Anna Brinkman's Archive

General Thoughts on Psychology…

8 Commentsby   |  05.02.11  |  The Schools of Psychology (Part IV)

I feel like this post may be more just spilling the thoughts of my mind than writing about a specific subject, but now that we are nearing the end of our time in this class I looked back on the theories that we have learned about. Psychoanalysis, behaviorism, humanisitic, exisistential, etc. And within each of those big categories, there are smaller ones to choose from. What makes someone choose what approach to take in therapy? I do not plan on being a counselor, but for those of you who are, I am curious as to what one you identify with and why? I feel like each of the theories have positive and negative attributes. It is interesting to see how something as simple as the background of your family and how you grew up can influence how you approach therapy. Each approach seems to build off oof the other and it makes me wonder about the future and how much each theory we know now will grow and what new approaches we will see in the future.

Free Will (not the Rush song)

4 Commentsby   |  03.21.11  |  Pre-Renaissance (Part I)

Ok, I know the song does not really have a lot to do with William James and his view of free will, I just thought it would be a nice intro. The idea of free will has always been interesting to me, especially as a Christian because of the whole choices or the will of God thing that pops up so often. I like how obvious it seems when James says that because you can choose to believe in free will then it is true. I feel like having free will is something that God has blessed us with. I do not think God’s goal in making us was to have us run down the path he set out for us with no decisions involved. We were given a brain and the ability to make decisions, so it is obvious we are supposed to use it for something, right?

God is Dead

3 Commentsby   |  02.21.11  |  Renaissance/Premodern (Part II)

I was hoping the title would catch your attention, becasuse it certainly did mine. This is perhaps the best known statements made by Friedrich Nietzsche. When I first saw the caption I was like wow…what is his problem? I know he is an existentialist, but really? As I read on I realized what he meant by it, and it was quite profound. When he said this, he was speaking about the influences of European society and how they had become so secular and far from God that they more or less “killed” Him because God was a symbol of values and upholding righteousness and Nietzsche was seeing values being tossed out the window all around him.

Nietzsche’s view of God being a symbol of values showed how important keeping the God “alive” in society would be and without God there would be no objective truth or universal perspective. Perspectives would be individualized and we could only rely on our own perspectives. This introduces the concept of perspectivism, which says all ideas come from particular perspectives. That implys that no way of seeing things is actually true and that is how one of Nietzsche’s contributions to the existentialist view came about.

Plato and Aristotle: The Relationship of Teacher and Student

11 Commentsby   |  02.02.11  |  Pre-Renaissance (Part I)

I love seeing how much views differed and how rapidly they changed in the times of Plato and Aristotle. When I look at where the world is right now as far as developing new theories on things and new discoveries and inventions and it all seems like it is pretty stagnant. Seeing Plato descending from Socrates with these new views and then Aristotle coming off of that and developing a whole new perspective on life, souls, etc is encouraging.

I really love to look at the teacher/student relationship Plato and Aristotle had with each other and see how different their views are. I feel that today there is more encouragement towards accepting other people’s opinions with a blind eye rather than taking their opinions and forming ones of your own. Not to say that being inquisitive is frowned upon, but it seems that the goals of philosphers in the times of Plato and Aristotle were to grow in their knowledge of the world (both physical and nonphysical) whether it agreed or disagreed with those around them.

Taking Plato’s belief in reason and the mind “remembering” things and then comparing that to Aristotle’s view that the mind gains knowledge through experience–they look really different. It is really encouraging to see that different views can arise between teacher and pupil and yet both be accepted by different worldviews. For example, I can relate the mind remembering things to the Buddhist view of reicarnation whereas the mind gaining knowledge through experience is a very post modern Christian point of view.

Each of these philosophers brought new and refreshing ideas to the table which I think should be encouraging to people today to not just blindly accept the views of those bigger than us, but to morph them and make them make sense to us and how we see the world.

Anna Brinkman's Comment Archive

  1. Anna Brinkman on Jean Jacques Rousseau says what?
    10:29 pm, 02.21.11

    I’m not sure I completely agree with this, but I do think that your last statement, “Children need discipline, love, and example” is very true. While I don’t whole heartedly agree with Rousseau’s view, I do believe that babies are born as a clean slate in a sense. Taking your example as Child A and Child B, it can be simplified to an act of jealousy. Jealousy is a learned trait, I think, and if the media and other children did not influence a child, then jealousy would not take over and the situation would not have happened. I do like how you thought about it and if it were me, I would take a little bit of your side and a little bit of Rousseau’s to make my case.

  2. Anna Brinkman on Frederick Nietzsche
    10:23 pm, 02.21.11

    Jacob-wow! That quote really is awesome. It really does make the whole existence thing a lot easier to grasp for me. It is so hard not to dwell on the past and look forward. It is really freeing that when we give ourselves a why, the how takes care of itself in the process because of obstacles we overcome.

  3. Anna Brinkman on Spiritual Nativism?
    8:28 am, 02.03.11

    This is a really interesting take on it. It’s something I haven’t thought about much, but I really like the depth of your statement about shaving away all the influences of society and the truth being left behind. I agree with you in that I think we all have the ultimate truth in us through the holy spirit, it is just hard to know and recognize the truth in some cases (not in clear right/wrong circumstances, but in more complex situations). I think that if the truth really does reside inside of us through the holy spirit, introspection and seeking it from within is a good way to go.

  4. Anna Brinkman on The Greeks on Sleep & Dreaming
    10:04 am, 02.02.11

    I think it’s really cool that you are so interested in this because dreaming is something that a lot of people are really intrigued by, but have little information about. Since dreaming is so subjective it is hard to have any fool proof theory. Bringing Aristotle’s view about sensations and retention of images in to analyzing dreams makes it a lot more concrete, I feel, because just looking a dreams alone is hard to prove anything (by this I mean it is hard to understand when you have not experienced it first hand) but taking the behaviors or deja vu kind of things that come up with dreams really makes it something worth looking at.

  5. Anna Brinkman on Reason
    9:56 am, 02.02.11

    I like that you put up this dilemma between Plato’s reason and Christianity because it is something that I think a lot of Christians confront in their spiritual journey. I think that we as humans attempt to find some reason in every thing, for example Christians may accept the idea of God to find reason in life. I think the question you posted, If you could only find truth through reason then how could God be truth?, is something that deserves to be thought about because it is such a dilemma in our lives.

  6. Anna Brinkman on Views of Happiness?
    9:52 am, 02.02.11

    I like that you state that Christians morph philosophy into something that they can make sense of. This has always been something that has bothered me a little because I wonder if that’s how philosophers meant their works to be used. I feel that Christians want to accept certain things but not others so they put it together however they want and that is not the intention that these philosophers had.