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Top 3 Reasons Why Some People Never Change — Psychotherapist/ NYC. Lets get right in the mix. 1. The first reason is best explained by the father of psychology himself, Sigmund Freud: "Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened by responsibility. " True change is about letting go of blame and taking personal accountability for the way you move through the world.

When you yourself are the source of your happiness, the onus is on you to maintain your fulfillment in life. When you 'CEO' yourself and take full ownership of your personal sense of fulfillment, you promote yourself to a position of power and say: "Changes need to happen here, and since I'm running this show, I need to be the one to make this happen -- if my strategy doesn't work out, I'm willing to acknowledge that, adapt, try something new, and keep it moving. " 2. 3. True change takes real guts. Nature or Nurture: Why No Two People Are Alike. “My solution to the mystery is that three perpetrators are involved: three mental systems that go about their business in different ways. Together, these three can answer the hows, whys, whens, and wheres of personality development.”

Judith Rich Harris Becoming Human What makes us…us? What makes one person open, honest, and enthusiastic, and another ornery and closed-minded? Why do some of us love risk-taking and some not? The “nature versus nurture” debate is probably as old as modern humanity. We still wonder, but thanks to Darwin and all that came after him, we don't have to speculate as much as we once did. In fact, oddly enough, we can see through carefully done research that about half of personality variation can be explained genetically. The surprise is that two identical twins are so damn different! The Nurture Assumption Judith Rich Harris may have the best answer, and it's in her book No Two Alike, an amazing contribution to modern thought. The Modular Mind And so it goes. Moral character is the foundation of a sense of personal identity | Aeon Essays. One morning after her accident, a woman I’ll call Kate awoke in a daze. She looked at the man next to her in bed. He resembled her husband, with the same coppery beard and freckles dusted across his shoulders.

But this man was definitely not her husband. Panicked, she packed a small bag and headed to her psychiatrist’s office. Kate has Capgras syndrome, the unshakeable belief that someone – often a loved one, sometimes oneself – has been replaced with an exact replica. A classic philosophical thought experiment poses the following paradox. Personal identity does not work this way. This distinction, between mind and body, begins early in development. For Nina-the-ship, no part of the vessel is especially Nina-like; her identity is distributed evenly across every atom. Get Aeon straight to your inbox One day not too long ago, a friend came to me with a problem. But the soul is something else, too. And where does the soul go when we die? Organic transformations can be no less sensational. Whatever you think, you don’t necessarily know your own mind | Aeon Ideas.

Do you think racial stereotypes are false? Are you sure? I’m not asking if you’re sure whether or not the stereotypes are false, but if you’re sure whether or not you think that they are. That might seem like a strange question. We all know what we think, don’t we? Most philosophers of mind would agree, holding that we have privileged access to our own thoughts, which is largely immune from error. Evidence for this comes from experimental work in social psychology. Get Aeon straight to your inbox Many other studies support this explanation. Building on such evidence, Carruthers makes a powerful case for an interpretive view of self-knowledge, set out in his book The Opacity of Mind (2011). The ISA theory has some startling consequences.

Another consequence is that we might be sincerely mistaken about our own beliefs. If our thoughts and decisions are all unconscious, as the ISA theory implies, then moral philosophers have a lot of work to do. Why You Can't Trust Yourself. Bertrand Russell famously said, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves and wiser people so full of doubts.” Over the years, I’ve hammered on the importance of becoming comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity, in questioning all of your most cherished beliefs and dreams, on practicing skepticism, and doubting everything, most importantly yourself.

Throughout these posts, I’ve hinted at the fact that our brains are fundamentally unreliable, that we really have no clue what we’re talking about, even when we think we do, and so on. But I’ve never given concrete examples or explanations. Well, here they are. Eight reasons you can’t trust yourself, as demonstrated by psychology. Stop Being an Emotional Idiot Discover tips to become more self-aware, empathetic and emotionally intelligent. 49-page guide. 1. There’s a thing in psychology called the Actor-Observer Bias and it basically says that we’re all assholes. We all do this. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. The Art of Living: The Great Humanistic Philosopher Erich Fromm on Having vs. Being and How to Set Ourselves Free from the Chains of Our Culture. A pioneer of what he called “radical-humanistic psychoanalysis,” the great German social psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) was one of the most luminous minds of the twentieth century and a fountain of salve for the most abiding struggles of being human.

In the mid-1970s, twenty years after his influential treatise on the art of loving and four decades after legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead turned to him for difficult advice, Fromm became interested in the most basic, most challenging art of human life — the art of being. At the height of a new era that had begun prioritizing products over people and consumption over creativity, Fromm penned a short, potent book titled To Have or To Be? — an inquiry into how the great promise of progress, seeded by the Industrial Revolution, failed us in our most elemental search for meaning and well-being.

Fromm frames the inquiry: This is indeed well understood by any gardener. The Johari Window. Disciplines > Communication > Models > The Johari Window The Basic Johari Window | Four Personas | So what? The Johari Window sounds somewhat esoteric until you learn that it was devised by two men called Joseph and Harry. Despite this quaint naming it is, in fact, a very useful way of understanding something of how our self may be divided into four parts that we and others may or may not see. The Basic Johari Window Below is a diagram of the standard Johari Window, showing the four different selves and how the awareness or otherwise of these aspects of our self by others and by us leads to these four categories.

The Public Self The Public Self is the part of ourselves that we are happy to share with others and discuss openly. The Private Self There are often parts of our selves that are too private to share with others. Private elements may be embarrassing or shameful in some way. The Blind Self We often assume that the public and private selves are all that we are. The Undiscovered Self. Identity. Explanations > Identity Description | Discussion | See also 'Identity' is both a simple 'me' and a much, much deeper philosophical topic. These are a few pages on this impenetrable subject done during a university course. Identity is...: More than is often thought. Deducing Our Selves: Knowing who we are. Death and Identity: Where does identity go when we die? Sociology, Psychoanalysis, Critical Theory, Emile Benveniste Need for a sense of identity, Theories about how we think about ourselves, Attachment Theory Blogs by subject: Identity.