My recent fixation on flowers is quite plausibly an instance of psychological transference, where feelings or emotions that might find themselves unattainably inhibited in one direction find new avenues, channels and vectors of (self) expression. We often enough observe the rapid and adaptive transmutation of emotional needs and impulses from one goal to another and, […]
Category: Psychology
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Global Conflict: Time to Grow Up
While it may be low-hanging fruit and all references to it may be quite akin to stating the bleeding obvious, there is a distinct lack of unity in the world: wars, political dissonance, conflict, sabre-rattling and a thousand different flavours of internecine anger or paranoid fear. What might be somewhat less obvious in such an […]
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Information Bubbles
Observing some of the unfolding confrontations and adversarial self-definitions across these social media spaces we all now inhabit, even if indirectly bearing the burden of their consequences, I really have to wonder sometimes, not if the world can still be saved from its own erstwhile immaturity and wilful ignorance but if it is even worth […]
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The Power of the Collective
The mystery of this “power of the collective” is not in the overt presence or tidal, cultural and narrative-psychological force it compels. It is in the many and diverse ways that individuals bound together by information, communication and shared experience or role find themselves as bearers of a meaning and a message which is hardly […]
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Incomplete Sketches of Mental Life
Our mental images are the incomplete sketches upon which we build a whole world and in their useful ambiguity and uncertainty we cultivate our freedom to grow.
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Ignorance is Bliss
If it is true that ignorance is bliss, I am surprised that there are not many more blissfully happy people in this world. Ignorance, of course, has quite little to do at all with acquired knowledge or education and is more often a direct measure of a person (or group) being unable to accommodate the […]
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Partisan Pathology
There is quite a lot to be said for the psychological dynamics of a partisan pathology (on all sides of any conflict or adversarial competition) that can only ever define itself reflexively in opposition to and by difference from a fictionalised, idealised and almost entirely abstract fantasy of Other. It is an infantile symmetry that […]
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Love is Blind
It was Shakespeare who coined the phrase regarding love’s indifference to what we directly perceive with our senses but his intention was more to indicate that everything we do, no less – those deep visceral and emotional facts of our lives, are first and foremost mental phenomena. I love not what I see but what […]
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Human Beings Being Human: Anger
It is a simple truth. Fear drives most of our irrational decisions and our inability to admit it is in fact the greatest fallacy of all. Violence, war, hatred, discrimination, cruelty – it is all at base and in essence just fear under another name. People fear the truth of their own essential vulnerability more […]
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Philosophy of Loneliness
There is a certain philosophical psychology of loneliness in which we might come to understand that every act of self-definition and individuation is always already the construction of that difference and distance by which we also inadvertently traumatise and emotionally isolate ourselves from each other. In orienting ourselves as “the type of person who would […]
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Interpersonal Personality
Interpersonal relationships are in general rendered enigmatic and intractable by the fact(s) of our dual existence as both material and mental creatures. In many ways, the dissonance and dissociative friction that often emerges between people is really only a microcosm of that inverse symmetry and self-inflected relationship we have with (and within) ourselves. While there […]
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The Paradoxical Haunting of Selfhood
What is (perhaps) even more curious than this, the translucent Cheshire Smile of a concept of Self that becomes an artefact around which we find ourselves (!) in endless free-fall and ontological orbit, is that the very difference and distance by and through which we define that self traps us in an intractable enigma. We […]
