Category: Relationships, Social, and Cultural
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Psychological Treatment and Understanding Depression and Anxiety
An inhabitant of the variegated landscape of experience is pain. Within this landscape, physical pain has location, distribution, coloration, brightness, sharpness, intensity, duration, and slope. Physical pain has texture and flavor. Pain signals injury, damage, threat, imbalance, dysfunction. Pain informs attention and correction of the cause of pain through feedback. The mitigation of pain guides…
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George Floyd and America’s Collective Unconscious
The protests centered upon the death of George Floyd are fed by a deeper stream of discontent. The discontent is not specific to any one issue, but by multiple inconsistencies with democracy and touted American values. Fundamental premises that underlie the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator…
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How I stopped smoking…
I managed to inveigle my first pack of cigarettes when I was twelve years old from my Grandfather. During the summer months prior to Eisenhower’s first term for the presidency, “Eisenhower for President” and “Stevenson for President” cigarette packs in colors of red, white, and blue could be purchased at tobacconists. I told my grandfather…
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Capitalism and the Fate of Big and Little
You rightfully may wonder why does a shrink concern himself with social-political issues. Culture, society, and its trappings are interdependent. We live within the matrix, and just as the characteristics of water effect the health of fish, so the social-political matrix effects human physical and mental health. At the onset of this essay, I declare…
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Limits of Binary and Zero-sum Mindset
The binary framework has deep roots in Western culture. The binary framework applies to systems defined by restricted logics such as board games and to science and digital applications, such as Newtonian physics and programing. Binary logics rely upon axiomatic, self-referential, closed systems. Inputs to the system must accord with the system, otherwise inputs are…
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American Psychological Association and Public Policy
Much that passes as “scientific” in psychology fails to meet basic criteria of truth. Amicus briefs, press releases, and news articles, promulgated to the public and to the members of the profession, often do not pass fundamental “common sense” criteria of science. Consider, for example, the November, 2916 magazine cover of the American Psychological Association…
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Primal Dispositions, Educated Elites, and Liberal Bias
An interconnected web of alliances and accommodations link education, professions, media, government bureaucracies and agencies, corporations, foundations, think tanks, lobbyists, central banks, and global elites. These groups, individually and collectively, strive for self-interest, power, and expansion. The motives for power and expansion borrow from primal human needs for survival. Humans in hierarchical societies align with…