Psychology isn’t so much science as it is engineering – applying ideas and evidence to a purpose

 --- Simon Ings, in a review of The Age of Guilt by Mark Edmundson, New Scientist, 8 Jul 2023

In context

In his Freudian analysis of what we might loosely term “cancel culture”, Mark Edmundson wisely chooses not to get into simplistic debates about which of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s ideas have or haven’t been “proved right”. What would that even mean? Psychology isn’t so much science as it is engineering – applying ideas and evidence to a purpose. In The Age of Guilt: The super-ego in the online world, Edmundson, a literary scholar, simply wants to suggest that Freud might help us better understand our cultural moment.

Another neat excerpt

Arguments from intuition need a hefty health warning, but I defy you not to agree with more than a few of Edmundson’s denunciations: for instance, how the internet has become our culture’s chief manifestation of the superego, its loudest users “immune to irony, void of humour, unforgiving, prone to demand harsh punishments”.

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell

--- CG Jung, from Ch. 5, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (1951) (per u/moscheles in a reddit thread)

Trust is the bridge between the known and the unknown

--- Rachel Botsman, Said Business School, University of Oxford, author of "Who can you trust," in "In what? we trust" by Douglas Heaven, New Scientist, issue 3149, 28 October 2017

Quote in context

Trust is a human instinct that is essential to our survival. It first evolved when we lived in small tribal groups, and probably provided benefits in times of conflict. Groups that were better at working together – more trusting – were more likely to survive than less cooperative rivals.

“All societies are based on trust because you can’t do everything yourself,” says Luciano Floridi, who studies online trust at the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK. “At some point you have to trust someone to keep the fire going.”

The trouble is, trusting groups can always be exploited by untrustworthy individuals. Putting your trust in someone puts you at risk, it makes you vulnerable. “Trust is the bridge between the known and the unknown,” says Rachel Botsman at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School.

"behind every great fortune there is a psychological aberration"

--- The Economist's Schumpeter columnist, in Great bad men as bosses, 23 July 2011.

Quote in context:

Balzac supposedly wrote that “behind every great fortune lies a great crime”. It would be truer to say that behind every great fortune there is a psychological aberration. Henry Ford hated Jews. George Eastman sanctioned industrial espionage. Thomas Watson turned IBM into a personality cult, complete with company songs about “our friend and guiding hand”, a man whose “courage none can stem”. Michael Milken, the inventor of junk bonds, was jailed. Richard Tedlow of Harvard Business School argues that many “giants of enterprise” suffer from what Norwegians call stormannsgalskap, the madness of great men.

Stormannsgalskap is particularly common among media barons, not least because they frequently blur the line between reporting reality and shaping it. William Randolph Hearst is widely suspected of stirring up the Spanish-American war to give his papers something to report. Lord Beaverbrook regarded himself as a kingmaker, literally so in the case of George VI. These men’s megalomania was captured in two masterworks: Orson Welles’s film “Citizen Kane” and Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Scoop”.

The ugly side of these entrepreneurs is often just as important to their success as their admirable side. You cannot reshape an industry without extraordinary confidence in your own rightness. And it is hard to build a great company from scratch without what Mr Tedlow dubs “the imperialism of the soul”. But these negative qualities often end up undermining the empires that they helped to create.

"The anatomy of focus is inseparable from the anatomy of melancholy"

--- Jonah Lehrer, summing up his piece "Depression's Upside", New York Times Magazine, February 25, 2010

The story is built around the "analytic rumination hypothesis" for depression advanced by Andrew Thompson and Paul Andrews. Here's the quote in the context of the penultimate paragraph:

This line of research led Andrews to conduct his own experiment, as he sought to better understand the link between negative mood and improved analytical abilities. He gave 115 undergraduates an abstract-reasoning test known as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which requires subjects to identify a missing segment in a larger pattern. (Performance on the task strongly predicts general intelligence.) The first thing Andrews found was that nondepressed students showed an increase in “depressed affect” after taking the test. In other words, the mere presence of a challenging problem — even an abstract puzzle — induced a kind of attentive trance, which led to feelings of sadness. It doesn’t matter if we’re working on a mathematical equation or working through a broken heart: the anatomy of focus is inseparable from the anatomy of melancholy. This suggests that depressive disorder is an extreme form of an ordinary thought process, part of the dismal machinery that draws us toward our problems, like a magnet to metal.

"Anatomy of focus" refers to the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), a part of the brain that seems to be important for maintaining attention (among other things). Lehrer reports that "[s]everal studies found an increase in brain activity (as measured indirectly by blood flow) in the VLPFC of depressed patients."

There are other good quotes near the end too. For example, after talking about the striking correlation between creative production and depressive disorders, Lehrer quotes neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen

Why is mental illness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, Andreasen says, “one of the most important qualities is persistence.” Based on the Iowa sample, Andreasen found that “successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll stick with it until it’s right.” While Andreasen acknowledges the burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” she says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

He also talks about "the virtue of self-loathing", one of the symptoms of depression, and quotes Roland Barthes: "A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem."

For a critique of Lehrer's piece, see Edward Champion's "Jonah Lehrer: A Malcolm Gladwell for the Mind", February 28, 2010.