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psychopathology

Emotional avoidance, self-coherence, and psychosis: Why affective regulation is a form of relational care

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.

Psychoanalysis, Magic, & the Occult: An Uneasy Shared History

Psychoanalysis emerged during a high tide of interest among scientists and laypeople alike in psychical research and spiritualism. Freud and subsequent psychoanalysts held conflicting, ambivalent attitudes toward the occult. In this post, I explore some of the historical attitudes held toward the occult and divination within the field of psychoanalysis.

Magical Thinking in Cultural Context

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.