...Megan Morrone Sigmund Freud and William James on Religion Intro to Philosophy Final May 3, 2013 The Will to Believe, an essay by William James, is a defense of religious faith in the absence of convincing logical facts or scientific evidence. James focuses on reasoning and choice in reference to the basis of belief. To James, when reasoning it is a necessity to recognize other considerations apart from those in which the evidence points to. If truth is the primary focus of our beliefs, sometimes it may necessary to take the risk of believing without solid evidence. Moreover, he clarifies that, although we sometimes have a choice in what we believe, there are many beliefs that we cannot will. James views faith in God as falling short of knowledge because we, as humans do not naturally experience the supernatural. However, he also explains that, such faith is sensibly meaningful to many people, and it is reasonable to wonder how, and to what extent it can be justified. James believes that both logic and science have limits beyond which we can legitimately seek rationality. James discusses genuine choice and stresses the three criteria for genuine choice; the choice must be live, forced, and momentous. In other words, personally meaningful, mutually exclusive and presented with an option and/or answer, and must involve potentially important consequences. James defines religion broadly, as having simply two elements, the first being that the best things are eternal, and second...
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...Question 1：Compare and contrast that Freud and James meant by religion. How does each feel that psychology illuminates the phenomenon of religion? a. Freud : “ The Future of an Illusion” * Oceanic feeling : In his opinion, there is not a strong enough need for it to be the source of all religious energy. Freud does not deny that this feeling may occur in people and offers a psychoanalytical explanation. Freud argues that the "oceanic feeling", if it exists, is the preserved "primitive ego-feeling" from infancy. The primitive ego-feeling precedes the creation of the ego and exists up until the mother ceases breastfeeding. Prior to this, the infant is regularly breastfed in response to its crying and has no concept that the breast does not belong to it. Therefore, the infant has no concept of a "self" or, rather, considers the breast to be part of itself. Freud argues that those experiencing an oceanic feeling as an adult are actually experiencing a preserved primitive ego-feeling. The ego, in contrast, comes into existence when the breast is taken away, and involves the infant's recognition that it is separate from the mother's breast, and therefore, that other persons exist. Freud argues that it would not necessarily contradict psychoanalytical theory for this primary ego-feeling to coexist along with the ego in some people. The main argument for this is that psychoanalytical theory holds that all thoughts are preserved in a conservation of psychic energy. Therefore...
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...Introduction to philosophy Borislav Tsankovski - 09046631 Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud (1912) The teachings of Sigmund Freud have had such a tremendous impact on contemporary culture, but the opinions regarding his doctrine are dualistic and vary from total reject to faithful followers. Between those two poles are some people who try to keep a critical distance and try to identify what is really important and significant in his ideas. Freud’s ideas have a profound effect on modern men’s self-esteem and identity, because the modern man gets angry and bitter when someone touches their identity. On the other hand Freud show’s us deep spiritual movements or “currents” inside ourselves. Freud created a doctrine that meets the most typical modern desire – the desire to build the new image of man. I believe that Totem and Taboo is exactly one of those works which can teach the reader a lot of things about his inner and outer self. And that from that entire information one can derive a blueprint on how to read and recognize the basic truths which were there when human kind made its first steps and will stay with us till the end. That one should really think upon in order to fill in the bits of lost puzzle in time, space and matter, so that one day we actually know who we are and why we are. Throughout his whole scientific work Freud supported the understanding that man evolved from his animal state, because of the cultural and social conditions that came along with...
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...revolving and advancing. Bush’s book (2003) is divided into eight chapters. It starts with Chapter 1, entitled “The Worldview of the Advancement”. This chapter discusses the fundamental of compare and contrast of modern view and earlier view of God, nature, history and mankind. The second chapter of Bush’s book, The Rise in the Advancement of Science, pays particular attention the development of modern science. The rise of uniformitarian thought in evolution. “The human body is related to nature, and it is similar in many respects to the body of animals” (34). This thought does not include that the Christian view that a human body is different than animals. We have a soul, whereas, animals do not. Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, argued that religion base on wishful illusion, rather than reality. Bush’s third chapter (2003), The Advancement and the Theory of Knowledge, concentrate on how science effects and outcomes with the absence of God. The Bible promotes the idea that man was made in the image of God. However naturalistic biological evolution “explains the variety of living things as being a set of natural variations of organic matter. Every life-form, including human life, supposedly arose from the same underlying reality” (page 38). The only reality that exist is physical reality. Bush refers to this as “nature”. Chapter four, Modern Theistic...
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...mystery for humankind since the beginning of time. These nocturnal vivid images seem to arise from some source other than our ordinary conscious mind. They contain a mixture of elements from our own personal identity, which we recognize as familiar along with a quality of `others' in the dream images that carries a sense of the strange and eerie. The bizarre and nonsensical characters and plots in dreams point to deeper meanings and contain rational and insightful comments on our waking situations and emotional experiences. The ancients thought that dreams were messages from the gods. The cornerstone of Sigmund Freud's infamous psychoanalysis is the interpretation of dreams. Freud called dream-interpretation the via reggia, or the royal road to the unconscious, and it is his theory of dreams that has best stood the test of time over a period of more than seventy years (Many of Freud's other theories have been disputed in recent years). Freud reportedly admired Aristotle's assertion that dreaming is the activity of the mind during sleep (Fine, 1973). It was perhaps the use of the term activity that Freud most appreciated in this brief definition for, as his understanding of the dynamics of dreaming increased, so did the impression of ceaseless mental activity differing in quality from that of ordinary waking life (Fine, 1973). In fact, the quality of mental activity during sleep differed so radically from what we take to be the essence of mental functioning that Freud coined the term...
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...Sigmund Schlomo Freud BRIEF OVERVIEW Although Sigmund Freud was not the first person to formally study psychology, many consider him the most pivotal figure in the development of the field as we know it today. Freud changed the way society has come to think about and treat mental illness. Before Freud, mental illness was thought to result from deterioration or disease of the brain. Freud changed all of this by explicitly rejecting the purely organic or physical explanations of his predecessors. Instead he believed that unconscious motives and drives controlled most behavior. During a career that spanned 58 years, beginning with an earned medical degree in 1881 and continuing to his death in 1939, he developed and repeatedly revised his theory of psychoanalysis. Most of Freud’s theory was developed from contact he had with patients seen in his private practice in Vienna. This type of “clinical” work was a radical departure from the laboratory research that was practiced by most leading psychologists of the day. When Freud first presented his ideas in the 1890s, many of his contemporaries reacted with hostility. In fact, throughout his career, Freud faced enormous opposition to many of his ideas. Those especially controversial included notions about the role of the unconscious in behavior, childhood sexuality, and how the mind was governed (id, ego, and superego). But despite the opposition, Freud eventually attracted a group of followers that included well-known theorists 1856–1939...
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...exaggerated REM will suffer from sleep deprivation and fatigue while they are awake. Usually, a fully-grown person has about 4 to 5 cycles of REM sleep, consisting of about 25% of a night's sleep. A new-born child's sleep can consist of as high as 50% REM type sleep (Davidmann, 1998). As I previously stated, a person would go through the sleep stage cycle four to five times a night, hence four to five dreams per night. With this in mind it can be calculated the average human being will have 136,000 dreams in a lifetime, spending about six total years in the REM stage dreaming. Mentally retarted people and people with less IQ's are tend to have less REM sleep as compared to other mental disorders. The reason this cases are still unknown. Sigmund Freud first argued that the motivation behind all the dreams content is wish fulfilment and the abetment of a dream is often to be found the day past the dream, which he called the day residue. In the case of small children they dream about those things that they have encountered in their previous day since they dream quite...
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...Sigmund Freud’s influence on modern day thinking permeates into our lives every day whether or not we realize it. Although much of his work has either been refuted or revised, his ideas have influenced an enormous spectrum of psychology and how we view life through our own thoughts. While his influence is irrefutable, the opinions concerning Freud and his writings vary greatly throughout the world. Individuals may distinguish the great genius in his groundbreaking theories of psychoanalysis, or they may reject his writings arguing that he had pushed the envelope too far. Either way, it is safe to say that his theories still evoke a considerable amount of debate to this day. Out of all of Freud’s theories, however, it can be argued that his views on women and feminine psychology are the most controversial. The debate between Freud and feminists has been well documented through the writings of many authors. The Enigma of Women is one of several books that have been published that analyzes the issues between Freud and feminism. In The Enigma of Women, Sarah Kofman comments on Freud’s prediction that feminists would take to the warpath against his writings on the women arguing that Freud’s theories are “rife” with masculine prejudice (11). Other credible books, such as Samuel Slipp’s The Freudian Mystique raise important questions on Freud’s theories of feminism. Why did Freud make such grossly biased and incorrect statements about women, while in other areas he was a very perceptive...
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...the chapter about Sigmund Freud, he states, “Not only did Freud’s clinical method stress attentive listening to his patients and assessment of the “texts” they created about themselves; it promoted a “metapsychology” or a seemingly structure (the unconscious mind) beneath a surface structure (the conscious mind) that we assumed was our self” (McComiskey 243). The conscious mind and the unconscious mind is two parts of who are, and how we act. We do things based on how we think, feel, and that’s how we respond to it. We have to be aware of the things that we do for us to see things that aren’t in the norm. Everything that we do always starts with “self.” In another perspective, In Pope, Studying English Literature and Language, He states, “Dreams, for Freud, are ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ (Pope 149). When it comes to Lockwood with him seeing things, one can infer that is him spacing off into another world, which would be more of the waking when he has a lot going...
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...A Character Analysis on Kerima Polotan-Tuvera’s The Virgin Analyzing the Characters in the Psychoanalytic Approach Miss Mijares was a 34-year-old woman who works in the placement section of an agency. In the story, she was described as impolite and bossy when it comes to dealing with job applicants. I can also infer that she routinely lives her life in discipline making her life dull. Later on in the story, she finally let go of her control with herself and gave in to the new carpenter in the agency. Miss Mijares was a stern, responsible woman with hidden desires. The carpenter in the story was unnamed. However, he plays a very important role in the story to make us discover all that characteristics of Miss Mijares, the protagonist. He was described as “a tall, big man, walking with an economy of movement”. From this we can say that, though he was only a high school graduate and only working as a carpenter, his character can be viewed as the stereotype who, despite of his unlikely appearance, he apparently will turn out to be the one you should fear for because he is capable of more than you know. It may be possible that the reason why he was unnamed is that we could underestimate him first. Virginity in the story Virginity is a prized possession of a woman. In the old Filipino culture, the chances of a woman who lost her virginity before marriage to get married to a good man most likely are scarce. By tradition, it is seen as a disgrace for a woman to be lost her virginity...
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...This chapter is an introduction to the ideas, people, and events that have guided scientific activity in developmental psychology over the past century. Its preparation has been facilitated by several recent publications on the history of developmental psychology. The views of the past held by active researchers are reflected in chapters of the edited volume, A Century of Developmental Psychology (Parke, Ornstein, Rieser, & Zahn-Waxler, 1994). The contributors are, with few exceptions, currently involved in contemporary research. Secondary commentaries can provide useful guides and interpretations, but there is no substitute for consulting original sources. To that end, a reprint series containing historically significant original articles and volumes has been prepared by Wozniak (e.g., 1993, 1997). Other recent volumes include the contributions of professional historians and others who are not enmeshed in current empirical debates of the discipline (e.g., Broughton & Freeman-Moir, 1982; Elder, Modell, & Parke, 1993). In addition, the social relevance and the making of the discipline in American society have been told expertly by Sears (1975) and White (1995). Any single overview—including this one—can tell only part of the story.1 Adopting the convention used in the previous Handbook of Child Psychology, 20 years must lapse before a contribution or event qualifies as historical. Two decades constitute approximately one generation in the life of our science; therefore, 1976...
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...school last fall, I ran into a student on the University of Virginia Lawn, not far from the famous statue of Homer instructing an admiring pupil. Homer's student is in a toga. Mine was wearing wraparound sunglasses like Bono's, black jeans, and a red T-shirt emblazoned with Chinese characters in white. Over his shoulder he carried his laptop. We asked each other the usual question: What did you do over the summer? What he did, as I recall, was a brief internship at a well-regarded Internet publication, a six-country swing though Europe, then back to enjoy his family and home, reconnect with high-school friends, and work on recording a rock CD. What had I done? I had written five drafts of a chapter for a book on the last two years of Sigmund Freud's life. I had traveled to Crozet, a few miles away, to get pizza. I'd sojourned overnight in Virginia Beach, the day after I woke up distressed because I couldn't figure out how to begin my chapter. I'd driven to the beach, figured it out (I thought), and then I'd come home. My young friend looked at me with a mixture of awe and compassion. I felt a little like one of those aged men of the earth who populate Wordsworth's poetry. One of them, the Old Cumberland Beggar, goes so slowly that you never actually see him move, but if you return to the spot where you first encountered him two hours past, lo, he has gone a little way down the road. The footprints are there to prove it. I headed back to my office for draft No. 6, or something...
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...Dreams are successions of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.[1] The content and purpose of dreams are not definitively understood, though they have been a topic of scientific speculation, as well as a subject of philosophical and religious interest, throughout recorded history. The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology.[2] Dreams mainly occur in the rapid-eye movement (REM) stage of sleep—when brain activity is high and resembles that of being awake. REM sleep is revealed by continuous movements of the eyes during sleep. At times, dreams may occur during other stages of sleep. However, these dreams tend to be much less vivid or memorable.[3] The length of a dream can vary; they may last for a few seconds, or approximately 20–30 minutes.[3] People are more likely to remember the dream if they are awakened during the REM phase. The average person has three to five dreams per night, but some may have up to seven dreams in one night.[4] The dreams tend to last longer as the night progresses. During a full eight-hour night sleep, most dreams occur in the typical two hours of REM.[5] In modern times, dreams have been seen as a connection to the unconscious mind. They range from normal and ordinary to overly surreal and bizarre. Dreams can have varying natures, such as frightening, exciting, magical, melancholic, adventurous, or sexual. The events in dreams are generally outside the control of the...
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...Chapter 1 The Dimensions of Psychology Summary: Psychology is an academic and applied discipline that involves the scientific study of mental functions and behaviors. Psychology has the immediate goal of understanding individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases, and by many accounts it ultimately aims to benefit society. In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is called a psychologist, and can be classified as a social, behavioral, or cognitive scientist. Psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in individual and social behavior, while also exploring the physiological and neurobiological processes that underlie certain cognitive functions and behaviors. Structuralism was the first school of psychology and focused on breaking down mental processes into the most basic components. Researchers tried to understand the basic elements of consciousness using a method known as introspection. Wilhelm Wundt, founder of the first psychology lab, was an advocate of this position and is often considered the founder of structuralism, despite the fact that it was his student, Edward B. Titchener who first coined the term to describe this school of thought. Functionalism formed as a reaction to the structuralism and was heavily influenced by the work of William James and the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin. Functionalists sought to explain the mental processes in a more systematic and accurate...
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...[pic] CARL JUNG 1875 - 1961 Dr. C. George Boeree [pic] Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throught the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul. -- Carl Jung Freud said that the goal of therapy was to make the unconscious conscious. He certainly made that the goal of his work as a theorist. And yet he makes the unconscious sound very unpleasant, to say the least: It is a cauldron of seething desires, a bottomless pit of perverse and incestuous cravings, a burial ground for frightening experiences which nevertheless come back to haunt us. Frankly, it doesn't sound like anything I'd like to make conscious! A younger colleague of his, Carl Jung, was to make the exploration of this "inner space" his life's work. He went equipped with a background in Freudian theory, of course, and with an apparently inexhaustible...
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