Political ideology, a consistent set of ideas and visions for how society should work, is a modern phenomenon born out of the French revolution. To understand nationalism, it is important to understand the idea of nations. Nations are bound together by a shared language, culture, and history. Nationalism is an ideology which claims that supreme … Read more
The decades after World War 2 were critical in shaping the Middle East’s political structures. After the war began, demand for oil increased – the Middle East became more valuable, as a supplier of oil, and as a strategic location. During the war, British and French forces occupied Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria while Soviet forces … Read more
The French established protectorates across North Africa but they were not all of the same kind. The Gulf peninsula was ruled by tribally based federations tied together through political and religious affiliations. The most important of these was the house of Saud’s alliance with the figure Ibn ‘Abd el Wahab’. The Saudi/Wahabi alliance would emerge … Read more
Chapter 1: The Ottoman Empire and its Legacy in the Middle East The Middle East is the birthplace of three monotheistic faiths of Judaism (2000 BCE), Christianity (1st Century AD), and Islam (7th century CE). The Ottomans tried to regulate Islam across the empire through the Grand Mufti. In the 18th and 19th century, the … Read more
Alfred Adler and Carl Jung both had independent ideas and were not psychoanalytic deviants, as is commonly believed. They collaborated with Freud, but maintained their independence, and after their break, they developed their own systems of psychoanalysis. Freud’s goal was to incorporate into scientific psychology the insights alluded to by Shakespeare, the Greek tragedians, Goethe, … Read more
The Life of Freud Sigmund Freud broke with official medicine and was the first in the history of dynamic psychiatry to do so. The result was a cultural revolution that can be compared to what Darwin had unleashed. Freud’s personality was strongly shaped by the Jewish tradition, he kept the patriarchal ideology, which included man’s … 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
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