Arquivo de psychology | Page 16 of 19

Personality is demarcated by choices

Personality is demarcated by choices. And, of course, the lack of personality is the inability to choose. I admit it is cozy to have the medium as an architect of reality: this is no less than exempting oneself from any responsibility. However, it is assuming submission, evidencing a myopic and very limited understanding of existence. Raskolnikov is not the corollary of an unjust and oppressive medium, but the portrait of a conscious action and its consequences. It is good to remember Viktor Frankl: the human being is the reaction to circumstances; the final act vetoes any response, but the rest of the piece will always give way to action.

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The Queen of Procrastination

Antipathetic to work, sometimes denying it, it is incredible to notice how the mind is stimulated to toil for procrastination. If there is no reason, it finds: because it wants to postpone it, it must postpone it immediately. Tomorrow, the day after: not now. And so wrecks the productivity. What could be done, is not. The little bit that, added up over many days, would become something robust is lost in the smoke of idleness. I think the phrase is from some philosopher; if not, let it go from me: there are cases that, fatally, demand violence.

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The “Motivational Therapy”

It is amazing to see that exactly in the century immediately following the eruption of the geniuses of modern psychology, the so-called “motivational therapy” is so successful. “Overcoming problems”: this is the impossibility—when we consider real psychological traumas—transformed into a product in the marketing era. When the means for a drastic deepening in the understanding of the psychology of the human being, of the origin of traumas arise, and when there is the possibility of using cognition to alleviate their unwanted effects, reduce their means of action—and never overcome them, eliminate them—man turns his back on knowledge and opts for the path of childhood, exchanges analytical prudence for happy psychology, psychology whose practice is summed up in “thinking positive” and acting like a child in the face of the traumas that overwhelm, sometimes without emitting a signal. Everything seems evidence that geniuses, when they appear, do it in vain…

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Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov is an author who shakes me like few others. His Lectures on Russian Literature have given me a very strong and ambiguous impression. Then, interviews, like that of the Paris Review, consolidated the image I have in mind of him: a giant, but of an arrogance that escapes my understanding. And I simply do not understand some stones thrown by Nabokov, as in Dostoevsky in particular: I remain on the wall judging them envious or expressing intellectual honesty. Whatever: my mind suffers from this unbearable need for judgment; I do not. For I open Lolita and, repeating what I said a few days ago: one page is enough to perceive myself before a great writer, one page is enough to impress me with wonderful, elegant prose, brilliant in style and powerful in content. Nabokov’s prose, in Lolita, is endowed with the body that the English language seems to lack. And that is not the only reason why the work shines: Nabokov teaches the pairs of his century that writing about moral corruption does not demand the corruption of the language. Lolita digs deep: these are frightening pages about the psychology of a pedophile, ambiguous from the beginning, either by the controversial moralism, or by the behavior of Humbert Humbert, the protagonist, who oscillates between sarcasm, love, dissimulation, and desire, terribly corrupting a young girl and installing in our heads the infamous doubt: has he really corrupted? The mere questioning is the confession of immorality that inhabits our minds. And the masterpiece is the full proof that in man the hideous mixes with the sublime.

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