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
If you are told to picture someone who is lonely, depressed, unable to keep up with technology, dependent, forgetful, physically weak – you may imagine an older person. But many of these perceptions are false. Our impressions of the elderly are cystalized at a young age. In Snow White, one of the seven dwarves, “Grumpy”, … Read more
The idea of the midlife crisis is so prevalent that there are internet sites and businesses that are built for the purpose of mitigating it. The Midlife Club and LifeLaunch through the Hudson institute are examples. We all know what a midlife crisis is through popular culture. In American Beauty (1999), Kevin Spacey quits his … Read more
Background Freud is the author of several influential books including Civilization and its Discontents and Totem &Taboo. But he was a medical doctor, not a psychologist. This explains the controversy around his ideas. But he was the first to systematically study the unconscious. His ideas led to the Neo-Freudians (Jung, Horney, Adler, Erikson). id, ego, … Read more
The Trade-off of the 21st Century “But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” Brave New World, Aldous Huxley In his book, Homo Deus, Harari discusses the trade-off between power and meaning, essentially saying that in the 21st century, … Read more
Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo is a book that explores the origins of human morality and religion. Freud argues that the primitive societies of the past were organized around a totem, or a sacred object, which was the focus of religious rituals and taboos. He suggests that these taboos were created to protect the totem … Read more
Summary In Homo Deus, Harari brings up many of the same ideas that he discussed in Sapiens – including crediting our success as a species to our ability to communicate and believe stories efficiently. But after transcending our primordial roots, our ambitions have grown. Today, the conversation about attaining immortality is not speculation, but a … Read more