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             Thanks to Mary Streepy for permission to use this Photo.

While spirit mediums and trance channellers come and go, there has never been anyone else quite like Catherine Elise Muller (more commonly known as Helene Smith). Born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1861, Catherine`s father was a Hungarian merchant with a talent for learning languages and her mother was prone to seeing “visions“. From an early age, Catherine had a vivid imagination and extremely intense daydreams. She would tell her parents of her visions of brightly coloured landscapes, bizarre images, and bright lights and openly speculated about being a changeling. It was in 1891 that she was first introduced to Spiritualism and quickly showed a remarkable talent for automatic writing. She also showed a knack for mediumship and communicated with different spirits (including the ghost of Victor Hugo). Table-tipping, spirit writing, clairvoyance, Catherine did it all. Her spirit guide, Count Cagliostro (more commonly known as “Leopold“) acted through her body and she claimed not to remember anything that occurred while she was in one of her trances . Surprisingly, Catherine never charged for her séances and supported herself as a shop-worker despite her growing fame throughout Geneva.

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              Thanks to Jordan Garn for permission to use this Photo.

I have never liked the term “learning disability,” preferring instead to use the term “learning difference.” Is this just more PC-speak? It seems to me that the identification of somebody as “learning disabled” is rather arbitrary. We don’t refer to people as “athletically disabled” or “musically disabled,” and send them to remedial classes. A literate culture cares a lot about verbal and mathematical skills, but in other realities, these talents might not count for much. Should we ever be so stupid as to bomb ourselves, my guess is that the Hell’s Angel is more likely to survive the new world order than the accountant.

We know that many serious conditions have compensatory aspects that keep them in the population, such as the protection from malaria that is the flip side of sickle cell anemia, or the creativity that seems to correlate with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Obviously, not all conditions have such benefits, but it is interesting to consider the ones that do.

Having spent a lot of time with my two favorite people with dyslexia, Mr. F and Karen, I was always dazzled by what they did well. Yes, writing was a struggle, especially for Karen, whose love of public relations plopped her in some exceedingly challenging reporting classes in the journalism departments of her universities. No spell check on lab work? Catastrophe! But these struggles were always offset by some amazing creativity. Karen just had her first-year research project accepted for presentation at the prestigious International Public Relations Conference …do I sound like a proud Mom or what? (more…)

         Thanks to vieilles_annonces’ for permission to use this Photo.

On September 15, 1985, a seemingly innocent package was delivered to the home of Dr. James V. McConnell, then-professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.  His assistant, Nicklaus Suino, opened the package as Dr. McConnell looked on.  The resulting explosion resulted in Suino sustaining injuries to his arms and abdomen.  Dr. McConnell was more fortunate although he suffered a hearing loss as a result of the blast.  It remains unclear exactly why Theodore Kaczynski (a.k.a. the Unabomber) targeted Dr. McConnell as he had others in the scientific communit, but Dr. McConnell’s colorful career may provide a clue. 

Considered a maverick in his time, James V. McConnell’s career was marked by his unconventional research and outspokenness.  In his most famous research project, he classically conditioned Planaria (flatworms) to react to bright lights using electric shocks.  He then cut up his research subjects and fed them to other Planaria and he found that the cannibal Planaria learned to respond to the bright light more rapidly than control Planaria did.  In his classic paper Memory transfer through cannibalism in planaria which was published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, he suggested that memory was chemically based and that the memory transfer had been accomplished through what he termed memory RNA.  While it was an intriguing finding at the time, other researchers have not been able to replicate his results and the concept of memory transfer fell by the wayside. (more…)

Of all the prominent English artists who came to international attention during the reign of Queen Victoria, Richard Dadd definitely is in a class by himself. Born in 1817, as the fourth of seven children, Dadd showed early promise as an artist and began sketching at an early age. After his family moved to London, he entered the Royal Academy of Arts at the age of twenty.

Along with other artists with whom he studied, Dadd formed an important group that became known as the Clique although he remained the foremost artist among them. Their meetings throughout the 1830s and into the 1840s inspired a new style of painting that rejected academic high art and favoured more personal art that they felt should be judged by the public rather than academics. Given Dadd’s developing prominence in the art world, it was only natural that he was chosen to go with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips, as a draftsman on a planned expedition through Greece, Turkey and Egypt. The expedition that began in 1842 was seen as an excellent opportunity for Dadd to expand his artistic horizons.

Absolutely nobody could have foreseen the profound change that would come on him over the course of the journey. (more…)

This Tuesday’s episode of Dr. Phil ushered us into the always unpleasant and fractured confines of the Dr. Phil house, where we met a second pair of newlyweds in dire need of man campification. The Dr. Phil canon is quite large, and it is not immediately clear if he has ever associated himself with Jungian psychology—or any school for that matter. Today, though, a quick look at Jung’s God-image archetype seems fitting.

The problem pair today was mostly Jack and Danielle. Jack was characterized by the entire house (and an unusually surly Dr. Phil) as a “rude” and uncooperative “know-it-all” who is “constantly manipulating” and undermining his wife, the rest of the house’s progress, and—worst of all—the show. Jack, on the other hand, claims that the others are taking advantage of him, lying to him, leaving him utterly confused. Making matters worse, Danielle’s various psychic problems contribute and exaggerate the situation. At first, this may seem like a time to talk about group psychology and the collective unconscious. But, in many ways, it is unclear whether man camp constitutes a true collective.

Anyway, we have darker waters to walk: the archetype of the God-image. Jung speaks of “an archaic God-image that is infinitely far from the conscious idea of God” (The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconsciousness). The individual enlightened by a conscious awareness of the God-image sees, within his own mental and spiritual state, the manifestations of a Godliness that differs significantly from the removed, inhuman, and arcane God of many established theologies. Jung writes that “what one could almost call a systematic blindness is simply he effect of the prejudice that God is outside man” (Psychology and Religion). What is this “important and influential archetype” doing, resurrected here on the Dr. Phil show (Ibid.)? For most of the guests, very little.

           Thanks to Cody Dematteis for permission to use this Photo.

Only Jack seems to have any conscious comprehension of his own power—even if it is, all too often, manifested malevolently. Danielle is the prime example of an individual with no sense of his or her own mental and spiritual agency or value. She overtly projects not only her scapegoat desires onto others (mainly her husband), but she also imbues external forces with all the power to control her reality, destiny, and perceptions. Even if her husband immediately stopped being abusive, where would she turn? Not into herself. Deep within her lies a terrible secrets that “not even [her] parents know” and which would “ruin [her] life if it got out.” This secret seems to be preventing what Jung might call the necessary development of a interior God-image for a healthy psychic state. More insidiously, it seems that the very lack of this God-image is what causes the secret to be so powerful and threatening. It has no power over Jack—or Dr. Phil, the God-image extraordinaire.

He tells Danielle that, for Jack, it’s “all about controlling you.” That’s a serious no-no, since Dr. Phil wants to control everyone in his house, with Godlike omnipotence and authority. The end of the show is ambiguous in that it is unclear whether Dr. Phil has actually killed Jack’s God-imagined gusto and ego-centricism. This reveals a very important fact about the God-image. Individuals with a well developed God-image archetype may have great control over themselves, and in some cases considerable powers over those who still hold fast to the exterior image of God, but they have little binding authority over others who feel the God-image within themselves. To take it to the degree of blasphemy, one might think that Christ could ordain himself easily, were he the only one around at the time who saw Godliness within himself. When two people feel so ordained, however, as Phil and Jack both do, of course a battle between good and evil will ensue. Jung’s answer is very different from Phil’s though.

In Jung’s words “it is the prime task of all education (of adults) to convey the archetype of the God-image, or its emanations and effects, to the conscious mind” whereas in Dr. Phil’s words “you need to listen to my advice” and stop being such a manipulative little know-it-all when “you’re not the smartest guy in the room…not by a long shot” (The Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy). Is that evil, good, or just God-image talking?

Seth Woolf
Creator of Deconstructing Phil
Ashworth University Contributing Blogger 

*Although Mr. Seth Woolf is currently pursuing a law career in Boston, Massachusetts—he may need to change horses in midstream, as he’s already fast becoming an underground legend in the psychology world, not for his theories on Freud or Žižek or even Foucault for that matter, but for his groundbreaking work on the enigma that is Dr. Phil McGraw.  The recently launched blog, Deconstructing Phil, is insightful, funny, disturbing, and always original.  We’re excited to have Seth Woolf as a member of our contributing bloggers’ network and we’d like to thank Seth for the opportunity to share his perspectives with our Ashworth University student community.  All kidding aside, there is a lot to be learned on Deconstructing Phil and we encourage you to visit and tell your friends about Seth’s blog as he continues spiraling out of control into Dr. Phil’s mind.  Thanks Seth!

There seems no question that William James Sidis was a genius. Born in New York City in 1898, his parents, Boris and Sarah, were Russian immigrants and intellectuals who had fled to the U.S. to escape persecution. Boris earned his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University and taught psychology there. He was a close friend of William James who was his son’s godfather (William was also named for him). Sarah was an M.D. whose family fled the Russian pogroms ten years before William’s birth. She gave up her medical career to be a full-time mother to her son (and later daughter). They both held radical notions concerning early child education (radical for the time anyway) and encouraged William to learn without using the discipline that characterized education in that era.

The results were nothing less than spectacular: William could read the New York Times by the age of 18 months and taught himself eight languages by the time he was eight (he also invented a new language and a new logarithm table). At the age of 11, he entered Harvard as part of an experimental program along with other promising prodigies including Norbert Weiner and Buckminster Fuller. He excelled in higher mathematics and language and a brilliant future was predicted for him. Intelligence testing was still in its infancy (and Boris dismissed IQ tests as “pedantic and misleading”) but later estimates would put William’s IQ in the 250 to 300 range. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts Degree with full honors at the age of 16.

And then things went downhill from there…

His lifelong feud with the press began with an interview before graduation in which he stated that he planned to remain celibate and that women did not appeal to him. Publicity over the interview may have been the cause of his being threatened by a gang of Harvard students and which led to his leaving Harvard to go to Rice University in Texas. After some time, he abandoned mathematics and enrolled in Harvard Law School in 1916. He withdrew three years later without finishing and became involved in political causes including being a conscientious objector to the World War I draft.

His arrest in 1919 for participating in a socialist rally that turned violent caused him to be sentenced to 18 months in prison for rioting and assault (there is some question concerning the legitimacy of the charges). His father made a special arrangement with the District Attorney to keep William out of prison by having him sent to his private sanatorium instead. This seemed to be an especially dark time of William’s life and he never forgave his parents for “kidnapping” him and holding him against his will for more than a year. He accused them of subjecting him to various forms of “mental torture” including scolding and nagging for hours at a time. He was frequently threatened with transfer to a regular insane asylum where his prospects for an eventual release would be slim.

William eventually managed to escape in 1921, but he never reconciled with his parents. His experience in the sanatorium had left him “scared of his own shadow” and his parents’ efforts to have him returned to their care made him extremely paranoid about his privacy and intrusions into his life. He spent the rest of his life apparently drifting between menial jobs although he continued to publish a range of eclectic works (mostly under pseudonyms) that still attracts a cult following.

He especially resented intrusions into his life by the press (who regularly presented him as being an unhappy and burned-out product of his forced acceleration) and even sued one paper for what he considered to be a libelous article about him that caused “grievous mental anguish and humiliation”. The stress from the lawsuit may have contributed to his death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1944.

What do we make of William Sidis? Despite his early death and failure to live up to his early potential, his case is still followed in educational circles. Would things have turned out differently had his parents not intervened in his jail sentence as they did? Some questions can’t be answered.

Romeo Vitelli
Creator of Providentia
AU Contributing Blogger

*A man who has lived a fascinating life, Dr. Romeo Vitelli spent fifteen years as a staff psychologist in Millbrook Correctional Centre, a maximum-security prison run by the Ontario government. In 2003, he successfully escaped prison and went into full-time private practice and currently also serves as a Disaster Management volunteer with the Red Cross.  He is one of the web’s most respected and trusted sources in matters of psychology.  We here in the AUCJ community are honored to share with our students and would like to express our gratitude.  Visit Providentia to learn more about the life and work of Dr. Romeo Vitelli.