Frayn's - shared 'Home Address'

Frequently I've made the point that 'person-centred' means placing the individual, patient, carer ... whatever the context, at the centre of Hodges' model. At the same time this is of course an idealisation:

individual

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group

What is your 'home' address?

'Science, it turns out, is in this respect simply an extension of all the other means we have found of representing the world. As with pictures and narratives, the world is unimaginable without the focus of a viewpoint. To understand the world in any way whatsoever scientifically, historically, artistically, anecdotally, imaginatively we find ourselves compelled to assume a potential point of convergence from which everything is  viewed, measured, and recounted. About the entity that defines this point we know only that it is by definition invisible to us. And since the instruments of science, of logic and mathematics, and of art, are all products of this invisible entity, they will not serve to represent or explain it to us. Anything in the world, or out of it, can be perceived or thought about, or both, and represented in our various codes. The only thing that systematically eludes us, whichever way we turn, is the something upon which everything else depends. The conscious subject that gives meaning to the objective universe cannot give meaning to itself. Without it nothing can be understood; about it nothing can be said.  'The point of convergence . . .' And already we've gone wrong. The self isn't a point, in any remotely geometrical sense, but a complex organisation; and the consciousness that it generates, and by which it is animated, is a complex phenomenon.' pp.401-402. (my emphasis)

Frayn, Michael (2006). The human touch: our part in the creation of a universe. 'Home Address', Chapter 5. London: Faber & Faber. 

A final post from my paperback copy, next - off to a good secondhand home. Previously: 'Frayn'.