Category: Psychology
Karina Aguiar, Your TED Talk: Let’s Talk About It
Talking with Dreamers
Summer Reading, Albert Lafarge: Brave New World Revisited (1958)
Writes Albert Lafarge:
I have just absorbed the following passage from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited in which Huxley quotes liberally from Erich Fromm:
The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without a fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish “the illusion of individuality,” but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But “uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. … Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.”
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited (1958), p.20 .
And I recently finished George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, mainly via the audiobook edition, which is read by a cast of over 100 people. Saunders is one of my heroes and this novel, his first, is a weird masterpiece.
Summer Reading, Richard Murphy: You Must Change Your Life (2014)
In the following I shall discuss, initially using a literary model and later a psychological and sociological context, how acrobatism became an increasingly far-reaching aspect of modern reflection on the human condition: this occurred when, following the trail of the ubiquitous Nietzsche, people discovered in man the unfixed, unleashed animal that is condemned to perform tricks. (61)
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, p. 61
Summer Reading, Angelika Festa: Various Works of Oliver Sacks, MD.
Below is Oliver Sacks’s last message to his readers of the New York Times. The message is titled: My Own Life: Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Cancer.
“I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight. I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends.”
The New York Times, February 19, 2015. Dr. Oliver Sacks died on August 30, 2015.
Psychology of Flourishing Students Assess Their Own Strengths
Writes Professor Christine Vitale:
In Fall 2016 Psychology of Flourishing, students exchanged pen-pal letters with Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences students who were similarly studying positive psychology. In this assignment, the letter writers introduced themselves. They expressed their personal concepts of success. They described those moments when reader and writer felt pride in themselves and explained to each other what each regarded as his or her own “character strengths.” In the letter she exchanged with her pen pal, one student wrote this:
…Right now, I think I want to be a scriptwriter. I love to write. Watching my words come to life on the screen is very exciting and satisfying for me. I enjoy the fact that the resulting images are always different from the ones in my head when I originally wrote them, it’s the beautiful unpredictability of the medium. I think that art is a form of expression—a language—that has the potential to explain phenomena that cannot be described or summed up into words. I hope one day that my work will excite something within people that they cannot explain…. My greatest accomplishment is the fact that I am a junior in a fine arts college pursuing the career of my dreams. I am happy that I have come this far in spite of every challenge I’ve faced these past few years. I am also proud of being a good sister and daughter; it is so important to be kind to your family and to let them know that they are loved.
“If Hollywood Don’t Need You,” (1982), Don Williams
An Interesting And Surprising Life
A Friday Night Lights character drafts a self-evaluation for college applications:
TYRA [Voice Over] Two years ago, I was afraid of wanting anything. I figured wanting would lead to trying and trying would lead to failure. But now I find I can’t stop wanting. I want to fly somewhere in first class. I want to travel to Europe on a business trip. I want to get invited to the White House. I want to learn about the world. I want to surprise myself. I want to be important. I want to the best person I can be. I want to define myself instead of having others define me. I want to win and have people be happy for me. I want to loose and get over it. I want to not be afraid of the unknown. I want to grow up to generous and big-hearted, the way that people have been with me. I want an interesting and surprising life. It’s not that I think I’m going to get all these things. I just want the possibility of getting them. College represents possibility, the possibility that things are going to change. I can’t wait.
“Happiness is largely related to one’s sense of belonging,” Katie McColgan declares in a simulated survey of affiliative traits that she devised for a Liberal Arts 400-level “summative elective,” Friday Night Lights: An American Mirror.”
Friday Night Lights is a television series treating high school life in an imaginary Texas small city.
Says Professor Robert Gerst: “Katie evaluated characters who play leading roles in the show. Katie learned affiliative personality analysis in LASS-281 (Psychology of Flourishing). She used that lens to analyze, as if they were real people, her fictional subjects.”