’t have colored pens, but in fact I love them. When the teacher didn’t gave Sara (One of the members of my group) a pen, I was absolutely sure that it was a sort of experiment, and that he would take them back later.
In fact, a few minutes later we had to give him our pens back I (say “our pens” because he said it was a present for us so…) I felt a bit sad, because I already drew some things in my agenda and it was a very nice green.

I linked some ideas and I supposed that he wanted us to realize if we had felt any type of attachment to the pen, and what we had felt when we had to return it to him.

After a while, when we were still reflecting on the texts, he let us take another pen, this time I was a bit upset so I decided not to take the pen, not that I am a proud person, just because I didn’t feel like taking the pen again if he intended to take it away. But when he finished giving them to us, I thought that he wouldn’t take them away again, and that I would be without my green pen.

It´s not that I felt very attached to it, but I actually really liked the color, and I am not going to buy one because I think it would have been a nice token from our psychology teacher.


I have been thinking these days about my reaction of not wanting to take a pen again, and I don’t think that it means that I am scared of losing it again or something like that, just that I felt “teased” the first time. But as the teacher said, now because of rejecting the pen, I can´t enjoy writing with it. 

1 comment:

  1. Hi Senay

    My purpose was not annoying you with this practice (as I guess you already know). I wanted you create a new sensibility to track how we create our emotional bondings with objects (as we do with people, places, activities, etc...).

    When you say " I didn’t feel like taking the pen again if he intended to take it away. But when he finished giving them to us, I thought that he wouldn’t take them away again, and that I would be without my green pen" it is very important for me that you notice your expectation (he is going to take the pen again so I prefer not to take it). It is your expectation what influences your decision of not accepting the pen, this is my gift (gift creates a context, a meaning of course). And when you realize that is was finally a real present what you feel is again influenced by your previous expectation (or feedforward, as we will see soon). We will see if you can allow yourself to accept it or not... that's up to you.

    But do you still see all this as an example of "teasing" or just an experimentation from me? What other options could you use in order to frame the whole sequence? Does it influence your thoughts and feelings in some way?

    Thank for writing (and also for writing so well)

    Regards

    Alejandro

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