Two Minds Blog

I heard an excellent talk this fall by Dr. Andrew Hoffman about his book " The Engaged Scholar ." The book's basic thesis is that society offers academics like me a certain level of independence, and endows us with a certain level of credibility and respect. In return, society has a right to expect useful information from its scholars -- not just academic jargon and peer-reviewed papers for a small audience of experts, but actual knowledge with real-world applications. That's what I hope I am doing in this bi-weekly blog: Opening a window in the ivory tower to send some bits of psychological knowledge out into the world. I agree with Dr. Hoffman that this is an obligation for scholars. It's also fun and interesting for me, and I hope for anyone reading it as well. As I have noted previously, applying concepts from Two Minds Theory to real-world issues also allows me to test and refine the ideas, and I hope my academically oriented work is better for that as well.

In his classic set of lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901/1982), psychologist William James anticipated the now-common distinction that many people make between “religion” and “spirituality.” James used the term religion, but the meaning of this in his lectures is clearly what we would these days consider individual spiritual belief or experience as opposed to formal religious practice: “religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men [sic] in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (p. 31). James said that his scope of inquiry in the book was “psychological, not religious institutions, but rather religious feelings and religious impulses” (p. 3) - a strongly psychological, experiential, and personal view of what “religion” (or again what we today would probably call “spirituality”) entails. When we begin t

 I didn't want to let 2021 pass by without noting another major loss in the world of psychology, Dr. Aaron Beck, who passed away in October of this year at the age of 100. The bow tie in the picture above was one of Dr. Beck's defining visual characteristics! He was known as one of the fathers of Cognitive Therapy (along with Albert Ellis, who developed similar methods independently of Beck around the same time in the 1960s), which later became the core of the cognitive-behavioral approach that dominates modern psychotherapy.  Beck's Cognitive Therapy has a few defining characteristics that differentiate it from other strands of CBT within psychology: First, it relies on the idea that your thoughts determine your behavior , although in this model the term "thoughts" is sometimes loosely defined to include things like perceptions and attitudes as well as conscious narratives that can be expressed in words. Second, Beck proposed a " negative cognitive triad &