Psychology
for Lawyers
understanding ourselves | an introduction
Preface
"It might seem that self-knowledge is a central
topic in psychology. In some ways it is; from Freud onward, psychologists
have been fascinated by the extent to which people know themselves,
the limits of this knowledge, and the consequences of failures of self-insight.
Surprisingly, however, self-knowledge has not been a mainstream topic
in academic psychology."
--Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the
Adaptive Unconscious vii (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belnap
Press/Harvard University Press, 2002)
"[M]en have begun to be aware that they have a psychology."
--C.G. Jung, "Is Analytical Psychology a Religion?"
in William McGuire & R.F.C. Hull (eds.), C.G. Jung Speaking:
Interviews and Encounters 94-98, at 96 (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1977)
"What do you know about yourself? We wouldn't have psychology
if we were transparent to ourselves . . . Just because you believe
something about who you are doesn't make it true."
--Jordan Peterson, "A History of Violence," YouTube
audio [55:58 mins; relevant commentary at 49:14
mins. to 49:26 mins.] [http://bit.ly/2GLV8MG]
"Being yourself is one thing, knowing yourself
is quite another. We may not know oourselves as well as we thin
we do, for lack of courage or other reaons. Like the blind person
who complains about poor illumination, we may not know tht we don't
know."
--David B. Cohen, Out of the Blue: Depression
and Human Nature 194 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994)
"Nowhere are we closer to the sublime secret
of all origination than in the recognition of our own selves, whom
we always think we know already. Yet we know the immensities of
space better than we know our own depths . . . ."
--C.G. Jung, "Analytical Psychology and
Weltanshauung," in Collected Works: The Structure and
Dynamics of the Psyche (vol. 8), at 737
"Human beings are curious about the structure and function
of everything, not least themselves . . . "
--Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The
Architecture of Belief 177 (New York: Routledge, 1999)
"You need to know where you are, so you can start to chart your
course. You need to know who you are, so that you understand your armament
and bolster yourself in respect to your limitations. You need to know
where you are going, so that you can limit the extent of chaos in your
life, restructure order, and bring the divine force of Hope to bear
on the world."
--Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
63(Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018)
"In both our personal and professional lives,
looking inward is necessary for self-actualization."
--Marjorie A. Silver, Love, Hate, and Other Emotional
Interference in the Lawyer/Client Relationship, 6 Clinical L. Rev.
259, 274 (1999)
"When, through a study of the products of his own unconscious,
an individual's awareness of the hidden realms of the psyche is increased,
and the richness and vitality of that unknown world is borne in upon
him, his relation to the dynamic and nonpersonal forces within himself
is profoundly changed.
--M. Esther Harding, Psychic Energy: Its Source and its Transformation
15 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1963)
"To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection
is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery
of individuality in fact is."
--C.G. Jung, "The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious,"
in Collected Works: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
(2nd ed.)(vol. 7), 123-241, at 155
"We are not by nature psychological. Psychology must be
gained for it is not given, and without psychological education
we do not understand ourselves and we make our daimons suffer.
This suggests that a reason for psychotherapy of whatever school
and for whatever complaint is to gain psychology--a logos
of soul that is at the same moment a therapeia of soul.
We need to gain the intelligent response that makes the soul intelligible,
a craft and order that understands it, a knowledgeable deftness
that cares for its wants in speech. And if logos is its therapy,
because it articulates the psyche's wants, then one answer to
what the soul wants is psychology."
--James Hillman, Healing Fictions 94 (Barrytown, New York:
Station Hill Press, 1983)
"[W]e know that the wildest and most moving dramas
are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and
women who pass by without exciting attention, and who betray to the
world nothing of the conflicts that rage within them except possibly
by a nervous breakdown. What is so difficult for the layman to grasp
is the fact that in most cases the patients themselves have no suspicion
whatever of the internecine war raging in their unconscious. If we remember
that there are many people who understand nothing at all about themselves,
we shall be less surprised at the realization that there are also people
who are utterly unaware of their actual conflicts."
--C.G. Jung, "New Paths in Psychology"
(1912), in Collected Works: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
(vol. 7), 245-268, at 257
"Nowadays everyone has many problems. This does
not of course mean that we are all mentally ill, just that many of us
feel lost in life and fail to understand ourselves and others. This
explains the ever-increasing thirst for psychological knowledge and
accounts for the popularity of books and lectures about psychology."
--Jolande Jacobi, Masks of the Soul 13 (Grand
Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publ., 1976)(Ean Begg transl.)]
[Jacobi goes on to note that psychology is "far
from simple. It is extremely difficult to fine one's bearings in the
maze of the psyche. One longs to find the right path and at the same
time shrinks from it." Id.]
"The modern personality is forced to live in
search, in search of itself, psychologically, spiritually, and
historically."
--Ira Progoff, Jung's Psychology and Its Social Meaning
13 (New York: Grove Press, 1953)
"Anyone who has probed the inner life, who has
sat in silence long enough to experience the stillness of the mind behind
its apparent noise, is faced with a mystery. Apart from all the outer
attractions of life in the world, there exists at the center of human
consciousness something quite satisfying and beautiful in itself, a
beauty without features. The mystery is not so much that these two dimensions
exist--an outer world and the mystery of the inner world--but that we
are suspended between them, as a space in which both worlds meet. It
is as if the human being is the meeting point, the threshold between
two worlds. Anyone who has explored this inwardness to a certain degree
will know that it holds a great beauty and power. In fact, to be unaware
of this mystery of inwardness is to be incomplete."
--Kabir Helminski, The Knowing Heart: A Sufi Path of Transformation
69 (Boston: Shambhala, 1999)
"The primary atmosphere in which the human being
lives and moves and has his being is inward. It is contained in the
way a person thinks about himself, perceives and experiences his fundamental
nature. It involves his conception of himself, his potentialities, and
the resources upon which he can draw. These comprise the atmosphere
of his life, and they are within him.
* * * *
The great need is to enlarge not only the awareness
of reality but to enlarge the capacity of experiencing its deeper levels
in the symbolic terms it requires."
--Ira Progoff, The Symbolic & the Real
12, 11 (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1963)
"Healing demands the re-imagining of self and world, and it
is not an easy task.
* * * *
[H]ealing requires that we become psychological, against our will
in most cases."
--James Hollis, The Archetypal Imagination 116 (College
Station, Texas: Texas A&M Press, 2000)
[W]e don't fully understand what we do in our lives.
Much of what we do every day is oblivious to itself, as though we
sleep-walk through life, unconscious to our actions and activities.
We simply do what we do and don't give it a second thought: it is--or
has become--second nature to us. So, to do these actions daily, even
to do them well on a daily basis, is not the same as knowing or understanding
that which we do (even if it is done well); the mere doing does not
guarantee knowledge or understanding of what is done or how it is
accomplished. Knowledge or understanding of the kind desired requires
something else, something like reflection on the activity done, giving
it the second thought it deserves. We may do this if we realize that
what has become second nature to us still is something what we have
acquired, and hence is something that we might not otherwise have
done, or might have done in a different way. So the challenge here
is to bring all of this--what we have done and said, our actions and
activities, and their imagined alternatives--to consciousness, to
conscious inspection and reflection; then, perhaps we shall see what
it is that we are doing and how we manage to do it."
--Thomas D. Eisele, "Our Real Need": Not Explanation,
But Education, 3 (2) Canadian J. L. & Juris. 5, 10 (1990)
Readings
"The Power of Discovering the Self," in Gerry
Spence, Win Your Case 9-18 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005)
"Understanding Ourselves," in Thomas Shaffer
& James R. Elkins, Legal Interviewing and Counseling 300-351
(St. Paul, Minnesota: West Publ., 4th ed., 1997)
Kathleen O'Dwyer, After Freud: How Well Do We Know Ourselves
and Why Does It Matter?, 3 (2) J. Phil. of Life 97 (2013) [online
text]
David B. Cohen, Out of the Blue: Depression and Human
Nature 190-208 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1994)
Gerry
Spence on Self-Knowledge :: James R. Elkins
:: notes
An
Unexamined Life :: James R. Elkins, Archaeology
of Criticism
Jason E. Smith, The Illusion of Self-Control [online
text]
Class Videos
Self-Awareness in Your Work as a Lawyer
Class Viewing 1: Importance
of Self-Awareness [2:52 mins.]
[Len Riskin is a law teacher] [comments on mindfulness as a self-awareness
practice]
Class Viewing 2: Start
With Yourself [9:46 mins.]
[Gary Friedman, a California lawyer who was an instrumental figure in
the 1980s humanistic legal education movement] [end presentation at
7:36 mins.] ["we live day-to-day and we need to take a step back";
what brings you to the practice of law?; what is that you care about?;
"an internal investigation" to find what you care about (and
this turns out to be an antidote to burnout); seeking moments of reflection;
"taking yourself seriously"; "saying what you belief
in"; we cover ourselves in fiction, "we are a walking fiction"]
Gerry Spence on Being a Lawyer and a Real Human
Being
Class Viewing 3: On
Self Discovery [6:17 mins.]
[talks about being 83 years old and still in the process of learning
who he is; "it's a magical trip"; "the stuff we have
to look at is called fear"; "will I ever become anything?";
"life is a river . . . and when I think I've figured it out, here
comes a bend"; "how do I deal with this person who I thought
I knew and is a mystery to me"; "this business of self-discovery";
"we should offer a degree in self-discovery"; "you might
begin to ask questions"] Pt2
[2:27 mins.] ["you are owned by the people who
control your thoughts"]
An Introduction: Jacob Needleman | Charles Tart | Erv Polster
Class Viewing 4: The
Inner World [2:38 mins.] [Jacob
Needleman]
Class Viewing 5: Charles
Tart: Waking Up [3:11 mins.]
[Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove] [on living in a state of illusion,
a kind of dream state, a state we know as ordinary consciousness] [Charles
Tart is an American psychologist known for his work on the nature of
consciousness, and as one of the founders of the field of transpersonal
psychology.]
Class Viewing 6: Self
Observation [10:49 mins.] [Charles
Tart] [Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove] [begin in-class viewing
at 1:51 mins.; end at 8:23 mins.]
Optional: Erv
Polster Interview [8:57 mins.]
[class presentation begins at 2:00 mins., ends at 4:58 mins.] [the pleasure
at "looking within"; "psychotherapy is a fascinating
experience"] [Erving Polster is a pioneer in the field of Gestalt
psychotheraphy.]
Jordan Peterson
Class Viewing 1: The
Pinnacle of Complexity [8:22
mins.] [relevant commentary ends at 5:17 mins.] [we are complex; our
ability to understand ourselves is not all that great; science is not
all that good in helping us concepualize the ideal; Peterson recommends
that students approach his Personality and Its Transformation course
as if they were "engineers of the spirits of other people";
we should ask ourselves: "what are we trying to be, to create?";
we learn how to perceive and our behavior follows perception; we should
be interested in the "implicit structures" of our behavior;
what constitutes knowledge is the development of cognitive structures
that allow you to understand yourself] [at 5:17 mins.: Peterson comments
on the Big Five traits of personality]
"The Pinnacle of Complexity" video is an except from: Introduction
to Personality and Its Transformation [54:02
mins.] [Peterson's introduction lecture to the course] [for class
purposes begin at 10:46 mins.; end at 11:35 mins.] [Peterson claims
that a course in psychology, of the kind he teaches, can be viewed
as a "course in applied wisdom."]
Class Viewing 2:Your
Attention is Governed by Your Future Self [2:54
mins.] [Jung made the point that we are not masters in our own house.
We find that we are "gripped" by something that is "beneath
our will" that we cannot control.] [this short video is quite important]
Class Viewing 3: Your
Personality & Who You Can Become [8:21
mins.] [end at 1:44 mins.]
Optional: We
Don't Know Ourselves [1:34
mins.] [begin presentation at 1:04 mins.]
Class Viewing 4: The
Purpose of Life [3:45 mins.] [Jordan Peterson] [perfect
video for the end of this introduction class on using psychology to
"Understand Ourselves"]
Psychology and How We Find Ourselves in a
State of Not Knowing the Self
There is, for many of us, an abiding interest in the
question: who am I? You might try to answer the question by listing
your roles: mother, daughter, cook, reader, student. At some point,
it may dawn on you that these roles, one or all, do not actually define
who you are. When you say you are a student, that you are studying law,
that you are acquiring the knowledge and skills to become a lawyer,
do you say everything that needs to be said about you are, or is something
more required. If something more is required, we might find ourselves
turning to philosophy or religion, to psychology, or to a story. Answering
this question--who am I?--may require you to try to articulate how you
feel about yourself, how you imagine yourself, the stories you tell
about yourself, and how you relate to your inner world. We might even
get around to the notion that who you are and how you ask the question
about who you are tells us something about your psyche.
This idea of asking ourselves--who am I?--is always
related, in one way or another, to how we inhabit the world with others,
that is, how we work with others (and how we serve others in the work
we do), our capacity for friendship, our ability to understand and withstand
betrayal, and our wherewithal in navigating the ins and outs of life.
One reason we want to understand ourselves--and pursue psychology--is
so that we can know something about the people we must deal with every
day. No self exists in isolation. Isolation spells madness.
Being able to list the roles you play--or have been
assigned--in work and in life is easy enough to do (although your list
may be incomplete, or you may unconsciously leave some roles off the
list). Getting beyond the roles you are willing to see that you are
implicated, may turn out to be more difficult than making a list of
roles. What lies behind and deep within the roles you have assumed,
the roles you play, the roles in which you sense that you have been
inadequate? There are a good many ways to answer these questions. We
might start with the most obvious: Being self-aware means knowing something
about your feelings and underlying emotions, how they work and how they
shape your decisions and your life. After we see what we know about
the psychological realm we know as feelings, we can then turn to a central
concern of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology--the unconscious.
Reference (Jordan Peterson)
Professor Jordan Peterson teaches two courses, Personality and Its
Transformations, and a second course, Maps of Meaning that provide full-course
alternatives to the work that we have been pursuing in Psychology for
Lawyers. In Peterso's Personality and Its Transformations course, he
includes lectures on both Jung and Freud. Peterson has, of late, become
relatively well-known in Canada, and I highly recommend his lectures.
Becoming a Self
[28:00 mins.]
Self-esteem Doesn't
Exist
[9:05 mins.]
Reference (Jacob Needleman)
What is a Human
Being?
[3:09 mins.]
"Who Am I? Why
Am I Here?"
[1:48:25 mins.] [2015]
Time and the
Soul: A Spiritual Biography
[1:42:06 mins.] [2015]
Time and the
Soul
[19:49 mins.] [full
version :: 56:25 mins.]
Gurdjieff: A
Life in the Work
[1:56:05 mins.]
Necessary Wisdom
[57:00 mins.] [2014] [commentary on spirituality
and wisdom; making sense of mysticism]
Alchemy as a
Code for Interior Transformation
[7:05 mins.]
Our Inner Selves
[9:31 mins.] [Hal Stone]
Know Thyself
[4:38 mins.] [Professor Mitchell Green, describing a philosophy course
being offered
at the University of Virginia] [reference to the "adaptive unconscious"]
[Lecture 1]
[Lecture 1-2]
The Examined Life
[13:31 mins.] [Cornel West looking at the "examined
life" from a philosophical perspective]
Self-Concept
[6:32 mins.]
Self Image
[6:24 mins.] [Sheldon Solomon] Pt2
[9:56 mins.] Pt3
[7:10 mins.] Pt4
[2:55 mins.]
Psychological
Roadblocks to Therapy
[5:15 mins.] [Brad Peters]
Who
Do You Think You Are?
[13:21] [Richard Sennett drawing on the work of Erik Erickson] Pt2
[10:26 mins.]
The Plight of
Men
[1:03 mins.] [James Hollis]
Kathleen Speeth:
The Psychodynamics of Liberation
[9:43 mins.] [Kathleen Speeth is a transpersonal psychologist]
Developing Self-Awareness
[38:55 mins.] [Raymond Raad]
Self-Awareness
[1:00:40 mins.] [Peter Russell]
Stanislav Grof:
Adventure of Self-Discovery
[4:59 mins.]
What One Can Learn
About Themselves From Artists
[8:00 mins.]
Cognitive Behavioral
Tools
[26:30 mins.] [Dr. LuAnn Helms, Utah State University's Counseling and
Psychological Services]
Self-Reflection
for Conflict Professionals
[15:14 mins.] ["Your inner life is a powerful tool . . ."]
[Gary Friedman, et.al.]
Self Confidence
[24:12 mins.] [Alain de Botton]
Developing Self
Awareness
[3:35 mins.]
Movie: A Leader's
Process of Self-awareness and Reflection
[3:40 mins.]
Susan Blackmore::
How is Personal Identity Maintained?
[7:25 mins.] The
Self Illusion [23:27 mins.]
Ariel Garten:
Redefining Consciousness
[14:50 mins.] [Garten is CEO and Co-Founder of InteraXon,
a brain-sensing technology company]
Galen Strawson:
What are Selves?
[9:11 mins.]
Who and What
Am "I"?
[7:47 mins.] [Mark Solms]
Reference (Understanding Ourselves) (TED Talks)
The Capes We
Hide Within
[17:11 mins.]
The Importance
of Self-Awareness
[12:29 mins.] [Valon Murtezaj]
Increase
Your Self-Awareness with One Simple Fix
[17:17 mins.] [Tasha Eurich]
The Myth of Self-Discovery
[8:18 mins.] [a Ph.D. student in psychology]
Systematic Biases
in Understanding Ourselves and Others
[9:34 mins.] [Weylin Sternglanz]
Social World & Self-Understanding
Claiming Your
Identity by Understanding Your Self-worth
[16:04 mins.] [Judge Helen Whitener] [TED Talk]
[commenting on the social codes that define us]
Reference (John Searle)
Reference (Understanding Ourselves) (Articles)
Awareness
of Self: A Critical Tool
Esther Urdang, 29 Soc. Work Educ. 523 (2010)
Interpersonal
Dynamics: Helping Lawyers Learn the Skills, and the Importance, of Human
Relations in the Practice of Law Joshua D.
Rosenberg, 58 U. Miami L. Rev. 1225 (2004)
It All Begins With
You: Improving Law School Learning Through Professional Self-Awareness
Filippa Marullo Anzalone, 24 Hamline L. Rev. 324
(2001)
The
Lawyer's Aware Use of the Human Skills Associated with the Perceptive
Self
Beryl Blaustone, 15 J. Legal Porf. 241 (1990)
Multicultural
Lawyering: Teaching Psychology to Develop Cultural Self-Awarenss
Carwina Weng, 11 Clinical L. Rev. 401 (2005)
Reference (Understanding Ourselves) (Book)
Susan Daicoff, Lawyer, Know Thyself: A Psychological Analysis of
Personality Strengths and Weaknesses (Washington, D.C.: American
Psychological Association, 2004)
Understanding Ourselves (Web Resources)
(Self)
Knowledge is Power: Reinforcing the Ethics of Lawyering
Adrian Evans, Monash University
Contact Professor Elkins
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