Psychology Articles

“I am really not only a man of practice whatsoever….
I’m practically nothing but a conquistador by temperament, an adventurer.”

(Sigmund Freud, letter to Fleiss, 1900)

“If you deliver forth that which can be in you, that which you produce forth will be your salvation”.

(The Gospel of Thomas)

“No, our practice is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science are not able to give us we are unable to get elsewhere.”

(Sigmund Freud, “The Long term of an Illusion”)

Harold Bloom called Freud “The central imagination of our age”. That psychoanalysis will not be a scientific concept within a strict, rigorous sense of this word has extended been established. However, most criticisms of Freud’s operate (with the likes of Karl Popper, Adolf Grunbaum, Havelock Ellis, Malcolm Macmillan, and Frederick Crews) pertain to his – long-debunked – scientific pretensions.

Nowadays it’s always widely accepted that psychoanalysis – even though some of its tenets are testable and, certainly, tend to be experimentally tried and invariably discovered to become false or uncorroborated – is really a program of ideas. It will be a cultural construct, along with a (advised) deconstruction of your human thoughts. Despite aspirations for the contrary, psychoanalysis is just not – and in no way have been – a value-neutral physics or dynamics with the psyche.

Freud also stands accused of generalizing his very own perversions and of reinterpreting his patients’ accounts of the memories to fit his preconceived notions of a unconscious. The train of psychoanalysis being a treatment have been castigated like a crude form of brainwashing in just cult-like settings.

Feminists criticize Freud for casting women inside part of “defective” (naturally castrated and inferior) men. Scholars of traditions expose the Victorian and middle-class roots of his theories about suppressed sexuality. Historians deride and decry his stifling authoritarianism and frequent and expedient conceptual reversals.

Freud himself would have attributed countless of these diatribes towards the defense mechanisms of his critics. Projection, resistance, and displacement do seem being playing a prominent role. Psychologists are taunted with the lack of rigor of the profession, by its literary and artistic qualities, through the dearth of empirical support for its assertions and fundaments, from the ambiguity of its terminology and ontology, through the derision of “proper” scientists with the “hard” disciplines, and from the limitations imposed by their experimental subjects (humans). These are precisely the shortcomings that they attribute to psychoanalysis.

Certainly, mental narratives – psychoanalysis 1st and foremost – are not “scientific theories” by any stretch with this much-bandied label. They may be also unlikely to actually become ones. Instead – like myths, religions, and ideologies – they’re organizing principles.

Psychological “theories” do not describe the globe. At ideal, they describe actuality and give it “true”, emotionally-resonant, heuristic and hermeneutic meaning. There’re much less concerned with predictive feats than with “healing” – the restoration of harmony amid persons and interior them.

Therapies – the useful applications of psychological “theories” – are much more worried with functionality, order, type, and ritual than with essence and replicable overall performance. The interaction between individual and therapist is a really microcosm of society, an encapsulation and reification of all other types of social intercourse. Granted, it will be further structured and relies on the entire body of knowledge gleaned from millions of similar encounters. Still, the therapeutic procedure is absolutely nothing a lot more than an insightful and informed dialog whose usefulness is well-attested to.

The two psychological and medical practices are creatures of the instances, children to the civilizations and societies where they were conceived, context-dependent and culture-bound. As this kind of, their validity and longevity are constantly suspect. The two hard-edged experts and thinkers inside the “softer” disciplines are influenced by modern values, mores, occasions, and interpellations.

The difference between “proper” practices of dynamics and psychodynamic theories is that the former asymptotically aspire to an objective “truth” “out there” – although the latter emerge and emanate from a kernel of inner, introspective, truth that’s instantly familiar and may be the bedrock of the speculations. Medical practices – as opposed to psychological “theories” – need to have, hence, to become tried, falsified, and modified because their truth isn’t self-contained.

Still, psychoanalysis was, when elaborated, a Kuhnian paradigm shift. It broke with the past totally and dramatically. It generated an inordinate amount of new, unsolved, issues. It advised new methodological processes for gathering empirical evidence (investigation techniques).

It had been based on observations (however scant and biased).

To put it differently, it absolutely was experimental in nature, not simply theoretical. It offered a framework of reference, a conceptual sphere after only which new suggestions formulated.

That it failed to generate a wealth of testable hypotheses and to account for discoveries in neurology doesn’t detract from its importance. The two relativity hypotheses had been and, currently, string theories are, in exactly the same position in relation to their topic matter, physics.

In 1963, Karl Jaspers created an essential distinction involving the medical activities of Erklaren and Verstehen. Erklaren is about discovering pairs of leads to and results. Verstehen is about grasping connections amongst occasions, occasionally intuitively and non-causally. Psychoanalysis is all about Verstehen, not about Erklaren. It will be a hypothetico-deductive approach for gleaning occasions inside a person’s life and creating insights concerning their connection to his present state of mind and functioning.

So, is psychoanalysis a research, pseudo-science, or sui generis?

Psychoanalysis can be described as field of analyze, not a concept. It is usually replete with neologisms and formalism but, like Quantum Mechanics, it has a variety of incompatible interpretations. It is actually, as a result, equivocal and self-contained (recursive). Psychoanalysis dictates which of its hypotheses are testable and what constitutes its very own falsification. To put it differently, it truly is a meta-theory: a concept about making practices in psychology.

Moreover, psychoanalysis the concept is generally perplexed with psychoanalysis the therapy. Conclusively proving that the therapy works doesn’t create the veridicality, the historicity, and even the usefulness for the conceptual edifice of one’s concept. Furthermore, therapeutic techniques evolve much more swiftly and significantly than the practices that ostensibly yield them. They may be self-modifying “moving targets” – not rigid and replicable processes and rituals.

Another obstacle in attempting to create the scientific value of psychoanalysis is its ambiguity. It really is unclear, for example, what in psychoanalysis qualify as causes – and what as their results.

Look at the essential construct of a unconscious. Is it the cause for – does it bring about – our behavior, conscious thoughts, and feelings? Does it produce them having a “ratio” (explanation)? Or are they mere signs or symptoms of inexorable underlying processes? Even these fundamental questions obtain no “dynamic” or “physical” treatment in classic (Freudian) psychoanalytic concept. So a lot for its pretensions being a medical endeavor.

Psychoanalysis is circumstantial and supported by epistemic accounts, beginning using the master himself. It appeals to one’s common sense and prior encounter. Its statements are of those forms: “given X, Y, and Z reported because of the affected individual – does not it stand to (everyday) cause that the triggered X?” or “We realize that B brings about M, that M is quite comparable to X, and that B is really comparable to some. Is not it reasonable to presume that a causes X?”.

In therapy, the individual later confirms these insights by feeling that they’re “right” and “correct”, that they are epiphanous and revelatory, which they possess retrodictive and predictive powers, and by reporting his reactions towards the therapist-interpreter. This acclamation seals the narrative’s probative worth being a fundamental (not to say primitive) type of explanation which offers a time frame, a coincident pattern, and sets of teleological aims, ideas and values.

Juan Rivera is appropriate that Freud’s statements about infantile life can not be proven, not even with a Gedankenexperimental movie camera, as Robert Vaelder advised. It is usually equally correct that the theory’s etiological statements are epidemiologically untestable, as Grunbaum repeatedly says. But these failures miss the point and aim of psychoanalysis: to offer an coordinating and extensive, non-tendentious, and persuasive narrative of human psychological improvement.

Ought to such a narrative be testable and falsifiable or else discarded (since the Logical Positivists insist)?

Depends if we desire to deal with it as discipline or as an art kind. This could be the circularity you get with the arguments against psychoanalysis. If Freud’s operate is regarded as for being the current equivalent of myth, religion, or literature – it need not be tried to get regarded “true” in your deepest sense in the term. Following all, how a great deal for the research for this 19th century has survived to this day anyhow?

Los Angeles Psychologist

Defending Psychology

You may not have ever considered it, but there might be some sort of correlation between solar flares and human behavior. Consider if you will some of the evidence for solar system happenings and human behavior, for instance, we do know that on very hot days [heat comes from the Sun] there are more road rage calls into the Highway Patrol, and you can even study this for yourself, when the weather is very hot and muggy, or just plain wicked hot you will notice more aggressive driving, and see more people using their middle finger gestures more.

Now then, try this out sometime because I have done this. When you witness bad driving behavior around our town, or out on the highway, do what I do – I always go home that night and look up on the Internet to see if there has been any major solar flare activity at SpaceWeather [dot] com. And nine times out of 10 there has been. There was an interesting research project done at the University of New Mexico on this topic, and they did find a correlation between solar flares, and the violent and non-premeditated crimes.

This study confirms what I believe I’d already discovered. It is also my contention that psychologists who want to get their degrees, should study this phenomena, rather than duplicating all the past psychological research on silly things like bullying, drug addiction, and child abuse. It’s not that those things are not also unfortunate, rather it is that they have been studied to death.

One thing I do not understand is that when you go on to Google Scholar and search this topic there are very few research papers or scientific reports with empirical data, and there should be more, many more. It has often been said, and you can ask just about any police officer, that on a full moon there will be more crimes reported, ambulance first responder personnel, and even emergency room doctors and nurses will tell you the same.

Now this could be for many different reasons, such as on a full moon it’s easier to see people committing crimes, people would rather commit crimes on a full moon so they don’t trip over themselves in the darkness are stealing something, or there is some type of primal instinct in the brain which causes people to misbehave during full moons. Nevertheless, there is a correlation. Isn’t it time we started studying these things? Please consider all this.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes it’s hard to write 20,000 articles; http://www.bloggingcontent.net/

Note: All of Lance Winslow’s articles are written by him, not by Automated Software, any Computer Program, or Artificially Intelligent Software. None of his articles are outsourced, PLR Content or written by ghost writers.

Psychology is an inexact science…the realm of empirical judgment as much as of quantitative measurement. There aren’t any formulas guaranteed to produce specific results in shaping human behavior if only somebody follows prescribed steps faithfully enough. However, I have ample experience to suggest that if you can get a very bright…gifted…child to believe that his intelligence is perfectly ordinary and then turn him loose to interact and grow up with lots of other kids who are normal, ordinary, average…who fit in readily…and permit him to wonder about all the comparisons he can’t help making, if you deny him the opportunity to ask honest questions about why he feels so different from other kids…you ought not to be surprised at having helped create a very confused and unhappy young person. That’s what happened to me. See if you can appreciate the logic from the point of view of the child I used to be, and imagine how it would feel if those things happened to you.

In the late 1940’s, kindergarten had pretty well not yet been invented in our little town, so it was not until I reached the age of six…old enough for First Grade…that I got a chance to begin learning about went on at school. By the time I had turned five, though, I had long since understood the rules for playing with neighborhood children like my friend Vito, who was my age. It never occurred to me to wonder whether one of us might be smarter than the other. The older kids…Warren, Sandra, and Bertie, who already went to school…were naturally smarter because they were more grown up. Everyone knew that. My Great Aunt Margaret used to explain to me in private that I was, indeed, quite smart and that she knew I would become a fine little scholar when the time came for me to start school, but none of my other elders ever said any such thing. I assumed that she was saying it to be kind, and besides she was my aunt so such a thing would not count, anyway.

It did not take long, once school had started in the fall of 1950, for me to realize that there were in fact quite a few children in the classroom who could not easily figure out the new reading words, get the arithmetic answers right, or understand whatever it was that the teacher might be saying. More or less by default I created for myself a cosmology in which everyone could learn things with the same degree of ease. Those who failed to do so, I perceived, were stupid, disobedient, or lazy…all of which meant more or less the same thing. From time to time I caught hints from adult conversations about things like being really smart, or very bright, all mixed up with words like intelligence, but it never occurred to me to wonder whether any of that might apply to me. If that had been so my parents would have told me, and they had not. Parents can’t lie to kids. Everyone knew that, too.

Now imagine being a bit older, sitting in Fourth or maybe Fifth Grade class next to several other normal kids…the ones who never get into trouble and always get good marks…and hearing them talk about how this or that new challenge was really hard. Well, you reason, I tried that and I thought I got it right. I’m just like them, so there must be more to it, something I missed. Getting it right must be painfully difficult…and you make the next logical step to searching for obscure layers of meaning, for relationships that don’t exist, to answers you’ll never discover because the questions will never be asked.

There are more holes than substance in that logic, but when it’s the only logic you have and experience has been nibbling away at your self confidence ever since you could remember, it’s not so easy to escape.

That’s the way it worked for me. A few years later, as I began life as a teenager, I began stumbling over those holes in the logic and wondering. I made the mistake of exposing my real thoughts and asking my parents things like why do I feel so different from the other kids? They tease me for being smart. Am I? The answers I invariably got, harsh as if they bore some kind of punishment, were always the same. “Get those ideas out of your head, young man. You are no different from the other kids in your class at school.”

Was intelligence a burden, a curse, something to be hidden and denied? Logic seemed to dictate that it was, so by the time I had become a high school upperclassman I had learned to dumb down my responses to life to avoid the pain of being impaled yet again on the sharp stake of being different. As time passed it became more and more difficult to distinguish between what the real me believed and what I guessed it would be safe to reveal. By the time I had gotten used to the idea of being a college student, I’d become so good at hiding the real parts of me that most of the time they might as well not even have existed. I truly believed that I’m not smart…they are. To anyone who might have been watching with care, it would not have been hard to predict that my next adventure was going to be a debilitating emotional breakdown and the collapse of what I’d believed my life was supposed to be into a sad pile of little broken pieces.

Robert A. Benjamin is a writer who has devoted years to a personal account of his experiences as an unacknowledged gifted child. To learn more about A Gift of Dreams, I Promised You Daisies, and Side Door To Heaven, the three books of the Imperfectly Ordinary trilogy, go to http://www.imperfectlyordinary.com

Over the past 11 years, the field of psychology has been on a new mission, one of identifying, researching and teaching the skills that lead to well-being and resilience. Called “Positive Psychology,” it’s a rapidly growing branch of scientific psychology that studies the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.

In 1998, Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania was elected President of the American Psychological Association (APA). At the time, Dr. Seligman was famous in the world of research for his work on Learned Helplessness and Optimism. As President of the APA, he designated Positive Psychology as the theme for his term.

In many of his presentations to psychologists and others, Professor Seligman reviewed the field of psychology in the 20th century from a historical perspective. He pointed out that before World War II, psychology espoused three missions: curing mental illness, making the lives of all people more fulfilling, and identifying and nurturing talent and genius. A number of famous psychologists dedicated their work to promising theories of happiness but without the empirical research to support them. 
 
After the war, two events changed the focus of psychology. In 1946, the Veteran’s Administration was created, and practicing psychologists found they could make a living treating mental illness. Then in 1947, the National Institute of Mental Health was formed, and academic psychologists discovered they could obtain grants for research on mental illness. Thus, the major, almost exclusive emphasis in psychology was on mental illness. And the effort has been very effective in bringing both greater understanding of psychopathology and many more effective treatments.
 
A little over a decade ago, however, Professor Seligman believed it was time for psychology to learn what it is that makes life worth living, what helps people bounce back when adversity occurs, what makes their lives more enjoyable and meaningful, what communities and institutions can do to promote well-being. He declared it was time to find what’s right in people — rather than only what’s wrong with them.
 
What has occurred in the period from 1998 until now is nothing short of spectacular. Research is being done on Positive Psychology in just about every corner of the world. The findings are being applied in therapy, coaching, schools, institutions, corporations and communities. So much has been discovered about happiness and its pursuit. Interestingly enough, some of the results have been counterintuitive, that is, they are not what would be expected by most of us.
 
The field of Positive Psychology holds dear the goal of preparing people to handle all the difficulties and curve balls that life so often throws our way. When Seligman asked one of his heroes, Dr. Jonas Salk, the American biologist and physician famous for the first effective polio vaccine, what he would do if he were a young scientist today, Dr. Salk said, “I would do immunization, but instead of doing it physically, I’d do it psychologically.”
 
You can find more information on the impact of Positive Psychology in my book, It’s Your Little Red Wagon… Six Core Strengths for Navigating Your Path to the Good Life (Embrace the Power of Positive Psychology and Live Your Dreams), available on Amazon.com.
 
Copyright 2009. Sharon S. Esonis, Ph.D.

Sharon S. Esonis, Ph.D., has spent close to three decades helping individuals thrive and improve their lives through her work as a licensed psychologist, author and life coach. An expert in human behavior and motivation, Dr. Esonis specializes in the burgeoning field of Positive Psychology, the scientific study of optimal human functioning and the core strengths that can lead to the achievement of one’s personally-defined goals.

Dr. Esonis earned her doctoral degree at Boston College and currently maintains a life coaching practice in the San Diego area. She also teaches Positive Psychology in the Extended Learning Program at California State University San Marcos. To learn more about the power of Positive Psychology and to order her latest book, visit her website at http://www.PositivePathLifeCoaching.com

In 1972, Thomas Nagel first introduced what is now known as the “epistemic gap” amongst contemporary philosophers. It was described in his paper “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” and the gist of the argument was this: one cannot fully understand the mind unless one is experiencing that mind.

Nagel took the example of a bat because bats are so fascinatingly different than humans; they hang upside down most of the time, use echolocation, they are nocturnal, and most eat nothing but insects. Could a human ever convincingly claim that he knew what it was like to be a bat? Nagel didn’t believe this was possible – I agree.

Can the same be true amongst humans? Can another human fully understand the mind of another, or, does one have to be in the first-person to understand the mind more clearly?

Philosopher Frank Jackson wrote a paper in 1982 titled “Epiphenomenal Qualia” where he introduced the famous thought experiment known as Mary’s room. It goes like this:

“Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. (…) What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete.”

These arguments by Frank Jackson and Thomas Nagel are two of the most famous papers in support of the idea of qualia – a term used in philosophy to describe the subjective quality of conscious experience. It is an idea often associated with the mind/body dualism (the belief that the mind is in some-part nonphysical, and therefore a separate entity from our physical bodies).

The epistemic gap does not prove any such thing however, and it is perfectly compatible with a materialist view of the mind. The real questions that the epistemic gap provokes is within the field of psychology and the scientific method itself.

Science is science – we believe – because of its objective, empirical, and third-person approach to knowledge. Science has often given men the ability to step outside of the happenings of natural phenomena, study them, test them, replicate their findings, and come to conclusions.

There is no doubting the breakthroughs and advancements science has come to offer man throughout the centuries. It would be foolish to deny these achievements.

Even in Western psychology (which is quite a young field relative to the natural sciences), researchers have made incredibly discoveries of the mind and how it works. We have devised useful models for how the mind perceives sensations (Psychophysics), how it processes information, stores memories, and solves problems (Cognitive Psychology), how the mind changes throughout the human lifespan (Developmental Psychology), how the mind builds associations and how these associations affect our behaviors (Learning or Experimental Psychology), how the brain or the “physical anatomy of the mind” works (Neuropsychology), and we’ve been given the chance to take all of this information and apply it to a variety of other fields: Clinical Psychology, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Sport Psychology, and even Forensic Psychology.

There is no denying the leaps psychology has made, all in the name of proper science. This is knowledge we would likely have not gotten any other way if it were not for the extraordinary and rigorous scientific method.

However, there is good reason to believe that Nagel and Jackson are right and that we cannot fully explain or understand a mind from an outside view. This is the belief that once science carries out its full course of discoveries that there will be something left unsaid about the mind (our understanding of the mind could never be as complete as our understanding of the physics on our planet). Unless – we redefine science.

But I believe we already have the techniques used to fully understand a mind – or at the very least, our own mind.

To understand this technique properly, we need to first drift away from the Western logical positivist philosophy of “if you can’t measure it, then it isn’t real,” which I believe has plagued much of modern day intellectual thought. Instead, I turn to the philosophies of the East – who have been studying the mind far, far longer and far more thoroughly than the West.

In particular I am fond of Buddhism which – like Western Science – takes pride in an objective approach to the study of phenomena. But there is a important property of the mind that Buddhists acknowledge and scientists go out of their way to ignore: the mind is – before all else – something that must be experienced first-person, or it wouldn’t be a mind at all.

This brings me to the practice of meditation – or more generally – a mindfulness of our inner worlds. There is a world in all of us that is subjective, personal, and completely our own. We cannot let anyone in it no matter how colorful our language or how much experience we share with another human being – it is ours and ours alone – and there are aspects to it that can only be dealt with by our self; no therapist, psychologist, family member, friend, scientist or spouse can ever figure it out for you.

Neither Buddhism or Science can rightfully claim to know how to bridge the gap between the subjective and objective. Both try their best to be objective at different vantage points: Science takes a third-person empirical approach while Buddhism takes a first-person empirical approach. Why can’t the study of the mind include both?

There is a fast growing interest in the West in meditative practices, yoga, tai chi, and other mind/body, holistic and alternative medicines for physical and mental health. This suggests there might be a vacancy in the West’s psyche, perhaps due to a combination of an incomplete scientific view of the mind along with an overwhelming nihilistic and atheistic attitude toward what would be deemed the spiritual or “mystic” aspects of man.

Many of these so called mystical practices are lumped into the demeaning pop psychology term “New Age.” Followers of so called New Age practices are said to be gullible and weak-minded – and perhaps some of them are. But it is also my belief that introspection and reflection on one’s mind can be the most rewarding and therapeutic practice for better mental health, the sharpening of one’s mental skill set, and a complete understanding of how the mind truly works (in the context of how it operates in the head of the individual and not by inference of a third-person observer).

Because of this I am very welcoming of these alternative and non-scientific studies of the mind. I in no way mean to deter scientific practices (I believe their should always be a science of the mind and a scientific study of human psychology), but I will stand up for the little guy on this one – science is not the giant be-all end-all of knowledge. It has its limitations, and we must be open to alternative studies of the mind. Sometimes we should turn our senses inward — and we may find there is some gold of truth to be discovered.

http://www.theemotionmachine.com

In 1972, Thomas Nagel first introduced what is now known as the “epistemic gap” amongst contemporary philosophers. It was described in his paper “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” and the gist of the argument was this: one cannot fully understand the mind unless one is experiencing that mind.

Nagel took the example of a bat because bats are so fascinatingly different than humans; they hang upside down most of the time, use echolocation, they are nocturnal, and most eat nothing but insects. Could a human ever convincingly claim that he knew what it was like to be a bat? Nagel didn’t believe this was possible – I agree.

Can the same be true amongst humans? Can another human fully understand the mind of another, or, does one have to be in the first-person to understand the mind more clearly?

Philosopher Frank Jackson wrote a paper in 1982 titled “Epiphenomenal Qualia” where he introduced the famous thought experiment known as Mary’s room. It goes like this:

“Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. (…) What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete.”

These arguments by Frank Jackson and Thomas Nagel are two of the most famous papers in support of the idea of qualia – a term used in philosophy to describe the subjective quality of conscious experience. It is an idea often associated with the mind/body dualism (the belief that the mind is in some-part nonphysical, and therefore a separate entity from our physical bodies).

The epistemic gap does not prove any such thing however, and it is perfectly compatible with a materialist view of the mind. The real questions that the epistemic gap provokes is within the field of psychology and the scientific method itself.

Science is science – we believe – because of its objective, empirical, and third-person approach to knowledge. Science has often given men the ability to step outside of the happenings of natural phenomena, study them, test them, replicate their findings, and come to conclusions.

There is no doubting the breakthroughs and advancements science has come to offer man throughout the centuries. It would be foolish to deny these achievements.

Even in Western psychology (which is quite a young field relative to the natural sciences), researchers have made incredibly discoveries of the mind and how it works. We have devised useful models for how the mind perceives sensations (Psychophysics), how it processes information, stores memories, and solves problems (Cognitive Psychology), how the mind changes throughout the human lifespan (Developmental Psychology), how the mind builds associations and how these associations affect our behaviors (Learning or Experimental Psychology), how the brain or the “physical anatomy of the mind” works (Neuropsychology), and we’ve been given the chance to take all of this information and apply it to a variety of other fields: Clinical Psychology, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Sport Psychology, and even Forensic Psychology.

There is no denying the leaps psychology has made, all in the name of proper science. This is knowledge we would likely have not gotten any other way if it were not for the extraordinary and rigorous scientific method.

However, there is good reason to believe that Nagel and Jackson are right and that we cannot fully explain or understand a mind from an outside view. This is the belief that once science carries out its full course of discoveries that there will be something left unsaid about the mind (our understanding of the mind could never be as complete as our understanding of the physics on our planet). Unless – we redefine science.

But I believe we already have the techniques used to fully understand a mind – or at the very least, our own mind.

To understand this technique properly, we need to first drift away from the Western logical positivist philosophy of “if you can’t measure it, then it isn’t real,” which I believe has plagued much of modern day intellectual thought. Instead, I turn to the philosophies of the East – who have been studying the mind far, far longer and far more thoroughly than the West.

In particular I am fond of Buddhism which – like Western Science – takes pride in an objective approach to the study of phenomena. But there is a important property of the mind that Buddhists acknowledge and scientists go out of their way to ignore: the mind is – before all else – something that must be experienced first-person, or it wouldn’t be a mind at all.

This brings me to the practice of meditation – or more generally – a mindfulness of our inner worlds. There is a world in all of us that is subjective, personal, and completely our own. We cannot let anyone in it no matter how colorful our language or how much experience we share with another human being – it is ours and ours alone – and there are aspects to it that can only be dealt with by our self; no therapist, psychologist, family member, friend, scientist or spouse can ever figure it out for you.

Neither Buddhism or Science can rightfully claim to know how to bridge the gap between the subjective and objective. Both try their best to be objective at different vantage points: Science takes a third-person empirical approach while Buddhism takes a first-person empirical approach. Why can’t the study of the mind include both?

There is a fast growing interest in the West in meditative practices, yoga, tai chi, and other mind/body, holistic and alternative medicines for physical and mental health. This suggests there might be a vacancy in the West’s psyche, perhaps due to a combination of an incomplete scientific view of the mind along with an overwhelming nihilistic and atheistic attitude toward what would be deemed the spiritual or “mystic” aspects of man.

Many of these so called mystical practices are lumped into the demeaning pop psychology term “New Age.” Followers of so called New Age practices are said to be gullible and weak-minded – and perhaps some of them are. But it is also my belief that introspection and reflection on one’s mind can be the most rewarding and therapeutic practice for better mental health, the sharpening of one’s mental skill set, and a complete understanding of how the mind truly works (in the context of how it operates in the head of the individual and not by inference of a third-person observer).

Because of this I am very welcoming of these alternative and non-scientific studies of the mind. I in no way mean to deter scientific practices (I believe their should always be a science of the mind and a scientific study of human psychology), but I will stand up for the little guy on this one – science is not the giant be-all end-all of knowledge. It has its limitations, and we must be open to alternative studies of the mind. Sometimes we should turn our senses inward — and we may find there is some gold of truth to be discovered.

http://www.theemotionmachine.com

In one intuitive moment, when the waking mind merged with the dreaming mind, and the left brain sparked with the right brain, these ideas were forged. It was as if ancient, primitive thought had collapsed back like a wave of quantum energy on to the shores of modern consciousness. Make no mistake. This is not psychology of the current empirical, quantitative mode. This is from intuition – the teacher within – where deep unconscious trends blend and match to arrive at startling new models of thought and new ways of seeing the world.

God, the giver, who is the flow of love. God, the eternal ’cause’ of all effects. What can spiritual psychology say about this creator? Psychology, being literally the study of mind and behavior, ought to commence this from deep in the meditative experience. Being ‘in the zone’ of the creative artist is to be operating with high frequencies of alpha, theta and delta waves in the cerebral hemispheres. When you are deeply immersed in this ‘creative zone’ you are only then able to perceive yourself as ‘The Creator,’ if you will.

Now remember that all books were written by human beings. Social teachings, spiritual scriptures and religious guides can not logically escape this restraint. The writer believes that all such special and holy books were written from within ‘the zone’ of the creative human mind. Quantum physicists now believe that the human consciousness plays a necessary, creative role in shaping reality itself, from moment to moment. So in a sense, higher levels of human consciousness have god-like powers of cause and effect. This is supported in the Hindu scriptures by Krishna’s concept of ‘a single law of cause.’

The Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, also acknowledged these ideas by saying that humans ’stand at a point before creation.’ The mind is viewed as something to purify first, before it can reveal its creative mysteries. The Chinese sages, such as Lao Tse and Confucius, also emphasized purification through meditation and the practice of virtue.

Finally, for the record, the Mormons teach that ‘Intelligence is The Glory Of God.’ This brief quote reveals how a human attribute can be viewed as having divine powers. We live in human societies where the political process of leadership has sometimes had to be rationalized in unexpected ways.

Now let us focus our intelligence on the concept of the devil. The source of bad, ‘evil’ things which rule or dominate this world can only be ‘the condition of being under severe psychological stress.’ This is the destructive force that we see unleashed too frequently in modern times. It may also be behind every divorce, every war and most crimes. The breakdown of the social fabric has stress as a major contributor. Stress has very many causes and sociologists emphasize the structural and changing aspects of a society as being the major causal areas.

Psychologists, however, might mention unbridled emotions such as greed, fear and guilt as having negative influences. Spiritual masters would consider the dominant thinking of the individual and the habits of focus and self-talk as being all important. Meditation would be prescribed as the cure.

Summary and Conclusion:

So a simple bi-polar model has emerged to explain God and the devil in any human community. Assuming these things to be universal, God is equated with ‘being in the creative zone’ of the mind, while the devil is equated with ‘being in the destructive zone’ of the mind. That’s it in a nutshell: being creative versus being destructive. The problem is, it is doubtful whether humans can stay conscious long enough to see exactly what is going on! That takes desire, self awareness and perhaps a leap of faith.

Geoff Dodd is a New Zealander with a background in psychology, now living in Western Australia. He has had extensive Internet experience since 1996 and is a webmaster operating 35 web sites.

Geoff Dodd
Perth 6000
Australia