My thoughts on anything related to psychology.
The Courage to Trust Others Don’t trust others because you’re naïve, trust them because you’re courageous. You should expect them to have the capacity to hurt you, but you should be willing to take a chance anyway. That is the foundation of society. Some people are too disagreeable, they refuse to be naïve about anything. … Read more
To be proud of your insufficiencies is arrogant and foolish. Peterson recalls a conversation he had with a student who was a bad writer, in which the student asserts that she is not actually a bad writer, but that she has a unique style that is difficult to understand. Instead of graciously taking advice to … Read more
I first read the 48 Laws of Power, and since then, I have read the other five books that he wrote and have summarized them. Understanding Greene The reason why I enjoy his work is because they are written in a simple way, and while there is some degree of pretension, his outlook on human … Read more
The Psychology of Joker Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, provides the backdrop for the life of the famous Batman villain. The movie touches on key psychological themes that relate to Jung, Freud, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky. Arthur has a problem; he sometimes loses control of himself, and bursts into fits of laughter. While working … Read more
To what extent can experiments in a laboratory inform us about the human mind? The replication crisis in the social sciences suggest the answer is “to some extent” but not much more. Brian Nosek estimated the reproducibility of 100 studies in psychological science from three high-ranking psychology journals.[40] Overall, 36% of the replications yielded significant findings (p value … 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
What is Sublimation? We all have impulses to do socially inappropriate things, we have sexual fantasies, that if we manifest in public, would be less than ideal. A solution to this plight of ours comes through sublimation, the redirecting of libidinal energy towards socially beneficial pursuits. This idea from psychology was popularized by Freud, but … Read more
The term “inferiority complex” was coined by psychologist Alfred Adler. The idea is that each individual is born with a weakness, this may be physical or not. For example, someone might be born with bad vision, hearing, or locomotion. These children tend to develop insecurities about these shortcomings (organ deficiencies) that they deliberately choose to spend … Read more
Toxic people are zombies. They are the Walking Dead, the White Walkers – brainless, but physically present, they march towards one goal, to convert every living thing in their path to their own ideology – or rather, the dominant ideology within them. Nietzsche had an interesting idea – that we have many sub-personalities and that … Read more
In Sapiens, Harari mentions Buddhism a couple of times, as a means of escaping the absurd mission of our lives: the constant chase of positive feelings and repression of negative feelings. When you crave positive feelings, you are waging a losing fight against nature. Harari gives the example of standing on a sea shore, watching … Read more