In this post, I will give a summary of the first chapter of Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious. The first chapter is a review of the history of dynamic psychology. Ellenberger begins with Freud and moves chronologically through the history of dynamic psychology. Ellenberger starts with Freud because he is the father of dynamic … Read more
Philosophy Pierre Janet was a psychologist who invented the idea of the “subconscious.” He had a religious background and he questioned the spirit of Darwinism. To him, the cult of progress is dangerous because it leads to hatred for the present, and the destruction of the past. After being interested in theology, Janet shifted his … Read more
In the book The Happiness Myth, Hecht observes that each generation had its prescriptions for ultimate happiness. Some of these included bizarre aphrodisiacs like Spanish fly, chocolate, and green M & M candies. But things are no less silly today, arguably, with things like feng shui, aromatherapy, and mood enhancing crystals. The old trope is … Read more
Nassim Taleb’s Ergodicity is the idea that you cannot judge the egalitarianism of a system based on a static representation. You cannot say that inequality in a country is high because at this point in time, a minority of people own the vast amount of resources. But rather, you must take into consideration what happens … Read more
Based on the book The Discovery of the Unconscious. Homer Shakespeare Goethe Schiller Heine Grillparzer Nestroy Dostovesky Kraepelin Freud Janet Wernicke Bleuler
Borne recommended shutting oneself away for three days with a supply of paper, to write, “without falsehood and without hypocrisy,” about every topic that comes to mind. Borne’s idea was that men are stifled by the burden of conventional ideas, and that they do not dare to think for themselves. His aim was to free … Read more
Many people believe that traumas are the source of repressed memories. This idea is portrayed in movies like The Butterfly Effect (2004) and Batman Returns (1995). These views can be traced to Freud’s belief that hysteria and neuroses are created by the repression of sexual molestation in childhood. He saw repression as an unconscious way … Read more
The belief that hypnosis can retrieve lost memories is prevalent among academics and mental health professionals. 84% of psychologists and 69% of non-psychologists in 1980 believed that memories were permanently stored in the mind and can be retrieved with hypnosis. The root of this belief comes from the early psychologists such as Pierre Janet, Joseph … Read more
Many people and psychologists think that memory is stored in the brain the way we store information in a tape recorder, but our recollection of the past is not nearly so accurate. The popular belief about the exactness of our memory stems from residues from the ideas of Sigmund Freud, who contended that forgotten and … Read more
Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. These stages, often called the “Five Stages of Grief,” supposedly describe an invariant sequence of stages that all people pass through when dying (Kübler-Ross, 1969, 1974). These stages are widely accepted in medical, psychological, and nursing communities. They have permeated popular culture through movies and TV shows. In The … Read more