This is a space for Kyle’s blog which looks at how understanding a bit about systems is central to us all working together to help prevent or overcome multiple disadvantage; and inviting your thoughts, comments and input.
We’re working on how to support an on-line discussion, for the moment here is Kyle’s first blog, and his e-mail address if you want to get back to him sharing your thoughts, at Kyle Buckle-Hodgson
Perspective, June 2026
We approach everything with a perspective: it’s impossible to approach anything with perfect indifference.
Even those less-intense feelings like disinterest or puzzlement point to our own affects, preferences and 
prejudices. Something may provoke your disinterest as it doesn’t align with your affects, your preferences and your prejudices. Or it may be puzzling for a similar reason.
So it’s understandable the when individuals’ perspectives are in tension, hostility can arise. It can be very tempting to double down and stick to your perspective. After all, this reflects your position in the world and the experiences that have led you to it.
But can anyone ever really have a perspective that is truly their own?
Freud 
Sigmund Freud argued that, at birth and infancy, our sheer helplessness exposes our dependence on social nurturing: our existence completely depends on those who care for us. This, apparently, is a source of great anxiety as children.
But we hold an image of our own body as one that is similar to those that care for us: bigger, more mature, more emotionally integrated and physically coordinated. In short, ‘more together’.
And the promise of this image as something we can attain points to overcoming the helplessness that troubles us as children.
Lacan 
Jacques Lacan, however, argued that attaining this image is a fantasy: we are always at risk of feeling split or destabilised, our subjectivity – and perspective – being something extrinsic or ‘outside of us’ – and created through the many agencies we interact with – language, family, culture etc.
It’s not too crazy an idea; if you think about your perspective regarding an issue, how much of it comes from outside, whether your parents, friends, what you’ve read or heard, or what’s just an unquestioned norm?
Positive
But this is a positive thing. For if we recognise the things that determine our perspective, we can confront them critically, and start to challenge our affects, preferences and prejudices. We can think through and challenge those of others – not to create hostility, but to negotiate its waters and seek understanding.
You might even think perspectives are a fundamental thing and that there is a truth of relativity: that perspectives are ways of looking which we can come to inhabit.
This is also positive, for when we find system barriers they may not be clear obstacles we can hope to pass around, jump over or smash through, like a wall. Rather, they can be relational – created through bundles of perspectives, affects, preferences and prejudices – where some agree and some don’t, where some enable and some block.
Move through the waters 
But if everyone can think through their own perspectives and can think through others’, then moving through those waters becomes possible and, with it, the barriers can begin to dissolve.