Hormonal urges to which all men are susceptible

Psychoanalytic Views of Mental Health from An und für sich by Jeremy

Recently Nancy McWilliams, a prominent American analyst, presented at my graduate program. Here’s her list of mental health. Let me know what you think.

Signs of Mental Health based on McWilliams’ Presentation at GWU (March 2012):
1) Capacity to Love (Freud)
2) Capacity to Work (Freud)
3) Capacity to Play (Winnicott)
4) Secure Attachment (Bowlby)
5) Sense of Agency/Autonomy (Erikson)
6) Self Constancy/Identity Integration (Stern)
7) Object Constancy (Stern)
8) Ego Strengths (Westen/Shedler)
9) Realistic/Reliable Self-esteem (Kohut)
10) Sense of Values (Superego) (Cleckley)
11) Affect/Thought Tolerance/Frustration (Tomkins)
12) Insight (Reality Testing) (Fenichel)
13) Mentalization (Reflective Functioning) (Fonagy)
14) Good Coping Strategies/Defensive Flexibility (A Freud)
15) Balance between Self-Definition & Self-in-Relationships (Balint)
16) Passion/Vitality/Purpose (Winnicott)
17) Acceptance & Capacity to Mourn/Suffer (Klein)

Notice, the absence of sex and aggression!

Sex and the godman: Nityananda haunted by his past by Venky Vembu Firstpost May 4, 2012 14 Comments

Yet, the karmic deeds of a past when kundalini forces—and the hormonal urges to which all men are susceptible—played havoc with a spiritual practice aren’t proving so easy to bury.

Should women dress modestly? Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo ... 14 Oct 2011 by Sandeep

In everyday life, people frequently engage in pseudo-interactions with women (e.g., through the phone or the internet) or anticipate interacting with a woman later on. The goal of the present research was to investigate if men's ...

Empirical Evidence, Sexual Harassment, and the Economic Way of Thinking from Marginal Revolution by Alex Tabarrok

What the theory and the empirical results are saying is that people exposed to a higher risk of sexual harassment are paid more, just as people exposed to a higher risk of death are paid more… Nevertheless, the principle here is clear, the way to think about these issues is not to throw out economic reasoning but to apply the reasoning ever more deeply.

Lacan, Anarchy, Masculinity, and Psychosis from Larval Subjects (Levi Bryant)

I argued in The Democracy of Objects that it’s actually the masculine side of the graph of sexuation that’s semblance, masquerade, and fiction 

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1m - Savitri Era Party ‏@SavitriEraParty - @orsoraggiante @pragmatic_d [Why liberals are dogmatic ideologues - Shadow Warrior]

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Creative people easily rationalize their dishonest behavior

Study finds men suffer mental decline when around, or even just thinking about women. Same doesn't hold true for females, researchers say Comments (30) BY RHEANA MURRAY NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Tuesday, March 13, 2012 Seen in movies like "The 40 Year-Old Virgin," sometimes men don't know what to say in the presence of a woman.

Men just can’t think straight when women are around. Researchers are studying how males can actually experience a mental decline when interacting with women, Scientific American magazine reported. A study from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands showed that while heterosexual men’s cognitive performance was impaired when they were around someone from the opposite sex, the same didn’t hold true for women. Just the anticipation of interacting with a woman could impair mental performance, according to the study, first published online last November.

Researchers compared the findings to a scene in Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karenina,” in which a male character, Levi, becomes so nervous trying to think of something to tell a woman, Kitty, that he doesn’t recognize a friend who walks by the pond where they’re standing. Such temporary lapses in memory or mindfulness are more common “if the woman is attractive and men report trying to impress her,” according to the study’s authors. And they happen in real life, too…

Men who were told a woman would be watching them performed worse on subsequent tests of cognitive ability, even when there was no actual face-to-face contact with a woman. Women showed no change.

Researchers suggest the findings could be attributed to “evolutionary pressures” that have shaped men to be more likely to sexualize otherwise neutral situations, but say further study is necessary. rmurray@nydailynews.com

Creative people more dishonest, Harvard study finds - Daily Dose 2 Dec 2011 – By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff - But are creative types more likely to lie, cheat, and steal?

“There’s been a lot of anecdotal evidence linking creativity with dishonesty, but without much empirical evidence,” said Francesca Gino, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. She decided to conduct a series of experiments with several hundred college students to determine whether creativity and intelligence play a role in lowering ethical standards when it comes to making money. The findings were published in the recent issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology…

“When you’re a creative person, you can use that creativity to come up with reasons for why unethical behaviors may be okay,” said Gino. “Crossing ethical boundaries may not be as problematic.”

Interestingly, all of the study participants wanted to maintain a positive view of themselves: In anonymous surveys, nobody admitted being a cheater, and all considered cheating to be wrong. But when faced with ethical dilemmas where they weighed self-interest against the desire to maintain their high self-image, the creative participants were better able to rationalize their dishonest behavior, so they could still see themselves as honest human beings.

They figure what’s the harm in cheating, just a little? “One might reason that other people would cheat under the same circumstances or that a little cheating will not hurt anyone,” wrote Gino in the paper.

Other research suggests we all start to self-rationalize more when we’re in a creative mindset -- looking for ways to lower our tax bill, for example, or coming up with a new idea for an advertising campaign. “Anyone who’s thinking creatively at [the] moment, may be more likely to engage in unethical behavior,” Gino told me.

Of course, we shouldn’t try to avoid being creative, but we may want to be a little more self-aware. “Knowing that creativity can have this side effect,” Gino said, “should make us stop and think more carefully when we’re faced with an ethical decision.” Deborah Kotz can be reached at dkotz@globe.com

Rich People 'More Likely To Lie, Cheat And Break The Law' 28 Feb 2012 – huffington post

People from privileged, wealthy backgrounds are more likely to be dishonest and unethical than their poorer counterparts, a study has found. Wealthy more likely to lie, cheat: Study - Indian Express Washington, Tue Feb 28 2012

They may be the more respectable and upstanding members of society, but the rich are also more likely to lie, cheat and engage in other kinds of unethical activities than those in lower classes, claims a new study. But these findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, do not mean that everyone of high status behaves unethically, nor that everyone in lower society behaves ethically, scientists cautioned. 'Wealthy class more likely to lie, cheat' - Times Of India

However, the researchers suggested that the rich's view of the world may be clouded by self-absorption and greed. As a result, they have fewer scruples than those who have less money to burn.

Everyone believes what they want to in a post-fact world

The fallacy of mood affiliation by Tyler Cowen on March 31, 2011 at 8:43 am in Philosophy Permalink Recently I wrote:

It seems to me that people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood and, to themselves, justifying those views by the mood.  I call this the “fallacy of mood affiliation” 

Let’s not count the poor from Kafila by Shivam Vij

As someone recently commented on a Kafila post, we live in a post-fact world where there are no facts. Everyone believes what they want to. 1:47 PM

We are all salespersons to different degrees, and use fallacies Why Politicians are Liars, Darrell Williams author's web site September 19, 2007

These are complex deceitful statements that are used to sell an idea by misleading claims. This is done by different individuals to different degrees for different purposes. Some are harmless but some are dangerous and illegal. There are over 166 different ways in which a person can use fallacies to deceive or mislead someone. 5:36 PM

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Neat People vs. Sloppy People":

Oh well, it is not so much her questionable sense of humour that bothers me here; it is not the fact that she is painting a very two-dimensional black and white picture either. It is that people relate to it: "Oh yes, everything in my life can be defined so simply. One line, two kinds of people." Seriously? I don't recognize any sloppy nor any neat people I know in this essay. Why not stick to the definition? (Oxford) neat: arranged in a tidy way; in good order. sloppy: careless and unsystematic; excessively casual.

I see nothing about waste or attachment to things here.
When you want to put people in boxes, the larger your boxes are, the more judgmental and wrong you get. And it doesn't get any funnier... Evergreen Essays at 7:15 PM, March 17, 2012

Non-marriage based communities

Feminism and the Family – Thoughts on International Women’s Day from Kafila by Nivedita Menon MARCH 8, 2012 - Excerpts from my forthcoming book Seeing like a Feminist (Penguin India/Zubaan Books).

Women have to learn to remake themselves completely, but even more significant is the fact that the entire period of their lives before this singular event of marriage, is spent in anticipating and preparing for this specific future, from choice of career and job options to learning to be adaptable from early girlhood.

As a young girl said, ‘Whenever I ask my mother to have fun, go out, to wear interesting clothes, she says, ‘Now I am married, I can’t do that’. If marriage is the end of life, how can it also be the goal of life?’[7] […]

The family is an institution that rigidly enforces systems of inheritance and descent, and in this structure, individuals – sons, daughters, wives, husbands – are resources that are strictly bound by the violence, implicit and explicit, of this frame. We tend to take this frame for granted, and it becomes obscenely visible only in extraordinary circumstances.

As feminists we need to build up the capacity and strength of both women and men to live in ways in which marriage is voluntary, and to build alternate non-marriage based communities.

The questionability of the traditional family from An und für sich by Adam Kotsko Mar 6, 2012

Modern society has certainly tweaked with the traditional model to a significant extent, relying primarily on the willingness of the mother to leave an abusive situation and take the kids with her. In extreme situations, the state itself will intervene to take the kids away from an abusive parent’s custody. Yet the primary strategy is to provide exit strategies for when things go wrong. And of course conservatives are constantly fighting to make those exit strategies more difficult — and to cut off the means to avoid becoming entrapped in bad situations in the first place (i.e., birth control and abortion).

This is where gay marriage is absolutely necessary: at its best, it provides a model for a voluntary union of equals. Unless we’re going to go the full Republic route, it seems that more or less autonomous households are here to stay — and so we might as well have them forming without all the baggage of patriarchal presuppositions. This is the good way that gay marriage challenges the traditional family: by pushing it further in the direction of being a realm of love and affinity rather than a regime of property.

Obviously this isn’t a magic-bullet solution, because gay marriage and the changed marriage norms it can hopefully bring with it do not lead automatically to a utopia in which everyone is good and responsible. Yet the patriarchal model is practically begging the father to abuse his power, and so moving away from it can only be good.

Thus I would say that straight people would do well to make their marriages a little more gay.

Auroville Radio Auroville Radio Newsletter Editor's Notes Dear readers,

There is much hustle-bustle here in Auroville these days with new developments as well as the Bulgarian celebrations in the International zone. And with International Women’s Day just around the corner, you can imagine the excitement as women take the lead in History, Literature, Cinema, Dance and a lot more! 

How many Ashrams have we imagined where the inmates, some unmarried, especially women, expose their lower bottom on the body by wearing shorts and go out on the streets, even to the markets? How many traditional Indian ashrams serve non-vegetarian food to their inmates? This is a reality in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and a big attack by some fundamental groups who are plotting a planned and systematic attack to the very essence and existence of its survival. This is the nature of attack… Manas 12:33 PM from: Narayan T Rao narayan.t.rao@gmail.com date: 6 March 2012

'लिव इन रिलेशनशिप' को स्वीकार करें: टीम अन्ना दैनिक भास्कर गाजियाबाद. टीम अन्ना 'लिव इन रिलेशनशिप' के समर्थन में आगे आई है। टीम के सदस्य और पूर्व केंद्रीय मंत्री शांति भूषण ने कहा है कि लोगों को बदलते समाज के सच के साथ इसे स्वीकार कर लेना चाहिए। भूषण के मुताबिक लिव इन रिलेशनशिप का विरोध नहीं होना चाहिए। 

गाजियाबाद में एक कार्यक्रम के दौरान मीडिया से बातचीत में शांति भूषण ने कहा, 'सामाजिक मूल्य बड़ी तेजी से बदल रहे हैं और हमें इसे स्वीकार करना चाहिए।' विधानसभा चुनाव के बारे में शांति भूषण ने कहा कि अन्ना फैक्टर ने अपना असर दिखाया है और चुनावी नतीजों को देखने से यह बात साफ हो जाती है। (12/03/12) 

Live-in fallout of materialistic western culture: RSS Ramu Bhagwat, TNN Mar 17, 2012 Times of India - NAGPUR:

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has made it clear that it could never approve of the recent vogue of live-in-relationships. Reacting to events organized in Nagpur and Gujarat by lonely senior citizens to find live-in partners, RSS joint general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale said that it was a fallout of materialistic western culture and such an act cannot be encouraged.

Hosabale was speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the three-day Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha which began here on Friday. The remark coming from him became all the more important as he is being billed to succeed Mohan Bhagwat as next 'sarsanghachalak' (RSS chief) few years down the line. Hosabale said over the last one year the RSS has conducted camps to spread the message about importance of strengthening the institution of family.

Oedipus complex may not apply to other cultures

Comment on Practising Titiksha with marshmallows by Sandeep from Comments for Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo & The Mother by Sandeep

True. You might be aware of American psychologist Alan Roland’s book “In Search of Self in India and Japan“, in which he examine cultural differences between Indian, Japanese and American cultures. He observes that Western psycho-analytic models such as the Oedipus complex may not apply to other cultures. One Japanese psychologist defined other variations which were more prevalent in his culture.

MacIntyre against Wilber’s worldcentrism from Love of All Wisdom by Amod Lele

MacIntyre, in the 30 years since his famous After Virtue, has been telling us a story of regret and decline – one focused largely on ethics, but ethics broadly defined. In After Virtue, MacIntyre described the Enlightenment project of “justifying morality” as performed most famously by Kant and Mill, but also more recent analytic figures like Alan Gewirth. And he argues that this project has not only failed, but had to fail. “Morality”, in this sort of modern context, nearly always stands opposed primarily to “self-interest”.

rick-santorum-women-military-combat-roles

But I do have concerns about women in front-line combat, I think that could be a very compromising situation, where people naturally may do things that may not be in the interest of the mission, because of other types of emotions that are involved," Santorum continued. "It already happens, of course, with the camaraderie of men in combat, but I think it would be even more unique if women were in combat, and I think that's probably not in the best interest of men, women or the mission. [Women are more afraid]

Social currency and insecurity

sbicitizen : Message: Re: Social currency: 'via Blog this'

Human devised solutions to the issues such as currency, morality, rights etc, will always be unequal. This is not an opinion, it is His (nature/universe) law. He has designed us differently (similar only in race), this universe is uniquely dual and its chaos are loaded with benefits.

Sense of equality touches our conscious, sounds good, is wonderful in concept, but remains a mirage that a desperate thirsty mind chases. We have choices, stay in pursuit of the mirage as we done since time immemorial, or seek a different beat; preach reality. Let us challenge human mind to adopt to the realities of this universe and take charge of self survival. Our fair mind has always taken care of rare/exceptional unequal human conditions. In the name of equality, organized religion has exploited/failed its followers more than providing claimed benefits.

Let us get real for the sake of our own conscious and broadcast/preach real values as they exist. He has given His creation the adaptability to adjust to the realities of their situation. Fake bleeding hearts and false hope generating exploiters remain the only constant impediment. Nirmal S. Nilvi, Texas.

Class and Academia: On cultivating a sense of entitlement by Adam Kotsko from An und für sich - Jan 13, 2012 

My father is a truck driver and though my mother went to college shortly after I did and ultimately became a teacher, she spent my childhood helping to run a small business and then doing various service jobs. At every level of my education, my parents were of little assistance in helping to discern what I should do. My mom opted not to put me in the “gifted program” when offered the opportunity in elementary school. I applied to only one college: Olivet, where I knew I would qualify for a full-tuition scholarship. It seemed obvious to me that I couldn’t afford college anywhere else, even though I had a 4.0, excellent test scores, and a strong record of extra-curricular activities. And when it came time to do grad school, I was already far out of their range of experience.

My ignorance of the practical mechanics of these kinds of processes was exacerbated by a lack of the skills associated with success: social networking above all. But perhaps most important was the emotional burden. Every step I made, it seemed to me, could be my last. One small mistake could lead me tumbling back down to where I really belonged. This sense of the fragility of my position has had profoundly negative emotional effects. The job market is always stressful, but for me it was devestating — far out of proportion to the actual results, which turned out to be really good in the end. I deal with groundless anxiety in my teaching, somehow convinced against all evidence that one small mistake will spell the end. I am also overly sensitive to “pride”-related issues like recognition for my work from other academics.

“Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” from Per Caritatem by Cynthia R. Nielsen

King calls for solidarity and a concern for humans qua humans.  None of this suggests that King is advocating for a post-racial society where we deny difference. Rather, he sees that in order to fight for justice, human rights, and the like, there must be some common bond, some unity that connects us and yet allows difference to manifest and even be celebrated. In other words, I see in King a desire to hold unity and difference in tension rather than to exalt one over the other.

Joy of being: Practical life and spiritual path The Hindu

Sri Aurobindo calls it 'to watch the thought'. This means, we do not identify with the thought but sit above and watch it. What happens when we sit above ...