A road less traveled: Vocation,sex, and religion

This chronicle of embodied experience charts the pilgrim's progress of a qualitative researcher during a research trip to New Mexico. The story traces a path from his spiritual awakening as a teenager, through his painful coming out in his thirties as a gay man, to an eventual collision of conflicting issues in his fifties while traveling on the road to a healing shrine with a group of Hispanic Roman Catholics. His participation as a researcher forces him to come to grips with the events of his life as he realizes the vital connection between body and soul in the long journey home.     

Schleiermacher's sermon at Nathanael's grave

The writer provides a translation of the sermon delivered by the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher at the grave of his nine-year-old son Nathanael in 1829. An analysis of the sermon explores this most personal statement of Schleiermacher's attitude toward death and reveals the consonance between his theological reflections and the substance of his life.His article first appeared in theJournal of Religion 57 (January 1977):64–75,and is reprinted with the publisher's permission.     

‘Clemency on the way to the gallows’: death,dreams and dissociation

The survivor of a decade of childhood sexual trauma and violence, perpetrated by a monstrous father, produced a series of dreams in the final year of a ten‐year analysis. They illuminated the ‘death drive’ beneath a lifelong preoccupation with dying and fantasies of submission to death, perpetuated by the promise of hoped‐for freedom from pain and release from a life of suffering. The initial dream involved the collapse of a team of white horses drawing him in a pillory cart to his own hanging for a crime he did not commit. It signified the collapse of a fragile psychological system based on his role as the ‘sacrificial lamb,’ protecting a (not so) innocent mother. The raw truth was now unconcealed: primal, violent, and terrifying dreams and affects emerged where he was now the murderous aggressor. His dreams would become primary agents for an instinctive, life‐giving authenticity to emerge, offering him clemency from the shattering repetitions of persecution and dissociation.     

陈立与20世纪中国工业心理学

陈立的工业心理学生涯跨越70年, 但主要活动集中于1935至1937年, 1977至1990年代中期, 中断40年而再续, 可谓波澜起伏。除了1935年撰写的《工业心理学概观》, 陈立的主要贡献源于后一阶段, 其中包括：恢复了中断多年的中国心理学教学和研究、建立了中国第一个与管理有关的专业(工业心理学)和第一个国家重点实验室、培养了国内第一批工业心理学硕、博士、继承和发扬了实地调研—实验室研究—理论学习相结合的工业心理学传统; 陈立还通过写作和其他形式的呼吁, 促成了中国管理学的兴盛。但他晚年却觉得自己一生是失败的, 主要是因为他认为工业心理学没能做到 “指导人走向最适宜的机会, 并在此过程中实现最高的自我”。     

ANGST. EN PSYKOANALYSES FORLØB

Throughout his adulthood, man weighs the amount and quality of his masculinity in his attempts to accomplish, on his own, what he regards as worthwhile in life. His deeply-rooted ideal is to prove that his capabilities and strength are sufficient in the pursuit of desired satisfactions. His worst fear is that he is incapable in the face of the challenges of the world; that he would become castrated by life when trusting in his own activity. In the beginning of life, the psyche, in its early absoluteness, regards as evil everything that destroys good, or everything that makes it impossible to reach the desired pleasure. The more dominant the derivatives of this ultimate interpretation are in man's life project, the more he is inclined to see the realities of life as a camouflage of the hidden evil, and the more it is thus necessary for him to mobilize his compensatory phallicism as a weapon and fortress for the sake of the security of his self. When the phallicism thus increases, the black side of it, fear of castration, also grows in force, and a vicious circle is created. In this paper, the psychodynamics of captain Ahab and his crew in Herman Melville's Moby Dick are explored in order to illustrate and analyze these phallic-narcissistic layers of masculinity.     

Claude Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande: Secrecy,mystery and ambiguity in Debussy's life and art

Debussy attempted to conceal the stresses of his early life: his father leaving to fight in the Franco-Prussian War, his younger siblings being sent to live with an aunt, and Debussy remaining alone with his mother. His early-discovered musical talent provided him with a sense of continuity throughout his life. However, he felt his training at the Paris Conservatoire to be restrictive and rebelled against it in the musical style he developed. Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande gave him an opportunity to creatively depict these thwarted passions and his aversion to restriction.     

Death and Dying in Camus' The Plague

ABSTRACT: Albert Camus' allegorical novel The Plague provides meaningful insight into the process of death and dying. As with other literary masterpieces the author shares with his audience his concern with and knowledge of the vicissitudes of the human condition. In The Plague Camus employs the reactions and responses of a community and its citizenry to an epidemic of the bubonic plague as a symbolic representation of the individual's grappling with death and dying. His main themes are those of separation and exile, despair and despondency, and helplessness and hopefulness.     

Socratic Persuasion in the Crito

Socrates does not use the Laws' Speech in the Crito principally to persuade Crito to accept his coming execution. It is used instead to persuade Crito to examine and work on his inadequate view of justice. Crito's view of justice fails to coordinate one's duties to friends and those to the law. The Laws' Speech accomplishes this persuasive goal by accompanying Crito’s earlier speech. Both start from the same view of justice, one that Crito accepts, but reach opposing conclusions. Crito cannot judge between the two appealing speeches. His understanding of justice is too confused for him to decide well how to help Socrates. His need to explain what happened the morning he visited Socrates will prompt him and others to examine this indeterminate view of justice. Socrates foregoes direct refutation because Crito will not abide that usual way of interrogation. Engaging in short question-and-answer conversation is not the only way to bring a person to aporia and the intention to examine oneself. Socrates does not here undermine his assertions in the Apology about his ignorance, lack of interest in teaching, constant philosophizing, and his belief that what he does is question, examine, and test those he talks to.     

Death,Myth and Reality in C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis's life and writings were profoundly shaped by his childhood experience of his mother's death. It is significant that the young hero's dying mother is mentioned at the very beginning of the first book of the Narnia sequence (seeThe Magician's Nephew.)., which in more general terms offers a mythopoeic version of the Christian interpretation of death. Lewis had a keen awareness of the power of myth (he would not have denied that the Christian gospel is myth). However, it was in the experience of the death of his wife (recounted inA Grief Observed) that he felt confronted by reality in a way that shook his faith to its foundations. This article will explore the tension between myth and reality in Lewis's attempts to write, as a Christian, of the experience of death.     

Reflections on Freud's reaction to the death of his mother

Freud's reaction to the death of his mother as he reported it in letters to Ernest Jones and Sandor Ferenczi is discussed. The sense of liberation and the absence of grief which he emphasized is given some analytic consideration. An attempt is then made to gain an understanding of Freud's somewhat cryptic remark that a change in the "values of life" in the "deeper layers" will have occurred following his mother's death. His discussion of these concepts in Civilization and Its Discontents, which was published just before her death, is utilized. The question is raised of whether the death of his mother may have been related to the change in Freud's view of the significance of the preoedipal mother which he presented in "Female Sexuality," the first paper he wrote after her death.     

Apotheosis of actuality: Kierkegaard’s poetic life

By way of an interaction with Kierkegaard’s Point of View, this paper attempts to show the extent to which Kierkegaard’s Repetition was a poetic repetition of his own life. By comparing several of his published texts with journal entries and letters to friends, this paper traces the extent and degree of Kierkegaard’s poetic reflection and corresponding lack of existential immediacy. At its most extreme, this paper argues that Kierkegaard did not really exist in the typical sense of the term; or, more precisely, that he only existed as a poetic repetition, an apotheosized ideal. Kierkegaard lived only insofar as he wrote himself into poetry.     

BREAKING A TABOO: FRANK TIPLER'S THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY

Abstract. In his book The Physics of Immortality. Frank Tipler has broken a longstanding intellectual taboo by dealing as a physicist with the theological themes of God and immortality, as well by arguing that theology can provide material for concept formation in the field of physics. His work on the anthropic principle convinced Tipler that, since the emergence of intelligent life is of the essence of the universe as a whole, the future of life is of fundamental significance. His Omega Point theory takes theological theories of the future's significance seriously from a scientific point of view. Theories of computers play a central role in Tipler's theory of immortality, and even though many critics have misunderstood his thrust in these theories, they are worthy of further exploration. Perhaps Tipler's most important contribution is his insistence that the world as described by physics is more open to interaction with biblical and theological perspectives than is often believed.     

Some Psychological Reflections on the Death of Malcolm Melville*

ABSTRACT: Malcolm Melville died on September 12, 1867, at age 18 from—to quote his death certificate—a “pistol shot wound in [his] right temporal region.” Contemporary designations of the mode of his death changed within hours from suicide, to accident, to death while of unsound mind. Historically, the mode of his death has remained equivocal. In order to approach this enigma a “psychological autopsy” of an equivocal death case as identical to Malcolm Melville's as was possible was conducted as though it were a genuine current “open” case at the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center in 1973. That procedure resulted in a near-unanimous judgment by the center staff that the most accurate certification of the death as described was “probable suicide,” which would then be certified as “suicide.” In this paper the assertion is made that Herman Melville himself had been a psychologically “battered child” and, in a way typical for battered children, psychologically battered his own children when it came his turn to be a parent. The further assertion is made that, for Malcolm, his father was suicidogenic; and established this penchant in Malcolm (through his neglect, active rejection, fearsomeness, and his fixed attention to his own writing—Redburn, White Jacke, and Moby Dick) within the first 2 years of Malcolm's life. For Malcolm, the psychological basis of his suicidal state was isolated desperation—a ubiquitous characteristic of most suicides. Malcolm had a deep unconscious feeling of not being wanted by his father; that it would be better if he were out of the way, dead. On the morning of his death, the choice for Malcolm was between the memory of his mother's kiss a few hours before and the terror of (and the need to protect himself against) his father's rage to come.     

The Old Book Switcheroo: Or Anatomy of a Delusion

In this paper, an aging baby boomer “tells all” about his personal experience with some of the “pitfalls of organized religion,” as observed from his somewhat unusual perspective as a Jew by birth and a Roman Catholic by choice, and a lifelong Asperger’s sufferer, the butt of practical jokes in a variety of juvenile and adult settings. His conclusion, echoing H.L. Mencken’s famous statement that “the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy,” is that the best antidote to these “pitfalls” may be found simply in the responsible practice of religion, including both Judaism and Christianity. The author also believes his own survival in life despite some “ogres and tricksters” along the way validates the Jungian philosophy of synchronicity. He believes that the storms of life are best weathered by accepting them as parts of a Merciful Providence’s “vast eternal plans” for all His children on Earth.     

Lives and deaths: Biographical notes on selections from the works of Edwin S. Shneidman

Edwin S. Shneidman (DOB: 1918-05-13; DOD: 2009-05-15) is a father of contemporary suicidology. His work reflects the intensive study of lives lived and deaths, especially suicides, and is the mirror to his mind. His contributions can be represented by five categories: psychological assessment, logic, Melville and Murray, suicide, and death. His works on suicide can be further divided into five parts: definitional and theoretical, suicide notes, administrative and programmatic, clinical and community, and psychological autopsy and postvention. In this article, not only are the selected works explicated, but also Dr. Shneidman's rather personal biographical notes are shared to allow the reader to understand one more unique individual's life lived, and his death: Edwin S. Shneidman.     

Love Life: Aristotle on Living Together with Friends

According to Aristotle, the most characteristic activity of friendship is “living together” [to suzên]. This paper seeks to understand living together in the light of his famous, foundational claim that humans are social by nature. Based on an interpretation of Nicomachean Ethics 9.9, I explain our need for friends in terms of a more fundamental human need to appreciate one's life as a whole. I then argue that friendship is built into the very structure of human life itself such that human living is living together.     

The White–Jung Friendship: The Untold Story

For decades Jung searched in vain for a theologian with whom he could deeply and openly converse about his new vision of Christianity. Only very late in his life did he find and form a deep friendship with Victor White, a Dominican theology professor, whose own psychic life was saved by Jung's teachings. Jung saw White as the first theologian he had met who truly understood his psychology. Jung wanted to use White's expertise in Catholic theology in his pioneering efforts to transform Christianity, through his psychology, into a living, breathing, vital faith in the divine. For his part, White wanted to resuscitate Thomistic theology by infusing its dry, cerebral character with the emotional vitality of the original Thomas Aquinas by using his newly discovered Jungian teachings combined with some of the original teachings of Aquinas. In the process of their work together, Jung and White became close, trusting friends. However, White was pushed beyond the limits of his psychological resources by political events within his order, whose superiors destroyed his career as a theologian and sent him into exile. In his scathing review of Answer to Job, White displaced his anger/rage onto Jung instead of the appropriate objects. This attack wounded their friendship deeply, and it was only toward the end of their lives that a partial reconciliation was possible. And yet, Jung's friendship with White was perhaps the closest and most trusting relationship he had with a man during his lifetime. Finally, I suggest that White's mission in this life was to resuscitate Thomism rather than help Jung achieve his purposes, and that White achieved his mission.     

Nocturne

A king must be willing to first lower himself and live the life of a common man, before rising once more to his full stature. Boromir fails this test (he who should have realized that he was a steward, not a king), but finally redeems himself in death. Strider/Aragorn fully passes his test and, unlike Boromir, does not die but instead triumphs over death, actually raising the Army of the Dead to help him in a great battle. After the Quest is completed—the ring is destroyed—Strider fully becomes Aragorn, reunites Gondor and Arnor, and is crowned king. His is the classic path of the hero, one that can teach all of us many lessons about our own individuation.     

Least Likely Suicide: The Search for My Father,Ross Lockridge,Jr., Author of Raintree County

“Ross Lockridge, Jr. took his own life on March 6th, 1948, two months following publication of his best-selling novel, Raintree County. The thirty-three year old author from Indiana left his wife and four children. His second son, Larry Lockridge, five years old at that time, has undertaken a search for answers to what has been called the greatest single mystery in American letters. Here, he describes the psychology of survivorship as well as the convergence of factors that led to suicide—personality disorder (narcissistic), biological (possibly genetic) predisposition to depression, and cultural factors related to success in the United States. A merging of such interpretive methods may be more productive than a privileging of one over the other.”     

It's a Wonderful Life: Reflections on Wittgenstein's Last Words

On his deathbed, Wittgenstein is reported to have said, upon hearing that his friends were coming for a visit, “Tell them I've had a wonderful life.” Malcolm found this puzzling, given that Wittgenstein seemed to be fiercely unhappy. I find my way into these words against the backdrop of the Hollywood film It's a Wonderful Life and Wittgenstein's famous remark, to wit, “Man has to awaken to wonder . . . Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.” Along the way I discuss Plato's praise of wonder, Nietzsche's attack on science, and Kierkegaard's remark about finding the sublime in the pedestrian. I conclude that Wittgenstein did have a wonderful life insofar as he was fully awake to wonder, what I call the wonder of our words.