Conventional wisdom holds that avoiding your emotions cuts you off from important data about yourself, but did you know that habitually flinching from feeling can also lead to severe distortions of social cognition, conceptual coherence, and reality testing? 1/thread After several years of specialized training in & work with psychological testing (especially with the Rorschach Inkblot Test), I have become increasingly convinced that rejection of affective life leads many people to what I would call “micropsychotic breaks.” 2/30

Little 6 year old Rain loved to wear their great-grandmother’s costume jewelry and play with the glass “gems” from board games.

Grown-up Rain is absolutely delighting their inner child by making astrological talismans.

(Wistful 🧵) There was this one pin that I inherited (or maybe that my long-suffering mother allowed me to wear): a lion maybe two and a half inches long. I poked myself with the brooch pin many times getting it clasped on Sunday mornings when I would put it on over my heart for church.

Since the idea of astrology being “irrational” is rearing its head again, let's explore how such criticisms are in fact nothing new, but reflect ancient debates. In fact, any sharp “rational” vs. “irrational” dichotomy is ahistorical, unempirical, & fallacious. 1/thread Contemporary critics of astrology caricature divination and astrology as pathological ways of (not) knowing that stand in tension with or opposition to natural science, as if these practices were irrational holdovers from pre-scientific eras. 2/40

People tend to think about psychiatric diagnosis in terms of symptoms. In this thread I explain the idea of structural diagnosis, which puts relationships front and center, in order to suggest how animism and re-enchantment could be potent tools for psychological health. 1/45 Thanks to the vast influence of scientific psychiatry, most people categorize psychological troubles in terms of overt symptoms such as low mood, anxiety, hallucinations, dissociation, sleep disturbance, and so forth. Hence the DSM’s grab bag of superficial categories. 2/45

Psychotherapy and psychoanalysis get lumped together as mental health treatments, but the difference between them is crucial. Understanding that difference helps make sense of why mainstream culture marginalizes not only psychoanalysis, but also astrology and divination. 1/19 The Lacanian psychoanalyst Raul Moncayo characterizes psychotherapy as a narrative discourse that “supports certain social ideas and helps the individual ‘adapt’ to society. For example, cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on thoughts’ empirical truth and utility. 2/19

Can astrology show mental disorders? No answers here. Instead, a thread of questions. If astrology is a map of the self, what kind of map is it? Topographic maps don't show all that navigation charts do: how does astrology represent the data of mental disorders? In other words, do psychiatry and astrology speak the same language? Are you a capable translator?

Stated disbelief in magic is “rational,” yet saying we're rational doesn’t make it so. Research shows that so-called irrational, magical thinking lurks right below the skeptical surface of the minds of Western individuals, ready to pop out under conditions of risk. 1/thread Eugene Subbotsky & Graciela Quinteros (2002) performed two cross-cultural experiments to show how a person’s verbal beliefs come apart from their behavior. If a person says one thing but does another, it shows that their state belief does not deeply penetrate the mind. 2/27

Jung's personality typology uses a few basic concepts and principles to derive 16 personality ways of being in the world. Here, I sketch the conceptual building blocks of Jung’s model, focusing on the psychological functions of sensation, intuition, thinking, & feeling. 1/thread In a previous thread I described Jung’s notions of extraversion and introversion. Extraverts tend to orient their energy to external objects, whereas introverts tend to orient their energy toward the archetypes those objects constellate. 2/26

https://twitter.com/500livesasafox/status/1320379036934209536

Unconscious phenomena such as dreams and projective identification have long been seen as uncanny & strange—even paranormal. In this thread I explore the ambivalent ways that psychoanalysts have engaged with the occult and divination. To begin with, two quotations: 1/thread “Have I given you the impression that I am secretly inclined to support the reality of telepathy in the occult sense? If so, I should very much regret that it is so difficult to avoid giving such an impression. In reality, however, I was anxious to be strictly impartial…” 2/49

Myers-Briggs (MBTI) types come under frequent criticism from skeptical rationalists. In this thread, I consider and respond some of those criticisms from the perspective of Jung’s theory of psychological types and try to contextualize the enduring interest in MBTI types. 1/thread The MBTI is a test developed based on the ideas of Carl Jung, which derive primarily from his book Psychological Types. By returning to Jung’s work, we can enrich our understanding of the MBTI and think with greater nuance about its criticisms and its potential utility. 2/50

The myth of the mentally ill witch in textbooks of abnormal psychology: a thread on history, ideology, the status of the occult within clinical psychology, and why I am skeptical of psychology’s claim to place a premium on multicultural diversity. 1/25 Open any abnormal psychology textbook and a dozen or so pages into Chapter 1 you’re likely to encounter a story about how in the Middle Ages in Europe, superstition and demonology flourished, exorcism equaled treatment, and mentally ill women were persecuted as witches. 2/25

1/ Although some diviners do tender conclusions purely on the basis of the rational symbolic significations of their divinatory system, any claim that this is the norm, let alone the only possibility, is ahistorical, culturally conditioned rasure the anthropological evidence.

https://twitter.com/wadecaves/status/1276289513300598785

2/ Historically and cross-culturally, divination is foremost a cultural-religious practice that becomes meaningful against a backdrop of cosmological beliefs. It is not, however, an irrational process, but a complex practice of meaning-making, rather than an abdication of reason.

How academic psychology tries (and fails) to dunk on astrology, a thread. 1/

https://twitter.com/500livesasafox/status/1259255911102722049

The root of the problem is a construct called “magical thinking” that developmental psychologists like Piaget used to describe children’s propensity to see relationships between objects in events in non-causal terms, to ascribe mental states to objects, etc. 2/