Mentioned this “new science” web site once before (in connection with an Owen Barfield review). The net result is one of the whackier, crankier, sets of ideas for bringing the spiritual to bear over the classical objective scientific, and I can’t find much to identify with, except an enormous “Reader’s Journal” of books and other texts that Bobby Matherne has read and reviewed.
[Linked thanks to a search cross hit on my earlier post.
Love this Hoffenstein quote – very much from
the Wordsworth school of “Murder to Dissect”.]
Little by little we subtract,
Faith and fallacy from fact,
The illusory from the true,
And starve upon the residue.
– Hoffenstein, 1933
As well as popular science, Barfield, Herrigel, anything “Zen and the Art …” (except Pirsig) there are dozens of Rudolf Steiner (of Anthroposophy fame). Lots of good sources on the right lines.
I knew Doyle Henderson back when he first published his personal magnum opus “New Truths About Your Emotions”. At the time he published, he had about as close as anyone had gotten to unlocking what finally revealed itself to be Memory Reconsolidation, which has since shown serious signs of being psychotherapy’s honest-to-god E=mc^2 moment. Henderson wanted to save the planet from neuroses and complexes, and he ALMOST had the keys to the kingdom (which now reside with a host of transformational disciplines which *restore* emotional health, rather than simply lessen trauma’s burden a-la CBT.
I met Bobby Matherne only briefly. I was suitably unimpressed. His Hubbard-style extrapolations and obfuscations on Henderson’s life’s work frankly disgusted me. I don’t know whether he was trying to create a cross between NXIVM and Scientology or was just sufficiently off his nut enough to see God in something that only offered up a worthy prophet. But he sure didn’t honor Henderson’s work. Doyletics? Are you KIDDING me??? He claimed that Henderson endorsed Matherne’s cultified take on regression therapy. I knew Doyle well enough to wonder if he was just disheartened enough with the response he got from “New Truths” that he would have given his blessing to Matherne’s warped take on the transformational process that Henderson so clinically described, thinking that ANY means of getting his message out was better than none at all. He was an ex-NASA engineer, and wrote like an ex-NASA engineer trying to write mass-market nonfiction … badly. And that’s a shame. Also a shame that he did a lot of remarkable therapy with a lot of people and I don’t think he ever got the therapy that he had pioneered. He actually asked ME for that and I turned him down. Thirty-five years later, I’m still not sure that I made the right choice.
“New Truths” is only a footnote in psychotherapy’s history now, but I’ve discovered to my surprise that it’s still read with intent, and appreciated, by addiction counsellors, transformational therapists, self-help historians and casual readers interested in how transformational psychotherapy finally broke through to the prominence that it has today.
Thanks for the op to spout off about a man whom I will always respect, and another man whom I hope some day to think of with something other than disgust. Doyle was no hero, and certainly no genius. But he deserved at least a footnote in the history of mental health treatment.
Thanks for your thoughts Cub. Agree about Matherne but I did find Henderson’s ideas (as summarised) at least interesting. I captured some thoughts here, about the same time as this post https://www.psybertron.org/introduction-to-doyletics
I will take a look at his original work, thanks for the reference.