People actually live with their id exposed. They're not good at concealing what's going on inside.
~Philip Seymour Hoffman~

I have a mind to crank up some RL Burnside.

Id, Ego and Superego

Perhaps Freud's single most enduring and important idea was that the human psyche (personality) has more than one aspect. Freud (1923) saw the psyche structured into three parts (i.e. tripartite), the id, ego and superego, all developing at different stages in our lives.

These are systems, not parts of the brain, or in any way physical.

Although each part of the personality comprises unique features, they interact to form a whole, and each part makes a relative contribution to an individual's behavior.

id ego and superego

The id (or it)
The id is the primitive and instinctive component of personality. It consists of all the inherited (i.e. biological) components of personality present at birth, including the sex (life) instinct – Eros (which contains the libido), and the aggressive (death) instinct - Thanatos.

The id is the impulsive (and unconscious) part of our psyche which responds directly and immediately to the instincts.

The personality of the newborn child is all id and only later does it develop an ego and super-ego.

The Logic of Misogyny

If you were ever tempted by the thought that gender politics is over in America, the 2016 election campaign must have come as a rude awakening. Brazen displays of misogyny have prompted renewed interest in the subject. In a New York Times column from late March, for example, David Brooks claimed to have discovered in Donald Trump a new strain of misogyny, which has evolved beyond moralism. Whereas old-school misogynists condemn and punish women for their sexual powers and transgressions, this new kind of misogynist competes with other men for heterosexual dominance—and for the ladies.

Trump’s misogyny is not the historical moralistic misogyny. Traditional misogyny blames women for the lustful, licentious and powerful urges that men sometimes feel in their presence. In this misogyny, women are the powerful, disgusting corrupters—the vixens, sirens and monsters.
Brooks is right that Trump does not blame women for making him feel lustful. His misogyny manifests mainly as sexual harassment, along with grade-school put-downs, of women who cross or challenge him. (This may not seem very new, but set that aside for the moment.) Rosie O’Donnell mocked Trump’s show of munificence in pardoning Miss Universe for indulging in underage drinking, so he called O’Donnell a pig and a dog, among other epithets. Carly Fiorina competed with Trump for the Republican nomination; he implied that her face was not attractive enough for a president. When Fox News’s Megyn Kelly pressed Trump about his history of insulting women, he fumed that she had blood coming out of her eyes and her “wherever,” coining a new euphemism by way of a word-finding problem. Hillary Clinton’s bathroom break at a debate was “disgusting”; Elizabeth Warren is “Pocahontas,” Hillary’s “goofy friend.”

Trump’s blunt kind of misogyny is a good place to start in understanding the general phenomenon. It is so crude, shameless, and unapologetic that we run little risk of getting lost in its nuances. But we must ask the natural next question: What happens to misogyny when it acquires a little subtlety or goes underground and manages more by way of plausible deniability?

The Narcissist's Stripped Ego

Question:

Sometimes you say that the narcissist's True Self has relegated its functions to the outside world and sometimes you say that it is not in touch with the outside world (or that only the False Self is in touch with it instead). How do you settle this apparent contradiction?

Answer:

The narcissist's True Self is introverted and dysfunctional. In healthy people, Ego functions are generated from the inside, from the Ego. In narcissists, the Ego is dormant, comatose. The narcissist needs the input of and feedback from the outside world (from others) in order to perform the most basic Ego functions (e.g., "recognizing" of the world, setting boundaries, forming a self-definition or identity, differentiation, self-esteem, and regulating his sense of self-worth). This input or feedback is known as narcissistic supply” .Only the False Self gets in touch with the world. The True Self is isolated, repressed, unconscious, a shadow.

The False Self is, therefore, a kind of “hive self” or “swarm self”. It is a collage of reflections, a patchwork of outsourced information, titbits garnered from the narcissist’s interlocutors and laboriously cohered and assembled so as to uphold and buttress the narcissist’s inflated, fantastic, and grandiose self-image.

In healthy, normal people ego functions are strictly internal processes. In the narcissist, ego functions are imported from the surroundings, they are thoroughly external. Consequently, the narcissist often confuses his inner mental-psychological landscape with the outside world. He tends to fuse and merge his mind and his milieu. He regards significant others and sources of supply as mere extensions of himself and he appropriates them because they fulfil crucial internal roles and, as a result, are perceived by him to be sheer internal objects, devoid of an objective, external, and autonomous existence.

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Positive psychology could revolutionise journalism

Mark Kelly, the astronaut husband of former US politician Gabrielle Giffords, clutches his wife’s arm as they approach Jared Lee Loughner in the courtroom. It’s early November 2012 and almost two years since Loughner killed six people and injured 13 others, including Giffords, in a shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona, in January 2011. Giffords was left with a brain injury, partial blindness, a paralysed right arm, and for now, retirement from politics.

The atmosphere in the room is tense as Gabrielle Giffords locks her stare directly at Loughner. Her husband then breaks the silence, speaking on his wife’s behalf: “Plans she had for our family and her career have been immeasurably altered… Every day is a continuous struggle to do those things she once was so good at.”

Brutal, terrible and sickening in all its violence, the Tucson shooting and its aftermath are sure headliners for media all over the world. But why are you reading about it in Positive News? The answer might surprise you. As well as the necessity of reporting the tragic events that unfolded and the outcomes of the prosecution, there are, in addition, also positive and constructive stories to be found, which have value for society. But we have to decide to look for such stories and know what we are looking for as reporters.

Personally, I wouldn’t have known what to look for had it not been because of what I learned in 2010 while studying for a master’s in positive psychology. You see, for most classically trained journalists, ‘positive’ is something Pollyanna-ish, fluffy and non-critical. It’s the feel-good piece about a kitten being rescued from a tree, and it’s placed just before the weather in TV´s evening news. It’s definitely not the prizewinning kind of journalism, which usually involves investigative pieces and stories that topple people in power.

The history behind ‘negative’ news

In my opinion there were two defining pivotal historical events shaping modern journalism and fostering its current negativity bias: the leak of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal during the 1970s. After the Vietnam War, journalism would never be the same. News organisations that had once cooperated routinely with the government, began to view the term ‘national security’ as a sure way that government consciously manipulated coverage and hid the truth from the public.

The Pentagon Papers were a classified report authored by the United States Department of Defence on US political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. They described how four US administrations had deliberately expanded their aggression in the region with bombings and raids hitting Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, none of which had been reported by media in the US. Thus, four consecutive US administrations had misled the public regarding their real intentions and foreign policy. This of course fostered a widespread public distrust toward those in power.

Only one year later, in 1972, another scandal of epic proportions hit, increasing distrust and journalists’ determination to expose corruption and abuse of power. The Watergate scandal uncovered how a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, DC was orchestrated by the Nixon administration. This eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, the only resignation of any US president. Watergate also resulted in the indictment, trial, conviction, and incarceration of several key Nixon administration officials.

The reporters leading The Washington Post’s coverage were Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. They became idols, and are still viewed as icons for journalists today.

These events are usually highlighted as establishing a golden age of contemporary journalism. However, I believe that this so-called golden age has also had a profound negative influence on our ability to innovate journalism as a profession. Beginning with Watergate, great reporting was to always be critical reporting, ie negative. Since then, despite what it has achieved, news reporting has stalled into describing a disease model of the world.

Let me make it clear from the outset that I highly value quality investigative reporting, when corruption is exposed and people are held accountable on the basis of solid journalism. However, when ‘catching the crook’ thinking is infused in all news reporting, the relentless uncovering of wrongdoing fosters a downward spiral that seems to repel our audience.

What is Media Psychology?

Media Psychology is a new and emerging field, so the early entrants have the excitement and burden of defining the path.

What is media psychology? It’s a field with no consensus definition, no clearly-defined career paths, and no easy answers. In spite of that, it can add value anywhere human behavior intersects media technologies. Here’s why:

1. Media technologies are everywhere
2. People of all ages use media technologies a lot
3. Young people use them most
4. Older people worry about younger people
5. Technology is not going away
6. We all worry if this is good or bad or somewhere in-between
7. Psychology is the study of people of all ages

Media psychology is using #7 to answer #6 because of #1 through #5

Psychology is key to understanding the implications of technology. Consequently, it seems like it should be pretty straightforward to define media psychology. For some reason, though, it’s not. I have had discussions with colleagues for hours (or at least it seems like it) about what constitutes media, mediated communication, and technology and what we mean by psychology in the context of media—and we’re not even philosophers. In this and the following two posts, I will discuss my definition of media psychology and why I think media psychology is so important.

Both media and psychology have made major contributions to western culture throughout the 20th century. Can you imagine The New Yorker without Freudian references or Jason Bourne without operant conditioning? The term “media,” however, used to be confinable to a bucket labeled “mass media.” Our awareness of media, however, has reached the collective consciousness, as if we all woke up yesterday, awakened by our programmable alarm with the iPod attachment, and over our coffee made automatically by our coffeemaker, checked our blackberry for emails and headline news and then looked up shocked to see that our kids are doing much the same. This awareness is leaving people clamoring for a new level of understanding. There is an infiltration of media applications and information technologies into nearly every aspect of our lives. What does it all MEAN? Just like Mighty Mouse (or maybe Underdog), media psychology emerged in a time of need.

Mind Control Theories and Techniques used by Mass Media

Mass media is the most powerful tool used by the ruling class to manipulate the masses. It shapes and molds opinions and attitudes and defines what is normal and acceptable. This article looks at the workings of mass media through the theories of its major thinkers, its power structure and the techniques it uses, in order to understand its true role in society.

Most of the articles on this site discuss occult symbolism found in objects of popular culture. From these articles arise many legitimate questions relating to the purpose of those symbols and the motivations of those who place them there, but it is impossible for me to provide satisfactory answers to these questions without mentioning many other concepts and facts. I’ve therefore decided to write this article to supply the theoretical and methodological background of the analyzes presented on this site as well as introducing the main scholars of the field of mass communications. Some people read my articles and think I’m saying “Lady Gaga wants to control our minds”. That is not the case. She is simply a small part of the huge system that is the mass media.

Programming Through Mass Media

Mass media are media forms designed to reach the largest audience possible. They include television, movies, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, records, video games and the internet. Many studies have been conducted in the past century to measure the effects of mass media on the population in order to discover the best techniques to influence it. From those studies emerged the science of Communications, which is used in marketing, public relations and politics. Mass communication is a necessary tool to insure the functionality of a large democracy; it is also a necessary tool for a dictatorship. It all depends on its usage.

In the 1958 preface for A Brave New World, Aldous Huxley paints a rather grim portrait of society. He believes it is controlled by an “impersonal force”, a ruling elite, which manipulates the population using various methods.

The thread is open. Have a great weekend!