Psychology

I was just looking at the Wikipedia page for abstract expressionism, and it led me to a discovery about my psychology of art.

While looking at their examples of the genre, I learned that there is abstract expressionist sculpture as well as painting, and I immediately concluded that I didn't mind its sculpture, because that at least has to look like real objects, because they are real objects. Objects in paintings can have all kinds of unrealistic boundaries and can generally not look like anything. I prefer paintings that look like something.

Then I thought, well, the objects in these sculptures aren't anything you'd find in the real world, so they're not "real" objects, but what I mean is that the sculptures themselves are something real that I could walk around and touch (if that were encouraged). Of course, the paintings are real objects too. The canvas is real. The paint is real. It's just that what they're depicting doesn't look like anything that could really exist.

So I realized that I automatically think of paintings as depicting three-dimensional objects. I always think of them as a window onto a scene. I even think of color fields that way. I think of the color as being projected onto some kind of cloth or screen. Since this style is called abstract expressionism, I wonder if the artists are trying to get away from that way of looking at things. Well, at least the ones like Jackson Pollock.

I think I like the three-dimensionality of sculpture because it allows me to look at it from different angles, which gives me a sense of discovery. And I like paintings that act like windows for a similar reason—I can imagine that something is happening or at least that I'm there interacting what whatever I'm being shown, which again delivers a sense of discovery. Discovery, and newness in general, is one of my major motivating values.

I don't usually read about art. A couple of days ago I found an iGoogle artist theme by Reg Mombassa, and his style reminded me of a painting I had seen at the Dallas Museum of Art in high school. I had stuck in my mind, but I couldn't remember the artist, which had always bugged me. It was next to Edward Hopper's Lighthouse Hill, which I had reproduced in colored pencil for an art history project. So after finding Reg Mombassa, I searched for 20th-century American painters, found a list of them on Artcyclopedia, and started clicking. Finally I just scrolled through the thumbnails and found one that sort of reminded me of the painting, and by chance it was the guy I was looking for: Thomas Hart Benton. The painting was Prodigal Son. From the Wikipedia article on Benton I ended up in the one on abstract expressionism. For some reason I have a compulsion to trace my trains of thought like that, probably because I like to know that my ideas are grounded in something.

Thanks to my miraculous C-Pen, I have been able to whip together another project. It's an expanded version of the tools index at the back of Refuse to Choose. I wanted to make it more useful and give people a guided tour of some of the book's features. Here it is:

The Annotated Scanner's Toolbox

Do you have a lot of different interests? Do you find yourself trying to juggle all of them? Do you rarely get bored, and when you do, do you find it to be an intolerable condition? Do you have a large and diverse library or collection of half-completed projects? Do you have trouble settling on a college major or a career path? Do you want to travel everywhere and experience everything? If you said yes to any of these, you might be a Scanner!

Scanner is the term that life coach and motivational speaker Barbara Sher has given to these Renaissance people, and she has written a book to help them along their path in life, Refuse to Choose!: A Revolutionary Program for Doing Everything That You Love. And I have written a review of her book and posted it here on my site!

If you're a Scanner, I think you'll find a lot of encouragement in Sher's book. I found a lot of her insights to be true of me. I already know the value of having diverse interests, which many Scanners have been taught to believe is somehow a defect; but I do have trouble finishing what I start, and my Scanner Panic started when I hit 25 and realized I was halfway through my 20s and what did I have to show for myself? And it only got worse from there. My life was slipping by and I wasn’t making anything of it, and I almost felt I couldn’t make anything of it. And Sher says we are right to feel this way! “Scanners are not being dramatic or inventing this danger. When you have unused potential, you’re driven to use it. Since, by your very nature, you can’t devote yourself to one goal and you don’t know how to manage many goals, you are in real danger of living an unused life” (38). My problems are more than just being a Scanner (being slow and a hermit are equally hindersome), but now I see my prospects a bit differently, thanks to Barbara’s helpful ideas.

I have one more project to do with this book, and then I'll probably move on to other subjects.

Version 1.0, 3-20-05

The summer after my junior year in high school, our church youth group went to a week-long camp in North Carolina with about five other youth groups. Youth camp happened every summer, but this was the first time the camp had included other churches. Maybe they felt the need to regroup, or maybe it was their practice to begin with, but whatever the reason, early in the week a few of our guys started meeting together at night to talk about what was going on in their lives and how they were doing spiritually. A day or two into it, I was invited. I had never seen anything like it. Certainly I had never been involved in such a thing. I had always been withdrawn, and I'm surprised I even had the kind of friendships that would get me there in the first place.

But instead of feeling threatened by all the openness, I was enlivened by it. It wasn't, as one friend suggested, that I was glad to see that other people's problems were worse than mine. It was that people were gathering to share something that was somehow of vital importance to me--their inner lives. Eventually the gathering became co-ed and grew to about forty people (we had a large youth group). My fascination only grew as the group did. The more the merrier, to me!

Thus was my interest in psychology sparked. I am never content just to experience things like the communal self-disclosure of those meetings. Anything that so engages me I have to study. So the human mind became something to explore. By coincidence I was already signed up for a high school psychology class the next year, which was also fascinating, and I decided to major in it in college. That changed to Christian education the next year, however, though I kept psychology as a minor. There were a couple of reasons for the switch. One was that I could see myself in a church setting more readily than in a counselor's office. The other was that I didn't entirely trust psychology. I had been reading Christians who believed that our guide to human nature was supposed to be the Bible and that psychology was intruding on Scripture's territory. There was something compelling to me about their arguments, and it is an issue I'm still wrestling with. Nevertheless, psychology still has a huge draw for me, and I do see a lot of benefit in it.

Several topics in psychology capture my attention. One is psychotherapy, which is basically what drew me to psychology in the first place. Sitting in those youth camp meetings, I felt impelled to help the people who revealed their personal struggles, even though I had no idea how. Helping people is what I had in mind as a psychology major and even when I switched to Christian Education, although it would be a somewhat different format for my helping role. Psychotherapy was also my main point of tension with psychology. Christianity and psychology seemed to have competing ideas about what was wrong with people and how they could be helped. As I said, I'm still exploring this question. Many of the topics that fit under psychotherapy could fit just as well under spirituality or philosophy, so my categorization of some of these essays will be somewhat arbitrary.

The psychology of personality has been one of my central tools in understanding human nature and in relating to the people around me. One of my friends got me into the Myers-Briggs personality theory our senior year in high school, and it was a major obsession of mine for the next year. Fortunately, the obsession was temporary. Myers-Briggs is helpful, but it isn't everything. In any case, I am also intrigued by the Enneagram and am generally willing to try out any personality theory that comes along. The thing I like about these personality theories is that they represent systems of values and strategies for dealing with life. As you will no doubt discover if you keep reading this site, I am enthralled by systems, values, and strategies. Other facets of individual differences also interest me, like birth order and gender.

The psychology of education grabbed me in the middle of my sophomore year in college when I got fed up with the anxiety of exams and decided to analyze what made school so stressful. That began a process of discovering how I learned and worked and what practices made a teacher helpful or unhelpful. But my interest in education is broader than a concern for my own stress levels. Personal growth is what engages me, both my own and other people's. It's an occupation that penetrates to the bedrock of my life and sends out tendrils to every part of it. One means of growth is education--growth by knowledge and interaction, two of my other pervasive concerns. I suppose this means I'm destined to become a teacher.

Then there are a few other topics that wander through my mind. One is cognitive psychology, which has a natural tie-in to epistemology. Another is interpersonal psychology, which includes things like friendship and conversation (and personality, but I separate that one out). And then there's linguistics, which isn't psychology but is a social science, and I don't have a better place to put it. I have a passing interest in other areas of social science as well, like anthropology. But even though psychology is one of my major interests, as with philosophy, I don't know that much about it yet.

Psychology Introduction

Psychology links

Psychotherapy

Personality

Scanners

Reflections on Barbara Sher's Refuse to Choose (added 4-29-07)

A rambling review of Barbara Sher's book on Scanners, who are people who have many interests and an inner compulsion to follow them all. They tend to have trouble settling down into one career. Sher says they don't have to!

The Annotated Scanner's Toolbox (added 5-12-07)

A modified version of the tools index in Refuse to Choose. I added descriptions of the reasons you might use each tool.

Education

Cognitive

Interpersonal

Social science

I used to be good at staying on top of my e-mail. I wrote to people constantly. If communication dropped off, I was always the last person to send a message. I was always doing research and writing essays on my favorite topics. When I wasn't doing that I journaled.

But now when I have something to write, I put it off for weeks, even months. It's like I can't be bothered to think. Why do I do this?? This is not good for my future! I believe the thought process goes something like this:

- I don't have as much time as I used to.
- I'm a slow writer to begin with.
- Everything I want to write about seems so much more complicated now and would require so much more thought to write well about it.
- I have a bunch of other stuff I want to do, too (things that take less work!), so I don't want to spend all evening writing one little thing.
- My mind feels blank, as if I have nothing to say.

I need to get over this. It worries me. Sometime later I'll write more about why. (haha)