Wanting by Luke Burgis is about mimetic desire. Burgis was an entrepreneur who was on course to living out the Silicon Valley myth, before he experienced a change of heart. He realized that his desire to be an entrepreneur was highly influenced by the people around him, and that his thick desires (more authentic) took … Read more
Walden Two is a novel written by the behaviorist B.F. Skinner. A renegade professor named Frazier conjures up a utopia. Skinner didn’t write the book in a particularly gloomy time for the human race. On the contrary, things were looking up. It was actually the discontent that he saw in his own wife that inspired … Read more
Mimesis and Science, edited by Scott R. Garrels, brings together some of the best scholar of Girard’s mimetic theory, with leading imitation researchers from the cognitive, developmental, and neuro sciences In the science of man and culture today there is a unilateral swerve away from anything that could be called mimicry, imitation, or mimesis. And … Read more
The Divided Self by R. D Laing is a landmark book in psychology that managed to point out the moral failings that underpinned the emerging field of psychiatry. Schizophrenia Laing begins by saying that “schizophrenic” should be used to describe people who are internally divided, or who experience a rift between their self and their … Read more
Before Piaget, there was very little work done to understand child psychology. While there has been considerable progress since, there is a large debt of gratitude that psychology owes to him. Piaget, in The Language and Thought of the Child, like his other works, didn’t just teach us how children perceive the world, he taught … Read more
In The Interpretation of Dreams, one of the classic works of psychology in the 20th century, Freud wrote that dreams were created by two processes in the mind. The first comes from an unconscious force which construct a wish that is expressed in the dream. The second is censorship which distorts the expression of the … Read more
Written in a lucid conversational style, the essential argument made by Jaron Lanier is that smartphones carry ramifications that could spell disaster for the human species. Smartphones are an invention that we take for granted. But we should remember how recent this invention is. Since we carry around this device everywhere, we are always being … Read more
“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing” – Isaiah Berlin If we look back toward the beginning of the universe, we can see the fragile nature of existence. If events unfolded differently, life would not exist. Particles and anti-particles, or matter and anti-matter, were residues of the energy created by … Read more
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle is about our relationship with our own minds, time, and fate. The foreword to the book starts the book by telling us about three myths. Myth 1: Humanity has reached the pinnacle of its development. Tolle cites Michael Murphy, who argues that humans have the potential to reach … Read more
Most people associate psychotherapy with reclining on a couch, recalling painful memories from the past. This idea is reinforced in popular culture (Analyze This, Good Will Hunting, The Sopranos). Many Hollywood movies feature the “sudden cure” moment when a particular event from childhood, usually physical or sexual abuse, relieves them of their problems. While these … Read more