After Freud
More than 150 years after his birth, Freud’s legacy has been largely dismantled by the ideas of his greatest challenger, Aaron Beck. Cognitive therapy is now the orthodox talking cure in Britain, and the government wants more of it. But with cognitive science comes a new battle for the meaning of the human mind
What makes us who we are?
The BBC series “Child of Our Time” assumes that studying children with their parents will help us understand how their personalities develop. But this is a mistake: parents influence their children mainly by passing on their genes, according to American psychologist Judith Rich Harris. The biggest environmental influences on personality are those that occur outside the home.
The cognitive vs the psychodynamic
A deep cultural faultline runs through contemporary views of how the mind works; but it is rarely acknowledged. The war of the mind needs to be fought openly to be resolved
Knowing how someone else feels
If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness
Was Hitler's evil made in childhood?
In portraying Hitler as the product of a diabolical incest, Norman Mailer has taken fictional ambition to a remote peak of implausibility
The woman who split apart
Multiple personality disorder is psychiatry’s most controversial diagnosis, viewed by many in the profession as a form of self-dramatisation
The evolution of insanity
Sebastian Faulks has revived the ideas of Julian Jaynes who, in his book, the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, published in 1976, concocted the notion that, as language evolved, humans in the early stages of consciousness would hear voices, just as schizophrenics do
The tale of the three alcoholics
Mick, John and Leonard are all chronic alcoholics. Are they just “addictive personalities,” or can they make up their own minds?
After shock
The 7/7 bombings may have receded into history for many Londoners, but for the survivors the smallest things—the smell of burning, laughter, being late—still trigger traumas. But what can help overcome memories of being trapped in trains, surrounded by the dying?
The King Who Listened
Eysteinn Magnusson, king of Norway from 1103 to 1123, was renowned for kindness, and loyalty to his friends. Can he be counted as Europe’s first psychotherapist?
