Many authors quote Freud as saying “If I had my life to live over again I should devote myself to psychical research rather than to psychoanalysis.” However, Freud did not exactly say this, and was not as ardent a supporter of the occult as some would like to believe. And do we really need him to be? Do we even want colonial, materialist science to incorporate the occult?
Conventional wisdom holds that avoiding your emotions cuts you off from important data about yourself, but did you know that habitually flinching from feeling can also lead to severe distortions of social cognition, conceptual coherence, and reality testing? In this post, I explore this idea and draw out some of the relational implications of the intimate connection between thinking, self-coherence, and affect.
A recent New York Times article claimed that “most psychologists agree that astrology’s appeal rests largely on ‘confirmation bias’—the human tendency to seek out, recall and favor information that confirms what we already believe.” This claim reflects a long history within psychology of reducing belief or interest in astrology to error or psychopathology. In doing so, my fellow psychologists fail to do justice to the empirical data and miss an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the meanings and purposes of astrology in people’s lives.