• Psychology

    Virus Dreams

    April 13, 2020 - By 

    You don’t have to be a Jungian psychologist to know that dreams can be the most confounding things. Your long-dead mother is brewing coffee and turns to you with a beatific smile as a torrent of word salad comes out of her mouth, whereupon a parrot flies right through a closed window and hops onto her shoulder to translate it as a long poem by Sophocles, the meaning of which you grasp instantly even though you hate poetry, have never read Sophocles in your life and wouldn’t know him from Maya Angelou. Then the parrot dons an apron and asks—in…

  • Psychology - Religion

    In Praise of the Darkness

    December 4, 2019 - By 

    A rather well-known book once began with this rather foreboding line: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep.” A few lines down in that same story, we read: “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years…” Much later on in the Book of Matthew, Jesus talks about sinners being flung into the darkness, where there is “wailing and gnashing of teeth.”  That would be down there with the…

  • General Nonfiction - Psychology

    Life, Aging, Death, Self:
    Atul Gawande’s “Being Mortal”

    February 17, 2019 - By 

    The problem isn’t so much that in the end, we die. It’s in all the time leading up to the end. Not death, but severe decline is what puts fear in our hearts. A long debilitating illness or just aging that cuts us off progressively (regressively, come to think of it) from all that we love. We all peak physically at some 30 years of age, but robustness and increased life satisfaction can persist for decades longer as we go about building our lives, hopefully coming to accept our aging and its limitations with equanimity and often, good doses of…

  • Fiction - Psychology

    A Halloween Tribute to Hermann Hesse’s “Steppenwolf”

    October 27, 2018 - By 

    “O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,” wrote T.S. Eliot in a poem that was not about Halloween but maybe should have been. (It might have helped lighten Eliot’s mood.) Eliot was writing more about the encounter with non-being, rather than the relatively jocular invitation to explore the dark side of human nature via America’s second most commercially prosperous holiday. (It trails only Christmas in economic activity.) Sure, Halloween is rampantly commercialized and mostly a bonanza for the candy companies and costume stores. But it also reflects a rich tradition of human beings who are not only aware of…

  • Personal Reflections - Psychology

    Outliving Ernest Becker and
    “The Denial of Death”

    October 21, 2018 - By 

    In his 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning work “The Denial of Death,” cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wove together major threads of psychology, philosophy, anthropology and religion in positing that the central motivating force of human life is the fear of death, which compels us to live in its denial. We do so by not thinking or talking about it much, by drinking and drugging too much, sleepwalking through life as if it were giving us all the time in the world, embracing eternal life doctrines of religion, and by pursuing any number of immortality-seeking “hero” projects in our jobs, sports, the military, hobbies, and private obsessions. (Climbing Everest,…