Self-empowerment begins with self-reflection. The question, “what is humanness or what does it mean to be human?” is obviously a part of any serious self-reflection. For Sigmund Freud and others, humanness was simply a position on the evolutionary ladder. A position with more cortical matter and therefore more inhibitory ability. Mankind’s marvelous brain was not only more sophisticated in terms of its ability to reason, etc., but more powerful in terms of its ability to inhibit impulses. The latter is critical since according to Freud our unconscious was a seething cauldron ... Read More
I’m puzzled. For years I have spoken to many people about changes they desired in their lives. Some desired to simply lose weight or stop smoking but most longed to enjoy happier and healthier lives. It seems there is also a drive to have more money among most. So why then, when you go back years later, has nothing changed? That is my puzzle. Cardiac Rehabilitation I recently interacted with a team of rehab professionals within a hospital. They administer both a health education and exercise program chiefly for cardiac ... Read More
It is interesting to see the social networking posts criticizing people who do not know how to think, or do not seem to have common sense, or who say the dumbest things, or carry out really stupid acts, and so forth. It is also intriguing to me to review the many complaints about criminality, mental health issues, politicians and the like. What do all of these things have in common? One might argue that there is some mental or moral deficiency or both. Perhaps that’s true, but does that mean ... Read More
Not long ago the affairs of mankind were thought to be controlled by the gods. The idea of self-improvement/self-empowerment is relatively new and yet today it is a multi-billion-dollar business. The acceptance of modern theories in psychology together with advances in our definition of freedom has led to a mobile society such as no other time in history. We are upward mobile, mobile as to where we live, mobile in our expectations and truly believe that a member of our society can become almost anything they really desire to be. ... Read More
For more than three centuries the idea of an unconscious mind was ignored or denied by the larger community of science. Indeed, as Joel Weinberger and Valentina Stoycheva point out in their wonderful new book, The Unconscious, “. . . for most of the history of Western thinking, unconscious processes were ignored, minimized, or flat-out denied.” And while this is undeniably true, researchers and philosophers alike nevertheless discovered evidence of unconscious processes but chose to relegate them to material matters. For example, Mesmer credited magnetic fluids and refused to acknowledge ... Read More
