Self-therapy

[Anonymous No.15496803]

I'm doing psychology reading to better understand myself. Besides Jordan Peterson, Carl Jung, Kierkegaard. What other authors would you recommend?

[Anonymous No.15496818]

Nietzsche

[Anonymous No.15496821]

Not them

[Anonymous No.15496823]

>>15496803
Freud

[Anonymous No.15496850]

>>15496803
>>15496823
Freud, Peterson, Jung etc. will not tell you anything meaningful about yourself. Their works are not accurate portrayals of the human mind, nor are they for the most part scientific in nature.

They will not tell you anything about how your mind is actually working, why you feel the way you do, etc. They will aid you only in constructing a personally useful narrative concerning yourself.

That is not understanding, though.

[Anonymous No.15496860]

>>15496850
Let’s hear it, gadamer; what’s understanding?

[Anonymous No.15496890]

There are only two men you need in this world for that.

[Anonymous No.15496906]

dsm5

[Anonymous No.15496937]

You are asking a contradictory question. Therapy =/= better understanding yourself.

Learning more about your mind will not make you happier or be therapeutic in any way. Ignorance is bliss. Philosophers like Deleuze even go so far as to say philosophy's very definition is "inducing sadness"

The human mind is a pit of insecurities, cognitive biases, and animal impulses. If you want to heal your mind, do something like meditation or prayer and learn to deal with your problems. Philosophy and psychological literature will just poke at the problem more and exaggerate your flaws.

[Anonymous No.15496961]

>>15496803
Thomas Szasz. Psychology in general is not helpful to better understand yourself, it largely consists of ideological pathologising for the purpouse of legitimising persecution. You would do better to understand yourself by sitting down for a bit everyday and just thinking about yourself. If you want to understand a bit more about your biases in day to day life you could read something like "Thinking fast and slow" by Kahneman, but as is generally the case in the so called "science" of psychology, lots of the research the book rests upon is outdated and poorly conducted.
>>15496823
Freud is especially notable for being a flavor of the week shitter. While his recognition of the unconscious role was important, the majority of his work is attempts at justify his earlier half-baked theories. Freud developed his ideas in a time when hysteria was considered a mental illness for women, as women gained rights this mental illness got tossed out. We're seeing the exact same thing with transvestism. Psychology as a study is almost entirely political and cultural, so any attempts to use it as a tool for understanding yourself will only further push you into what the current sociopolitical paradigm deems your mind to be like.

[Anonymous No.15497387]

Guys, please quit over complicating. Start with the simple things, and if those don't work you go after whatever. Get a book on CBT, OP. Judith Beck's intro to cognitive behavioral therapy is great. Another really good book is this The Gift of Therapy by Irvin Yalom. The latter isn't a starter book, but it is a great read.

I don't know what exactly is that you are trying to deal with, but I don't think it is advisable to do this kind of thing unless you don't have much choice. There is another book by James Pennebaker called Expressive Writing: Words that Heal, this one is great but be careful depending on the type of thing you are dealing with, specially if you are living alone. He does give a lot of orientation on the book and please follow it strictly. This was the book which inspired Jordan Peterson to do his authoring thing.

Anyway, get an intro to psychology course/book too, if this is all new information to you, which doesn't seem to be.

[Anonymous No.15497451]

>>15496803
None of those have anything to do with psychology
>>15497387
CBT is shit. Treating yourself like a rat to be retrained with treats has nothing to do with getting to know yourself. Psychology got so obsessed with making up for the writers OP mentions and proving itself an actual science that it lost any relevance.

My suggestion is to read Tolstoy, Chekhov, Cervantes, Melville, etc. They will teach you more about yourself than any psychologist or charlatan ever will.

[Anonymous No.15497460]

>>15496937
>Philosophers like Deleuze even go so far as to say philosophy's very definition is "inducing sadness"
that bit of wisdom really helped his hippie faggot ass when he hurled himself out a window, huh? Only shitty philosophy induces sadness, like telling people to keep calm and meditate.

[Anonymous No.15497493]

>>15497451
Jesus, bro. Quit this bs, come on. Are you serious? Might as well tell the OP to start with some Greek myth and work from there, right? Maybe in 30 years or something he will start to get better.

Anyway, it worked for me. I didn't had CBT back at the day, but came with with a similar approach, took about month to deal with a long term issue, a minor one but it had a high negative impact on my life. Then I came up on those and thought it was great, totally worth it. Reducing CBT to the B part clearly shows that you know shit about that. Don't listen to him OP.

[Anonymous No.15497531]

>>15497460
Not an argument.

[Anonymous No.15497552]

>>15497387
>James Pennebaker
I think that dude's research fascinating. Suicidal people tend to use "I" more in their writings because they can't separate themselves from experiences. Happier people tend to use causal phrase like "because" "from that" "as a result" "which lead to" because they can firstly externalize and separate circumstances from themselves.
Really fascinating how discourse markers and related words can tell you more about a person's thinking style than you would first believe (provided you have a corpus of text you can run through a algorithm to count these imperceptible ratios for you).
He reckons they can even predict how successful a romance will be based on the couple's texts.

[Anonymous No.15497554]

Must be a dream to be in a place like that.

[Anonymous No.15497567]

>>15496803
nigga if you want to understand yourself, open up google docs, and start writing a Socratic Dialogue between you and Socrates.
Start off with what ever is the biggest mystery about yourself or the value or belief you think is most essential to your identity. And get Socrates to start questioning what underpins it.
Then read it.
That's it.
What the fuck does Jordan Peterson know about you? What the fuck does a voluntarily celibate scion of a wealthy industrialist from centuries ago in Denmark like Kierkegaard possibly know about you?

[Anonymous No.15497617]

>>15497552
Now that you mentioned, this was definitely true on my case. I remember being extremely depressed and not being able to think simple causal statements.

Hm I remember seeing something like that. Didn't knew that it was him too.

[Anonymous No.15497623]

>>15497567
Based post and fuck Peterson.

[Anonymous No.15497731]

>>15497617
It does seem to dovetail quite nicely into a lot of other theories of trauma and the brain. Dennett's theory of Narrative Identity, the idea that narrative helps deal with trauma because you take all these highly emotionally charged fragments and put them in a cohesive context, then there's "Narrative Exposure Therapy" where they ask people to externalize their negative traits rather than take ownership of them which helps them to stop being guilt ridden or confined by those traits.
But perhaps most importantly the capacity to write a narrative, which means you're taking a sequence of events and actually finding a cause and effect is just so fucking important. Because it lets you identify choices you made, what circumstances you made them, or if you didn't "choose" to do something you can at least see what brought that about.

I'm sure the romance text thing has been tested by others as well, maybe it was his doctoral students. But I distinctly remember in a lecture he mentioned it.

[Anonymous No.15497869]

>>15496803
the dialectic is real, you can't understand yourself in isolation, you require interaction with someone who is not you. otherwise you're just going to develop a form of extremely reasonable, erudite autism but an autism nonetheless

[Anonymous No.15498134]

Jung? Peterson? People actually recommending Freud? Am I getting baited or is discourse on the board legitimately getting worse

[Anonymous No.15498220]

>>15498134
Why don't you mention who you would suggest and steer the discourse somewhere better?

[Anonymous No.15498252]

>>15496803
Viktor Frankl. Existential therapy is a trip.

[Anonymous No.15498283]

>>15496803
Counseling student using Jung for self growth here. How can I help?

>>15496818
Don't do that until you know yourself

>>15496906
This is not bad

>>15497387
Irvin Yalom is fucking great

>>15498134
It has swings

[Anonymous No.15498352]

>>15496803
If you ever veer into the scientific side of psychology, read Latour before you start reading psychological research.
Also learn how to critique scientific papers before you read them.

[a_poor_sinner !!eiHxl4pZe1i No.15498365]

>>15496803
You won't learn about yourself from other people, OP.

[Anonymous No.15498401]

Thoreau - Walden
Marcus Aurelius
St. Augustine - Confessions
Boethius
>>15497451
is also right. Great, classic works of literature are so for a reason. Truly understanding yourself is not going to occur from reading a book or two, rather from years of introspection and assimilation of different modes of thought.
If you set a goal to read several great books over the course of a few years you will have a much better understanding of yourself than just reading one or two 'perfect' books.
Save Jung for later. Build a solid foundation of knowledge which will in turn provide you with fertile ground for truly growing as a person. It is not an overnight aspiration, you will learn about yourself over time. See the link below for a good general outline of reading. It will take a long time but you will be better off for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World

[Anonymous No.15498510]

>>15496803
Anyway, what is it you're trying to figure out? Relationships? Addiction? The damn printer screwing up again?

[Anonymous No.15498548]

>>15498220
Okay if OP wanted psychologists and modern researchers I would start with cognitive and behavioral therapy: B F Skinner, Albert Ellis, Aaron Beck, Carl Rodgers, then there is a huge dispersion into third wave therapies with all sorts of changes based on cognitive therapy. Personally, I think ACT is promising and may eventually topple CBT as the default cognitive based therapy.

Kierkegaard had some interesting ideas, like in the Concept of Anxiety, but that made me think OP was looking for works that were “therapeutic” in tone or existential. That made me think of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling or Either/Or. Herman Hesse’s Siddartha and The Glass Bead Game are both great. The anons suggesting Frankl, Thoreau, Aurelius, are all making suggestions I agree with too. I’m worried this board sees Freud or Jung show up in Oxford’s Worlds Classics catalog or their English 101 survey and then they take the id, ego, superego, or archetypes or any other frivolous subconscious or mystical crap to heart.

[Anonymous No.15499381]

>>15497451
Ignorant of your own ignorance

[Anonymous No.15499391]

[Anonymous No.15499409]

>>15496803
The fuzzy feeling of self-understanding you get from psychoanalysis is just suggestion. Knowing one's self is a lost cause

[Anonymous No.15499667]

>>15499409
>Knowing one's self is a lost cause
how can you know this for sure?
How can you be sure the self us an known unknowable?
I mean surely through a combination of objective measures, second hand opinions, and just analysis of habits you can learn a lot and understand yourself deeply and usefully?
Why the hell would it be a lost cause?