Psychology for Lawyers
a brief (incompleted) (selective)
introduction to psychology
Sidney M. Jourard, Disclosing Man to Himself (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1968):
"Psychotherapy begins when a person cannot live his life further in the ways he has, and consults with somebody who itends to help him. The fact that a person would arrive at such an impasse should provoke wonder, since all of us are gifted with intelligence that could guide us out of existential culs-de-sac. But people arrive at this point and there are those who would be of help." [52]
"Psychothearpy is not so much a science or technique as it is a way of being with another person." [57
Liam Hudson, Human Beings: The Psychology of Human Experience (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books,1975): "This book [and this course Psychology for Lawyers] is designed to serve as an introductory text; an invitation to approach the discipline of psychology in a certain way. The view of psychology it advances . . . has immediate human relevance, in that it is about people and the lives they lead . . . . [T]he heart of psychology lies, I believe, in interpretative argument: in the effort to make sense of what people think and do." [3]
This "text is bound to be selective. Psychology is by now a huge and rambling empire." [4]
"[T]he portrayal of psychology offered here represents something of a break with the traditional view conveyed in textbooks: the conception of a scientific discipline unfolding with all the cumulativ inevitability of a physical science. And to this extent, it is bound at moments to seem iconoclastic; but a radical revision is in order, granted the very curious pattern of growth that twentieth-century psychology has followed." [5]
"In practice, [psychology] amounts to no more than a ramshackle assemblage of topics, techniques, and mutually incompatible points of view." [5]
"[T]he psychologists deals exclusively neither with thughts nor with deeds; but with the interplay of the two. These two apsects of our experience, the private and the public, bleong indispensably together, and it is on the flow from one to the other that our lives as individuals dpend." [9-10]
"[P]sychology remains, in the broadest sense, a philosophical activity. It is one of the few ways we have found in this century of expressing our sense of what human life is about. At every step, usually tacitly but occasionally more explicitly, the psychologists adjusts the boundary between appearances and reality: between what people seem to be, and what he claims they actually are." [11]
"Here I shall steer a . . . central route, one in which conflicts of need and principle are envisaged as the important activating force in each person's life, and in which the resulting tensions and ambiguities are seen not as problems to be resolved, but as the generative root from which all the most significant human accomplisments and transformations spring." [11-12]
"Grossly inconvenient though it may be, human meanings are rarely the sorts of meaning that you find in a dictionary. They consist of attitudes and assumptions, beliefs and needs. Characteristically, such sentiments lie at least half-buried in the mind of the person under their influence. And quite often . . . their owner will systematically deceive himself (and others) about their nature and strength. " [15]
"My own inclination is to concentrate on . . . the question of where, in each individual, the boundary is placed between what he is conscious of and what he is not, and the consequences of altering this placing on the pay in which he thinks." [85]
"Adjacent to the question of consciousness is that of identity: the sense that each of us possesses of who he is, and what thoughts we can properly acknowledge as our own. Conceptually, the terrain is trying, for ideas like 'identity' and 'self' are by no means easy to handle." [86]
"Some see themselves as agents and initiators: people who can shape their own lives, influence other people, get things done. Others see themselves as cogs in a manchine. Others see themselves as helpless victims--pawns of forces that lie outside themselves." [154]
"[W]e each grow up to create for ourselves a predominant disposition or frame of mind. This underlies the 'character' by which we are know, and it is within this that our more specific beliefs and skills are set." [117]
"[I]n the course of any specialized education or training, we acquire not only specific mental skills and discipline, but a way of life. . . . the conventions that bound these ways of life . . . are part of the 'deep' or hidden structure of what our education transmits. The life we lead is one that centers, to a considerable extent, around the observation or transgression fo these bounding conventions." [140-141]
"[T]he human biography takes shape under conditions of continual and unresolvable tension between the forces of self-expression and those of control between the desire for spontaneouos utterance and the necessities of disciplinary constraint." [151-152]
"[Sigmund Freud's] achievement lay in establishing
a memorable language or rhetoric, in which current assumptions about
the unconscious could be treated as though they were scientific truths."
[153]
How
You Inhabit a Story
[14:15 mins.]
Finding
Your Own Path
[26:47 mins.] [James Hollis]
Psychodynamic Theories of Personality
[9:12 mins.]
[focus on Freud; id, ego, superego]
Psychoanalytic Theory
[7:41 mins.]
Humanistic
Theory
[6:03 mins.]
Jaylynne Chase-Jacobsen
[4:24 mins.] [a clinical social working talks about
the nature of psychotherapy]
On Listening (Jordan Peterson)
A
Psychotherapist is an Engineer of the Soul
[4:20 mins.] [Jordan Peterson]
How
To Find a Therapist
[4:18 mins.]
A Historical Perspective
The
History of Psychology: Freud, Jung, Psychoanalysis
[34:33 mins.] [references: Darwin
& evolutionary psychology--4:41 mins. to 9:16 mins.; Freud on ego,
superego, and id.--24:39 mins. to 26:12 mins.; C.G. Jung--27:32 mins.;
Jung's psychological types--29:27 mins. to 30:43 mins.] [brief commentary
on neurosis ("pursuing something you don't really want") begins
at 23:04 mins. and ends at 24:27 mins.] The
History of Psychology: Ethics, Logic, Truth [35:03
mins.] The
History of Psychology: Mind, Self, Soul [34:29 mins.]
Academy of Ideas
The Psychology
and Principles of Mastery
[10:43 mins.]
The Psychology
of Self-Transformation
[10:38 mins.]
The Psychology
of Self-Deception
[10:27 mins.]
Contact Professor Elkins
 |