Before #MeToo, before Black Lives Matter, Bessel van der Kolk argued for the centrality of trauma to human experience. President of the Trauma Research Foundation in Brookline, Massachusetts, van der Kolk is author of The Body Keeps the Score, a book that has been a perennial best-seller since . . . . Continue Reading »
Obituaries for Toni Morrison, who died on August 5, remember her as a Nobel Prize–winning novelist, a black woman novelist, and the last great American novelist—never a Catholic novelist. Morrison converted to Catholicism at age twelve but stood aloof from the Church for years. Despite a few . . . . Continue Reading »
With a bestselling book, 850,000 followers on YouTube, and $60,000 a month in direct contributions from fans, Jordan Peterson has every material reason to be happy. But watch one of the lectures or interviews that have made him famous, and you will see a face full of sorrow. He talks about . . . . Continue Reading »
The field of psychology, which once taught us not to value character, is beginning to praise virtues as necessary for the good life. Continue Reading »
Manhunt: Unabomberrevisits the story of Ted Kaczynski, the domestic terrorist who waged a decades-long bombing campaign from a one-room cabin in Montana. Continue Reading »
Christians don’t talk enough about depression. Emotional pain, for one thing, can be hard to share. Despair can feel very physical for the sufferer, weighing heavily on the heart and clogging the brain, but its surface features can be easily overlooked or missing altogether. A depression that . . . . Continue Reading »
It is a fair question to ask why the modern reader should be concerned with any of the writings from the early days of psychology. Knowledge of the biological conditions of mental illness and the psychological aspects of personality disorders has advanced, and the science has moved on. Why rehash theories of psychology promulgated by the early thinkers, many of which are just plain wrong? Continue Reading »