Since my retirement 10 years ago, Ape Mind, Old Mind, New Mind has been a work in progress. The basic ideas arose from my knowledge of the internal experience of the major mental illnesses directly imparted to me by thousands of my patients in 35 years of practicing psychiatry. The “data” of these composite descriptions …
A glaring weakness of the agenda of the political left is that social justice does not appear to be rooted in the flesh and blood of human nature. The two most influential thinkers on our attitudes about what makes us tick are Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud: we are ape-men who when psychoanalyzed are revealed …
I have never been one that would conceive of going on a religious pilgrimage, but have just returned from an American pilgrimage. It would be a purely secular journey in any other country, but the very essence of America dwells in the spiritual realm of ideas. The very heart of the American ethos was forged …
Science from a peculiar source indicates that our bodies have been hairless for at least 3.3 million years. The DNA of the lice that infest our head hair has a continuous ancestry for 12 million years, well prior to appearance of our hominin tribe six million years ago. However, the lice that reside on our …
(Have any interesting anxiety dreams? Put them in comments section.) You are late and in a big hurry, but everyone is relaxed and confident; suddenly you are in a huge room full of desks, and you realize you are supposed to be taking an exam! But you never went to any of the classes! …
An Evolved Will for Justice Separates Us from Apes Perhaps the world’s foremost scientist on the subject of mind evolution, Michael Tomasello, states in his recent book, A Natural History of Human Thinking (2014): The main problem is that collaboration, communication, and thinking do not fossilize, so we will always be in a position of …
Upon my son and daughter-in-law’s graduation from Harvard Medical School, the Dean gave the students three pieces of superb advice. The first two are fairly standard: (1) “Be kind” (2) “Listen to your patient” A quick and easy way to determine whether you have a good doctor in the first ten minutes of an appointment …
But then the links will loosen with time, one by one broken and left dangling, left to gently wave in the cyber breezes…until, one day the last link will snap, and then something that I loved intimately and passionately will forever be adrift…
Hominin language has always been centrally engaged in the attempt to achieve a “running” consensus about which of a limited number of narratives corresponded to the chaotic events that were happening all around them.
Pope John Paul II issued and Encyclical that stated that the Holy Spirit has been a force in human evolution.
Jill was in turmoil. She knew that Jack had been jealous of the dog he nicknamed Sissy
Although not really caring about truth, the bullshit artist requires a sensitivity to the variable tensile strength (stretchability) of truth (particularly about oneself) with each and every audience.
This alternative view of human nature is a deeper, richer, and far more noble narrative of our exclusively human legacy: that of an indomitable spirit possessed of a will for justice and sustained through the millennia by the bounty that it fosters.
Causal narratives seek to knit together disparate observations, facts, and events into a coherent and inclusive whole that convincingly links later events to prior events.
The initial strike with a razor blade had cut clear through my cheek, causing it to gape open.
An excellent small book on mental illness for patients, family, and friends containing a compendium of treatments that work and easy to understand diagnosis on the basis of how it actually feels to be mentally ill.
My first philosophical theater was a maximum security prison. Early in my employment, I spent some time counseling an inmate who had been confined to a solitary cell in the infirmary because he somehow had repeatedly gained access to razor blades with which he would compulsively slash his own arms and legs. Later in my …
