Why did Freud Abandon His Death Drive Theory? In the hit TV show Mad Men, ad executive Pete Campbell makes a daring pitch to Lucky Strike cigarettes. To sell their product, he suggests, they should embrace the subconscious "death wish" that drives people to smoke....
The History of Personality Psychology? Personality psychology is the study of the patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make each individual unique. Throughout history, philosophers, scientists and psychologists have grappled with questions of identity,...
Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. Trained at Zurich's Burghölzli hospital, he was Sigmund Freud's leading collaborator from 1906 until their break in 1913. He then built his own psychology around complexes, the...
The Royal Road to the Shadow In Jungian psychology, a dream is not a random firing of neurons; it is a letter from the Self. Carl Jung argued that the psyche is a self-regulating system, and dreams are its primary mechanism for restoring balance. When we ignore our...
Dissociation is a disconnection between parts of experience that normally run together: thoughts, feelings, body sensations, memory, your surroundings and your sense of who you are. Brief forms are common, like zoning out on a familiar drive or feeling unreal after a...
Colors in dreams carry feeling, but no color means the same thing for everyone. A red dress can be desire in one dream and danger in the next. The best way to read a dream color is to start with what that color means in your own life, and then use shared meanings to...
Are Artists Narcissists? The Fine Line Between Creation and Deception I had a patient ask me once if all artists were narcissists. The question sent me for a loop because it hit on such a basic, uncomfortable truth about how these personality types communicate. Both...