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
In this week’s spotlight, I wish to focus on a subject seldom discussed. If you’re an older member of our society, you probably never thought about blaming your parents for defective genes and you probably never considered demanding that your parents owed you everything because you never asked to be born. Many young people believe that the baby-boomers stole their future and ruined everything including the environment, and many adults argue that young people, Millennials, in particular, are Narcissists. These are but a few of the new demands made on ... Read More
In this week’s spotlight I would like to discuss the construct we call ‘balance.’ Webster defines balance this way, “An even distribution of weight enabling someone or something to remain upright and steady; a condition in which different elements are equal or in the correct proportions.” Think about those two definitions and try to assign the “correct proportions” of what it takes to have balance in your life. Juggling Balancing life is little more difficult than distributing weights equally and or using equal proportions of this and that in order ... Read More
The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand. ~Vince Lombardi Divided We live at a time when it seems there is no limit to the varieties of “truth” one might encounter as they travel the world. That said, we might not even have to leave our nuclear family unit to discover that there are vast differences between the way we see the world and ... Read More