Carl Van Vechten

Have you ever done something bizarre, and wondered what your motives were? Has there ever been a time where you’ve done something but your reasons were much deeper than you could understand? This is the result of your unconscious hard at work. The unconscious mind holds the secrets that create our outer personality and drive our actions, the secrets that we cannot harness voluntarily. Psychologist Joseph Campbell describes how the unconscious mind plays a huge role in mythology and culture, two…

In Giorgio Agamben’s The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, he evaluates Paul’s letter by taking a close reading of the opening of Romans and then claims that within these treasured words ultimately lies Paul’s messianic philosophy. Each chapter, interestingly, lays out the context and content that each word of the opening means and what Paul was hoping to convey to the Romans. Agamben also presents Benjamin’s Theory on the Philosophy of History side-by-side Paul’s…

the psychosexual stages, and the defense mechanism used to cope with anxiety (Cervone, & Pervin, 2010). Within this paper will be an explanation of psychodynamic theory as Sigmund Freud designed it and how neo-Freudian theorist such as Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, and Erik Erikson advanced Freud’s concepts. Furthermore, this paper will illustrate how Freud’s school of thought still influences theorist and therapy in the 21st century. Sigmund Freud The father of psychodynamic theory Sigmund Freud…

Carl Rogers was “born in Chicago, IL Jan 8, 1902” (deCarvalho, 2010) into a “fundamentalist religious home” (Rogers, 1980, p. 27). Growing up, Rogers did not have any close friends in elementary school or high school, which he attributed to his home environment (Rogers, 1980, p. 28-29). His first real experience of comradery came when he went to the College of Agriculture at the University of Wisconsin where he “almost immediately joined a group of fellows that met in a YMCA class” (Rogers,…

The function of dreams has been a highly controversial topic throughout history, and at this point, no one fully comprehends why we dream (Hill, 1996). Philosophical explanations for dreams are dominated by Socrates and Plato, both of whom also believed in the psychological function of dreams. Plato thought that when our reasoning capacity was suspended during sleep, passions and desires revealed themselves (Hill, 1996). Similarly, Socrates argued that an unruly gathering of desires exists and…

her clearly. You cannot hide anything, but look behind and a shadow is standing right behind. The shadow self or known in psychology as the personal shadow is an assertion that everybody has another personality deep within them. First formulated by Carl Jung. It has been developed by his followers, some of them are Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams. The shadow self is a personality hidden to the outside world, either by design of the person or by chance. Zweig and Abrams theorize that for people…

Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus are explorations of unconscious sexual desires as of childhood. The incest relationships between Hamlet and Gertrude, and Oedipus and Jocasta illustrate the sexual psychology argued by Sigmund Freud as the ‘Oedipus complex ‘, which is a young boys’ lustful repressed desire to be with their mother and get rid of their father (Freud, 1900, p. 84). Hamlets and Oedipus’ autonomy is questioned as their sexual desires dictate the choices that they…

A Perspective on the Life and Ideas of Carl G. Jung However, just before this falling out occurred, Jung was appointed as the President of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1911, which infuriated the other members, who were part of the movement longer than Jung, and predominantly Jewish. They felt that he only got the position because he was Freud 's favorite, and that Jung himself might have had an anti-Semitic viewpoint. Officially, Jung had been appointed over the more senior…

Sigmund Freud was the one responsible for many different famous theories, a couple I will touch on is his theory on dreams and his sex theory. Though the majority of his theories intertwine with each other, these are the two that stuck out most to me. Freud started studying the realm of dreams in the late 1800’s and later came out with a book called The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. In this book, he goes into detail how to understand the meaning of the dream that the unconscious dreamer…

Dreams are defined by a series of ‘mental and emotional processes that occur during sleep, including thoughts, imagery, and problem-solving.’ (Osman, 2015) They often have a temporal progression with an accompanying narrative. Dream research focuses on the implications of dreams, both psychological and physiological, and how these implications relate to conscious and unconscious processes. Assuming a dualist approach to the mind-body debate, dream research attempts to connect material and mental…