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Another bit of rambling from my Personality Theory class…  Tonight I wrote a short paper on Victor Frankl.  He wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, which is still on the Library of Congress’ top ten list for books that have influenced humanity.  Frankl makes a good basic point: people are happier and better-adjusted when they feel their lives have meaning.  Which is awesome, but more than one of his critics said his philosophy, called logotherapy, was closer to religion than psychology.

And he was very religious — he was a Jew from Austria who’d spent a few days (three) in Auschwitz.  He came to America after that, and was extremely popular from the late 1950′s onward.  Some of his theories were pretty religious, like the idea of suffering bringing meaning to life.  I’m of the opinion that a lot of religions do that because the random cruelty of the universe is hard for most people to bear.  Horrible things don’t happen for a spiritual reason.  They just happen.

But I’m getting off the subject.  Frankl was a pretty arrogant and autocratic kind of guy, from what I’ve read.  He lied about his life before he moved to America — he worked for Nazi-controlled hospitals and performed experiments on fellow Jews to save himself, and he even worked for the Goering Institute for two years (Pytell, 2006).  Not cool.  But you have to feel some sympathy for the guy — he lost his wife to a concentration camp.  She died there.  As I’ve said before, a lot of personality psychologists based their theories on personal experiences.  Frankl’s search for meaning in suffering and his religiosity were probably wed tightly to his time under Nazi rule.

It’s weird — when I was researching my paper I could find a ton of articles on Frankl the man, and on his philosophy and religion, but very little about his psychology.  Everything I got was from PsycARTICLES.  You’d think a database of psychology papers would have more about his psychology, wouldn’t you?  They don’t even have many of the papers he wrote.  I’m tempted to find a copy of Man’s Search for Meaning and thumb through it, just for curiosity’s sake.  It would be a look into history as well as psychology, because it no doubt says something about the culture of the late 1950′s and what made the book so well-received at the time…

Reference

Pytell, T. (2006). Transcending the angel beast: Viktor Frankl and humanistic psychology. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 23, 490-503.  (Pytell has written several papers about Frankl’s personality history.  Interesting stuff.)

A couple of weeks ago, the Viking’s dad got told his heart was seriously damaged.  Last night he had a heart catheterization done to see if it really was damaged, and it wasn’t.  Yay!  V’s dad had a heart attack about ten years ago, and has six stents.  But he should be fine for a good long while, according to the doctor.  I’m really glad.  He’s a decent guy, and he treats me like family as well as being good to his son.

This 2003 book by Sarah Vowell is a collection of essays and personal stories revolving around American history and politics.  She talks about sobbing at George W. Bush’s 2000 inauguration; feeling the Montana wind in her hair as she thinks about Teddy Roosevelt; her former job selling maps from early American history to collectors; going on walking tours of Salem and Gettysburg; and many other essays that intertwine her personal experiences with her thoughts on being a civics geek and patriot.

I like Vowell.  I’ve read two of her other books — Take the Cannoli and Assassination Vacation.  I particularly liked the latter, which was a road trip of political assassination locations.  I liked it better than Patriot, actually, although Patriot had both the sad and funny moments expected in a collection of Vowell essays.  The essays about the 2000 election really brought back the memories of those horrible days, getting sick of hearing about hanging chads and being glued to CNN hoping Gore would win in the end, then the plummeting feeling in my stomach when the Supreme Court crowned Bush president.  I was so damn mad, and sad.

During that time I was having my breakdown, the one that’s led to the last twelve years of mental illness.  I had symptoms for years before that, but I was never that bad before, never completely incapacitated.  So picture, if you will, an unemployed web developer sitting on a couch in Las Vegas with her burned-out writer boyfriend, with nothing better to do than watch the news and chain-smoke a million Camel Lights and hope the rent money could be found in time to prevent eviction.  It was really sad.  Vowell’s book brought that year back to me.  I hope I’m never that low again.

I should pick up Vowell’s most recent book — Unfamilar Fishes, which is about the annexation of Hawaii.  Should be interesting.  Her books always are.

I have three papers to write in the next couple of days, none of which are over three pages.

Two are for Personality Theory:

• A Big Five personality trait, including behaviors, precursors, and outcomes
• Freud’s definition of “polymorphously perverse” sexual desires in children, and an alternative explanation for formation of adult sexuality

And the third is a draft of my term paper for Forensic Psych.  I’m writing about involuntary commitment — the kind where the police are involved. I’m going to write about the different laws in different places, the training officers get, and how psychologists/psychiatrists determine the fitness of the incoming patient.  It could be a whole book if I let it get away from me.  The final paper is only 6-10 pages, so I’ll be summarizing a lot.  I know a good deal about the topic from my years as a peer counselor for an Assertive Community Treatment team.  But I have to find actual papers and briefs on the subject.  Hey, I’ll get to search my school’s library databases for something other than psychology articles!  Cool!  PsycARTICLES is the only database I’ve ever needed up until now.

My professors are being exceptionally understanding about my illness and are allowing me to turn in the papers late.  I’ve been really lucky with teachers, both at this school and at the community college I got my associate’s degree from.

By Sunday I need to write a third Personality paper, this one on the theories of a humanist psychologist not detailed in the textbook (e.g., Fromm, May, or Frankl).  No more than three pages.  I can do that.

Oh, and in two weeks I’ve got my Personality term paper due.  The topic I picked is how Bandura’s theory of modeling affects children who learn to be homophobic and/or transphobic.  That one’s got to be 8-10 pages, IIRC.

So I’m going to go to lunch with a friend, and then get to work.  I’m still having trouble focusing, but I feel a bit better today so maybe I can pull it off.  Wish me luck!

I love Zach Weiner.  He’s the creator of the wonderful SMBC comic and is generally one of the smartest, funniest people on the internets.

He’s written a blog post about agnosticism and atheism.  It’s thoughtful and logical.  He concludes with defining himself as “irreligious.”  Not a bad term, I think.  I’m not adopting it myself, but I love the way he reaches the conclusion.

A former friend of mine used to refer to himself as a “weak atheist.”  By that he meant what I believe — he didn’t think there were deities, but he didn’t know for sure.  I wish there was a better term for it.  According to him (and others), “strong atheists” were people who were certain in their belief that no deities exist.  And that’s what most religious people assume all atheists are.

From the comments in Weiner’s blog, people have a wide range of definition for agnostic.  I find this fascinating.  Some people consider agnostics to be deists.  Um… no?  Deists believe there’s a god, just not one who interacts with the world like theists do.  Agnosticism means, literally, “without knowledge.”  How does that translate into deism?  Whatever.  I shouldn’t argue points with random commenters on the internet.  It’s futile.

If you don’t read SMBC, check it out.  Great comic.  The related video group is pretty good too…

I find Penn, at least the one I know from watching Bullshit and his vlogs on YouTube and his writings –to be a really interesting, complex guy.  He strikes me as a remarkably cool person to have a beer with.  Sorry, a caffeine-free Diet Coke — he apparently doesn’t drink alcohol.  He’s snarky, intelligent, and opinionated.  I admire that.  But his politics drive me nuts.  According to God, No!, he has handwritten pages from Ayn Rand in his office, and he said that if he’d been born earlier he would have wanted to fuck her.  Yikes.

He wrote that he’s libertarian because he believes people are inherently good and will take care of each other in the absence of government.  I strongly disagree.  I’ve studied enough psychology that I doubt his belief in people.  I don’t think people are inherently evil, but we’re all naturally self-absorbed and self-serving to some degree or another.  We also also extremely dependent on our circumstances.  A few examples from social psych:

• Most people — even supposedly more moral and compassionate seminary students — will completely ignore a sick homeless person if they’re in a hurry to get somewhere.
• Social loafing is an established fact.  Most people don’t try as hard when they’re working in groups.
• Related to that, in a crowd people will, in an emergency, not act, because they assume someone else will call the police/save the drowning kid/perform CPR.  While the Kitty Genovese case (where a woman was murdered while 33 neighbors listened or watched from their windows without calling the cops) has been proven to be extremely exaggerated by the press at the time, it sparked a whole host of experiments where the same principle held.
• Most of the time, people will follow along with the crowd even when they know for a fact that the truth is different.  They don’t want to stick their necks out and possibly get ridiculed.
• The Stanford prison study by Zimbardo showed that perfectly normal, healthy people can turn into sadistic monsters in the right situations.  Situational and environmental variables play more into a person’s behavior than their personal feelings do, usually.
• Milgram’s shock studies demonstrated that a majority of people will follow authority figures no matter what they’re told to do.
• Ingroup versus outgroup thinking is inherent in the human brain.  It was important in our evolution many, many millennia ago, as it fostered positive relationships within the social unit.  We can get past it, yes, but it’s hard for there not to be an “other” in any sort of us versus them situation.  This includes, but is not limited to, sexism, racism, nationalism, homophobia, and religious differences.

These are just a few theories there’s a lot of evidence for.  Everything I mentioned has had dozens of studies done on the respective ideas.  The theories are as close to fact as science gets.  I don’t think people are inherently evil, but I don’t think we’re all mostly good, either.  I see people create corporations that screw their employees over.  I see people wield hate speech and prejudice.  I see people think the poor are just lazy and deserve what they get.  And so, unlike Penn, I think government has a stronger role to play than just running the military.  Desegregation would have never happened without government.  Women wouldn’t have gotten the ability to vote if it had been left up to the (male) voters at the time.  Right now states are struggling with gay marriage, which should be a right for anyone who wants it.  The right wing wants to put gay marriage to a vote, because their voting bloc will come out and vote against it.  Government could stop that.

Do I think our government is perfect?  Fuck no.  But I think roads and schools and fire departments deserve funding, and that we the people sometimes need a kick in the ass from government.  We should be kicking politicians’ asses, too.  It should be give and take.

Anyway, on to the subject of Penn’s book: atheism.  It bugged me that he says in the beginning of the book that atheism means “I don’t know,” then contradicts himself later by saying of course there’s no God.  He says agnostics are “pussies” who are really just apologists.  I agree with him about a lot of things, like faith in a deity being detrimental to progress and peace, but…  I dunno.  Maybe he’s just too strident for me.  I like him a lot, but I don’t think I’ll ever think he’s right about everything.  Far from it.  And you know what?  I think he’d be cool with that.  As he says in his book, he does like a good argument.

So there is some evidence that Freud lied about his female patients’ childhoods.  He claimed that sexual feelings towards the father were fantasies.  It’s very possible that these patients were actually sexually abused as children, but Freud covered it up to make his theories more palatable — nobody wanted to hear how widespread molestation was/is.  Wow.  I already thought he was a bastard, but that really takes the cake.  There’s no absolute proof, but there is enough evidence (e.g., Masson, 1984) to question the asshole’s findings.

It seems like a lot of personality theorists base their ideas on their childhoods.  Freud was close to his mother but hated his father.  Jung was a lonely child who lost himself in fantasy, so a lot of his work was based on dreams.  Adler was a sickly child, and his ideas centered around the inferiority complex.  Horney felt distant from her parents and wrote about the childhood need for safety.  Finding inspiration in one’s early life is reasonable, but the degree to which some psychologists (I’m looking at you, Freud) blinded themselves with their childhoods is embarrassing.  No wonder psychology hasn’t been thought of as a hard science.  Freud set research back forty years, all by himself.  Fucker.

There were psychologists before him, by the way.  In the U.S. they were called alienists.  Freud did not invent the idea of the subconscious.  I’m really surprised that my textbook didn’t mention that fact.  They start the book off with him like he was the inventor of everything modern.  Yeah, he had a huge effect on society and psychology both, but the book acts like he created everything from whole cloth.  Wrong.  He stole from colleagues and those who came before him.  He did have some original ideas, but most of those were based around his obsession with sex.

At least the textbook doesn’t let him get away scot-free.  There’s a section on each theorist that talks about what further research has provided evidence for or against the theories.  A lot of Freud’s have been proven wrong.  Go figure.  Some things he got right, like some defense mechanisms.  But catharsis, dreams, penis envy — all that has proven to be bullshit.  Yet still people reference him.  Argh!

References

Masson, J,M. (1984). The assault on truth: Freud’s suppression of the seduction theory. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Schultz, D.P., and Schultz, S.E. (2009). Theories of Personality, 9th ed.  Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

I love Florence + the Machine.  She’s a fantastic songwriter.  But she’s got one song that really bothers me: “Kiss with a Fist.”

It’s perky.  And catchy.  And it upsets me every time I hear it.  It’s about two people beating the living shit out of each other, and the main line of the song is, “A kiss with a fist is better than none.”  Um, no it’s not.  Maybe I’m taking the song too seriously, but it bothers me.

Here’s a better Florence song to make you feel better.  She really is fabulous.

My aunt went to the emergency room Friday afternoon with heart-attack type symptoms.  The doctors thought she’d had a mini-stroke.  But!  They ran some tests, and her MRI came back clean.  Turns out it’s probably just stress.  I’m really glad she’s going to be okay.

Tomorrow I have to do a shitload of homework.  I’ve not been well for a week now, and I’m hoping I can catch up.  I like making the dean’s list.  I want to do it again this term, but I won’t if I can get to feeling better…

[This post brought to you by the fact that I was able to read two chapters of Penn Jillette's God, No! tonight.]

I called myself an atheist for a long time.  I’ve given up on that label and have started referring to myself as an agnostic.  Atheists from Richard Dawkins to Penn Jillette have described atheism as basically an extreme version of agnosticism — “There could be a god.  I highly doubt it, but nobody can say for sure.”  I agree with that.  But calling oneself an atheist makes one misunderstood by non-atheists.  They believe atheists don’t believe in god as surely and arrogantly as theists do believe in god.  And I don’t feel it’s my job to educate theists.  If they want details about my beliefs then I’ll discuss them, but if they’re looking for a label it’s easier to say agnostic.

It also doesn’t help that the atheist community is, well, difficult.  There’s a lot of sexism towards women.  I have no respect for Richard Dawkins because of his sexism.  There are many people in the scene who are all for gender equality, but there are enough bad apples that I’d be uncomfortable at a skeptical or atheist gathering.  If you want to see the kind of assholes out there, check out the comments @rebeccawatson (founder of the Skepchicks) gets on Twitter.  She gets rape and death threats — from other atheists.

There’s also a lot of prejudice in the community towards religious people.  I don’t like religion, but I refuse to believe that all believers are idiots and sheep.  There are smart theists, and there are stupid atheists.  A rather large proportion of atheists in the community — online and off — make blanket statements and jokes about the religious.  Prejudice is prejudice.  My mother believes in God.  So do some of my friends.  They’re not idiots.  I hope for their sakes that there is an afterlife where you get to be with your loved ones forever.  Hell, I’d like that.  It would be nice if me and the Viking could be together always.  I doubt it, but they can believe whatever they want.

My only problem with religious people is when they try to force their faith and/or morals down everyone else’s throats.  There’s nothing wrong with being non-heterosexual, or transgendered, or kinky, or tattooed, or bacon-eating, or whatever else people can do or be that’s harmless.  I don’t care if someone wants to believe in the Easter bunny as long as they don’t try to make me worship plastic eggs and marshmallow Peeps.

So… yeah.  Rather than deal with all the anti-theists in the atheist community, I’ll just call myself an agnostic.  Or just say I’m not religious.  That one usually works pretty well.

It’s almost 2am.  I really should go to bed, but I’m not even slightly tired.  I hope I can sleep tonight.  I have stuff to do tomorrow…