Psychology Articles

This article will consider the viability of the many psychotherapeutic methods on the market. In newspapers, journals, on the internet, there is a profusion of advertisements for people to train as psychotherapists (I am using the term to cover counselling as well) or undertake therapy. Its achievements, rarely tested, are glowingly itemised. This article analyses the nature of psychotherapy employing directly or indirectly theories of perception.

Whatever shortcomings psychotherapy has, and there are many, in the present state of understanding of human nature, it must be preferred to the often barbaric and dictatorial (certainly historically) methods of psychiatry.

I will demonstrate that psychotherapists base their approach upon structured treatment environments that seek to impose and embed perceptual positions upon clients, ignoring and denying other equally valid positions. Psychotherapy functions not as a system of tested knowledge, but through the narrow, sometimes fanatical, pursuit of subjective, supposedly intuitive, insights based upon thoroughly examined but untested theories.

In order to better illustrate the above points, I will refer to ‘being’, a term for the fluid, discrete, dynamic nature of individuals in interaction with the discrete nature of other individuals, groups or institutions.

Learning Processes

The client meets the therapist in a room, which may resemble an office or more closely a place of treatment with books of analysis of one kind or another. Usually there would be something to indicate the function of both room and therapist. The therapist normally determines sitting arrangements and whether or not there is eye contact. Similarly, the therapist determines how much vocalisation occurs in the room. Rarely, is a room large. In fact they tend to be relatively small with little to distract from the intended purposes. The therapist determines how long each session will last. Some therapists employ time to frustrate clients, stopping a client in full flow, for them to begin where they left off next session.

Any client nowadays consulting a therapist will clearly understand the processes. The therapist is a healer, a professional, a member of a group who has acquired accreditation and thereby is considered both intelligent and responsible. The personality of the therapist fits into a number of parameters. The client is the member of the room who requires healing, but is also a student and acolyte. The therapist has access to training and knowledge the client has an awareness of but little more than working knowledge of therapy. Psychodynamic clients usually had knowledge of psychodynamic theories and techniques, invalidating any empirical proof obtained.

The above processes encourage learning and provide a perfect environment for hypnotism. The client is cut off from the outside world and is in space which has a singular purpose. Within the period of therapy the client assumes a different way of relating and of being. The active, able or failing individual that exists in the eternal world beyond the therapy for a limited period has no true existence. Dissonance ensures. The learning process results from the exclusivity of the room and shared definition of what occurs there.

Perceptual psychology provides insight into the above processes through understanding of class room learning environments. Students entering a class/lecture room or hall enter a place of learning and expect certain events to take place. While in the room they will memorise in one way or another what is given to them by the teacher/lecturer. Everything that occurs within the room is part of the learning process. They are conditioned by the familiarity of the room and the objects in the room to learn in a linear fashion. They may question the lecturer, but only as part of the learning process. Whatever is provided in the room becomes ‘information’ that needs to be consumed by the student. It becomes knowledge. Whatever the lecturer says is knowledge. It is a form which embeds a world-view in the learner.

In the therapeutic environment, everything that occurs there becomes treatment and involves a healing process, the therapist the guide and shaman. The therapist assumes a powerful position, theatrically controlling the environment.

Suggestion/hypnosis/symbolic effects of training

The therapy room can be viewed as a womb; for it is there that the client is symbolically recreated. The therapist is therefore the mother. The processes are creative. But this reconstruction of ‘being’ within the therapy room carries dangers. One of these is the subjugation of the client’s being based upon their existence in the eternal world. The closed nature of the room, exclusion of outside stimulation and outside references, encourages the client to become suggestible. The therapist’s authority increases the client’s susceptibility.

The therapist perceives the client as ‘ill’ or requiring ‘healing.’ The therapist sees themselves as a ‘healer’, as ‘healthy’ as a student and investigator of psyche. They occupy the active, vigorous position while the client occupies the passive, receptive, suggestive position. Within the therapy room, the therapist has the stronger more coherent world view, which he/she assumes the client must adopt in order to become similarly aware or healthy. The therapist is a teacher. Within the room, the therapist controls reality and being. They become dangerous or pointless to the client if their awareness is flawed by subjectivity.

Training serves, amongst other things, to eliminate subjectivity from the therapeutic processes. The therapist is normally trained to become a receptor, but this is an illusion. The therapist’s training inculcates a number of beliefs, both personal and professional, about themselves which are rarely properly tested. They might, for example, inculcate powerful ideas such as they are more aware than others of how people think and act. That their professional status has somehow imparted magical qualities. Objectivity is impossible, as by undergoing training and other professional processes, the therapist assumes group subjectivity, which is as fixed as individual egotism. The therapist is a product of their training, one which espouses particular world-views. Within the therapy room, the client’s many sources of training, an equally creditable perception of reality, are ignored.

The therapist is trained to cleanse their mind of preconceptions and projections onto the client, but their training encourages processes of preconception and projection. They learn an understanding of human behaviour that is culturally based, which provides just another interpretation amongst many of why humans act and think. The therapist’s reconstruction through training encourages the tyranny of another worldview.

In client-centred therapy the therapeutic process concerns interaction between therapist and client. While this is thought to encourage a dynamic which allows the client’s emotions and relationship conundrums to be examined there is a lack of empirical proof that it serves any useful purpose. Further the artificial nature of the therapeutic environment and the power-discrepancy between therapist and client militates against this. The therapist assumes the professional mantle, in consequence believing thereby that they are better than those they deal with. The behavioural therapist’s controlling techniques in contrast, while successful to a degree, verge too often towards client abuse.

Psychotherapeutic Myths

There are a number of myths that proliferate in therapy that inform therapy, therapist and client. The belief, common to psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and client-centred therapy, that a client must go deeper and deeper to achieve release, catharsis and ‘health.’ Deeply hidden memories and the feelings attached to them must be reached and drawn out from the mind’s recesses. This belief prevails although evidence suggests that traumatic memories are easily accessed and that exploring the attendant emotions provides temporary relief but does not then affect behaviour. There appears to be confusion here between the function of memory and that of feeling. Although feelings plays a part in the retrieval of memories, these tend to be autobiographical in nature and often close to the surface of the client’s consciousness. As therapists obtain their sense of being from clients, and pay mortgages etc through them, going deeper may simply mean longer.

Childhood as a separate place, where later difficulties have their genesis, is also a myth. Different cultures have a different understanding of childhood. For some it means the child functions within the community, helping that community. In Western culture childhood is perceived as a place of victimhood, of development, and a stage prior to functioning fully within the community. People are encouraged to brood on this early part of their lives, rejecting the developmental importance of other periods. It is perceived of as a time of complete receptivity, of innocence, not a period where a child might victimise others and engage in competition. This concept of childhood owes much to Dickens as well as Freud and Klein. It is a fantasy.

The nature of the healing process involves the myth of therapeutic omnipotence and of therapeutic intuition. The omnipotence is assumed from the therapists medical connections. In our society doctors hold a position of extreme trustworthiness and are respected for their intelligence. In fact most doctors are little more than engineers or mechanics, capable of remembering large amounts of information. A therapist often assumes the mantle of a medical professional, claiming the authority ascribed to doctors in general. But they have few claims to scientific rigour.

Therapist’s Logic.

The therapist functions by remembering their training, often long and demanding, or through empathy. The empathetic leaps are situated in the imagination of the therapist and depend upon apparent, often contingent, association. An example of this is an article, ‘To Resist Is To Exist’ (2006) written by two psychotherapists, I came across concerning mental health problems amongst Palestinians. The article asserted that Palestinians remained psychically whole through resisting Israeli aggressors. Now this is a good idea, combining existentialism and psychotherapy. Unfortunately the intuitive logic employed by the writers insists on the victimhood of Palestinians (victimhood is very important in therapeutic understanding of mental disturbance) without any historical basis in its truth. A number of commentators throughout the Islamic and Western worlds have also pointed out that Palestinians stay in the past and do not develop their economy and society, placing the blame on Israel. To develop their society would mean accepting the legitimacy of the Israeli state. In other words, the matter is complex and any understanding and solution requires the synthesis of several points of view.

The rights and wrongs are not here my concern, but the nature of therapeutic intuitive logic is. The writers came from a single dynamic and imposed it upon a complex situation. Therapeutic intuitive logic goes from A to B, and back again to A. Dependent upon largely subjective insights, it ignores or disdains other equally creditable evidence. It imposes upon reality, rather than deconstructs it.

Knowing little of history, economics, sociology, the writers clearly do not believe that such factors affect human nature or behaviour. If they believe anything it is in the genuine reality of victimhood and of childhood responses to trauma. The writers in fact ‘unconsciously’ (or not) view the Palestinians as merely children, unable to affect their own futures. Whole sections of reality are cut off from them, ignored or dismissed as irrelevant to understanding human psyche. All knowledge resides in their own psyche, composed of individual experience and training. Their authority as trained psychotherapists of repute lends credibility to half-baked ideas.

The client’s being is subverted and reduced through the therapeutic environment, which concerns the therapeutic experience and has little to do with obtaining insight into individual psyche. Commonly, therapists recognise no other psychic dynamics affecting clients. Not only those itemised above, but principles, integrity, morality, sensibility. The client assumes something of the therapist’s being and outlook. There in fact is no other clearly observable dynamic.

Conclusion.

Lectures tend to focus on the designated subject matter. The intention is for the learner to imbibe a certain knowledge framework. The end result is normally passing exams. The class room or lecture hall is structured to allow for psychological and educational embedding. The therapist’s treatment room serves the same or similar purpose. Such environments work through suggestion and control, but equally through the exclusion of other matters. Entering through the appropriate door for treatment or a lecture, the client or student opens themselves up to the process.

A therapist excludes other perceptions but also hundreds of years of all other forms of knowledge. They exclude the client’s intellectual and developmental counter-experiences. The therapist is by definition, semi-educated, that is having knowledge of one subject to the exclusion of others.

Although therapists claim knowledge of human nature, their reasoning is both logically and intuitively flawed, constructed as it is upon subjectivity. Their training, certificates, working environments underpins their credibility and authority. But that has been so with quacks down the ages.

Stanley Wilkin Greenwich Tuition Academy London

IELT classes, Business and Health and Social Care classes.

We all believe we know exactly what ‘genius’ means. To quote (Collins Dictionary): ‘(person with) exceptional ability in a particular field’. At times it is just used for someone with talent.

This article will consider the nature of ‘exceptional’ individuals, how we perceive their special nature and simply if they are or were exceptional or that perhaps other phenomenon was evident to explain their appearance. Perhaps, an idea this article will pursue, such individuals merely represent the accessible and recordable evidence of societal or technological change. This article will also consider the connection between notions of genius and of individuality.

I will not discuss here footballers, popstars or TV celebrities, on whom the epithet is often placed, but limit my discussion to those who have achieved intellectually. I will begin with the most prominent individuals in present modern (Western) culture.

Newton:

There are many reasons to see Newton as the originator of modern Science in that he introduced the validity of mathematical proof. Now, scientific ideas are subject to mathematical interpretation. Although this was a period of mathematical and scientific discovery, Newton, like Shakespeare, has become isolated from his contemporaries as if all scientific innovation passed through him. The contribution of others, such as Halley, has been largely downgraded. Newton was one of many working alone similar lines. In fact, he was part of a group.

Some of his claimed advances, reflective telescope, were created by others. In fact, such discoveries were formed incrementally by numerous individuals. It appears easier to conceive of only one discoverer when recalling the history of a specific form of technology or idea. Newton’s empirical law of cooling owes much to Fourier.

The discoveries of that European wide early scientific community have been made accessible through concentration on one of their strongest personalities, focused upon to represent an entire way of understanding. In the distant past, inventions were made, or concepts evolved, which promptly died through lack of suitable methods of propagation. Now, in several scientific fields, such as practical physics, where drivers of discovery are in place, prominent figures have once again become anonymous.

Another example, using a scientist of much less importance than Newton, Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, is now recognised as the head of a team that made the discovery. He assumed attribution, or, as likely attribution was bestowed on him. Nevertheless, understanding and recognition of the discovery was achieved by focusing on one individual and their ‘heroic’ achievement.

Ancient Supermen/women

Heroic is a justified term when discussing supposed scientific, academic or literary innovators. They are a continuation of the heroes of the ancient world, who usually possessed supernatural abilities. Social and technological wonders were ascribed to them. Gilgamesh, an early Mesopotamian hero, was credited with building Uruk’s (a huge ancient city) walls. Later legends claimed he was the son of a god and a mortal woman. Samson, who appears in the Torah stopping the Philistine advance through Palestine (after whom the country is named), had abnormal strength, that of the gods. Samson is no more than a version of Gilgamesh and Hercules. Closer to home, Alfred the Great, an ancient Saxon King of England, has often been credited with a number of important national developments that belonged with other kings.

The early Mesopotamian kings had their own understanding of genius. It was what set them apart from other kings, albeit an achievement, physical attribute or ‘luck’. It was what signified or identified them. This I suggest is a concept that is still with us.

In conclusion, the term ‘genius’ is a way of identifying a methodology or focusing in on scientific or academic endeavour that might otherwise be ignored. It drives recognition. Where for example would Physics be in the public mind without Einstein as a reference point? He has also served as a reference point for other Physics’ innovators (Feynman), within his personality located a entire way of understanding the external world. The concept connects people to ancestors, provide historical signposts, and associate individuals with the super-natural.

The above serves not to deny special individual ability but to rationalise it into its true nature. Any innovation is the result of numerous individual’s intellectual activity coalescing into one point to enable accessibility and understanding. Such individuals may only have greater general powers of empathy, coincidence, opportunity and luck on their side.

Stanley Wilkin

http://www.greenwichtuitionacademylondon.co.uk

Most psychologists believe that it began in 1998, when Martin Seligman chose it as the theme for his term of president of the American Psychological Association, though the term originates with Maslow, in his 1954 book Motivation and Personality. Seligman stressed that clinical psychology had been consumed by only mental illness, echoing Maslow’s comments. Research into positive psychology might be traced back to the 4 P. A. Linley et al. origins of psychology, such as, in William James’ writings on healthy mindedness. In fact, views that reflect humanism can be found in the work of William James, John Dewey, and G. Stanley Hall. William James argued that in order to study optimal human functioning thoroughly, one has to consider the subjective experience of an individual. For that belief, James is considered, by some psychologists, to be America’s first positive psychologist.

In his presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 1906, William James asked why some individuals were able to utilize their resources to their fullest capacity and others were not. Positive psychology has common interests with parts of humanistic psychology, and its emphasis on the fully functioning person, and self-actualization and the study of healthy individuals. Maslow lamented psychology’s preoccupation with disorder and dysfunction. The term first appeared in Maslow’s book Motivation and Personality. In this book, Maslow maintains that psychology itself does not have an accurate understanding of human potential, and that the field tends not to raise the proverbial bar high enough with respect to maximum attainment.

The first summit took place in 1999. The First International Conference on it took place in 2002. In 2009, only last year, the First World Congress on it took place. As I mentioned above, this science finds its roots in the humanistic psychology of the 20th century. Earlier influences on it came from philosophical and religious sources. The ancient Greeks had many schools of thought. During the Renaissance, individualism started to be valued. Utilitarian philosophers, such as John Stuart Mill, believed that moral actions are those actions that maximize happiness for the most number of people, and that an empirical science of happiness determine which actions are moral. Thomas Jefferson and other democrats believed that Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights, and that it justifies the overthrow of the government. The Romantics valued individual emotional expression and sought their emotional true selves, which were unhindered by social norms.

To summarize and add more details, most psychologists agree that the advent of it can be traced back to Martin E. P. Seligman’s 1998 Presidential Address to the American Psychological Association. Seligman realized that psychology had neglected two of its three pre-World War II missions: helping all people to lead more productive and fulfilling lives, and identifying and nurturing high talent. The advent of the Veterans Administration in 1946 and the National Institute of Mental Health in 1947 had rendered psychology a healing discipline based upon a disease model and illness ideology. With this realization, Seligman used his APA presidency to initiate a shift in psychology’s focus toward a more positive science.

After his A.P.A. (American Psychology Association) Presidency, Martin Seligman, reminded the field that it has been side-tracked reiterating that psychology is also the study of strength and virtue and that treatment is nurturing what is best within us. Seligman’s presidential initiative was catalyzed by a series of meetings of scholars who could inform the development of positive psychology, and the establishment of the Positive Psychology Steering Committee (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ed Diener, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Chris Peterson, and George Vaillant). What segued was a Network, that later became the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, the first Positive Psychology Summit, and a special issue of the American psychologist on positive psychology to mark the new millennium.

Since Seligman’s presidential address, there have been numerous positive psychology books, journal special issues, and the establishment of regional positive psychology networks that span the globe. In 2006, the first dedicated journal, The Journal of Positive Psychology, was published. Seligman united the efforts of the scientists who have become key players in the positive psychology movement. These players include the Positive Psychology Steering Committee and the leaders of numerous positive psychology research centers, research pods, and grant holders (Seligman, 2005). C. R. (Rick) Snyder edited the special issue of the Journal of social and clinical psychology in 2000 and the influential Handbook of positive psychology in 2002.

Chris Peterson headed up the Values-in-Action project that led to the VIA classification of strengths and virtues, which I studied in this course’ previous assignment. The winners of the prestigious Templeton Positive Psychology Prizes were: Barbara Fredrickson, for her work on positive emotions in 2000, Jon Haidt, worked on the positive moral emotion of elevation in 2001, and Suzanne Segerstrom, for her work on the beneficial effects of optimism on physical health in 2002. Some of the financial donors are: the Templeton Foundation, The Gallup Organization, the Mayerson Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, and the Atlantic Philanthropies. To conclude, this science also offered excellent opportunities for rapid scientific advances.

References

Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Positive Psychology Network 2004 progress report.

Thank you.

Elena Pezzini, M.S., C.P.C.
You Have Got The Power, Inc.
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The other day, I was talking with an international acquaintance who enjoys studying such interesting topics as sociopathic and psychopathic behavior. Yes, I told you it was intriguing. Anyway, she has come to the conclusion after some 50-years of studying such folks during her life-experience that essentially most people are good people, but don’t kid yourself she reminds us, there are evil thinkers amongst us! Well, I doubt that comes as any shock to any of us, but I think you might find our conversations relevant.

She explained to me that she believed that 75-82% of people globally are normal, that is to say; “have the normal range of emotions, and are basically good human beings.”

Okay so, that is a good jumping off point to look into this topic further. You see, she may believe this to be the case, and it may be so, but we have no way to quantify it, and really little if any empirical evidence because the social-psychological researchers (many of whom are certifiably nuts themselves) use their views to skew the data to prove themselves right to further their own causes (in my opinion).

Now then, she also points to the inordinate number of psychopaths and sociopaths who are attracted to business and politics. That would be hard to deny especially on the political front, after all, to get elected one has to be a good liar and feel comfortable with “being on stage” all the time, and continually lying through their teeth, yes, as they smile for the camera. It goes with the territory and honest folks well, they just have a much tougher time in politics for obvious reasons.

So, the same as the charge one might claim against a corporate leader or politician, tends to go for the whole of the population it appears. Thus, I guess I ask; what’s the difference – and reiterate that the 75-82% could be correct, but we just don’t know, and it would seem that psychopaths would be attracted to careers they can excel in, such as politics for instance.

However, just to be fair, I did meet a psychopath the other day who walked over to me at the Starbucks patio from the bus stop to bum some change. Now he’ll never be in politics, but he along with his story was that of a textbook sociopath, not that I aced my college psychology class, but you get the point. Indeed, he will practice his endeavors somewhere, even if he never masters his skills to take him to the leadership level of a company or political position.

Humans regardless of their level in society use other humans to serve their will. Like the guy from the bus stop attempting to panhandle – what’s the difference? After discussing this later my international acquaintance adjusts the figure to 75-80%, which again, it may or may not be. But she asks if I reject her theory. Yes, well, yes I do somewhat reject this theory, especially when specifically applying it to political figures or corporate leadership, in that we’d be calling out a group of people due to their profession.

Also, consider this – if the 75-80% (good people or good little humans) allow your psychopathic labeled people to control them through indifference, fear, or for whatever reason, which inevitably leads to a boiling over, and chaos ensues then aren’t they really to blame in the end, as much or even more so than the individual that took advantage of them? And it is that indifference and weak character which could be said to be the real problem in that case.

So, one could argue that there are “good little humans” who are a big problem and there are “bad big and little humans” who are a problem. And yet, they all share one major characteristic, THEY ARE ALL HUMANS! Okay so, as usual you may email me with questions or concerns, but I ask you please consider all this.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank http://www.worldthinktank.net – Lance Winslow believes it’s hard work to write 22,222 articles; http://www.bloggingcontent.net/

Being born into a world in which nothing is known outside of the empirical knowledge gained from a slight understanding of the physical tangible observable universe, the youth are taught a collective objectified version of reality which holds no real bearing or relation to the inner depth of the human psyche and spirit, as posited by the greek philosopher Plato in his Allegory of the Cave, and the theory of the simulacrum. In this condition in which people are subtly forcebly separated from their own nature, from all angles, and unwittingly made into being something that they are not by their culture, the impressionable teenage mind is made to be incredibly disturbed and unhappy with it’s existence, as it can only think and feel in terms of what it knows from the aforementioned empirical knowledge; this is called “The Human Condition”.

The Allegory of the Cave posits in this world, people have been symbolically bound and tied in a dark cave, where they only see the shadows projected onto a wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them. The poor wretched people who are bound in the cave get into a game of identifying the shadows on the wall based on names that they have given them, and so over time the one who wins the game is not the one who can accurately describe what is being seen, but rather the one who can match the shadow to the names given to it by the poor blind cave people; this is exactly the condition of the majority of people in the world in which we live in. From the very beginning what is taught to children is not what is the objective truth of the situation, but rather it is the objectified assumptions of the past.

Genetic memory has been proven as a fact, there are lab studies in which a placard of a harmless animal was shown to a baby chick, and then a placard of a harmful predator like a wolf or fox was shown, to gague the reaction and see if the chick would retain a genetic memory of predators. Sure enough, it was proven that baby birds especially have a strong retention of cellular or genetic memory. The same is proven when baby sea turtles pop out of an egg and go straight for the ocean, knowing exactly what to do without being taught in the least bit by it’s external environment. “Both the readiness to respond to specific triggering stimuli and the ensuing patterns of appropriate action are in all such cases inherited with the physiology of the species.

Known as ‘innate releasing mechanisms’ (IRM’s), they are constitutional to the central nervous system. And there are such in the physical make-up of the species Homo sapiens as well.’ (Joseph Campbell, ‘Myths to Live By’ p.117) How this works is not complicated to understand, our genes that are handed down to us from previous generations effect our physical makeup, our desires, and what motives us, we interact with the environment, and depending on our perception and our thoughts and feelings our genes are effected and passed down to the next generation. In fact in studies of twins it has been showns that genes account for 50-75% of your decision making, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective as we would need to be prepared for our environment as well as be flexible and able to adapt to new changes. What results when these two factors are considered together is “The Human Condition”, whereby people generally and teenagers specifically are at constant odds with their own internal feelings and self, and the external self which they are forced to be by the co- denizens of their dark dank cave.

At every stage of an adolescent’s life which is supposed to be a natural progression of the life cycle, and in between, a corrupted objectified stale reality gradually seeps in to the nascent psyche and replaces what is truly a beautiful nature with it’s own bizarre abnormal form. Some people may be more resilient or react in different way then others, but within the general 99% of the population, most are so blinded by the objectifications that they are completely unable to even see what is happening. The “party line”, the mainstream view of things, is never challenged, and if it is the challengers are outcasted and laughed at for their failure to identify the shadows on the cave wall as successfuly as the deluded dungeon dwellers. According to teendepression.org “About 20 percent of teens will experience teen depression before they reach adulthood. Somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of teens show symptoms of depression at any given time. About 5 percent of teens are suffering from major depression at any one time.” Depression doesn’t include rage, frustration, insanity, apathy, lack of happiness, lack of excitement, and any other of manifestations of a constipated conditioned psyche.

These expressions of extreme sadness are unnatural, you can feel that they are unnatural when you are under them, because your body is telling you that something is not right by this visible manifestation of extreme sadness and maladaption. It is shocking and incredible that modern man continues to pump his children full of crazy drugs in order to “cure” this condition of the consciousness. The problem is not one which can be fixed merely by altering the chemistry in someone’s brain.

God knows what kind of additional psychological problems could be triggered with the addition of this poison in their brains both in the form of information and in the form of chemicals. If a child were raised in an environment where all of the good qualities of life could unfold themselves without violent interruption, where people worked together instead of apart, where a child was raised with a healthy mind, body, and Spirit, where there was no false perception of reality based on a purely materialistic awareness, there would be no 20% teenage depression. To look for support for this hypothesis you would need to look towards no less of a liberated soul then the Dalai Lama, who says, “If you want others to be happy, practice Compassion, and if you want to be happy, practice Compassion.” This statement contains the essence of my hypothesis, that happiness and a natural, enlightened state of being is possible through simply allowing our conscience to be our conscience. Most people understand all of this intuitively but are unable to enact it out in the world due to the thick layer of “simulacrum”.

What needs to be done is for people to be educated on the nature of their reality and their position in it. People can use the internet with such tools as Youtube to get the message of sanity out there, or post flyers, but something must be done to make people more generally aware of Plato’s ideas as well as those positive auspicious qualities of life which are not a product of man’s false simulacrum.

The author of this article is James Portocarrero from http://www.alchemymeditations.com – Alchemy Meditations is a direct way of experiencing the Transcendental Spiritual Energy of Meditation, evolving your Consciousness, and changing your life directly through special guided Shaktipat Meditations.. You can check out his YouTube channel also at http://www.youtube.com/ShaktipatSeer

James can be contacted @: ShaktipatSeer@gmail.com I began Meditating at the age of 21 and since then have been on a tremendous path of wonder and amazement.. Immediately after I began meditating I had a Kundalini awakening and began to transmit this Kundalini electricity to others through powerful group Shaktipat Meditations. I started to host daily Satsang (I would read from an Esoteric Text or lecture on Esoteric Science) and group Meditations and found the experience so utterly rewarding that I hardly had any say in the matter of devoting all of my Heart and energy into expanding my work. I have been gradually trying to build up my capacity to serve and help bring others together to serve and help to change the paradigm we live in.. Through my Youtube Channel ShaktipatSeer I have reached out to tens of thousands of people with my Pineal Gland Activations and much more.. check out my website and my Youtube channel for some amazing Wisdom and Electric Shaktipat Meditations!

Most people in our world completely ignore the value of the dream messages. Dream interpretation is considered by them as an attempt to possibly discover something meaningful inside confused images that have no meaning.

Other people think that we may discover something important thanks to the meaning of our dreams, but they ignore that there is a unique method of dream interpretation that accurately translates their meaning. Only Carl Jung could discover the right code for a perfect dream translation, as I prove in my work. I continued his research, proving that his theories were real discoveries.

Dreams are so important that when the entire world will learn the truth, everyone will study the dream language. The unconscious mind that produces dreams is a superior mind that possesses eternal wisdom.

After continuing Jung’s research I verified that the unconscious mind has a divine origin. However, I also verified that the biggest part of the human brain and psyche belong to the anti-conscience, our wild and primitive conscience. The unconscious guidance in our dreams protects us from the evil anti-conscience that keeps trying to destroy our human conscience.

The religious lessons we had when we were children were not fairy tales. Even though our world is atheistic and materialistic, there is also a spiritual reality. Now that the true meaning of dreams was discovered, it became obvious that the truth has many dimensions and that the atheistic mindset of our historical time is based on erroneous conceptions.

You can trustfully believe that the unconscious mind has a divine origin and that your dreams are sources of valid information. Their veracity was already scientifically and empirically verified many times. You can have more proof if you’ll care about studying my work.

Many times you won’t be able to understand how wise the unconscious guidance is because it will unavoidably upset you. You may have to change your plans, or have to admit that you are making mistakes.

You are constantly influenced by the absurd content you have inherited in your anti-conscience. You cannot understand the unconscious wisdom because you ignore many things, and you care only about feeling fine at the moment. Your vision is too limited.

The unconscious mind tries to transform you into a sensitive human being. This is how you’ll become wise, and stop making mistakes. If you are violent, you are dominated by your primitive conscience. Therefore, you will continually suffer throughout your life unless you take action. You have to transform your personality so that you may do only what is good for you and for your community. The way to achieve this personality change is done through understanding and subsequent application of messages sent from the unconscious that manifest themselves in your dreams.

The unconscious mind helps you avoid bad relationships or negotiations that will bring you problems and suffering. It shows you all the dangers you cannot see alone. It cures all diseases or mental illnesses. It helps you prevent accidents and misfortunes. It shows you how to live peacefully and happily forever.

Therefore, your dreams are the most powerful tool you have at your disposal when you learn the dream language. You only have to follow the unconscious guidance, even if you cannot understand its wisdom at the beginning. This is where I come in to help you on an amazing journey of self-discovery that you will never regret.

Christina Sponias continued Carl Jung’s research into the human psyche, discovering the cure for all mental illnesses, and simplifying the scientific method of dream interpretation that teaches you how to exactly translate the meaning of your dreams, so that you can find health, wisdom and happiness.
Learn more at: http://www.scientificdreaminterpretation.com
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“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