Two Minds Blog

A recent New York Times  opinion piece  titled "You Can Vote, But You Can't Choose What is True," highlighted the difference between opinion and empirical fact. This is a valuable reminder in the era of "fake news," when people choose what they want to believe and sometimes seem to pay more attention to the source of the news than its content. But Professor Harari's column makes a mistake in arguing that we should leave chemistry to the chemists, physics to the physicists, etc. In fact, we should be careful about over-idealizing science. When I wrote a blog post last year about the  role of intuitive thinking in legal decision-making , several people wrote back to say in effect "that's all very well for lawyers, but fortunately scientific decisions are more rational." Unfortunately, this isn't true. Scientists' beliefs about the world are not necessarily any more valid than anyone else's, and scientists are just as prone to logic...

Sigmund Freud, 1936, oil on canvas. Painting by Wilhelm Viktor Krausz (1878-1959). Although psychodynamic counseling is still widely used, citations of Freud are rare these days in the scientific literature. In the original paper on Two Minds Theory , I noted a connection between the idea of the Narrative and Intuitive Mind, and Freud's theory of the ego and the id. The conscious Narrative mind is what Freud called “das ich” in the original German, translated as “ego” in English but simply meaning “I,” the part of me that I call myself. By contrast, the Intuitive mind is at least in part what Freud called “das es,” translated as “id” but meaning “the it ,” the part of myself that I don’t recognize or acknowledge, the mysterious drives that lead me to actions I don’t understand. All of this is very much in line with TMT. I recently went back to Freud's  Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis  (IL)  looking for other possible connections. Here's what else I ...