Archive for May, 2009

Counseling Couples

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

In life there is what we think happens, and what actually happens. What actually happens is difficult, if not impossible, to establish objectively. There is a Russian proverb that says, “Never trust an eye witness”, and this theme has often been explored by artists and film directors. The most recent may be Vantage Point (2008), which is a film directed by Peter Travis in which a presidential assassination is recalled by six different witnesses. Their combined stories finally reveal the true story. In Kurosawa’s film Rashomon (1950), four different people recount different versions of the murder of a man and the rape of his wife, but in this case no objectively truthful version is established. In the last analysis “truth” isĀ  not absolute, but something arrived at by consensus, and this makes the cultural environment we are brought up in a crucial factor in how we all agree about reality. (more…)