My notes on everything psychology related.
If heroism requires courage, why are so few people truly courageous? Even Carlyle, who terrified people, depended on his father for validation. Becker argues that one reason that people lack courage is because they lack authority, and they lack authority because they did not choose to be born – they have been granted everything: a … Read more
Philosophers have tried to figure out the core nature of man, but perhaps this eluded them because man does not have only one core nature. As Erich Fromm put it, the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature. One the one hand, he is a symbolic self, he can create ingenious things and speculate … Read more
We live in a time when easy answers are given to complex questions about man’s purpose in life. Embedded in every society is a hero system. This system can be religious or secular, it can be political or economic, but its function is the same – to give the individual the feeling that they are … Read more
Jane is author of the book: Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World If you have trouble sleeping, you should try 10 minutes of Tetris. Research shows that games like Tetris, Candy Crush, or Bejeweled can help overwrite negative visualization – this has applications for overeating, preventing … 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