Word: freuds
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...overseer of the Grant Study results, George Vaillant, himself studied not psychology but history and literature when he was at Harvard; indeed, it may be the literary quality of many psychological findings that makes them go down so smooth for a meaning-hungry public. In my tutorial this year, Freud was sandwiched as a social thinker between Durkheim and Beauvoir—but really, my section leader told us, the Germans read him as poetry...
...causes of happiness has a whiff of the wet blanket about it. But there’s something even more miserable about thinking that our happiness can be defined by the jobs we choose, or what we eat for breakfast, or how many miles we run each week. Freud himself pointed out that the only thing normal is pathology, which makes applying a bell-curve-style prescription for joy more than a little reductionist. Even if all the indicators in our lives point to success, a craving for something indefinable may persist. Aristotle, for instance, thought that happiness was found...
...sages of the U.S. Supreme Court have, over the years, determined that segregating the races is a way of treating them equally and that forced sterilization to improve the gene pool is a swell idea. Generations of doctors bought into Freud's theories of mental illness. Eminent military historian John Keegan traces the catastrophic stupidity of World War I to the fact that European nations began training their smartest officers to make strategic plans. Eventually, they made such fine, lean plans that, like concentrated ozone, they exploded on contact...
...therapy may actually be making us miserable: "Since Freud, most forms of therapy have maintained that the best way to deal with a problem or trauma is to concentrate on it. Through this 'processing,' the theory goes, you'll eventually gain insight and feel wiser, and hopefully better. Accordingly, most people ... think they're more or less obliged to chew over a breakup or career reversal ... [Yet], directing your attention away from a negative experience ... can be a superior coping strategy...
...Since the days of Freud, research into the mind-body relationship has come a long way. Studies show that not only are your mental health and mood dependent in large part on physical factors like exercise, but also unchecked stress, anxiety and depression can affect physical health, increasing blood pressure, heart disease and even risk of death. So it was perhaps inevitable that patients would start bringing their yoga mats into therapy...