Latest news with #Freud
Boston Globe
3 days ago
- General
- Boston Globe
What your stress dreams about high school and college say about education — and you
Write to us at . To subscribe, . TODAY'S STARTING POINT Millions of Americans are graduating from high school and college this time of year. Some of them are about to join the ranks of those of us who have had The Dream. The classic version goes something like this: You're back in high school and need to pass biology to graduate — except you've forgotten to study for the final exam. Or maybe you're walking into a college art history test only to realize that not only did you not study, you haven't been to a lecture all semester. Advertisement Other versions of test-anxiety dreams involve sleeping though an exam, struggling to find a classroom, or finding your test written in some indecipherable script. 'There are a lot of variations,' says Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard Medical School. 'They can be just as unique and broad as people are.' I started having test-anxiety dreams in college — and still get them eight years after graduating. Freudian roots Researchers have documented test-anxiety dreams at least since Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist who pioneered psychoanalysis more than a century ago. 'Everyone who has received his certificate of matriculation after passing his final examination at school complains of the persistence with which he is plagued by anxiety-dreams in which he has failed,' Freud wrote in his 1899 book, ' Advertisement Freud argued that such dreams in part reflect the transition from childhood, in which parents are the authority figures who mete out punishment 'for misdeeds which we had committed,' into early adulthood, when professors assume that role. Modern research has disputed many of Freud's theories about human psychology, but there may be some legitimacy to this one. 'Exams in our culture represent authority figures evaluating you,' said Barrett, whose 2001 book, ' It's hard to know how common these kinds of dreams are, Barrett said, because other factors — including whether you tend to remember dreams at all — affect whether you report having them. Yet the rise of universal public education in the United States during the 20th century and the growing shares of Americans who are high school or college graduates have almost certainly made taking tests — and having nightmares about them — a far more common rite of passage. 'In Freud's time, it would've been an elite that was doing that,' Barrett said of test-taking. 'Now every kid in America is.' The dreams probably most often afflict middle-school, high-school, and college students, all of whom regularly take real-life exams. But adults whose lives have nothing to do with academia also report experiencing them. Some of Barrett's psychiatry residents still get the dreams despite being past the point in their education where they regularly take paper-and-pencil tests. The writer Susan Van Allen has confessed to having exam nightmares Advertisement Not all bad Yet if test-anxiety dreams often reflect the role of education in our lives, today's graduates are entering a world in which some Americans are increasingly questioning it. Many Americans now Yet despite the stress they can cause, the persistence of test-anxiety dreams also suggests a happier truth for today's graduates to consider: that high school and college are formative times that stick with us long after they're over. Many adults still dream about high-school sports victories or hanging out with their college friends. 'The good parts of college definitely stay with people,' Barrett said. 'It's usually not only test-anxiety dreams.' If you get those dreams regularly, Barrett suggests taking note of when they recur and consulting a dream psychologist or therapist about the real-life stressors that might be triggering them — including ones unrelated to academics, like a work deadline or family conflict. And if that doesn't help, she has one more piece of counsel: 'I think the only positive spin for that is you wake up.' Advertisement 🧩 1 Across: 67° POINTS OF INTEREST Rosie Emrich with her eight-year-old transgender child at their house in Hooksett, N.H. Brett Phelps for The Boston Globe Boston and New England Real-life 'Succession': From family infighting to the shadow of past mistakes, the dynamics that have made the ouster of Market Basket's CEO a juicy business story echo those in Trans rights: As New Hampshire Republicans weigh banning medical care for transgender youth, some families are Local vs. federal: The MBTA Transit Police chief praised federal prosecutors for indicting a former sergeant who helped cover up a beating — and Money talks: Who's giving it, who's spending it, and whose dad has a lot of it 'It's in my blood': Jaiden Mosley, a 22-year-old Black man from Maryland, studied at Tufts. His family tree Crash: The Holyoke Police Department is seeking charges against a driver who Trump administration Outlandish: On social media, President Trump shared a fringe conspiracy theory that former president Joe Biden was 'executed in 2020' and replaced with clones or robots. ( 'Confusion and concern': The Supreme Court's decision letting Trump end legal protections for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans in the US has Defensive move: To combat Trump's attacks, Harvard Spaced out: The White House pulled an Elon Musk associate's nomination to lead NASA shortly before he was set to receive a Senate confirmation vote. Musk left the administration last week. ( Foreign students: Nearly 18 percent of college and graduate students in Massachusetts are foreign-born and pay full tuition. The administration's efforts to ban them Disorganized labor: Primary care doctors at Mass General Brigham voted to unionize. But the hospital's opposition and the federal labor board Trump has paralyzed The Nation and the World Israel-Hamas war: At least 31 Palestinians were killed while on their way to get food from an aid site in Gaza, witnesses said. ( Poland: Right-wing candidate Karol Nawrocki won the country's presidential election, beating a pro-Europe liberal. ( BESIDE THE POINT By Teresa Hanafin 🗓️ Free events this week: Musical bingo, a mind-set refresh, the kickoff of Summer in the City, 📺 TV shows this week: Owen Wilson in 'Stick,' George Clooney's Broadway show, Cynthia Erivo hosts the Tony Awards, 🍭 Gas 'n' snack: The most popular gas station snack in Massachusetts is Doritos, but the wise travelers of North Carolina and Georgia have it right: Snickers. ( 🎹 Open-air tunes: Outdoor summer music festivals have returned. 🏈 Simply the best: The Ringer has chosen the 100 best sports moments of the first quarter of the 21st century. But they got No. 1 horribly wrong. ( 📸 As he sees it: Stan Grossfeld's weekly photo column features great shots of the 🕵️♂️ Fan of James Bond films? Here are 13 far-flung locales the fictional spy visited over the course of 27 movies — including his grave on the Faroe Islands. ( Advertisement 📖 Fan of Jane Austen novels? The author's 250th birthday isn't until Dec. 16, but celebrations have already started. ( 🎬 Indie films are gone: Filmmakers don't really take no-budget movies and put them on the big screen anymore, Thanks for reading Starting Point. NOTE: A 🎁 emoji indicates a gift link. A $ is a subscription site that does not offer gift links. This newsletter was edited by ❓ Have a question for the team? Email us at ✍🏼 If someone sent you this newsletter, you can 📬 Delivered Monday through Friday. Ian Prasad Philbrick can be reached at
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Whataboutism Is Rotting Our Brains, Our Consciences, and Our Politics
BEFORE WE CAN ADEQUATELY RESPOND to the frontal assault Donald Trump has launched on our way of life, we need to grapple with whataboutism. It is destroying our capacity to make rational judgments. In the face of an unprecedented defiance of law, tradition, and the Constitution, too many of us find ourselves so mired in polarized thinking that we can't see straight. Humans have always been beguiled by black-and-white thinking. Something is either good or bad. You are either with us or against us. Greek or barbarian. Saved or damned. Sigmund Freud coined the term 'Madonna/whore complex' to describe the mindset of men who relegate women into one of two categories: pure or sullied. A related error in logic is called 'tu quoque' (you too), a form of the ad hominem fallacy because it attacks the person rather than disproving their argument—which should sound familiar to anyone who's lived through the past few years of American politics. The tendency to engage in polarized thinking is hardly new, and yet, it seems that we've regressed in recent years. We live in an age of overflowing information and knowledge, and yet we seem more inclined now than in the recent past to succumb to whataboutism. It's perfectly clear why Trump and his many enablers rely on whataboutism. It's the easiest deflection. What is the proper response to Trump's iniquitous treatment of women? What about Bill Clinton? How can one evaluate his pardons of the January 6th insurrectionists? What about all those who rioted in protest of George Floyd's murder and were never prosecuted? (They were.) Was Trump's refusal to return highly classified documents a serious breach? What about Joe Biden keeping files in his garage? (Biden returned them when asked.) Is Trump corrupting the rule of law with his pardons of friends, donors, and political allies? What about Joe Biden's pardons of Hunter and his entire family? We don't do whataboutism at The Bulwark. We don't have partisan loyalties or ulterior motives. We just tell you what we really think. Join us. This game can be played endlessly, and it has been played aggressively for the past decade. It's important to dwell on the consequences. Some people who are caught in a lie, betrayal, or other transgression admit their guilt and seek to repair the damage. That's how mature people and societies stay civilized. Truly depraved people don't take that route. Trump uses whataboutism not just to change the subject or disarm the accuser ('tu quoque' was pretty much the theme of the 2016 presidential race) but also to breed cynicism. If 'everybody does it' then it's unfair to hold him accountable. And because people who constantly transgress can't function with the knowledge that they are immoral, they must believe—and teach—that everyone is just as corrupt as they are; that the standards themselves are flawed or at least universally flouted. Does a mafia don tell his daughter that he's a criminal, or does he explain that the world is composed of killers and losers and that you must choose one or the other? Though Americans are sometimes perceived as idealistic, there are other strains in our character that demagogues can tap into, such as cynicism about politics. A line perhaps inaccurately attributed to Mark Twain has been a staple of after-dinner speeches for more than 150 years: 'America has no native criminal class, except Congress.' Or as a more modern wag put it: 'Politics comes from the Greek 'poly' (many) and 'ticks' (small, annoying bloodsuckers).' A certain amount of skepticism about politicians is healthy. But cynicism is corrosive because it invites the very thing it scorns. Once you elect a sociopath and agree with his jaundiced view that everyone is corrupt, you've lost any chance of upholding basic values. If you treasure honesty, integrity, the rule of law, and decency, you must be prepared to reject whataboutism and to risk mockery by insisting that no, not everybody does it, and we don't want to accept the kind of society in which that is assumed. As David Frum outlined in the Atlantic: Nothing like this has been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency. Throw away the history books; discard feeble comparisons to scandals of the past. There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president. The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial African dictatorship. Trump's corruption is so off the charts (a Qatari luxury jet, hundreds of millions in memecoins and tokens, bidding wars to dine with him as his club) that it defies comparison. Through the memecoin, anyone anywhere for any reason can put hundreds, or thousands, or millions of dollars directly into Trump's pocket. Not into a campaign fund, not into a political party, but into the hands of the president. And as we witnessed on his Middle East trip, eager foreign leaders and businessmen are lining up to do so. Vietnam, hoping for relief from tariffs, is in talks to help Trump build a luxury golf course. Due almost entirely to his crypto holdings, Trump has, by one estimate, doubled his net worth in just four months. Share The Constitution could not be clearer. Article I, Section 9 reads: 'No title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign state.' Are we so cynical that we cannot summon outrage at a flagrant disregard for our founding document? In keeping with the current grab-everything-that-isn't-nailed-down ethos, the Trump administration announced last month that it was disbanding the Justice Department unit devoted to ferreting out crypto crime, and the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped an investigation into one of Trump's largest donors—the one who donated top dollar (or memecoin) to have dinner with Trump at his country club outside D.C. Yes, Biden's pardons of his family were grubby, but they were a few pebbles compared with Trump's avalanche of corruption. The current president is signaling with his pardons that anti-democratic violence is encouraged if undertaken on his behalf, and that no action, not even murder, is beyond redemption if you are in his camp. He has pardoned a corrupt thief who happened to be the son of a big donor, granted a 'FULL AND Unconditional Pardon' to a Virginia sheriff who was convicted of selling government offices but who was redeemed by his Trump loyalty. The family of Ashli Babbitt, who violently stormed the Capitol and was shot by police, received a generous payout from the Trump-controlled government. Murderers, politicos on the take, swindlers, thieving reality TV stars, gangsters—all have been pardoned by Trump in the past few weeks. If you're a Trump supporter, you have an honest-to-goodness get-out-of-jail-free card. The Department of Justice's watchword is no longer 'Equal Justice Under Law,' but, in the words of Ed Martin, Trump's newly minted pardon advisor, 'No MAGA left behind.' We must disenthrall ourselves from the whataboutism mindset. There are honorable politicians. There are honest businessmen. There are police and soldiers and teachers and programmers and athletes and judges of integrity. Millions of Americans are appalled and deeply embarrassed by the kakistocracy we've elevated. Hold on to that outrage. It's the road back from this disaster. Share
Time of India
06-05-2025
- General
- Time of India
Six arrested, minor detained for rape of two teenagers
More than dreams: 10 Sigmund Freud quotes that dive deep into human nature On May 6 we celebrate the birth anniversary of one of the most revolutionary minds- Sigmunf Freud. The man, who gave birth to psychoanalysis, was not just a pioneering neurologist. He was a cultural force who reshaped the way we understand the human psyche, identity, and behavior. Freud's ideas was bashed as uncomfortable and disconcerting, however they hold a respectable place in modern dared to explore the unconscious mind at a time when it was barely recognized. He invited patients to speak freely from the couch in his Viennese office, encouraging them to share their thoughts, memories, and dreams without censorship. Through this method, he uncovered the hidden as well as complex layers of desire, repression, and conflict that, he believed, shaped much of human behavior. It was Freud who first insisted that truly listening—deeply and without judgment—was key to healing the his work has sparked decades of debate and reinterpretation, Freud's influence remains profound. He painted an unflinching picture of the mind as a battlefield between instinct and reason, between what we know and what we try to life, too, was shaped by upheaval. In 1938, as the Nazis took over Austria, he was forced to flee Vienna. He spent his final year in London, where his home at 20 Maresfield Gardens—now the Freud Museum—preserves his library, collections, and the original psychoanalytic couch that launched a honor his birthday, let us look at 10 quotes that offer a window into Freud's extraordinary mind— Times Of India
Time of India
06-05-2025
- General
- Time of India
2 Thane cops arrested for selling CDRs to pvt detective agencies
More than dreams: 10 Sigmund Freud quotes that dive deep into human nature On May 6 we celebrate the birth anniversary of one of the most revolutionary minds- Sigmunf Freud. The man, who gave birth to psychoanalysis, was not just a pioneering neurologist. He was a cultural force who reshaped the way we understand the human psyche, identity, and behavior. Freud's ideas was bashed as uncomfortable and disconcerting, however they hold a respectable place in modern dared to explore the unconscious mind at a time when it was barely recognized. He invited patients to speak freely from the couch in his Viennese office, encouraging them to share their thoughts, memories, and dreams without censorship. Through this method, he uncovered the hidden as well as complex layers of desire, repression, and conflict that, he believed, shaped much of human behavior. It was Freud who first insisted that truly listening—deeply and without judgment—was key to healing the his work has sparked decades of debate and reinterpretation, Freud's influence remains profound. He painted an unflinching picture of the mind as a battlefield between instinct and reason, between what we know and what we try to life, too, was shaped by upheaval. In 1938, as the Nazis took over Austria, he was forced to flee Vienna. He spent his final year in London, where his home at 20 Maresfield Gardens—now the Freud Museum—preserves his library, collections, and the original psychoanalytic couch that launched a honor his birthday, let us look at 10 quotes that offer a window into Freud's extraordinary mind— Times Of India
Time of India
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Sigmund Freud for Beginners: Meet the man who invented your subconscious
Freud – The Interpreter of Nightmares The Ego, the Id, and the Oh-So-Fraught Superego Id: the primitive, instinctual part of the mind, all hunger, libido, and tantrum. Superego: the internalised parent, full of shoulds, musts, and guilt trips. Ego: the negotiator, stuck between your inner caveman and your inner priest. PSYCHOTHERAPY - Sigmund Freud Freudian Slips and Other Confessions The Talking Cure and the Couch Revolution Freud – The Cultural Prophet Fight Club Black Swan Psycho Sex and Death: Freud's Favourite Dinner Guests Freud – The Flawed Genius Freud's Final Years Freud's Enduring Relevance If Noam Chomsky is the Devil's Accountant , then Sigmund Freud is the Architect of Dreams. Not the whimsical kind involving rainbows and flying cows, but the kind where you're chasing your mother through a dark hallway while holding a cigar. And yes, it is just a cigar. Or is it?Explaining Freud is like trying to explain cricket to an American. At first glance, it's long, confusing, and seems to revolve around daddy issues. But if you sit with it long enough, you begin to realise the strange beauty of a man who single-handedly turned Western civilisation into a therapy didn't just invent psychoanalysis. He invented the modern notion of the self: that what we are is not just what we do, or say, or post on Instagram, but a bubbling cauldron of instincts, memories, and traumas buried beneath the surface. Born in 1856 in what is now the Czech Republic, Freud was a neurologist by training, but like all true revolutionaries, he broke his field before he built a new Copernicus did to the Earth, Freud did to the human ego: he displaced it from the centre. His claim? You are not the master of your own house. Your mind is not a palace but a haunted mansion, and the real decisions are made in the basement, by people you've never met, in languages you can't most enduring contribution is the structural model of the psyche: the id, the ego, and the superego. If the human mind were a dysfunctional family dinner, the id would be the drunk uncle demanding cake, the superego would be the grandmother wagging her finger about cholesterol, and the ego would be the exhausted host trying to keep the model of the psyche is often compared to Plato's chariot allegory. The id is the wild black horse of passion pulling recklessly, the superego is the white horse of restraint tugging toward virtue, and the ego is the charioteer—struggling to keep both in check while trying not to crash into existential model helped Freud explain why civilised people behave in very uncivilised ways—and why your dreams might involve inappropriate thoughts about your chemistry was obsessed with the idea that everything we say accidentally is actually on purpose. You didn't 'accidentally' call your boss 'mum.' That was your unconscious waving a little flag. These verbal misfires, known as Freudian slips, revealed the darker urges we tried to repress. And repression, for Freud, was the root of neurosis. Forgetfulness, phobias, even physical symptoms—all were expressions of unprocessed trauma lurking beneath consciousness. The mind, he said, was a battleground. And dreams? That was where the war played great innovation was the couch—not just for naps, but for confessions. He developed psychoanalysis: a method that involved free association, dream interpretation, and long silences where your therapist waits for you to say something meaningful while billing you by the 'talking cure,' as it was called, wasn't just about healing. It was about uncovering. Freud believed that to be free, you had to confront what you'd buried. Therapy wasn't about fixing problems; it was about excavating he began in medicine, Freud's impact spilled far beyond psychiatry. His ideas shaped art, literature, feminism, cinema, and even politics. Think ofand, or Hitchcock's. Think of advertising's obsession with desire, or politics' manipulation of mass psychology. It's all Freud, Marx saw class conflict and Darwin saw natural selection, Freud saw repression. Civilisation, he argued, was a trade-off. We get security, but we give up freedom. Our lusts are suppressed, our instincts caged, and the result is a society full of frustrated people dreaming of was most memorably expressed in Civilisation and Its Discontents, where Freud argued that all of society's order and beauty is built on top of a reservoir of rage and desire. If Chomsky was the prophet of logic, Freud was the prophet of theories inevitably return to two things: sex and death. Eros and Thanatos. The life drive and the death drive. He believed human behaviour was driven by the need to create and the urge to destroy. Love and aggression were two sides of the same coin, forever scandalised Victorian Europe by suggesting that children were sexual beings (cue monocle drop) and that even the most upstanding citizen was full of shameful urges. His theory of the Oedipus complex—that boys experience unconscious sexual desire for their mothers and rivalry with their fathers—was less a literal claim and more a metaphor for how identity is formed through conflict and it didn't stop generations of undergraduates from looking at their parents weirdly for weeks after Psych be clear: not everything Freud said has stood the test of time. Some of his theories—like penis envy or the seduction theory—have been widely discredited. Feminists have taken him to task. Neuroscientists have rolled their eyes. And even modern psychologists often treat him like a problematic grandfather: respected, but not to be left alone at like Shakespeare or Darwin, Freud's shadow looms over everything that came after. Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein , Slavoj Žižek—they're all riffing off Freud. Every time someone says 'you're projecting' or jokes about daddy issues, they're paying homage to fled the Nazis in 1938 and spent his last days in London, dying a year later of jaw cancer after decades of cigar addiction. He asked for euthanasia, and his doctor obliged. A final act of control from a man obsessed with the things we cannot ashes are stored in a Grecian urn, which, in an almost too-symbolic twist, was nearly stolen in 2014. Even in death, Freud can't catch a break from people wanting to steal his live in a time of TikTok therapy, Instagram trauma, and dopamine detoxes. Freud might scoff at the pseudoscience of it all, but he'd also recognise the yearning beneath it. The desire to be understood. To be free. To turn chaos into meaning. As Chomsky gives us the tools to dissect language and power, Freud gives us the mirror. A cracked one, perhaps, but a mirror nonetheless. As Freud once wrote: 'Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.'In 2025, amid AI hallucinations and algorithmic identities, it might be the best exercise of all.
