Early Days
Tulane 1974
***
Notes from my first day at Tulane Library, New Orleans, 1974
I didn’t go to Tulane simply to study—I went to inquire, to explore. My time there was more than an academic chapter; it was a deeply personal investigation, a way of using literature to make sense of my own lived experience. I was trying to bridge the silent, intuitive way I understood the world with the structured language that tried to pin it down.
Compelled by a quiet urgency, I wandered into the psychology section of the library, searching for words that could articulate what I already sensed but could not yet say. I was looking for reflections in ink—echoes of an inner knowing I hoped to find mirrored in the texts of others.
I still remember that first day. Surrounded by a stack of books, something clicked—something opened. Inspiration struck, and I began writing. What follows are the thoughts I captured in those first moments of discovery.
“The Farther one pursues knowledge the less one knows”
“Before I utter a word and you have heard it, the whole history of the universe is enacted”
“The cause of death is birth”
“No one can understand things human who does not first understand things divine”
“There is a world which is not of this world though inseparable from it”
“The Wild geese do not intend to cast there reflection;
The water has no mind to retain their image.”
An Appeal to Intuition
Study Subjects
Theories, inheritance, motivation, systems, evolution, dynamics, history, comparative, feeling, statistics, perception, emotion, computation, psychophysics, personality, methods, learning, social, measurement, memory, attitudes, test, thought, opinions, differences, cognition, cultures, physicological, language, behavior, disorders, development
Though and Language
Words and Things,
Syntactic structure
Universals of Language
Meaning
Cultural anthropology
Culture and personality
Ego
Paul Federn p. 72
“The ego is the lasting or recurring psychical continuity of the body and mind of an individual in respect of space, time and causality”
p. 591 The Annual survey of psychoanalysis, John Frosh, Nathaniel Ross, Vol IV
The ego is felt and known by the individual as a lasting or recurring continuity of the body and mental life in respect of time, space, and causality, and is felt and apprehended by him as a unity”
Freud – Reasons for unconscious
1. Posthypnotic suggestion
2. latent dream content
3. parapraxias
4. The fact that the ideas suddenly appear in consciousness from some other source which obviously serves as some storehouse of information in order to prevent clutter in the conscious mind
5. Unconscious problem solving
6. The result of analytic investigation in the individual patient
Jung – Personal unconscious
Collective unconscious racial inheritance of significant memories, which are not ideas per se but germs of ideas. It is the wisdom of the ages handed down from man to man, and is superior in shaping his life. These images or archetypes are revealed through dream interpretations
