What I am about to say will make some people stand up and shout “hooray!” It will make others blush with embarrassment. Either way, take this advice and make your life a little bit easier.
This is about email etiquette. When you are exchanging emails with friends and family, do whatever you want. But when you are conducting business, either as the customer or as the merchant, you need to observe some common rules.
First, I am constantly amazed, on a daily basis, how many people will send me an email without signing their name! C’mon! If you send me an email without signing your name, my first impression of you is “LAZY BUM.” Right or wrong, that’s what you project if you don’t bother to sign your name. It’s a common courtesy to sign your full name.
Here is the rule: If it’s worth sending, it’s worth signing.
This is just like writing a paper letter to a company. You should tell them who you are. Always sign your first and last name.
I got an email the other day from a customer that had NO name at all, and all it said was…
“i lost my psswrd”
That’s it! How lazy is that? That’s all it said. No name, no contact information. After spending a few minutes checking my database (grrrrr), the email was not on file. In other words, they were contacting me now with a different email address then they signed up with and they were too lazy to tell me who they were. How can I help this person?
So I had to email the person back and start trying to extract basic information out of them so I could help them. It was like pulling teeth. This is really irritating. And get 10 or 20 of these a day and it becomes a gigantic pain in the you-know-what. You will soon understand this when you get an email from one of your own customers who needs the download link for your ebook again because they lost the link. Hey, we all lose links and info from time to time. However, an email that says “pls send link” with no name or contact details doesn’t cut it. You’ve got to know who they are first in order to help them. So make sure when you contact people in a business setting that you do so properly. You will save them and YOU some valuable time.
Second, do not leave the subject line of your emails blank. Not only does it look like SPAM, and some people won’t even bother to read it, but it makes you look LAZY! Put a subject line in your emails.
Third, get rid of that silly background color, flowers, smiley faces, pictures and all that other junk. Many email services block those pictures now anyway, mine does. Oh, and that beautiful email you think you are sending shows up as bunch of ugly boxes with red X’s in them. I even get emails where people have brown writing on a black background. What were they thinking? I can’t even read the darn things and have to copy and paste it into Microsoft Word to even figure out what their email is saying. Just a white background and black letters is fine, thank you.
In a world where common courtesies seem to be going down the drain, take some pride and be one of the people who project a smart, professional image. Not only will it make you look better, but it will save you time and energy.
Copyright 2006 Jeff Yancey
Jeff Yancey is the author of The Pegasus Formula: How To Create A Perpetual Traffic Generator and Get Lots of Real Traffic To Your Website located at http://www.pegasusformula.com
It is the nature of soul to grow, to heal, and to love. As we
enter into the world, we emerge as a tiny child. We are open. We
do not have conditions placed on us by our parents or ourselves.
We have not closed ourselves off from any possibility. It is
though the world lay at our feet. We are a bundle of
unconditioned purity.
As we age, conditions are placed on us to direct us along our
paths intended to keep us from harm. Even if we manage to stay
out of harms way, we move into a state of stimulus-response
reactions toward life. This draws us further and further away
from the natural state of pure being we came into the world with
as an infant.
How can we return to our natural state of being? How can we call
our soul back and gain a sense of spiritual well-being? The
following are ways we can return to the wholeness and healing we
seek as spiritual beings incarnated into the human race:
1. Do Something Creative.
Creativity engages our heart, our mind, and our imagination.
These activities allow us to utilize our whole being. Our
attention moves from outer expressions of the world and enters
the inner dynamics of living giving rise to our heart and our
imagination. When our heart and our imagination are given
attention, we enter into the realm of insight. Insight is our
ability to see from within just how sacred and magical our lives
really are.
In the realm of soul, our humanity becomes sacred. Through
creativity we are aware how life flows through us and not from
us. The more we identify with these qualities of attention
flowing through us, the more we are identifying with qualities
residing in us that are whole and healing. It is our natural
state.
2. Spend Time With A Child.
Children have a way of drawing our attention away from
activities and responsibilities defining us as adults. All a
child wants to do in this world is have fun. They seem to never
tire of such activities. Children are constantly motivated by
play.
As adults, we tend to think of play as wasted time. Adults who
lose a sense of play and joy in their lives are in danger of
losing self-motivation. The kind of self-motivation I am
referring to involves the desire to have fun in life. This can
lead to a depressive state lacking creativity, spontaneity, and
the heart of a child.
Each of us has the heart of a child within us that never tires.
It is the part of us fully participating in and with life. As
our imagination and heart begin to guide us over the mind, we
are in soul. In soul, our mind is in its proper perspective.
This part of us is our inner awareness not bound by the
pressures of the world. When we return to soul, the possibility
of living whole and healed becomes a reality.
3. Become A Child.
The next time you look into a child’s eyes try to feel their
heart. Notice the difference and similarities of your heart and
their heart. Is there a difference? Is this awareness a long or
short distance from where you were as a child?
What happened to that little boy or little girl inside you?
Since we cannot retrieve childhood physically, maybe we can from
within. Remember your past as a child - the good times and the
bad times. As you look at your life through the eyes of a child,
recall how active your heart and imagination were. Embrace it.
Let this inner vision penetrate your entire awareness. Let go of
your adult interpretations of your childhood and view it with
innocence and love.
Our true nature is to live in the world without being fully of
it. Inside us are endless avenues that can move us toward the
experience of joy. When we let go of our tendency to view the
world as right or wrong, good or bad, we leave behind dualism
and enter into Unity.
This Unity behind all appearances of diversity is a healing
state of unconditional love. It is the part of us bringing all
life into being, leading us through life, and what will lead us
home. It is the force of nature giving us life. It is our soul.
Samuel Oliver, author of, “What the Dying Teach Us: Lessons on
Living” For more on this author; http://www.soulandspirit.org
“I am actually not a man of science at all. . . . I am nothing but a conquistador by temperament, an adventurer.”
(Sigmund Freud, letter to Fleiss, 1900)
“If you bring forth that which is in you, that which you bring forth will be your salvation”.
(The Gospel of Thomas)
“No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we cannot get elsewhere.”
(Sigmund Freud, “The Future of an Illusion”)
Harold Bloom called Freud “The central imagination of our age”. That psychoanalysis is not a scientific theory in the strict, rigorous sense of the word has long been established. Yet, most criticisms of Freud’s work (by the likes of Karl Popper, Adolf Grunbaum, Havelock Ellis, Malcolm Macmillan, and Frederick Crews) pertain to his - long-debunked - scientific pretensions.
Today it is widely accepted that psychoanalysis - though some of its tenets are testable and, indeed, have been experimentally tested and invariably found to be false or uncorroborated - is a system of ideas. It is a cultural construct, and a (suggested) deconstruction of the human mind. Despite aspirations to the contrary, psychoanalysis is not - and never has been - a value-neutral physics or dynamics of the psyche.
Freud also stands accused of generalizing his own perversions and of reinterpreting his patients’ accounts of their memories to fit his preconceived notions of the unconscious . The practice of psychoanalysis as a therapy has been castigated as a crude form of brainwashing within cult-like settings.
Feminists criticize Freud for casting women in the role of “defective” (naturally castrated and inferior) men. Scholars of culture expose the Victorian and middle-class roots of his theories about suppressed sexuality. Historians deride and decry his stifling authoritarianism and frequent and expedient conceptual reversals.
Freud himself would have attributed many of these diatribes to the defense mechanisms of his critics. Projection, resistance, and displacement do seem to be playing a prominent role. Psychologists are taunted by the lack of rigor of their profession, by its literary and artistic qualities, by the dearth of empirical support for its assertions and fundaments, by the ambiguity of its terminology and ontology, by the derision of “proper” scientists in the “hard” disciplines, and by the limitations imposed by their experimental subjects (humans). These are precisely the shortcomings that they attribute to psychoanalysis.
Indeed, psychological narratives - psychoanalysis first and foremost - are not “scientific theories” by any stretch of this much-bandied label. They are also unlikely to ever become ones. Instead - like myths, religions, and ideologies - they are organizing principles.
Psychological “theories” do not explain the world. At best, they describe reality and give it “true”, emotionally-resonant, heuristic and hermeneutic meaning. They are less concerned with predictive feats than with “healing” - the restoration of harmony among people and inside them.
Therapies - the practical applications of psychological “theories” - are more concerned with function, order, form, and ritual than with essence and replicable performance. The interaction between patient and therapist is a microcosm of society, an encapsulation and reification of all other forms of social intercourse. Granted, it is more structured and relies on a body of knowledge gleaned from millions of similar encounters. Still, the therapeutic process is nothing more than an insightful and informed dialog whose usefulness is well-attested to.
Both psychological and scientific theories are creatures of their times, children of the civilizations and societies in which they were conceived, context-dependent and culture-bound. As such, their validity and longevity are always suspect. Both hard-edged scientists and thinkers in the “softer” disciplines are influenced by contemporary values, mores, events, and interpellations.
The difference between “proper” theories of dynamics and psychodynamic theories is that the former asymptotically aspire to an objective “truth” “out there” - while the latter emerge and emanate from a kernel of inner, introspective, truth that is immediately familiar and is the bedrock of their speculations. Scientific theories - as opposed to psychological “theories” - need, therefore, to be tested, falsified, and modified because their truth is not self-contained.
Still, psychoanalysis was, when elaborated, a Kuhnian paradigm shift. It broke with the past completely and dramatically. It generated an inordinate amount of new, unsolved, problems. It suggested new methodological procedures for gathering empirical evidence (research strategies). It was based on observations (however scant and biased). In other words, it was experimental in nature, not merely theoretical. It provided a framework of reference, a conceptual sphere within which new ideas developed.
That it failed to generate a wealth of testable hypotheses and to account for discoveries in neurology does not detract from its importance. Both relativity theories were and, today, string theories are, in exactly the same position in relation to their subject matter, physics.
In 1963, Karl Jaspers made an important distinction between the scientific activities of Erklaren and Verstehen. Erklaren is about finding pairs of causes and effects. Verstehen is about grasping connections between events, sometimes intuitively and non-causally. Psychoanalysis is about Verstehen, not about Erklaren. It is a hypothetico-deductive method for gleaning events in a person’s life and generating insights regarding their connection to his current state of mind and functioning.
So, is psychoanalysis a science, pseudo-science, or sui generis?
Psychoanalysis is a field of study, not a theory. It is replete with neologisms and formalism but, like Quantum Mechanics, it has many incompatible interpretations. It is, therefore, equivocal and self-contained (recursive). Psychoanalysis dictates which of its hypotheses are testable and what constitutes its own falsification. In other words, it is a meta-theory: a theory about generating theories in psychology.
Moreover, psychoanalysis the theory is often confused with psychoanalysis the therapy. Conclusively proving that the therapy works does not establish the veridicality, the historicity, or even the usefulness of the conceptual edifice of the theory. Furthermore, therapeutic techniques evolve far more quickly and substantially than the theories that ostensibly yield them. They are self-modifying “moving targets” - not rigid and replicable procedures and rituals.
Another obstacle in trying to establish the scientific value of psychoanalysis is its ambiguity. It is unclear, for instance, what in psychoanalysis qualify as causes - and what as their effects.
Consider the critical construct of the unconscious. Is it the reason for - does it cause - our behavior, conscious thoughts, and emotions? Does it provide them with a “ratio” (explanation)? Or are they mere symptoms of inexorable underlying processes? Even these basic questions receive no “dynamic” or “physical” treatment in classic (Freudian) psychoanalytic theory. So much for its pretensions to be a scientific endeavor.
Psychoanalysis is circumstantial and supported by epistemic accounts, starting with the master himself. It appeals to one’s common sense and previous experience. Its statements are of these forms: “given X, Y, and Z reported by the patient - doesn’t it stand to (everyday) reason that A caused X?” or “We know that B causes M, that M is very similar to X, and that B is very similar to A. Isn’t it reasonable to assume that A causes X?”.
In therapy, the patient later confirms these insights by feeling that they are “right” and “correct”, that they are epiphanous and revelatory, that they possess retrodictive and predictive powers, and by reporting his reactions to the therapist-interpreter. This acclamation seals the narrative’s probative value as a basic (not to say primitive) form of explanation which provides a time frame, a coincident pattern, and sets of teleological aims, ideas and values.
Juan Rivera is right that Freud’s claims about infantile life cannot be proven, not even with a Gedankenexperimental movie camera, as Robert Vaelder suggested. It is equally true that the theory’s etiological claims are epidemiologically untestable, as Grunbaum repeatedly says. But these failures miss the point and aim of psychoanalysis: to provide an organizing and comprehensive, non-tendentious, and persuasive narrative of human psychological development.
Should such a narrative be testable and falsifiable or else discarded (as the Logical Positivists insist)?
Depends if we wish to treat it as science or as an art form. This is the circularity of the arguments against psychoanalysis. If Freud’s work is considered to be the modern equivalent of myth, religion, or literature - it need not be tested to be considered “true” in the deepest sense of the word. After all, how much of the science of the 19th century has survived to this day anyhow?
Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.
Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com