The motivation for self-display, which is part of virtually all aspects of modern human striving by individuals, throws a different light on the role of ego. Freud cast the ego in modern humans as a mediator between the superego, representing the inhibitions demanded by society, and the antisocial impulses of the (primate) id. To me, …
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.
ADDENDUM TO PREVIOUS POST In 1991, when we were “full tilt” with four young kids, working like hell and always strapped, I announced to my magnificently indulgent wife that I intended to hire a cartoonist at $100 per picture to illustrate my thoughts. I placed the following ad in The Washington Post: AD …
As I have said several times in this blog, I decided that mania (the “up” part of bipolar disorder) is a disorder purely of our own species, because one of its main symptoms is the hyperactivity of grammatically complex speech, which is clearly only recently evolved. I then deduced that mania itself represents a pathologically …
Freud’s observation that humans are hypersexual has become such a cultural staple to have settled in as the sitcom-with-canned-laughter cash-cow. Although I had long been steeped in Darwin’s theories of sexual selection and sexual display, I hadn’t put the two together until I read Geoffrey Miller’s book, The Mating Mind (2000), the thesis of which …
