Despite my general resistance against popular books of psychology, especially those that fall in the self-help genre, I decided to read the two books by Kishimi and Koga, beginning with the first, The Courage to Be Disliked. I reviewed the two books separately, and in each case, I began with what I liked about the…
Review of ‘Humankind: A Hopeful History’ by Rutger Bregman
Rutger Bregman’s recent book, Humankind: A Hopeful History (translated by Elizabeth Manton & Erica Moore) is a book about human nature. It is also about our beliefs about human nature, what informs our beliefs and what those beliefs lead to. He makes a careful case that our beliefs about human nature have real consequences. Whereas…
Repeating, Remembering, & Working Through
The title of this post is a slightly altered version of an essay title by Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” in which he briefly describes the development and the task of analysis. With regard to development, he writes about replacing the method of hypnosis with more appropriate methods, including free association and dream…
Learning with Grief, Learning with Joan Didion
Sometimes after recording a video I end up feeling I completely failed to say the most important parts of what I had planned. How could the very parts that motivated the video in the first place slip through my fingers? And how could I let that happen? Why didn’t I re-take the video? What I…
Absence of Purpose
Andrew Taggart just wrote this post about the (non)purpose of religion, which is closely connected to a discussion about the (non)purpose of art, education, philosophy, and ultimately the (non)purpose of being human. When we question the purpose of something, we often don’t realize how much prejudice is conveyed in our question. Questioning the purpose of…